Effective Business Decision Making requires looking past generic advice to evaluate your unique operational context. Tonya Kubo and Gwen Bortner examine why standard business best practices often fail when applied without considering your business stage, resources, and specific goals. You’ll learn how to distinguish between valid information and genuinely useful strategies for your enterprise. They also discuss why choosing what not to do is a critical leadership skill as your company scales. Discover how to stop reactive firefighting and start making high-impact choices that align with your long-term vision.

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Knowing What To Do Vs. Knowing What Matters

There is no shortage of information telling you what you could be doing in your business. The harder and, honestly, less often answered question is what deserves your attention. You can have a list of perfectly good ideas and still make poor decisions on what to work on next. I am here with none other than Gwen Bortner. You’d be surprised if there was anybody else here. Gwen, we want you to answer the question for us. What is the difference between knowing something would be good for your business and knowing it’s what your business needs?

Context Matters More Than General Advice

Context matters. You teed that up for me. It is true. The reality is there are lots of good options, but what your best option is has a tremendous amount to do with your specific context. It has to do with where you are in your business life cycle. It has to do with what resources you have. It has to do with what absolute specific goals that you’re headed toward.

It has to do with so many details that don’t necessarily hit that broad question of, “Should I do A, or should I do B?” Usually, people are looking like, “Is A a good choice, or is B a good choice?” That answer is often yes. Both are good choices until we dig into the details to figure out whether it is a good choice for you, your business, where you are, what’s going on, what’s been working, what hasn’t been working, who your clients are, what your product is that you’re selling, and what your business model is. We talk about it all the time, but the list is extensive.

Data Always Beats Information

It’s possible that something that was a great answer for you even a couple of months ago is no longer a good answer. This is also where I want to reach out to something that Nick Peterson says, which is, “Your data beats my information every single solitary time.” We’ve talked about it before, where I said the type of things that everyone says I need to do to increase my mailing list has never worked. Every person that’s come in said, “They’ve done it wrong,” including you.

I am here to say maybe they did do it wrong, but we have done it right, and it still didn’t work.

This was an example where people weren’t taking my data as data. It was like, “That can’t possibly be right because it works for everybody.” I know that you love that as an example when you’re in rooms where it’s like, “This will always work.” You’re like, “I have an example where it didn’t work.” I’m glad that I’ve been able to provide that example with you. That’s exactly what this is. It is saying, “Is this going to work?” Not that you did a bad job. Potentially not that anyone else did a bad job, but there are so many factors that we have to take into consideration. I say it all the time, but it’s a context-matters situation.

Your best business options depend on your unique context, life cycle stage, and goals rather than generic advice. Share on X

Valid Information Isn’t Always Useful

I love that you brought all of that up, but especially the Nick Pearson quote. I thought you were going to go a different direction with quoting Nick. He says, “Your data beats my information any day of the week.” The other thing he says that is applicable to what we’re talking about is that, “Information can be valid, but that doesn’t make it automatically useful.” Valid means logical. Logical within this context is most likely true.

Something being logical and something being true doesn’t make it useful to you based on your experience and your goals. You were saying business models, stage of business, and the resources you have. Valid information that is useful to somebody who liquidated some stock options and has $100,000 to sink into their business is not the same as information that is useful to somebody who is bootstrapping and going with available cash on hand, and that cash on hand is what they’re making from their primary job. It’s $500 a month max.

That’s the thing. It is to be able to ask lots of questions to help guide the thinking. One of the things that I see happen a lot is that we want someone else to tell us the answer.

We want to fast-track what we want to do. Who doesn’t?

Sometimes, it’s like, “I don’t want to make the wrong choice,” but most of the time, the only person that can make the choice in the business is you. You are the only one who can make the choice. Someone like me as an advisor can come in and say, “I see this, that, and this other thing as potential options.” I can help you think through them and say, “My experience has shown that if A, B, C, and D are true, option one is the best, but if A, C, D, and F are true, option B is probably best.” There’s still a point that you have to say, “That feels right to me.” There’s a piece of context that only you and your gut know. There’s a lot of context that we can dig through, unveil, and help you gain clarity.

