The 5 Decision-Making Mistakes That Are Slowing Your Business Down

If you're a small business owner, you need to make decisions every single day. This video is going to give you five tips that I use to make sure I'm making the right ones, or at least more of the right ones and fewer of the mistakes that cost me big time. I'll be covering five tactics to make Smarter, Faster decisions from the point of view of a Process Consultant if we haven't met before, hi, my name is Laila. I'm a process consultant here at ProcessDriven, the company I founded back in 2018. Since 2018, I've helped 2,000 clients systemize their operations, everything from tasks to knowledge management. The number of team members our framework has influenced has been a lot and one of the key things we work on with clients is decision making, figuring out how to make better ones and specifically how to make sure our teams make better ones. The first thing you need to know if you want to make better decisions faster and quicker. Know the difference between two ways and one way decisions. And I don't know who popularized this concept attribution here. If someone can find it, you let me know in the comments. But two way decisions are referring to things that you can make and then unmake with marginal costs. For example, I might decide to put my hair in a clip and then take it back down and it really doesn't cost me that much other than a few seconds. Similarly, there are things in your business that are a small and marginal cost. For example, you. You could not answer that email in your inbox. Not a big deal. You can always come back from it later. You could change your prices. Maybe you go too high. Not a big deal. You can change it back later. These are decisions that are flexible. Are there costs incurred with undoing it? Yes, but not the end of the world. That's a two way decision. A one way decision is a decision that once made will mark you. There are very few true one way decisions, but sometimes a two way decision can have such high costs that it goes into the one way category. Some examples of one way decisions would be deciding to, I don't know, commit fraud or bankruptcy or shut down the business. Those are some pretty severe things that once done mark you. Another decision would be to delete your YouTube channel. That would be pretty permanent and lasting. The reason I give you these two definitions is because I view choices on a spectrum between two way and very easily reversible. Slightly reversible, but a pain in the ass to very not reversible. And when I'm making a decision knowing where it falls on this spectrum is a helpful way for me to know how important is this? Because if you start treating every two way, highly reversible decision, like a hair clip, as if it was the decision to delete your entire YouTube channel, you're going to be exhausted. But if I know where it falls, I can kind of allocate my energy effectively. So tip number one, mistake, slash tip number two is around volume. I see so many of my peers of my clients who make so many decisions. They are involved in everything and nothing goes by without their say so. And I'm guilty of this from time to time, too. But one of the tips I found quite helpful when it comes to decision making is simply making fewer of them. The most classic example is in your closet. So rather than having 400 different outfits to wear, what if you just had 10? How much faster would it be to get dressed as someone who's not a fashion chica? That sounds amazing. And that would be one route I could go. Now you might be sitting there thinking, layla, I don't give a shit about fashion. What does this have to do with business? An example of fewer decisions to make in a business would be by setting your pricing. Maybe you don't publish it. That's your choice. Marketing gurus chime in here. But rather than negotiating a price and creating a bid for every customer, could you create a formula? Could you set a flat price bid that a full bathroom remodel is $2,500, but if it's this, that and the other, it's 7,500, and then you don't have to do all the costing and the, oh, I don't know, what do we feel like? You don't have to make so many decisions. Another example would be this right here. I could decide when do I feel like filming YouTube for this week? And then I would never film YouTube because I would just delay, delay, delay, delay. Rather than making it a decision, I just set things to repeat. Just like you would auto ship things from Amazon for people who are into that stuff. I auto ship tasks to my plate and every single Tuesday I sit down and I block off the day for you, my friend, for making these YouTube videos. And that's not a decision, it just appears every week. I know I have to do it every week. It's just a ritual I have. And as much as that might sound horrible to you, if you were someone who's not in the habit of building routines, it is life changing. So that's tip number two. The third mistake I See, are people creating decisions without using frameworks or systems? Go figure. Right from the process and systems chick that I would talk about systems here. But if you are making a decision, that's awesome. But in an ideal case, as a busy business owner, you want to be making decisions that can live on beyond that moment. For, for example, let's say your team member comes to you and says, hey, I have a customer that really wants a refund. And they're not happy with the product they bought 25 days ago. But our refund policy is only 21 days. So they're four days past it, but they haven't logged in. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I really think we should give them a refund. But it's against our policy. Can I do it? That is a decision that I'm being asked to make. It's interrupting my day. It's interrupting my flow. I could just say yes or no and I could go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and explain to this person my reasoning. Or I could create a system, a framework, a policy, a rule. That is what I have found to be the much preferable option. Because if I just say yes, or if I just say no, then every time that happens again, I have to deal with it again. And I love solving problems, but I hate solving the same problem again and again. I have a very low threshold of patience for that. Maybe you can relate. So in this moment, I could say, you know what, I'm sorry, we're going to stick to the policy. Go ahead and update the sop, the policies that my team will use here and make sure it's a hard and fast rule. Or maybe I want to say, hey, there's a grace period within seven days. Use your discretion. I trust you. If it's more than seven, then let's talk and we'll deal with that once we get to it. But anything less than that, just do it. You see how I'm answering the question by instituting a policy, but I'm not the one doing it. I'm asking