What Powerlifting Can Teach You About Your Business

This was my first meet and my deadlift opener. 

“Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.”

- Ronnie Coleman

That is one of my all time favorite sayings. Except, in my case substitute “bodybuilding” for “powerlifting”. The message still stands though - you can’t do either unless you commit to moving some “heavy-ass weights”.

I love this adage because it applies to business development and business strategy as well. And, it does it on a few levels. Let’s break four of them down.

1. Like any exercise regime (powerlifting included), building good strategy takes an investment of patience and dedication before you start to notice the results. In most cases, strategy is not something you decide on today and see the outcomes, benefits or data tomorrow. It takes time. Time for information and processes to disseminate through your organization and to take hold. When you’re building strength and strategy you have to put the time into actually doing the work to get to some kind of outcome. Not just thinking about/planning for all your future success. You can’t get your body or your business stronger if you aren’t putting in the work.

2. Realistic goals are important. When you’re powerlifting your body and gravity are absolutely brutal judges. When you’re setting goals around how much weight you’re going to move you have to do so within some (albeit temporary) constraints. Where am I today and realistically how much can I expect to improve before my next competition or meet? Works for business strategy too!

For the most part, as an entrepreneur you aren’t going to just wake up one day and decide that being a seven-figure business is attainable in the next 6 weeks. Especially, if you’re looking at your financials and you’re only a three-figure business today with no real growth opportunities jumping out at you. I’m not saying it’s impossible or never going to happen but in the short term it is probabilistically unlikely. So, get pragmatic. What are your current business constraints? How can you start to move the needle today to build some winning momentum that will eventually carry you towards being the World's Strongest Business.

3. Use the feedback you’re getting from your body and your business in real time. When I’m training my body it is constantly giving me real time feedback about what I’m doing. Tight shoulders? Put the weight down and stretch. Too heavy? Have someone help me get the weight off my chest and take it down a pound or two. Your business (any business) is often doing the same thing. Every decision you make in your business will provide you with feedback. It’s up to you to figure out what that feedback is telling you and make adjustments so that your next actions support the goals you set for yourself. The worst thing you can do while you’re training your body and running your business is ignore the feedback. It will eventually lead to some kind of breakdown or negative outcome that will cost you time, money and energy to come back from - if you can come back from it at all.

4. What you feed your body and your business matters. Talking about diets and business strategy is not a stretch I promise - just stay with me. It’s no secret that when you feed your body good things, like healthy food and appropriate sleep, you are setting the stage to get the best possible performance out of your body. The same goes for your business. When you are thinking about business strategy we swap out food for inputs. Inputs like time, money, workflow, sales prospects/opportunities, etc. These are examples of the things your business needs to perform optimally. It doesn’t matter how good your strategy is, if you aren’t feeding your business appropriately you won’t be able to get the most out of it. There is also a resource management function piece to this. It’s about equipping yourself, and your teams, as best you can so that they can have the opportunity to do the best work and deliver as much value as possible.

There has to be a balance of inputs. Just like in your body, there’s only so much protein your body can absorb in any one sitting. Eventually, the marginal benefit from eating one more ounce of chicken goes to zero. In your business keeping tabs on the marginal benefits of the inputs you’re providing it is just as important - you don’t want to waste any of the already scarce resources your investing if you can help it.

I have to cap this at four points because I think I can literally keep making this analogy for another 1500 words. Hopefully you’re seeing a pattern here. That pattern is that running your business or building good strategy isn’t all that different from taking care of your body. If you take the time to think about how you are measuring your physical health you can translate that into how to better take care of your business’ health. You don’t even need an MBA for that!

It boils down to a little bit of discipline, an eye for identifying what’s important and the commitment to follow through. Too many people and their businesses go the way of fad (crash) diets. The try really hard for a little while, see some results and then get lazy. What happens? They yo-yo back to unhealthy and look for the next secret to get them the quick results they think they need. Don’t be that person! If you are committing to healthier lifestyle, commit your business’ strategy and success in the same way.

