In our previous article, we looked at the mindset shift involved in moving from senior HR professional to business owner and why being an excellent HR professional and building a successful consultancy are not quite the same job.
One of the biggest differences is decision-making.
As an experienced HR professional, you have probably spent years making difficult decisions, advising senior leaders and weighing up risk. Yet making decisions about your own business can feel surprisingly different.
There is no organisation around you absorbing some of the risk. The money may be yours; the reputation is yours and so are the consequences.
Learning to make confident business decisions is less about finding another decision-making model and more about becoming comfortable making good commercial judgements when there is no perfect answer.
Recognise when you are looking for certainty
Senior HR professionals are used to gathering evidence, assessing risk and considering the consequences before recommending a course of action.
Those skills are valuable in business too. The problem comes when sensible analysis quietly turns into waiting for certainty.
- Should you attend that networking event?
- Invest in marketing support?
- Follow up with a prospect? Change your pricing?
- Approach a potential client?
You could find reasons both for and against every one of them.
Instead of asking, “What is definitely the right decision?”, try asking:
“Do I know enough to make a sensible decision and see what happens?”
Growing a business involves testing, learning and adjusting. Not every decision needs to be proved right before you make it.
Separate reversible decisions from expensive ones
Not every business decision deserves the same amount of thought.
Signing a long-term agreement, making a significant investment or fundamentally changing your business model deserves careful consideration. Many everyday decisions are much easier to reverse.
You can:
- try a networking group and decide it is not for you;
- test a different way of following up enquiries;
- approach a potential referral partner;
- experiment with how you describe your services; or
- focus on one business development activity for a month and review the results.
When the consequences are relatively small, making the decision is often more useful than continuing to analyse it. Save your deepest thinking for the decisions that genuinely deserve it.
Make confident business decisions based on what the business needs
There will be things you naturally enjoy and things you would rather avoid. Your business, however, does not necessarily need more of what you enjoy doing.
Improving a document, researching a topic or refining a process may feel productive. Picking up the phone, following up a contact or walking into a room full of potential clients may feel considerably less comfortable.
But which activity is most likely to move the business forward?
Ask yourself:
- What does the business need from me right now?
- What am I choosing because it is genuinely important?
- What am I choosing because it feels easier or more familiar?
You will not always like the answer, but it can bring considerable clarity.
Give decisions a time horizon
A decision can look very different depending on when you judge it.
Spend two weeks building relationships with local businesses and you might conclude that nothing has happened. Give those relationships six months and they may have produced introductions, referrals and clients.
The same applies to marketing, networking and other business development activities.
Before starting something, decide when it will be reasonable to judge whether it is working.
Otherwise, you risk changing direction because an activity has not produced an immediate result. Giving a sensible decision enough time to produce useful evidence makes it easier to decide whether to continue, adapt or stop.
Distinguish between a bad decision and a disappointing outcome
This is an important distinction when learning to make confident business decisions.
You can make a sensible decision and still get a disappointing result.
You might pursue a promising opportunity and not win the work. You might attend an event and make no useful contacts. That does not automatically mean the decision was wrong.
Judge it based on what you knew at the time, rather than purely on what happened afterwards.
Ask:
- Was my reasoning sound?
- Did I have enough relevant information?
- Was the potential return worth the risk?
- What have I learned for next time?
This stops hindsight from unnecessarily undermining confidence in your judgement.
Use other people to sharpen your thinking
Running your own business does not mean making every decision alone.
A mentor, coach, franchise network or trusted peer can challenge assumptions, identify blind spots and help you see options you may have missed.
But there is a difference between seeking perspective and seeking permission.
Rather than asking someone else what you should do, try:
“This is what I think I should do, and this is why. What am I missing?”
You retain ownership of the decision while benefiting from someone else’s experience.
Confidence comes after making decisions
It is tempting to think confident business owners feel sure before they act. Often, the opposite is true.
Confidence develops because you make decisions, observe what happens and discover that you can respond. Some decisions work. Others need adjusting. Occasionally you will get something wrong.
What grows is not certainty that every decision will be right. It is confidence that you can make a considered choice, deal with the outcome and change direction when necessary.
As an experienced HR professional, you already know how to think critically, assess risk and exercise professional judgement. Building your own consultancy asks you to trust those abilities when the decision belongs to you.
And if the idea of using that experience to build something of your own is becoming more than just a passing thought, you might be ready to explore what it could actually look like. You can download our prospectus or get in touch to find out more about building an HR consultancy with face2faceHR.