Be Decisive, Not Rash

One of the most important qualities that leads to success in business, is a decisive attitude. If you’re working for yourself in any capacity, then each day, including weekends and sometimes late at night, you may be “pinged” for a quick answer to a critical question. If a customer is standing by in an unhappy state of mind, every second of non-satisfaction re-shapes your company’s identity in that person’s mind.

However, there is a such thing as being too decisive for business. Let’s lay out an example.

Saying no to an important possibility might save you time now. That’s a business development decision, not a quick call. Imagine making a quick call against expanding your services in a way that’s just become available. Let’s say enacting the change would take a lot of work similar to when you first started your business. Enacting the new idea would require outside help or a costly amount of time, so you opt to focus on existing business and ignore the new option for now.

This could become a fatal error. Sometimes, every provider in a given marketplace sees a no-brainer upgrade to their operations, and enacts a change in unison. If that change means a lot of work, you’ll be completely behind the curve while you scramble to both retain customers, and enact the feature.

MySpace comes to mind in this example. Facebook took advantage of new technologies in ways that were obvious to programmers long before they became available. MySpace sat and waited. Users loved the new Facebook. MySpace started looking “dated” in a matter of weeks. Long afterward, MySpace more-or-less caught up. I bet they wished they’d acted sooner.

A quicker example. What if you web site goes down in the middle of the evening and the techies can’t get it back up? After hours of anxious back-and-forth, do you buy hosting elsewhere and hurriedly install the site? This is an obvious reaction for many people, but what if your web host could provision space on another server as a temporary fix? Making a quick call in favor of the obvious solution could mean unnecessary costs and delays – it takes two days to fully transfer a website, whereas a change with the same host can take minutes. Spending a little more time in the idea phase to a critical problem can shave days off getting to the solution.