Making better business decisions takes practice and discipline. If you need some help I have a free resource for you. It’s the Disruptive Decision Framework. Think of it as the workout plan for the decisions you have to make in your business. It will help keep you accountable and it’s free!  

How To Delegate (Better)

Delegation is scary. (Whisper Voice: It doesn’t have to be!) In my experience the entrepreneurs that I’ve worked with struggle with delegating work because it means having to let go. It means knowingly and willingly trusting that someone else can get the job done - exactly as you would. It’s also scary because it means that you can’t hide behind a wall of to-do’s that may or may not be the thing holding your business’ performance back. Crazy to think that you might be the biggest obstacle to your success isn’t it?!

For the record, it’s really hard to grow your business when you are focusing on growth and everything else in your business at the same time. This goes double for you if you are a self (or otherwise) proclaimed perfectionist. That means that getting good at delegating is critical if you plan on hitting the goals you set for yourself and your business.

The great thing is that delegation isn’t just for businesses that have lots of employees. It’s also not just a neat management trick for working in teams or getting your non-profit boards to get any real work done. Being able to prioritize and delegate is just as important to the solopreneur working from her kitchen table as it is to the CEO who’s charging her board with the goals for the next quarter. Before I can teach you how to be a better delegator I need to outline what kind of tasks/actions/responsibilities are best suited to be delegated.

Here’s the definitive list of things that can be delegated:

1. Everything that’s not a strength, that you’re not great at and/or that takes away from you driving your business forward.

End of list. Big list I know.

When you are trying to grow a business there are tons of things you need to be doing everyday. Some of that stuff is going to be fun and engaging and some of it is going to be repetitive and brain-numbing. The trick is finding a way to get everything done enough to keep you from burning out. Those things that you're responsible for only compound when you start adding variables like employees, contractors or even trying out new social media channels. Being able to delegate effectively will give you more time to focus on doing the important business growth stuff that you are best suited to do.

Here’s how to delegate. (This can even work if you are only delegating to a future you.)

1. Get specific. Get specific about desired outcomes, processes and resources you’d like to see utilized. This is not micro management! This is managing expectations. When you provide clear constraints and expectations you’re giving people permission to do their best work in a way that’s authentic to them - instead of guessing about what they think the outcomes are supposed to look like.

2. Get accountable. Accountability is a two way street when you are delegating. First, you should clearly identify the time frames and outcomes you’re expecting. Then you should make sure that you are also being held accountable with any resources, feedback or time that will help push the delegated tasks forward. There’s nothing worse than a breakdown in communication and accountability that leaves everyone involved a little frustrated and a little resentful towards you and the process.

3. Give authority. When you delegate something it’s important to make sure that who you delegate the task to has the authority to get it done. How can you expect someone’s best work when they feel like they have to be constantly checking in or asking for permission to make decisions or take creative liberties. Set up the constraints and give the appropriate authority to get the most out of your delegate-eys.

Those three things are the most important components to delegation. I’ve seen lots of entrepreneurs and business owners struggle with managing their employees and contractors because expectations weren’t managed, directions weren’t followed and projects weren’t completed. Spend a little time in the beginning, assume that no one knows what’s going on in your head but you, and in really good detail set the guidelines for what you’re delegating. You’ll be surprised with what comes back.

Happy delegating!

3 Tips To Creating Strategy That Works

There is such a thing as too much strategy. Way too much. 

There is so much advice on the web about creating strategy. Lots of frameworks, lots of fill-in-the-blank plans and LOTS of generic advice that you write down but never really know how to implement.

I hate it.

So in this post I’m not going to give you a dashboard to work through or some one-page cheat sheet. That’s not to say that I’ll never do that or that it’s not helpful to have guides but today is all about getting to real progress quickly. This post is going to teach you the three most important things to think about when you are crafting your business strategy or you are trying to make decisions about what you’re going to do to get your business growing.

