Best way to setup distributors and dealers.

Ok so my orignal plan was to have multiple distributors in just a few hideouts to not hit any penalties but unfortunetly for some reason you only allowed 1 per hideout.

I want to cutdown all the travelling so having multiple hideouts with 4 dealers per distrubtor isn't really ideal either.

So is it better to have dealers have way too many customers and limit to 4 dealers so I don't get the distributor penalty or vise versa?