This week on “Mind Your Own Business,” I want to talk about frogs on logs; what am I on about? well, this week, something interesting happened during a coaching session, there’s a client that I was talking to, and I shared this riddle with him. 

Five frogs are sitting on a log; one decides to jump off; how many are left? The answer is five. 

Just because a frog decided to jump off doesn’t mean that it took action and leaped off that log, and this is so applicable to the client that I was talking to this week they had decided six months ago that they were going to hire a key person for their team, because they could see that the pressure was coming.

They would need the extra resource in their company, and then what happened was he got distracted; the day-to-day stuff took over, and now we are six months down the line, and we still haven’t even started the recruitment process. 

This person is under massive pressure, their team is under enormous pressure, and this could have been completely avoided if he did it when he had decided he was going to jump off the log six months ago. 

Now, I want you to think about how does this apply to you in your business? What are you bottlenecking at the moment? What decisions have you not made or what decisions have you made but you haven’t taken action on?. 

As the business owner, you are likely to be the key bottleneck for your business because many decisions sit with the owner, and if your team members are waiting, they will eventually just move on. 

All those decisions that weren’t made come back and they come back with interest. It creates problems, creates chaos, sometimes feels like there is never enough time to do the things you need to do, but there’s always time to put out the fires and fix the mistakes. 

Well, I’m here to tell you that you must stop being the frog that decided to jump off and didn’t take action. Don’t be the key bottleneck in your business, and make sure that you release your people to do the job you’re paying them to do.

 So what decisions do you need to follow through on, or what decisions do you need to make so that you’re not that froggy stuck on the log? 

If you’re looking for more new business advice, then we’d like to see you every week on “Mind Your Own Business,”

Marco Soares is an award-winning business coach based in Sussex and is available if you’d like help implementing these tactics.