1. Focus on an identity. You need to get crystal clear on who you are, who you serve and why it’s important. When you focus on your identity it takes the pressure off of just focusing on generic growth targets and ideas.

Here’s real life, when you focus on generic growth you are inclined to do all the growth oriented things everyone else is doing. Which eventually just turns into stuff that looks like work. That means you’re thinking about making things more cheaply, trying to chase more of your market or even thinking about your next product/service offering based on the ebbs and flows of your competitors actions and consumers changing tastes. All that stuff takes time, energy and money that could be better spent by better honing in on who you are, why you are valuable and doing the work that only your business can.

When you focus on your identity all kinds of fun things fall into place. First, you better align yourself and your actions with your value proposition. This is a big deal because it re-enforces everything from how you make decisions in your business to how you deliver value to everyone outside of your business. Next everyone that interacts with you, buys from you or is in your audience better understands what you’re great at and why that sets you apart - in business-speak it’s your clear system of capabilities.

Lastly, focusing on your identity allows your audience or customers the chance to really fall in love with who you and your business are. It better allows you to create and foster an authentic relationship with them. You need that trust because it’s in that relationship and your differentiation that will keep people around and hungry for the work that only you and your business can do.

2. Strategy needs to be everyday. Strategic plans can sometimes be these big silly, overly complicated documents that you write and then instantly deviate from because it’s focusing on what you think you’re idea of your business is versus what you’re actually doing every day. Setting goals, figuring out what’s important to measure and having benchmarks are all great things - just make sure they reflect the work you are actually doing. When you’re building a strategy for everyday you don’t want to focus all of your energy on the big pie-in-the-sky stuff, you want to focus on what little things. Get really clear and focus on a small number of things that you do well and work on getting even better at them. (These are those pesky capabilities again.) Those activities is the heart of the work that you’re doing that ultimately reflects your values and reinforces your value proposition. You want to outline in detail the stuff you’re great at so that your employees or even virtual assistants can without any question replicate the experience you’re working to create for your customers.

If you’re not growing or don’t have any virtual assistants that’s ok too. You still want to do this stuff because it will help keep you focused and accountable to the work that matters as you’re growing your business. It’s definitely not a secret that there can be lots of distractions at any given moment in your business. As your business grows or iterates there will be lots of small changes so you want to make sure that you are keeping an eye on the stuff you’re trying so that you can pinpoint the stuff that works and continue to develop that.

3. Cutting costs helps you grow stronger. I know, sounds a little cliche but hear me out. Businesses that do the best jobs at closing the gap between what they planned to do and what they are really doing are businesses that have a near superhuman stranglehold on their expenses. I’m not going to tell you that you’re never going to spend money as you’re trying to grow your business.

That’s just downright misleading.

What I am trying to tell you is that the businesses that do the best are making sure that every dollar they spend is being spent to support what they are great at and as little as possible on everything else. When you’re looking at your business you need to be thinking of every expense as an investment, not just numbers in a checking account or in a report that Freshbooks (or Quickbooks) generates every month. You need to think in terms of opportunity costs and be constantly measuring what you’re spending money on and how that’s going to add value to your business.

Coffee meetings and business cards shouldn’t be necessary evils that are just rationalized expenses. You want to make sure, guarding money just like you should be guarding your time, that if you are allocating a resource or handing out a business card that it’s going to a person to which you can provide a ton of value.

That’s it! Those three things will help you create a strategy that actually works for you. Why?

1. When you don’t commit to an identity, your identity, you run the risk of washing yourself and your business out. You’ll scatter who you are and what you do so thinly that your audience won’t have anything compelling enough to hold on to and eventually engage with.

