There’s a particular kind of paralysis that hits small companies, and it looks nothing like indecision. It looks like rigor. It looks like due diligence. It looks like “let’s get more data before we commit.”
I’ve watched it kill momentum at more companies than I can count — including my own, in the early days. The founder who spends three weeks choosing a CRM. The marketing leader who won’t launch a campaign until every edge case has been addressed. The product team that debates a feature’s scope through four rounds of review before writing a single line of code.
These are all reasonable behaviors in isolation. In aggregate, they’re a disease.
The Two-Way Door
Jeff Bezos wrote about this in one of his shareholder letters, and while I’m generally skeptical of frameworks borrowed from trillion-dollar companies and applied to small ones, this one holds up. He distinguishes between one-way door decisions — the kind that are difficult or impossible to reverse — and two-way door decisions, which you can walk back if they don’t work.
Most decisions in a growing business are two-way doors. The CRM you choose can be switched. The campaign you launch can be paused. The hire you make can be managed out if it’s not working. The pricing model can be adjusted. The positioning can be refined.
And yet we treat almost every decision as if it’s irreversible. We stack up research and deliberation and consensus-building as if we’re choosing a location for a nuclear reactor rather than picking a headline for a landing page.
The cost of this isn’t obvious because it’s measured in time — the one resource you can never recover. Every week you spend deliberating is a week you’re not learning from the results of having decided.
What I Learned From Moving Fast
When Bruno and I started PipelineRoad, we were slow decision-makers. Both of us come from analytical backgrounds. We like data. We like being right. We’d spend days discussing whether to pursue a particular client vertical, weighing pros and cons with a thoroughness that felt responsible.
The problem was that while we deliberated, the market moved. A competitor would launch the service we were still debating. A prospect would sign with another agency because we took too long to send a proposal. An opportunity window would close because we were still gathering information.
The turning point was a conversation with a mentor who ran a much larger agency. He told me something that stuck: “You have a hundred decisions to make this quarter. If you get seventy of them right, you’ll have a great quarter. If you get eighty right, you’ll have an extraordinary one. The difference between seventy and eighty isn’t deliberation — it’s speed. The faster you decide, the faster you learn, and the faster you correct the ones you got wrong.”
That reframing changed everything. We stopped trying to make every decision correctly on the first attempt and started optimizing for the speed of the decision-correction loop.
The Correction Loop
This is the part that gets lost in the “move fast” discourse. Speed of decision only works if it’s paired with speed of correction. Making a fast bad decision and then stubbornly sticking with it isn’t decisiveness — it’s recklessness.
The system we run now has two components. First, we decide quickly — usually within a day for tactical decisions, within a week for strategic ones. Second, we build in explicit review points where we evaluate whether the decision is working and change course if it isn’t.
For a new client engagement, we’ll commit to a strategy quickly based on our best assessment, but we schedule a review at the thirty-day mark. If the data says our initial approach was wrong, we pivot without ego. The sunk cost of thirty days is negligible compared to the cost of spending thirty days deliberating and then running the same strategy anyway.
For internal decisions — hiring, tooling, process changes — we use a similar model. Try it for a defined period. Evaluate against clear criteria. Keep or kill.
The compounding effect is remarkable. Over a year, a team that makes and corrects decisions weekly will have run fifty-two cycles of learning. A team that deliberates for a month before each decision will have run twelve. The fast team knows exponentially more about what works by year’s end, not because they’re smarter, but because they’ve had more contact with reality.
Where Slow Decisions Are Right
I’m not arguing that every decision should be made in five minutes. Some decisions genuinely are one-way doors, and they deserve the deliberation.
Hiring a senior leader is a slow decision. The wrong person in a leadership role can damage culture, client relationships, and team morale in ways that take months to repair. We take our time on these.
Choosing your market positioning is a slow decision. Not the specific language — that can be iterated — but the fundamental question of who you serve and what you stand for. Changing your positioning confuses the market and your team. Get it right once and then refine.
Signing a long-term contract with a major client is a slow decision, especially if the terms limit your flexibility or require significant resource allocation. The commitment deserves scrutiny.
But these decisions are rare — maybe five or ten per year. Everything else is a two-way door. And for two-way doors, the optimal strategy is almost always: decide now, learn fast, correct as needed.
The Emotional Component
There’s a reason people default to slow decisions, and it’s not intellectual. It’s emotional. Deciding quickly means accepting the possibility of being wrong. It means sitting with uncertainty. It means your team might see you change course and think you didn’t know what you were doing.
That last one is especially powerful. Leaders who need to appear infallible will always decide slowly, because speed increases the chance of a visible mistake. The deliberation is a hedge — not against a bad outcome, but against looking like you made a bad call.
I’ve had to get comfortable with being wrong in front of my team. It’s not natural. But the alternative — projecting false certainty by taking forever to decide — costs more than the occasional visible correction.
The best teams I’ve worked with don’t judge their leaders by their batting average. They judge them by their throughput. How many decisions did you make, how fast did you learn from the misses, and how quickly did you get us to the right answer? That’s the game.
Speed is the strategy. Correction is the skill. Deliberation is the luxury you earn after the first hundred reps.