(ThyBlackMan.com) As a society, we are very interested in how people react to seemingly impossible decisions that need a final answer. When a movie character must choose between sacrificing themselves for the greater good, or when Spiderman chooses who he must save, or when we hear the story of Dave Chappelle turning away from millions of dollars so he could keep his integrity in comedy, we smile. It’s hard to make those decisions, and deep down we wonder how we would react given the same set of circumstances.
Either/or choices rarely happen in business life, but they do and will occur. As a business owner, you will come across them more than others. Whittling down job candidacy between two of your best applicants, deciding which service to go with, considering which demographic you should appeal to most of all, or if you should ally with another company or not. While there can be positive and negative outcomes, the idea of a business decision resulting in an ‘all-bad’ or ‘all-good’ result can be hard to square with one another.
That’s why we hope to guide you:
Value Now
Consider how the value representation may work right now. It might be that if needing to set up part of your offices with managed IT 
services, using the provider able to equip your office with the right server setup and virtual addresses in a week can be much better than another which will require at least a month to have that all in place. It’s often easy to only think about the long term investment and return that emanates from your decision, and that’s because 99% of the time, that is more important. However, do not completely discount the immediacy of your need, especially as a small business. It could mean the difference between weeks of productive trading or not.
Value In The Future
It’s important to consider how value may propagate in the future. For example, using Google or Microsoft for email may seem like a choice between two immediately worthwhile options, and it is, as they offer very similar functionality. However, it might be that you believe the pricing structure of one service is more worthwhile, that your future software outfit will be more conducive to a certain package, or that you will need to spend less time training staff within one ecosystem. Future value is essential to consider.
Adjacent Value
The stated value of a choice can be one thing to consider, but the knock-on effects and consequences can be quite another to ponder. For example, it may be that one supplier is offering you a 20% discount from their order. However, one other supplier makes vibrant use off your services when they can, returning the goodwill you have shown tem for five years. Do you make that choose to push on to another supplier of equal quality? Or do you eat that immediate saving for the goodwill that may build and build in this unpredictable manner over time? Adjacent value may not help you make the decision outright, but it can be the influence you need to get there.
With this advice, we hope you can properly enjoy making that vital either/or choice in business.
Staff Writer; Fred Brown
