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

Revenue Growth Hiding Business Chaos: The REAL Cost #shorts

12 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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1:22

In this short monologue, Bill Canady explains how a company’s apparent revenue growth can mask a growing operational complexity that never appears on the profit‑and‑loss statement. He lists the incremental sources of hidden work—more customers, SKUs, one‑off pricing, exceptions, custom configurations, and small ad‑hoc orders—that consume capacity and increase cycle time. These hidden costs accumulate as undisclosed discounts or “too much stuff” that sit in the system, eventually exhausting capacity while demand remains strong. The result is a flattening of the growth curve around month 15 and a crossing of the margin curve over the revenue curve around month 19, a warning sign CEOs recognize as the “month‑19 phone call.” Canady emphasizes that this is not an accounting error but a design problem caused by repeatedly accommodating individual requests without a holistic strategy.

Chapters

Underneath it, quietly, the business is getting more complicated every week. More customers, more SKUs, more one-off pricing, more exceptions, more configuration, more small orders from some accounts, from these tiny little accounts that somebody in operations is now spending a Tuesday afternoon expediting. Now, none of that shows up a line on your P&L. There is no expense category called too much stuff. So it hides. It hides in capacity. It hides in cycle time. It hides in the 14% discount somebody gave a customer in 2019 that no one's ever revisited. We've all seen those. It's like, how did that get here? They kind of get here and they hang out for a while. And then someone around month 15, the growth curves flatten somewhere in that period because you've run out of capacity, not out of demand. The margin curve, which has been drifting down the whole time, finally crosses in front of the revenue curve. Where everybody can see it. That's the month 19 phone call every time. And I want to be fair to that CEO because I was that CEO early in my career. I ran a business where I could show you revenue chart that would make you want to invest and a margin chart I would've preferred you didn't ask about. I thought the second chart was an accounting problem. It was not an accounting problem. It was a design problem, and I designed it myself. One accommodating yes at a time.