Founders waste months agonizing over decisions that deserve hours. The fix is sorting reversible decisions from irreversible ones, then matching the right speed to each.
I had a founder on a call last year who’d been sitting on a pricing increase for five months. Five months. His costs had climbed, margins were thinning, and every mentor told him the same thing: raise your prices.
He couldn’t pull the trigger.
When I asked what was stopping him, he said, “What if I lose my best clients?”
Fair question. Terrible reason to stall for five months. Because here’s the thing nobody wants to hear: the cost of a slow decision is almost always higher than the cost of a wrong one. Especially when the decision is reversible.
Did he raise his prices? Yes. Did he lose his best clients? Not one.
Two Types of Decisions (And Why Founders Treat Them the Same)
Bezos calls these one-way doors and two-way doors. I’ve adapted the idea for the founders I coach because language shapes behavior.
The Founder Decision Framework
Stop agonizing. Route every decision through this filter.
Bias toward action
Set review date
48hr deadline
Jeff Bezos calls reversible decisions "two-way doors." Most founder decisions are two-way doors treated like one-way doors.
Irreversible decisions are one-way doors. Once you walk through, you can’t come back. Taking on a co-founder. Signing a five-year lease. Selling equity. These deserve deep analysis, multiple perspectives, and time. Sleep on it. Get counsel.
Reversible decisions are two-way doors. Walk through, and if it doesn’t work, walk back. Pricing changes. Hiring a contractor. Launching a campaign. Testing a new tool. Restructuring your meeting cadence. These should be made fast, tested quickly, and adjusted based on what you learn.
So what’s the issue? Most founders treat every decision like it’s irreversible. They apply the same agonizing analysis to a $500/month software decision that they should reserve for a $500,000 partnership deal. The result? Decision fatigue, stalled execution, and a team sitting idle waiting on the founder to greenlight the next move.
The Decision Speed Process
This is the exact process I walk founders through. It takes about 15 minutes once you’re comfortable with it.
Step 1: Classify it. Ask yourself one question: “If this goes wrong, can I undo it within 90 days without catastrophic consequences?” If yes, it’s reversible. Move fast.
Step 2: Set a deadline. Reversible decisions? 48 hours max. Irreversible? Two weeks max. Write it down. Tell someone. Committing to a timeline kills 80% of the agonizing.
Step 3: The 70% rule. You’ll never have 100% of the information. Amazon’s principle is to decide at 70%. I tell founders the same thing. Got 70% of the data you wish you had? Make the call. The other 30% comes from doing, not from analyzing.
Step 4: Pressure-test with one person. Not a committee. Not a Slack poll. One person who understands the context and will give you an honest reaction in under 10 minutes. For my clients, that’s usually me. For you, it could be a co-founder, a mentor, or a peer.
Step 5: Decide and document. Write down what you decided, why, and what would make you reverse course. Takes two minutes. Saves you from spiraling at 2am. When doubt creeps in, you can read your own reasoning instead of replaying the decision in your head for the hundredth time.
Decision Speed: Before vs. After Coaching
Average time-to-decision across coached founders.
Faster decisions compound. A founder who decides 3x faster makes 3x more progress per quarter.
Why Founders Actually Get Stuck
Is it the decision itself? Almost never. After working with 140+ founders, slow decision-making comes down to one of three things:
Fear of judgment. “What will my team think? My investors? My spouse?” This is the big one. Founders carry an invisible audience in their head that evaluates every move. Here’s what’s interesting, though. Your team judges indecision far more harshly than a wrong call that gets corrected quickly. They want to see you make the call. They want momentum.
Perfectionism disguised as diligence. “I just need one more data point.” No, you don’t. You need to make a decision with imperfect information and learn from the outcome. I had a client who used to spend two weeks on every hire. We got it to four days with structured interviews and a simple scoring system. Did his outcomes get worse? No. They actually improved because he stopped overthinking culture fit and started evaluating whether the person could execute.
No sounding board. When you’ve got nobody to talk through decisions with, every decision lives in your head. And your head is not an objective place. It’s full of biases, past failures, and worst-case scenarios. One conversation with a thinking partner externalizes the whole thing, and the path forward gets clearer almost immediately.
What Happens When Decision Speed Improves
I track this with my coaching clients because the numbers tell the story:
Before coaching: Average time to make a significant decision? 3 to 6 weeks. Decisions deferred or avoided per quarter? 4 to 7. Self-reported confidence? 5 out of 10.
After 90 days: Average decision time? 3 to 10 days. Deferred decisions? 0 to 2 per quarter. Confidence? 8 out of 10.
How? When you have a standing weekly call with someone who asks, “What are you avoiding deciding on this week?” you stop avoiding it. When someone walks you through the reversible/irreversible question in real time, the fog lifts. When you have a deadline and someone holding you to it, you honor the deadline instead of ignoring it.
The Hidden Cost of Indecision
Want to put a dollar figure on it? Say you defer three decisions per quarter by an average of four weeks each. That’s 12 weeks of delayed execution per quarter. In a company doing $2M in revenue, each of those decisions is probably tied to $50K to $200K in potential revenue or savings.
That means indecision is costing you $150K to $600K per year. And that’s before you factor in the morale cost. Your best people want to move fast. When they see you agonizing over decisions they view as straightforward, they start wondering whether this is the right company for them.
A Decision Audit You Can Do Right Now
Five-minute exercise. I give this to every new coaching client:
- Write down every decision you’re currently sitting on. All of them. Pricing, hiring, firing, product, marketing, ops. Get them out of your head and onto paper.
- Next to each one, write “R” for reversible or “I” for irreversible.
- Every “R” decision gets a 48-hour deadline starting now.
- Every “I” decision? Schedule one conversation with someone you trust this week.
- Cross off at least two today.
How many of those decisions are reversible ones you’ve been treating like they’re permanent? I’m willing to bet it’s at least half. That realization alone will change how you operate.
The Bottom Line
The best founders aren’t the ones who make perfect decisions. They’re the ones who make good decisions quickly, learn from the outcomes, and adjust. Indecision is a luxury you can’t afford between $1M and $10M. Your competitors aren’t waiting. Your market isn’t waiting. Your team is definitely not waiting.
Make the call. If it’s wrong, fix it. If it’s right, build on it. Either way, you’re further ahead than the founder who’s still “thinking about it.”
Want a thinking partner who helps you make faster, better decisions? Book a discovery call and let’s figure out what you’ve been sitting on too long.
