How to make decisions to move your vegan business forwards

There can be an overwhelmingly different amount of ways to reach your business goal, so how do you know which are the right and wrong decisions to take?

We look at how to get better at making decisions in your business.

You can watch or listen to this article as a podcast instead.

Making decisions can be really hard in business. Should you put your budget into social media advertising or invest that money in hiring a virtual assistant? Or how about the best way to get new customers – should you be doing Pay Per Click advertising through Google or going around the country having stalls at vegan fairs and events?

You could say that building a business is just making a series of decisions one after another. And if you’re the sort of person who over-analyses each decision and agonises about whether it’s the right one or not, then you’re always going to struggle to move your business forward. Because you might be worried about making the wrong decision, but let me tell you that simply not making a decision at all is far worse.

To illustrate that, imagine that your business journey is a path, and on that path you come to a split where you have to decide if you go left or if you go right. Imagine if you get to this junction and you don’t make a decision on which way to go. You stop and sit there because you can’t decide if you should take the left or right path. You stop moving forwards. And that’s what will happen in your business if you can’t make decisions – they change from being decisions to barriers.

The 'right' decision

I’m going to start by letting you into a huge secret – and if you’re the kind of person who over-analyses everything or worries about making wrong decisions then this secret might just blow your mind: there is no such thing as a ‘right’ decision. You might have made decisions in the past that turned out to be ‘good’, and you might have made decisions that you think turned out ‘bad’, but that doesn’t mean there was ever a ‘right’ decision. Because maybe that time you thought you made a really good decision, the other options would have worked out just fine too. Or maybe when you made that really bad decision (the one that still keeps you awake at night!), have you ever thought that the other option might have worked out even worse?!

And that’s your role as an entrepreneur. Your job isn’t always about picking the right or wrong option, more often it’s about being able to take a decision so that you can move forwards, and then making sure that decision becomes the right one.

There are many, many paths to your goal. Moving away from metaphors and into the real world, have you ever really been out on a walk in the woods and come to a split where the path goes left and right and you don’t know which one to take? So you take one and a few minutes later you realise that both paths come out at the same place anyway. That’s like many decisions in business. There’s not a right or wrong decision, all the options can be right decisions if they let you move forwards.

So don’t worry about getting it wrong because you are going to get it wrong. No-one has built this exact business before so you’re always going to be path-finding. That’s just the price you pay for wanting to build your own business instead of going and working for someone else and letting them make the decisions instead! So get comfortable with it. Don’t beat yourself up if you take the left path and then realise you have to trace your steps back again and take the right one. Few decisions are permanent. That new employee you are not sure about hiring, if it doesn’t work out then they don’t have to stay with you. Or that new product or service you were thinking about developing, test it out to see if people are as excited about it as you are. And if not, you can just move on to the next one having learnt something useful in the process. So don’t let the fear of making a wrong decision hold you back, else deciding not to make a decision will be the worst decision you ever made.

How to make a decision

It’s all good and well saying that you should just pick a decision and make it work, but if you’ve got multiple options in front of you how do you actually decide which is the best one? Fortunately, there are different methods and frameworks you can use to help you make a decision.

The first thing you might do is pay someone else to make a decision for you. Decision-making is a lot easier if you have experience of the thing you are trying to make a decision on, so you can pay someone who does have that experience to come into your business and advise you on the best route forward. Business mentoring can be a great option too or you might pay someone who’s an expert to come and consult with you for a half a day to give you their opinion.

You would do this especially when you have a big decision to make. For example, if you are thinking about selling your business you might bring in someone who’s an expert on business exits to give you their time and advice on your options. Or if it’s a technical decision like setting up a company pension scheme, you’d bring in a financial advisor to advise you.

You can do the same for smaller decisions too. Don’t know what platform to use for your social media scheduling? Call up your friend whose business is all over social and ask them what they recommend because they have probably tried out a few different ones.

Using decision-making tools and frameworks

There are also a number of tools and frameworks that you can use to approach a business decision in an analytical way. The simplest one is creating a ‘pros and cons’ list for each option open to you. Take a sheet of paper, draw a line vertically down the middle. On the left, put all the benefits of an option or decision; on the right write down all the drawbacks and negatives of that option. This sounds really simple, but when you get all the conflicting thoughts and feelings you’re having about a decision on paper, you might see that the pros massively outweigh the cons but just one negative is stopping you from moving forwards with that decision. Maybe you didn’t consciously realise what the thing was that was stopping you – but exposing it lets you tackle it directly to see if there’s any way to lesson it’s impact or even get rid of it all together.

If you are trying to make a decision that has lots of different options, then do a pros and cons list for each option. That will quickly show you which option has the most benefits and the least draw-backs. And if you are going to do this exercise for a range off options (e.g. maybe you’re evaluating three new products or services you are thinking of developing and can’t decide which to do) then do a pros and cons list for the status quo option also – i.e. draw up a pros and cons list for doing nothing too. This is really important. Because this exercise is just helping you to evaluate your options and is not, necessarily, going to help you implement your decision. I’ve seen plenty of companies pull staff meetings together to analyse the different options, come up with a clear winner and then never actually do anything with that decision. Month’s later they still haven’t gone ahead with the option they picked.

That’s why it’s really important to also evaluate what the impact of not taking a decision means too. So use the same pros and cons framework to evaluate the benefits and draw-backs of doing nothing: in the pros list you might have ‘won’t take up any time’ or ‘no expenditure’, but in the cons list you might have ‘continued loss of sales’, ‘decrease of motivation in the business resulting in loss of key staff’ or ‘running out of money in 12 months’. This will help you realise that ‘doing nothing’ is not the option you want to take.

