Triple Top Line or Triple Bottom Line?

By now the ideas relating to the three legs of sustainable business should be quite clear. Environmental, social, and financial success. But saying "three legs of sustainable business" doesn't sound quite... professional now does it? Then what does?

Consider first the term "bottom line". In accounting, the bottom line refers to the final amount of money a company makes after everything like taxes, charges, you name it, gets deducted. The last line then, the 'bottom' line says what's left in profit.

The bottom line isn't something that can be estimated or guessed, and it's not something that can be figured out in the beginning.  Only after the quarter (for instance) can the bottom line be configured.

What does that have to do with sustainable business?

Call it now the triple bottom line. Triple implies three, does it not? With this term, not only are finances an important end of period figure, but so are the aspects of the environment and social gains a company can have. Triple bottom lines gives single bottom line importance to all three aspects - just as it should be.

Then what's triple top line? A term used many times in William McDououbh and Michael Braungart's book Cradle to Cradle and often the talking point of many sustainable business classes at Aquinas College, triple top line takes the importance of the results of a quarter and puts the importance at the beginning. At the top. Make sense? No?

Triple top line calls environmental, social, and financial benefits and gains important. So important they need to be planned for at the beginning instead of an end of the line results. Planning top line advanced implies it will for sure happen (whatever 'it' needs to be) while bottom line implies the gains were an aftereffect and just happened to gain a benefit.

Make more sense now?

Business minded people are already familiar with the idea of the bottom line, so adding 'triple' to it isn't that difficult for them to understand. Triple top line however confused business minded people. I recommend using that term only after the positive benefits of the triple bottom line are shown before opening their minds to more subjective thoughts.