How to Be a Better Decision Maker (& Why It Matters)

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter Podcast. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. This is part two of a three-part series where we talk about how to really leverage what we're entering for many of us now is the offseason.

For a lot of people in our industry that we serve in the construction-heavy-highway asphalt industry, we have been hitting it hard all year. Depending on where you're at, you are possibly going to have a little bit more bandwidth to be working on some of those business things that take a backseat during the busy season.

In our last episode, the first of this offseason series, we talked about the grow-or-die phenomenon, the statistics around the number of companies that are stalled, what that really says about the future of your company, how easy it is to ignore those early indicators and those red flags, and why it’s really critical to have a growth mindset.

That is one of the things that is on the top and the peak of a lot of people's minds right now as they start to think about heading into the offseason, what it looked like this year, and what they want next year to look like. But another thing that we're going to be talking about today is decision-making, the outcomes and objectives that we're trying to reach, and the impacts of making poor decisions. Let's dive into today's episode.

It is part two of our three-part series talking about how to prepare for the offseason. It never really even feels off all the time but we still have that heavy production season in our industry. For most of us, there's at least a period of time where it's not as significant on the production side and we know we need to leverage that time.

There are so many things that get swept under the rug or neglected. We're actually talking about that. I know that last time, I alluded that during this episode, we would probably dive pretty deep into the phases of Flywheel, the investigate, the identify, and the implementation, but we're actually going to postpone that just a little bit, because there's some stuff that I need you to understand before we get there.

This second part of the series, we're going to talk about decision-making. What does that process look like? I want to share with you some research about decision-making that when I present this at my conferences, when I discuss it with clients, most people's minds are completely blown away.

Let's start with the fact that the average person makes 3,500 decisions per day. I believe that if you are an executive, a business owner, anything like that, you're making easily double that. The stakes of the decisions you're making can be really weighty. They impact your employees. They impact your clients, your partners, they impact so much so they really can weigh on you and fatigue you down very significantly.

Another funny fact is that over 500 of those 3,500 decisions the average person is making is just about food. Just imagine that today, as you go through the day, you're making over 500 decisions about food. Some of these happen almost subconsciously and some of them if you're trying to eat for certain health concerns, lose weight, or you're trying to be cognizant of a partner's problems with certain types of foods, imagine how different those decisions actually feel and how much more weighty they feel.

This leads me to another topic that I think is incredibly real. It's something very important that business owners, leaders, and managers in our organizations need to think about. As we come out of a really busy production season where we have been going on the fly, making decisions on the fly, just going, going, going and we're going into a season where maybe the decisions we're making require more thought, they're heavier, they feel heavier, and for some of us, those decisions even increased during the offseason, or for some of us, maybe they slightly decrease.

But one thing that can really happen and that needs to be addressed is something we call decision fatigue. Let's talk about some more stats because I love data and I'm always doing research, 1/3 of adults struggle with basic decisions. That's not hard decisions, weighty decisions, critical business decisions that impact other people in the future of their companies. That's half or 1/3 of adults struggle, just the basic decisions, and one-half of millennials are struggling with basic decisions.

Just this morning, I was talking with a peer of mine who has started a business. She has so many clients already that she has no time to take on anymore. She's basically building an oversubscribed waitlist, which is incredible, but she also hasn't quit her regular job yet even though she was starting this business while she was doing that and she just can't even set a date. She just refuses to set a date. She's just struggling with that decision.

But the fact that she's letting that linger on really struck me as the most critical part of that because it was just really weighing her down. She felt like that decision never got made. She never got to move on from it. She was constantly analyzing that.

Why I mentioned this story is because one of the symptoms, and also we see from decision fatigue is decision avoidance. People in critical decisions that need to make decisions tend to fall into a category. If they're suffering from decision fatigue or they're actually avoiding decisions, they put them on the back burner. They tend to analyze them over and over again. They continually seek advice but they won’t actually take the action that is advised by those people even when they look for outside party influence and insight into something.

Another impact of decision fatigue that we see is reflexive decision-making versus strategic decision-making. They do it more as a reactionary. Just think about anything, any force that comes on an object, you have an equal and opposite reaction to that. Instead of making decisions that we're pushing out into the world, we're actually just pulling away and reacting to all of the things around us and that's what dictates our reasoning for decision-making.

Another problem that happens with decision fatigue is we default to the easiest thing. Whatever the easiest option is, that's what we're going to do and sometimes that's great. But a lot of times, we need to do something a little bit hard early so that everything gets easier down the road or the easiest thing isn't the best thing for everybody for where are you trying to take the business.

How do you avoid decision fatigue? How do you control the decisions and how do you make better decisions? I like to think of this as instead of being decision makers, I want you to be strategic decision makers. I think about quality versus quantity. If you have a strategy in place, you're going to significantly reduce the quantity of decisions that you have to make, because by having a strategy in place, knowing what your objectives are, for your operations, for your marketing, for your sales, for HR, for everything in your business, it eliminates over 50% of the decisions that may need to be made right out of the gate.

