Why the count feels fine until it suddenly isn't
If you also carry your own sales territory, your own accounts will always come first, because that is the part you control directly. Every distributor sits one layer removed, and when the week gets tight, that layer is what gives. This is not a character flaw. It is just how priority works when one part of the job reports to you in real numbers and the other part reports in promises.
The problem is that this is also exactly the condition under which a distributor can fail quietly. If there is no budget and no written sales and marketing plan for each distributor, there is nothing to check a cooperation against except revenue, and revenue is the last thing to move. Without a plan, the clearest early sign is simpler than any KPI: whether a distributor is still coming to you with quotes and questions. The ones who stop reaching out are usually the ones who have already stopped trying. By the time the revenue line confirms it, the decline has often been visible, in hindsight, for months, sometimes years.
Measure revenue against effort, not revenue alone
The useful question for a network that has grown past what one person can run is not "how many distributors is too many." It is "which distributors are costing more to manage than they return." Put every distributor on two axes: what you are actually spending on them (onboarding, training, visits, your own attention), against what they are actually returning (revenue, but also a pipeline they build themselves, not just the orders you hand them).
Some will sit where you want them: modest effort, solid return. Some will be new and still earning their place. The ones to look at hardest are the distributors taking as much of your time as your best performers while returning a fraction of the revenue. That combination rarely fixes itself, and it is the one a busy calendar makes easiest to ignore, because managing it does not feel urgent in any single week.
The distributor you keep because there is no reason not to
Not every distributor you should let go of looks like a problem. One case: good people, the right profile, the right network. They turned up for every training session and every visit while the principal was in the room. What they did the rest of the time was never clear, and at the end of three years the revenue had still not shown up in any meaningful way. Three years of onboarding and follow-up visits, in time and money, for a result that never arrived. When that distributor was finally replaced, the new one started selling almost immediately. The three years had not been protecting a slow-building relationship. They had been a cost with nothing behind it, and the only way to see that clearly was to finally make the comparison against what a working distributor actually looks like.
This is the harder case to act on, because there is no conflict, no dramatic failure, nothing to point to. The relationship is pleasant. That is exactly why effort against return has to be a deliberate comparison and not a gut feeling: a gut feeling will keep rating "pleasant and present when I visit" as good enough, right up until someone finally runs the numbers.
What rationalising actually looks like
Rationalising a network is not the same as firing distributors. Three moves cover most of it. Consolidate overlapping territories into one stronger partner instead of two thin ones. Formalise a written budget and plan with the distributors worth keeping, so the next review has something to measure against besides revenue. And close out the ones that have been coasting, as cleanly as the relationship allows, rather than leaving them on the list out of habit.
None of this requires cutting your total count on a fixed schedule. It requires knowing, for each distributor, what they are costing you and what they are giving back, and being willing to act once you know. The count that was too many in one case might be entirely manageable in another, once a few of the weakest relationships are no longer drawing on the same hours as everything else.
For more detail, read how to measure distributor performance, or how to run ten relationships without a dedicated channel manager.