---
title: "Why Uniting With Your Competitors Can Be the Smartest Way to Grow a Market"
id: "18255"
type: "podcast"
slug: "why-uniting-with-your-competitors-can-be-the-smartest-way-to-grow-a-market"
published_at: "2026-06-23T03:07:00+00:00"
modified_at: "2026-06-18T17:09:44+00:00"
url: "https://kulapartners.com/thekularing/why-uniting-with-your-competitors-can-be-the-smartest-way-to-grow-a-market/"
markdown_url: "https://kulapartners.com/thekularing/why-uniting-with-your-competitors-can-be-the-smartest-way-to-grow-a-market.md"
excerpt: "Milford built its business on relationships in oil and gas. But breaking HDPE pipe into the municipal water market meant playing an entirely different game — one of competitive bids, regulatory hurdles, and contractors set in their ways. Tyler Fowler,..."
---

#### Episode 396

**June 23, 2026**

Milford built its business on relationships in oil and gas. But breaking HDPE pipe into the municipal water market meant playing an entirely different game — one of competitive bids, regulatory hurdles, and contractors set in their ways. Tyler Fowler, Director of Marketing at Milford, explains why relationships rarely cross verticals even when the product does, and why he and his competitors put their differences aside to grow the category together. Along the way he shares how he treats organic social as a test bed for paid, why he resists vanity metrics, and why winning a new industrial market is a five-to-ten-year grind with no easy button.

##### *Why Uniting With Your Competitors Can Be the Smartest Way to Grow a Market* Transcript:

**Jeff White:** Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how you doing, sir?

**Carman Pirie:** Yeah, I’m doing well. How you doing?

**Jeff White:** Great. Thank you

**Carman Pirie:** Today’s conversation’s gonna be fantastic. You know, a defining nature of, um, B2B manufacturing industrials overall is the relationship basis of many of the sales motions, and it’s something that I think a lot of current marketers kind of have to work within, and if they’re not from a manufacturing background, have to even learn a little bit about.

So I’m excited that today’s guest might shine a light on some of, uh, these considerations, how to think about all this and more

**Jeff White:** And I, I think the coolest part about that, and I think the piece that really connects additionally with manufacturers, is the vertical nature of those relationships a- and the importance that those, uh, niches or niches play in those manufacturing relationships.

**Carman Pirie:** Yeah, I wonder if, uh, I’ll be curious to see if today’s guest brings some more, insight into that, ‘cause I, I, I mean, that’s one of the challenges that you, uh, kind of end up talking through with organizations as they seek to expand, saying like, “Yeah, we have a bunch of relationships on the sales side here,” but just because you have relationships in one vertical doesn’t mean they trans- that you, you have a bunch more sitting somewhere else, right?

**Jeff White:** Even if the product does cross verticals, uh,

**Carman Pirie:** Yeah, the product can cross verticals easier than relationship can sometimes, I suppose, can it? Yeah.

**Jeff White:** The plot thickens.

**Carman Pirie:** Without further ado

**Jeff White:** So joining us today is Tyler Fowler. Tyler is the Director of Marketing at Milford. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Tyler!

**Tyler Fowler:** Thanks for having me, guys. Appreciate being here.

**Carman Pirie:** Hey, Tyler, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us. I wonder if you could, uh, introduce our listeners to Milford a bit. Tell us what you all are up to

**Tyler Fowler:** Yeah, so Milford is a PVF distributor, pipe, valve, and fitting. Um, we started in 1972. The company’s gone through many iterations of specifically what the area of focus is, but kind of always came back to PVF as that central, business theme. And for the last decade or more, um, have really gotten more heavily into, um, HDPE as a specialty distributor of that material, um, and all the equipment and everything you need to go along with that.

**Jeff White:** I was just gonna ask if you could fill in our listeners on, uh, what HDPE is and what these — how these products come to life, ‘cause it’s a, a very specific type of, uh, product, but the chemicals are used a lot of different ways.

