How to make fewer dumb decisions…

Summary

• When feeling stuck or that your business isn't growing, it often indicates poor decision-making rather than a lack of good decisions.
• As co-CEO of acquisition.com with an $85 million annual revenue, I've made this video to share insights on making fewer dumb decisions, which is crucial for business growth.
• Starting with no business experience, my background in the fitness industry and passion for helping others channeled me into learning about sales, marketing, and customer retention, leading to the successful start of Gym Launch with my husband.
• Making fewer bad decisions is more important than trying to make brilliant ones; it's about avoiding 'net zero' decisions that can negate all the positive ones.
• Businesses often fail by making decisions based on fear of failure instead of proactive actions, especially during growth phases where momentum leads to poor judgment.
• The balance between action and reflection is key; reflecting on mistakes allows for better future decision-making while still being proactive.
• Trading problems for different problems instead of seeking nonexistent perfect solutions can be a powerful mindset in decision-making.
• Employ a decision-making framework to protect from emotional decision-making, which can lead to 'paying the dumb tax' or costing your business due to poor judgments.
• Reflecting on the 'dumb tax' prompts consideration of what could have been accomplished without those losses, emphasizing the need for a solid decision-making process.
• Avoid making decisions based on assumptions; challenge beliefs by treating them as assumptions to open up possibilities for creative solutions.
• A practical step-by-step approach to decision-making includes asking the right questions, separating symptoms from problems, testing assumptions, and mapping out likely results to minimize risk and maximize positive outcomes.
• Save your business from potential pitfalls by applying structured decision-making processes and always considering the compounding effects of your choices.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting by making sure you're not making dumb decisions. It's better to have no bad ones than to try to make brilliant ones. To do this, learn from mistakes. When you mess up, think about it and learn. This way, you can make better choices next time.

Keep taking action, but also take time to think back on what didn't work. This balance is key. Reflect, but don't stop moving forward.

Create a list of business problems. For each problem, think about it like you don't want more problems; you just want different ones. This way, you can figure out solutions that might be better, even if not perfect.

Put together a step-by-step plan for making decisions. Here's what to do:

1. Ask yourself the right questions to find the real problems, not just what seems wrong on the surface.
2. Separate what's really going on from what just looks like the issue.
3. Don't assume you know things. Test out your ideas to see if they are actually true.
4. Think about what could happen with different choices. Go with the one that likely turns out best and is least risky.

Following these steps could save your business from making mistakes. Remember, every choice has effects that add up over time, so choose wisely.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"Outstanding long-term results are produced primarily by avoiding dumb decisions rather than by making brilliant ones"

– Leila Hormozi

"Every time you make a new decision or you're looking at a problem you're trying to solve in your business, it's not, Do I want to solve this problem using this? But it's, Would I like to trade the problems I have today for the problems that exist if I choose that solution?"

– Leila Hormozi

"If we turn our beliefs into assumptions, we expand the possibilities of our business"

– Leila Hormozi

"The biggest piece that I've taken away from… decision making is… it's not necessarily that [my mentors are] more skilled than I am, but they make a few better decisions than I do or more so they make less bad decisions than I do"

– Leila Hormozi

"Decisions dictate the quality of our life; it also dictates the quality of our business"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

