Bill Canady explains what companies gain after completing Zero Up: a focused, mission-driven organization that reaches this point in 6-9 months. The real work starts in Stage 4, where you translate the new structure into concrete changes like reassigning sales territories. Implementation takes months or years, and you need constant daily engagement to monitor personnel, competitors, and external shifts.
So, if you think about the journey that you've been on and you look at what you gained through the Zero Up, you started out with, you got your data, you segmented it. So, now you kind of know where it belongs together. Then you simplified it. Hey, here's how we're going to run this business. Then you did your Zero Up, which was actually shifting the resources from where they were to where they need to be. Right? Now's when all the fun begins. Right? Now you're actually at the end of the beginning. You can go and start making the actions happen. Right? It is so critical to get to this point. The average company, if you're really focused and driven, will be at this point somewhere around 8 to 9 months. Sometimes you can do it in 6. Sometimes it can take much longer than a year. It just depends on, are you a mission-driven company, a value-driven company? We talked a little bit about that, but depending on your focus and your need to get to there, about 6 to 9 months is not an unreasonable target. So you've gone out, you've reorganized your company. What are you gonna go do? Well, this is where we think about it as stage 4, the step 4th, which is you now need to go take the actions because just because you take a group of salesmen and say, hey, you were calling on this set of accounts, now you gotta go call on that. All that stuff has to go out and actually happen. And it takes months, sometimes years to really see it setting, setting itself into it. And you're gonna find some of the changes that you did work really well. Some of it didn't work so well. Uh, it's okay. You need to look at it every day, just as you were engaged when you were thinking about segmentation and simplification to zero. You need to stay engaged on it because you've got your company set up beautifully now. And by math, it says it's exactly right. But guess what? Everyone gets a vote. Sometimes that key salesperson you had leaves the company. Sometimes you hire another one. Sometimes a competitor who didn't have a factory or did have a, they change it. They put a new one in. Maybe they buy someone, whatever happens. So sometimes your competitor makes moves as well. You're gonna have to deal with these things. So just because you've got through the process, It's really where all the, the effort and the energy comes and starts happening, and it gives you a shot to really see your creation and what's going on, but it will take constant management, constant looking at it, and just kind of your, your hand lovingly on the tiller of the company as we go through.
