I was recently reminded of the challenging and difficult decisions that we must make in the business world…especially those that cause many sleepless nights and constant second guessing. As a business owner I’m often faced with such decisions yet I rarely find myself losing sleep or second guessing myself. I’ve been raised to follow your heart and do what I know is right…even if it hurts.

Without naming names or getting into too much detail, several months ago I was faced with such a rare situation – in the first year of my business. Even though the end result was one of the most important decisions I’ve made in my young career as the owner of my company, it didn’t make the situation any easier to deal with at the time.

Several months back we had just started working with a new client who had an amazing new technology. After several months of sharing ideas and swapping business philosophies, we were eager to get started on this new client. Surprisingly, our first task was to support a decision they had made to litigate against a competitor infringing on their technology patent instead of leading with the various positive story angles around their innovative technology. We agreed to support such an announcement but advised that we shouldn’t be proactive with our outreach as with any litigation, they couldn’t get into details about the lawsuit at the end of the day. A story came out in a popular technology blog that the client viewed as unfavorable and ironically, this blog also happened to have a partnership with the competitor they had just named in a lawsuit. Here is the kicker…the very next day this blog was added to the lawsuit despite the hundreds of other partners this competitor had…the blog was the only partner added. That’s when my ethical radar kicked in.

To make a long story shorter, I made the decision to let that client go. Not because I didn’t agree that fighting for your patented technology was the right thing to do, but because they were leveraging litigation to get back at an unfavorable blog post. Not to mention my name & my firm’s name was on the release.

The reason I’m sharing this story with each of you is not to discuss if it was right or wrong to make this decision (I am at peace of mind today about my decision), but to remind each one of you to follow your heart and above all else…make the right decision, no matter how wrong it might feel at the time.

Have you ever looked back on a decision you made in business (or life) and no matter how hard it was to stomach at the time, felt refreshed that you truly did the right thing?

I’ll leave you with the words of the wise and crafty Mark Twain…”Always do right – - this will gratify some and astonish the rest.”