Decision Paralysis can effect more than your bottom line.

Harvard Business Review ran an article back in February 2009 titled Why good leaders make bad decisions! and it got me thinking The biggest reason why many businesses fail, is partially responsible to bad decisions. Over-thinking and failure to act are often the results of an inability to make a decision or what I like to affectionately refer to as analysis paralysis.

I was recently speaking to an owner of a moving company. Our meeting took place in the board room otherwise known as of his kitchen table. The point of this meeting was to discuss more effective ways to market his business online and the effects that they would have on his moving company. We talked about what he felt was currently working, what wasn’t, and what he would like to accomplish. Knowing how you will define success will help you measure your return on investment.

One of the biggest mistakes a person can make is assuming that success of a campaign can only be measured by a capital return on your investment.

Lets get back to my business meeting. Since of my  part of my job would be  running a Google Ad Word campaign, I suggested a budget that was aggressively conservative in nature. It would accomplish his objectives, help with branding and most importantly show measurable results.

I asked him how he would measure if our campaign was successful. He replied that all he needed was this campaign to help generate 1 new customer per month to break even, 2 clients per month would turn a profit. I like those odds. His expectations were very conservative and highly obtainable. If you know how success is to be defined it is easier to plan and achieve.

Knowing how to benchmark your progress really does help in measuring success and failure. If I know in advance what my client considers successful, I can use that as my benchmark staring point and build of of that. The length of our initial agreement would be for three months after that we could go month to month, change direction, increase or decrease his monthly budget basically customize his campaign to be most effective. I don’t like locking clients into long term contracts for a few reasons but mainly; I don’t want either party to feel trapped or locked in. Lets face it, sometimes things just don’t work out for a variety of reasons.

Lets fast forward a bit to the I have to think about it phase otherwise known in my opinion as we will not be doing business. In this case I believe that the business owner did not feel confidant in his ability to make a decision. Decision paralysis effects many a decision maker. He began to reinforcing his indecisiveness, by raising these objections:

What if this doesn’t work? What if it does?

We are getting ready to go into their slow season and maybe he should wait until business starts picking back up in the spring. Just because your entering your slow season does not equal people not needing your service. specifically if they are moving. In my opinion you need to stay proactive in your messaging people need to know you exist year round.

I have to run this by my partner. I can respect that but on the phone when we sent this appointment I asked if there were other decision makers that would need to be present at our meeting or involved in the decision making process. You told me you made all the decisions, it’s your company.

The fear of making a bad decision will always trump making any decision. If you run your business based in fear you may run it into the ground.  I am not advocating making rash decisions, I am however advocating making better decisions.

Remember you are in business that depends on clients and customers for your very existence. They need to know about you. They need to know about all your products and services. So you need to  make sure that you effectively communicate your message to them, If you don’t effectively get out your message to your customers, your competitors will.