Your gut is good at real things. Reading a room. Sizing up a customer. Sensing when something is off on a job before anyone says it out loud. Those fast, in-the-moment calls keep the day moving, and that kind of instinct is earned.
What your gut can’t do is tell you whether the business is working. It remembers the wins louder than the misses. It leans on what felt true last year. It won’t catch a trend forming across twelve weeks or a margin slipping a point at a time. Those are the calls that belong to the numbers, not the feeling.
So keep the instinct for what it’s good at and hand the bigger questions to the data. The job you took because it seemed worth it. The price you held because it felt right. The slow stretch you brushed off. Each one has a number behind it that will tell you more than the gut did.
This week, take one decision you’ve been making on feel and check it against the number. Trust your gut where it’s strong. Let the numbers handle the rest.