How do you know if your business is actually working?
You don't. Unless you set success and kill criteria in advance. Without it - it's just guessing.
In coaching, we are taught to use evidence-based decision-making. Before you choose a new eating routine, a new sleep ritual, a new way of giving feedback, you first define:
What evidence would convince me this is working?
What evidence would tell me it isn’t?
Otherwise, you are just doing things, shooting in the dark, and quite often wasting your time. Guesswork never produces consistent results you can rely on. Even worse, you might spend months doing things that don’t move the needle while ignoring the things that actually could.
But you can’t make decisions based on evidence if you never decide which evidence matters. When will you stick with it? When will you pivot? When will you kill the idea entirely?
Annie Duke, former professional poker player and absolute Jedi of decision science, popularized a tool I now teach founders and use in my own coaching: kill criteria.
Kill Criteria = pre-defined conditions that tell you when to stop.
A specific milestone + a deadline.
For example:
“If we haven’t hit X by date Y, we shut it down.”
Why does this matter?
Because of the sunk-cost fallacy. We humans hate waste. Once we invest time or energy, even a tiny amount - we cling. We justify. We tell ourselves “just a bit more.”
Kill criteria save you from that trap. It works best with outside accountability.
Fast success in business is really fast learning.
And fast learning requires 2 things:
a) knowing exactly what you’re trying to learn
b) knowing when to stop if the learning isn’t producing the result you want
So over to you dear reader (and a note to myself):
The projects you’re working on right now - your startup, your diet experiment, your new workplace initiative - do you have clear, pre-set triggers that tell you when to keep going and when it’s time to walk away?
