In my latest monthly video, I talk about a simple idea: Indecision is a decision.
We tell ourselves we’re waiting. Waiting for the right moment.
But waiting is a choice.
And sometimes the most revealing version of that choice sounds like this: “We don’t have 90 minutes to spare.”
I hear it occasionally when I invite an entrepreneur and their leadership team to a 90-Minute Meeting to explore whether EOS might help them run a better business.
There’s no cost.
There’s no commitment.
There’s no contract hidden underneath the table waiting to leap out and attack you.
Just 90 minutes.
And yet:
- “We’re too busy.”
- “We can’t get everyone together.”
- “This quarter is crazy.”
- “Maybe when things settle down.”
You always have the time.
Not literally, of course. There are only 24 hours in a day, despite what LinkedIn productivity gurus seem determined to make us believe.
But we make time for what we decide matters.
A major customer calls? You find the time. The bank calls? You find the time. Your biggest employee threatens to leave? Suddenly calendars become surprisingly flexible. A crisis hits? Somehow six people who couldn’t find 45 minutes together for three weeks are all in a conference room within an hour.
So when we say, “We don’t have the time,” what we are usually saying is: “This is not important enough for me to make the time.”
Fair enough.
But here’s where it gets interesting.
How do you know?
- How do you know the meeting isn’t important if you haven’t taken the meeting?
- How do you know the conversation won’t save you hundreds of hours later?
- How do you know it won’t expose an issue that is quietly costing you money, people, momentum or sleep?
- How do you know the 90 minutes you “can’t afford” isn’t precisely what helps you get hundreds of hours back?
That is the paradox.
The businesses that insist they don’t have time to work on the business are often the businesses most desperately trapped inside it.
- Everyone is busy.
- Everything is urgent.
- Every issue is mission critical.
- Every email demands an immediate response.
- Every customer is a fire.
- Every employee issue lands on the owner’s desk.
And somehow the founder has become air traffic control for the entire company.
At some point, I have to ask: If everything is important, is anything actually important?
And if you genuinely cannot carve out 90 minutes to examine how your business is being run, perhaps the lack of time isn’t the objection.
Perhaps it is the evidence.
Because running around like a chicken with its head cut off isn’t necessarily a sign of commitment.
Sometimes it’s a sign that the business is running you.
That distinction matters.
There’s also another possibility: A more uncomfortable one.
Maybe the objection has nothing to do with time. Because the scary part isn’t losing 90 minutes.
The scary part is what those 90 minutes might reveal.
- That your priorities aren’t actually clear.
- That your leadership team isn’t aligned.
- That everyone is working incredibly hard, but not necessarily toward the same destination.
- That a people issue you’ve been tolerating for 18 months is poisoning the organization.
- That your meetings are mostly updates, debates and recycling the same unresolved problems.
- That accountability is fuzzy.
- That your processes live inside people’s heads.
- That growth has created complexity faster than your company has created discipline.
Or, most uncomfortable of all:
What if you are the problem?
Ouch.
I say that with enormous empathy because entrepreneurs are usually the reason the business exists in the first place. And the same reason why so many of them ultimately fail.
- Your energy created it.
- Your instinct grew it.
- Your refusal to quit saved it.
- Your fingerprints are everywhere.
But sometimes the very behaviors that helped create the business eventually begin constraining it.
- The visionary becomes the bottleneck.
- The problem solver prevents others from learning to solve problems.
- The founder who wants control inadvertently creates dependency.
- The leader who says, “Nobody can do it as well as I can” eventually builds a company where nobody does.
This is why I describe the 90-Minute Meeting as a mirror.
A mirror doesn’t create wrinkles. It just reflect they’re already there.
And if you’re not prepared to gaze into it and acknowledge the inconvenient truth, I’m not sure EOS Worldwide can help, because this runs way deeper than any operating system can fix alone.
This was the point of my latest video: Indecision is a decision.
When you refuse to choose, you aren’t preserving the status quo. You are choosing it. And the status quo has a cost.
That is how companies get stuck. Not usually because of one catastrophic decision, but because of 100 decisions they refused to make.
So I have a challenge for you.
- Think about the meeting you “don’t have time” for.
- The conversation you keep rescheduling.
- The issue that somehow survives every leadership meeting.
- The decision that has lived on your mental to-do list so long that it is practically paying rent.
And ask yourself three questions:
- Is this really about time?
- What might I discover if I actually confront it?
- What is waiting costing me?
You don’t need to know exactly what the answer will be before taking the first step.
Maybe the meeting changes nothing.
Fine.
You lost 90 minutes.
…but maybe it:
- Changes the trajectory of the business.
- Gives you your time back.
- Forces a conversation that should have happened a year ago.
- Exposes the root cause instead of allowing you to spend another year treating symptoms.
- Reveals something about your company.
- Reveals something about you.
And perhaps that’s exactly why you’ve been too busy to take it.
Are you sure you don’t have 90 minutes? If you do, book the 90-minute meeting directly right here.
PS The number one thing I hear from clients who took a long time to commit: Why didn’t we start it sooner?