You can actually create quick, easy litmus test that you and every single person in your company can use to test it against your strategy. We actually have some companies that we've created these litmus tests for and created laminated cards that they can keep with them so that whenever something comes up, they can quickly reference that. It helps them make a decision. Or it says, “I don't even need to make a decision about this. It's irrelevant because it doesn't align with our strategic objectives.”

This is a really incredible reason why we should be having a strategy in place is just that we can eliminate the quantity of decisions. Also, the decisions that we do make are much higher quality if they're based and tied to the objectives that we've created in our strategy.

Having a strategic plan eliminates over half of the decisions that we make and it makes the other half much more clear and we can make much better decisions, decisions that actually get us outcomes. What is the strategic objective or outcome for each action that we take? This is the question that I want you to ask yourself.

Let me say this again because if you think about you're moving towards having a litmus test or you're starting to think about strategy that you want to develop during this offseason and how you're going to make all those decisions that you're going to be facing moving into the next season easier and more effective to get the outcomes you want, here's what you need to ask yourself: What is the strategic objective or outcome that you want from each action?

An action can also be considered a tactic and actually, our next episode, we're going to get more into what is the difference between tactics and strategy, and how do they influence each other? How do we really, really think about developing tactics that really move strategy forward?

Another thing that I want you to think about is if you can make strategic decisions, you can decrease, you can make better decisions, you can avoid decision fatigue, you're going to get nine times more results. If you think about it from a tactical level, the actions that you're taking, if they're based on a strategy, studies show that if, for example, it's trying to get a certain sales outcome, or trying to get a marketing outcome, you will actually get nine times more results.

Here's another story for you. I actually know of a company that when they implemented this, they went from a very tactical reactive approach to their business year after year, definitely a stalled revenue situation, they implemented strategy, and they were actually able to increase their sales by 600%.

This is incredibly uncommon and this was not an asphalt industry contractor, asphalt liquid producer, or anything like that. They were a little bit more on the retail side. But imagine if you could increase your sales just by 50%, what would that mean for your business? What would it mean for all of those key executives for you as an owner, if you're the owner, if you're that manager, that key executive, that it was so much easier to accomplish that?

You actually were making fewer decisions. You felt more confident in the decisions that you were making. You could actually, in your mind, draw a line between the decisions and actions and the strategic objectives. That is a great, great feeling.

Make sure that you are subscribed here to The Contractor’s Daughter. Make sure that you are also checking out other Blacktop Banter network content, but most of all, if this is intriguing to you, and you're trying to prepare for your offseason, I would love to talk to you about any questions you have about the decision-making in your company. How do you struggle with this? How do you transition from this high-volume season to this more offseason flow?

I know a lot of companies that because of the pressure on some of the key people in their companies, those people really, really suffer mentally, emotionally, physically, in the offseason. How can you really think about this in your business, not just to be increasing revenue, to be increasing sales, but also the performance, job satisfaction, the happiness, and the retention of your team? What if we could impact that as well?

These might be some things that you're wanting to think about in your offseason. How do you approach decision-making in your company? A question for you, remember that question, that key question I asked you, what is the strategic objective or outcomes of each action or tactic? Look at your previous year. What did that look like in terms of making decisions and execution?

Was there a strategy? Did you know what the objectives were every single time that you made a decision? Could your team quickly and easily identify what those objectives were so they can also make easy and effective decisions or eliminate decisions altogether? What do you want that to look like next year?

If you had a strategy in place, if you had objectives and outcomes that you actually visualized and had communicated to your team, what could those actions and tactics look like? How much could you reduce the decisions or increase the quality of the decisions that were being made by you and your team?

This is definitely something that deserves some of your time in your offseason. Next time, we're actually going to get deeper into what is strategy, how does it directly tie to tactics? We're going to look at examples of this. We're really going to research and dive into what does that look like? How do they work well together? What could it look like in your company? And really get into some examples.

Strategy versus tactics, what's the difference? How do we leverage them together? How do we communicate and translate those to every single member of our team? We've got some really great insights and tips for how you can do that in your organization so make sure that you're subscribed to The Contractor’s Daughter. Make sure that you back and listen.

As always, get on our calendar. If you want to talk about this and you want to really leverage your offseason, make sure that you get on our calendar. You can get a time on our calendar at storybuilt.marketing/schedule. Anytime you need to schedule that, you should be able to find some time.

I know that this is actually ending up turning into our busy season because as our clients and our industry that we serve are actually moving into their offseason, we're moving into our busier season where we're really working with a lot of clients. Every quarter, we're working on strategy for ongoing clients. But this is the time of the year where we really have a lot of people say, “I want to come in and start with some of this stuff.”

If you have questions, if you have concerns about decision-making versus strategic decision-making in your company, now's the time to really address this as you move into your offseason. Next time, be prepared for strategy versus tactics and really getting into how to deploy that all the way through your company after you have a strategy in place.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.