Using the Santa service as my product, I want to discuss how this product tracks along the product lifecycle.

Introduction Phase: From a very early age, the target audience (two little children) had quickly become loyal customers of the service due to heavy promotion of the Santa service by mum, dad, relatives and broader society. 

Growth Phase: The customer retention rate was high:  annual Santa photos, numerous shopping trips to visit Santa and take in all the Christmas sights, etc.  There was 100% loyalty in the product and repeat purchasing year on year.

Product maturity and Product Extension: The kids were reaching points of doubt and disbelief in Santa’s existence, however a few words of wisdom (or watching The Polar Express) were simply required to continue the repeat purchase and a boost in Santa product sales.  With this we were able to continue the product extension.  

At this point, the effort to retain these two loyal customers was still minimal.  Business overheads were low: no special bonuses, no discounted offers, no special videos. It was easy. You could say the returns (and profit) came easily.

Decline: The kids were reaching a point in their customer journey where their loyalty was wavering significantly.  I had underestimated my customers and where they were on the product lifecycle.  Sure, I knew at some point the lifecycle would end.  I had expected that I would need to have that difficult conversation where I had to communicate with my customers that the Santa service was ending.  Instead, I had neglected to totally stay at the forefront of understanding my customers. This is the point where my Santa business had finally failed.

After a depressing 2020, sprinkle some sparkle into your marketing planning by adding a few Christmas graphics and decorations.  Decorate your website and social media posts, your small business or your home office.  Don’t forget to decorate your zoom background with a Santa Christmas grotto.  There are plenty of choices online, being mindful of copyright.

5 Top tips to improve your decision making in ONE short summary!

Tip 1 – Recognise your gut-feel… then put it aside for the moment.  Gut-feel or intuition is an important part of how we operate but it can be so powerful that it prevents us from thinking clearly.

Tip 2 – Separate the facts from the assumptions.  You can’t run a business or get through life without making some assumptions but make sure you ‘label’ those assumptions correctly and don’t confuse them with ‘facts’.  Be open to changing your assumptions when new or better information comes along.

Tip 3 – Is it a problem or a conflict?  Problems can be solved with logic but often what we face in business are emotional conflicts.  Acknowledge and ‘speak to their values’ before their logical brain.  When emotions are driven by ‘values’ and people use words like ‘honesty’, ‘trust’, ‘loyalty’, ‘fairness’, don’t be surprised if your attempts at logical problem-solving and ultimately decision making get rejected.

Tip 4 – Develop more than one solution.  Avoid the temptation to stop thinking when you get to the first acceptable solution in decision making.  Keep thinking until you generate several different options and ask how each of them can be turned into the ‘best’ solution.

Tip 5 – Test your decision before taking action.  See if you can test your best and second-best options before locking them in.  

Want more info on decision making in your business, email Trent trent.moy@halide.com.au or comment below.  Next week we’ll provide a short summary.  Let us know how you are getting along applying these skills for better decision making.ONE

Tip 5, Week 5: Test your decision before taking action

OK – you have thought through a complex issue and made a decision about what to do.  Good work.  But as you know, sometimes the best plan goes pear-shaped when we try to implement it.  The drawing looks OK but the reality on-site is more complicated.  

Ideally, you will have more than one option or solution when making decisions.  Plan A and Plan B could both work but you won’t really know until you try them.  Is there some way that you can test both Plan A and Plan B before actually getting locked-in to either of them?

Here are some tips for testing decisions:

• You don’t have to go it alone.  Making decisions is not easy.  Talk through your options with a few people that you trust and get their perspectives.  If you have a role-model or mentor that you can’t actually talk to (like a famously wise but dead person that you admire) then just imagine the advice that they would give you.
• Explain your decision to a rubber duck or your dog.  Remarkably, when we explain something step-by-step to something that can’t interrupt or speak back to us, we discover what we confidently know and what we might need to rethink.  And it’s safe… the rubber duck or dog won’t judge us or tell anybody else.  A simple decision making tool.
• Stare into the future. Ask how each option will appear to other people in the future.  For example, how will this look to my children, my partner, myself in 10 years’ time?
• Go for a small trial or experiment before big bang.  Give yourself room to modify your decision based on the experiment. 
• Can you do some research? Look at whether you can do an online survey, a social media poll, or perhaps undertake some focus group research through an external agency. This research could be to new or existing customers. You can also do A and B testing easily in social media marketing. 

Summary – How to make better decisions

In this series we have looked at a few tips for better decision making.  The good news is that we don’t have to make perfect decisions, we can develop the skills of making better decisions through practice. 

Remember, the enemy of a good decision is not an imperfect decision (or even a poor decision)… the real enemy is not deliberately making a decision at all.

Want more info on decision making in your business, email Trent trent.moy@halide.com.au or comment below.  Next week we’ll provide a short summary.  Let us know how you are getting along applying these skills for better decision making.

