The CEO Decision Filter: How to Stop Pivoting Mid-Quarter

Tired of chasing every trend and feeling like your momentum resets every few weeks? We break down a simple CEO decision filter that keeps you focused for a full 90 days, even when revenue dips, boredom creeps in, competitors launch something shiny, or early results feel slow. The goal is clear: stop the mid‑quarter pivots, double down on what matters, and choose profit on purpose.

We start by separating strategy problems from discipline problems. Strategy issues show up as unclear messaging, misaligned offers, and audience mismatch; these require sharpening your promise and ensuring product‑market fit. Discipline issues look like one‑and‑done emails, sporadic posting, skipped collaborations, and platform hopping. From there, we move into data versus emotion—why a single viral post or a quiet week tells you nothing, and how to track leading and lagging indicators over a full 90‑day cycle so your choices are grounded in real numbers, not mood swings.

Focus is the multiplier, so we stress aligning every task with one 90‑day revenue goal and using an idea parking lot to defer good opportunities that don’t serve the current plan. We also unpack the difference between discomfort and misalignment: discomfort is the stretch that precedes growth, while misalignment drains your energy and signals a pivot to schedule next quarter. Instead of burning strategies down, we show how to tweak within the plan—iterating copy, refining audiences, optimizing funnels, and improving calls to action—so you build repeatable systems and SOPs that speed execution and strengthen confidence.

If you’re ready to measure what matters, keep momentum through the messy middle, and make decisions you can defend with data, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share with a founder who needs focus, and leave a review with your one 90‑day revenue goal—you’ll help others commit alongside you.

