Great technology does not become a great business on its own. The breakdown often occurs when founders must convert technical progress into investor confidence, customers, and enterprise value.

In this episode of The 1000-Day CEO, Bill Canady speaks with Heath Naquin, Senior Vice President of Innovation & New Ventures at the University City Science Center and founder of Forged Catalyst Group.

Heath explains why capital is often not the real constraint—and why a company’s structure, leadership, regulatory strategy, and investment readiness determine whether its innovation reaches the market.

Bill and Heath discuss:

• The difference between raising money and becoming investable
• Why capital efficiency is not the same as being cheap
• How regulatory shortcuts create delay, rework, and dilution
• The corporate hygiene institutional investors expect
• Why contracts, intellectual property, and data rooms affect enterprise value
• The warning signs that a technical founder may not be ready to scale
• Why inventing the technology and leading the corporation require different skills
• The question every CEO should ask before deploying the next dollar

This conversation is for founders, CEOs, investors, operating partners, board members, and advisors working with medtech, life-sciences, deep-tech, and venture-backed companies.

Connect with Heath Naquin:

University City Science Center:
https://sciencecenter.org/people/heath-naquin

Forged Catalyst Group:
https://www.forgedcatalystgroup.com/

LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathnaquin/

Learn more about Bill Canady and The 80/20 Institute:

https://billcanady.com/
https://the8020institute.com/

Most companies try to buy attention. Ted Wright explains how CEOs can earn something more valuable: a story customers genuinely want to share.

In this episode of The 1000-Day CEO, Bill Canady sits down with Ted Wright, CEO of Fizz and a pioneer in modern word-of-mouth marketing. Ted breaks down how leaders can turn customer advocacy into a disciplined growth system using Story–Target–Goal and AIR: Authentic, Interesting, and Relevant.

In this episode:

• Why genuine advocates cannot simply be manufactured
• How Story–Target–Goal turns conversation into action
• The difference between advocacy and paid influence
• How to identify the customers most likely to share
• Why access and recognition can outperform financial rewards
• How customer conversations become digital proof
• Why the most interesting person is not always the CEO
• How integrity builds stronger brands and enterprise value

Ted also shares examples from Pabst Blue Ribbon, trade shows, motorcycles, Disney, and the Corvette—and explains why word of mouth must be earned rather than purchased.

Connect with Ted Wright:

Fizz: https://fizzcorp.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ted-wright-3266b73/
Email: ted@fizzcorp.com

Subscribe to The 1000-Day CEO for practical guidance on accelerating growth, improving performance, and building enterprise value.

What brand do you recommend without being asked—and what story do you tell about it?

#WordOfMouth #CEOLeadership #BusinessGrowth

When a company's plan drifts, the usual response is another off-site and a new three-year strategy. Bill Canady argues that a tenured PE-backed CEO needs something more concrete: updated arithmetic, one page, and 100 days.

In this episode of The 1000-Day CEO, Bill explains how to reset a plan three years into the hold—after the market multiple has moved, debt paydown has become a fact rather than an assumption, and the board has grown polite instead of candid.

The reset has four gates:

• Days 1–14: Reconstruct the sponsor's number using today's inputs.
• Days 15–45: Find where the profit moved and build the five-lever bridge.
• Days 46–70: Align compensation, structure, and ownership with the mandate.
• Days 71–100: Replace narrative reviews with a variance-driven operating cadence.

Bill also explains why profit disappears inside averages, why a compensation document can overpower a strategy document, what he learned from the smartest person in one company, and how consistent variance data can stop board micromanagement.

In this episode:

• Why boards get polite before they replace a CEO
• How to reconstruct required exit EBITDA from five inputs
• What one turn of exit multiple does to the operating mandate
• Why growth scales a deteriorating customer and product mix
• How to find profit at the customer-SKU intersection
• Why the compensation document wins over the strategy document
• How to turn a narrative review into a bridge review

Run your own Board's Number and download the report:
https://billcanady.com/lbo-calculator/

Bill Canady has led multiple billion-dollar businesses as CEO and created more than $3 billion in shareholder value. He is the founder of The 80/20 Institute and host of The 1000-Day CEO.

What assumption in your current plan has moved without being formally rerun?