If Decisions Feel Hard, What’s Missing Underneath?

Hard business decisions aren’t always hard because the stakes are high. Sometimes they’re hard because you’re trying to decide without a filter, and every option feels the same weight. In this episode I'm getting blunt about the real issue: a missing brand foundation. When you don’t have stable reference points, you keep reopening the same choice, resetting your mental load, and burning time you don’t have.

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Transcript

Straight Talk On Brand Clarity

SPEAKER_00 0:03

You're listening to Brandon Butler, straight talking, occasionally in your face, no BS, branding podcast for modern marketers and business owners. For those who want to understand the influence and power of branding and health caring association, consumer behaviour and design thinking can impact what people say, think and feel. I'm your host, our lad, is sometimes funny, sometimes vulnerable, and often unapologetically blunt. Founder and creative director of brand and design agency, your one and only. But got a good one today. We're talking about clarity as a decision filter. I think this one could answer a lot of questions for someone. But think of it like this, right? It could be it's it's always, always, it's always, always, it's always that decision that you know you can do in about two seconds that sits with you and just weighs you down. And hell, you could have been carrying this for months. One of mine was like cleaning up my inbox. But say you reopen, you close, you reopen, you close, and the thing is you know it's not a hard decision. Like we do this so often, especially if you're an ADHD and you're like, this is my daily life. Yes. But it just has nothing to run through. So what I want to talk about with business, because it's something I've come across recently, is that the most hard business decisions, or most hard business decisions, I should say, before I go off on two different tangents, they're not actually that hard. We make them hard. They are decisions being made without, I guess, a filter or a lens or a direction in which you need to make them. And so the decision feels harder because you're essentially winging it. So without that lens or the direction, everything

Why Simple Decisions Feel Heavy

SPEAKER_00 2:10

looks equally as important. Like, have you ever done one of those name the most important things in the studio or wherever in your business things where you list everything that's on your mind and then you go through and you actually list what's direly important, and most of the time it's like two things. You're like, just do those two things, you know? Anyway, everything feels really hard at the moment because it feels really scarce for a lot of businesses, but also even if you're going great and you still need to grow, even if you're going great, the consumer market is still essentially scarce in some spaces. So inflation affects everyone, and pricing is affecting everyone, and petrol prices are affecting everyone. So, regardless, there are still different spending behaviors happening, regardless of where people are financially. So I just want to make sure that people are aware of that because even with people with money, still make smart decisions. And this is something that a lot of people are just like, oh, they've got the money I'm gonna charge them. And it's like you're missing a big part of consumer psych right there. But we'll carry on. So I want to talk, yes, I want to go back off on a tangent. There I go. I want to talk about the business decisions that become quite hard. And if you've ever sat with a decision that should have been simple and you couldn't figure it out, done this plenty of times, by the way, it's usually not indecision, it's missing a foundation or you're missing the direction. I know this from an ADHD's point of view is that when I can't find the solution, everything goes like a spy, it's like an anxiety spiral. And so I really need to understand it or I go down this, I guess, kind of paralysis. And I want to kind of lay that down. So you could look at it like, I'm trying to like figure out which part to start with. You could look at it like decisions that are being weighed against one another, right? So, but in isolation with no fixed reference points. So you're like, I want to run a race. I wish he's running. I don't know what it's just too. I want to run a race. You're like, where are you running? I don't know, is it gonna be winter or summer? I don't know, how far is it? I don't know, okay, other hills, I don't know. So if you don't know any of those things, like what are you training for? It's like when you put it into a different analogy, you go, oh, well, that sounds pretty stupid, right? Well, not stupid, just misdirected, I guess you could say. You go, okay, what race are you running? Do you want to run in summer or winter? Are you going to travel for this? Are you running heels? Is it a good course? Is it a long course? Is it an easy course? All of these things make sense because it dictates then how you would create a training plan for it. Um, are you a fast runner? Are you a slow runner? All of these things then cater to you as an individual or you as an individual business, you could say. So when you know the variabilities, you are able to, variabilities or variables, you are able to find what's missing and then start to build on top of it. Most people with a missing foundation, it's actually, you know what? It's never just a missing foundation. They may have four or five really core parts and they miss five, six, seven, or they're missing three and seven. You know, seven seems to be the number everyone's missing, but it's never all of them. So that's why it feels so weird because people, I've got this and I've got this, and I've got this. And it's like, great. So this and this and this is great, but you're missing just this one part. And this one part is like a bridge from this to this. And if this doesn't make sense, then this part can't make sense, and you haven't got that part in the middle that bridges the two together. And so all of these things are really important. It's like a puzzle piece, right? That one piece that's missing, and so the whole piece can't be completed. And when you're building strategy, it's understanding what piece is missing so that you can find the gap and you can find that clarity. So when you understand, I guess, the decision that's being made,

