The FractionX Podcast
Leadership is Hard. We're here to help.
The FractionX Podcast
Gut level decisions vs. data driven decisions. Do you know how to make the best decisions for your business?
Does data drive your decisions or do you lead and decide with your gut? On today's episode Matt and Drew hash out a better way to make decisions.
This is our first time recording this year. Yeah, so we released a podcast, but we haven't recorded yet in the new year. Tell me, what was new year like for you? Are you? We've talked goals. I mean, I've listened back. I don't know if this is narcissistic or not, but I've listened back to you teaching on that last podcast about being goals and process goals. And man, if someone's listening hasn't heard that yet, dude, you changed my whole outlook of my year with that stuff. That was super great so, but what does the first year look?
Speaker 1:like for you. So, so funny. I had some friends over from out of town and they are like New Year's people and so we're we're reading it, hawkers, this like, yeah, asian hip restaurant in East Nashville and we're having a great time and everybody's going around the table talking about what they're so excited about the new year. And I'm like I'm not that excited and my wife's like you're such an eight. Was that you just wanting to be different than everyone else.
Speaker 1:No, it's um. I love to be steady, eddie, you know. So. Very few things are like mountaintops, but also very few things are valleys, you know. So I just kind of live in this space.
Speaker 2:It's. That's one of the reasons why I love partnering with you, is one of the reasons why my wife loves that we partner together, cause I need someone in my life like that.
Speaker 1:So, um, even though I absolutely start to review, okay, what are some things I'd like to do different this year and I'll I'll set some, some targets and some process goals and some, you know, being goals for the year. Yeah, I don't like go. You know, january 1st, it's this.
Speaker 2:So the calendar is not necessary. It's not a big deal for you.
Speaker 1:I pay attention to it, but I don't get hype about it. Are you a January 1st guy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know, it's just like I'll like. So I've got some health goals I'm working on and I love the idea of ramping up to something. Yeah, like a week out, two weeks out. Okay, on this date I'm gonna start, you know, and all that. But I have, I mean thanks to like what we talked about before. I've not been making like these bold resolutions, whatever, but I do like a start date to something and the turn of a calendar. Even Mondays for me, I feel that way. Okay, a new week, new, fresh. You know, I love it, I'm all in on it. So, yeah, january 1st. I was like, okay, we're gonna stop this, start this, whatever, and we'll see. We'll see how long it lasts.
Speaker 1:It's good.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I'm all in on it. You played golf this last week.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I went to a tournament in Hilton Head and got absolutely crushed.
Speaker 2:I was like, should I bring this up or not? I know it didn't go well. No it's it's.
Speaker 1:it's super frustrating. Golf is like the most. You have to be a bit of a crazy person to play Cause like it's just so hard, it's just so hard.
Speaker 2:Well, you're actually a great golfer, see, I've not got to the point where I get frustrated yet, because it's like I'm just pumped if I get one, one good shot. You're to the point where you've played good enough that when you play bad, it's frustrating for you.
Speaker 1:Well, we. So the tournament. The reason I signed up was it's at a course that the professionals, the PGA guys, play every April. It's the week after the masters they go to Hilton Head and play this course called Harbor Town and so it's kind of a bucket list. Anytime you can go play where the real players play. It's kind of like ooh, you know. Then you see it on TV and you're like, oh, I remember I'd hit it out of bounds on that hole or I made a birdie on that hole which I made zero of on Sunday. But it was great. I love being in Hilton Head, I love getting to compete, and so I've got some process goals I've got for golf that I set up every year and so, yeah, it's something about competing, man, I just love like let's go in the ring, let's like put the gloves on.
Speaker 2:And you're competing against yourself. Oh yeah, oh yeah, you know, it's like that's a sport where it's like, you know, you can really make it personal and again, this is super like deep cut for people.
Speaker 1:but there are guys that are in their 60s that play these tournaments and golf's such a great game because you know, I grew up playing a lot of sports soccer's what I played in college. You can't do it past your 20s.
Speaker 2:Golf's a game you can play until you're 80, you know If you're in decent shape, so it's like this is a great game.
Speaker 1:It can last forever.
Speaker 2:So what are some leadership, kind of what's kicking around this first year for you, like, what are you guys doing over?
Speaker 1:there. Yeah, this is such a random thought. So I was listening to the radio and I heard an artist that the original singer resigned from singing but stayed in control of leading the organization. He put a new singer in place and I thought that's really strategic to leave an artist gig but still like maintain control and probably revenue streams and all the ways that they run the organization. I was like man, that guy's gotta have pretty good guts, like I bet his stomach for leadership is pretty strong, like his own things.