I was talking to a gentleman. His name is Greg Crabtree. Gregory Crabtree has this great book called Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!: 4 Keys to Unlock Your Business Potential. When I first saw it, it was like, “This is going to be another one of my people.” It’s generally designed for larger businesses than I’m expecting our reader base to be. One of the things that he talks about, which is true, is that if we’re looking at the data, the data will help him, an advisor, give me options that I can give to you to say, “Based on the data, I see A, B, or C as a path,” but it goes back to you still going to have to make that choice because there’s additional context.

Real operational data from your own business will always outperform outside advice or broad industry trends. Share on X

He’s going to be good about asking all of the right questions, but it’s one of those things like, “Are you thinking about retiring soon, closing down the business, or doing something else?” That could drastically change what the right answer is. That isn’t necessarily obvious unless someone asks because if the business is doing well, and maybe you’re in your mid-40s, they’re going to continue, but there may be reasons you’re like, “I want this thing closed down by the time I’m 47.”

Anyone on the outside, me included, is going to make some amount of assumptions if we’re not careful. I know sometimes, I do make assumptions. I try to be clear. I’m like, “I’m assuming this is true,” and often, once it gets verbalized, it’s like, “That’s not true,” then, we can work from there. This is the thing. You’ve got to ask lots of questions before saying, “This is good or bad.”

Most of the time, at a surface level, they’re all good. Occasionally, there’s a bad one where it’s like, “That’s stupid.” That’s what people call best practice, which is often common practice and is often based on an observation that’s not true. We talked about that in the last episode or the episode before that. Sometimes, it’s easy, but most of the time, it’s not.

To your point about asking lots of questions, that is the problem that we face. We’re given lots of answers without being asked follow-up questions. People assume that if we’re using certain vocabulary, our definition of those words is the same as their definitions. They assume that our experience is the same as their experience.

There’s very little advice out there that is given to anybody who’s an outlier. I don’t know about you, but I have found myself more now than ever having to tell clients, “That’s a good idea,” and, “It’s not a good idea for you right now.” One thing that I’ve always done, going back in history, is talking about social media ads. Ever since the first headline of the Death of the Algorithm or whatever, it’s been like, “I know I have to pay to play, so I want you to help me with ads.”

One of the big questions I will ask is, “Give me your organic traffic numbers.” If you’re not getting any organic traffic, we don’t necessarily know if you have offer-market fit. There are a lot of things we don’t know that we run the risk of paying to promote an ill-fitting offer and ill-fitting messaging. In that case, paid ads would be a great way to grow quickly.

Standard advice like working on the business can actually be destructive for founders in early operational stages. Share on X

Before we can do those paid ads, we need to do this or that or acknowledge that our paid ads are going to help us determine whether we have offer-market fit. Not everybody wants to pay to figure out if they have offer-market fit, though. How about you? In what context are you finding yourself telling people, “It’s a good idea. Not a good idea now.”

One came up with a client. She’s relatively new in her business. She came out of a true big corporation environment. It was big corporate, not a corporate of 50 people. It was probably one of the top 50 companies in the United States. Giant corporate. Everyone talks about, “Don’t get stuck working in the business. Work on the business.” That’s generally good advice. You have to be careful that you don’t spend so much time in the business that you’re not taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture.

Avoid Working Out Of Context

She said, “What I’m focused on is I’m spending almost all my time working on the business and not in the business.” I said, “That’s bad advice for you.” I’m sure that was not what she expected, and I’m sure it wasn’t received well. It was because this was a completely different industry than what she’s been in in so many ways I can’t even begin to count. Different industry. Different size. Many different things. She hasn’t been in a startup before. The list is enormous.

