No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs by Dan S. Kennedy

Author:Dan S. Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781613083765
Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
Published: 2017-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER 8

Decisiveness

“You will never stub your toe standing still. The faster you go, the more chance there is of stubbing your toe—but the more chance you have of getting somewhere.”

—AMERICAN INDUSTRIALIST, CHARLES KETTERING

Decisiveness saves a lot of time.

People waste a lot of time on indecisiveness for a whole host of reasons: lack of clarity about their intentions; lack of confidence in themselves and their decision-making capabilities; insufficient information or a lack of trust in its sources; and maybe worst of all, a habit of decision avoidance or procrastination for no good reason but its ingrained habit-force. Some people believe that slowly made decisions are better than quickly made ones, but I’ve certainly seen no evidence of this in my own business experience—with clients or in my study of exceptionally successful entrepreneurs, CEOs, and leaders. You can even make a solid case for failing forward fast. If you are a painfully slow and anxious decision-maker, it’d be good to identify the root cause and eradicate it.

I have sold three businesses I created during my career. In all three instances, I decided to sell the company, decided who I would sell it to, made a plan for the structure of the sale to that person, made just one phone call, went to one meeting, and got the sale agreed to—all in the space of a few days to no more than a few weeks. It is arguably possible I might have squeezed more juice from these by moving much more slowly and engaging many more potential buyers, but then again, I might have gotten no more, maybe less, and spent a lot of time getting there for which I had other profitable uses. In each case, I fortunately zeroed in one potential buyer who practiced decisiveness comparable to my own.

I make a fair number of significant investment decisions as the possibilities are presented to me by the handful of brokers and “finders” I use in one phone call. If I see something in the news that points me to a stock or stocks, I almost always act on it within the hour. (By the way, I heartily recommend the book Laughing at Wall Street by Chris Camillo for a very different perspective on making your own investing decisions.) I have out-performed the Dow and S&P in total net yield in six of the past eight years, been essentially flat one year, and took light losses in the other. One of my all-time best, substantial investment decisions, in a startup, was made in one conversation. Have I made unsuccessful decisions at this speed? Of course, but not very many thanks to the preset criteria and parameters I use for all of them. And the costs of the losers is far, far outweighed by the time saved and invested productively rather than consumed by dithering and delaying and timidity.

When I meet for a day with a new consulting client, by the middle

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