Bill CanadyCEO & Founder, The 80/20 Institute · Be a Great CEO: Learn how to Fix it, Grow it, & Sell it.

Are Unprofitable Customers Stealing Your Company's Time & Money? #shorts

19 Aug 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:50

In this short, Bill Canady recounts a leadership meeting about a $310 million business line with a 32% gross margin and 8% EBITDA. Seven functional heads sit around a table, each exhausted and clutching binders they prepared over the weekend—materials the speaker never asked for. Instead of discussing the binders, Canady asks a single, pointed question: what percentage of each function’s productive weekly time is spent serving the bottom 20% of customers? The room falls silent, highlighting how unprofitable customers can silently drain a company’s resources without being directly addressed.

Chapters

Let me finish this and I'll come outside and then just, I'm just, I got time right now. I was just checking. Okay. Second floor conference room, power band parts, $310 million of revenue, 32% gross margin, 8% EBITDA. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it? 7 functional heads around the table, all of them competent, all of them tired. All of them holding a binder they'd spent the weekend preparing that I hadn't asked for. I asked them one question, not about their binders. I said, what percentage of your function's productive time in a typical week is consumed by activities related to the bottom 20% of our customers? Well, it was silence, a bit of crickets.