Speaker 1:You mean yeah absolutely your leadership instincts, I go, but there's not everybody's wired that way to have a good gut about leadership. So what's the opposite of having a good gut and leadership? And it's like, well, maybe data, like people who are really reliant on the information and I just remember this conversation we had several years ago and you were kind of frustrated. It's like man, we always make decisions based on kind of intuition. We probably need a better approach to get data to make these decisions. So I just remember thinking like, oh yeah, drew was like the hey, we should really ask people what they think before we make some of these decisions. So talk about a little bit with that book. Yeah, it's called.
Speaker 2:Why? Yeah, no, it was called Ask it's the name of the book and a friend of ours, kyle Chalming, turned me on to it and I was just picking on his brain around some just marketing strategy and some stuff like that and it's such a simple concept. But when he said it I was like, oh man, this is genius. He's talking about some of the best leaders of all time. At their best probably only are about a 70% accuracy when it comes to just following their gut. I mean, these are like really great gut instinct leaders that are gonna only be 70 or 80% and you just talk about closing the gap even for the rest of us.
Speaker 2:I'm very much a gut instinct emotional leader, like I'm a feeler right, I like to feel things out and I, the older I get, the more I realize how unreliable. I'm not saying I have terrible instincts. I think my instincts are okay. But because I'm such an emotional person it's like what we talked about earlier having guys like you in my life that I can bounce off, bounce ideas off of you know, living in consultation this idea of like, hey, I'm gonna not just make decisions on my own, I'm gonna make them with other people. I've gotten better. I've gotten stronger because of that, not just realizing, you know, relying sorry, relying on gut instincts.
Speaker 2:And so the book basically says I can save you from reading. I just ask Now. It does give you a very specific method on the right questions to ask to get the best answers right. So there's some science behind it, for sure, but it's just this concept of like man. We would make a lot better decisions in our life if we would just ask the people that we're serving, whether it's a product or it's a service business, whatever it is hey, what is it you're looking for? What do you need? Or even follow up, evaluation, feedback, like you know, where did we miss? You know, I just had a client that rolled off recently and, as much as I had feelings about losing this client, at the same time, what was bigger inside of me is, I wonder what valuable information they could give me that will help me serve my next client right.
Speaker 2:So and that's hard to do sometimes at the end of a relationship to have these conversations right Because our pride, our pride bubbles up. But, yeah, absolutely I think the discipline of asking great questions to increase our odds of success. And I just wonder, if I look back at my story, how much better I could have been, or more accurate I could have been, with my decision making, if I'd have been willing to be not ignore my gut, but maybe back up those gut instinct decisions with a little bit of data.
Speaker 1:Well, and it's so tough because I think there's an American like image of the out front leader that is just relying on gut. You think about the Jack Welches and some of these fantastic American stories, and one of the most famous ones is Henry Ford saying if I would have asked the world what they wanted, they would have said we want faster horses. And if he would have polled his potential clients at that point, he wouldn't have built a great American brand.
Speaker 2:So how do you know, matt, if you're a gut leader or if you're a data leader? Talk about that first. I have a follow up question to that after you unpack that a little bit.
Speaker 1:I think it comes back to understanding yourself a little bit. I know some leaders are very opposed to those personality assessment filters, enneagram Strengths, finder, working Genius, myers-bectures, tons of them. Pick One, some of those things can help. You know that. My thing is by the time you're responsible for the type of influence it takes to lead an organization, you should really have a pretty good idea whether you're the like hey, let's go get consensus, let's go get feedback before we make this call, or man, I just know we gotta go over here and do this thing. So I think a lot of people of course I'm saying that as an instinctive person instinctively know that. But I do think people who are hesitant to make decisions probably don't have that gut level we're gonna go do this and they're the type of leader that might really benefit from getting good data, because they're uncertain, they're insecure, they're not exactly sure what to do next. Sometimes a better data system can help drive decisions for those types of leaders.
Speaker 2:Sure so my follow up question is this because that's really, that's great, that's helpful. You mentioned the Henry Ford example, which I personally love because I lean that way.
Speaker 2:I love to be pioneer, yeah, I mean like what could be? You know what's next, what's on the horizon, and so I am the type that will probably ignore the odds to go after something, because I just can reframe and dream and believe in all kinds of stuff. But how do you know? As a leader? Because I would imagine if you're more of a database leader, the tendency is gonna be to get stuck and paralyzed with your decision making because you're like I see the odds and it's keeping me from making decision. Now, the the other spectrum is you're this gut level leader and you're just going out and you're making mistakes and you're leaving just a trail of mistakes, wreckage and mistakes everything behind you.
