How embracing your inner toddler can be the best decision making strategy of all

Asking why over and over reminds me of my kids when they were toddlers: “But why, mum?” they’d ask again and again. No answer quite seemed to satisfy their curiosity or compulsion to understand “Why?”

But I tell you what – they were on to something and the truth is, asking why has become one of my most productive go-to strategies when making any decisions about Prezzee. Just when you think you’ve found a solution or got to the bottom of something, it usually pays to ask “why?” again just one more time. This is my unique blend of Simon Sinek’s philosophy of “finding your why” mixed with a bit of the 5 Why technique and when it comes to making business decisions about Prezzee it’s a recipe that has served us well.

Whether you are posing that “why?” to yourself or to others, asking, of course, goes hand in hand with listening. What’s the point, after all, in asking a question if you’re not going to really reflect upon and pay attention to the answer. Yes, sometimes you’re going to hear something that throws you, makes you uncomfortable, or disrupts your plans. But the journey of being a founder is in part about being able to adapt, respond and be flexible. And I’ve found that it’s easier and easier to know when it’s time to let go of something – especially if it’s your customer telling you. If you’ve asked why and you’ve listened, then the next thing is to respect what you’ve heard and put it into action.

All this reflecting is apropos Prezzee’s upcoming third birthday. Three! And two years for Prezzee Business. Toddlers, I suppose, in human age, but to be honest, both platforms were practically running before they crawled - in particular, Prezzee Business, which has shown phenomenal growth is such a short space of time.

In fact, Prezzee Business is a great example of why it can really pay to listen. We had a timeline and a vision for when we might eventually look at a business platform but were very focused on refining and rolling out the consumer user experience. We thought we had a pretty good picture of the industry but sometimes it’s not until you are really inside an industry that you realise what you don’t know. Prezzee Gift Cards had allowed us that opportunity to really get up close with retail and what we heard stopped us in our tracks and then very quickly set us on a new track at a faster pace than we had anticipated.

In the process of rolling out the Prezzee consumer product, we were having a lot of meetings with different retailers and it became obvious that there was another product they were crying out for – a business platform. For my co-founder and I, the penny really dropped in a meeting we were having with a sports and lifestyle retailer. It wasn’t that they said anything very specific like “Hey, you guys should do this”, it just became clear, if we listened “between the lines” so to speak, that there was an opportunity there to grab if we were alert to it. And indeed, the question at that point became less “why?” and more “why not?” A business platform would take Prezzee from being a seasonal consumer product to a year-round corporate service, capturing the rest of the market.

There was still very little Australian data from the market for us to work with, but we have become practised at working through big decisions intuitively, backing them up with as many facts and and trends from overseas as we can get our hands on, and then making the decision to take a risk or not. With Prezzee Business, it was a risk we were confident enough about to really dive into. Two years later, it’s one that keeps paying off.

There’s no resting on our laurels, though. We keep listening and we keep asking why. Our track record shows that by doing so, we’ve continued to add value to both platforms – adding features when they are needed and discarding features that don’t work for our clients and customers.

So I’m going to continue to embrace my inner toddler and ask why, always remembering to have my “listening ears” on for when the answer finally comes.