Ep. 28. How to Make Solid Strategic Business Decisions for The New Year

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to this week’s show. I have been talking on LinkedIn a bit about decision-making and so I thought it would be really helpful to break down my decision making process a bit for you. We are heading into the end of the year. If you’re listening to this live. We’re also heading into 2025, where I know you will be doing those end of year evaluations, hopefully, and setting up your strategy for the new year. That means that you will be making lots of decisions and thinking through exactly, what the best way is going to be to grow your business? [00:01:24] The first thing I want to say about this topic is that decision-making is a skill set. It’s something that we should be constantly improving as entrepreneurs and thinking about in a very structured and intentional way. A lot of founders don’t really focus on the skillset of decision-making at all. They just get caught up in the decision itself. Those are two totally different things. Right? There is the decision you need to make and then there is the process and the mindset and the thinking that you bring to that decision. As you think about heading into the new year, of course, I want you to think about the actual decisions you want to make, the actual strategies you want to use to grow your business. But I also want you to spend a bit of time thinking about how you approach decision-making just in general. This is a skill set that we want to bring your attention to and consistently and regularly improve so that you just become a better decision maker with time and that helps you to scale your business to each and every level. [00:02:38] There are three steps that you really should be following whenever you sit down to make a strategy decision for your business. A strategy decision is basically just a directional change. You can think of it that way. Right? So it’s basically, okay, we’re doing this and we’re thinking about doing something different and that triggers a decision that needs to be made almost like you’re standing at a fork in the road and you have, you know, two different options. [00:03:06] Should we go with option A or should we go with option B? A lot of times it’s easy to get stuck in the wrong thinking and the wrong approach. That can lead to things like indecision or procrastination or the feeling of just complexity. Like you’re in analysis paralysis. You’re not sure which one would be the smartest, which one would be the most strategic or which one would really move the needle with the budget and the timeline and the resources that you have. When you’re standing at that crossroads, whether that’s at the beginning of the year or just when you’re sitting down on a month to month basis looking at, okay, how can we move things forward? You really want to be following three steps. [00:03:52] . These three steps involve what you need to be doing, but also how you’re thinking. In today’s episode, I’m really going to break down and give you an intro into these three steps. These three steps also are inside our simply sustainable goal achievement system that we teach founders at the do business better school. [00:04:14] We teach a four-part goal achievement system that’s based upon this cycle of making decisions, implementing and evaluating, as well as bringing the best of your brain to each of those steps, using neuroscience-based mindset tools. Of course decision-making is kind of step one of that goal achievement system, right? Because you really can’t do anything in your business or take any action until the decision has been made. Until the strategy has been set and the action plan has been laid out. I’m going to give you an intro into these today. Then if you’re curious about learning more, you can head over to our website and learn more about the simply sustainable goal achievement system, which is really helpful for all founders to get moving faster, but with more ease in their business. [00:05:03] Okay. Let’s start with step one. Step one: when you’re sitting down to make a decision is actually just filtering out, whether that’s a necessary decision or an unnecessary decision. I think that a lot of founders, me included can sometimes just follow the rabbit hole. It’s like, whatever comes into your brain as maybe a good idea, we just follow it and we start thinking about it. A lot of times the ideas and the thoughts that come into your brain, where you might be considering a directional change, they may not be necessary, or even the most strategic thing to be spending your thoughts or your time on at all. Right? We want to constantly be on the lookout as founders, for what gets our attention and what gets our energy and what we should, what Adam Grant says, put on the metaphorical nightstand. Right? There are so many potential things that we can do to grow our business. There is an endless amount of things that we can spend our money on. There are so many different channels and strategies and ways that we can grow our business. It’s important that we don’t get distracted and start to consider things when they’re not actually going to move the needle for us in the most strategic way possible at this period of time.. [00:06:24] You want to start to recognize what is unnecessary and what is necessary? One of the things that makes a decision unnecessary is when it’s coming from the survival fear-based brain. A lot of times these types of thoughts, they’re what I call brain drama. They feel really strategic, but they’re actually a distraction, a