The Missing Foundation Problem

SPEAKER_00 6:05

rewinding now, looking back into the reference point. Should we take this client, for instance, or should we sell this product? Should we add this service? Should we say yes to this opportunity? Each one gets, I guess, started, it starts from zero. I'm like, what does it do? It starts from zero. And it's because there's nothing stable to measure it against. And when you do that, it's like resetting the mental load. So it's slow, it's exhausting, it doesn't get easier, and because the founder keeps treating it as a decision problem when it's actually a foundation problem. So if you have the right steps to take in order to answer that question, then you don't need that one person to answer the question. It's like when everyone has one person that they need to report to, and then all of the problems go to this one person and they become the bottleneck. It's the same thing with the brand. If you haven't got the brand foundation set, all of these marketing problems then become a bottleneck because you haven't figured out the brand. I talk about this all the time. And you know. So why is it happening? Let's talk about this part because this part's important. Because positioning is usually treated as a marketing output, a statement for a website or something that just needs to be added in as a point of difference. Short story, it's not a real position or a real market position and a positioning is a decision-making filter. And this is why I am so deeply invested into human behavior and the way we make choice and why I love strategy is because essentially these are the decision-making processes people are taking in order to choose you as a brand or whether they want to buy your product. And if you haven't got these thought about, if you got these thought about, if you haven't thought about these in depth, then you're not even considering the options or the variabilities that are at play or variables. I keep saying variabilities, variables at play when someone is making a choice. This is where most people are going wrong. So when it exists, hard decisions have fast answers. Okay. When you've got that list of or a direction or the clarity, the decisions are easy. Does this align with who we are and what we do? Yes or no? When does it exist? Or when does it not exist? There is no filter. So every decision is a I guess a fresh negotiation or a new choice that you need to do with yourself or the team, whoever's making that choice. So it becomes hard. So it's like mental load gets added. And so positioning as sacrifice, I would say, is a positioning that has, I guess, just been thrown together, or you've whacked it together with AI, or something that you've created maybe a couple of years ago that may not be holding now because let's face it, people are making choices very differently. Uh, I just saw this morning that Hooters were rebranding into a family restaurant, and I was like, well, that's interesting. That's a whole repositioning because we all know what hooters stood for. And if you're young enough to not know, then don't worry. It's you know, you and I both know if you know who hooters are, they are not a brand that would succeed these days. It's just not going to work. This is important because this is what I mean by when things change. Meaning changes, language changes, narratives change in terms of societal narratives. And if your brand is, I guess, adhering to an older version of that and society has moved on from that, that is a repositioning time. That is where you need to move, or you will become like a brand like Kodak or Blockbuster or any of the big ones that have been taken out or moved on because they simply just did not notice those signs and moved on and I guess evolved. And so positioning is important because it helps you to solidify your market position. And if the market position isn't safe, then you need to make a new one. And a positioning that's decided what it is not for also becomes a filter that resolves decisions almost automatically. So if you are for so for instance, we have we are for progressive brands. If you're not a progressive brand, instantaneously you're out. You're done. So it's just as much here for those that don't want to work with you as much as it is for those that do. The problem is everyone thinks that everyone wants to work with them, and that's that's the wrong thing to think about. Because without the sacrifice, there's no filter, right? And without a filter, decision making never

