MBA2204 How Your Indecision Is Wasting Your Time & Money

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling.

Payments and wondering how this became my life.

But once I automated the admin side of things, of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with Intuit QuickBooks. QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform.

Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Product perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals.

Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Doll RMBA Show Business Building insights you can count on every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's lesson you'll learn how your indecision is wasting your time and money. Whether you're just starting out in business or you've been running your business for a decade, indecision is your biggest enemy. Some people call it analysis paralysis or see it as a form of procrastination, but in my opinion, it's a fear of risk. You see, when you look at indecision for what it is, it's really us delaying, taking a leap forward. When you make a decision, you say to yourself, hey, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to focus my efforts and follow through. And of course our decisions can end up being wrong and we think subconsciously if we don't make a decision then we can't make a wrong decision. But indecision is the worst decision. And by the way, not making a decision is a decision and it's actually the worst outcome. And I'll explain why. But that's not the worst of it. The problem with indecision is that it's wasting so much of your time and money. Your opportunity costs go through the roof. So in today's lesson, I'm going to show you why it's so important to make decisions in a timely manner. I'm going to give you my method to make sure that you can make decisions quickly so you don't waste time and money. And how to lower the risks of your decisions so you're not losing sleep over decisions you've made. And sometimes even sabotaging hard decisions for the fear that it could be the wrong decision. Fam this is so important because as an entrepreneur, as a leader of your business, your job is to make sound decisions. And when you don't make these decisions, you let things hang out. Your business suffers. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.

In business, decisions are a funny thing because we know that decisions are important. We got to make the right decision. They're critical, especially if you've been running your business for some time and the stakes are high. But at the same time, by not making a decision, by delaying your decisions, you're wasting time. By not doing the things you should be doing, the things that will contribute to the new decision, you're delaying results. You're delaying the possible money and customers you could be earning. You're wasting your biggest asset, which is, of course, your time. And you're kind of in this limbo state where you're not really creating anything or producing anything for your business. It's not a good place to be. And the bottom line is that we find ourselves in this place of indecision because of fear, because we're afraid to make a decision with the worry that it's going to be the wrong decision. Let me give you an example. Let's say you know that you need to change your pricing or your packaging for your business or product. You're delaying this decision because you're afraid you might turn off new customers with your new pricing, you might be too expensive. Maybe you're worried that the product that you're offering is not that valuable or you won't be competitive in the marketplace. Now, while you're umming and ahhing about this decision, you're not taking action, you're not moving forward, you're not actually doing the work that you need to do to actually put this decision in the real world, right in motion, where you have to maybe change your pricing page, change your pricing on your payment processor, communicate to your customers, do all the things you need to do to actually implement this change. Let's say you delayed this decision for months. Instead of taking action, you could have been done by now, you could have already had the prices changed, you already have the revenue coming in and you would actually have the answer to your worries. The wondering of is this really something that's going to affect my customers or my business in a negative way? Instead, months have gone by, you don't have any more information, you haven't made any progress towards a decision and you're even more behind on the progress of this decision. Now, as business owners, we don't work in a vacuum, right? We have competitors, we work in a marketplace. We gotta move fast because we gotta keep on improving and trying things and experimenting. Otherwise we're gonna be taken to the cleaners by our competitors. This is why I implement this strategy. I give myself a time period to make a decision. Now, the bigger the decision, meaning the bigger the impact this decision will make on my business. The more time I give myself meaning, if you're looking to sell a two hour workshop versus sell your whole company, these are two different decisions. One is going to require more thought and research and the other one, it's okay if you get wrong. It's not huge in terms of impact that it'll have on your business and your personal life and your future, right? So I like to time box my decision making. So for example, with the workshop idea, the two hour workshop, should I offer a paid two hour workshop? Well, I give myself 48 hours and this is just something I came up with, decisions at this level, no more than 48 hours, I should make a decision and move forward or not move forward. But a decision needs to be made. So what do I do in those 48 hours? Well, I try to gather as much information to allow me to be able to make this decision, an easy decision. So I might survey my customers, I might do some AB testing or run an ad to test if people are interested in this type of workshop. I might run a poll on Twitter. The point here is, is that I have 48 hours to gather as much data to make my final decision. This often allows me just focus on, okay, let me get as much information as possible to make this as easy as possible for myself. And by the time the 48 hours is up, making this decision is super simple. The point here is that you got to hold your feet to the fire and make a decision during this time. Now you want to give yourself more time if it's a bigger decision, obviously, but regardless, you need a deadline. And what I like about this strategy is that I give myself permission to do all that research, to get the data, to think about it, to ponder, to ask myself, do I really want to do this in the first place? I get it out of my system, and at the same time, I ensure that I actually gave the decision the time it deserved. But once I make a decision now, the deadline's up. I made a decision, Yes, I will go ahead with this workshop. There's no more back and forth, meaning the decision has been decreed, right? It's like a law from a king. The next step is just pure implementation. It's time to take action, to take the steps to complete this decision, to complete this task or this new initiative, in this case, the workshop. That means I got to outline the workshop, I got to put a page together. So I got to start selling it, I got to start marketing it, I got to put it on the calendar. It's going to happen. Now I'm in just implementation mode. That's it. My CEO brain has already made the decision. Now I just go ahead and implement. Now what I like to do in these situations is I like to MVP the idea, meaning minimal viable product. Many people think, hey, I should do an online course on this topic. And creating this online course may take you months. Instead, try to sell a workshop like in this example. This is the first version of your actual course. It could be the first module of your course. Learn from it. See if you enjoy it, see if there's interest, if there is. Awesome. And now you have momentum. Now you have proof, rock solid proof that this is a good idea. It's a good decision. The problem that most entrepreneurs experience is they don't have a structure. They just kind of just say, I gotta make a decision on this thing. A too hard basket. I just kind of think about it later. And they don't hold themselves accountable. They don't have deadlines to make decisions. They don't allow themselves to gather the right data and do some testing and AB testing and all that kind of stuff to figure out if this is worth pursuing. What happens is that the business owner just gets paralyzed with indecision. And if you're ever finding yourself in this situation, what you need to do is remind yourself that the people that win in life and in business are those who take action. And when you don't have a decision, it's hard to take action. So even if that decision is, no, I will not do this, great, now I can focus my efforts and my actions towards something else that will help my business. And in most cases, your decisions will not make or break the whole business. In fact, in a lot of ways, it will help your business if you make a wrong decision. Let me give you an example. Before I launched my software company, Webinar Ninja, eight years ago, I thought it would be a good idea to teach people how to put together webinars on their own. The way I used to do Frankensteining, eight to 10 different pieces of software. I called it the DIY webinar guide. And it was a guide, a book with some tutorials. I worked on this product. I made a decision to put it out there, and I put it for sale. And it flopped, right? I had two sales. One of them was a chargeback, right? It wasn't even a real sale. But in that process, I learned that people do not want to learn how to do this thing right. This is a bad product. They actually want a tool to do it for them. They don't want to learn how to do it for themselves. They want it just solved. And that's why I created Webinar Ninja, to make things easy for people to run webinars. So just like Ben Horowitz says in his book the Hard Thing about Hard Things, sometimes you have to create a bad product to create a good one. And yes, it was a bit of a waste of time and money. But I'm glad I made the decision to move forward with the DIY webinar guide because I learned a huge lesson that changed the trajectory of my life and business. I actually think the cost of indecision is a whole lot worse, a whole lot more expensive than making the wrong decision in most cases. Now, sometimes I'm going to tell you from experience, making the wrong decision can cost you a fair bit of money and time. But I don't know any entrepreneur that has never made a wrong decision. I think if I look at the aggregate of my decisions, I'm probably in the positive because I force myself to make a decision and take action, and because I have so many reps I have the chance to make better decisions every single time. The thing is that let's say it takes you so long to make a decision that you only make three or four decisions a year. That means you only get three or four major things done. But if you are in the habit of making decisions, let's say you do 30 decisions a year, you have more of a likelihood to achieve some success because they have 30 at bats 30 chances to do something great for your.

