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Friday, February 7, 2025
Business Booster

3 QUESTIONS TO ASK, TO DRASTICALLY IMPROVE YOUR DECISIONS

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You are always making decisions, whether you know it, or not. As business owners, we carry the weight of our decisions, because it’s not just us who feels it, it’s also our staff and their families too. Cue the sweating of bullets.

This means that we have an obligation to ourselves, to our teams and to their families, to make sure our decisions are in fact, well-informed and taking us in the right direction. Our decisions lead to actions – and our actions lead to outcomes.

There is a way to enhance your decision-making, and it involves asking yourself 3 things:

  1. What is real?
  2. How do I know it is real?
  3. What do we do about it?

These are questions normally reserved for the hallways of philosophy, but we like to think that it’s perfect when you apply it to your business. Mainly because we find a ton of business owners struggle dealing with reality. These same businesses often:

  • Don’t have a good online web presence,
  • Haven’t invested in marketing themselves online,
  • Use systems (accounting, admin) that are old and time-sucking,

These (or the lack of these) cost them in the long run, as their clientele can’t find them anywhere online, or worse, they can’t keep up because their service is too slow!

These are decisions that get made, that actively hurt their companies. Why? Why choose something that hurts you? We can only point to a lack of being grounded in reality. Let’s work through these questions…

1. WHAT IS REAL: WITH AN OUNCE OF DOUBT, COMES BETTER QUESTIONS

Have you ever had something on your mind for a long time, that spat out a ton of questions you could never answer right on the spot?

Well, we have found that if this “something” persists being there for months on end, it’s probably real!

This is the “filter” time gives us – where an idea surrounds you and your team for months, years, on end – it’s probably worth investigating.

So, for example, your business needs to find out how to use social media marketing to drum up business for yourselves – you delay and delay and delay, until eventually, you decide to do it.

This leads to our next question…

2. HOW DO I KNOW IT IS REAL: WITH EVIDENCE, COMES ANSWERS

We could be wrong about this but… don’t you need evidence to build up a case? Businesses will often try something new (*cough social media advertising) but only do it once. If it bombs, it’s catastrophic for them, and they never try again.

But have they exhausted all their options? Do they have enough evidence?

Have they gone to all the social media marketing companies in their area and tried them out for 3-6 months at a time? Have they read multiple books on the subject? Have they tried, and measured and put themselves in a position to be well-versed on the subject?

When you become an expert at something, you get pretty clear on what you don’t know, but that shouldn’t stop you from being creative about your approaches.

3. ULTIMATELY: HOW STRONG IS MY CASE AGAINST DOING WHAT I THINK I SHOULD DO?

Our goal is to get you to do something.

We find that it’s easy to give reasons why you can’t do something. Or give a rock-solid excuse. It’s a lot harder to scrutinize how “rock-solid” those excuses really are – because it means you might have to do some work!

We used to host two-day seminars, and one of the tasks at the end of the first day was try your hand at video-marketing… Namely, create a 30-second branded video, where you give a short splurb about your business, and you make an offer!

The benefit? Video-Marketing is the most effective form of presenting an idea (by the way) and Facebook Advertising works great with it to bring your overall ad spend down when you use it.

We would play it in front of the other business owners (giving you a chance to get some business) and you could also get pointers on how to do it better… There was also a prize for the best-voted video. Now, we’ve seen some funny videos… but the funniest part was:

Less than 10% of the audience did this – the 90% would tell you how they would not do it, they could not do it, it simply couldn’t be done… And they didn’t really have a strong case against doing it either…

  • “We were so tired”
  • “We got home so late”
  • “It was already dark”

And so on… Meanwhile, the best videos that won the prizes and went on to being the company’s proudest moment were done in the same conditions as these “rock-solid” excuses.

Great decisions are made when you come face to face with reality.

Not what you feel, but what is real. It’s important to know that you don’t know something. A good way to know that you’re dealing with reality is when you feel uneasy… uneasy that it will work out. If you feel very sure that everything will work out, it might not…