2. When you don’t make your strategy an everyday thing you run the risk of doing the same stuff that you’ve been doing all along. How can you affect change if you can’t distill what you want out of your business in a way that you can take action and implement daily? Answer: You can’t!  You don’t want to be the business that promises lots of things and struggles to deliver or worse never actually grows into the vision you had for it when you started.

3. When you don’t keep an eye on your spending, more specifically spending on the stuff that really matters you run the risk of self-stunting your growth. Money is easy to lose sight of because it’s easy to fall into the “I’m a habitual consumer trap” or the “if I had this one extra resource I’d be successful trap”. Be mindful and cut costs to grow stronger.

Building your strategy for your business is going to be a process. There’s going to be happy tears, sad tears and lots of anxious tears. That’s ok! When you’re following the advice of your favorite growth hacking guru or in my case I like to follow lots of different economists I want you to just remember these three things along the way. They will help ground you and help you build something that works with and for you.

Find More Money Inside Your Business

Do you really need that wireless credit card payment processing subscription? 

Lately, every business owner I’ve been running into has been talking about needing more money. That’s usually a bait to have me ask them about their business and most of the time I bite. When I ask them about what’s going on in their business they are quick to tell me all about how they’d love to do more marketing, hiring or <insert generic growth term> (sometimes that even means hiring me) but their budgets are anemic.

Every business owner (or person alive really) has to face opportunity costs. Making choices is all about giving something up to gain something. “Not having enough money,” is an excuse to avoid making hard choices and just complaining about it shows me that there’s probably more to the story. So, I ask about more qualitative stuff. How happy are their customers? Their employees? Do they work on weekends? Then when they are feeling good about talking about themselves, and a little less defensive about money, I ask more quantitative questions and one of two things always happens.

Either they are growing and revenues/clients/customers are increasing or they aren’t. I give a little more leeway to the businesses that are struggling because they’re immediate opportunity costs probably sting a little more and the choices are a little harder. For both kinds of businesses I offer the same kind of starting advice - looking for more revenue or outside financing is not going to make all your internal financial problems go away. You need to take a hard look on what’s going on inside your business first, that’s where you’re going to find some liquidity the fastest.

Here are 3 places you can start to look for money right now.  

1. What kind of subscription are you paying for every month?

This sounds like a no brainer but some business owners hoard monthly subscriptions like people hoard apps on their phone or porcelain cats. When business is good it’s easy to rationalize away a $10/month subscription here or a $29/month membership there because you set them up once and make the buying decision once based on your financial situation at the moment of the purchase. Those small monthly cash-outflows add up though! You need to look at each of those monthly expenses as an investment. What kind or return are you getting every month? Would you invest in something that earned you negative, zero, or less than one percent on the life of the investment? NO! So if you haven’t used that gym membership in 3 months it’s either time to find some way to hold yourself accountable or get rid of it.

The same goes for monthly subscriptions to anything else. If you signed up for some customer relationship management, podcast hosting, email management or cloud storage service that you don’t use or isn’t actually helping you move your business forward it’s time to get rid of it. If you are looking for more money in your business start by getting clear and objective about where money is going automatically every month.

2. What are you doing with your time?

Time is money right? This isn’t a plea for you to go out and hustle more it’s a plea for you to spend your time evaluating looking at the billables or billable projects you have on the table. If you aren’t a point-of-sale kind of business you should be looking at tightening the payment terms or the time it takes people to pay you. If you are keeping busy with lots of billable work you can start to up the money that’s coming into the business by asking the people you serve to pay you quicker.

You can even offer some kind of small percentage off for paying early. If you are more of a retail or point-of-sale kind of business maybe give your suppliers a call and ask about either extending terms or asking for some preferential early pay terms. A few percent off a bill might not sound like a lot but in the long term it adds up. It adds up in the short term too if you’re at a point where you are trying to stretch the dollar of every dollar in the business. The same goes for calling credit accounts you have and asking for lower rates. Every. Dollar. Saved. Counts.