Part of it was like, “Someone in your position needs to be in the business to understand who’s walking through the door. What are they looking for? Why are they there? There’s a whole lot of data that you need to be gathering that you can only gather in the business. Your right-hand, your chief of staff, and your whatever is not going to gather it in the same way that you are if you’re in the business.” Her split was 80/20 on the business and in the business. I said, “That needs to pretty much swap. You need to be about 80% in the business and 20% on the business.”

The 80/20 split in the other way is great advice for someone whose business has been around for a couple of years. They know they’ve got product market fit. There are a whole lot of things that can be good advice for, but not at this stage. I know there was no one who was going to challenge her on that because it’s that same sort of thing. It’s like, “This is the right answer.” It’s like, “It can be a right answer, but not at this stage of business for you given all of your context.”

“Given these specific circumstances and conditions that you’re facing.”

“These specific circumstances of who you are, what you’ve experienced, and what you’ve done.” I have another person that I worked with years ago. I haven’t worked with them at all recently. If they had said the same thing to me at the same stage of business, we didn’t know each other at the same stage of business, but even then, I know enough about her history that I would have said, “That probably makes sense.”

She had a different work history, experience, and all sorts of things that change the context. It’s not a timing issue. There are lots of details about why this makes it a better choice. The thing a lot of people miss is we need to not just say yes or no, but we need to explain why this is a different context. That’s a place where a lot of people miss. That’s always my thing. If you can’t explain why this is a good answer or a bad answer with relation to details of your context, then I’m not sure someone’s giving you good advice.

 

 

What are some questions that you ask in helping clients or even people you meet in networking situations to get to the answer of whether this is a good idea or a good idea for now?

One of the things that came up on a completely different call with a completely different person in a completely different situation for me is he said what you said, and I told him about your statement of, “Did you know this was a problem before you heard about the solution?” I still love that. That’s one of the things that we have to get caught. We have to catch ourselves to say, “Are we solving a problem that we already knew was a problem, or are we solving a problem that we got excited about because someone told us?” To me, that is the first thing.

Often, we don’t even know that we got caught in that unless someone else is asking that question. I still say your question is one of the best starter questions. I love that. It is then looking at, “Why do we think we need it? What is that going to change as we go forward? What are the things that you’ve tried before that are similar? Did they work or did they not work? Do we know why, or is it one of those things like, ‘We tried that. That didn’t work.’ Do you have enough data to understand why it didn’t work? Did it not work because you didn’t do it long enough? You were expecting a one-month result, and that particular thing is a six-month result.”

Back to, “Where is your path? Does this line up with your path?” That’s one of those questions that’s a hard question because a lot of folks haven’t thought enough about their own alignment. Something we’ve talked about for years is that just because this was the direction you’re going, is that still the direction you want to go? Is it the place that you want to be, keeping in mind, not just for the business, but for your life, your family, and all the things that are going on?”

Solve Root Causes Instead Of Symptoms

You also can get into the deeper questions like, “Are we solving a symptom problem, or are we solving a root problem?” The list of questions is potentially limitless. For me, the thing that I’m always looking for is someone helping ask questions about my context and helping me think about my context. With the gentleman I was talking to, we were talking about something completely different, but what he brought up was my context. Then, he made your statement. He didn’t use it quite the same way, but he was helping me think through my context, not the solution.

Some questions that I have heard you ask in the past are, “What are you trying to accomplish with this? What is preventing that?” You’ve also talked about what’s changed. I’ve heard you tell people, “You said you were doing this, and now you’re talking about this. What has changed between those two things?” I know you’re always listening for indicators on whether we’re talking about a symptom versus a root cause.

Digging toward the root cause prevents you from getting trapped in an endless cycle of fixing symptom problems. Share on X

You’re somebody who’s always going to dig toward the root cause because you know solving symptom after symptom allows the root cause to grow bigger. It’s harder to fight the bigger it is. Oftentimes, we’re talking about whether this has to be addressed now or it can wait, and if it’s blocking anything. Though those are great questions for you to ask, for me to ask clients, and for consultants to ask, we as clients can also take responsibility for ensuring that we’re getting the right information for our context.

