Why Do Founders Get Stuck on Decisions?

It's not that they (we) can't make decisions.

They make a lot of them all day long, and some of them they make really fast.

What they skip is deciding how much a decision is worth before they start pouring effort into it.

So the $400 software subscription gets the same amount of consideration as the $200K hire.

Each one just gets whatever attention you happened to have that week.

From the weeds it’s hard to see. You've got a decision, you want to make it well, so you think about it.
Not sure? Think more.
Still stuck? Think harder.
And the whole time, everything downstream is waiting on you.

It doesn't have to be that way.

Before you deliberate, ask two questions.

#1: if this turns out wrong, what does it cost to undo?

#2: what would another week of studying actually teach me, specifically? Name the information, name where you'd get it, name what you'd do differently once you had it. If you can't, you're not researching anymore. You're waiting to feel certain, and that feeling was never coming.

Most founders face three or four genuinely irreversible calls in a year. Everything else can be undone.

So if you're deliberating over everything as if it's irreversible, you’re wasting two of your most valuable resources - your time and energy.

I explain how to stop that in this article.

The Day You Go From Cleanup to Building

There's a shift that happens when you stop solving yesterday's problems today, and you start solving tomorrow's problems today.
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That's when you stop living paycheck to paycheck with your time, and you start earning a compounding return on it.

When you're solving yesterday's problems, you don't get to decide when. You're behind, so every minute is already claimed by something that should've been handled last week. There are fires that have to be put out now. Every choice is forced.

When you're solving tomorrow's problems, the conditions are much more favorable. You're getting to make a choice about what you aim your attention at.

When you're working on what's coming instead of what already broke, you're playing a different game. You fix root causes instead of the same issue every quarter.

That's the difference between reacting to your business and running it. There's power in that shift that founders don't understand until they've been in both worlds.

And once you've been there, you don't go back.

Founders vs the Five Ceilings

If you're the founder of an expertise business, you need to be aware out of the gate that there are five potential ceilings that you could run into - simply because of the model you've chosen.

Your expertise is the product, and that's a unique constraint.

1️⃣ The leader is the production bottleneck: The business can only grow as fast as the founder/owner can personally produce, decide, or deliver.

2️⃣ Market size: Market size: Who you're trying to reach and how you're positioned limits growth more than the actual demand for what you do.

3️⃣ Pricing that doesn't match the value: Your pricing limits revenue independent of demand or capacity. You may be leaving money on the table.

4️⃣ Delivery complexity: The more you customize, the harder it becomes to deliver consistently, train others, or scale.

5️⃣ Clients graduate or outgrow: The best clients graduate or evolve past what the business offers, and that revenue resets instead of compounding.

But these ceilings don’t have to be a problem.

You can avoid them - you just need to know what you're looking for.

​Learn more here or go straight to the free test here.

Build the business you envision,

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