3. Watch your driving.

If you’re a small business owner you might be doing a ton of driving. Not thinking that every time you hit the pump it’s money that’s coming out of your business. As a management consultant I know this pain all too well. Yes gas prices are falling and yes eventually you can claim mileage on a tax return but that doesn’t stop the sting of hurting for cash now. Setting some kind or parameters around your driving can make a big difference every month. Think about how you can use more technology if you need to meet people face to face, things like Skype and Google Hangouts are my new favorites.

Planning ahead and batching your schedule with meetings or networking based stuff by location is helpful too in controlling the fuel cost bleed. Professional truck drivers and delivery companies do it, you should too. Lastly, if you can have your people come to you. Personally I used to insist on being on site with clients and for a select few I still do but if you have a professional space or a favorite coffee shop that’s close try to load your schedule such that there are big chunks of time where you get to be in one place.

You can start to work on these three right now! 

These three tips sound really simple in theory but you’d be surprised how much static you give yourself when you start to trim away the unnecessary. As a business owner you have to make choices and if you’re goal is to stay in business you can’t let any decision about money slip unseen into the murky fog of rationalization.

When it comes to the money in your business (and your life really) it’s about building good habits. No one wakes up a perfectly rational decision making maching but you have to actively try to be clear about what you expect in terms of return on those dollars you're spending. Otherwise, you’ll just be the person no one likes to talk to because no matter how good times are you’re always going to be talking about how there’s never enough money. That person get’s hard to listen to, or take seriously, after a while.

Why Are Strategic Plans The Worst?!

I hate excuses. I think that the old way of creating long form strategic plans is an exercise in preemptively creating excuses for your business. Strategic plans are so often argued over, passively decided on and luxuriously spiral bound for businesses that haven’t yet done the work necessary to truly understand the impact of the decisions they are (or aren’t) making in their business. My favorite offenders are the one-page downloads that promise to, in one-page, definitively nail down the over-arching strategy you’re going to implement or execute on in your business. Definitively. All that stuff that looks just like strategic planning busy work is just that, it’s busy work and a scapegoat for you to blame your business shortcomings on later.

Don’t get it twisted though, I’m not at all down on crafting strategy for your business. Articulating goals is great. Teasing out effective ways for you to track whether or not your efforts are pushing you towards those goals, even better. Evaluating the decisions you make everyday against the backdrop of the vision and values you and your business stand for, the best. I’m just down on how maybe some institutions frame strategic planning…<<cough cough>> Some bad “business” mentors/consultants <<cough cough>>

But, that’s hard.

Getting to real understanding and depth in your business and for your customers means doing the work to understand more than just what you do and what you offer. It means getting to the heart of why your consumers choose (and maybe keep choosing) you, quantifying the real value you offer (not what you think you offer) and the ability to objectively identify what’s working and not working in your business.

Let’s set the scene. You're a new-ish business owner. (In business for yourself for less than 3 years.) You’ve been at your craft for a while, have moved a few units and/or have delivered a some hours of your services. You believe you bring value to your target market and you may even have a few testimonials on your website that support that claim. You wake up one morning and decide that you need strategy to get your business to the next level. That’s what you’ve read on the internet from your favorite “teach you how to build a business” business guru so it must be true. You’re first, albeit unintentional, excuse as to why you haven’t grown into the lifestyle or business size that you want is that you haven’t had a good strategy.

So you set off one morning and Google all kinds of fun strategic planning based keywords and over and over again you see the same kinds of results:

• Articles about the Balanced Scorecard

• Wikipedia Definition

• HBR Articles

• Forbes Articles

• Software/Web-App Planning Tools

• Dummies.com Articles

• Assortment of colleges and university course resources

Great. Now what?

