16 Oct, 2026
The Decision-Making Framework Behind Founders Who Scale
People who join Rocket SaaS are usually surprised by how quickly I decide things. I hire people on the spot in the interview room, I sign up to suppliers during the sales call, and I sign off large budgets while the meeting is still running. I actively try to not take any decisions out of that meeting room. The decision-making framework in this piece is what lets everyone else here do the same.
If you asked me to boil down why we’ve scaled as fast as we have, it would be the speed at which we decide, and you can see it in the decisions that got Rocket SaaS to $4m ARR.
I’ve worked with well over a hundred founders and startups. Ask me the common theme in the ones that fail, and I’d say it’s a lack of speed in decision-making. I rate it even higher than product-market fit. If you haven’t got product-market fit and you make quick decisions, it means you can change the product quickly.
I go through all of this on episode 116 of SaaS Marketing Weekly, The greatest founders have this ability.
What is decision making in business?
Decision-making in business is the process of choosing a course of action on hiring, spending, suppliers or campaigns, and deciding who holds the authority to make that choice. The quality of a decision matters, and so does the speed of it, because a decision nobody makes still costs you something.
Two parts go into deciding well, and only one of them can be taught. Good judgement is hard to learn. You’ve either got it or you don’t. But you can certainly learn how to be brave enough to make decisions fast.
Why 20 fast decisions beat 5 perfect ones
Here’s the maths behind making fast decisions. Say that in a month, Business A makes 20 decisions. It won’t get all of them right, but it gets 16 right and 4 wrong. A competitor, Business B, takes its time, makes 5 decisions and gets all 5 right.
Which business is moving faster? As long as the four wrong ones aren’t catastrophic, it’s going to be Business A.
Deciding this way does mean you fly by the seat of your pants a little. Pair it with good judgement and it tends to work out.
The cash flow caveat
I couldn’t work this way when I was cash strapped and bootstrapping. Deciding at speed is a luxury that arrives with cash flow. Once we were cash flow positive, I started going for it.
Bootstrapping slowly into that position was probably good for me. Plenty of founders raise funding and go from being extremely frugal one day to having $2 million in the bank the next, and spending at that pace is a hard adjustment when you’ve never done it.
The 70% rule
Jeff Bezos put a number on how much information is enough, in his 2016 letter to Amazon shareholders:
“Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had.”
Jeff Bezos, Amazon
That final 30% is the hardest part to get, and it takes the longest, so he doesn’t wait for it. Neither do I. If you want the wider version of this argument, we cover it in our piece on the habits of fast-growing SaaS startups.
What slow decisions cost a business
I see founders who need a committee for everything. Three people get brought to a meeting about the smallest marketing task, and nothing can be agreed without all of them in the room.
Then there’s the version that costs you more than money. Somebody pitches the founder an idea that’s low budget and low lift, and the answer is “let me speak to my colleagues about that and come back to you.” Weeks go by. The campaign gets forgotten. Had that person decided there and then, it would have been off and running, a different team would have picked it up, and everyone would have moved on to the next thing.
If you don’t make quick decisions, those activities that are meant to drive the business forward get lost, and they disappear.
That’s why speed has to run through the whole business rather than sitting with one person. A founder who decides in seconds still has a slow company if every manager below them is waiting for permission.
How to build a decision-making framework for your team
Speed can’t live with the founder alone, so we wrote ours down as a decision tree and shared it with everyone.
Set spending thresholds
Our account directors can spend anything below $200 on a client without asking anyone. They don’t need to check with their manager or with me; they just make the decision. Between $200 and $500 they speak to their manager, and it never reaches me at all.
Name the sign-offs for hiring
We have the same thing for hiring. A junior role needs two named people to sign it off, and nobody else has to be asked. A mid-level hire needs two named people as well. Neither one needs a meeting with me.
Add training and guardrails
None of this works without clear rules and proper training behind it. Give people authority with no guidance, and you get bad decisions made quickly.
