Successful Franchise Owners Make Precise Decisions Deliberately and Confidently

Good decision making in business and life is a learned skill and can be practiced immediately. This article focuses on the decisions we make consciously. This isn’t a discussion about synapses firing, conscious versus unconscious (habits) or emotional intelligence. It is about a practical process built on 39 combined years of experiences as a Successful Franchise Owner and Fire Chief. This article gives you a process to make positive decisions more often than not.

4 General Decision Categories:

1. There are a few unimportant decisions that have little impact on your life and business today. A simple example is eating a banana or cantaloupe as your morning fruit. Both are healthy for long-term impact but unimportant for today.
2. Some decisions are routine to the point of being positive habits. Deciding you like to get your blood flowing with a brisk, 7 am walk around the neighborhood with your 3-year-old German Shepard is a positive routine you decide to follow even on mornings you don’t feel like it.
3. Each day we make decisions for efficiency. We decide to plan our day/week/year to be as convenient as possible. Efficiency decisions help Successful Franchisees save time, money or both. You plan your day to get the most done and minimize downtime, for example, reducing time spent in traffic or waiting on a late appointment.
4. The topic for the rest of this article is about the process I use with success concerning the issues most important to you. Important decisions may need to be made urgently or not. The commonality is that these decisions are highly impactful for your Franchise, your team and you.

How to Know What’s “Important?”

After just doing a search for “how to know a decision is important” and “what is the definition of ‘important decision’” all kinds of “how to make important decisions” websites and videos came up. BUT nothing found addresses this simple question: “How do you know what decisions are important?” Some decisions are made important by law, stopping at a stop sign and paying taxes are two simple examples. Others are important out of common courtesy like calling 911 if your neighbor’s house is on fire. The decisions discussed here are about you and your business when you have options.

And lastly,

4. What is your estimated cost/benefit analysis telling you? Occasionally, you’ll have the luxury of time gathering data to know as much as possible about a decision. At other times, a minimum amount of data is available and you must make a decision now. Either way, an analysis is helpful to know if your decision is important.

Learn to Make Positively Impactful Decisions

Successful Franchisees make important decisions looking at 5 areas of impact:

1. Long-term impact may cause some short-term hurdles to overcome. This type of decision positively impacts the future of your company. These decisions can impact the value of your company when you pass it on, your legacy and the lives of those working with you.
2. Impactful short-term decisions can avert disaster. During the 20 years with ImageFIRST there were only a couple of times the GM and I decided not to let the rest of our team go out to make deliveries. If the roads were icy at 4:00 am, we reverted to our pre-plan to alter the rest of the week’s deliveries.
3. What processes are impacted by your decision? Tightening process standards on the front end of a set of processes certainly has an impact on processes deeper inside. In the laundry industry, setting the drying time correctly for the relative humidity daily determines if that batch needs to be processed again because all of the patient gowns are damp.
4. Successful Franchise Owners look at who is affected by their decisions, how to best communicate the reason(s), and why this decision is made now. This is amplified if the decision made impacts your team financially in any way. Major decisions also bring on emotional reactions. The Covid-19 vaccination policies of companies is a current example.
5. As best as you can, predict what unintended consequences can occur because of your important decision. This fortune-telling is certainly not foolproof. You can, however, make this exercise a part of your decision-making process to vet out possible impacts your decision will have. The Terrace Park Fire Department Officers decided early in my tenure to formalize and strategize the training process. What we didn’t intend nor predict was the positive effect this decision had on recruiting and retaining our unpaid-professional members.

The 7 Steps to Making a Well-Thought-Out Decision:

1. Understand the context of the issue. Is the current problem a one-off or is it consistent? Who is communicating the issue? Working in a 1000-person sewing plant taught me quickly how to look for context when an issue was raised.
2. Determine the “who’s,”
   • Who needs to be involved in making the decision?
   • Whom does this affect and how?
   • Who is the ultimate owner of the decision?
   • Who can provide relevant input?
   • Who will communicate the decision and plan-of-action to those affected and how?
3. What factual information is necessary? In my past life, we used a stopwatch for the many time studies needed for the sewing plant to operate efficiently while providing fair wages. These studies allowed the management team to make decisions based on data.
4. Predict the possible outcomes of your decision. If you have time, determine a range of outcomes and assign a probability to each point in the range. This is helpful when considering a cost/benefit of a particular decision.
5. Make your decision and act. Consensus isn’t always possible or desirable. If the decision comes from a group, especially the management team, everyone on the team MUST be fully committed to the decision. Even if there is disagreement within the team, the outward communication needs to be the same song.
6. Measure the actual outcome(s) of your decision and compare to the hypotheses.