I know what. You download the worksheets, read the blog posts, listen to a few podcasts and probably even peruse a few HBR articles. That’s great, you just spent hours getting your learn on. I’m all for learning but your shotgun scatter patterned attempt at muscling through how to create a strategic plan has forced you to a cross roads. Also on top of that, you’re still not even sure what the value of a strategic plan is for you and your business. #mixedmessages

At this point you’re making a choice.

1. You are either going to keep powering through and are going to try to recreate a strategic plan from some template or example and try to force what you “think” is important into a mold that most likely has nothing to do with who you are and what your business actually does.

2. Or you’ll quit. You’ll quit and move on and rationalize that you are too busy, too small or that crafting strategy really isn’t right for YOUR business.

Both are terrible but, are totally natural reactions. It’s the result of oversaturation/information overload, you're wrestling with how to spend what scarce resources you can muster on this task and business guru’s trying to package some program to sell you in a $497 ecourse.

That’s why strategic plans are the worst. You just spent all this time trying to figure it out and have made your way to creating something that is not at all authentic to you and your business or you move on from it all together.

Strategy is important and it hurts my heart that business owners never get to see the value of good strategy. Strategy that comes from deliberately thinking through problems and opportunities and actively participating in the choices that come from that thinking process.

Instead of trying to slap together some word document that you’ll only reference once or twice a year try this instead.

The Strategic Un-Planning Process

Below I’m going to outline an example process that you could use in lieu of the templates you just downloaded that I bet will work better for you and matter more to you. It’s not the be-all-end-all in strategic planning but if I can at least help one person who’s reading this create something that has the potential to be a real asset over some generic nonsense it’s 100% worth it.

1. Figure out what your long game really is for your business and be able to articulate that long game. Is it a specific idea of what you’re life will look like, some large financial goal or building a legacy business. That’s going to be the big idea you measure the choices you make everyday against.

2. In smaller intervals what kinds of goals are you going to have to hit to get to your long game. In strategic planning speak these would be your strategic aspirations. Is it buying a building, controlling 40% of your market share, selling one-billion hamburgers? Again get specific.

3. Repeat number two again but do that process for each of the individual goals you listed from step two. That should get you to a place where you can identify the actions you need to keep track of on a daily/weekly/monthly basis to get you to those goals. I’m all for impact and engagement but to be the most effective you need to associate actions with dollars.

4. Look outside your business. Talk to your customers about the value they really get from your offerings. What are the biggest pain points that customers can specifically share with you that you’ve solved. This will help you get even more focused in your offering and how to better position it in the market.

Before we move on I just want to recap what you will have really done up until this point. Going from 1-4 means you’ll have honestly reflected on what matters most to you, you’ll have broken down to at least two tiers worth of goals that you need to hit to get there and started to work out why people are engaging with you to better frame the actions you need to take to get more customers through the door. We are flying through these steps in a very simplistic way but this is all the work that I talked about in the beginning of this post.

 5. Look at your business. Really, truly, objectively look at your business. Do your day to day actions reflect the value that you bring to the market? What does it cost to get one more customer? Is there a gap between what you planned to do at the start of your business and what you are actually doing? Are you making excuses right now because there’s a little bit of dissonance stirring in your brain about this stuff? It’s time to do something about that right now. You need to DECIDE what the actions are in your business that are the biggest drivers in how you deliver value as well as get in front of potential new customers. If you’re struggling with this part I’ve built a decision making framework that you can download for free. (Notice it’s not a one-page strategic planning template. You’re welcome.)

6. Pick a handful of actions to really focus on in your business. Think of them as strategic themes. These are the types of work that align best with what’s important to you, your customers and what you want the business to stand for. Figure out what success for each of those actions looks like in a quantifiable way and how each of those themes will get you to your short, mid and long game goals.

7. Get to work and stick to it! What gets measured, gets managed. This is where the work really begins because here you’re working to prove the hypotheses you created for yourself. Just like in 7th grade science class you need to collect data and that data comes from getting your hands dirty. Creating and managing strategy is a daily practice and it works best when you can make decisions against the outcomes your actions are showing you. No winging it, no shortcuts, no more guessing about what you think people want - just data.

