The Time I Was Fired

About a year into my fledgling career I was fired.

I worked for an advertising network, a business that buys space on websites to bundle up and sell to advertisers.

There were two teams in the growing business:

1. A sales team selling to advertisers.
   

2. A publisher team increasing the size of the network.

Both teams worked separately and competed to grow their part of the network.

I was a graduate who joined the publisher team at a time that finding and acquiring more ad space was becoming increasingly harder and more competitive.

When the problem became obvious, cuts had to be made, and I lost my job.

In the UK there's a process of consultation when people are made redundant.

It gives both sides a few days to understand the reasons and find the best route through a bad situation.

Normally I would have been paid off, or asked to work out my notice period in the failing role.

But after getting over the initial shock, I came back with an idea.

I had noticed a problem in the business:

A significant proportion of our booked sales were not delivered, despite us having more than enough inventory in theory.

So I proposed that I could use my remaining time to go upstream, to find a way to increase the efficiency of the network and increase revenue.

The business agreed and I was allowed to test the theory, while I searched for another job.

A few weeks later I had a job offer, but I’d also started to make the company more money.

The company countered my offer and allowed me to build a role focused on this new opportunity.

Within the year I’d cut losses from 17% to under 5%, increasing revenue by more than £850,000.

I was able to build an operations team, that sat between the sales and publishing teams, and focused on delivered on our promises to advertisers and ensure that the publishers earned more money from the same space.

This sudden upheaval of getting fired gave me the spark to think and act upstream.

It was not a fun way to learn, but it showed me that a key way to build a career was to spot problems that no one else was noticing and grab the opportunity to improve things.

How upstream thinking fixed a $100 million a year problem for Expedia

In Dan Heath's book Upstream, he shares a great example from Expedia of the value of upstream thinking that shares some of the characteristics of my experience.

Back in 2012, for every 100 customers who booked a trip through Expedia, 58 of them called the support line for help.

The number one reason for calling was to get hold of an itinerary.

And it took 20 million calls to support that need in 2012.

At $5 of support costs per call it was costing Expedia $100 million a year!

Expedia had two separate teams working in this area:

• In the lead up to the sale the Product team’s job was to “maximise the bookings”.

  
  

• Responsibility was then handed over to the Support team whose job was to “help customers as efficiently as possible”.

But no one was responsible for the overall process.

So after a simple and rapid booking process 58% of customers were left without this obvious and essential information and they were left to waste a lot of time seeking it out themselves.

Each team was intently focused on their piece of the puzzle.

Everyone was focused on downstream thinking and actions.

The system was hugely inefficient for both the company and the customers.

Mark Okerstom - Expedia’s CEO said, “When we create organizations, we’re doing it to give people focus. We’re essentially giving them a licence to be myopic.”

To solve the problem someone at Expedia had to think upstream.

They had to look at the whole puzzle, which was the job of “saving customers from needing to call”.

And it was a quick problem to fix.

By adding the itinerary to the site, they saved the business $100 million while also improving their customer experience.

Along with other improvements, today only 15% of customers need to contact support instead of 58%.

So what problems exist in your business or sector that are an opportunity waiting for someone to go upstream?