Scaling CEOs are not short on intelligence, experience, or access to information. The pressure comes from making consequential decisions under conditions that quietly erode judgment.
As companies grow, pace accelerates, inputs fragment, and decisions carry more weight. Under those conditions, the failure point is rarely the strategy itself. It is the environment surrounding the decision.
William Holsten’s work centers on that distinction. Decision failure is typically not a capability issue. It is an environmental one—and it follows patterns that can be identified before they compound.
Most organizations assume decision quality tracks with analysis and expertise. When something goes wrong, the explanation tends to focus there—what was missed, what was misunderstood, what should have been modeled differently.
That diagnosis is often incomplete.
“Big decisions rarely go wrong because leaders lack intelligence or information… more often, the problem is the environment around the decision.”
As companies scale, those environments degrade in predictable ways. Stress becomes persistent. Fatigue is normalized. Signals arrive unevenly or too late. Leaders operate across too many threads to fully process what matters.
Under those conditions, even experienced CEOs begin to rely on assumptions that haven’t been tested or overlook weak but important signals. The result is not isolated error. It is a pattern of preventable mistakes—decisions that likely would have held under different conditions.
Holsten’s study reinforces how common this is: 86% of 300 entrepreneurs reported at least one business-impacting mistake in the past year.
The issue is not frequency. It is where leaders look to explain it.
Holsten’s approach is structured around two linked constructs:
The sequence matters. Recognize the condition first. Adjust behavior second.
STORM captures five conditions that degrade judgment:
Any one of these can be manageable. Risk increases when they overlap.
“If you're stressed, tired, overloaded, rushed or missing signals, that's STORM… if multiples of those things happen at the same time, that's when you need to slow down.”
These conditions are often treated as normal operating reality in a scaling company. The decision still feels necessary, often urgent. What goes unexamined is whether the conditions support sound judgment.
STORM reframes that moment. It signals elevated risk—not because the decision is complex, but because the environment is unreliable.
When those conditions are present, the response is not more analysis. It is disciplined constraint on behavior.
SAFER defines five adjustments:
These are intentionally simple. Under pressure, complexity breaks down. What holds are repeatable behaviors that create space to think clearly.
“The best scaling CEOs build simple habits and guardrails to help them slow down.”
Decision failures rarely originate in flawed strategic thinking. They begin earlier, in how decisions are processed under constraint.
Patterns show up consistently:
These are not irrational choices. They are decisions made under conditions where speed overrides validation.
A hiring decision proceeds without fully testing fit. A launch moves forward despite unresolved concerns. A strategic move relies on incomplete data that feels directionally sufficient.
In each case, the logic of the decision may appear sound in isolation. The failure lies in the conditions under which it was made.
Holsten’s framework shifts attention to that moment. Before evaluating the decision, assess the environment that shaped it.
This reframing expands the CEO’s role in decision-making.
It is no longer sufficient to focus on selecting the right path. The conditions under which that choice is made become part of the responsibility.
Three shifts follow.
First, decision quality becomes an environmental discipline. Stress, fatigue, and overload are not background factors. They directly affect judgment and must be managed accordingly.
Second, timing becomes a control point. Choosing when to decide is often as important as what to decide. Acting under degraded conditions increases the likelihood of avoidable error.
Third, simple constraints outperform complex methods under pressure. Slowing down, checking assumptions, and reducing distraction have disproportionate impact compared to adding analytical layers.
Holsten’s framing makes the shift explicit:
“The question isn't just what decision to make, it's how to protect judgment while making it.”
Most CEOs invest heavily in improving strategy, talent, and execution. Far fewer apply the same rigor to the conditions that shape their decisions.
That gap explains why preventable mistakes persist, even in otherwise disciplined organizations.
“Fixing preventable mistakes is expensive… but preventing them could be priceless.”
The implication is straightforward. Before committing to a decision, assess the environment. If conditions are degraded, adjust them—or adjust the timing—before proceeding.
The decision itself is only part of the outcome. The environment in which it is made often determines the result.