Speaker 2:You can just go on. How do you bring those worlds?
Speaker 1:together. Yeah, I wish this was mine. There's a leader named Jim Collins, who's leadership author written some classics. He has this idea of musket balls versus cannon balls, oh yeah. So in an organization you can't afford to always fire the big guns every time there's a new idea. So the idea is like you fire the small bullets and try to figure out okay, will this idea have traction? And so sometimes it's target marketing, like let's do a small sample size of a product or a service and see to a really small audience if it's going to get traction, before you just unroll a brand new website, brand new idea, whatever it's going to be. And so the idea is like okay, where are small ways to test new ideas, new concepts, before you go full throttle?
Speaker 2:after it, beta test stuff. And I remember that was something that we used because we were an organization that had a lot of different divisions. It was smart for us to say, hey, we're going to try this over here in the kind of the corner of the division. If it works here then we'll take it throughout the whole thing. But we can kind of beta test here. A lot of companies are doing that. Even before they bring, like, a restaurant to Nashville, there's certain cities in the US that they'll go that's comparable but smaller, that they'll go and they'll beta test a restaurant. If it works in the city of North Carolina, then they bring it to Nashville because they know that'll work. Similar demographics.
Speaker 1:I was driving from Hilton Head to Charleston to get my flight home from this golf tournament and I think if you're a small organization maybe you can't afford like tons of analytics and tons of demographic information. You can always steal. So one thing in real estate development is if you follow targets Starbucks and Chick-fil-A before they plan a flag in a community, you better believe they've done all the market research for household income and growth and all the things that go around.
Speaker 1:I was driving through this town on the way to Charleston, it was like there's nothing here. Then, all of a sudden, you start seeing these apartment complexes. Like man, these are massive. I feel like I'm in the middle of nowhere. The next thing I saw was a Walmart, then a Target. Then you start seeing all the shops that are like the up and coming retailers and it's like, okay, someone knew, hey, we can go build these giant apartments because these other retailers have already gone here and showed us these markets are going to work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2:Well, one of the main reasons why we started FractionX is and I want you to kind of go back to some of your golf analogy golf example that you started with earlier but a lot of the reason why we do this is because I feel like I could have avoided a lot of mistakes in my leadership or maybe even have just greater effectiveness and success if I would have surrounded myself more with the team of people that I would actually listen to and trust and respect to help me navigate, make decisions.
Speaker 2:And so we understand that building a business is tough. We understand that some people have teams but still feel alone in their leadership and you need good people around you to help you make good decisions. And this is another podcast. We talked about this the other time but it's probably costing you a lot of money every year the decisions you're making that are wrong, or the decisions you're not making because you don't have people to bounce these ideas off of. But I remember you talking about Mickelson, which I don't know much about golf, but because I used to play PJ Tour golf on the computer as a kid.
Speaker 1:Mickelson was my guy.
Speaker 2:Right. So I did know that he's a big risk taker, but there was a kind of a cool story that you told me. I didn't know about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so a couple of caddies ago, phil notoriously had this veto rule. So if people knew that Inside baseball, so to speak of golf, like there's so much analytical information that goes into a shot, you got your yardage. Is there elevation change up or down? Is there is the golf course at elevation or sea level, when all this stuff, and so there's so many pieces of like data going into each golf shot. And so, phil, is this like notorious gut level instinct guy? Yeah, I just think it's this, I'm gonna go for it.
Speaker 2:I'm just gonna do it 10 cup.
Speaker 1:It's high risk and high reward. I mean honestly, if there wasn't ever a Tiger Woods for about a decade, maybe even a decade plus, phil Mickelson would have been the best golfer in the world for a long time.
Speaker 2:It's probably people love him too because he's so fun to watch.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, you never know what's gonna happen, right.
Speaker 1:He could win a major or he could not make the cut, but he um, he gave his caddy one veto a year. So it's like, hey, if I'm gonna do the risky thing right now and you just think it's such a bad idea that you would waste your one, no, on this shot, yeah, I'm gonna give that to you. Yeah, and I was like man, that is actually a pretty brilliant because, if you know, if a leader's wire like you are where it's like new horizons, I can reframe, I'm gonna be optimistic. You need someone in your corner who goes dude, I'm with you. This is awesome, I'm going on the journey with you. But this one thing right here is a really bad area for you. Let's not do this. Yep, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Well, and for me, I know in my life I'll be a serial entrepreneur, like I love start. I'm a starter, I love starting things, building things, handing them off, whatever. But one value that I have is I'll never start something alone, because I need like and we talked about earlier I need to have Matt, someone I can bounce something off of, because I Am a dreamer and I will run and get a lot of different directions and I need someone to pull me back when they're like hey, nope, that's not what we said we're gonna do. Or be like hey, no, that's something we should. We should try, and part of it is too. I just want to have someone in it to share the success, the reward, and also to share the failure. Yeah, be able like hey, it's okay, we're gonna, we'll pick ourselves back up, we'll go.
