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Time to Decision as KPI

(or: why “we’ll get back to it” might be your most expensive habit)

Let me guess how this starts. Someone on your team says, “Hey, we should probably make a decision on this.” Everyone nods. It’s a good point. Sensible. Timely, even.

And then… nothing happens.

There’s just a quiet drift into the land of “we’ll revisit,” “let’s get more input,” and the all-time classic, “we’ll circle back.”

Then a week later, the decision is still sitting there. The same as before. Maybe now with a longer email thread and a calendar invite attached to it.

That gap—that slow stretch between knowing a decision is needed and making one—is what we’re talking about when we say:

Time to Decision

Ok- it’s not a fancy metric. No dashboards required here. It’s just a simple question:

How long does it take to decide things in your business?

Here’s why it matters more than most SMBs realize.

Today, you don’t have the luxury of moving slowly. In big companies, decisions can drag out for weeks and people barely feel it. There are layers, buffers, and entire departments designed to absorb that kind of friction.

You? Well, you’ve got momentum. Or at least, you’re supposed to. But let’s face it momentum is fragile.

Every time a decision lingers too long, something small but important starts to fade. The energy behind the idea. And that’s a crucial part about putting ideas into motion. Once the urgency on moving forward is gone, fewer ideas get generated. The confidence people had when they first brought it up starts to evaporate. 2

Do that often enough, and your team learns something you never explicitly taught them:

decisions don’t really happen here.

No one wakes up thinking, “Today I will slow the business down with indecision.” It’s rarely intentional, by the way.

What happens is much more reasonable-sounding:

“We just want to be thorough.”

“Let’s make sure we’re choosing the right option.”

“Can we get a bit more data first?”

All fair. All logical. And something we’ve all heard before.

But here’s the reality that will keep you above water. Most decisions in an SMB aren’t life-or-death because they’re not irreversible. They’re not going to collapse the business if you get them slightly wrong. They’re adjustable. And when decisions are adjustable, stretching them out doesn’t make it all better. It just makes it later.

You’ve seen this stretching play out in small ways.

1. Approving a tool subscription that costs less than a team lunch—but somehow needs three conversations.
2. Choosing between two vendors when either one would be “good enough.”
3. Delaying a marketing experiment until it’s perfectly planned… and then never quite starting it.

Meanwhile, the clock is quietly running. Not in a dramatic, ticking-bomb way but more like a slow leak. This is when opportunities pass as competitors move forward. Your team hesitates the next time they have an idea because, well… what’s the point?

What’s interesting is that you’re already tracking this KPI—you’re just not calling it that.

Every “we’ll decide next week” is data. Every stalled initiative is data.

Every time something obvious takes too long to get approved, that’s your number, showing up in real life. The only difference is whether you choose to pay attention to it.

But this isn’t about turning your business into some hyper-speed, shoot-from-the-hip chaos machine. It’s about recognizing the difference between decisions that need time, and decisions that are just, well, taking it.

Some things should be slow. For example, important hires. Major investments need time as well. Strategic shifts. Absolutely—take your time on these.

But those aren’t the decisions clogging your week. 3

It’s the smaller, everyday ones that pile up. The ones that feel harmless to delay but collectively drag everything down.

Here’s the payoff. If you changed nothing else— implemented no new tools, no big process overhaul—but simply got a bit faster at deciding, you’d feel it almost immediately.

And you’d see the results because projects would now be on the move.

Conversations would end with outcomes instead of what are the “next steps?”

People would start acting instead of waiting. And you’d notice something subtle but powerful:

things get done when decisions don’t linger.

Next time something comes up, and you catch yourself saying, “Let’s think about it,” just pause for a second.

Ask: What’s the real risk of deciding now?

If the answer isn’t all that scary, you’ve got your signal.

Because in most SMBs, the problem isn’t bad decisions.

It’s decisions that take so long to happen, they might as well not have happened at all.