William Holsten is the founder of Think Smartly and a business mistake prevention specialist. He advises CEOs on reducing preventable decision errors, drawing on a study of 300 entrepreneurs and decades of operating experience. His work focuses on identifying the environmental conditions that degrade judgment in scaling businesses.
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Jeff Holman is a CEO advisor, legal strategist, and founder of Intellectual Strategies. With years of experience guiding leaders through complex business and legal challenges, Jeff equips CEOs to scale with confidence by blending legal expertise with strategic foresight. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
Intellectual Strategies provides innovative legal solutions for CEOs and founders through its fractional legal team model. By offering proactive, integrated legal support at predictable costs, the firm helps leaders protect their businesses, manage risk, and focus on growth with confidence.
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The Breakout CEO podcast brings you inside the pivotal moments of scaling leaders. Each week, host Jeff Holman spotlights breakout stories of scaling CEOs—showing how resilience, insight, and strategy create pivotal inflection points and lasting growth.
Listen and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform:
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Want to be a guest—or know a scaling CEO with a breakout story to share? Apply directly at go.intellectualstrategies.com.
TRANSCRIPT SUMMARY
00:00 — Host introduction and guest welcome
00:15 — Guest role and expertise definition
01:06 — Decision environment vs intelligence
01:57 — Background and mistake prevention focus
03:05 — Study design and methodology
05:10 — Key findings on business mistakes
06:37 — Risk levels and environmental conditions
08:01 — CEO risk perception vs reality
09:19 — Slowing down and assumption checking
10:21 — Fatigue and decision quality impact
11:54 — Solo vs supported CEO environments
13:11 — External perspective and feedback loops
14:12 — STORM and SAFER frameworks explained
16:36 — Self-awareness and risk assessment tools
18:54 — Preventable mistakes and cost implications
21:17 — Organizational dynamics and confirmation bias
23:38 — Customer proximity and insight gathering
25:12 — First-time vs repeat founder patterns
26:21 — Closing and contact information
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jeff Holman, Host (00:01.27)
Welcome back everybody to the breakout CEO podcast. I'm your host Jeff Holman and I'm so excited to be here with you today. Today we're talking about how CEOs make big decisions and we've got an expert here with us. We've got William Holston on the show. William, welcome to the show.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (00:15.931)
Hey, Jeff, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Jeff Holman, Host (00:18.348)
Yeah, super glad to have you here. I'm glad you answered the call. Every month we're putting out the call to advisors to come and help out with specific topics. And when I mentioned this one, you said, me, I can do that. I can help address that from a specific angle. So we're excited to hear your thoughts about how CEOs make big decisions in their businesses today.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (00:36.625)
Sure. Happy to. By the way, my back, I am a business mistake prevention specialist. I got into that. It's a long story, but that's my focus in helping founders and CEOs and everybody else. One thing I've noticed working with founders and CEOs is that big decisions rarely go wrong because leaders lack intelligence or information. More often, especially when the strategy is already good, the problem is the environment around the decision.
Jeff Holman, Host (00:50.616)
I love it.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (01:06.189)
As companies scale, the pace accelerates, the stakes rise, and leaders operate under stress, fatigue, distraction, and incomplete signals. Under those conditions, even very capable CEOs can rely on assumptions that haven't been tested, or they missed something important. So the question I focus on isn't just what decision to make, it's how to protect judgment while making it. It's the environment you're operating under.
The best scaling CEOs build simple habits and guardrails to help them slow down at key moments, challenge assumptions, and bring in outside perspectives before committing to the big move. That's kind of my basis for talking about this. And it's based on a study I did, published this year, of 300 entrepreneurs across America.
Jeff Holman, Host (01:57.934)
Oh, I love that. You said so many things in there that we can dig into. you're going to have to excuse me because I want to, before we jump straight into that, I plan to jump in, but when you said business mistake specialist, give us a little bit more color around that because it sounds intriguing.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (02:14.934)
Yeah, my background, had 38 years in a corporation in marketing and innovation. And in the final 10 years in that position, I was also a side gig entrepreneur CEO on my own, inventing and marketing carnival games. Again, it's a long story, longer time than we have right now. But in doing so more on my own side than in the corporate side, I made a lot of mistakes. And I went after I retired three years ago from the major corporation.
