Decisions, Decisions

I had just opened my first office for Advantage Payroll Services - well, if you could call it an office. It was literally in a storage room in an office building. I used several boxes, a discarded table and whatever office chairs had accidentally been left behind for my fledgling operation. We managed to bring quite a few clients on service in the first six months, none of which were invited to visit my storage - I mean, office space.

Getting started in any business is exasperating and exciting. There are hundreds of decisions that need to be made. Some are urgent, some are important and some are both.  The hard part is deciding which decisions need significant time and focus to be made properly and which can be made rather quickly. Logically, we can see that deciding on what color pen you should use today is low on the significance scale, but I have seen, and probably made, bigger decisions - like what products should be offered - just as hastily.

Making the decision for a very meager setting for my first office was not necessarily simply by choice. It was all I could afford when I opened the Long Island Advantage office, so the choice was partly made for me. Would I make that choice again? Probably, as it really gave us the opportunity to build a client base and focus on servicing new clients instead of worrying very much about our overhead. Some business decisions will not be so obvious and will require much more thought.

We recently completed an exercise about decision making at Working Lunch, our monthly event to help business owners overcome their mutual challenges. I was not surprised to hear most of the attendees reveal that they do not have a process in place when making significant decisions. I asked for a volunteer to share a significant decision that they were struggling with at the time, to provide the group with an example of how they presently made important decisions. A brave woman in her early forties who sells services to small and medium-sized businesses agreed to participate and bring her challenge from private to public.

Her dilemma was familiar to most of the attendees present. She was doing well and making a healthy living, but wondered that if she buckled down and put more time and effort into work to make more money, would she and her family be better off? Until our meeting, she had been thinking about this for quite some time, but had not made a decision. She was constantly struggling as to what would be best decision because she did not have a methodology in place to help her make this difficult choice. She was fueled by emotions which were stifling her ability to act.

Here are the questions we told her to ask herself, using pen and paper, as we helped her make a decision that was right for her.

1. Do I have all the information I need to make an informed decision?
2. What are my options/choices? 
3. What are the effects of the outcome of each decision? Weigh the pros and cons.
4. How will I feel if the decision I make is wrong?
5. Have I ever needed to make a similar choice in the past? If so, what was the conclusion? Did this have a positive or negative effect on my life?
6. If I remove my emotions from the choices, does my decision change?

After careful evaluation and actually writing down her answers and watching the pros and cons of the decision come to life, she was able to make an informed choice. After weighing the selections she had made and the reasons why, she made the decision to invest the extra time and effort into ramping up her sales to increase her income. There is no right or wrong answer in this particular situation. She made the right decision for her.

Don’t get blocked by indecision or lack of clarity. You can use this very easy technique to help you make the right choice. I wish I had discovered this simple and effective method when I first started my businesses. I now regularly use this type of process when making decisions today.