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

Customers Know Your Business: Protect Your Interests! #shorts

26 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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In this short advisory monologue, Bill Canady warns that customers are often aware of product gaps before a company updates its item master, and they will act to secure those products before the company can respond. He stresses the need for proactive planning, especially ahead of an upcoming test scheduled for Monday. To illustrate his point, he references a pseudonymous case study, "PowerBand Parse," a $310 million industrial firm with 32 % gross margins and 8 % EBITDA—financially respectable but showing signs of stagnation and untapped upside. The overall message is to anticipate customer behavior, plan tests, and protect revenue streams.

Chapters

Your customers know which of your products they're getting away with buying, and they'll move to protect that before your operator people have updated the item master. They're gonna get ahead of it. They don't have anywhere else to go to get this stuff. You're the one they want. It's hard to say no. So you gotta plan for it. You gotta plan for this test. It's coming on Monday. Here's the proof. PowerBand Parse. Remember, that's a name I'm just putting in here because I don't want to use the name of the real companies. Let them tell their own stories. $310 million industrial business. When I took it, 32% gross margins, not terrible. 8% EBITDA, kind of where you'd expect it to be in that low to mid single digits. This was in the upper piece of that. So not horrible, but lots of upside. It's respectable, unremarkable, and stalling.