Positioning As A Decision Filter

SPEAKER_00 10:45

gets quicker. It's a chore and it's cognitively overwhelming for the person that you're trying to target. And so you just will never get chosen. It's it's this is what's important. So I guess you've got to look at it like this they think that they're bad at making decisions, the team, the founder, whoever it is, or you and you're not. So you're making decisions without the one thing that makes decisions fast, and that is essentially just the plan, the foundation, or the blueprint. Lots of people call them different things. It's the layer that sits first. It's like you can't build a house without the plan, right? It's the same thing. The strategy is the outline. And I guess you could look at it like grilled. So they decided if you know the burger joint, grilled, you know, preface, super preface, so if I can talk to you, but they decided what they were not, and they decided that they weren't cheap. So not the volume market, not adding menu items just because customers asked, so not you know, the local burger joints that you know I'm talking about here, the chains. They the sacrifice for that helped them to turn away um the decisions of I guess the consumer that's looking for something cheap. And that sacrifice turned every later decision fast, if you know what I mean. So, should we add a value meal? No, this is not who we are. The answer was already there. Compare to a client who came into reopening the same three decisions every month. So once the foundation was named and the decisions didn't get easier to make, they got faster to make because there was something there that they could measure against. And by that I mean GRILD said that they were a, I guess, a more upmarket kind of burger joint. So when you know that things are more value aligned, you know that you're going to get essentially a better quality. So therefore, it's not about the quantity, it's about the quality. So you don't need to be adding menu items every five seconds to try and appease, you know, a new crowd with something new because they know that they're coming to you for something that's of higher value. You know, it's even their dining setting is slightly different, and that makes a big difference. And a lot of people just don't get this, I guess. That a clear foundation, and I say foundation because it is a foundation, it's what you build off. It doesn't make you smarter at all, but it does make people answer the question a lot easier. So it helps you know where to start from. It helps you to know what to revert back from. And this is what I find with a lot of businesses, right? They build something and they're great at the beginning because they're all fired up about it. Then business carries on and you get your clients, you get your customers, you get stuck in the business, doing the business stuff, and you might start marketing and you're saying that you're working on the business, but that's not working on the business, that's still working in the business in the marketing spa, in the marketing space. So what you actually want to be doing is going back and working on the big strategy while someone else is doing the execution. I know not everyone can do that. But when we're looking at it from the foundation piece, that's where we need to find those missing points because those are the points where you go 10 to 20 years down the track, like I said, you've got stuck in the business and you've built this thing and you go, what do we stand for? And you're like, oh, it's nothing like what we started. And you're like, well, now you've built a business and now you feel so out of sync with it because you've grown into this thing that hasn't stayed on track because you've just done what you needed to to bring money in the doors. Now I also get that's important. But you need to make sure that whatever you do isn't at sacrifice of what you said the brand will be in the first place because then you create a distrust in what you said you were gonna do in the first place. So you have to make sure that things are on brand. You have to make sure you do what you say, you have to be, I guess, have integrity in what you do. And that might mean that you would never so I remember there was a big uproar because Stone and Wood beer said that they were going to be stay, they would stay independent, and then they sold out to a large beer corporation or you know, big business, and people lost their shit. And I thought that that was really interesting because everyone was like, you stood for the independence, and you stood for what it stood anyway. You know, they do what they need to do, but it was a really interesting. I remember that circling for a while. I didn't know the ins and outs of it, but I remember that was a hot topic. And so it makes people think differently, right? So it's if the same decision keeps getting, I guess it gets keeps coming back to you, which is more often than not, more information isn't gonna close that loop. Don't come find something else. You have probably had enough information for months. I bet you've been consuming, consuming, consuming. We we try to look for different answers to complete the same answer. Or look for different answers to complete the same question, if that makes sense. So instead of just doing the thing that we need to do the way it needs to be done, we try and look for alternate ways to do it faster. And by doing that, you're actually wasting time. This is actually what AI does, by the way. People like sit more, sit in AI longer than they do, then they could actually solve the problem to begin with. Not in all cases. AI is great in some places, but that's this is where a lot of people are just resorting to AI because they think it's