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Transcript

Focus On 90-Day Momentum

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This card card is for uploads and service page with the product. Each week you'll have to add clients now with all these people yellow output or support programs, products, and platforms while building a business that supports your life, not the other way. If you're ready to move beyond trading time for money and build profit with intention, you're in the right place. How many times have you changed direction in the middle of a quarter? You have decided that you're gonna try to start to chase a new strategy, a new shiny object. You see someone else talking about something and think it has to be the trend that you need to be getting on. Substack, for example. It's not a matter of needing to change. You have to stick to those 90-day quarter goals. Momentum is what's going to continue to build your business. A pivot resets it and doesn't leave you anywhere to go from there. There are four common triggers for pivoting mid-quarter. The first one is going to be a revenue drop. We notice that there isn't as much revenue coming in and we immediately start to panic and think that we have to pivot away from what we were doing and the plan that we've laid out because there's a revenue drop that we weren't anticipating. The second is boredom. We get bored. We are creative beings, we are entrepreneurs. Many of us will get bored if we are continuing to stay on a path that we've laid out for ourselves. Doesn't make it okay. The third is we may see someone, a competitor, for example, doing something new or different. Substack, I alluded to in the beginning of this video. It very well could work for someone else. But I want you to pay attention to why are they talking so much about Substack all of a sudden? Is it because they're promoting a new course on Substack or a workshop? So it's really determining what is the right move for you and your goals. The reason why someone is jumping on a trend isn't because it's in line with your goals. It's often because it's a trend. They want to be the first ones out there and they're gonna look to monetize it as quickly as possible. So you have to keep that in mind. When you are trying to determine why people are doing what they're doing, and you then need to decide I'm staying with the 90-day goals that I set out for myself so that I can know whether or not the path that I am on is going to actually bring profit into my business. And the fourth reason is discomfort when results are not being seen. When we don't see results, we can often start to feel really uncomfortable and question everything that we're doing and we think that we should burn it all down and start over. And that's just not true. You have to actually set yourself up to be able to watch and see what is going to happen. Nothing in the online business world is going to be immediate gratification that leads to profit. You will get immediate gratification. You'll get likes and impressions and things that ultimately don't matter to your bottom line. So you have to make sure that you are staying the course within your 90 days. In the CEO decision filter, there are multiple steps that we are going to take. The first step is to determine whether or not this is a strategy problem or a discipline problem. When it comes to it being a strategy, you are going to be examining whether or not your messaging is off. Maybe you didn't make it really clear on who it was meant for. You didn't hit on the pain points. That would be a strategy issue. Maybe your offer is misaligned. It's not meant for the exact audience that you were trying to portray it to. Or maybe when you put that offer out there, it wasn't actually ready to go with the product or service because you haven't thought about the pain points that you have to talk about in order to get people to purchase that product or service. And then you may very well have an audience mismatched. These are all strategy issues. So now I want you to determine if it's actually strategy or discipline. A discipline problem is you stopped promoting. You said I'm gonna put out one email and you did one email, or you put it out once on your social media. You didn't continually have it as part of a funnel where you are consistently promoting it. You didn't follow through. You said you were going to take certain steps, whether that was reaching out to collaborate with others or get on other podcasts or potentially just build relationships. Instead, you stopped and determined that it wasn't the right fit for what you were doing. And you might have shifted your focus halfway through. This is often what I see clients do. They say that they're going to grow their email list and they're going to make sure that they are collaborating with others. Maybe they're gonna reach out to do list swaps, and instead, halfway through, they decide, nope, I'm gonna go on to a new platform and I'm gonna build it on there because I hear everyone talking about how great Substack is. Or they decide, I wanna go on back to Instagram and I'm gonna use Instagram because my people interact and have common conversations with me, but they don't take any action. So, how is it actually impacting your bottom line? Is the question I want you to ask. This all comes down to discipline. These types of stops and pivots are a matter of your discipline, not a matter of the strategy being the problem. So you need to determine why you are doing these things, whether you are stopping because it's a strategy issue that you need to fix, or is it actually discipline and following through on what you said you were going to do? The second thing that you have to ask yourself when you're determining this CEO decision filter is am I making a decision based on data or emotion? We often will make decisions because we feel we should. You have to look and see is this something that you are consistently measuring over time? Not one week, not two weeks. I'm asking you to stick to 90 days and measure it. Do you have multiple data points, not just again from one week, but over the course of 90 days to show that this isn't the right fit? And are your objectives actually clear where you were trying to go, the goal that you set for yourself? Were those tasks and projects actually in line with what you were trying to do? Now, if that's the case, then you're having a database pivot. And those should be happening after 90 days, not because in the middle of your second week in within your 90 days, you see a dip. This is an emotional decision then that you are making. If you start to feel uncomfortable with where you are trying to go and you potentially see a dip in your income. So you will decide you're going to totally walk away from what you were anticipating you were going to do, the path that you had let out for yourself for those 90 days. You may often make an emotional decision based on low engagement post or a high engagement post. All of a sudden