Decision making for business owners: Ando Chong on the hard calls only you can make, why delay compounds every day, and what the 2018 rebuild taught him.
There is a decision sitting on your desk right now that has been there for months. You know the one. The partnership that stopped working a year ago. The loyal manager who is out of their depth and everyone can see it. The location that has never made money and never will. You have gathered the information. You have talked yourself around it a dozen times. And you have not decided.
I am not going to pretend I am above this. In the lead up to my hardest years, there were calls I knew I had to make, on the Melbourne office, on commitments we could no longer carry, and I made them late. Every month of delay made the eventual decision more expensive. When I rebuilt from 2018, the sharpest lesson was not about strategy. It was about decision making for business owners, and it fits in one line. Delay is also a decision, and it is usually the worst one available.
Most decisions in a business can and should be delegated. Pricing a job, scheduling a crew, choosing a supplier, a well built team handles all of it. But there is a small category with no delegation path, because they sit where ownership lives: whether a partnership continues, whether a senior person stays, whether a location closes, whether the business changes direction. Decisions that reshape the business itself.
These are the calls where you are the escalation point and there is nowhere further up to send them. That is precisely why they stall. Everything else in your week has a system. These have only you.
Not because they lack information. I have never met an owner who genuinely needed a thirteenth month of data on an underperforming location. The avoidance is emotional, and it usually wears one of three disguises.
Loyalty. The manager out of their depth was with you from the start. Deciding feels like betrayal, so you wait, and their team pays the price of your sentiment every week.
Identity. Closing the office you proudly opened means admitting the expansion was a mistake. The decision is cheap. The admission is what costs, and I know that one from the inside.
And hope. Maybe next quarter it turns around. Hope is lovely and it is not a strategy. Meanwhile the delay compounds quietly: the money the location loses, the good people the weak manager burns through, the drag a dead partnership puts on every other decision. You pay for an unmade decision every day, you just never see the invoice.
Name it as a decision. Write the actual question down in one sentence. Do we close the branch, yes or no. Vague dread becomes manageable the moment it has edges.
Set a decision date. Not a deadline for the outcome, a date by which you will decide. Give yourself two weeks, gather nothing new, and talk to one trusted voice outside the business, a mentor or a peer who has made this kind of call. Not for the answer, but because saying it out loud to someone with no stake strips the fear out of it.
Then decide, and act with respect. Hard calls made cleanly and kindly do less damage than soft avoidance ever does. Your team already knows the decision needs making. What they are watching for is whether you will make it.
The decision you are avoiding is costing you more than either answer would. My 2018 rebuild started properly on the day I stopped protecting old decisions and started making current ones.
Write your stalled decision down tonight, one sentence, and put a date under it. Two weeks. That is what deciding looks like.
The ones that reshape the business itself: partnerships, senior people, closing or opening locations, and major changes of direction. Nearly everything else can be systemised or delegated to the team.
Rarely from lack of information. The blockers are loyalty to people involved, protecting past decisions tied to the owner's identity, and hope that the problem resolves itself. All three feel reasonable and all three compound the cost.
Once the question is clearly framed and the facts are on the table, around two weeks is enough for most calls. Set a decision date, consult one trusted outside voice, then decide. Open ended timelines are how decisions stall for a year.
You sometimes will, and a wrong decision made cleanly usually costs less than a right one made a year late. Decisions can be corrected. Drift cannot, because it was never pointed anywhere.
Anderson Chong, Founder of iQuest Consulting and Business by Design.
From a quick conversation to transforming the business.
Book a 15 minute chat.