**Tyler Fowler:** Yeah, absolutely. Um, so ACPE is a specific type of piping material. It competes with PVC and ductile iron most commonly across most industries and verticals. Um, there are some industries that HDPE absolutely dominates. Um, natural gas distribution, um, especially when you get down to these smaller lines that are…

I mean, I think a lot of people see those as the yellow pipe. It’s probably about eight inches, um, running through the cities that they live in being installed. Uh, of course, most, most of these pipes live underground, so once they’re buried, you don’t see them. That’s the biggest place that ACPE is used.

Um, and then, you know, it’s found in every industry, uh, in every application where piping is needed, unless there are certain technical requirements it can’t meet, um, like super high temperatures, some aspects where they may want like stainless steel or something like that.

**Carman Pirie:** Hmm. That’s very cool, Tyler. And I wonder if, um, we can fill in some blanks as well about how you end up there. How long have you been, uh, at Milford and, uh, you know, how — what, what’s the career path that lead you there.

**Tyler Fowler:** Yeah. So, um, grew up in West Texas on the edge of the prolific Permian Basin oil field. Uh, it wasn’t booming when I was, you know, coming of age. Uh, but around the time I got out of college in 2011, 2012, the oil field was taking off. The fracking boom had hit and, you know, just by nature of being in the area, I wandered into a company that, manufactured and sold, things for oil field companies.

So started doing marketing for them. Uh, worked through that for a number of years. Um, learned a whole lot about that specific industry and then found my way venturing out. You know, wanted to live in a different part of the world. The Permian Basin is kind of rough if you’ve never been there. Um, and so wound up in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Worked for a few different companies. Um, worked for a hedge fund for a very short time, and then went and led marketing for a company that rents natural gas generators and primarily to, oil and gas companies. And so what they would do is take a really large generator, put it out on site so that the gas that the well was producing at the wellhead, it would go through a simple like scrubbing mechanism to clean up the gas a little bit, and then that generator would use that as fuel and connect to the local, you know, either equipment or a local grid, um, to help power everything else on site or nearby.

Um, and so did that for a few years. Ran marketing for them, really helped start that up and grow it. And then a former, um, associate of mine, had been working in Milford and was leaving, and they were in the process of relocating their corporate headquarters and a bunch of transition stuff going on.

Um, and so I began talking to them and learning more about their business and what they do. And, um, after a little bit it seemed like a really good fit. Um, and so came on board and, and, uh, been with them ever since. So that’s been about three years now. Three and a half years.

**Carman Pirie:** One of the similarities between you and Milford is that experience in the oil and gas space, of course, right? Um, uh, so what, I guess, one of, one of the things we wanted to kind of drill into a little bit here… Come on, like nobody’s gonna roll their eyes at that terrible pun?

**Jeff White:** I was ready to call it, and you called it yourself first.

**Carman Pirie:** To. I had to. I couldn’t resist. But, uh, one of the pieces that we thought we could, uh, uh, dig into a, a deep, a bit deeper would be to just understand, how you’re approaching, expanding, Milford’s presence in the water, uh, vertical. Understanding, of course, that it probably has a number of differences from oil and gas, and maybe a number of those, those relationships don’t transition over.

So, uh, I would have to think that has to be both a new sales reality for the organization as well as a new marketing reality for you.

**Tyler Fowler:** It is. It requires a little bit, different effort. Um, thankfully, some of those, relationships do transition over. Uh, not, not a perfect one-to-one, but many of the things do translate. Uh, one of those is primarily the contractors that we serve. So we serve end users or buyers of the material, but we also, sell and service to the contractors, whether they’re buying pipe or oftentimes they’re buying equipment or renting equipment, from us.

And so a lot of those relationships translate, or they have sort of the same, um, development path. Um, on the other side of that, the material side is quite a bit different, um, because when you’re dealing with oil and gas companies, they, they know what they want, they know when they need it, and they don’t have to go through governmental entities to review all their quotes and everything like that, right?