share with you is a training that i did on how to make better decisions or more so how to stop making stupid decisions so that you can grow your business and so if you are at a point where you feel like maybe you feel stuck maybe you feel like things aren't growing as fast as you want them to grow maybe you feel like you can't get yourself out of the business oftentimes it is those are symptoms of a root cause which is that you're not making the best decisions or maybe uh you might be making great decisions but you've made enough stupid ones that outweighs the smart ones you've made and so in this video that is what i go over and that's why i made an entire training about it and so if you don't know who i am my name is laila hormozy co-ceo of acquisition.com portfolio of businesses that does about 85 million per year in annual revenue um and i just made this video because i felt like it was something that was needed and is a problem that i dealt with for many years and i think a lot of the ceos in our portfolio deal with and so i hope it is of value to you uh have a great rest of your day night evening drive whatever you're doing the topic i chose actually and it was something that chris had brought up was how to make well it was really making tough decisions but i i've kind of reworded it into how to make fewer dumb decisions and so i'll i will tell you why i chose that to be the topic in a second but i figured i'd give a little bit of background on myself you know i'm not like a professional speaker or presenter or anything like that and so i don't um if i say i'm more like it's just because i don't i usually just i'm speaking to my clients at this point i think it was we just celebrated or i think coming in a month is our five year anniversary from our first company and that company is called gym launch and that is one that my husband and i started back in 2016 and to give you context prior to that um you'll see i have like a picture right there in the corner of myself overweight and then myself competing in a bikini competition because prior to that i had no experience in companies um i had been a trainer for seven years and so i actually got into the fitness industry because i lost weight i wanted to help other people lose weight i didn't know anything about business marketing sales nothing i was just exercise science physiology major and i really just wanted to help people that was genuinely all i wanted to do and i actually got interested in business because as soon as i got out of college and got out of my internships you know i had this idea of what my life would look like i'm sure as many of you you know you start a business you're really passionate about it or you go into something you're really passionate about and then you realize it's like oh i have to know how to sell and to market and to keep customers and to do billing and all these things and that was really how i got into um studying more of that side of the business aspect of things and then i met my husband and that's when we started our first company gym launch and essentially what that company uh grew to do was uh we've worked with over 5000 gyms now and essentially small microgyms and we have a business model that we like to put into their facility so that they can honestly just make more money and retain more clients because the average gym has really bad numbers the average gym owner takes home like 18 000 a year only and their churn is usually 20 month over month and so we just saw a really big need for it in the industry and it just so happened it was our first business together and i think because of the combination of our skill sets which was just happenstance um he's really good at marketing and vision and i'm really good at managing people and leading people and operations um it just grew really quickly and so that's a picture of i think that was our fourth event and we had 750 gym owners there and it was a really great experience growing it and now we've expanded into we have a company called prestige labs which does we supply supplements and meals for facilities to sell through so like a chiropractor a physical therapist a gym they can all sell these through their facility and it's built with that in mind so that then they have kind of proprietary things to sell so that they're not like price looking on amazon and such and then from there we started a software company about 11 months ago that nurtures leads and all of these the supplements and the meals and the software came from the first company it was really ideas that stemmed in there but they deserved their own you know team and efforts behind them so i kind of look at them more like product lines if that makes sense we're really passionate about giving back uh you know i think uh some of you may be from familiar with like the clickfunnels world um we were good friends with the ceo and we had said it's really cool to have all these like make money awards but like we don't really feel good taking a make money award because it just feels kind of grimy and so we suggested he do uh we wanted to start one for donating so who can donate the most um we thought that was a better form of competition and so we're on the board of uh actual all-stars it's a charity that they work with underprivileged kids and so um it's been a tough year for them because of you know not having contact with them in school which has been hard um but they're a really great organization and so at this point we have about um between the three product lines i have about 85 people on my team and the reason i feel like i i can share with all of you today is that i started with no experience five years ago you know i literally had no idea what i was doing and so i just have a lot of uh in the trenches knowledge it's and it's something i've become passionate about because i think i remember when we first started our company that my thought was i cannot let this not work because of me um and i my husband or my partner at that time right he had so much faith in me he was like you're just so good with people there's no way you can't do this so i was like all i need to do is acquire the skill it's not like i have to i know i have the right intentions i'm the right kind of person i just have to acquire the skill and i think that what i realized along the way was the one skill that i was missing in the beginning um and that i think i've really honed in on in the last two years is really just decision making and it's so interesting because it's not something that i really like would say is a skill but now i would say it's a skill um and the biggest piece that i've you know taken away from that is i think