> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.maffeodrinks.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # What a Bottom-Up Mindset Looks Like in Career, Strategy and Leadership - URL: https://www.maffeodrinks.com/what-a-bottom-up-mindset-looks-like-in-career-strategy-and-leadership/ - Published: 2026-10-20T06:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-20T06:09:30.000Z - Description: From The MAFFEO DRINKS Podcast: everyone agrees with bottom-up in private, then defaults to top-down in the boardroom. The shortcut always sends you back to square one. What compounds is building at a pace that doesn't jeopardise the future. Mark Burgess interviews Chris Maffeo. - Author: Chris Maffeo - Tags: Podcast Episodes *Everyone agrees with bottom-up when it is just the two of us talking. Then they walk into the boardroom and do the opposite.* The top-down path is the path of least resistance. Water runs down it on its own. Targets get written on a whiteboard, plus five, plus ten, and the only question left is how to hit the number. So experienced people, inside well-funded companies, reach for the shortcut. The shortcut has a habit of sending you straight back to where you started like on a game of Monopoly. [The MAFFEO DRINKS Podcast | 133 | Chris Maffeo & Mark Burgess | What a Bottom-Up Mindset Looks Like in Career, Strategy and LeadershipMark Burgess is a global executive search consultant with AIMS International who turns the mic around to interview MAFFEO DRINKS host Chris Maffeo about twenty-plus years of building brands across…![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0a/22/0a222910-9a71-468a-beb7-296274924478/content/images/icon/NzExOS5wbmc-5311a811-2e69-4f74-b960-4b524c70e679.png)The MAFFEO DRINKS Podcast![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0a/22/0a222910-9a71-468a-beb7-296274924478/content/images/thumbnail/YmMzZS5wbmc-330041bf-c8ec-4d9d-bbb7-4ad1c93cc295.webp)](https://themaffeodrinkspodcast.com/s4/133?ref=maffeodrinks.com) Mark Burgess spends his working life moving leaders in and out of the biggest drinks and FMCG businesses. As a global executive search consultant with AIMS International, he watches from the outside what works and what quietly fails. For this episode, he turned the mic around and interviewed me. He pushed on the one idea I keep coming back to. > it would be building at a pace that doesn't jeopardize the future. That sounds patient. It is the hardest thing to hold when the number is due this year, and it is the only thing that compounds. DEAR DRINKS BUILDER, **For €100 a year you get this analysis and access to the full archive of 125 episodes, each one translated from industry conversation into the commercial decisions underneath it.* ***Subscribe at maffeodrinks.com.** ## Presence Is Not Distribution A listing is not a sale. Putting a bottle somewhere a customer could theoretically find it is the start of the work, not the end of it. Distribution is countable, so it gets counted. Rotation is harder to see, so it gets ignored. A brand can look like it is everywhere and be selling almost nothing, because the unit on the shelf is a hope, not a habit. This is where my years in beer still shape how I read spirits. An opened keg goes bad in about three days, and draught needs real money upfront in the font, the lines, the cleaning, so you only chase outlets that can guarantee throughput. Auditing European markets at Pilsner Urquell, I found very few pubs actually moving the two kegs a week I treated as the floor. Spirits let you forget that discipline, because a bottle does not expire on the back bar. > You may go into a bar and see lots of bottles on the back bar, and they may be there already for five years. A distribution point nobody rotates is not distribution. It is storage you paid for. ## It Has to Make Sense for Everyone Brand building is simple to say and hard to do: a move only works if it makes sense for everyone it touches. The trade is treated as a chain, or a row of separate boxes, but it is an ecosystem. Marketing, the salesperson, the distributor and their reps, the bar owner, the bar staff, the drinker. The more of them a decision makes sense for, the better the odds. Leave one out and the move quietly dies. Favor one at the expense of the rest, and it does worse than die. The clearest version is the deal that looks too good to turn down. A prestige account offers to move you from a cocktail listing into the speed rack as the house pour, in exchange for a deep kickback. Take it, and the moment the terms spill across a connected city, every other account expects the same, and you cannot afford to give it. The reputation you were building becomes the price of the deal. > It's simple, but it's not easy. A win for one account that poisons the rest of the ecosystem was never a win. ## The Boardroom Forgets the Trade The distance between a strategy and the street grows every time a leader stops going to the street. People who built their careers in the trade reach the office and stop leaving it because the office is comfortable, and a bartender's complaint is not. Then they import the playbook from their last company, forgetting it ran on that company's budget and people. A tenth of the money and a fifth of the team cannot fast-track the same plan. I have been inside this, not just watched it. When a cluster of people move together from one big company into another, they carry what they call best practices and stop questioning them, the path of least resistance again. The leader who won somewhere else becomes a king without a kingdom, promising a result the new company was never resourced to deliver. In the one-to-one conversation everyone agrees. Only in the boardroom do the forces collide. > I have no army. I'm a fancy general. A strategy built away from the trade is a budget waiting to be spent on the wrong thing. ## Why the Shortcut Always Loses The scarcest resource is not money. It is time, or more precisely the belief that you have none. A founder with investors has to show fast growth. A manager hired into a three-year window is already mid-budget before they unpack. Both feel the clock, both reach for the shortcut, and the shortcut returns them to the beginning. I think about it like the board game everyone has played. You try to fast-track it, you land on the wrong square, you go back to start, because foundations will not be rushed. The move that actually works is quieter: make small bets, watch what the market rewards, and double down there, instead of going all in on something unproven because a target demands it. > you cannot go all in on something that you don't know if it works. What the example confirms is that speed bought on credit is not speed. It is a loan the brand repays at square one. ## Honesty Is the Differentiator Talent is common. What separates the people who fulfil it from equally gifted peers who waste it is honesty, starting with honesty about themselves. Honesty with yourself tells you which room you belong in. Honesty with everyone else, playing with open cards, builds the relationships that outlast any single deal. People can feel the difference between a real conversation and a rehearsed one, every time. The sharpest version of this came from a psychologist, not a boardroom. At a leadership programme she laid out a choice she called the school of pain: forcing yourself toward the skills your career supposedly needs, against who you actually are. I am a PowerPoint person, not an Excel person, and I chose not to take the school of pain, which eventually led me out of the corporate world and into work I actually like. The same trap catches the bartender promoted to ambassador to manager until they burn out, when staying where they were strong would have served everyone better. > People are eager to grow because we've been sold this dream of up or out. What the example confirms is that self-awareness is not a soft skill. It is the one that decides whether talent ever turns into anything. ## The Moral The moral is the same in a brand and in a career. The shortcut is a loan, and you repay it at square one. What compounds is building at a pace that doesn't jeopardise the future, making sure the move makes sense for everyone it touches, and being honest enough to know which game is actually yours. Two goals down with ten minutes left, you do not score by hoofing it from the halfway line. Score the draw first. Then go and win.