I decided to write a book about my experience making those mistakes and suggesting how readers might not make those same mistakes. I put together 10 tools that they can use. The book was called How Not to Go Ahead and Make All Those Mistakes. I began when I was talking on podcasts and things, talking about myself as a business mistake prevention specialist. And I realized after a while,
Jeff Holman, Host (03:01.006)
I love that.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (03:12.484)
It was only based on my experience in my book learning and some of the things I took from the corporation. So to fill that out and to give some credibility to it and actually add value, I commissioned and did this study late last year, published this year, studying that.
Jeff Holman, Host (03:28.074)
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to hear about that. I am going to pause and you have to forgive me just because you're saying intriguing things here for me. I had my physics class, high school physics class was taught by Stephen Jackson. He was the inventor. So he told us of the world's first and maybe only glass bottle stretchers. You know, when you went to the carnivals and you got the really elongated stretchers and filled them with whatever.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (03:53.818)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (03:56.75)
He made those now there's there's a whole lot more behind that and there's a voice that goes with it. In fact, I had a friend on on the podcast, maybe episode eight, I want to say with Spencer Harrison, he was a classmate of mine, we might have mimicked that that voice from Steven Jackson that day. But anyway, Cardwell, what an interesting world.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (04:11.558)
When you talk about stretching bottles, I think of the other machines of carnivals where you put the penny in and you squish it and you get the imprint of whatever site you're at. Anyway, we got distracted there.
Jeff Holman, Host (04:19.521)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (04:23.021)
I love it. I love it. Yeah. So, and I'm going to correct what I said before because I called you a business mistake specialist, but you are a business mistake prevention specialist. So, I want to make sure that prevention is in there. Well, tell us about this study that you did and 300 entrepreneurs, tell us about that.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (04:33.783)
Yes, yes.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (04:41.252)
Yes, yes, it was all online. asked a battery of 12 questions that were like rate this from I never do this to I always do this. And there were things like when I'm under stress, I rush decisions without fully checking all the details. So somebody either never does it, always does it. And most were someplace in the middle. We we asked that of all all 12 questions. They went through conditions, including stress.
Jeff Holman, Host (04:51.885)
Mm-hmm.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (05:10.01)
and fatigue and distraction, faulty assumptions, missed customer signals, and in general, knowledge gaps or competence gaps. we found, first off, that 80, I'm looking at my numbers, 86 % of the 300 said they made at least one business impacting a mistake in the past year. And one out of five said they had made five or more. So this is a very prevalent problem, even though people usually don't talk about it. My first book.
The Uh-Oh book, nobody was looking for it because nobody's searching for how not to make mistakes. They're all interested in how do I grow? How do I manage costs? How do I hire the right people? How do I succeed in the marketplace? But this is the hidden factor, these conditions under which decisions and actions are made.
Jeff Holman, Host (06:00.621)
Very interesting. And I was going to say 86 % said they... What happened to the other 14 % that they claim they hadn't made a mistake? That can't be.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (06:08.314)
Yes, yes, it's interesting because we took this battery of 12 questions to be able to separate the 300 into people based on their answers. Did it appear that they're high risk, medium risk or low risk? And the majority said that they're low risk, but their answers told us something different. We found that I think those that were high risk, those are the ones that said always or most of the time to some of these
Jeff Holman, Host (06:28.16)
Interesting.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (06:37.35)
risky questions, that was about at one point in time, because this probably changes over time. 9 % of people were at high risk today. The other, there were 51 % at medium risk. And then what are the differences? 40, 41, or something like that. Hold on. 40 % leftover. Those were, in fact, low risk based on their answers. So what does that mean?
Jeff Holman, Host (06:38.701)
Mm.
Jeff Holman, Host (06:47.213)
Hmm.
