The Cost of Not Making Decisions

I'm going to be honest with you. This one comes from a place of genuine frustration.

Over the last few months, several brands came to me wanting to get involved in our April 1st mischief. Excited. Enthusiastic. Full of ideas. And then, one by one, they quietly disappeared back into their calendars.  

I respect that it's their call and their business. But it got me thinking.  

Not about them specifically. About the pattern. About how many times that exact thing happens inside businesses every single day. Someone gets excited about an idea, books the meetings, loops in the team, gets everyone's hopes up - and then realises they've got five other things that were already supposed to be the priority. The initiative dies. But the meetings already happened. The time's already gone. The energy's already spent. And nobody puts that on a spreadsheet.

The invoice that never arrives

Indecision isn't free. It just feels that way because the cost never shows up in a format anyone recognises.

There's no line on a P&L that reads "six weeks of meetings that went nowhere." No budget code for "competitor moved while we were still discussing the theory." No audit trail for the revenue that never materialised because the campaign launched three months late.

But the cost is real. And in most cases it's bigger than whatever budget you were too nervous to sign off in the first place.

Think about the employees in those rooms. Prepping decks. Getting genuinely excited. Reorganising their workload to make space for something that was never really going to happen. That's not just wasted time. That's wasted belief. And belief is harder to get back than budget.

"Let's explore this further"

You know the meeting. Everyone in the room knows the answer. Half of them knew it before they walked in. But somewhere between the first slide and the third coffee it becomes an exploration. A discovery process. A journey.

Then it gets parked. Restarted. Handed to a working group. Presented again with slightly different fonts.

Meanwhile your competitors made a call, launched something, learned from it, and moved on.

This isn't a startup problem. It's not a corporate problem. It's a leadership problem. I've worked with PLCs that made decisions at extraordinary speed and startups that couldn't get anything approved. The size of the business is never the real reason. Culture is. Leadership is. The people at the top either create an environment where decisions get made or they don't.

We actually put it on the wall

At Vega Gibraltar we have one of our values mounted on the wall: Think Fast, Move Faster.

Because strategy without movement is just theory. And theory doesn't win clients, doesn't hit targets, and doesn't show up in anyone's end of year numbers.

Accountability means someone actually makes the call. Not delegates it upward. Not forms a committee. Makes the call, owns it, and moves.

I've always respected the spirit behind Zuckerberg's "move fast and break things" - the acknowledgement that in moving quickly you will make mistakes, but you learn faster than anyone standing still. Whether that philosophy still carries any edge given everything that's followed is a different conversation. But the underlying truth? Still stands.

‍The bit everyone agrees with but nobody wants to act on

People tell me they admire what we're building at Vega Gibraltar. The results, the energy, the case studies.

And then they tell me they couldn't do it that way. Too many stakeholders. Too much process. Board wouldn't go for it.

Which is fine. Not every business is built to move fast and not every needs to.

But don't confuse process with protection. A lot of what gets called due diligence is just the organisational equivalent of leaving the decision to someone else. And someone else leaves it to someone else. And eventually the deadline arrives anyway.

Carl… Out