Making Decisions for a Business

When you’re running a business, your day to day job could best be described as ‘decision maker’. It’s your responsibility to decide on both the long future of the business as well as how you use the limited resources available to you to face the problems and meet the opportunities every day brings.

It’s a heavy responsibility, and today we’re looking at some of the ways you can feel confident you’re making the best decisions.

Getting Some Help

One of the most important things you can do is know when to get some help. There are plenty of consultants and freelancers who can offer their expertise to your business, and while sometimes that doesn’t prove to be money well spent, if you can identify the right opportunities it can boost your business to higher levels than you can achieve on your own.

The key to finding the right consultants for you is to identify the knowledge and skills you don’t have in your workforce, but can’t wouldn’t hire full time at this stage in your business’ life. Market research, competitor analysis, legal advice and even HR specialists are all subject areas that can benefit your business but it’s rare for small businesses and start ups to have the budget and impetus to hire in house, full time.

Make sure you go in with clear expectations, and targets for your consultants to hit (or miss). If you don’t know what success looks like from the exchange, you’re more likely to waste resources and not get the outcome you need.

Build Trust; Delegate

As your business grows, it expands beyond the scope of any one person’s direct oversight. The key here is to ensure you have a trusted layer of employees below you. In a moderately sized start up, this might be your C-Suite. In a shop or similar business these are your managers. Hire carefully and build their trust and level of responsibility so as your business grows you can rely on them more and more for the decisions you used to take, while you shift to deal with long term strategy and high level problems and concerns.

Use Data

There’s nothing like hard data to boost your decision making abilities. Use market research, sales figures, survey your own customers: anything that gives you data about how people behave. As long as you understand how to interpret it – or you can hire consultants who can – you can make increasingly accurate predictions about how people will behave in the future, and avoid negative outcomes.