Developing Your Decision Making Skills

When it comes to running a business on your own, each decision you make can have great impact on your profit levels. If this is your first independent business venture and you have never been actively been involved in the decision-making process of an organization, then all this may seem new to you.

If you have never made any crucial decisions previously, then you must pay extra attention to sharpening your decision making skills and evaluating your thought process that leads to a decision. This is because making business decisions is usually different from decision making in your personal life. You must never allow business decisions to go with the flow like you may do in case of personal decisions.

Simply take a look at the corporate world and you will find examples of lots of companies that have slipped into serious issues due to poor decision making skills. Wrong decisions can prove disastrous especially when the company is considering whether or not to invest in new machinery, products or markets. In most cases, the decision itself or the idea behind it is not to blame. The complete thought process may be flawed due to various factors like:

* Ignorance
* Lack of proper investment appraisal
* Over optimism
* Biased assessment
* Inadequate information
* Insufficient time for planning and deliberation

Failures due to bad decisions can happen even with companies that have experts in all necessary departments. If your business is not able to afford such experts to aid you in making decisions, you can still have an edge over your competitors by using reason and logic to arrive at key decisions regarding:

* Investments in equipment
* Investing in software
* What product lines to market or withdraw
* Outsourcing a part of your workload
* Whether to reinvest or withdraw your profits
* What marketing strategies to use

These are of course just the key areas. You must be able to identify the other areas of your business that demand good decision making skills and then focus on these areas whenever an important decision is due.