The Best Business Decision I Ever Made

Here’s a question worth asking yourself.

What’s the best business decision you’ve ever made?

The one that changed the trajectory of your agency.

The one that you can trace back to playing a monumental part in achieving a level of success.

I’ll share mine at the end of this article, but I’ll explain what got me thinking of this question over the weekend.

I’ve been hyper-focusing recently on audiobooks that investigate the use of analysis and data in football.

Back in the day, when I was a local reporter in Watford, I interviewed the football manager, Sean Dyche (around 2011/12). During the chat, the amiable Dyche shared how he watched back games on TV.

He said, “If there’s commentary, you must turn it off, it can prejudice how you feel about the match or players involved. You need to take the emotion out of your analysis.”

Cold, Hard, Data

This was brought back home a couple of weeks ago with a talk my daughter had with one of her coaches at Brighton & Hove Albion.

After a match, she felt she hadn’t played well, but her coach said he thought the data/analysis would tell a different story and that she had performed well. What she thought/felt wasn’t what the data would say. No emotion, no biases, just data.

There’s a reason I’m sharing these anecdotes.

In James Tippet’s book, X Genius It’s xGenius: Expected Goals and the Science of Winning Football Matches, he regularly cites Brighton and Brentford as ‘smart clubs’ that take the guesswork out of player selection and recruitment.

The book also dives into stats showing that when a team is winning 1-0 and plays defensively to protect their lead, they are more vulnerable than if they go on the front foot and try to score more goals.

The rationale here is to play to win by putting even more pressure on your opponents.

Are you Playing to Win?

The “play to win” mindset isn’t just for football. It’s how the best businesses operate.

It is something Nike uses; during recessions or downturns, they’ve tended to increase their marketing/advertising spend. They did this famously decades ago when Reebok had a larger market share than they did heading into a recession.

Reebok cut back on advertising, Nike upped it and won market share. Reebok never recovered.

So, what was my best decision?

 In early 2020, we were motoring along nicely with the Estate Agent Content Club.

Then COVID hit — and without realising it, I played to win.

During those crazy first weeks, when everyone was locked down, we realised no one was advertising on Property Industry Eye—they referred to this as selling advertising e-shots very cheaply—£250 per e-shot, compared to the usual £700-ish per shot at the time.

We bought four E-shots – our membership of the Estate Agent Content Club doubled from 50 members to 100+.

That £1,000 decision didn’t just double our membership at the time.

It created relationships, revenue and momentum that are still paying off years later.

We played to win, and it continues to pay off.

Your Turn

What’s the best decision you’ve ever made?

Thanks for reading,

Jerry