Jeff Holman, Host (06:56.653)
Yeah, I think it'll be 40 % left over.
Jeff Holman, Host (07:03.447)
Yeah.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (07:06.53)
It means at any given time, given conditions around a CEO, you can be in any one of those three. If you're under high stress, if you're having to work weekends and nights and not getting anything done, if your customers are complaining and there's lots of stress on you or you and your staff are basing things because you're going so quick on faulty assumptions that weren't checked.
Jeff Holman, Host (07:29.387)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Holman, Host (07:33.1)
Yeah, so that's super interesting that you've got these numbers. And just to clarify again, the perception that the CEO, of course, people outside the business world always think that CEOs are these super risky people and they take all these risks. And when you talk to CEOs, they're like, no, I don't take that many risks. I'm actually very measured in what I do. But your study shows that they're slightly more risky or maybe a lot more risky.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (07:58.951)
There were people who said that I'm low risk and we asked them why do they say that and they said things like that. No, I'm very measured and I take extra cautions and everything else. Those who said they were low, but in fact were less. They didn't say that. They say sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes I'm under pressure. And I recognize that my study was a point in time in their lives, not tracking them over weeks or months because I my suspicion based on this learning is
Everybody goes through peaks and valleys. And the advice I give is to be aware of when these stressful conditions are rising. Be aware of that. The analogy I use is if you're outside, everybody drives a car. If you're driving today's a nice blue sky day here in Delaware. But if you're driving yesterday in very heavy rain, you're going to keep the wipers on when it gets dim out. You're going to put your washer, your your lights, your watch, your lights on.
And you're to be much more cautious. The same can be and should be true for CEOs. When all this stuff is happening and you know it's present, take a pause. The advice, the way to act on this, and these are very simple things, just take a slow down around peak decision times. If you've got something going on that you really think is important, a decision, a hire,
Jeff Holman, Host (09:10.391)
Yeah.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (09:26.734)
a launch, go back and fact check or assumption check many of the things that are in there to be sure you're on the right path. Focus is critical. It's so easy, especially as a CEO, to be distracted by all the noise of just running the company, but also by your cell phone, by the phone ringing, by customers calling it odd hours. If it's one of these bad weather times with stress,
and distraction and fatigue impacting. Take an extra pause, check assumptions. You might ask yourself, would be at risk if that's a wrong assumption or what must be true for this to be a right assumption rather than just accept it on face value? Go ahead. I was just going to continue on the energy. Watch out if your battery is drained.
Jeff Holman, Host (10:10.573)
Mm-hmm.
Have you? go ahead.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (10:21.548)
I know me, I get kind of dumb when that happens and I just either avoid tough decisions or make sloppy decisions.
Jeff Holman, Host (10:29.291)
Yeah. Well, have you found that most CEOs are aware of their environment enough to make these types of assessments? Are they? Yeah.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (10:39.918)
I was going to ask you, I don't think so. I've kind of discovered this is kind of the hidden variable because everybody's looking at strategy and competition and everything else. Few people are thinking about that. And I take it as my job to make as much noise as I can because it is a factor many times in making good or bad choices.
Jeff Holman, Host (11:02.669)
Do you find then that, because I'm wondering about, know, as we talk about this, if I'm a single CEO running a small company and I'm trying to do everything myself, then, you know, I'm probably, I would assume, more susceptible to missing out on these environmental signals and then being at higher risk of making bad decisions and, you know, due to bad environment or, you know, bad judgment clouded by
or complicated by the environment around me. But I think I contrast that with a scenario where you've got, you know, a lot of these, I just think of VC backed funders who bring on investors and then they put a board of advisors or a board of directors in place. And now they're surrounded by a lot of people who probably have been, you know, down these paths before they've got the experience. That's a different type of environmental factor, right? Where you have a
peers or mentors or advisors who you either can go to or are expected to go to for these types of decisions. Is that fair to call that another environmental decision or factor?