Use the same pros and cons framework to evaluate the benefits and draw-backs of doing nothing too. This will help you realise that 'doing nothing' is not the option you want to take.

Other frameworks

Sitting down and analysing the options open to you is really useful to help you take a decision. Making a pros and cons list is just the simplest way of doing this. You might instead do a cost/benefit analysis, where you judge the cost of each option against the likely income it will bring in and pick the one that best fits with your resources at the moment. So if something is likely to bring money in quickly and won’t cost much to set-up, then if you are in your start-up phase, that beats something that’s going to cost a lot to implement and might not make any money for a long time.

Another option is doing a SWOT analysis on the options open to you, and if you’ve ever done a business studies module then you’ll be familiar with this model. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, and instead of listing out just the pros and cons this gives you more viewpoint to consider an option from.

Using 'worry time'

You now have a couple of good frameworks to help you decide which option is better than another. But that’s only 50% of being able to make a decision. Because you might already know which is the best option. You might have worked that out long ago. You might have done your research, got advice and even mapped out a plan to implement it. But you’ve still not done it. Sound familiar? To tackle this we need to put down the business studies textbook and pick up the psychiatrist’s handbook instead.

Fortunately or unfortunately, businesses are run by human beings. And us human beings struggle to separate a business decision from a personal one. We take our business decisions personally and we take the possibility of a bad outcome personally too. So, I want to introduce you to a tool that you might find incredibly useful called ‘worry time’.

Worry time is actually as bad as it sounds, because this is an exercise where you put aside a period of time to just worry about what might go wrong. And you might say that you don’t need to make time to do that because you already do it all the time! But this is about worrying methodically instead of letting your fears fester at the back of your mind.

So take the decision that you are struggling with right now, and write down the likely outcomes if it turns out to be a bad decision. Write down all the things that could go wrong. Get them all out – all your worries, all your negative thoughts about moving forwards with something, really catastrophise and get all the possible negative scenarios attached to that decision down on paper.

And in doing this, two really important things will happen. First, you will likely find that the possible bad outcomes are nowhere near as bad as you thought. Second, you can put a plan in place of what you will do if the worst does happen. Having a contingency in place reduces the amount you need to worry about something happening – because you know you’ve already got a plan ready for if it happens. So for example, maybe you’re worried about how much something is going to cost to implement and that your business will run out of money if the sales don’t come in quick enough to offset the money that you are spending. In that case, you can create a simple cash forecast spreadsheet to monitor your cash realities and allow you to plan where your ‘line in the sand is’ (i.e. the date by which time it either needs to be working or you need to pull the plug). Doing this you might see that you’ve got a clear six-months or a year until you reach that line, when you were worried it might have been sooner.

Or maybe your biggest worry is that a new service or product will prove too popular and you will be over-run with orders. In that case, you can plan what you will do if that happens. You can get some quotes from virtual assistants or work out how much it will cost to bring in another member of staff to deal with the increased sales. Or maybe you’ve already got a relationship with another company that you will be able to sub-contract some of this extra work or production out to that you could talk to if that happened.

By doing this ‘worry time’ exercise to confront the things that are clogging-up your ability to make a decision, you will find that most of the things you fear are actually not that bad. You will also find that, even with the very worst scenario you can think of, you will still have options. Even if that option is giving it all up and getting a job working for someone else instead!

But I guarantee you that none of the worst-case scenarios that you come up with will be as bad as just doing nothing. They won’t be as bad as sitting there and letting the moss grow over you and your business because you can’t make the decision that will take your business forwards. There might be uncertainties to the outcome of your decisions, but the outcomes of not making a decision are far more certain.

The more you make decisions, the easier it gets. You start to develop an instinct for which is the right way to go. Know that there is no one way to reach your business goals, and by analysing your options in a more critical way, and starting to make more decisions, you will pick up on the kind of things that are going to move you towards your goal. So be lead by those.

Ask: which decision will make me more money quicker? Which decision will allow me to deliver a better service or product to my customers? Or which decision will get me a step closer to my final goal of a vegan world?

A bullet point recap of what we’ve covered in this article:

Business is really just making a series of decisions one after another – and if you’re the sort of person who over-analyses each decision and agonises about if it’s the right one or not, then you’re always going to struggle to move your business forward.
Not making a decision at all is far worse than being worried about making the wrong decision. That’s when decisions become barriers – if you decide not to decide, you stay stuck at the crossroads.
The big secret is that there is no such thing as the ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ decision. A good decision that you took in the past might have turned out just as good if you’d chosen another option instead. Your role as a business leader is to be able to take a decision so that you can move forwards, and then make sure it was the right decision afterwards.
If you’re struggling with a decision, bring someone else in to make it for you. Pay for a few hours of an expert’s time or call up a friend that you know has more expertise than you do in this area, or even get a business mentor to help you navigate through it.
There are also frameworks you can use to help make decisions. They range from using pros and cons lists, cost-benefit analyses through to SWOT analyses.
If you analyse a decision using a decision framework tool, it’s also important to analyse the pros and cons of not making a decision using the same tool. Just picking a winning often isn’t enough for you to actually then make that option happen – sometimes you need to face the consequences of what might happen if you don’t go ahead on implementing a decision too.
Use ‘worry time’ to work through the negative potential outcomes of your decision. Work out what you would do if they actually came to pass. Knowing that you have a plan ready to deal with them means you will find that they are not as negative as you think.
The more you make decisions the better you get at making them. You develop a sense of what decisions will move you towards your goal and which won’t and you can be lead by that.