April 23, 2025
The other day I was at a small business conference in Sundance Utah called HoldcoConference.com – a conference for people who own multiple businesses.
I had no idea what to expect.
On night 2, I sat down at a dinner table with a few people.
This is how it went.
Dinner Conversation
I shared a meal with several interesting people at that table.
- Mark Edler – owner of the accounting firm Edler Zain
- Chase Murdock – owner of Decada Group, a Salt Lake City based Holding company
- Jarrett Vaucher – founder of Your Data Playbook
We got on the discussion of interesting things I’ve learned from our peer groups at SMBCommunity.co, and Mark Edler said something interesting…
“Rand, you should write a book about everything you’ve learned talking with all these business owners about the things they are struggling with”
Then, Chase interrupted with a bit of an addition, something like “yeah – some of these stories need to be shared”
Now, I don’t think it’d be a good book, I don’t think it would really sell well, and I don’t think I’d enjoy writing it.
Then I said this:
“I’m not sure if I’m really qualified to talk about small business ownership, I’m still very early in the game.”
Book Title
When Mark and Chase shared their thoughts, I thought that if I had to write a book, this is the book I’d write:
How To Make Good Decisions
Yes, yes, an extremely vague title, but this has been an idea on my mind for a while.
Why Decision-Making Matters
A few reasons why:
- Everyone makes a few large decisions in their life, ballpark is one big decision every 3 months.
- I have never heard of a process or system anyone uses in their lives to intentionally sit down, think, work through detailed thought exercises, gets them to write down all their options, gets them to work through a logical process of why they are making a specific decision, gets them to write down what the plan is/what success looks like, and gets them to come back months later to evaluate whether it was a good decision or not, and write down the unexpected things they did not imagine happening when they made the decision
- I believe that by working through a process of how we make decisions, gives us the ability to measure them, which then gives us the ability to learn from them, which then gives us the ability to make better decisions in the future.
This topic is very interesting to me, because I want to learn it for myself, and I figure teaching it to others would be a good effort and a novel thing that doesn’t really exist yet as far as I can tell.
Where I Stand Today
I have 26 pages of chicken scratch on all my ideas that may be included in the book. And likely for the rest of the year it will remain as chicken scratch. I have no goal on a publishing date.
But I do have the goal of learning this for myself and documenting it along the way, which I think gets me 80% of the way there.
The Vision
In the meantime, I’ll be building the framework of “How To Make Good Decisions” as I test it out, and we’ll see where this goes.
My general goal is to turn this book into a timeless and widely renowned “How to Win Friends And Influence People” level of success.
But 99% of books sell less than 1,000 copies, so I’ve got a long road ahead.