The EBITDA Bridge: A Step-by-Step Guide to the Levers You Control—and the Market You Don't

We can't control the market. Here are the levers we can pull.

Every chief executive gets a number from the board, and most of them spend the year explaining why the market moved. Copper went up. Construction went soft. Rates rose. All of it is true, and none of it is a plan.

The EBITDA Bridge is the plan. Bill Canady has spent three decades running industrial and distribution businesses for private-equity owners, and he grows EBITDA with five levers in a fixed order: price, mix, share, M&A and cost. Price comes first because it is the fastest money and it is already on the invoices. Cost comes in two kinds. What you buy to run the business goes out to bid in the first month, beside price. What goes into the product pays last, because first articles and customer approvals take months, so its work starts early and its savings arrive in year two.

The book works through ten ways to pull those levers, and every bar on the bridge gets a dollar figure, one owner and a date. The owners read it together every month.

Follow Thornbury Wire & Cable, an invented company of two plants and 760 people, for two years: from $24.8 million of EBITDA to $34.9 million, against a board's number of $34.4 million. Its numbers are illustrative.

Audiobook by Bill Canady, narrated using a digital replica of his voice. The 31 figures and the reference tables described in the narration are in a separate visual companion PDF with 47 reference pages plus cover (48 total pages). The EBITDA Bridge · The Field Guide, with all thirty-six worksheets, is sold separately.