that the people that i've observed that have i consider mentors i look up to it's not necessarily that they're more skilled than i am but they make a few like just a few better decisions than i do or more so they make less bad decisions than i do right and so that's why i felt this was a good topic to share it's just something i've been really interested in shedding light upon it with our clients and with you know friends of ours that we just um have you know maybe we have equity in their business or something it's been something that i think has been helpful and so that's why i want to share that with everybody here so the biggest piece is obviously we all know that you can't make progress without making decisions right and i think it's really interesting because i think we make about uh the numbers 30 000 decisions a day and so you think about that you think about your business right you have like one big decision to make but you have all these micro decisions you're making around it and so i just really became obsessed with thinking like how can i make less bad decisions because i feel like you can make a ton of really good decisions but if you make one really bad one it kind of outweighs it which is my point here which is like no matter how many decisions that you make that are good if you make one bad one i've coined this phrase you can get zero right and so it's essentially a net zero decision meaning that that one bad decision is so bad that it cancels out all of the good decisions that you just made and i've seen that happen so many times with clients of ours um where it's like they have so much momentum and it's often times when you have the most momentum that you make the worst decisions and so here's my theory behind it well as well as like you know the compilation of everything i've studied often those net zero decisions are made in an attempt to avoid failure so they don't come from a place of proactive i'm aggressively taking action they come from a place of i don't want to mess up and i see this happen so often especially in the first couple years of a business i feel like these are most often the decisions that are made when i can consider a good decision would be you know picking a growing market finding a blue ocean developing a proprietary technology that allows you to have a moat around your business maintaining a really healthy margin developing a high performance culture picking the right business partner those are fundamentally very good decisions right a net zero decision and these are ones that i took from examples from either myself or from people that i knew uh first one is one i've made which is hiring the wrong co uh picking the wrong investor selling to the wrong firm expanding into the wrong niche under investing in your product or failure to innovate fast enough i've seen all those take out a lot of businesses in the last few years and particularly within you know the client sector that i've coached and i consider those net zero which i've seen people who have had a really great beautiful seven or eight figure businesses and they've made one of those decisions like everything up until that point they're batting ten out of ten and then they make that and it's zero out of ten it cancels everything else and so i hope that just if i can just help one of you on this call not make one of those decisions then that would be that would be enough for me and so this is often the way that i see it happening which is you get into business and i think we all know this right it takes a ton of bold decisive action to start the business because just in general you have to feel it's like that fierce fire it's more of a masculine energy help you get it off the ground and get it started and then what continues to happen is in the beginning you probably feel like a fraud because you're making all these mistakes but the thing is is that you're continuing to make mistakes but then you'll correct them very quickly because you're taking a lot of action in the beginning then what starts to happen is you start to question yourself i see this all time this is where the mistakes come in and you start to say i don't know if i'm so good at this i don't know if i trust myself and then you start to make mistakes by omission and that's at the very top that's the peak that's usually when the business is actually in a very good state and then you'll see the ceo starts to back off they start to really like pull themselves almost withdrawal and oftentimes it's the feeling of they don't want to talk to their team maybe they don't talk to their customers or maybe they don't want to speak up as much because they're starting to lose confidence in themselves because they feel like oh i'm making mistakes all the time but the reality is they're making decisions all the time at least they're aggressive mistakes that they can course correct quickly but what happens from there if they make the mistake by omission is that then they go down the road or they start being more passive and decisions are made for them because they just put them off they become indecisive and they put things off they start to procrastinate and i've seen this cycle so many times with people and i think that what everyone just tends to forget is that you know the mistakes by aggression is typically always the better way to go because if you make a mistake by omission meaning you just put it off and never make the decision it is a decision in itself and it usually doesn't end up in our favor right so we have no control over that situation so that's a cycle that i've observed what i think this stems from is there's a dichotomy at play and you probably all feel it which is there's taking action and then there's reflection and you'll often see there's different ceos that are oriented towards one or the other either they take a lot of thinking time or they're just very action oriented i think that what happens is that people say oh i shouldn't be taking so much action right like i'm taking too much action any more reflection but in reality i think we all know here it's action plus reflection and so it's can you make all of those little mistakes but also at the end of the day or have that scheduled time to sit and reflect and think and i just it's i think it's a hard balance for for especially female entrepreneurs to find that to find that sweet spot of like where do i have where am i taking enough action but i'm also making sure it's the right action by reflecting upon that and so that's where um you know i think that as we say that decisions dictate the quality of our life it also dictates the quality of our business and that is what really