It’s just, “Hey, can you get me this? Can you get it to me on time?” Um, “Yep.” And so it’s pretty much just, “Okay, we’ll cut a PO, and then we’ll send you an invoice.” With, cities who are primarily buying the water pipe, there’s a bid process. Um, sometimes there’s requirements, whether it’s a, you know, a minority-owned or a female-owned company that’s selling the pipe.

So there’s a lot of other factors that come into play. Um, it’s much less about the relationship and more so can you be competitive on the bid?

**Carman Pirie:** How, I mean, I, I, I’ve seen this, uh, come to life in a lot of different sectors. It can be very hard to be good at both of those games. I mean, sometimes the organization that’s very good at leveraging and maximizing value out of relationships isn’t always the one that’s the sharpest bidder in a RFP.

Have you encountered that? Have — Are you — Like, is it, is it kind of like exercising two completely different muscles, or are there more similarities than I think?

**Tyler Fowler:** For the marketing side, it’s not that difficult. From the sales side and supporting the sales team, it takes a different type of individual to sell into that market. It takes a more technically-minded, process-minded, someone that can sit and wait for that order. You know, they, they start talking about today, well, it’s not actually gonna ship for nine months when typically in oil and gas then people are, you know, I’ll quote something, I’ll sell it, it’ll ship in three weeks.

And so it takes a little bit of a different person to run that. Now we’ve had some people that have successfully made that transition and indeed helped us make that transition. Um, and then others who they’ll dip their toe in once in a while, uh, but they really — that’s not their game.

**Carman Pirie:** And from a marketing perspective even, have you had to get more f- maybe formal in some of the m- proof assets that you submit with bids or… I don’t know. I mean, it seems to me if, if a lot of the way you’re then selling and positioning yourself has to be formally submitted, that may require some different attention on the marketing side too.

**Tyler Fowler:** Not so much on the marketing side because they really just want to ensure that you have the, you know, um, technical backing, uh, of the manufacturers, right? That you can certify those products are coming from a certain place. And so it’s I wouldn’t call that marketing. Um, but we do represent ourselves in that market a little bit differently.

It’s much more, you know, education-focused. And so we partner with organizations like the Alliance for PE Pipe, or Plastic Pipe Institute in trying to, you know, broaden that message of support, uh, for the material itself and getting municipalities to choose that or make that an option on bids in, in comparison to PVC or ductile iron.

**Jeff White:** Talk to me a bit about how that relationship works, because obviously you’re not the only member who’s bringing, PE Pipe into that alliance group. You would have competitors there as well. What’s the, what’s the dynamic there in, in leveraging that group to get awareness?

**Tyler Fowler:** Yeah, so it’s really interesting ‘cause we will support them. So in the, in the very large water trade shows, if you don’t have a gigantic booth or a, or very flashy small booth, you’re going to get missed. Like people just don’t have time to stop and talk with you. Um, and so for those shows, um, we have, we have realized that it’s important for us to at least be a part of the most critical conversations happening there around that material.

And so what that organization enables us to do is kind of put aside our differences with our competitors and all unite around we’re all trying to move this pipe type forward in the water market. And so we show up with manufacturers and our competing distributors to really put aside our differences and, um, push that material out into the market.

**Jeff White:** That is a, a really unique dynamic that you’re, that you’re having to play into, and it’s kind of a rising tide lifts all boats sort of situation.

**Carman Pirie:** Be curious, like how much pent-up opportunity is there there? ‘Cause I’m guessing that there’s some industry dynamics that make that possible. Like, everybody’s fairly cooperative because they obviously think that they can all gain by, um, ad-advancing the use of this material in the water space.

Do you envision that there’s a point of, of saturation or something where that co-opetition maybe may not happen as, uh, as easily?

**Tyler Fowler:** Yes, I think eventually, you know, that will happen. Um, right now, and i-it’s also regional, right? There are some regions that HDPE is much more accepted in, and so the need for us to all combine our powers and go at this together are — it’s almost nonexistent in, in a very few places. Uh, but by and large, um, the water market is the biggest lagging market for that material type.

