Help with your decisions

Problem: People procrastinate over questions like: Car and home buying/selling decisions, which job offer to take, what clothes to buy, where and what to invest in, where to live, etc. Decision advisors do exist -- Clergy, fortune tellers, friends, family, psychologists, lawyers, etc. -- but they sometimes have religious, profit/sales, personal, or other biased motivations that influence their decision processes. People often do not know where to find advisors who can help in making decisions in an unbiased manner. Some people are better/more experienced at making decisions than others.

Suggestion:

I suggest a face to face version of a media consumer decision advisor such as clarkhoward.com. Clark Howard has no posted business phone or e-mail address. His WSB radio employer will not allow them as so many people stop him in the street, and try to otherwise get in touch with him for personal advice.

Independent, fee based, one stop shop “General Practitioner Decision Advisor” offices could be franchised. They would provide the same sort of advice that Clark Howard provides. Clark has already done much of the market research that would be required to determine the type of questions that people ask and what kind of answers they seek -- just listen to his syndicated radio show or see his web site. Clark himself could start such a franchise as he is an MBA with business experience. I suspect that, following the 80/20 rule defined by Pareto, at least 80% of the decisions that the average human has to make have also been made by other humans millions of times in the past. It seems that the successful and unsuccessful analysis/decision making patterns could be harvested from a large group of persons, for each subject area. The successful decision making processes could be analyzed, averaged and converted into software “flow charts” distributed to the franchises and to be utilized by the clients. The advisor would walk the client through and assist in interpreting the results.

I would guess that 20% of the problems would be beyond the scope of the decision advisor and would have to be referred to doctors, psychologists, marriage counselors, lawyers and other specialists, just as a General Practitioner MD forwards a patient to a medical specialist. The decision advisor would charge a referral fee for his or her services in guiding the client to unbiased specialists.

Other examples of fee based independent advisors are independent insurance agents and independent financial advisors. Other free sources of (hopefully) unbiased decision making assistance include “Consumer Guide,” http://tinyurl.com/cyuex, and corporate hotlines assisting employees in deciding savings and insurance benefit choices.

This concept sounds overwhelming initially. An adventurous entrepreneur or business school research project would be required to “trail blaze” this concept, at least in a one on one client environment. I suspect that an entrepreneur would have to offer the service for free or at a very low "introductory" cost initially to discern the type of questions regularly asked by –fee- paying clients, and to define the best decision making processes for those questions. 5,200,00 decision making “flow charts” appear in a Google search done today, but many persons do not know where to locate them, or would prefer the guidance, confidence and assurance of a professional in selecting and/or creating the proper flow charts.

A psychology background might be of benefit for the decision advisor as some interpretation of the individual needs and characteristics of each personality will be required. The decision advisor could be certified and monitored by an organization modeled on those that certify independent financial advisors and similar professionals, in order to keep bias and "kickbacks" to a minimum.