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (12:10.31)
It is reach. When you're a solopreneur or running a small company and doing everything yourself and without VC or angels or somebody overlooking your shoulder because they have a vested interest in your success too, when you're all by yourself, it's logical to believe you're more susceptible. My study recruited people who were running small businesses and were entrepreneurs. And that includes these small company CEOs.
Jeff Holman, Host (12:39.159)
Mm-hmm.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (12:39.574)
We didn't get to qualify, do you have VC backing or are you bootstrapped? But it's logical to think if you've got these people who've been down the path before, they can warn you. If you are solopreneur or a small company and you're running it yourself, the advice besides taking the pause, checking assumptions is to reach out and get a mentor or get a third party who's smart or even a naive observer. You bounce this thing off of them to see
if it feeds back to you like you intended.
Jeff Holman, Host (13:11.659)
Yeah, yeah, no, it's, that sounds like writing a draft document. I've, I've, I've sat down to write arguments in legal issues before. I think of patent, patent examination and sometimes in, you know, party disputes. And I sit down and I'm like, I know exactly what's going on. I write down this argument and halfway through the argument, just, just by the fact of writing it down and putting the pieces in place, I'm like, wait a second.
This is not accomplishing what I thought it was going to accomplish. think I'm actually making a better argument for the other side than for my own client right now, which of course I, I will then rework and I'll figure out, you know, assess that more deeply. but is that the process where, you're just suggesting that people need to figure out how they, you know, what external factors maybe influence them.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (13:44.422)
Mm.
Jeff Holman, Host (14:01.205)
in a ways that cloud their judgment and then try to put some tools or exercises or something in place to counteract that.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (14:12.346)
Yes, by and large, that's it. I created a two acronym approach for this, one to be aware of these conditions and the other, it ties together five of the steps you can take. I've gone through those five steps. The acronym is STORM, when it's stressed, if you're stressed, tired, overloaded, rushed or missing signals, not just one of those, but a combination of those is the signal.
Jeff Holman, Host (14:27.184)
good.
Jeff Holman, Host (14:37.815)
Mm-hmm.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (14:41.924)
that you should watch out and drive more slowly or more carefully. The other acronym is SAFER, which is slow down at moments that matter. Assumptions check, focus and reduce distractions. Energy guardrails when you're fatigued don't choose to make key decisions or take key actions when it's the time you know you're always exhausted. Put them for the peak points of the day. And then the last one on R is
raised small issues early. did learn in our study that under these bad conditions, many founders and CEOs put off making hard, having hard discussions with employees, with customers. They just wait. And those things don't get better if you make them wait.
Jeff Holman, Host (15:26.573)
Okay, let's go through those one more time because I want to make sure that everyone has a chance to... It's like telling somebody your phone number at the end of a phone call. Here's my phone number, me back. And you're like, I got to listen to it. Maybe I am the only one that does this. I got to listen to it three more times to get the phone number. So first acronym is STORM and walk through those one more time, those five.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (15:34.032)
Yeah.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (15:40.615)
Me too. Yes. Storm, storm and at the end, if you want or in the show notes, just put my website, it's on there. If you're stressed, tired, overloaded, rushed and or missing signals, that's storm. And it's not one of those things. If that's present, you could probably make it through. But if multiples of those things happen at the same time, that's when you need to slow down and
and take these precautions. By the way, we did find that stress, fatigue, distraction, and assumptions typically happen together when one starts the other's fixer getting involved. Safer is slow down at moments that matter. A is assumption check before deciding or acting on something, especially when it's important. F is focus to reduce multitasking and distractions during those periods. E is
Jeff Holman, Host (16:31.723)
Mm-hmm.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (16:40.056)
Energy guardrails for fatigue. It's an awkward E, but watch out when you know you're too tired. Schedule important things outside of those times. And R is raise small issues early. One step I do recommend is to have people be self-aware of these conditions, either when they're heading into a very stressful or very important decision time or when they've just come out of it.
Jeff Holman, Host (16:49.037)
Got it.