Part of that is having the courage and the presence of mind to not just take every bit of advice verbatim, write it all down, and go, “That’s what I’m going to do,” but to then mirror back your context. It’s like, “I am looking at selling my business in five years. Based on that information, would you still give me the same advice? Is this still what I should be doing now? As a reminder, I’m working toward this. Can you help me understand how doing this now is going to get me there?”

The biggest challenge that all of us have in what you’re saying, which is you’re right, and we should try to do that, is that it’s so hard to verbalize our own personal context because it is so obvious to us what our context is. As we think about that context, that’s where, for me, we’ve got to be self-aware enough to say, “This is something I know. There is likely no way anyone else knows it,” even though it’s in our head and, for us, it’s obvious.

One of the things that I’ve also known by working with you is that this seems to get harder for business owners as they become more experienced. Why do you think that is? I know why you think that is, but our readers need to know why you think that is.

It is because we’ve been doing the thing. It has become our habit. It has become our method of working. We all get into ruts. The more we do the same thing, the more we feel like everyone should know. We’re like, “Everyone should be completely aware of this. Everyone should know.” That’s not necessarily true. The more that we can verbalize and the more that we can pull ourselves out of the assumption, the better off we are. Maybe you’re thinking of something else, so I’m going to throw it back in your court. You’re like, “The other thing you say is.” You listen to me. I don’t know. I talk half the time.

Things that you have said over the years and over the course of this show are that the true entrepreneur is a visionary. The further along they go in business, the more they know and the more possibilities they see. They see the possibilities in the advice that they’re being given. The further along you go, going back to what you said before, the less likely people are to push back. Especially internally, we go, “I’m working with this business advisor. They say this and this,” and everybody goes, “Okay.”

Experienced founders often jump straight to familiar solutions without me realizing methods no longer fit. Share on X

Experience Can Create Blind Spots

That’s one way that it makes it harder. Going back to our original conversation here about the marketing thing and how marketing hasn’t quite worked out for you, that experience makes it easier to jump immediately to a solution. When you’re working with experienced people, especially if their experience is very narrow, it doesn’t occur to them that that tried-and-true advice isn’t so tried and true in this context.

Unless they happen to be in that same context. That’s where the challenge hits in a lot of situations. It’s easy to assume if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck, but it might be a duckling versus a senior duck.

Leadership Means Choosing What Not To Do

Maybe it’s a swan. Who knows? The other thing that I know, and we’ve talked about this before, is that choosing what not to do is oftentimes a more important aspect of leadership than choosing what to do.

Almost always.

If somebody is reading and they’ve got five things competing for their attention. How would you help them to figure out which one matters?

I’d ask them lots of context questions to get their mind thinking about their own context. That would be the very first thing I would do. Grabbing my experience and their context, I would start talking through, “Do we think this is the thing that needs to be done now? How is that going to provide value?” We will work through it backwards to see whether we can cut to four of those things or at least put them on a back burner for now.

That’s a good thing for people to take notes on. It’s a great place to end this. After two years of recording this show, one of the things that I have figured out is that the business that you want comes down to learning how to make better decisions. What I’ve learned from you is that making better decisions comes from spending more time in reflection, which is why we have our One Really Good Question email. It goes out every Friday. I like to call it a CEO retreat. It’s an invitation to spend 5 to 15 minutes reflecting on your business and your role within the business.

 

 

If you choose to respond, Gwen and I will offer you some insight and feedback based on what we know. We can’t go super in-depth because we only know what you choose to share with us. You’re going to get another email next Friday and the Friday after that. Over time, you will start making those better decisions within your own context. You’ll want to go to www.tonyakubo.com/Question to sign up. We’ll see you next time.

 

Mentioned in This Episode

• Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!: 4 Keys to Unlock Your Business Potential
• Why Does Success Keep Moving The Finish Line?
• Subscribe to Gwen’s Weekly Email

 

About Your Hosts

Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.

Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.