form of self-sabotage. They just throw complexity into the mix, which is not necessary, but they feel like a good idea. I’ll just give you an example of this. When my brain wants to give me unnecessary things to think about it will often do it in the shower. I don’t know why this is, but I will get ideas about new product ideas, new revenue channels, new ways of marketing and selling or even new niches in the shower. Most of the time when I zoom out and I look down at myself and I’m observing my own thinking, I can see that my brain does this halfway through what I’m implementing. Okay. [00:07:32] It’s really important that when you are thinking about making a strategy decision, and making a directional change that you have actually completed the current strategies that you are testing. You’ve brought those through a certain period of time. Maybe you said, okay, I’m going to test the strategy for a month. Then you complete all of those steps without, you know, throwing in the towel and reinventing the wheel. Then you evaluate. It’s when you’re sitting down at that evaluation moment to say, okay, what’s the data, what worked, what didn’t, what can we do or tweak in the next round? That’s when you might consider making a directional change, but if you’re halfway through implementation and you haven’t finished the full promotion or the full campaign or the full. Actions that you really wanted to take, any type of “Ooh, that’s a good idea” that happens in the shower is actually what I would consider brain trauma. You can be onto yourself with these ideas when you actually follow our goal achievement system, because we get founders into a very structured process and they know when they should be considering a directional change or not. They also know when and how to evaluate. It kind of cleans this up for them automatically. But if you’re not in our simply sustainable program, you just want to be on the lookout for whenever your brain wants to contemplate making a change halfway through what you’re implementing. [00:09:04] The idea might feel like it’s super smart, but we don’t want to always believe our human brains, right? The brain wants to risk assess. It wants to often use scarcity and sometimes the survival fear based brain turns on and that can interrupt or interfere with our prefrontal cortex, this ability to problem solve in the most streamlined and most powerful way when we’re in this fear based, “just fix it now” kind of energy. I’m not going to talk too much about how to make decisions with the smartest part of your brain today. I definitely will introduce that to you today and then we can have another episode on it as well. That’s the first step you want to really look at: is this decision necessary or is it not? You really want to be only focused on just a couple needle movers for your business at any given time. You should only be working one to three really intentional strategies for business growth. Of course that depends on the resources that you have, the budget, you have, the team members, you have everything must fit, right? We can’t be trying to do too much with too little money or too little of time or too little of hands. You want to be looking at what are the needle movers, do these fit, and put the rest on the metaphor for local nightstand, knowing that you will get to it when the time comes. [00:10:37] So after you filter unnecessary from necessary, you’re ready to take those necessary decisions and make a timely strategic decision with that. You might need to chunk down that decision even more to just the necessary smaller decisions and I think that this is something that you need to practice as well. [00:11:02] For example, I was on a coaching call recently with one of the founders that I’m working with. One-on-one and we were talking through an issue she was having with her team. Her brain was knowing that she needed to make a big decision about this team member, whether they were going to continue with the company or they were right for that role and where they should be, maybe moving this team member to a more appropriate position. She was zooming out and really pressuring herself to make that big decision in the moment. That’s not always the most necessary decision to make. There’s normally a smaller decision, a lead domino decision that can be made in order to help you make a more clear and confident. Decision when you’re approaching the big elephant in the room. Right? So for example, whether or not to let this team member go or shift their position to something that was more appropriate and it was going to set them up for success. So we really worked on chunking down that decision to say, okay, what is the very next thing you need to decide here in order to move toward clarity here? Without letting your fear based brain make this a very urgent, you know, fire to put out that we have to decide right this second. We were able to chunk down to the necessary decision of let’s just get feedback from the investors. Let’s bring them in. Let’s be vulnerable. Let’s be open and transparent and let’s create a dialogue here so that we can really make sure that we handled this in the most strategic way. Chunking down and focusing on just that next decision that needs to be made will really help you to make that big decision in step two. [00:12:50] Now, one of the things that I like to teach founders when they’re actually sitting down to make a decision, is that it needs to be made in a timely fashion. I think it’s really something fascinating that we tell ourselves a lot. We tell ourselves, you know, I think, need