Sacrifice, Integrity, And Market Shifts

SPEAKER_00 15:55

faster. But if you don't actually know how to do the original part, it just takes longer because you've got to learn that. And it's not always going to give you the right answer. At the moment, I've got it working in the background cleaning my folders because that it's a hellfire in there. So, as I said, the uncomfortable bit keeps coming back. And what's missing is not data. You don't need more stuff. It's the lens on which you need to navigate. It's it's okay, the directions over here. I need to know this, I need to know that. It's usually that you don't know the next step and you're looking for different ways to get there. And you cannot think your way out of the filter decision one at a time. You have to build it on purpose. You kind of have to learn through the process. So if you've come with that realization, which I think a lot of people have, and when I say filter, it's just identifying that there's a gap that you don't know what it is. That could be the filter, bang, right there. I don't know what to do next. I don't know how to scale here. I don't know that to do X, Y, Z. And then you find the right thing. A lot of people have been saying that they want to build a new offer, or that they want to create a new product line. And a lot of the times it's that they actually need to fix their core messaging, who they stand for and who they're targeting, because the people that they're trying to target aren't coming in. It's not that their existing customers think that their offers are shit. It's that they the people don't know who you are, or they're not aligning with you because there is no connection there, because the messaging is broken or the continuity with who you are as a brand is broken and the layout isn't isn't clear. So this is another thing with influencers I noticed with people with products is that they they will just choose an influencer based on their follower count and not actually in alignment to who that who that influencer is. So that's really important because if you choose an influencer that goes against some of the things that you stand for, people will call you out. So that's another thing to take into consideration. A lot of things to take into consideration seems to be a a good line of mine. So it's not a long one today, but it is a quick one in understanding what what I mean by this. There are a lot of people that are stuck in a hard place and they don't understand the dynamics of moving forward because they can't really figure it out. They say, I need to do this or I need to do that. And what you're actually doing is assuming that that's what you need to do. When there is a realignment or a readjustment to your direction of what you need to do for the business or the brand itself, there's generally a few things. Well, one, the market's changed so drastically. I don't care what anyone says, the market has changed so drastically. I've been studying human behavior and market consumer marketing behavior over the past, you know, in-depth the past six years. And it's like constantly adapting. I'm like constantly having to rethink new things. But the one thing that doesn't ever change is the psychology of it. The how humans think, that never changes. How we adapt in environments doesn't change. What we do individually can change based on who we are as people and what upbringing we have and I guess privileges that we have and how we sit in society. Also, social connections. So someone having a framework and getting from point A to point B will not always work for someone else because it worked for them. Timing is also a huge issue, which a lot of people don't like to bring up. But timing has been proven to be something like 47% of someone's success. If you have the right thing at the right time, it will blow up. Now, given you still need the other 53% to work. So you obviously need time and placement and the right messaging and the audience, but it is that time can come for you whenever you need. And what I mean by that is everyone seems to be on this on this timeline. I need to be quick, I need to get it done, I need to get it done. I want you to slow down because what that is, is uh it's almost like a capitalistic thing. It's they want you to speed up, to keep performing, keep performing, keep working to the cog. And it doesn't have to be like that. Resting and receiving and thinking is actually going to be the thing that helps you to come up with the ideas. Now I went to Fiji the other week. I know I mentioned this, and then I broke my bloody ankle when I came back, but I went to Fiji and I didn't do anything. I didn't come up with a big idea when I was over there either. So I'm not going to come to you and go, when I was over there and came up with a $5 million. Nope, nothing. I didn't think. I tuned right out. I did not think about business. I did not let myself think about business. Hey, if an idea comes to you while you're over there thinking about business, uh, you know, on a holiday and it comes to mind, great, fantastic. But I didn't allow myself to think about business. I was just fully present with my family.

AI, Info Hoarding, And Broken Messaging

SPEAKER_00 20:35

And that filled my cup. Then I came back and I was really motivated. And that's what needed to change. It was just the burnout and the working the grind. And the ideas are not going to come to you, and especially they're not going to be shown to you if you are pushing to the wire. And I think a lot of us are experiencing some kind of burnout, whether you're successful or not. I think it actually gets worse as you become more successful. And there's a big part of that that needs realignment. This is where the identity of the person comes into finding the gap. Because what I realized with you one and only after all of my stuff, you can go back and listen, transplants for my child and Audi HD diagnoses and postpartum depression and all of these things in such like a pressure cooker period impacted my thought process so much. And it creates blind spots when you have so much circling in your head. There is so many barricades for you to think of ways to move forward, especially adding stress because take a look around at the world right now, it is feeling really hard. And a lot of people keep trying to, it's a projection, a lot of people are like, stop talking about it. Stop talking about it. No, I will talk about it because it is hard. It is hard. And that connects more with people than those that are saying that it's not hard. The differences are knowing when it's hard and knowing when to pick yourself up. So you're allowed to have a pity party. Have a pity party and then figure out when the right time to move forward is. For me, when I found my realignment, it wasn't a big miraculous thing. It was a bit by bit. So it was reclaiming parts of myself, fixing relationships first, which became a big part of my personal and professional thing. It was thing as lives. Bringing them together as one was actually really important because you can't separate the two. So it really became how am I going in my per professional life versus how am I going in my personal life and how are the two corresponding? Because if I've got no sleep because I'm up with my baby all night and I'm stressed because my kid's sick, I of course that's going to play a role in how the business performs when I'm the creative thinker and strategist of the business. So there needs to be a clear understanding of how you then manage that because it doesn't, it doesn't stop. You just need to coexist. So the layer for that case is finding what the problem is. And a lot of the times it could be stress and it could be, you know, overwhelm or whatever that may be. And so instead of trying to work your way out of it, which trust me, I tried to do that, it doesn't work. You need to actually reflect. And this is where the person, the founder, the leader comes in. In how do I solve this, not fix it. How do I solve this? And so that might mean that you need to step back and maybe journal if you're into that thing. To me, I love to just brain dump. So I would write a whole bunch of different things down on piece of paper, it would just spew out, and then that felt like it was out of my head. And

