The Best Leaders Bat .600

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,755 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 3 minutes to read.

Happening in four15 - we have 17 firms in the community and Core Group sessions are starting this month. We held a strategic planning masterclass and I dropped my template for how I run Hall CPA’s annual strategic planning process. If you are running a firm >$1M in revenue, we’d love for you to be part of our budding community.

I had the pleasure of attending Winning Ways, a top practice management conference for CPA firms in Chicago.

During one of the excellent keynote sessions on leadership, the speaker had this to say about decision making abilities of great leaders:

The best leaders bat .600. You’d think that’s a mistake and they’d be more successful. The worst leaders? They bat .900!

The speaker’s point was great leaders find a way to make decisions quickly even when they don’t have all the information. They are comfortable taking risks and have honed their gut instinct through years of practice.

The worst leaders may have a higher hit rate but it comes ant the cost of speed. They are too slow to make decisions and suffer from analysis paralysis needing to know all information possible before moving forward. They are risk-averse and cannot operate in ambiguous environments (which is all leadership).

By the time they are ready to make a decision, the opportunity has passed.

They miss the boat.

Many of us accountants are overly analytical. Taking risks is hard and we’d prefer to analyze and re-analyze our spreadsheets to ensure 100% accuracy.

But as you move up in your career, and as your firm and team scale, your job becomes more and more subjective.

You cannot possibly have all the information.

So aim for a .600 success rate on your decisions.

Trade success rate for speed.

Make more decisions, more often.

That's all for this Sunday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:

→ Apply to join four15, the community I launched for ambitious firm owners doing $1M+ in revenue (17/30 spots filled)

→ Book a demo to get accurate salary data from B4Transparency so you can always attract top talent by paying top of market (I own a minority stake)

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