fascinates me about it and i've studied a lot of actually more so people that are in the investment arena because if you think about that i think it's really fascinating because people that are investing for a living you know they're taking other people's money and making bets on it essentially so it means they're making really high price decisions all day and so i find that those people are really good to study because they have very few decisions to make and they're very very important and so i really like to study that kind of decision making but what i wanted to go over today was really two things which the first is you know why don't we make good decisions and then the second is just how not to make dumb decisions or how to make fewer of them um and so the first question being you know why don't we make the good decisions and that being said inaction is a decision in itself right so i think that that we we can agree on that that a decision made by omission is also a decision it's just one that is easier to deal with because you feel like it's not your fault because you didn't actually take any action right the first thing that i see is the paradox of choice right and so i think this is really interesting because personally i experienced this all the time which is if there was a study and it was on jam in the grocery store right so the store that had 24 choices of jam only attracted 60 of the shoppers and 3 of them actually bought the jam whereas the one that had six choices of jam attracted forty percent of the shoppers so a little bit less but then thirty percent of them actually bought the jam i know personally that when i go to trader joe's and i go into the peanut butter aisle i'm like really reset on it i'm like i'm buying peanut butter almond butter sunflower butter something here like it's amazing right and i go there and then i'm like i literally can't choose it's either all or nothing and i choose nothing because it's easier because then there's no risk that i'm wrong right and so i think that this is one of the major reasons that i feel that people don't is that especially as you start to gain more success and get momentum it's like there's so many options you're like i could do so many things i have no idea how to pick the second piece is what i call and actually this is from when i used to be the fitness industry is i called it the prison of perfectionism uh which is essentially that you believe that if you make the wrong decision right there's a wrong decision that you are going to end up with more problems or an imperfect solution and so here's the what has helped change my mind completely about this is that you know you realize over time that with every decision comes consequence and so every time you make a new decision or you're looking at a problem you're trying to solve in your business and you say this is the solutions that i have available to me it's not do i want to solve this problem using this but it's would i like to trade the problems i have today for the problems that exist if i choose that solution that has really helped me because i am a perfectionist to heart but now i realize whenever i make a choice whenever i make a decision i am not eliminating problems i am trading problems it was like mind-blowing for me i'm like oh my gosh i am i'm trading problems it's like if you want to continue to be the weight you are say if you want to lose weight right then my problem is that i don't fit in my clothes and i don't feel good about myself if i would like to lose weight then my problem is that i'm sweaty all the time i don't have time to get dressed my clothes don't fit and i'm hungry all the time right it's like they both kind of suck but you know in my world i'm like well i'd rather be in shape right so i choose that i'm like i'd rather be hungry and like you know sweaty that's what i would choose and so i just look at it now as trading problems rather than trying to find a perfect solution the third thing is just i think that we've just never learned and i think that's something that's really not taught in business um and it's something that i think we can all utilize with our teams as well right is decision making framework how are we going to make this decision right and there's never really been a formal process taught i think that it's more you know there's little like vague things that are said like go with your gut it's like well your gut is really helpful but what if you're a really fear-based person what if your base state is constant anxiety well then your gut always tells you to go run and hide right and so i think that if we can develop a process for making decisions right and we learn that process then we can protect ourselves from those emotions that we know don't actually serve us and then the last piece of that really going in with the emotional piece is that we tend to take and i don't know if you guys feel like you do this i know i do this um is that i'll escalate a practical problem into an emotional problem so what i mean by that is you see a problem in your business and you make it mean something that it doesn't need to mean right and chris i know you've talked about this which is what meaning do you assign to something and so i uh in the in the fitness industry we talk about taking a practical problem into an emotional one right which is you step on the scale and you haven't lost weight and so there's one of two things that you can make that mean which is you could say oh maybe it's because i drank more water last night and i went out for sushi and so i did use soy sauce even though the sushi was low carb or it could mean i'm a fat pos and i'm never gonna lose weight person number one that chooses number one goes on with their day and they're not emotionally disturbed person number two that escalates it to me that their complete failure at life goes on for it to ruin their day and then the next day and then they're weak and then they just eventually feel like a fraud and then give up and so i think that we do that with a lot of problems in our business too you know it's like oh our churn is a little bit higher than it's supposed to be oh i suck my product sucks why can't i make something better right rather than like hmm what is the average turn for this market is this average is it below is it above you know what did we do the same week that our turn went up right rather than looking at like it's a practical problem i think that we take things a little bit more personally in our businesses and so they tend to escalate to be emotional issues and then i think what we all know is that when emotions go up intellect goes down and we do not make