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

Stop Quad 4 Customers: Where Profits Go To Die! #shorts

1 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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In this YouTube short, Bill Canady warns business owners about "Quad 4" customers – the low‑value, non‑core buyers that sit in the tail of a company’s product line. He describes them as a "complexity tax" that consumes a large share of capacity and generates complaints while delivering almost no profit. Canady urges automation through a website with commerce capabilities to serve these customers efficiently, but stresses that the real solution is to either reprice them or exit them entirely. He anticipates the common fear that cutting these customers will reduce revenue, arguing that the revenue they generate actually erodes overall profitability because it occupies a third of capacity for negligible returns.

Chapters

This is where you automate. It's what they make that internet for. That's why you got that website. Serve them through that, right? Don't just have content there. Do a little commerce for God's sakes, right? Quad 4, this is the tail. B customers, in other words, your lowest, buying tail products. In other words, the things you're not good at making. Small, low-value customers buying small, low-value, non-core products. This is your complexity tax. This is where profits Go to die. The action is reprice or exit. And I'm going to say the next part carefully because it's the single point in this episode where people flinch. Firing or repricing Quad 4 feels like losing revenue. Well, it's not. The revenue is consuming a third of your capacity and most of your complaints to earn almost nothing.