Ask most entrepreneurs what it takes to build a successful business, and “make faster decisions” rarely tops the list. For small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the most critical factor in building a successful business is access to growth capital.
Yet according to McKinsey research, organisations that decide faster than their competitors are twice as likely to outperform financially, and improving both the speed and quality of decision-making can lift productivity by as much as 25%. That’s not a marginal edge. In a market where conditions shift by the week, it can be the difference between staying relevant and being left behind.
For local SMEs navigating everything from load shedding to volatile input costs, the instinct is often to slow down and deliberate until every risk is accounted for.
But according to Sim Manqina, Transformation and Stakeholder Engagement Strategist at Engen, that instinct may be working against you. Speed, done right, isn’t reckless. It’s a discipline, and one that separates businesses that adapt from those that get overtaken.
“Quick decision-making is critical in business. Why? Because the market moves so quickly. If you are not able to make a decision and have the tenacity to stick to that decision, you will find yourself not staying ahead of the curve,” explained Manqina.
The Missing Ingredient: Risk Appetite
Speed without judgement is just recklessness, and this is where Sim’s answer gets specific. Fast decision-making, he explains, only works if it’s paired with a clear understanding of your business’s risk parameters. Knowing how much uncertainty your business can absorb before a decision becomes dangerous is what separates confident, quick calls from careless ones.
SME risk parameters and effective decision-making rely on balancing core financial limits, operational capacity and market uncertainty to protect cash flow and secure sustainability.
What “Risk Appetite” Practically Means
Risk appetite for SMEs means the amount and type of uncertainty the owner or team is willing to accept – specifically financial, operational, and growth boundaries – while trying to reach their business goals. It acts as a daily decision-making filter rather than just a corporate document.
How it works in daily operations:
- Deciding where to spend money: Choosing whether to launch a new product line using spare cash or keep the money safely in the bank.
- Hiring and staffing: Accepting the operational strain and wage risk of hiring a new manager before revenue is fully guaranteed.
- Setting boundaries: Deciding that customer service errors have a low-risk limit, while testing a new marketing tool has a high-risk limit.
“Your risk parameters are also equally important, so that there’s a sense of appreciation whether a decision is within the risk appetite of your business,” said Manqina.
This is the practical takeaway SME owners can act on immediately: before you can move fast, you need to know your own boundaries – what level of loss, delay, or disruption your business can genuinely tolerate. Without that clarity, speed becomes guesswork rather than strategy.
What “Staying Ahead of the Curveball” Looks Like Day-to-Day
For SMEs, curveballs aren’t hypothetical — they’re supplier delays, sudden price changes, a competitor undercutting you, or a client contract that shifts overnight. Manqina’s framing suggests that businesses which survive these moments aren’t the ones with the most resources, but the ones willing to commit to a decision and adjust course rather than freezing while they wait for more certainty.
Building a Simple Decision Speed Habit
For SMEs, a decision-speed habit is the 70% rule – deciding with enough info, combined with a 24-hour sunset limit and two-way door sorting.
The 70% Speed Trigger
Core components of the 70% speed trigger are:
- Stop waiting for 100% data: Make choices when you reach 70% of the information you wish you had; waiting longer creates costly delays.
- Classify instantly: Label any pending choice as a Two-Way Door (reversible) or One-Way Door (permanent).
- Speed run the reversible: Give yourself or your team a strict 24-hour clock to approve or reject low-risk, reversible tests.
Manqina explains that the lesson here isn’t about being impulsive. “It’s about recognising that indecision has a cost too, one that’s often invisible until a competitor has already moved.”
How to Build This Into Your Business
Turning this speed-based decision-making philosophy into practice doesn’t require an overhaul; it requires a few deliberate habits:
1. Identify and Address Weak Spots
You need to look at how your company is making strategic decisions. Do executives dictate what the direction of the company will be, while managers and employees are expected to follow their orders to the letter? This is a very rigid way of making these important decisions that leaves many people feeling like they have no say.
To make decision-making easier and effective across the board, managers and employees should be able to provide their own perspective, ask questions and challenge any incorrect assumptions. Through this collaborative approach, you can arrive at the best decisions for charting the company’s future course.
2. Determine the Stakes
Figure out the stakes or importance of your decision. For low-stakes decisions, spend less time making your choice so there’s more time for decisions of greater importance. Low-stakes decisions are ones where the following is true:
- Familiar environment: If you understand the circumstances of the decision, it might be a lower-stakes choice. For example, if you’ve made decisions about payroll before, you already know many of the factors involved in making choices related to payroll and might be able to expend less energy on future payroll decisions.
- You can change the decision later: If a decision can be easily reversed or modified, you may not need to spend as much time making the choice.
- Minimal consequences: The potential impact of a decision is crucial when evaluating if a decision is low- or high-stakes. For example, choosing a location for a business lunch is generally considered low-stakes because the effects of that decision likely won’t matter in a few hours or days.
3. Know Your Objectives
Determine what your ultimate goal is in making the decision. Keeping your goal in mind throughout the decision-making process will help you focus on the factors and possibilities most relevant to your goal.
4. Design a Criteria
Create a set of criteria that can help you evaluate your various options. Select the criteria that relate to your ultimate goal. Also, your criteria must be as objective as possible. For instance, if you’re determining a new product to develop, your criteria may include market need and cost-efficiency.
5. Collect Data
Gather all the relevant information for your decision. Having this objective evidence can help you understand the situation thoroughly and move forward confidently with your ultimate choice.
6. Commit to Your Decision
Once you’ve selected the best option, commit to that decision. Constantly reevaluating your decisions wastes time and will leave you behind your competitors. By adhering to your decision, you reduce your chances of experiencing decision fatigue and improve your ability to mentally progress onto the next task.
Manqina’s message is a useful corrective to a common myth in business: that slower automatically means safer. It doesn’t. The businesses that hold their ground in unpredictable markets aren’t the ones agonising over every variable; they’re the ones who know their risk appetite, commit to a decision, and keep moving. Fast doesn’t mean careless; it means clear.
