Bill Canady's company froze new discounts and let old ones expire. They expected sales to drop by a third but EBITDA jumped 1.9 percentage points in the first quarter, proving higher profits didn't require higher volume.
Granted over the years by good salespeople, one reasonable emergency at a time, and never revisited because nobody's job was to revisit them. We froze them. No new discount authority on that book. Existing discounts expire at the next order. That's right. That's, that's cold-hearted stuff right there, but it doesn't make a difference. We budgeted to lose roughly a third of the volume. I want to be honest about that number. That was the plan. We told the board that was the plan. And we'd run the play if we'd have lost the whole third. The result, the EBITDA rose 1.9 percentage points in the first quarter after implementation.
