Sometimes we make the best decisions we can with the available information and things still turn to shit.

Before we bought our last two houses, I checked their elevation. To be fair, I was thinking more climate crisis - rising sea water - than flooding, but still, the house we bought in 2019 is 50M above sea level and pretty much on the Grey Lynn ridge.

It still flooded on January 27, 2023, to such an extent that the foundations were severely compromised, and geo-tech engineers are now determining whether it can be saved or is destined for the bulldozer.

Sensible decision

I made a sensible decision based on good information, but we still ended up without a home.

I vividly remember when I was 8, my parents were house-hunting. We’d moved into a new home when I was 3 or 4, and they had decided we needed something bigger. All the houses we looked at were larger, some with a sizeable amount of land (for Birmingham anyway).

I remember it so well because one of the houses came with a donkey! For us children that was the clincher. It also came with a lot - I mean a paddock amount - of land. But I didn’t really care about that.

It had a donkey.

I remember us begging our parents to buy the house. The sellers were quite amused.

But in the end they went with a perfectly serviceable house nearby. It probably cost £1,000 less than the house with the donkey. And £1,000 was a lot of money at the time.

In hindsight, if they’d bought the house with the donkey it would be worth at least twice as much now.

Not a sensible decision

But it was a rational decision at the time.

The point is, we make decisions with imperfect information.

Turns out that having a house with a donkey would have been a better economic decision than having a house on Grey Lynn ridge. But that was unknowable at the time.

So, what can we take from this?

This is what I have learned.

• All decisions involve risk because we have imperfect information

• Big decisions are more risky than small decisions

• You have to make decisions, so break them down into a series of small decisions when you can.

• Sometimes, you should buy the house with the donkey.

Over the last year, I’ve been working on a system to help small businesses automate getting more customers. Actually, it is a series of small bets that make it easier for your prospects to engage with you. Just one example. How often does your business miss a call? Research shows that over 50% of calls to small businesses go unanswered. When that happens prospects call someone else.

What is that prospect worth to you? Say you’re a hairdresser and an average appointment is worth $250 (I’m guessing here - I don’t have much call for hairdressers).

What would it be worth to you to engage with a prospect immediately, and offer them an appointment that they could book themselves online?

You can find out how we do that with Customer Reconnect, one small part of the LazyMagnet system.