8. Rinse and repeat as necessary. What’s important to you may change over time and being honest about that is what makes strategy work. If you’re long game changes, your goals change or your market changes it’s ok. It just means that scale and scope of your work needs to change. This is where old timey strategic plans fall flat on their faces. When you or your business change, your work has to change or else your productivity and the quality of your outputs are going to drastically deteriorate. Think about the last time you worked on something you hated. You probably did the minimum and just went through the motions. If you are building a business I’m guessing that you don’t want to find yourself just going through the motions. Your customers probably don’t want that either.

I hope that if this blog post did anything for anyone it at least saved you a few hours of mindlessly searching for strategic planning resources on the interweb. This post was not designed to be a conclusive resource for your strategic planning needs but it was designed to challenge you to think. If you are pressed for time or resources I like to think that I’ve also offered you an abridged approach to creating something that matters for you personally.

Strategic planning is really a personal (business personal?) process and it’s not something you can just hammer out in a one page template and expect any real results. It’s a process that you have to work at everyday and one that requires you to get brutally truthful with. The people that buy from you or that you’d like to buy from you aren’t stupid, they know when what you’re offering is lip service. Customers know what authenticity is and how to hunt for the most value. Strategy at its core is about making decisions to so that your customers can find that value.

So, are you making decisions everyday that will match what you’re offering and how you deliver with the needs of the people that you serve?

How To Start Making Better Business Decisions Right Now

Welcome to the first blog post for the new and improved Disruptive Strategy Co. site!

Exciting times, I know. With this new (and improving) redesign comes a renewed focus on where I believe great strategy comes from - making better decisions. Growing a business, launching a new product and hiring your next employee all boils down to making good choices consistently. There are lots of tools, tricks, tactics and even paint-by-number style worksheets to get at business strategy but at the end of all that organization and planning it still takes you making a choice for anything to happen.

That’s where the heart of strategy is - choosing and equally important not choosing to do something. So with this blog I am going to teach you how to make better choices in your business, how to track those choices and how to decide on the outcomes that are most important in helping you on your business growing adventure. (Along with sprinkles of other types of business and strategy development.)

I’ll do my best to avoid all the buzzwords and jargon that can be intimidating or are interesting to read but leave you asking, what now? There may even possibly be an appearance of supply and demand type graphics - you can take the serial adjunct professor out of the classroom but you can’t stop him from geeking out over behavioral economics concepts.

In this blog post I’ll be offering up my first free decision making resource for you. It’s a downloadable framework you can use to help you through your next sticky situation.

Let’s tee it up first.

Sometimes making decisions in your business (or to grow your business) is hard. You have lots of information, options or challenges and there’s often not a clear way to weigh your options. Juggling lists of pros and cons in your brain doesn't work, just like it doesn’t work when you try to mentally balance your checkbook. Please, please, please don’t mentally try to keep track of your checking account. Bad things happen. Worse things if it’s the money you’re using to manage your business.

Hopefully you’re using some kind of framework to manage your money that’s not based on mental math. For the decisions you have to make in your growing business I have a framework for you. It’s something you can literally put into practice today and that I know works because I use it with the businesses I work with. It’s called the Disruptive Decision Framework and it’s a “pick your adventure” kind of exercise that helps you get to the heart of what’s important and provides some insight.

It starts with identifying what’s important, then running what you’ve identified through a gauntlet of important priorities and then challenges you to come up with solutions that are in line with what’s important to you. You’ll also get me in the process helping your through the steps like a little angel on your shoulder providing a little insight and helping you mentally digest the process as you move through the 5 steps.

Here’s the first page to give you an idea of what kind of adventure you’re in for and to get the second half there’s a digital download below it.

Page 1 of the Disruptive Decision Framework

Happy decision making!