Bill Canady identifies three ways the zero-up phase fails: leaders skip the data work and rely on intuition instead of sales and profitability numbers; teams miss red flags like declining margins because they're not actively monitoring; and uncommunicated product shifts surprise customers and vendors, especially when international lead times run 150 to 180 days.
You know, the potential pitfalls of the zero-up phase come down to really just 3 very simple buckets. The first one is you didn't do the work, right? So you actually think you know what's going on. Typically the person is right, but they really didn't get it down to the data and understand what it is. And when you do that, you'll make unintended decisions. You'll make decisions that have unintended consequences, right? You think that this is your best customer, maybe it's not. You think it's profitable, maybe it's not. Things like that. So You got to make sure you actually run the data, right? I see people getting themselves in that trouble actually kind of frequently because what happens is as you go through this, fatigue can set in or hubris where you think you already know the answer, right? So make sure you spend the time and energy to go do it. Don't believe just because you've been here for 20 years, you actually know what's going on. Let the data show you. It's pretty easy to do. So it's not a big challenge at all. The second area that you can really get yourself into trouble is around the team. They're actually not spending the time to understand what's going on. They're not looking at the signs. One of the things we talked about earlier was you, uh, see your sales going down and your profitability. That's a big red flag. That shouldn't happen, or it shouldn't happen unintended, right? Sometimes you can take products and get rid of them because you decide they just don't fit. But assuming that's not the case, if that's happening, That's a bad sign. So you really need to make sure you're paying attention not only to your inputs, but what the outputs are coming. What's the result you're getting from it versus the result you expected, and then adjust accordingly, uh, with it. And then the final thing that happens with the zero-up phase is you start surprising people. If you're, if you're going to take a product, a B-level product that you don't sell very many of, and you're going to shift it to something else, and that can go from always, I have an A product that's a good substitute, I wanna condense it down to just a very small scale piece of it, or I'm getting out of the business. You can surprise people. You need to make sure you're going out and talking to people, get in front of the customers, get in front of the vendors. I mean, think about it. You've got a great product you wanna go to, but if your vendor doesn't know that you're gonna do it, they may not be prepared to ship it to you. Or conversely, maybe it takes too long to get. You make a shift. And just to give you an example, we buy a lot of products from all over the world. It is not uncommon at all for the shipping time to be 150 days, 180 days. If you make a shift to something and you've told the customer product A is no longer available, we're gonna go to product B, but you don't have it in inventory and your normal lead time is it ships within a day and now you've got a 180-day lead time, this was a mistake. You shouldn't have done it, right? Doesn't mean that you shouldn't make that decision. It just means you should have been more planful. You should have got your inventory right. You should have let the customer know. And ultimately that would've had a very good outcome. Most customers are happy to get a, a better product at a at a very competitive price. But if you surprise them and you shut down their factory, they're not going to be happy with you no matter what the intentions were.
