A Right Decision and a Wrong One Can Look Identical for About a Year
In 2017, I made the best business decision of my career, and it nearly ended my business.
I'd built Compete Every Day on events and in-person sales. Booths, festivals, races, tables in the back of gyms. It worked, and I was tired, and I could see that the model had a ceiling I was already scraping against. So I made the call: we were getting out of events, moving sales exclusively online and through retail partners, and I was going to build a speaking business.
I was right. Ten years later that decision is the entire reason I have the career I have.
It also initially drove our revenue off a cliff. I can pull the numbers from 2017 to 2018 and watch the profit line fall off the page. The old thing was gone before the new thing worked, which is the part nobody tells you about strategic clarity - the clarity arrives long before the results do, and in between you just look like a guy who broke something that used to run.
By the back half of that year I couldn't cover contractors I'd worked with for years. Five of them. I had those conversations one at a time, and I told each person the same thing in different words: the business is sinking, and I can't afford to keep you on.
I was embarrassed. Not disappointed, not stressed. Embarrassed. These were people who'd bet part of their income on me being competent, and I was sitting there telling them I wasn't sure I was.
Right and wrong look the same from inside the year
The decision you make and the disaster you caused are indistinguishable for a long time.
That's the part I was completely unprepared for. I thought hard calls were hard at the moment you made them. They aren't. The moment of decision is almost easy - you have adrenaline, you have a rationale, you have the relief of finally choosing. What's hard is month seven, when the numbers are worse than the year you were trying to escape, and every piece of evidence available to you says you were wrong.
You can't tell the difference between a failing strategy and one that hasn't matured. Not in real time. Not from inside it. So you're left running the same loop I ran for most of a year: was that the wrong call, or is this just what the middle looks like?
Why I had nothing to stand on
That year was worse than it needed to be, and the reason had nothing to do with the strategy.
For the two years before the decision, I'd been taking advice from everybody. Different people, different directions, whatever anyone with a bigger business than mine would tell me over coffee. Not because I was coachable - because I was desperate. I wanted it to work badly enough that I outsourced the thinking to anyone willing to do it for me.
So when the results turned against me, I had no foundation underneath the call. I couldn't ask did I reason well? I could only ask whose advice was right? And that question has no bottom to it. You just keep falling.
Borrowed conviction doesn't survive a bad quarter. It can't. If you didn't build the reasoning yourself, you have nothing to check the results against, and the scoreboard becomes the only voice in the room. That's how strong operators talk themselves out of correct decisions eleven months in.
What your team actually needs while you're unsure
What I got wrong was how long I sat alone with the doubt before I said anything to anyone.
I thought protecting people from my uncertainty was leadership. It isn't. People can work through a hard stretch when they know it's hard. What they can't work through is watching their leader act like everything is fine while the evidence in front of them says otherwise. That gap is where trust goes to die - not in the bad news, but in the delay before it.
Your team doesn't need you certain. They need you honest, on time, in specifics. “Revenue is down, here's what I changed and why, here's what I'm watching, here's when I'll know.” That's a leader they can follow through a bad year. Confident vagueness is not.
What I'd do differently, and what I'd tell you to do now
Three things, and none of them would have saved that year's revenue. All of them would have made it survivable.
Write down what would prove you wrong before you need to know. The day you make the call, name the specific numbers and the specific date that would tell you it isn't working. In writing. You will not be able to generate that standard fairly in month seven, when you're scared and the evidence is ugly. Set the test while you're still thinking clearly.
Separate the decision from the outcome, out loud. A good decision can produce a bad quarter. A bad decision can produce a good one. Judge your call on the reasoning you had available at the time, then judge the results separately. If you collapse those two into one question, every downturn becomes a referendum on your judgment.
Tell your people earlier than is comfortable. Earlier than you think is fair to them. Earlier than you've figured out what you're going to do. The information isn't yours to time.
And one thing for this week: look at the biggest call you've made in the last year and ask whether you could defend the reasoning without mentioning the results. If you can't, you didn't make that decision. Somebody made it for you, and you're just holding it.
The line I still think about
One of the five people whose contract I ended was a guy named Keir. I'd just told him I couldn't pay him anymore. He'd have been within his rights to say almost anything.
What he said was that this would be a great chapter in my story if I didn't quit.
I've thought about that line for years, mostly because of who it came from. He had every reason to be done with me, and he handed me something instead. That's not a lesson about grace. It's a reminder that the people you lead are watching how you handle the worst version of your own decision - and some of them will still be rooting for you if you tell them the truth on the way down.
The chapter did get better. It took a lot longer than a year.