Jeff Holman, Host (16:53.133)
Very nice.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (17:07.726)
Self-awareness can happen just by thinking about the acronym. I also have an online quiz you can take with these same 12 questions that helps you grade yourself and get a score on how much at risk you are. You can think in advance. I don't think I've had a risk. Let me check. So you can take these 12 questions and right away on the screen, you get your score answer and tells you whether you're high, medium, low based on what you said. And then out spits first on the
Jeff Holman, Host (17:24.812)
Yeah.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (17:37.798)
email comes and sends you the advice I kind of just gave with the word safer. It doesn't use the words, but it goes through those steps.
Jeff Holman, Host (17:46.593)
Yeah. Do you find that when people take this quiz that they are surprised by the results? Do a lot of people say, you know, I guess the people, if they're self-selecting to take this quiz, they've got some curiosity at a minimum, maybe an inclination to think that they are very, you know, risky or risk averse. Otherwise, you know, they're thinking about it in some sense. So, but do you find that when people take this that they...
that they the results validate what they're saying and what they think about themselves or are they surprised by the results?
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (18:18.342)
I think about half will be surprised because in the 300, more than half of the 300 said, I'm at low risk. And it turns out only 40 % were at low risk based on their answers. The other responses I've gotten from people, well, your scoring is kind of absolute. I never do that or I always do that. Everybody's always in between. So I got a few comments on, I wish it wasn't that absolute. when you're on, nobody else sees these, by the way, it's all.
confidential and it only comes to you, it's good to have a mirror to hold up to yourself.
Jeff Holman, Host (18:54.56)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that's what I think a lot of this show and a lot of the journey of being a CEO in a scaling business or any business for that matter is all about, right? We're trying to figure out how to scale our business and to do that we often have to figure out how to scale ourselves, know, improve the way we're doing things as well. Being more alert to the risks, either the behaviors that we do that...
allow risk to happen or the environmental factors, the external environmental factors that might increase the prevalence of risk in a decision seems, yeah.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (19:31.09)
or at least your risk of making what is probably preventable mistake. This assumes your strategy is good, your team is good, you're going down the right direction. When these things are happening, they can muck up the works.
Jeff Holman, Host (19:46.315)
And I love that you are bringing the focus back to the preventable nature of it, right? That's what makes you the mistake prevention specialists, because these mistakes, a lot of them are preventable. There are some things that happen in our businesses that we can't prevent, but there's so much that we can prevent. And prevent means take care of it so it doesn't happen as opposed to fix it after the fact,
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (20:10.318)
Yes, yes. One of my phrases is fixing mistakes is expensive. Fixing preventable mistakes is expensive. The things you want to kick yourself later because you should have caught it. But preventing them is could be priceless.
Jeff Holman, Host (20:26.678)
You know, and I've talked to my wife in our business, we just are a small law firm that we run and you know, we're not at the same scale as somebody running a, you know, $300 million or billion dollar business necessarily. But it's really interesting because I think in talking with CEOs that we work with, I think we, the two of us and our team experience a lot of the same things that larger scaling CEOs also experience, only because we look back and we say,
gosh, we should have had a check-in sooner. We should have stopped and reassessed before moving so quickly. And not everything's a mistake, but when we do have those moments of pause and reflection, we're like, huh, how could we have done a better job? And there's usually something probably comes into that. We probably need to apply those factors, those safer factors that you mentioned, and get the benefit from that in our own business.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (21:17.88)
It could be and having worked for years and years in the corporate environment and then been on my own and also I now counsel, I'm a score mentor. So I'm seeing new businesses every week. I can contrast them. And there was something called confirmation bias that I learned in the corporate world. If the CEO says something, nobody's challenging. A lot of times they're not challenged and people.
Jeff Holman, Host (21:35.02)
Mm-hmm.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (21:45.489)
They're not all yes guys, but sometimes they try to execute what's been said without challenging it. And it's because the CEO said it. In a 10 person firm, I think it's just as important as I was in a hundred thousand person firm. When the CEO says it, your job is to get it done, not to question it. The CEOs could do a better job of listening and asking those probing questions. Is this a good assumption rather than saying, let's do this?
