[Home](https://stoneforgegroup.com/) · [Insights](https://stoneforgegroup.com/insights/) # Six minutes slower **James Walls** · September 24, 2026 · 9 min read About twice a week I drive the I-75 into Sarasota, and more often than not it slows to a crawl. Apple Maps tells me I’m already on the fastest route. But I still come off at Bee Ridge instead of staying on to the UTC exit, and we take Cattlemen Road. Right up until that exit, the map is telling me it’s going to be six minutes slower. Once I’m off, the comparison disappears – there’s no alternative left, so it just tells me how long it’ll be until I get there. I know the delay before I take the exit, and we do it anyway, because psychologically (to me at least), moving is better than not. Innately, doing something – moving, making a decision, progressing, even if it’s sideways – feels better than waiting it out (“Just keep swimming” – Dory). It’s more settling to my psyche, even though, realistically speaking, it isn’t the fastest way to get where we’re going, nor is it the most certain. The same is true for most business owners. The pull to be doing something, anything, is real, and it isn’t going away. When it conflicts with what’s most likely to be right, you feel the tension between the two. The job is to recognize that tension and balance the pull with a weighed, rational decision – one that answers the emotional need to act, the practical need to keep the commitment to a size you can carry, and the logical need for the numbers to back it. ## The urge to do something Many of the owners I work with are addicted to working harder and being in action – and often so am I – especially when under the stress of uncertainty. Working that way is how most of us built our businesses in the first place. But it means that when stress arrives, we immediately lean in to do something, and the things I see owners do at those moments are rarely small. The urge can be strong enough to override the odds, and the clearest evidence I know of comes from football (soccer). A study of elite goalkeepers facing penalty kicks (Bar-Eli and colleagues, 2007) looked at 286 penalties. The keepers dived left or right 93.7% of the time – yet when they stayed in the center, they saved about a third of the shots they faced, against roughly one in seven when they dived. The researchers’ explanation: conceding a goal while standing still feels far worse than conceding one after a full-length dive. The pull to move in the face of stress can outweigh doing the right, probable thing – and that’s when it becomes dangerous. ## When it’s a hire and a truck, not six minutes A few weeks ago I sat with an owner who was feeling that same tension. His crews said they couldn’t keep up, and his answer was to hire a ringer – a proven technician who could produce from day one – and buy another truck to put him in, possibly with a short-term business loan to carry the step: a BIG dive in football terms. He told me he was scared to take that step, and just as sure the business desperately needed it. Yet billing was off to a slow start, and payroll had jumped because it was a long month. So the month felt busy and expensive at the same time, and the numbers couldn’t yet say whether the busyness was real. Dive left, dive right, or stand still (the hardest thing!)? A big call like that, made unexamined in the moment, is where the pull becomes dangerous. To him, the truck felt like the big, dangerous decision – a commitment to a $30,000 asset. But once we looked at it, the truck turned out to be the small part – financed, it came to a few hundred dollars a month, not the difference between the business failing and succeeding. The real commitment was the person, and the training, support, and moral obligations that come with him, in a business that might already have more people than the month’s work needs. He was carrying all of it in his head: the uncertainty was driving the worry, and the worry was driving the impulse to move. So we didn’t make the big call that day – but we didn’t just stand still either. Unlike the keeper, he had time for an option that was neither. We took the fear and put two pieces of logic against it. First, we looked at daily billing – above a certain level, the crews are stretched; below it, the business is already well resourced – and set the slow start against its reasons: a public holiday, a day lost to a truck repair, and the normal trends for that time of year. That explained the slow start, but couldn’t yet say whether the crews were truly stretched. Second, we set the forward measurements that would tell him when the decision could be taken with the risk contained and understood. Between those two things, the feeling that the business desperately needed it became something we could measure – and we’d find out whether it was true. That’s what removed the fear. Then we turned those measurements into a stage gate – a condition, agreed in advance, that has to be met before the money gets spent. He buys the truck and starts the hire when there are four weeks of jobs booked ahead and daily billing has passed its threshold on at least eight of the last ten working days, with a no-go date by which both have to be met. In the meantime, his office started tracking jobs booked ahead alongside the daily billing they already watched. Welcome to balanced decisions: setting the gate was itself a real action, so it met the emotional need to do something that day. It met the practical one too, because the truck was never the big commitment, and the hire only happens once four weeks of booked work are there to carry it. And it met the logical one, because the numbers, not the month’s mood, would say when. ## How to set a stage gate A gate works