Um, and so I think it’s gonna be a while. We still have quite a bit of market share to gain, um, versus PVC and ductile iron

**Carman Pirie:** Hmm. Yeah, it’s interesting for, um, I think our listeners that, may find themselves in sectors that are driven by regulatory, nuance, complexity, new regulation introduction, et cetera. Um, uh, there’s some interesting learning there. Um, and have you looked at the, um, those small regional pockets where you’re saying, “Well, maybe like we don’t need to convince them there.

They’ve already been on this bandwagon a while.” What kind of duration are we talking? Are you — Like, is this, um, h- are, are you saying that this is a decades-long thing, that you have before you really reach that level of

**Tyler Fowler:** Yeah, absolutely. So

**Carman Pirie:** Yeah

**Tyler Fowler:** in the ‘50s is kind of when HDPE and PVC both came to the market, and for whatever reason, gas and mining and other markets primarily were the focus of HDPE and PVC primarily focused on water markets. And so they just kind of split, and they’ve been growing that way for a long time.

And HDPE has met the point of saturation in most markets into where now we’re saying, “Okay, well, the next path of growth is water markets.”

**Carman Pirie:** Is it the kind of scenario where those water markets have, like, is it — does HDPE carry just inherently some serious benefits over PVC, but it just hadn’t been considered there? Or are you having to convince people to do something in a fundamentally new way or different way of thinking about it?

**Tyler Fowler:** The benefits over PVC are primarily the strength of the pipe material. Um, so if you were to, you know, drop something super heavy on a piece of HDPE, it might get a little gash in it. It will — It could deform, but then it will come back to its shape. And as long as the gash doesn’t exceed 10% of the wall thickness, it’s fine to keep using.

It’s a super tough material. If you do the same thing to PVC, it’s probably gonna split and crack and fly all over the place, and it’s, it’s done for. Um, the, the main difference between them is that PVC is bell and spigot, and HDPE is fused. And so when you fuse it, it makes it leak-free.

Whereas PVC, you know, if you get pressure surges at that bell and spigot joint, it’s gonna leak. And it could also reverse the other way and pull water from the soil and surrounding soil back into the pipe system. And so there’s a number of things, right, that, that make it a superior pipe to PVC.

But primarily it’s just the contractors that have been working in water are used to doing PVC. It’s easier. You don’t need as deep of technical understanding or experience to actually put it together and connect it and put it in the ground. Um, so it’s, it’s getting those municipalities to understand and learn the material and what it can and can’t do.

And then usually after a project or two, and especially after they had to perform some maintenance on the line to add a line or whatever they’re gonna do, um, then they really start to like it and start to move more towards that. But the water market in the US is so fragmented that it’s, you know, it is literally a one by one.

There are tens of thousands of them trying to convince each one, “This is the way you need to go. Here’s all the support for it,” so on and so forth. Um, and so it’s just overcoming that generational hurdle of changing people’s minds.

**Carman Pirie:** Yeah. The way things have been done, kind of a standard, yeah.

**Tyler Fowler:** Mm-hmm.

**Jeff White:** Hey – endless, right? Well, not endless, but, uh, significant opportunity.

**Carman Pirie:** I, I, I could, I could pepper you with questions about all the little nuances of the strategy for days because I think it just, just really has a lot of little pieces that are fascinating. Regulatory shift perspective, the change at the contractor level, the, uh, getting the, uh, municipalities to actually spec different pipe initially to even open up the door for these conversations.

It’s really interesting. But I do, Tyler, want to not lose sight of a brief conversation that we had before this show about how you’ve thought about, uh, organic social and how it kind of informs your view of the market you serve. And, uh, and not to overly tee it up, but it just seems to me like I was a little surprised to have a conversation with somebody working in the space they’re in and hear them talking about organic social.

So that’s, uh, why I thought it was interesting to maybe peel that back a bit.