Jeff Holman, Host (22:08.896)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (22:15.18)
I love that and I think back to some businesses I've worked with where I have seen some, I'll call them the business functions. Some of the business functions are more prone to just go along with whatever the leadership says in my experience. Whereas I was listening to a podcast recently and I think it was the CEO of Uber had said he loves to go talk to the engineers.
because the engineers are, they're not so, I don't know if they're not focused on or if they're not so attuned to the social dynamics, right? And I say this lovingly because I have an engineering background myself, but he loves to go to the engineers and ask the engineers what they think, because they'll usually tell them straight up. They'll just give them the unbiased feedback directly from, you know, their experience as opposed to thinking to themselves and filtering out what does the CEO want to hear.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (22:48.752)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Holman, Host (23:06.986)
What do they want to hear me say right now? So I don't know if that's a trick that works or not, but sounded like it might.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (23:09.37)
Yeah, yes, and I've heard it repeated there, the television show, the hidden boss, undercover boss, undercover boss. They went with the cameras roll, so it's kind of hard to hide it. going out and being with your customers as they're using your product or service is so eye opening, no matter what your rank is. But it's more important for the
Jeff Holman, Host (23:20.62)
Undercover. Yeah, yeah.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (23:38.06)
C-suite people into big companies for a 10 person, $2 million company. You're in the trenches all the time, but you have to make yourself want to go and do that probe because it's not part of the day to day.
Jeff Holman, Host (23:51.061)
Yeah, no, I love this is very valuable. I mean, what CEO and what business isn't making mistakes once in a while and wouldn't love to prevent those more often. So what I really Yeah.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (24:01.468)
yeah, yeah. And the last thought is just to differentiate these preventable mistakes are not the ones that are just part of starting up and making mistakes like falling off a bike and getting up and learning because there were some things you must learn, sometimes the hard way. These are the ones when you got that right, your strategy is pretty good, your team's great, and you fumble.
Jeff Holman, Host (24:25.12)
Yeah. Well, let me ask you this to kind of bring this to a close here. Do you see a difference between what I would call first time founders and second time or serial founders who have started businesses before? Do you find that the second time founders, because I often tell my clients, I'm like, look, this might be your first time around. It might be your first business, your first invention, your first SaaS platform, first e-commerce product, whatever it is.
One of the goals of working with me and other people who've worked with a lot of other companies who've been down these roads before is to help you see around corners that you haven't seen before, to help you act more like a second time founder, even though in reality you are a first time founder. Does that make a difference?
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (25:12.644)
We studied it a little bit in the study and we looked at company size. We looked at company length of time since launch and we did not find a quantified difference between them. It was not between men and women or age of things. think it is these preventable ones creep up on anybody no matter what. If you let down your guard or if the conditions these hidden conditions suddenly surprise you.
Jeff Holman, Host (25:40.126)
if you're not utilizing Storm and Safer in your business.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (25:43.77)
Yeah, I'd like to say that. But I believe first timers are learning everything the first time, the hard way, and they may be more cautious than somebody who's been through it three times. They might take some things for granted. So the fact we learned that the difference in mistake making didn't differentiate based on length of time. We didn't ask number of iterations and how many were sold off. But length of time is a proxy. Yeah.
Jeff Holman, Host (26:08.844)
But length of time might be a good proxy for that. Yeah, I like that. Well, this has been fascinating, William. I really appreciate you sharing that. And if people want to connect with you, what's a good way to do that? Where should they reach out?
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (26:21.752)
Easiest is the URL for the quiz. And I invite people to take that. You'll find me there too. It's MistakeRiskQuiz.com. Three words put together. MistakeRiskQuiz.com.
Jeff Holman, Host (26:35.638)
Very easy, wonderful. Well, thank you for coming on the show and sharing your expertise. That's been great. And to our audience who's joined us today, thanks again for joining us on The Breakout CEO.
WILLIAM HOLSTEN (26:40.378)
Thanks for having me, Jeff. I appreciate it.
