By Tian DuBelko
No matter if you’re a startup founder or an entrepreneur, you have to handle tough decisions on the regular. From dealing with investors to hiring new staff to developing new products, your typical day involves making choices. In order to succeed in the frenetic business world, you need to quickly learn how to make decisions on the fly when faced with tough decisions. How well you assess the situation and respond to it will affect your company’s bottom line. Here are seven tips to help you make those tough decisions at work a cinch.
1. Take Charge
If you’re the company founder or a key decision-maker, then it may be in your best interest to simply take charge. Taking charge can be an effective tactic when a decision needs to be made quickly. However, taking charge in making decisions generally mean you are the only one involved in the process, which risks alienating your team.
2. Consult Your Team
For most startup businesses, significant decisions are made in a team effort. A collaborative process in making decisions is preferred by leaders looking to get input from several perspectives. Depending on your business, it can be a prudent choice to get the advice of your team before making a big decision.
3. Focus on the Customer
Before making a major decision, ask yourself, “How will this affect our customers?” A conjoint analysis will help your team better understand the preference of consumers and appropriately consider the pros and cons of any big move. Approaching decisions with your customer in mind will also allow you to keep tabs on the public perception of your product or service.
4. Know the Value
As a founder, the bottom line for your business is something that can’t be overlooked. That’s why a cost-benefit analysis is popular among entrepreneurs and leaders. In assessing both the financial benefits and costs as a result of different courses of action, you can better understand the value of your decision and its financial impact on your business.
5. Understand the Importance
In the business world, you’ll have to make decisions every day, simply by the nature of the trade. While some decisions can have a big impact on your company and your team, most will be small decisions. It can help to prioritize a series of decisions that you need to make, and rank them in order of urgency and impact.
6. Plan for the Long Run
Too many executives get caught up in thinking about how a decision will affect the company in the short-term that they fail to plan for the future in their decisions. In order to consider the long-term impact of your actions, think about the primary objective that you’re trying to accomplish, then consider how your potential courses of decisions will lead you there.
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