Tip 4, Week 4: Develop more than one solution

There’s an old joke about finding something you have lost in the last place that you would look… because nobody finds something and then continues to look for it.  But the same thing happens when we are going through the decision making process – once we come up with a solution that seems reasonable, we stop looking for other solutions.

In other words, when we are making decisions, we settle for the ‘first acceptable option’ rather than thinking through all the possibilities and choosing the ‘best possible option’.  One of the reasons why we settle for the first option may be that we form an unreasonable emotional attachment to the first good idea we have as being the best idea.  That’s true – it is the best idea we have had (so far) but it may not be the best idea we are possible of having.

When a group of people have to work through a decision, we can fool ourselves into thinking that we will come up with the best solution simply because lots of people can generate lots of ideas.  But sometimes we generate lots of ‘first acceptable options’ which (because we are attached to our own ideas) we then need to explain and defend.  The more we explain and defend, the harder it is to start thinking from the beginning.

Here’s a tip (or two):  When decision making, draw five circles on a sheet of paper and write one possible option or solution in each circle.  Then, around the outside of each circle, write down a few bullet points that respond to the statement, “This option would be a winner if I or we can….”

Why draw circles rather than just list your ideas?  Because when we create a list it has an order – from first to last.  The circles help us to realise that all of our ideas are (just for the moment) equally valuable. Drawing five circles can also push us to think of other options rather than stopping at one or two options.

The reason for then writing down the ways in which each idea can become a winner helps us to see that we might need to be creative and that the best option may not be the easiest option.

Don’t be surprised if this leads you to linking some of your ideas together, or developing a new option that was not part of your original five. If you think you will have more than five circles, draw them all.

Need more help on how to develop more than one solution, email Trent trent.moy@halide.com.au or comment below.  For more great tips, stay tuned for our final Tip in this 5-week series, next week.

Tip 3, Week 3: Is it a problem or a conflict?

Humans are good at solving problems.  If you look at the advances we have made with technology, medicine, aviation safety, etc, you can see that we really are quite clever at solving complex problems.  By ‘problem’ I mean the sort of thing that can be solved by thinking clearly (and sometimes creatively) about causes, effects, and solutions.

However, in running a business many of the difficult decisions that we have to make are not related to logical problems.  Those decisions relate to ‘conflicts’ or they relate to a problem that has been complicated by a conflict.  A conflict involves emotions, not logic. 

Think about some emotional conflicts you, or your staff, may experience in your work week:
“Those idiots just told us that our delivery is running late, yet again – I should never have trusted them”;
“Why haven’t you spoken to that customer and resolved their complaint yet?”;
“I told her that I would re-do the job and she is still unhappy”; 
“All those casual staff want to do is look at their phones rather than work.”

These comments are all hints that your business has emotional conflicts, not just logical problems. (You may have had an emotional conflict with a customer or staff member before reading this article).

Because most of us don’t want to be counsellors or UN peace negotiators, and we have no time or interest in ‘playing games’, we can often misread situations as straightforward problems that can be solved.  We skip over the importance of the associated emotional conflict and downplay the effect it is having on the issue.  And we can under estimate the effect of our own emotions on the quality of our decisions.

One of the most difficult type of conflicts to resolve is when somebody feels that their values (fairness, integrity, loyalty, honesty, transparency etc) have been ignored or stomped on.  Those values are the fuel that feeds the fire of our emotions.  We need to deliberately connect our values with the values of other people before we move on to trying to logically solve a problem. 

Here’s a tip:  When faced with a complex decision, see if you can spot the conflicts as well as the problems.  You can’t resolve other people’s emotional conflicts for them, but your chances of negotiating a successful outcome will be better if you can acknowledge and ‘speak to their values’ before speaking to their logical brain.

Want more info on resolving problems and conflicts, email Trent trent.moy@halide.com.au or comment below.  For more great tips, stay tuned for Tip 4 next week.

Tip 2, Week 2: Separate the facts from the assumptions in decision making

It sounds like an obvious thing to want our decisions to be based on facts rather than just assumptions.  But when you look at why jobs take longer than expected, business plans don’t go to plan, and misunderstandings happen with customers, it’s often because assumptions have been made in the decision making process.

Assumptions are powerful because they simplify the decision making process.  In some cases, making an assumption, or set of assumptions, might be a very sensible thing to do.  Some examples may be assuming the way your competitors price a piece of work or their final tender bid, assuming the expected working life of a particular piece of equipment, or making assumptions of how many wet weather days to allow in a contract.

The trick with using assumptions is to clearly ‘label’ the assumptions as assumptions.  In this way we won’t confuse them with facts.  The facts are unlikely to be completely wrong or to change, but my assumptions are less certain – I have to remain open to those assumptions being wrong or being corrected by better information down the track.  Ideally, I have to be on the lookout for how I can improve my assumptions.  And I need to be aware of the way in which customers, suppliers, staff, subbies and other people all have their own sets of assumptions.