Business ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people because of.

This paradox with indecision, I'm a big believer in having a low pressure, low risk business to start with. When you start out in business, whether you're a coach or you're selling products or services, make sure that you're not betting the farm right from the start. Right, right. When you're just even pre revenue where you're in debt and you're feeling the pressure of every decision. If you start off with a very simple business, let's say for example you sell services where you actually implement the services yourself. Let's say you're like a graphic designer, then the risk is low because you don't really need much upfront capital to get started. If things are not doing well, you don't really need to worry about paying payroll or paying other staff or creditors. It's just much simpler. You have less pressure and every decision doesn't affect so many other things. This allows you to get the reps of making decisions quickly, following through, taking action over and over and over. So you're so confident with your decision making abilities and your decision and action taking abilities that as you start to grow your business and reinvest and maybe even get investors and all that kind of stuff, you will have a whole lot more confidence as you move forward and make bigger decisions along the way. Decision making is like a skill, like any other skill, you need practice and it's great to do it in a low pressure environment so that you feel free to make decisions quickly. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love the show, the best way for you to support it is to hit, subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app right now. Whatever you're using to listen to this podcast, whether it's Stitch Radio or Himalaya or Overcast or Apple Podcast or Spotify, hit Follow, hit subscribe to make sure you get our next episode automatically. It also lets that algorithm know hey, this podcast is pretty good. Before I go, I want to leave you with this when making decisions, understand that not all decisions are created equal. When you have a business that doesn't have revenue yet, the shade of blue in your color palette is not as important as your pricing structure or the product itself, or having your first customer. Some people will dwell on the little details, the little decisions, and spend hours, if not weeks, on these decisions without making sure that they actually have a business on their hands. Make sure you have a product people want. Make sure you can make sales. Make sure that you're profitable. Make sure that you can bring in customers on a regular basis. Make sure you can deliver consistent quality. This is what really matters. And then once you have all that stuff sorted, you can spend a bit of time and fine tune and polish your business with the finer decisions. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.