**Tyler Fowler:** Yeah. So I think the — you always wanna be where your customers are, right? And a decade ago, they were just now starting to come online in social media channels in a way that it made sense to really start to market to them there. So I’ve seen, I’ve seen that rise over time. I won’t say that every social media channel is worth investing in for a company like ours.

I don’t really focus on X, I don’t focus on TikTok. Uh, I don’t make a lot of reels. Um, but, you know, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to a lesser degree, um, our audience is there, and I use organic me- social media as kind of a test bed. I look at every post as a, like a PR announcement or a basically an advertisement and see what actually users respond with.

Um, is it driving traffic and intent? Um, and then what that allows me to do is take those things that perform well in an organic manner and then build audiences and then target ads to those audiences.

**Carman Pirie:** So that all sounds pretty reasonable and straightforward. But I guess, um, what steps are you taking to ensure that those signals are actually pointing towards something that is truly resonating versus just service, serving into vanity metrics in some way, shape, or form? I’m just be curious how you’re thinking about measuring that or testing those first signals that you get.

And then I’d be curious how big the, the paid media bets are that come afterwards that, uh, on the back of some of this proof

**Tyler Fowler:** Yeah, I think the — Well, I’ll, I’ll address the first part. So I don’t try to get super honed in on all the analytics, I think, but at the same time, and because of this, I realize that a lot of them can be just vanity metrics. So the signals that I look for are we getting more calls? Are we getting more clicks?

Are we getting a higher percentage of branded search results, in our analytics pro-programs? Um, and then what do our customers say that make inquiries? What did they say that actually drove them to that? So what I use in my form fields is an open field that’s just how did you hear about us? And it’s, it’s not a perfect one-to-one, but no attribution metric ever is going to be.

The theory with that is that they’re going to fall back on the thing that, um, most impacted their decision to make contact with us. And so sometimes I can see the IP address, right? And then I can see, well, they touched the website at this point and that point and that point, or the pixel tracked them through from LinkedIn or Facebook.

Um, and so kind of just watching those patterns over time and taking a bird’s eye view at that and knowing that we’re doing something directionally correct rather than trying to hone in on, “Oh, it was this specific ad,” right?

**Jeff White:** Are you finding that, uh, the strategies that are working as you move into this different vertical into the water side of things are able to also be applied back to oil and gas, or are you keeping those two streams

**Tyler Fowler:** I think a lot of the core messaging stays the same. It doesn’t really change how we present ourselves in the market. On the water side, I feel like we’re allowed to get a little bit more technical and a little bit more into the, um, overall life cycle cost savings to the taxpayers, um, that they’re adopting those systems versus a company into oil and gas.

A company into oil and gas is using the pipe because that’s the material that they need. It suits their needs better than anything else. We’re not really trying to convince them of anything. And so we do lean on that little bit more technical aspects of the product itself in the water markets, um, and trying to create content there that explains that in a way that that resonates with them.

Everybody’s concerned about water usage, uh, especially in Texas and southern states where it’s getting very dry. Um, and so one of, one of the things about the pipe that is leak-free is, you know, we just have to explain how it’s leak-free and the installation efforts that have to go into that pipe material aren’t a huge constraint, and that’s kind of Milford’s primary role is to, you know, remove those constraints.

**Carman Pirie:** I wonder if, uh, so Tyler, as you think about how, how long have you been, uh, in the three years that you’ve been with the organization for… Has it been for the entirety of those three years that you folks have been, uh, pushing and breaking into this water market or has it been a percentage of that?

**Tyler Fowler:** It began, uh, a couple years before I arrived in Milford, uh, with, one municipality and, and one sales rep that saw an opportunity there. You know, they were getting some, a little bit of walk-in traffic, I think. Um, and then started seeing like, “Okay, well, how do I bid? What, what is the process to go through in that?”

So we kinda built that out, um, through that one local muici- municipality, um, and then kind of grew it from there and put more resources, more executive thought into, you know, how do we really build this into its own division?

