Most CEOs think compensation drives performance.

What if it's quietly destroying EBITDA instead?

Revenue growth can hide a lot of mistakes. Weak customer segmentation. Transactional selling. Pricing based on competition instead of value. Compensation plans that reward activity while leaking profit.

The problem isn't usually effort. The problem is incentive alignment. When sales teams are compensated against the wrong metrics, companies often create more revenue while leaving cash flow, margins, and valuation behind. The damage compounds because growth makes the problem harder to see.

The real exposure isn't whether a compensation plan is perfect. It's whether the plan creates behaviors that increase value—or embed costs that surface later when EBITDA, cash flow, or valuation come under scrutiny.

Eric Wiklendt from Speyside Equity spends his time evaluating and improving manufacturing and distribution businesses between $50M and $500M in revenue. His perspective comes from seeing how operations, pricing, customer economics, and compensation influence enterprise value long before most CEOs recognize the connection.

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