When to Make Better Decisions

tl;dr Don’t make decisions when things are great, but generally make them during normal times, with a touch of the honesty that comes from anger.

Back when I was traveling a lot, before the pandemic reshaped the business entirely, my favorite thing on my flight home was to rethink my pricing. Maybe I was coming from Peoria in a noisy little prop plane, stuck next to someone who thought he owned the armrest, already departing late and knowing I’d miss my connection, eating three-day old sushi from a disgruntled server who probably spat in it…. Well, you get the idea.

Anyway, the idea was to fully evaluate whether I ever wanted to do that again, for that amount of money. I had this firm belief that pricing decisions should be made at your lowest point. That it wasn’t a scientific exercise, but rather a game of moving the slider: if you got hired to do another job like that, the money would be good enough to get you excited again, and if you didn’t get hired, all the better.

When Leads to What

So that got me thinking about how the timing of our decisions impacts the quality of our decisions, and thus this very scientific chart you see right here in the article. And I fully expect that this will revolutionize the entire business world with my brilliant insights. Just kidding.

But the truth is that you are going to make all kinds of decisions, and given enough time, you’re going to make them during all of these phases. So let’s break each of them down.

Stupid Decisions at the Top

You just had an amazing year and decide to give out very generous annual bonuses, without attaching a warning to them, and then next year, and the years after that, any subsequent Christmas bonus that doesn’t meet or exceed the first lowers your approval rating until you don’t get reelected to the Office of Generous Principal.

Or, “Wow, the marketplace is cheering for us. We should really hire all these people to meet demand. Even though we didn’t really do anything to create that demand, but it was mostly on the back of one client who just really needed us.”

In another example, you think the acquirer is underestimating your potential, and so you slip in some half-hearted assurances about what they should expect your revenue to be. They keep feeding you enough rope to hang yourself in the earnout, which has now become a sentence.

Or this campaign that you’ve worked on for a great client over the last 19 months was a huge hit. Your CD wants a piece of the action or she’ll leave, so you make her a partner, ignoring the little flashing lights in your peripheral vision, and sure enough, she’s a fantastic doer and not really an entrepreneur.

Things are never as good as they seem. At least that’s what I tell myself, along with the important corollary: they are never as bad as they seem, either. Speaking of which.

Honesty…and Courageous Decisions…at the Bottom

You really don’t want to be acting on any of your impulses when things are terrible, either, at the other end of the scale. In your mind, there’s snow on the ground, the heat is barely keeping up, there’s a solid cloud cover at 900’, you haven’t seen the sun in ages, and woe is you.

You’re desperate and reckless, and you aren’t very caring of other people, either.

But I want to insert a really important note, here. This stage right here is where you are most honest. You say the things that you think a lot—but never utter—because you know how they will land. But you are thinking them, and they are largely true, and it’s about time you faced them.

When you’re having a loud argument with a spouse or friend, you say very hurtful things, but sometimes they are true things that you feel, and you’ve gotten to the point where the internal pressure has built up to the point where your empathetic self gets pushed aside so that you can express yourself and be heard.

Don’t say that shit when you’re mad, but do pay attention to it. And let the anger subside without losing the honesty, and then account for that truth in your decision making.

Safest Decisions in the Middle

There’s not much to say about the vast middle, where you should really be making the vast majority of your better decisions.

So I’ll end with one very specific ask: start listening more carefully to the things going through your mind and out of your mouth during that lowest level of anger, then take a few deep breaths, talk with a friend, and make better decisions in the middle that fully account for the honesty that you’ve been masking.

When you are frustrated with your business, and are therefore being more honest with yourself than normal—this is the time to make some choices and let the anger fuel change.

Finally

And now for the public service announcement: join the two dozen or so of us, being totally honest with each other, about our positioning, our service offering design to deliver that, and then a targetable, executable lead gen plan that we really look forward to instead of dread. Atlanta at a brewery, Jan 9-10, with Max Traylor teaching the middle section on service offering design and productizing your offerings.