Whether or not you’re aware of it – if you participate in any business beyond a sole proprietorship, you’re probably a participant in Bottom-up Business. In reality everyone is, but what’s really made this stick out in my mind today has been the constant mulling about I’ve been doing lately concerning my contributions at work.
I read a quote this weekend… can’t really recall it word-for-word… but it basically said something along the lines of “if it ain’t worth thinking about in the shower – it ain’t worth doing”.
I know, not the most profound statement in the world, but it did get me thinking more (haha – yes, in the shower).
So somehow (while showering mind you) I landed on the fact that most businesses probably keep their eyes on their bottom line – or rather they should. If you’re setting goals of a positive [insert percentage number here]% – you will probably want to make certain that the little issues are being taken care of lead the larger results you want to see.
Working from the bottom-up forces you to focus on core drivers in your business vs. just dealing with the symptoms.
It’s better explained in a quick example or two…
Say you come out with a new cookie – but people are quoted in the news as saying it tastes like crap. The “symptoms” way of fixing things (which some companies do), would be to create an ad campaign focusing on how delicious your cookies are. That’s a waste of capital because eventually everyone will taste these cookies (you convinced them were delicious) once, spit them out – and never come back because you lied trying to cure symptoms. Good Example of this: Domino’s Pizza back in the day.
Whereas if you just went to the core of the matter (the bottom) and had your cookie recipe re-engineered – you’d probably save yourself more of a headache in the long run (along with just saving our business in general). Again, think Domino’s Pizza on this one. Once they changed their tactic – they moved on and improved.
Rather than saying we should tell everyone this pizza they’re calling crappy is good – they focused on selling more pizzas. That was more advanced thinking – but then they dug deeper and paid attention to the fact that the core issue (from the bottom-up) needed to be resolved: hence the recipe “re-working”.
I guess you could just look at Life in general for another example – take being sick for instance. A doctor can deal with your symptoms (e.g. “you’re cold” –> solution –> “put on a blanket”), but you’d still be sick. They could even offer you medicine (much like Domino’s figuring out they needed to sell more pizzas). The meds at least make more sense because they could cure the immediate issue, but they’d leave you vulnerable to getting sick again down the line. Once the doctor realizes that you run in the rain every day and go to a drafty apartment — they may tell you to stay in when it rains and you’ll be fine.
More than likely, you’d find that your illness goes down because you’ve stopped taking drenched strolls (ironically) for your health. You dealt with the core issue from the bottom-up.
I’m sure I could pull other analogies out of thin air – but you get the point by now I’m sure.