to think about this for a few weeks. I need to think about this. We might even spend a month doing that. We often do that about big strategies, our business models or even smaller decisions and it can become a habit where we think we need a long time to think about stuff. We never think about something for weeks. What we really do is we pop in and out like of these little moments of thinking about it and then we leave each of those little mini sessions, without any decision made. Right? We leave it with indecision and with the feeling of confusion and our brain just , oh, I can’t make that in, it pops back out or it gets distracted. So it spends a lot of time popping in and out, in and out and creating a lot of clutter and not a very good use of your bandwidth of your energy and of your time as a CEO. [00:13:58] Indecision is the death of your business. It’s a really strategic thing to do to start to just pay attention to how often you contemplate things or think about things or consider things in your business. Just in your mind, without actually chunking it down to the next, like a minimal viable decision you need to make that we just talked about and then deciding on that next step and then going out and doing that thing. When you make little small decisions that move you toward more clarity and confidence where you’ve just taken the next step that you need to take in order to clear things up for you. You will make the decisions so much faster in the end. It’s when you leave these little moments with no decision made no plan for the next action you’ll take that’s when indecision can bleed out and become a habit of how you grow your business and those can really create these months where you’re not moving the needle. I see this all the time with coaching clients, right? They think they’re moving the needle. They think they’re working hard and yet the couple of things that they have decided are going to be the strategic things that you use to move their business forward, they actually go four weeks without actioning them. That’s because they are caught up in their brain, considering things and using a lot of bandwidth and energy on things that are not those move needle movers. But also because they have a lot of little unmade decisions based on those big strategies. For example, maybe they’ve decided that they want to do a direct email outreach campaign and they’re going to do cold calling and then they’re going to move people through a series of discovery calls and email follow-ups. This is just an example. And they know that this is the big way that they need to test over the next three months to maybe pilot their new product. Yet they haven’t actually made all the little decisions for that sales funnel. They put it on the calendar of like, yeah, we need to do that, but they don’t actually make all the decisions of, okay, what’s the first step? What’s the script for that? Who’s going to do it? When are they going to start it? Who’s going to approve the script? Right? They’re not actually making all those little decisions. So it’s helpful as well for your sales funnel that you really map out each step of the sales funnel. Then you sit down with yourself or with your co-founder or with your sales and marketing assistant and say, okay, what are the little decisions that we need to make for each of these steps so that we can actually get this sells a marketing campaign up and out. If we know that we’ve made the decision that this channel this marketing strategy is going to be the thing we want to focus on. [00:16:53] All right. There’s never just one big decision. There’s lots of little tiny decisions that need to be made and you want to be really fast with making those and really intentional to not leave any of those decisions admit. Okay. Once you’ve made all the decisions. I promise if you go on like a decision making audit of your business, you’ll find probably a lot of unmade decisions that you just have floating around. That’s a fun exercise that you can do as well. When you do like your annual CEO day, you just kind of take an audit of here’s all the things in my business that I’ve been contemplating as a strategy moving into the new year. Here’s all the undecided, unmade decisions that I have about those things. You can clean out the clutter there, right? Clean out the closet of, okay, these are the ones that we’re going to use. Here’s all the decisions that we need to make about them. The rest let’s just put on the metaphorical nightstand. [00:17:46] Once you’ve chunked down, you’ve made all the big decisions, all the little decisions, your ready to start implementation, but there’s one last decision making step. It’s not what you think it is. [00:18:13] Once you have made the decision, you have to decide to love it. There is a second decision to make where you commit and you say, okay, this is the decision we’ve made it. Now I’ve decided to love that. I’m not going to second guess it. I am not going to stop halfway through implementation and change my mind. I am not going to wait until I feel super confident in order to start implementation because the decision’s made. Now I know that my job is to learn to love this decision and then to use any mindset or coaching tools or nervous system regulation that I need to use in order to step into action taking, because that might feel uncomfortable. We might have things like procrastination happening, but we’re not sure why we might have overwhelm. We might have anxiety. We might have other things that are in the way of actually going out there and taking action on the