Always trust your gut
After 30 years of experience, I’ve come to believe one thing: always trust your gut.
In the last couple of months, I have terminated two clients who deep down I knew would be difficult from day one. The signs were there when they were engaging - having to be chased up, not answering all the questions, not providing the documents asked for, finding excuses not to sign the direct debit paperwork.
But I saw they had huge potential and put it down to workload rather than their behaviour.
Fast forward a few months - missed payments, cancelled meetings (at short notice) and actions not taken.
It wasn’t adding value for them or me so I cut my losses.
I ignored my gut that told me to stay well clear.
I also wrote off one piece of bad debt. Same scenario. They made all the promises but something just felt off and deep down they were always a risk.
On reflection, I had to trust my gut more than I did and it cost me - time, energy and a few quid.
That instinctive gut feeling is rarely accidental. More often than not, it is the voice of experience speaking before logic has fully caught up. Over decades of making decisions, facing challenges, and learning from both successes and mistakes, your mind develops an extraordinary ability to recognise patterns.
What we call “gut instinct” is often the result of years of lived knowledge, compressed into a single moment. Clarity.
But trusting your gut does not mean you should act blindly.
The strongest decisions come when instinct is supported by data. Your gut may tell you where to look, what feels right, or when something seems off, but data provides the evidence to validate that feeling. It sharpens intuition, confirms assumptions, and sometimes challenges what we think we know.
I am working with a c£2M turnover client at present whose work levels didn’t appear to be translating into profitability. My gut told me there was a problem; I asked for a breakdown of customer spend/ profit league tables.
What the data said:
40% of their clients weren’t spending enough for them to make a profit
20% of their clients brought in 80% of their revenue
80% of their clients had the potential to spend more but weren’t being engaged
That enabled us to develop a plan for profitable growth without much more effort.
The real power in business lies in a balance between the two - data and gut feeling.
Experience gives you the confidence to trust your first reaction; data gives you the confidence to stand behind it. One without the other can leave room for bias or hesitation.
Together, they create informed, decisive leadership.
In a world driven by metrics, dashboards, and endless streams of information, it’s easy to forget the value of wisdom earned over time. Yet some of the best decisions I’ve ever made began with a simple feeling that something was right (or wrong).
Always trust your gut, but make sure you regularly analyse the numbers to validate your next steps.
That’s where instinct becomes insight, and insight becomes action.
If there are red flags, run a mile and save your energy for better. I have learned my lesson.
What is your gut telling you in your business right now and do the numbers back it up?
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