the best decisions and the reality of that is that when that happens we pay the dumb tax right and i think this term was coined by kevin cunningham um when he talks about the dumb tax i love this question so i would like you all whether you have a notepad or you have something a pen and paper something to write this down okay because i want to ask you a question which is how much more money would you have call it business money personal money whichever if you could unwind your three worst financial decisions it's a really fun question to ask yourself right so my husband and i did this exercise and i came up with mine which was frightening it's nine million dollars i would have nine million more dollars in my bank if i had not made the three worst financial decisions and it's funny because i would say half of that relates to when i talked about the net zero decisions one i made there which is simply just having the wrong person in the wrong role right for a not a long period of time maybe a year that being said when emotions are high that intellect goes down we're more likely to pay more of that dumb tax and i think it's interesting because you can almost quantify it in your business by just looking at the amount of money that you would have had if you didn't make the wrong wrong or dumb decisions right and so i think about that in terms of opportunity loss i'm like well if i had had that nine million dollars what would i have been able to do with that in the business that i can't now right like i could have bought an entire new building for our team i could have flown everyone and move them all in because we're a virtual team i could have had the office by now all that money i could have reinvested and they're their moves and raising or adjusting their pay based on the state like there's so many things i could have done that would have moved the business forward but instead it kind of just attracted and so that's why i really think that you need a process to protect you from making the dumb decisions right because we all know why we make them but how do we protect ourselves from ourselves i think it kind of goes along i have a friend who is an entrepreneur and he has a process for protecting his team from his dumb decisions which is he has to write them a proposal every time he wants to make one right so everyone kind of finds the thing that works for them and i want to share what i found that works for me this quote is one that you know i said that i really like studying investors and the way that they make decisions i think warren buffett is somebody who obviously is like you know the number one and i would probably not invest like him because i'm not him but i think that his principles for investing are fantastic which i love this quote which is outstanding long-term results are produced primarily by avoiding dumb decisions rather than making brilliant ones and i was listening to a breakdown um about two weeks ago of jeff bezos and which i found out it's pronounced bezos not bezos i didn't know this and of amazon and it's really interesting when you think about it right because nothing amazon started with doing was brilliant it was things that people were already doing the difference was they did it all at once in the same business and so it was a breakdown by uh reid reid hoffman who's uh the founder of linkedin or the former ceo and he was breaking that down it's like well he didn't make some brilliant you know monumental decision he just made good decisions and didn't make many bad ones at all and so that really hits home for me because i think that sometimes we feel too that in order to have an outs outside success in business that we have to make these brilliant genius decisions we must be these very smart intellectual people and i just don't think that's the case i think that it's let's make less bad decisions and focus on that first and i think that if you have fewer dumb decisions then you have a higher quality of life and i found four people that have quotes that echo something like that and they were all the people you see here jeff bezos warren buffett the rock oprah i consider them all successful you know whether i have all the same beliefs and values as them or not i consider them successful here's my breakdown of my framework in which i this is actually what i work with my team on this of how to make not dumb decisions essentially i like saying it like that because it just helps me really clarify like we're trying not to make dumb decisions we're not trying to make brilliant decisions right so the first step is asking the right question right the reason is because the wrong question always leads to the wrong answer and unattractive questions lead to unattractive answers right why am i so fat well you're not going to get a good answer it's a very unattractive question right so here's one that i took from a client when i was on a coaching call with them which was well our rent is too high and then i'm like what's the problem well why is our rent so high how can i get the rent lowered this is like what i was walking them through i'm like what's the actual problem what's the question that you need to ask and that's what they got to is how can i get the rent lowered right i'm like well i don't know if that's a good question because like what can you really do to lower the rent besides send this you know i have like a letter that we tell them to send to their landlords or whatever for like a break but it's like it's not very convincing there's really not much you can do so a really powerful question that you could ask though is how might i make an additional 2 000 per month to pay the rent so that we can remain in our beautiful building close to our employees like how much more does that question serve you and i think that oftentimes and i challenge myself with this because i can be very like no that sucks no no no like just thinks i'm more of the i'm more of a cynic in the business right like i'll find the problems so i have to challenge myself to ask the creative questions to myself in order to find the right answer how might i blank so that i blink it's actually a form of copywriting and i was like that actually works for questions too how might i do blank so that i can have blank i think it's a question that just serves us a lot better so the first piece is asking the right question right and if the if the first answer that comes to your mind is like you you draw a blank then you know it's not the right question because if you're asking the right question then you'll have multiple answers that come to mind and it limits the overall of options right because i think that when you ask