“Last year plus five percent” is how companies preserve every bad decision they have ever made. In this episode, Bill Canady introduces Zero-Up—a disciplined way to rebuild the budget around where profit actually lives instead of automatically carrying yesterday’s cost structure forward.
You’ll learn why simplification must come before resource reallocation, how to distinguish occupied capacity from truly available capacity, and how the segmented P&L reveals where people and spending should move. Bill also shares the central Zero-Up question: If we rebuilt this business today, would we build it this way again?
The goal is not simply to cut. It is to free capacity and redeploy it toward profitable growth, with a named owner and a measurable destination.
