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Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
4 Choices You Have to Make Everyday, Every Quarter, Every Year 7-26-25
00:03:15
In this episode, Scott Becker explores 4 key decisions leaders and individuals face regularly: when to double down, pivot, stay the course, or abandon.
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Scott Becker
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business Podcast, the Becker Private Equity Podcast. Today's discussion is four choices you have to make every day, every quarter, every year. So here's the four choices that you got to make. And this can be true of business opportunities, business lines, hobbies, friendships, whatever it might be. But there's four choices you got to make regularly in business for sure, and in your hobbies and other things, too. So the first one is double down. Something's going well. One of the concepts in life is to be intentional about it and double down on what's going well. Don't get yourself scattered in a million different places. Don't put a lot of energies into things that don't return the energy. Double down on the things that are going well. So that's number one. Number two is what we call make pivots. So you're largely, you're not quite doubling down, you're not quite just staying the course, which are making pivots to try and find the perfect product market fit to try and the perfect recipe for business. Sort of what we call sort of making pivots. You might pivot slightly to a bigger sales team. You might pivot slightly to having the sales team focus more on a certain product line or service line than another service line. But this is a spot pivoting. It's not quite good enough to double down on. It's not quite just on auto, where you're just staying the course and going along with that business opportunity, hobby activity, but. But you gotta make some pivots to make it right, to try and find your right position or your right situation. So that's number two, the third concept, and this is almost like the old BCG cash cows. Things are going well, they're not accelerating. You don't see easy opportunities to accelerate, but they're certainly good enough if you keep on staying the course, keep on doing what you're doing, versus trying to make major changes, trying to pivot, trying to double down, but you're staying the course. You're not getting out of that activity, but you're keeping with it. We have business lines, our third or fourth business lines. There's still terrific lines, but we don't see the opportunity to triple and quadruple down on them. So we're staying the course. We're trying to keep them fresh, keep them moving in the right direction, but we're largely staying the course. The fourth thing is you've tried something significantly. It's not going particularly well. And this is where you're going to essentially do what we call abandon it. You're going to be in this activity, this hobby, this relationship, the business line. You put enough time and energy into it, you could see that it's got limited upside. So at that point you're going to say, you know, we're sort of done with this activity. We're going to abandon it. And just like Peter Drucker said in some of his famous writings, some of the best decisions you could ever make on what you're going to abandon, what you're not going to do versus what you're going to pursue. So again, four stages, four choices all the time. Double down on something, make some minor pivots, stay the course, or go ahead and abandon it. And all these could be great choices. Obviously, you love to be in the spot where you're doubling down on something, or love to be in the spot where you're so have so much clarity that you're abandoning it and then all these things in between the pivot and say, the course. Thank you for listening to the Becker Business Podcast, the Vector Private Equity podcast, and a special shout out today to Chanel Bunger, our incredible producer. Thank you so much. We could not do it without you. Fantastic. Thank you.