a creative question like that then it opens doorways but also eliminates them because it's two thousand dollars a month it's not unlimited money per month right like i'm dialing in the specifics for the question i'm not saying how do i make double my profits next month to cover this right it's just how do i make an extra two grand maybe throw an event on the weekend maybe get a sponsor maybe do a paid in full you know maybe sell this package right here it's not you know that's actually not that hard if you're thinking about if you're a brick and mortar business there's a lot of ways the second step is really separating the problem from the symptom i think we all know this right because the symptom is the surface level and the problem is deeper below but i feel like most of the time what we do is we get really caught up in our own business that we don't see that we're talking about these symptoms as if they are the problem and i know i've done this so many times i've had to catch myself this is one that i've seen come up so many times especially with product oriented business owners so like my problem my problem they say problem i say symptom is that i can't find the right marketing person my business would only grow if i could find the right marketing person right like i just need this marketing person so that i can do this right so my business will grow but in reality this is what the problem really is right i am deficient enough in my understanding of marketing that i do not even know how to find and recruit a proficient marketing director i lack the skills to find them and so i think that it's really looking at it like that right and i think in our businesses particularly we might think well i just can't find any many good people you know it's just because i'm local and i can't hire from all around the united states like you layla i hear that one a lot um or x y and z right there's always some excuse but i think that often it's pointing back at us or you know a decision that we've made at one point in time you know even a decision we made three years ago right maybe the person that is now looking for the marketing director that can't find them because you hired somebody who doesn't know how to find that person right so there's so many layers to it always goes back to us and so i think if you position it differently like that and you look at where's my deficit that i can't even identify why this is a problem and then the questions that i think are helpful to ask that that helped me come to a conclusion are these three which is one what are the possible reasons i'm noticing these symptoms why is it such a why am i noticing that i can't find a marketing person okay well because our business isn't growing right that's a thing what is not happening that if it did happen would make the symptom go away well if our business was growing i probably wouldn't need a marketing person because i'm assuming that that's what's gonna fix the problem and then the third what is happening that if it stopped happening would make the symptom go away at all i mean in this case i don't really think there is right there's nothing happening there's no action being taken it's something that's kind of like at a standstill so i might say okay well the problem is actually that like i can't find a proficient marketing person but the real problem is that i can't grow my business and so is the only way to solve that through marketing or is there a different way that i could grow the business you just come up with more creative solutions third piece to this is testing your assumptions and this is a piece that i got from a coach i had maybe five years ago it really changed how i looked at things but the question becomes where are you substituting opinions for facts right it's like we are literally assuming that something is word and it is truth when it is not and so i wrote down some that i saw in the last year or so that people believed to be true right but weren't a big obvious one is that many businesses assumed right that their business had needed to be in person to grow completely false i can tell you from personal experience there are so many people that i know that are just thriving even though they had to completely shut down their brick-and-mortar locations because i primarily have worked with brick and mortar businesses and i've seen so many people have bigger businesses now even with having to do that adjustment so that's false right it's not an actual fact some other ones that i've seen in business uh one this is one from the software world you cannot liquidate your cost of acquisition when you sell without sacrificing the experience of the customer this is not true at all that is an assumption made by the software world that's been around for i don't even know how many years they think it takes 12 to 18 months to liquidate your cost of acquisition that's just like what's normal right but like why has nobody questioned it second you can't sell too much to your customers at once otherwise you will lose goodwill that is also very interesting one if you look at the studies that have been done on buying frenzies which is that people are happier when they buy more all at once from a business and they often stick longer with the business too when they are sold more in that time when they're in a buying frenzy it's really interesting right so if you think about i this is a study done in the weight loss industry right people who when they sign up for a weight loss program buy supplements by meals buy new attire like a watch all that they're more likely to have success right and the people that are not sold as much will not it's so crazy right but that's something that people assume they're like i can't sell that much to somebody they would just think i'm all salesy right i would lose all this goodwill not true your loyal and longtime customers and partners will never leave you i've seen a lot of people that have had that realization in the last year right because people will leave when it serves them and then you have the best product ever for sure um i had to put that one on there because i just feel like anytime i'm talking to someone about their business i'm like what it sounds like the product might be the issue like it's not the product's not the issue it's oftentimes because they're so close to the product that they don't realize that it actually is the issue right and so it's a belief that they are not testing right and so the way i see it is that if we turn our beliefs into assumptions we expand our possibilities of our business and so instead of saying i believe x y and z i've turned this into saying i assume x y