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

20 Aug 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:51

In this YouTube short, Bill Canady warns that customers will quickly take advantage of product availability before a company's operators can update the item master, effectively forcing the business to supply the goods. He stresses the need to anticipate this behavior and to plan for an upcoming test scheduled for Monday. To illustrate his point, he presents a fictionalized case study called “PowerBand Parse,” describing a $310 million industrial firm with 32 % gross margins and 8 % EBITDA—financially respectable but showing limited growth and stagnation. The overall message is a cautionary call to proactively manage inventory updates and operational testing to protect business interests.

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.