you have a post that you thought wasn't going to do so well, but now it's doing great. So you think you have to really make sure that you're putting all your eggs in that basket, or vice versa, a low engagement post. And now you think, nope, my people don't want to hear about this. They're not interested in it at all. And you may also be affected by someone else's success. You may hear or see someone talking about something that is within your pillars of content that you speak about because you have a product or service for it, but that wasn't what your actual goal was for the first 90 days. So you need to make sure that you are deciding, looking at this through a decisive lens and seeing is it actually an emotional decision that you are making or is it databased? Is it based on actual numbers? Where I've given myself a sufficient amount of time to determine that. The third question and final question in the CEO decision filter is does this align with my 90-day priority? Am I making sure that I am sticking to that one revenue goal that I set for myself? And these were the tasks and projects that I was going to do. I haven't decided that I'm going to add something in that's totally going towards another goal that I may have. Yes, it may be a product or service that I offer, but is it something that I was planning on focusing on in this 90 days? That's key to take note of. Now, that wasn't part of my 90-day tasks, but the task was in line with the goal of growing that specific niche audience. So it's really determining is it in line with where you were trying to go with your 90-day goals? You have to understand, ideas are not equal to priorities. That is why we need to create a parking lot for certain ideas. That summit that I was invited to, maybe I would do in the next quarter in Q2 or Q3. Maybe I would find after Q1 of being very niche specific that maybe I shouldn't be putting all my eggs into this basket and I need to broaden my horizons with a broader audience. You need to determine that for yourself and know whether or not where you are trying to go. But the only way you can do that is to make sure that you are using data to determine if what you are trying to do is actually coming to fruition and revenue growth. The last piece I want to speak to you about is discomfort versus misalignment. I often talk about the fact that growth happens right as you start to get uncomfortable. And I've had many clients say that this is what they have found. They get uncomfortable and then all of a sudden the growth happens. That is a normal feeling. You're feeling a little uncomfortable, you're kind of questioning who am I to be doing this. It's often a matter of confidence and imposter syndrome kind of sneaking in and beating us up a bit, making us feel like we don't know what we're talking about. We're not the expert that should be speaking on this. That is discomfort. Misalignment is when you feel energy drained, you feel burnt out, you feel as if what you're doing isn't making a difference because it's not what you want to be speaking on. That is when you know that potentially a pivot is needed in the next 90 days. When you can see the difference between discomfort and misalignment, it is going to make all the difference because growth is uncomfortable. We are supposed to feel that. We are supposed to question and have that unknown of is this the right decision that I am making. So if you have listened to Kate Walker's recent episode on how she took her in her course that was specifically meant for just Texas and then made it national, she talked about that uncomfortable feeling of questioning who am I to be doing this? It's that imposter syndrome. And it's okay to feel that, but it's okay to sit with it too and work through it. Because that is where on the other side you will see the growth. Here's what I need you to finally understand is that when something is actually failing, you have to be able to see it and understand it and be able to decide how you are going to then pivot. But it's important that you keep yourself within these 90 days. Feeling that you are failing within two weeks of doing something is not failure. It's just potentially not knowing what you're going to be doing and wanting to get bored or feeling like someone else is doing something better. You have to stay within that 90 days to determine if you are actually failing. You have to make sure that you're tracking the metrics consistently so that you can see whether or not the numbers are actually showing that. If you are in an ad campaign and you give an ad campaign two weeks, it's not the right amount of data. You have to give it three months to really sit on it and see if it is continuing to grow and evaluate it during that three months. Don't just sit there waiting to see what's going to happen. Determine what is happening. Understand the conversions that you're looking for. Understand how you can potentially tweak the copy and be more strategic in what you are doing rather than just kind of letting it ride. Too often I watch entrepreneurs do this. They sit back, they put something in place, and they're gonna let it ride without tweaking. You have to continue to tweak within that strategy, not walk away and try an entirely different strategy, but tweak little things, the copy, the way in which you are aligning with your audience, who you are speaking to. These are the things that will make a difference. That is where strategy comes into place and is key for continuing to grow your business. Every time that you stay the course, you will find that you will gain more confidence. You will end up with more systems that are in place because you're doing it confidently. You're speeding up your process. It's not taking you as long to record a podcast episode or a YouTube video or do the task that you have said you are going to do in order to hit your goals. So I really want you to start to look at how you can make sure that you are sticking with what you set yourself up to do and make it so that the systems can really become stabilized. It can be part of your processes, your SOPs that you are creating within your business so that you can determine if this is the right fit after those 90 days because now it's not taking as much time and energy as it did in the beginning. Finally, I want you to ask your question, yourself these questions. What have you abandoned too soon in the past? What could you actually have committed to for 90 days? And what is that one revenue that you goal you are going to commit to for 90 days? And if you're not familiar in creating a 90-day plan for yourself, how to make sure that you are choosing the right goals and the projects and tasks that go into those, you're definitely going to want to grab my 90-day plan program. It is going to walk you systematically through creating that 90 day plan so that you can make sure that you are hitting the goals that you set for yourself and continuing to grow your business to what you want to see come from it.