Get it right, and you hold fewer meetings, you lose less time to head scratching about what to do, and the volume of Slack messages asking for permission drops away. It also gives people trust and confidence. And then the whole machine just moves faster.
Why marketing should be the fastest team in the business
Marketing is where slow decisions do the most damage, because the work is cheap to test and easy to change.
In the slow version, the team spends weeks building the perfect campaign and the perfect ads, then waits for the CEO to review them. Feedback comes back, things get tweaked, it goes back into design, and another fortnight disappears.
I’d rather get four different test ad campaigns live, read the data, scrap the ones that didn’t work, and double the budget on the ones that did. They won’t all be perfect. They don’t need to be, because the data tells you which ones deserve the money, and reviewing in advance never gives you that. It’s how we run LinkedIn and Meta ads for our own clients.
How to make decisions faster with the worst-case scenario test
The thing that gave me confidence to decide faster was working out what happens if I’m wrong.
Take hiring. I used to see an £80k salary as an £80k risk, and it isn’t. If the person is terrible, they can leave the business next week, and it has cost me a few hundred pounds. Agencies work the same way once there’s a break clause in the contract, so you can exit if it isn’t working. Software usually comes with a free trial, which caps the downside at nothing.
Run that test on most decisions and you’ll find the risk is smaller than it felt, which makes deciding quickly much easier.
Why fast deciders tend to be optimists
I think most successful founders are incredibly optimistic, and I certainly am in business. I assume things will turn out well, and that assumption is why I decide as quickly as I do.
Pessimism and speed don’t go together. If you expect every hire to be a mistake and every campaign to flop, no framework will get you to decide in the room, because you’ll always want more information before committing to something you think is doomed.
Run a month-long decision audit
If you want to get better at this, start logging your decisions as they come up. A notepad does the job, and so does a simple spreadsheet.
Record what the decision was, who it was for, the monetary value attached to it, and how long it took you to decide.
At the end of the month, read back through it. You’ll spot the ones where you dragged your feet, and you’ll usually see a pattern in the sort of decision that slows you down. When something similar comes round again, you’ll recognise it and decide much faster.
Share your decision-making framework with the team
I’m sure you hate hearing “let’s circle back” as much as I do. It’s a way to delay making a decision. Kill that phrase entirely and replace it with “let’s decide now and adjust later.” The first ends a conversation with nothing settled. The second ends it with something agreed and moving.
Then write your decision tree down and share it, so everyone knows what they can approve without coming to you. Speed beats perfection every day of the week, particularly when you’re trying to scale a business.
A decision-making framework is an agreed set of rules covering who decides what, up to what value, and how quickly. It removes the need to work out who has authority every time something comes up.
Ours is a decision tree. Account directors spend up to $200 on a client without asking anyone, and anything from $200 to $500 goes to their manager. Junior and mid-level hires each need two named people to sign off, and neither needs me.
Call it, close it, commit to it, and communicate it, as set out by Hanna Hart in Forbes.
“Close it” is the one most businesses struggle with, and it’s the same point I make about deciding in the room rather than carrying the question out with you.
Decision-making in business means choosing a course of action on hiring, spending, suppliers or campaigns, and knowing who holds the authority to make that choice.
Authority is the part that gets neglected. When nobody knows who can approve a $200 spend, every small decision travels up to the founder and slows everything down.
Gather enough information to be confident, which for most decisions means around 70% of what you’d like. Weigh up the worst case if you get it wrong. Decide at the level your decision tree allows, then review how it went in a monthly audit.
Waiting for the last 30% of the information is what costs most businesses their speed.
Hiring someone in the interview itself, signing a supplier during the sales call, signing off budget in the meeting where it’s raised, launching test ad campaigns to see which ones work, and starting a software free trial rather than evaluating it for weeks.
All five are decisions I’d make on the spot, because the downside of getting any of them wrong is small and recoverable.
Run the worst-case scenario test first, since most decisions carry far less risk than they feel like they do. Then set spending thresholds so most decisions never need to reach you at all.
Those thresholds matter more than personal discipline, because they speed up everyone in the business rather than one person.
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