Burnout, Rest, And Realignment

SPEAKER_00 23:55

someone, a friend, recommended that to me. So that was really cool. Or it could be just I was a verbalizer. So for me, when I after I had my second baby, I actually created a whole podcast and I spoke about my experience on that podcast. And then once I had kind of dealt with that, I didn't really feel like the podcast needed to go anywhere. So I kind of left it to park it for later on. So that's there. And it's really interesting to hear that now because it helped a lot of people, don't get me wrong, and it also helped me to build really deep connections with people who who aligned with that level of thinking at the time. So I would say do what you need to do as an individual that you know is going to benefit you. And it could be going to the gym, it could be going for a walk, it could be doing meditation, it could be because the opposite to being on is being off. And that is the rest and receive kind of vibes. You know, it's going away for the night and just not being interrupted, or going out to the bush and just walking and touching grass, whatever that may be. But that is ironically, that is the pole opposite of what you need to do in what you think you need to do. I be I mean, like, so you you think that you need to be working harder, working harder when it's actually you need to just stop. I know so many people say this when I was in the middle of it, and they would be like, you need to take a break, and I'd be like, go and F yourself. Like, I know that in the in the most nicest way, but you like it's like you know, but you can't do it. So I would say, or I can't do it. You make excuses, I can't do it, I can't I can't do it. And you know what? That's a trauma response. Um, and I think that a lot of people need to understand that a lot of the world is going through a collective trauma response because what we all went through for the past decade has been intense. And a lot of people, a lot of a lot of it is is really full on. Watching what's happening around everyone is full on. So of course that's going to then ricochet throughout the work that we do. So I guess at the end of the day, it's what's the baseline? The baseline starts with if you have a team, it usually begins with what where's the culture at now? What are we doing? How are we building it? Is everyone happy? Is everyone telling you that they're happy? Are they just following and stepping in line or is it a community kind of built thing? Because I know so many businesses that think that they've got this amazing community and it really is just the founder leading the, leading the leading the team. That's not a bad thing, but it means that if the team aren't committed and on the same line of thinking, then the founder's going to be doing all the work all of the time. When you have a really invested team, I might this is what I hated about having to let my team go when we went through our hardships. Was our team was really invested and they were super, I guess, conscientious and showed initiative, and we just used to always have each other's back. So when I had to let them go, it was not, it was not fun at all. I loved them, and so it was really hard. And these are the decisions that you end up having

Team Culture And Empathy In Marketing

SPEAKER_00 26:45

to make. These are the foundation choices too. If you're looking at something when you're like stressed out, this was something that I actually needed to reflect on. Did I need to let a studio go? Did I need to let staff go? How am I going to move forward in a way that can grow the business? Can I hire them back? Like all of these things ran through my mind. So this is the uncomfortable bit, right? So you do the decisions, and the decisions aren't just do I need to talk about my life? It's do I need to reflect on my life? Am I going through something that's pretty significant? And chances are for a lot of people, it's yes, especially if you're a parent. Um, especially if you've got health issues, or hell, you don't have to be a parent either. Like you've everyone has their own, their own things that they have going on. And that's, I think, one of the biggest things that is important for when you're a marketer is understanding empathy. And it's understanding inclusivity in the way we market. When we talk about that, it's also figuring out who you're talking to and how you can talk to them on a layer that can build true connection. And it doesn't always have to be relative to work. So, can that be built into the strategy? So these are the things that I will leave with you. Finding that strategy, building the bottom line or the bottom, what do you call it, finding the baseline for everyone, and knowing where your consumer sits there, your customer sits there, and how do you speak to them in a way that connects them, but also how do you build your business so in a way that that works with you. So that's this week. Uh the workshop is coming up. I'm really excited. Only a couple of days left. So if you haven't seen it and you're interested in it, please jump on to the website. I'll drop the link down below. You can have a look see at that. It's going to be in person, it's going to be really good. I'm really excited about it. And it's sorry, it's an oram park city if I'd missed that. I'll pop it all down in the show notes. You can read it, but it will be a lot of this deep thinking stuff. We're going beyond the surface. I want people to feel that they we're going underground because that's what it's called. Yeah, I want people to feel like they've had like a significant, significant conversation that can help them realign

Workshop Plug And Final Ask

SPEAKER_00 28:55

themselves. Until then, I will chat to you next week. Did you like that episode? Hope so. Because if you did, why don't you head over to whatever platform you listen on and rate and review? It's much appreciated and helps others know what we're about. If you want to follow us, you can find us at youan and only underscore AU on Instagram or head to www.ywanandonly.com.au