Being a business owner equals being a decision-maker. Whether you are a solopreneur or manage a large team, your role is to make decisions to move your business forward. While it can be daunting, if not downright terrifying, to make some of the decisions you have to make, if you do not make them, your business will not go anywhere. Making a wrong decision is still more valuable to the growth of your business than not making a decision at all.
What Successful Business Owners Know About Decision-Making
One of the characteristics of a business owner is that they can make decisions quickly. They decide, move forward, gather data about whether it was a good or a wrong decision, and then make their next decision based on that data. Successful business owners learn by doing, not thinking and waiting.
Since I love a good analogy, let’s compare decision-making to the television show American Ninja Warrior. If you have never seen this show, it is an obstacle course with extremely difficult physical challenges. The course is designed to be intensely challenging, and as a result, people fall all the time while attempting to complete it, which means that their attempt is finished.
Even though falling means they are done with that season, the same competitors return repeatedly. Each time, they get a little further. As elite athletes, their muscle memory remembers how to do the next bit of the obstacle until they can do it without thinking. They move very quickly, trust their instincts, and trust what they’ve learned from previous decisions and mistakes. While they do spend a few seconds visualizing the course in their mind, what they do not do is sit at the starting line, dwelling on whether or not to start with their left foot or right foot or if they should even start at all.
On the surface, it feels like being a business owner is more of a thinking situation than a physical obstacle course. The truth is that running a business is just as much of a take-action sport as any Tough Mudder or Ninja Warrior course out there. While sometimes it can feel more like the show Wipeout than an elite sporting event, being a small business owner is a full-contact sport.
Tips for Better Decision Making
The good news is that just like any other athlete, your capacity, ability to handle things, and strength grow as you practice. However, unlike sports, decision-making is done in real life and not on a practice course.
These tips will give you a competitive edge instead of feeling like you are randomly throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it will stick.
Recovery and Reflection for Better Decisions
Sticking with our athlete metaphor, the bigger the decision you make, the longer you need to rest. If you think about boxers, football players, or Olympians, it requires a lot of time for them to recover from their peak performances. They do not go hard 24/7, 365 days a year. They have seasons and might stay in shape during their off-seasons, but they train differently.
As a business owner, you must build a longer recovery time if you make more significant decisions and go for bigger goals. You need more space around you to recover from the stress of making the decision and taking bigger action. Bigger means scarier, by the way, not necessarily more volume. This recovery time does not mean taking off as much time as a football off-season, but you need to build in more self-care and more space around you not to burn out.
Following Through on Decisions
Once you make a decision, go all out to find out as much as possible about that decision. Time and time again, I watch things fail, not because a decision was made that turned out to be a bad one, but because someone made a decision and then did not follow up to make sure that the decision was the right one. Without that follow-up, the decision never stood a chance to succeed.
Returning to our Ninja Warrior example, if a competitor decides to tackle an obstacle a certain way, they must follow up by trying that method. Otherwise, they won’t know if that approach will work or if they will fall off the course. When you make a business decision, you have to play full-out in the direction of the decision so that the data you get as a result of your actions helps you make sure your next decision is as accurate as possible.
Trust Your Decision-Making Instincts
We have all gotten “that” feeling or gut instinct when something is a bad idea. It could be a job that did not seem right or a potential dating partner who gave off a bad vibe. As a business owner, learning to interpret your instincts is important. If you get a gut instinct, do not ignore it or find a way to justify not listening to it.
So often, we go against our instincts and do something for the wrong reasons, whether to save money, press an easy button, or please someone else. We go against our instincts to mitigate fear and are shocked when it does not work out.
However, there is a difference between not knowing how to do something or what you should be doing next and needing guidance versus ignoring your instincts. As a business owner, you need to learn how to interpret what you are doing and why you are doing it so that you are not making decisions for the wrong underlying reasons. You also need to understand the physical feeling you get when your instincts tell you to make a decision one way or another.
I differentiate the feelings in my gut as dread, or a clench in my gut that tells me I do not want to do something, compared to “buzzy roller coaster” or the vibration in my chest that is a blend of fear and excitement, because I know something big is coming, like the moment before a significant drop in a roller coaster. When I feel that excitement, I know it’s go-time.
Building Decision-Making Capacity
The way to grow your capacity to make better and faster decisions is to make more decisions. Do not worry about running a perfect obstacle course. That’s where our comparison to Ninja Warrior ends. If you make a decision and fall off the course as a business owner, you can get right back up and try again; you do not have to wait until the next season. If you do that, you will never get off the starting line.
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