and z with everything i assume my husband loves me and we're going to be married forever right i assume this business is going to continue to grow i assume the sky is blue like i don't care i'm just going to say i assume everything because my i am so much more open because of it and i found that in my business i've come up with so many more creative solutions if i just assume everything and believe or hold truth to nothing there's so much more flexibility in it and it just feels better right because if we're super rigid in everything that we believe and everything we hold true then it's really hard to have our beliefs broken for one which is always how we grow i think as business owners and for two how to change things the fourth step to this so after we've asked the right questions we've tested our assumptions right then we want to map out the most likely results and so i do this all the time actually on this whiteboard right here i'm like actually this is where i do it like every time um is i map out what the most likely results are going to be so this is the simple equation that i use you know my dad's an engineer and he has a decision-making matrix that has about 16 points on it and he weighs them all in little decimals and then there's like 15 on the x-axis and i'm like i'm good i'm gonna do this i put my options on this side in this column right and i ask these four questions which is one what's the upside two what's the downside three can i live with the worst case scenario so you think about the downside and then you think what's the absolute worst case scenario of that and then likelihood of occurrence so i'll give you an example what is the upside right so say that i have a director of marketing i'm not sure if i need to fire them or not i'm like they're not doing well they're not performing i'm pretty sure that their team like knows it too our marketing isn't doing well what do i do do i fire them do i coach them do i keep them what is the upside if i keep them right well there's no time lost looking for a new person the downside is that our company probably won't grow as fast it could and i will probably still stay really involved and split my time which prevents me from doing anything else to grow the business and then can i live with the worst case scenario the worst case scenario in my mind if i keep that incompetent person would be that we don't grow because that person's the wrong fit and i'm dragged in and i'm just babysitting them all the time and then we don't expand the business plus we get my time taken right it's like three minuses in a row that's the worst case scenario from that one now what if i say i'm gonna coach my director of marketing well what's the upside okay the possibility that she attains the skill needed to turn around the department i'm like i don't know because she hasn't developed it by now right and i've been like on her butt the whole time still not there the downside is it will consume a lot of my time and money and i'm not even an expert right like my thing's not marketing so like i'm gonna try and coach her on something i haven't learned myself yet okay that's a pretty likely downside and then what's the worst case scenario well i coach her and at three months she still sucks and we still lose a key teammate and then the other teammates we might lose two because they're just so sick of me keeping an underperformer and my last step is i could fire my director of marketing all right the upside there i can find a person with the same values as our team as well as a higher skill set and they can drive company growth that would be a very that's very appealing upside right what's the downside well i have to find spend the time and money to find another person uh as well as i probably have to take over in the interim so i have to bridge the gap and if i'm going to do that then i definitely need to be better than the last person who's in there so it's going to take some of my time it's annoying and then what's the worst case downside there well i don't find someone in time and i have to remain responsible for the department for longer than i would like right so i like think about that i'm like well i wouldn't like to do that but is it best for the business and so then i go into likelihood of occurrence right so i'm looking at how likely is it that the worst case scenario occurs i think 80 for sure right here that we wouldn't grow from this person i said 85 for the coaching and i said 30 percent for if i fire them so what i think is most likely is that if i fire them i will find somebody that works out so that is why i would make that decision and i would fire my director of marketing so the way i look at this is the most probable i know it's a lot of words but i'm like each one is very important the most probable compounding positive outcome plus lowest risk okay because if i fire my director of marketing it's the lowest risk if i take over the department in the short term because i know i can at least run it better than them so i consider that low risk i consider higher risk if they remain there positive outcome because either i'm there or i have someone who's 10 times better than me there that's definitely a positive outcome and then compounding compounding because if i hire that person think about how many other things will get better now all the departments have good cross departmental communication now all these teammates are higher performing so these six people who are underperforming right now raise the occasion i have more time on my plate so i can go grow the business it's a compounding decision i consider that to be the best choice i know i talk fast sometimes so i wanted to recap what we went over first why we don't make the good decisions right so we've got the paradox of choice which is when we have too many options so we become overwhelmed and freeze the second is a prison of perfectionism which is when we want the perfect solution even though it doesn't exist we're actually just treating problems the third is that we've never learned but we have now and then the fourth is turning the practical problems into emotional ones we're just escalating things that are actually practical we're saying that they mean something really bad about us right and so we freeze and then how not to make the dumb decisions so we're going to identify the right question we're going to separate the problem from the symptom test our assumptions and then map out the most likely results i really appreciate you having me on i appreciate all of you guys and i hope one of you it saves you from a bad decision oh i'm sure this is brilliant bye everybody take care everybody bye