decision. Those are separate. Those are things that we can coach through using coaching tools. But we don’t just rethink the decision or procrastinate on the decision. In order to create that confidence that we need in order to take the action. The last thing you want to do is really work on that commitment. Okay. [00:19:35] I like to teach something called the five stages of confidence. This is just a concept. That means that confidence doesn’t come right away. Right? All founders want to feel confident before they take action, but it’s just, it’s not how it works. Right? Confidence comes from actually trying, failing, practicing and mastering a skill, right? So a child is not confident to go to the bathroom. My toddler is learning to potty train. That’s why I’m giving you this example. My son is not confident, let’s say, to use the toilet until he actually has done it several times. Right? He’s failed and he’s succeeded he’s learned how to, you know, aim. And finally he gets it, but it doesn’t come before that process. So we can’t rely on confidence. What we have to rely on is clarity. That step one of this is what I’ve decided. This is what I’m going to do. I’m clear about all those little mini decisions that need to be made here so I can step into the action. Commitment of I’m not changing my mind and then a season of courage. A season of saying yes, I’m in my stretch zone. I am out of my comfort zone and yes, I will use nervous system regulation tools to help myself feel safe, but I’m not going to necessarily feel confident until tell I’ve actually gone through that season of courage. [00:21:04] Now you do not have to be the tough parent and use discipline and willpower, which I think is where most founders think they need to default to when I’m talking about this. You definitely can help to create safety for yourself and create a supportive, nurturing environment for yourself that will help your motivation get higher. That’s what coaching tools are all about. That’s part of our goal achievement system. But it’s not a good idea to rely on the artificial feelings of confidence before you take action. [00:21:34] That’s why this third step: love your decision is part of the process because it’s just such an important part to help founders to really step forward with their strategies. The last thing I want to say is that there is no right decision. Oftentimes founders will not feel competent because they’re like, I don’t want to make a wrong decision or Ooh, was that the right decision? We know that we will never be able to know that ahead of time as well. Right? It would be lovely if we all had a magic crystal ball and we could check it and we could tell the future. Right? I would love that too. But again, it’s just not how it works. So we can’t use procrastination or other artificial ways of gaining this sense of control. We have to realize that there’s actually no right decision. There’s a lots of dynamics at play. There’s always an endless amount of options. There’s always an endless amount of ways that we could pivot and adjust. So what we have to do is we have to get that sense of commitment and courage and that sense of feeling grounded and safe using the entrepreneurial cycle. [00:22:46] Make the decision implement, evaluate. When you chunk down the amount of time that you’re really testing things in your business to a week or a month. You know that you’re always going to have an opportunity to look at the data and make an adjustment. When you have a decision making process to follow, you know, that you can make dynamic quick decisions and clear decisions and confident decisions that you can put straight back into implementation into evaluation. [00:23:16] It really speeds you up and it gives you that confidence that you want of like, yes, I can make a decision, put it to the test of valuate using data. I don’t have to get into all this mental drama of analysis, paralysis and procrastination, because I have tools. I follow this cycle over and over and over again. As I build confidence in my structure, in my CEO processes, I also see the needle move on my revenue. I also grow the business and I don’t do that by sitting in my head thinking what’s the right answer ahead of time. I just put it into the process. [00:23:57] All right. I hope that this episode has been insightful for you and that you at least have a few golden nuggets to take into the end of the year and into the new year, as you really strategize for your business and make a plan for how you want to reach that next goal of yours. [00:24:14] Remember, you are always just three steps away from a solid strategic decision that moves the needle for you. Okay? I want you to ask yourself as you leave today: are you contemplating anything that’s actually unnecessary right now in your business? Do you have any on important things, right? That you are spending bandwidth on? [00:24:38] If the answer is yes, put them on the metaphorical nightstand. If there’s important needle moving decisions that need to be made. Have you made all the important decisions? [00:24:48] If not, let’s chunk them down and start making those one by one. And finally, do you love your decisions? Are you all in on your strategy or do you keep getting distracted by other ideas or changing your mind? [00:25:03] Use the process and the tools and the mindset had bits that I’ve shared with you today to become a powerful decision maker and watch your business grow as a result. [00:25:16] Keep serving the world, keep making sales and keep making time for self care. I will see you back here next time. Take care.