Either you make the decisions or they get made for you
A company’s highest cost never shows up on the P&L.
I have a mid-sized client in distribution who has to decide whether or not to buy a competitor. Another one in retail who has to decide whether to build a management team. And a third who is considering an across-the-board price increase. All of them are complex decisions, and the consequences depend not only on whether they are made, but on the direction they take.
Buying a company is not the same as not buying it. And buying a company that gives you market expansion is not the same as buying one that gives you extra capacity. Building a management team in a business that already turns over 12 million euros, and that has leaned on a single person for too long, is not straightforward either: is a management team really needed? which roles come first? what profiles do we hire? In the same way, a price increase hits the P&L directly, but it also brings the risk of losing customers, which may be healthy, but is still uncomfortable, isn't it?
Let's go again. The distributor is not deciding whether to buy a company: he is deciding how to stop depending on a single client, and buying is one of the ways. The retailer is not deciding whether to build a management team: he is deciding how to break the bottleneck at the general manager that is holding results back. And the third one is not deciding whether to raise prices: he is deciding how to recover the profitability he is losing. The option on the table doesn't change. What changes is what you are actually deciding.
So why do we hold back the decision?
To decide is to choose a path while accepting what you give up, and that hurts. Sometimes we give up money, time and/or security. Either way, choosing one path means not choosing another.
Even so, we know decisions are the foundation of the business, and they can't always be made in the best possible way. But like a shark, which can't stop moving without stopping breathing, companies have to keep making decisions if they don't want to drift.
That is why, to these three companies facing critical growth decisions, I gave the same message: what is the cost of doing nothing?
We often forget, but the highest cost in a company is opportunity cost.
If you don't buy the company, you'll have to grow organically to reduce your dependence on a single client, and that takes time and money.
If you don't build (and empower) the management team, you'll keep skipping the gym, and the business won't scale.
And if you don't raise prices, you'll keep losing profitability in an increasingly demanding market.
None of these three business owners has an information problem. They all have the numbers, they've spoken with the finance director, with the accountant, with someone on the board. Each one has given them an opinion, and the decision is still theirs. What they lack is not one more analysis: it is a place to put it all together and decide without the noise.
Because what you don't decide today gets decided anyway. By the market, by the client who leaves, by the general manager who burns out, or by the competitor who buys someone else. The difference is that by then, the decision is no longer yours.
© Oriol López Villena 2026