Speaker 2:But especially when you're running a small to medium-sized business or you're a brand new entrepreneur, it's like you're out there just calling the shots right and you can you can afford that right. It's like when you're leading a big organization, you know Like you've got to make slower decisions, more calculated decisions. You can't just run a gun shoot from the hip because there's a lot more riding on these decisions. It's kind of the fun part of a startup as you can kind of, you know, run a gun a little bit. Now you can sink yourself quicker, sure to you know, do that. But you can also, like you know, can you say, the high-risk, high reward stuff. But it's so important to have people around your table that you're dreaming with your bouncing ideas that you give a veto to yeah, or at least you know. Maybe if your gut is saying, try something, at least you have people you know Helping, you count the cost of what that that might be, so Go ahead.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was gonna say it's like I've said this a couple times very few things in life are light switch on or off, yeah or no. It's always a spectrum, some type of dial, and so I think, with organizations like you talk about, early in the life cycle, almost all you have, on some levels, your gut and I think I can go start this business. I think the world needs this product or service that I offer and that, as an organization grows, it becomes way more, you know, bureaucratic, and so, you know, as a leader, you have to bring people on, and sometimes those people maybe not be the Right people to support your vision. And so there, you'd need analytical people. You need your, you know, high-functioning operations people to bring data to the the business.
Speaker 1:What my concern for business leaders is sometimes is, as you grow and you bring more data to the table, it can be an excuse not to do something. Yeah, so it starts to be the, the insecurity blanket like, hey, data saying we really shouldn't do this, and it's like and we're only here because I took these risks Right, you know, as a leader, it's like you put all your cards on the table, right, and you go try something that starts working and then, as you get comfortable, you start to play it safe, yeah, and the organization loses its mojo because you're not willing to take those risks anymore, and part of that's a natural life cycle. But I think that's why so many organizations end up dying and end up at the end cycle of a business season, because it's like, man, you're done because you're not doing the things that got you here.
Speaker 2:Why? I mean, why do you think that is and I want to wrap this because we promised our listeners we keep these short, but this is such an important I think it's an important topic. I think you can make or break a business or a leader yeah, big time. This whole topic, you know it's something we should explore more. Why do you think that is as an organization grows? Is it just safety? Is it just like hey, it's working, let's not break, let's not? You know, don't, don't fix what's not broke, type thing, or why? Why do we get stuck? Because I've been a part of those organizations where it was super successful the first 10 years and then just leveled off and we've kept running the same play, but we stopped innovating.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think if you've never signed a payroll check. It's really tough to know the pressure that people carry when they have to pay people every two, every two weeks, absolutely. And so I think you start playing it safe because you know there's more at stake. It's just really difficult to stay in that go mode, and that's why leaders need people around them that remind them who they are. Hey, here's your identity as a leader, as a founder. This is what got you here. I'm not saying you throw all your chips in all the time. We're going to fire musket balls instead of cannon balls. We can be strategic, but we have to move forward with our decisions. We have to take some risk in business, and I think it just becomes difficult because the stakes get really high. Yeah, that's really good.
Speaker 2:So let's recap this real quick You've got your data kind of data driven leaders. You've got your gut level leaders and there's a spectrum right, it's not just one or the other like we've got that. It seems like the key to it is having great people around you that you're bouncing ideas off of. You know you're going going at the pace that you can stomach, that you can manage. What else, what do we want to leave people with?
Speaker 1:I think maybe the last thing I'd leave because that's a great rap is just you need, you need someone in your life that's got a veto, and it could be a spouse, it could be someone in your board, it could be guys at fraction X. Yeah, somebody in your life needs to care enough about you and your business to say, hey, listen, that's really not the best decision right now, and so I think it's always having a really healthy appetite for risk and also having the emergency break when it's time to pivot and make a different decision. Yeah, it's good.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks everybody for listening. If we can help serve you in any way, please reach out to us. We'd love to do that. We'd love to help leaders and organizations get better, increase revenue and all that good stuff. So thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 1:Bye.