**Carman Pirie:** That’s really interesting because I’m kind of wondering what the biggest surprises along that whole journey has been for you. I guess you’re — I mean, you’re starting there, you’re looking at the, the pipe that you have expertise in. You know it’s going to work, it’s gonna solve a bunch of problems there. I don’t know how big the price differencing is and stuff of that sort, but lots of challenges to work through. But what’s been your biggest like, huh, either totally thought that was gonna work and it flopped or had no idea and this was a secret to success? Just wondering what your biggest surprise has been along in trying to break into this market.

**Tyler Fowler:** I don’t know if I have a good answer for that. As with a lot of things in industrial businesses and markets, they’re just slow to develop, and so it’s just little by little inching towards what success looks like. I don’t — there’s no one, you know, flip of the switch or, “Oh, I wish we had just known that earlier,” um, type of thing.

**Carman Pirie:** I think that in and of itself is a pretty good lesson for folks listening, is that, uh, there is no kind of, um, there’s no easy button. If you’re going to go down this path, it’s, uh, it’s going to take that kind of persistence and just kind of methodical one step ahead, one foot ahead of the next, and keep going, keep going.

Because you’re, I mean, you’re talking, we’ve been at it five years or so now, and, uh, you said a few moments ago you’re staring down the barrel of another five to 10 years and working to expand this vertical. So it’s not a, uh, a light switch moment overnight. So I think that in and of itself is a great, uh, lesson for folks to remember, Tyler.

**Tyler Fowler:** Yeah, and we’re going through that right now. Being acquired by WinSupply, we were the first company — not the first company but the only company they have really that makes HDPE and the equipment part of it a focus of their business. And so what we have kind of done is now start to educate.

So they have — we have sister companies all over the country, and they’ve been primarily selling PVC and ductile iron. So they already have a lot of the same customers, a lot of the same contractor customers that we would sell to if we were there. But they’re just not getting HDPE from them. That’s ‘cause they don’t sell it.

So what we’re trying to do is educate our sister companies on the material and provide those vendor relationships to help them break into that market in their local places.

**Carman Pirie:** Very cool. I think I could have another half hour and get di trying to dive into the promotion of just materials as part of something, which is something that is very uniquely manufacturing and industrial as well. I’m just reminded of some work that we were recently doing on the plastic side, and we’re highlighting four different materials in the packaging.

So I mean, it’s, uh… But look, we’ve gotta, we gotta draw the line somewhere, Tyler. We have to, we have to decide to end this conversation at some point. I wanna just, uh, thank you for, for sharing your experience with us today. It’s been lovely to have you on the show. I think it’s been a, an interesting topic.

**Tyler Fowler:** Yeah, appreciate it.

**Jeff White:** Thanks so much.

[Read Full Transcript](#podcast-transcript)

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[Episode 397: When Buyers Can’t Touch the Machine, Video Has to Sell the Quality »](https://kulapartners.com/thekularing/when-buyers-cant-touch-the-machine-video-has-to-sell-the-quality/)

#### Featuring

### Tyler Fowler

Director of Marketing- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tfowler3/)

Tyler Fowler is the Director of Marketing at Milford, a Winsupply Company, based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where he leads brand, digital, communications, sales enablement, and commercial marketing for a technical distribution and services business serving municipal water, agriculture, energy, and industrial markets across the U.S. His work helps translate specialized product and field expertise into clearer market positioning, stronger brand visibility, and effective growth programs. Tyler brings a practical operator’s perspective to marketing in complex, relationship-driven industries where credibility, trust, and technical fluency matter.

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The Kula Ring is a podcast for manufacturing marketers looking to enhance their impact and grow their organizations.

Hosted by Jeff White and Carman Pirie, it features discussions with industry leaders who share their experience, insights and strategies on topics like account-based marketing (ABM), sales and marketing alignment, and digital transformation. The Kula Ring offers practical advice and tips from the trenches for success in today’s B2B industrial landscape.

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Kula Partners is an agency that specializes in maximizing revenue potential for B2B manufacturers.

Our clients sell within complex, technical environments and we help them take a more targeted, account-focused approach to drive revenue growth within niche markets.