How to Make Difficult Business Decisions When You’re Uncertain

Sometimes you’re not stuck because you’re afraid to make a decision.

Sometimes there’s genuinely not enough information to know which decision is right.

Hire or wait, invest or preserve cash, open the location or not, raise the price or don’t, keep the product or kill it.

And the crazy thing is, two intelligent people can look at exactly the same information and reach different conclusions.

All of this is coming up next.

Welcome to the Chris LoCurto Show, where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.

Welcome to the show, folks. I hope you’re having a fabulous day wherever you are.

Today we are talking about struggling with decision making when it comes to uncertainty.

Now, this isn’t indecision. Leaders really are operating with uncertainty.

In fact, the Conference Board did a survey and found that 42.9%, 43% of US CEOs surveyed going into 2026 named uncertainty as the external factor they expected to hurt their business the most.

So if you feel it, you’re not alone. You’re not broken, right?

This is something that’s happening with almost half of all CEOs.

So let’s talk about what really messes up uncertainty, what really messes up decision making.

And I will tell you the biggest thing is fear. Fear clouds decision making, no matter what.

So when your identity is wrapped up in the business, every decision starts to feel like a verdict on you.

Separate the two and the decision gets clear.

The truth is that healthy leadership isn’t always knowing the right answer.

It’s knowing how to make a healthy decision when the answer isn’t obvious.

So I want you to do yourself a favor, slap that filter on your decision making.

It doesn’t mean that you have to have the right answer, it means you make the best healthy decision

Write Down What You Know and What You’re Assuming (02:22)

when there isn’t an obvious answer.

So here’s what I want you to do.

Every single time you get into a situation where you’re facing uncertainty, you feel like you don’t have the right answer or answers, write down a list.

I want you to write down a list of all the things that you actually know about the situation.

And believe me, this is going to be incredibly useful information. Right?

So let’s say, I don’t know, you are struggling with a vendor’s information or a vendor getting something done on time.

And you have to write down the facts of the situation.

Do you know they’re not going to make it?

Do you know that, you know, the clock is winding down, maybe you’re not getting good information from them, or, you know, maybe they haven’t returned a call.

So what are the facts? Write them down.

Have we dealt with this vendor before? Yes.

Have they delivered on their promises before? Yes.

Have they ever messed up? Well, that’s a good question to answer.

Have they ever been late on your product? If the answer is no, then what are we worried about?

If the answer is yes, well, then that’s probably going to mean that we have to drive towards getting somebody’s attention somehow.

The key is when you write down the facts about the situation, you can start to answer things.

Oh my gosh, they’ve never done this before. I haven’t had a problem with them in the past.

Yes, this is something that is, you know, it does seem to be coming up on our timeline, and I haven’t heard from anybody, but maybe they’re just busy.

Let’s not make this a problem yet.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to be diligent.

That doesn’t mean that you don’t continue to make phone calls, do whatever.

If it’s a local vendor, send somebody on over. Do what’s necessary, but do not live in fear.

Focus on the facts, not the fear.

Second question I want you to ask is: what am I assuming?

Make the assumptions absolutely visible.

So once again, put the assumptions on paper. Write this thing down.

And trust me, you can test this, you can question it.

You can at least name it if it’s a risk instead of treating it like a fact. Right?

I’m assuming that they’re behind. They haven’t contacted me.

I’m assuming they’re going to be late on this delivery

Let Your Mission Break the Tie (04:45)

because I haven’t heard from them. I’m assuming whatever.

Write those assumptions down. Right?

Get those listed so that you can look at them on paper.

As you look at them on paper, what you will find is that is something again that you can question.

So just because they haven’t contacted me, does that mean that they’re going to miss this delivery? I don’t know.

Let’s go back to the facts. Have they ever missed a delivery before? No, okay.

Then this may be a really bad assumption.

And it may be something that, you know, fear and struggle may cause me to make some accusations of a vendor.

And that’s not going to help our relationship. That’s just going to hurt it.

So write those things down and ask yourself, what are you treating as fact that’s actually a guess?

You will be blown away. You probably have way more assumptions than you do facts.

Third question I want you to ask yourself. What do our mission, vision, and strategy say?

Now, your mission should actually guide your decision-making process.

Hopefully, this isn’t something you just hung on a wall. Hopefully, this is something that you live by.

Now, for me, I believe your mission is the purpose for your business’s existence.

And you can have a mission in many places.

You can have a mission for your marriage. What’s the purpose of our marriage?

You can have a mission for your finances, you can have a mission for your relationship with God.

You can have missions in many different areas, but especially when it comes to your business, you need to know what the purpose of that business’s existence is.

And that should be the guiding factor.

So when the data that you have doesn’t seem to break the tie between facts and assumptions, and you know, the uncertainty of the decision making, well, the mission should break that tie, right?

How do you base your decision making on that purpose?

And if it can’t help with a decision like this, then that’s something that you should notice as well.

How should we base our decision making based on our mission? Can we?

What about our core values? What about the things that we value the most, right? So it’s important.

And I’m only talking about a vendor with a delivery, right? What if it’s something bigger?

Rate the Downside If You’re Wrong (07:09)

What if it’s something that you’re experiencing with a client?

What if it’s a decision that your leadership team has brought to you that maybe doesn’t align with your mission statement?

What if it’s something that you’re not comfortable about?

You should always be able to turn to your mission statement and ask the question: how does this affect the decision that we are about to make?

So ask yourself that right now.

Which option moves you toward the business you said that you’re building? Right?

