Whenever somebody I know comes back from a casino, they often report something like, “I ended up breaking even.”
That always seems a little funny to me, like they’re fudging the truth to protect their ego. After all, if you know anything about the casino game, you know that it’s far more likely to lose money if you spend more than, say, 15 minutes at the tables – or especially the slots.
Why? Because casino operators are relentless in stacking the deck in their favor. Stay at the table here with me, because there’s a lesson in it for you and your business …
If the proliferation of casinos over the last two decades is any indication, today’s gaming halls are crazy good at gaming their own system. So good that you might not even notice.
Out on the betting floor, there are thousands of opportunities to tweak the odds just a bit to benefit the operation. For example, you get 2:1 odds for betting on black in roulette. You’ve got a 50-50 chance, right?
Actually, thanks to the two green spots, 0 and 00, your chance of winning on black is 47.4%. The other 52.6% of the time, the casino is taking your money!
Add all those little advantages add up over time, and multiply them by thousands of guests, and you can quickly see how they’re making money off you hand over fist. That’s the house edge that keeps casinos thriving.
Hey, wouldn’t it be great if you could just guarantee your own business success like that?
Unfortunately, your business probably doesn’t have the Vegas-style allure, or a customer base so primed to part with their money, to pull that off. But you can still look to the casino playbook for inspiration. And you don’t have to have the gilded glitz and glamor of the Bellagio on your side to make some of the mystique work for you.
Because ultimately, what really makes the registers ring – in Vegas, Atlantic City or any of the dozens of towns in between that now allow gambling facilities – is more about science, statistics, and sticktoitiveness.
Basically, casinos know that if you bet enough times, the odds will tip in their favor.
What if I told you that you could take this same principle, twist it a little, and apply it to your business?
Just as little bets add up in casinos’ favor over time, little decisions that lead to multiple small changes in your business can add up to significant improvements for your team.
At a time when the pace of change in business is lightning fast, it makes sense to ramp up your decision-making process and implement change more often.
Of course, it isn’t easy. Instead, many business owners I work with get analysis paralysis. They look at the spreadsheets, consider the trends, mull over the numbers, hem and haw and evaluate and think … and all too often, they never get around to implementing new ideas.
Listen, I get that you don’t want to fly off the handle and throw your team into a frenzy by making major changes every day. But if you have the courage and will to adopt a more dynamic culture of decision making, you can really accelerate your results.
“You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take,” as Wayne Gretzky said. Or pick your own inspirational quote about the need to take chances to get ahead. You’ve got to be in it to win it.
It works like this. You have to accept that you’re going to make some good decisions and some bad decisions. A typical model suggests that if you try 10 new things in business, one is going to be a game changer. Eight won’t really matter much at all.
The other one? Well, that one might hurt you a bit. But you know what? It’s still going to be OK!
So let’s extend this concept some more. If you make only 10 decisions a year, you might be avoiding that one bad one. But you’re also going to make only one major improvement in your business.
Now, what if you change the rules and started making 10 changes a month? Or a week? Even a day?
See, the more decisions you make, the more you learn and grow as a team. That’s why, sometimes, even the bad decisions do some good.
“Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up again,” as Alfred tells Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins. Or again, pick your own inspirational quote, this time about how failures pave the way to success.
When you make a bad decision and see negative results, you can learn from it, quickly course correct and make a new and better decision.
You can also empower your team to take a similar approach. By encouraging decision making, you’re fostering a culture of change. When you’re committed to change, you’re committed to growth.
But there’s no need to bet the farm on this cultural shift. You can ease into the change. If you’re usually very reserved and only implement one change a month, go for one a week. You just need to loosen up a bit, accept the fact that not everything your team tries is going to work and embrace the experience whether they win or lose.
Because when they win, you win. When they lose, everyone learns something in the process and you can quickly adapt to create a win.
In the digital marketing context, rapid decision-making is one of the biggest advantages of all this real-time data we now have at our disposal. By collecting, analyzing and applying the reams of digital information available today, we can make lots of small decisions based on the facts. And we can see right away if it’s going wrong or right.
Digital marketing is a perfect example. Today, we have unprecedented power to analyze and make decisions about:
- Keywords
- Ad placements
- Target audiences
- Messaging
- Calls to action
- Many, many other things
We can figure out which campaigns are giving the biggest bang for your buck, make some educated guesses about why, and make changes to other campaigns accordingly. Then we can monitor those changes, analyze the results, and adjust as needed. And so on.
Want to know the best part when it comes to rapid decision making in your digital marketing efforts? Nobody on your team has to have an advanced IT degree. We’ve got all this stuff streamlined so you don’t have to get mired in the technical details.
I can show you how you can take control and automate a lot of your efforts – much of the data collection, monitoring, and analysis – in a precise, four-step process.
You can learn about the four steps here.
We can give you and your team the tools and insights to make more and better-informed decisions. When you get in the habit of creating rapid decision making and implementing change, you’ll find a new energy and excitement in all you do. And you’ll quickly find the odds are stacked in your favor.