best when it’s set before the pressure builds, though it can still be set in the middle of it, as his was. Either way, it has to be specific enough that you can’t argue with it on a bad day. Mike Michalowicz’s *Clockwork*, which I introduced last week, would call this Designing work – shaping how things run, so fewer decisions have to be made in the moment – and it’s the first thing to go when stress pushes us back into the work itself. You’ll know you need one when a big decision feels like it has to be made today, and the reason is how the month feels rather than anything in the numbers. ### A Stage Gate **The decision:** the specific commitment you’re about to make – the hire, the truck, the lease, the new market. **The numbers:** the one or two numbers you’ll watch – weeks of work booked ahead, daily billing, cash left after payroll. If you’re not tracking them yet, start today. **The threshold:** the level each number has to reach for the decision to pay its way – enough booked work to keep another truck busy, and/or billing that shows your current crews are already at full stretch (roughly what they bill on a day when every crew is fully booked – your best recent full days are a fair guide) – and, where one good week could fool you, how long it has to hold there, such as eight working days out of ten. **The no-go date:** the date by which the threshold has to be reached – far enough out for a trend to show, but not so far that you’re left hanging – and what happens if it isn’t. “Not yet” is an acceptable answer, and it means the commitment comes off the table until you write a new gate from fresh numbers. Write it down, and tell one person who’ll hold you to it. The no-go date is the part that’s easiest to leave out. Without one, the gate never says no – it just sits there as a target, and you start forcing the number over the line, discounting to fill the calendar and chasing work to hit it. That’s the same pull to be doing something, left unexamined. ## Keeping the decision yours The map was right that Cattlemen would be slower, and good information is worth listening to, provided I’m the one assessing it and deciding what to do with it. Taking the exit is also an act of control – I’m choosing, not being told. The AI sidekick in Maps is a small version of something much bigger: we’re increasingly told we can outsource our thinking to AI, and when I look at LinkedIn and other sites, it appears many people are handing over their judgment, not just their writing, without a second thought. That’s the brain rot that sets in when we trust everything and stop judging for ourselves. Using your own brain is becoming more critical, not less – and a gate is exactly that: your own thinking, written down, so that neither the pressure nor the machine – a map, a forecast or a chatbot – makes the call for you. **Forecast.** A forward view of what the numbers will do, built from what the business knows now – work already won, work likely to be won, costs already committed, and the timing of both. [Full entry →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/glossary/#forecast) Yesterday I took the Bee Ridge exit again, as I still often do – but these days I do it deliberately. I knew what it would cost me, I knew what I was getting for it – a settled head instead of a fight with the traffic – and I knew my plan B: keep heading west to Honore or Beneva, or down to 41 if I needed to. If you’re doing it consciously – you’re aware of it, you understand it, and you decide to do it anyway – well, that’s okay, because it isn’t just an emotionally triggered pull. It’s a real, considered decision, and a stage gate is how you make a business decision the same way. A gate settles one decision; to see where the pressure is coming from in the first place, find out where your business is actually stuck. Where It’s Stuck is six statements and about thirty seconds: say how true each one feels for your business, and it points to whether the block sits in how the work is won, in the numbers underneath, both, or somewhere these six don’t reach. No email is asked for, and nothing you answer is saved or sent anywhere – it’s meant to be useful whether we ever speak or not. ## Three questions to sit with - What’s the decision you’re itching to make right now – and would you make it the same way on a calm Tuesday? - What number – or two – would show that decision is right, and by what date will you accept “not yet”? - What’s a decision you made under that pull that you’d make again – and what did you know about it that made it worth it? ## How this was written Idea, argument, stories and the connections between them: James Walls. Drafting, from James’s material: Claude (AI). Structure and flow: James Walls, with Claude checking the seams. Copy editing and consistency checks: Claude (AI). Corrections, final wording and judgment: James Walls. The thinking isn’t delegated; the typing and the checking are. James uses custom-developed AI skills to check style, structure, and facts against his own standards. ### Is it the selling – or the numbers? Six statements, 30 seconds – it points you to the right conversation. No email asked for, nothing you answer is saved. [Take the 30-Second Test →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/where-its-stuck/) More on the hire the pull keeps reaching for: [Can the business carry this hire? →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/questions/can-the-business-carry-this-hire/) First published in The Stoneforge Newsletter on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/six-minutes-slower-james-walls-cznne), September 24, 2026. ### New issues land here first An email when a new answer or a new issue is published. Nothing else, ever.