If the mission statement says this is what we are doing, this is our purpose for existence, this is what we’re building, then what option that you’re struggling with in any decision-making process, which one leans more in the direction of your mission statement?

Fourth question I want you to ask yourself. And let me tell you, this settles so many things.

I have been helping people with this for so many years with really, I mean, big struggle decision making.

And when I have them do this, it’s amazing how quickly it becomes a non-issue.

So here’s the fourth question: What’s the downside if I’m wrong? Can we recover? Right?

A reversible decision doesn’t deserve irreversible decision anxiety.

If we can actually reverse the problem, if we can actually, you know, solve things, how bad is it?

And here’s the part that I want everybody to focus on.

I want you to rate the negative downside if this thing goes badly on a scale of zero to 10.

10 is scorched earth. 10 is the absolute worst. It is horrible.

This is something we can’t recover from. This has just destroyed the business.

Zero is no problem at all.

The funny thing is, is that whenever I ask somebody, you know, hey, how about you rate this on, you know, a scale of zero to 10, how bad do you think it is?

They’ll usually say, gosh, it might be a seven or eight.

Then as we walk through facts and information and assumptions and all that, I say, go ahead and rank it again.

Oh gosh, I mean, maybe the negative impact is a two or a three. It’s just not that bad.

You need to ask yourself if this goes wrong.

(09:34)

Right. And you know, if a vendor doesn’t deliver, how bad is it going to be?

Is it something that we can fix? Is it something we can do something about?

If we open up another location, and we’ll talk about this in just a second, but if we open up another location and it just tanks everything, well, that’s pretty bad. Right.

We probably didn’t do this correctly.

So I want you to think about this, right? Run it through this, you know, reversible list of if this goes wrong, what could we do differently?

How could we fix it? What could we solve with it?

You know, and you might find that actually the decision isn’t that big of a deal.

Even if it’s a wrong one, even if it’s a bad one, it’s probably not that big of a deal.

Now, let me hit this thing on opening a new location, because I have helped many business owners in the past make decisions on when to open a new location, a second location, a third location.

But especially the second location, because if you don’t have that experience, this is one that could really affect you really badly.

Now, here’s the key to this. Let me just give you information to help you on this decision-making process.

Anytime you have a money-making business, and what you have opened up your ice cream shop and it has been doing great for five years and you’ve been making money.

Or you open your bicycle repair shop, or you know, you’ve got your architecture location and you want to open up another one somewhere else, you probably don’t need to do that if you’re an architect.

But let’s just say you’re looking at a second location. Here’s the thing that people almost never think about.

All the energy that is going into making your current location a moneymaking business needs to stay the same.

Whenever you open up a new location and it doesn’t have new energy specific for that new location, what happens is you will steal energy from your current location and then both locations will tank.

Make the Next Right Decision (11:50)

Folks, you need to trust me on this, and I have many, many clients probably listening to this right now that are like, yep, that’s exactly what he told me. And yep, that’s exactly what happened.

It has to be a different setup. And we’d be glad to help you with that.

That’s not a problem. That’s not difficult.

It’s just understanding that you cannot use all the energy, resources, and everything that is in your current location to open up a second location.

Now there’s ways around it and there’s phenomenal ways to do it very successfully.

But if that’s what your plan is, I’m going to tell you, don’t do that because that actually will be one of those decisions.

Can you reverse it? 100%. You absolutely can, but you’re going to take a hit and it’s going to be painful.

Now, fifth question. Here’s what I want you to ask. What’s the next right decision?

Not the next 10. We’re not looking for a bunch of different decisions. We are looking for the next right decision.

Because here’s the deal: uncertainty tempts you to solve the whole future before you even take one step forward.

You don’t have to, folks. You just don’t have to have that much information.

Make the next right decision. Learn from it, then focus on the next one.

So sit down with all of this information that you have and evaluate.

Evaluate the facts, evaluate the assumptions, evaluate where you are, evaluate what could go wrong, evaluate how bad that would be and if you can fix that.

Evaluate all of this. And then I want you to do one thing.

Ask yourself, what’s the next right decision? What’s the one next decision that I can make this week?

Run everything through that filter. Pick the decision you’ve been sitting on, whatever it is, the thing that you need to make a decision on.

And then I want you to write an answer to each one of these questions.

What do I actually know? What am I assuming?

What do mission, vision, and strategy say?

And by the way, if your strategy, if you’re doing as we teach, and this is your steps on getting to your next destination, your next vision, then that should help align with this decision pretty heavily.

Also, what’s the downside if I’m wrong? And what’s the next right decision?

Now, if you’re sitting there thinking, Chris, every hard call in this business lands on me, and I’m the only one who can make it, that’s exactly where I’d start.

(14:20)

Because maybe nobody else has the information to weigh in.

Maybe your team waits for you on every big decision. Maybe you’re carrying all the uncertainty by yourself.

The question is: does it have to stay that way?

Now we’ve created a free owner dependency assessment. You need to take this.

It’ll help you to see how dependent your business really is on you and where that dependency is coming from.

It only takes a few minutes. And the link is right there in the description.

So take the assessment and look at the results honestly, because making better decisions starts with not having to make every one of them alone.

Now, what I want you to understand is you don’t need certainty to lead.

You need enough clarity to take the next healthy step.

You know somebody who’s probably dealing with this right now as well. Send this to them.

Send this to a leader who’s sitting on a big decision and needs to make it. Help them to make this decision as well.

Well, folks, that’s all the time that we have for today. I hope that this has helped you immensely.

As always, take this information, change your leadership, change your business, change your life.

And join us on the next episode.