If you’re new at being your own boss, especially the boss of an online home-based business, you’re probably also new at being solely responsible for making the decisions that can determine whether your business even survives. While most of your decisions will be clear cut – what would be good for your business in the long term versus what would be bad – some decisions may force you to choose between what’s bad for your business and what would be even worse.

Well, don’t worry. In the event that you find yourself having to choose between what's bad for your business and what's worse, this is all you have to remember: ALWAYS CHOOSE BAD. Why? Because choosing worse always makes you LOOK worse.

A textbook example of this recently occurred in the horse riding industry. A fast-moving virus was rapidly infecting horses in the western region of the United States and Canada -- nearly one hundred confirmed cases at more than five dozen facilities, and, sadly, at least a dozen horses euthanized. Quarantines were quickly declared, restricting horses from being transported across state and county lines and resulting in many rodeo and other horse riding events to be cancelled or postponed.

After postponing a horse riding competition for young women, however, one group decided that "the show must go on." But how could it, when they were unable to use actual horses? Someone came up with the idea of using TOY horses – plush, stuffed horses’ heads on sticks!

If you’re wondering why this business decision falls into the “worse” category (whereas continuing to postpone the event would have been merely “bad”), you need only to look at the resulting photos and videos of teenaged girls galloping around on stick horses looking like overgrown toddlers in an overgrown sandbox. And the videos are getting easier to find – the offline and online media coverage is pushing them into viral territory, accompanied by remarks like “New Olympic sport?” and “Straight out of a Monty Python skit” and “I thought April Fools Day was long gone,” and “I would have demanded a refund.”

Maybe it was decided that the show had to go on because the competition hosts couldn’t afford to give out refunds. Maybe they thought they’d look more attractive to potential sponsors and advertisers by having the "courage" to forge ahead. But instead, they’re on their way to being an international laughingstock. More important, barring a complete turnover in upper management, additional sponsorship revenue is much less, not more, likely to happen.

When you’re both the only boss and only employee of an online home-based business, "worse" decisions can be impossible to recover from. But it’s a lot easier to tell which are good, bad, and worse decisions when you understand the basics of legtimate online marketing.