this person to, to go co author this thing with me. So now we're collaborators on this new rule we're going out to. So that way, when, not if, this situation happens again, there is a game plan that can be independently figured out without me having to be involved. And I should say, when it comes to this kind of system building, I have a free tool in the description you might want to check out. It's called the Systemization Snapshot. It's a bunch of questions. Basically asks you about scenarios in your business and how do you handle them. And based on your answer, it generates a score on how systemized you are or are not. And sometimes that can be a really helpful gut check because I've had a lot of clients come to me and be like, oh my gosh, our systems are amazing, but my team is shit. Then they take that snapshot and they realize, oh, it's actually not my team, it's not me. We don't have to change. Our systems are actually really below the average. And I don't know, it can be very helpful to check that out. So we created that tool for free. It's in the description below. Check it out if you're interested. All right, number four. The fourth mistake I have both made and seen is making decisions too slowly. And you might think, wait, slowly? Like slow decisions are good. We want to make sure we're making the right choice, making the right thing. I get where you're coming from. I was in the same boat. But I have never regretted making a quick decision. Because if I make a quick decision, especially on a two way decision, I can make a quick decision again and move on to it. The pain I have found most painful in business, and again, maybe this is just my experience, is the pain of indecision. It's the pain of stress, pressure without direction. As a leader, as a manager, as a business owner, I view my role to be the rudder of my team. I. I'm guiding our direction both for the future, far out, but also just for the week. What's the tone we are setting? Where are we focused? What's our priority? I am steering. And if I ever get in a point where I'm like, I don't know what I want, I just keep spinning the wheel of the ship and we go in circles. Everyone around me, whether I realize it or not, feels that energy. I'm not like hippie dippy here. I really have seen this to be true and it affects them. It affects team wide productivity to have that uncertainty. I'm someone who's long believed in the adage of strong opinions. Loosely held. I would rather be wrong and quick than way too slow and right. I have found this decision around pacing to be very personal. So find the balance that works well for you. But finding a way to act faster, decide faster, communicate faster has served me very well, even though it is not my natural inclination at all. And by the way, if that sounds scary to you, something I've actually found helpful is realizing that these other tips of, you know, two way Versus one way decisions, reducing volume, you building systems. This stuff all naturally makes your decisions go faster. So if this feels impossible to you right now, focus on some of the other tips and you'll actually see your speed dramatically improve as well. Or at least that's what was true for me. So might be worth a shot. Number five, last but not least, the fifth and most deadly mistake that has bitten me in the ass more times than I like. Missing options. There, I'm sure are plenty inspirational quotes that I should and could pull up here. But I have made my worst decisions when I thought I was making a choice between two things, but there's actually a third and a fourth and a fifth and six. I didn't realize what options were actually available. And so my tip for you, slash, what I found helpful is to really make sure I'm evaluating all options before any decision is made. I want to move quick, you know. Yeah. But I don't ever want to be in a false binary. I never want to think, oh, it's this or nothing. That's rarely true. Usually there's a C or a D or an E or an F. There's other things that are available to me that if I look around for a second I will spot. This has particularly been true for me when it comes to hiring employees. So if any of you have gone through that process, you know, kind of like the pressure, the two way pressure of like, oh, is this the right person? I don't know. Maybe. Early on I used to make the mistake of choosing between candidates of like, is it Bob or is it Susie? I don't know. And that is a great example of missing options. It could be neither, it could be both. It could be Bob part time and Susie quarter time. It could be all Susie, except rather than the salary she wants, it's a benefits package. There are so many different terms that are available to you in every decision that whenever you find yourself between two options, I always kind of like my spidey senses go off and I'm like, look around. Yes, we want to act quickly, but we don't want to act stupidly and based on false information. Of course I know I'm preaching to the choir because if you're watching this video about business decision making, you've already been through quite a bit. I bet you've been through your fair share of bad decisions, great decisions, good decisions, mediocre decisions. You know this firsthand. But the cue that I have found very helpful is to think about the terms. And I actually stole this term from from Cody Sanchez youtuber which I will link somewhere on this thing who has a book called oh my gosh, Main Street Millionaire. There it goes. Forgot the name where she talks about this in the concept of deal making of mergers and acquisitions. And Cody's politics aside, I really love the way she covered this approach to deal making and decision making. So if you're looking for an additional book recommendation here, that would be a really good one to check out. If you like, I find this area something where you could benefit from a little more creativity. Now I promised at the onset just five tips, but I'm immediately feeling a little bit of FOMO here. Like just five. What was I thinking? There's so many principles around decision making that have been helpful to me over the years, so I'm going to ask you to help me out. Go down below this video and leave a comment with what you think Number six should be. What tips have I missed? Obviously I have not gotten all the years under my belt quite yet. I have so much to learn and and learning from you is my favorite part about doing this job. So leave me a comment, let me know what tips you would add when it comes to faster and better decision making. If you enjoy this video, definitely watch this video here on the end screen where you can continue down this kind of business building journey. And until next time, make sure you head down the description and find that free systemization quiz I mentioned earlier on. And until we talk next, enjoy the process.