We've watched a lot of owners lose deals.

Almost none of them lost because they made the wrong call.

They lost because they made the right call too late.

The invoice you can't cover, the equipment that would double your output, or the ad you desperately need to run.

You knew what to do, but you couldn't move.

And each day you sat on it, the decision got heavier.

Because waiting can feel like the cautious choice when it's actually holding you back.

Ask the Fed.

In a recent Small Business Survey, managing cash flow and credit access sit right behind rising costs as the thing keeping owners up at night.

Here's something else that should grind your gears: that same survey found large-bank applicants wait the longest for a credit decision of any lender type.

Not funding, just the decision to move forward or not.

Meanwhile, community banks typically take 2 to 4 weeks for funding.

And SBA loans? 30 to 90 days.

Now, name one good opportunity that waited 90 days to get a yes…

Yeah. That's what we thought.

Jeff Bezos grew Amazon on a simple axiom: not every decision deserves the same amount of fear.

Some decisions are one-way doors.

Walk through those, and you can't walk back.

(At least not without a pretty hefty cost.)

Decisions like that deserve long, slow, sweaty deliberation.

Pretty much everything else?

Two-way doors. Reversible or fixable.

Bezos’ warning to his own team: treat every decision like a one-way door and you get slowness, risk aversion, and a company that stops inventing.

Said another way: being wrong may cost less than you think, but being slow is expensive for sure.

Now look at your last capital decision.

Was it a one-way door or a two-way door?

Did you wait too long, or did you act too fast?

Running decisions through this framework keeps you focused on what matters, without getting slowed down by decision fatigue.

Let's talk about the 24-Hour Rule.

If your next decision is a two-way door, you get 24 hours.

One day to deliberate before you have to move on it.

Because speed isn't recklessness.

Recklessness is going fast through a one-way door, while speed is refusing to crawl through a two-way one.

The owners who win aren't fearless.

They just know which doors are which.

Keep swinging,

-Team Contrarian

P.S. Codie goes deeper on all of this in her new book, Own or Be Owned.

Sign up here for the free launch event, learn how to make good decisions at scale, AND potentially win part of $1M+ in cash and prizes.

Plus, if you sign up to be an affiliate and bring tons of people, you could win exclusive merch, signed books, and more.

But no matter what, if you attend the launch on September 18th, you’ll walk away with my #1 business scaling tool, FREE.

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Talk soon,

-Codie

The information contained here is educational, may not be typical, and does not guarantee returns. Background, education, effort, and application will affect your experience and the profitability of any business. Individual results may vary.

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