I ask a version of the same question in almost every first meeting with a growth-stage founder: how long does it take your company to make a decision that isn't trivial — a new hire, a pricing change, a vendor switch? The answer, more often than not, is longer than the founder would like to admit, and longer than the founder actually realizes.
Slowness Rarely Comes From Caution
The instinct is to assume slow decisions reflect a careful, risk-aware culture. Sometimes that's true, and it's healthy. More often, when I dig into a specific delayed decision, the real cause is unclear ownership. Three people believe they need to weigh in. Nobody is confident they have the authority to close the loop. The decision drifts across meetings, gathering opinions, without anyone accountable for actually making the call.
This is especially common around the $10M mark, where a company has grown past the size where the founder can personally decide everything quickly, but hasn't yet built the clear decision rights that would let someone else decide quickly instead. The result is a company caught in between — too big for founder-speed decisions, not yet structured for delegated-speed decisions.
Measuring What You Can't See
Most companies don't track decision latency at all, which means the problem is invisible until someone notices a hiring process has dragged for two months or a vendor decision has been "under review" since the spring. I encourage founders to pick five or six decision types that recur regularly — hiring approvals, pricing exceptions, capital requests under a certain threshold — and simply track how long each one takes from first raised to finally decided.
The results are usually uncomfortable. A hiring approval that should take a week takes five. A pricing exception that should take a day gets debated across three meetings. Nobody designed this slowness on purpose. It accumulated because nobody was measuring it.
Assigning a Single Owner, Not a Committee
The fix is almost always the same: assign a single named owner to each decision type, with clear authority to decide without further sign-off, and a target timeline. Input from others is welcome. A final vote from a committee is not required. This feels risky to founders who worry about losing quality control, but in practice, most decisions made this way are just as good as the slow, consensus-driven version — and they happen in a fraction of the time.
Speed Compounds Into Culture
A company that decides quickly develops a different culture than one that doesn't. People bring problems forward sooner, because they trust something will happen with them. Good employees stay, because indecision is one of the most common reasons ambitious people leave a company. And the business itself becomes more competitive, because in most markets, the company that decides fastest — not the one with the best plan on paper — wins the opportunity in front of it.