High-Level Decision Making With FnD Piers
- May 6
- 3 min read
By Bill Vaughan
Hello, my name is Bill Vaughan, and I am the Co-owner and Founder of FnD Piers. If you think high-level decision-making is about sitting in a mahogany boardroom waiting for an epiphany, you’ve already lost the race. In the world of foundations and business, everything is an absolute animal. You’re either moving forward, or you’re being swallowed by the abyss. Elon Musk says business is like chewing on glass and walking into the abyss, and he’s right. If you want to survive, you need a framework that is Fast and Dependable, not one that is slow and bloated.
Here is how we handle the heavy lifting at FnD Piers to ensure our decisions actually add value instead of just wasting time and margin.
The Framework: Start, Stop, and Continue
People love to overcomplicate frameworks. They build these complex systems that look great on a whiteboard but fall apart the moment they hit the mud. At our shop, we keep it simple because simple is what survives.
Every Monday morning, we ask three questions: What should we start doing? What should we stop doing? And what are we going to keep (continue) doing?
If you want to make an effective decision, you have to be disciplined enough to look at your current operations and identify the dead weight. If a process isn't saving time or making money, it’s a bad smell and you need to stop it immediately. Iron sharpens iron, but only if you get the metal to 800 degrees and hammer it out until it’s solid. That Monday morning discipline is the heat that keeps our business sharp.
Evaluating Risk: The Foundation Test
In foundation repair, if you don’t account for the soil, the fat clay that shifts and moves, the whole house eventually falls into a hole. Business risk is the same. You evaluate risk by looking at the foundation: the people.
I look for quality humans. You can tell a lot about a risk by looking at the telltale signs. I call it the Truck Test. If a man shows up and his truck is a rolling disaster, he’s a high-risk hire. If he can’t take care of his own equipment, he isn't going to take care of your project.
Systematic risk evaluation isn’t just about spreadsheets; it’s about character. If you’re healthy and disciplined, you can handle a crisis. If your organization is unhealthy, meaning you have people on the struggle bus who make excuses, your risk goes through the roof. We mitigate risk by hiring for discipline and firing for a lack of it.
Execution: The Next Day Mentality
Planning is worthless if it doesn’t lead to execution. I wrote the book Next Day Helicals because, in this industry, speed is the ultimate competitive advantage. Most guys want to give you a three-week lead time. We want to be there the next day.
To improve execution, you have to be the cup of coffee and the cattle prod. You have to be the partner who supports your team, but you also have to be the driver who pushes them to move.
Simplification: Take a complex system and break it down until it’s a simple step.
Milestones: Tie everything to time and money. If the dirt hasn't moved, the check doesn't get cut.
Nothing is going to teach you to ride the bull like riding the bull. You can read every management book on the shelf, but until you get out there and start drilling, you don’t know anything. Take care of the project’s health, and the project will take care of you. Be disciplined, be fast, and for heaven's sake, be dependable. That’s the only way to stay out of the abyss.
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