“I just have a feeling about this one.”
The CEO was talking about a deal. Big logo, complicated scope, aggressive timeline. His sales lead was nervous. His ops lead was worried about delivery. His finance person—me, at the time—had run the numbers and they were thin.
But he had a feeling.
We took the deal. It was a disaster. Not a “learned some lessons” disaster. A “lost $180K and a key employee who quit from burnout” disaster. The kind you don’t forget.
Afterward, I asked him what the feeling had been based on. He thought about it for a long time. “I guess I just wanted it to work.”
That’s gut feel. Wanting dressed up as knowing.
I’m not here to tell you intuition is worthless. It’s not.
Gut feel works great for:
Reading people in a room. Sensing when a deal is going sideways. Knowing which employee is about to quit before they say anything. Catching the vibe shift when a client goes quiet.
These are pattern-matching problems. Your brain has processed thousands of similar situations and can surface a signal faster than conscious analysis. Trust that.
Gut feel fails for:
Whether a deal is actually profitable. How much runway you have if three things go wrong. Which customers are worth keeping and which are underwater. Whether you can afford the hire.
These are math problems. Your brain isn’t built to hold seventeen variables and compute their interactions in real-time. Nobody’s is.
The mistake isn’t using intuition. It’s using intuition for problems that require arithmetic.
The usual defense of gut feel is speed. “I don’t have time to run the numbers on every decision.”
Fair. But here’s what I’ve noticed: the CEOs who say this spend enormous amounts of time dealing with the consequences of decisions they made too fast.
The deal that looked good but wasn’t profitable? Six months of cleanup.
The hire they rushed because they “knew” he was right? Eight months of underperformance, then severance, then recruiting again.
The expansion they greenlit because the opportunity “felt” urgent? A year of dragging a money-losing office before finally shutting it down.
Gut feel isn’t faster. It’s faster to decide and slower to recover.
The companies I work with that operate best have flipped this. They’re slower to commit—not by much, maybe a day or two—and dramatically faster to execute because they’re not constantly unwinding mistakes.
When I talk about replacing gut feel with financial facts, I don’t mean analysis paralysis. I don’t mean waiting six weeks for a report. I don’t mean building models instead of making decisions.
I mean having answers available at the speed of conversation.
“Is this customer profitable?” You should know. Not calculate, know—within sixty seconds. Not revenue, not margin, but actual profitability after fully-loaded cost to serve.
“Can we afford this hire?” You should be able to model it against your 13-week forecast in five minutes. Here’s cash with the hire. Here’s cash without. Here’s the break-even point.
“Should we take this deal?” You should have a framework that scores it instantly. Margin profile, cash timing, delivery risk, strategic fit. Not gut feel. Criteria.
That’s Intelligence Rhythm. Not more analysis. Faster answers.
Most companies don’t choose gut feel over financial facts. They default to gut feel because the facts aren’t available.
The CEO isn’t ignoring the profitability analysis. There isn’t one. Nobody’s ever built it. The data exists in seven systems that don’t talk to each other, and pulling it together takes two weeks, so nobody does it.
The decision gets made on gut feel not because the CEO trusts his intuition more than data. It gets made on gut feel because gut feel is available and data isn’t.
This is the blank stare problem in action. The questions don’t get answered because the infrastructure to answer them doesn’t exist.
So the CEO does what any reasonable person would do: makes the best call with available information. Which is no information. Which is gut feel.
And sometimes it works. And sometimes it’s a $180K disaster.
One client, a $16M manufacturing company, used to make pricing decisions in the hallway. Sales would ask, “Can we do 15% off to close this deal?” and the CEO would say yes or no based on whether he was feeling generous that day.
We built a simple profitability model. Took about a week. Now when Sales asks about the discount, they get an instant answer: “At 15% off, this deal is break-even. At 10% off, it’s worth $14K. At full price, it’s worth $31K.”
The CEO still makes the call. But now it’s an informed call. He knows what he’s trading.
His close rate dropped slightly. His margin improved dramatically. Net profit up 23% in the first year. Not because he made different decisions, often he didn’t, but because he stopped making decisions in the dark.
That’s the shift. Not from gut feel to spreadsheets. From invisible tradeoffs to visible tradeoffs.
Some CEOs resist this. Not because they don’t believe in data—they do. But because data removes a certain kind of freedom.
When you don’t know which customers are profitable, you can pretend they all are. When you don’t know the real margin on a deal, you can tell yourself it’s “probably fine.” When you don’t know your runway under stress, you can avoid the anxiety of knowing.
Gut feel isn’t just a decision-making shortcut. It’s a way of not having to face what the numbers might say.
I get it. The numbers aren’t always kind. But they’re not going to change just because you’re not looking at them.
If you’re making decisions on gut feel right now, pick one.
One decision type. Pricing, maybe. Or hiring. Or taking on new customers.
Build the fact base for that one decision. What would you need to know to make it with confidence instead of intuition? Customer profitability data? Fully-loaded cost per hire? Margin by service line?
Get that one thing. Make it available. Use it.
Then pick another.
You’re not going to go from gut feel to financial facts overnight. But you can go from one decision to two decisions to ten decisions. And somewhere in that progression, you’ll notice that the disasters have stopped. Not because you got smarter. Because you stopped making math problems feel like intuition problems.
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Read about the Blank Stare Problem →
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