How to Identify Your "Perfect Pitch"

In baseball, you only have 3 chances to hit the ball before you strike out.

But in business, you can sit back and let 50 pitches go by that you don’t like. If you love the 51st pitch, you can swing for the fences.

Many of us swing at any pitch instead of patiently waiting for the right one.

Waiting for the perfect pitch is the mindset of several well-known investors and CEOs, including Warren Buffett. He likened his investing approach to the hitting approach of Ted Williams, one of the greatest hitters of all-time.

Williams broke the strike zone down into 77 different zones (each the size of a baseball). He understood what “his pitch” was - a fastball down the middle. If he got his favorite pitch every time, he could hit well over .400. If he swung at a pitch low and away, he did much worse.

Here’s how The Splendid Splinter described his approach at the plate:

“My first rule of hitting was to get a good ball to hit. I learned down to percentage points where those good balls were. The box shows my particular preferences, from what I considered my “happy zone” - where I could hit . 400 or better - to the low outside corner - where the most I could hope to bat was.”

Are you taking this approach to your business?

Too often, I see founders/CEO constantly trying to branch off into new industries and opportunities they don’t fully understand.

Instead, you should be replicating your best successes over and over again.

Warren Buffett has such a well defined investment philosophy that he’s willing to pass on decent investment opportunities, because he’s comfortable waiting for the fastball down the middle that he can crush.

How can you turn your business into a repeatable system where you’re just crushing fastballs down the middle over and over?

Buffett put it like this:

“If he waited for the pitch that was really in his sweet spot, he would bat .400. If he had to swing at something on the lower corner, he would probably bat .235.”

Ted hit .344 for his career, one of the best averages in the history of baseball.

But why didn’t he hit .400 for his career? Because with the parameters of the game of baseball, he was often forced to swing at a pitch that wasn’t hit. With 2 strikes, you can’t wait for the fastball down the middle. You have to swing at anything near the strike zone.

But people like you and I, don’t live within those parameters.

Buffett can look at 100 investment opportunities and pass on every single one of them if he doesn’t love any of them. His business is set up to wait for the right pitch; he has no incentives to deploy capital in a hurry or rush the process of buying companies in order to collect fees.

Here’s a question I challenge you to ask yourself about how you’ve set up your business:

Are you productive, or just busy?

Swinging at every single pitch can kill your growth opportunities.

Yet that’s what many of us do. We take on every single opportunity for fear of leaving some money on the table.

But often, those opportunities are the equivalent of swinging at a curveball that bounced 5 feet in front of home plate.

Poker may be a better analogy here. There is no 3 strike rule in poker. You truly could sit back and wait for the perfect hand to take action, no matter how long it takes (as long as you don’t make it obvious to the other players that you have a great hand).

In poker, half the profits come from 5 hands.

Business is the same.

Are you going all in with a terrible hand? Too many entrepreneurs expand all their resources trying to sell a product with terrible margins that customers don’t want. There’s a slim chance you’ll win playing a bad hand.

How can you set your business up to instead wait for the pair of aces, and then go all in?

Imagine you know how to market flowers. Take a look at these offers:

How to Market
How to Market Flowers
How to Market Perennial Flowers
How to Market Perennial Flowers in the U.S.
How to Market Perennial Flowers in SoCal to Garden Centers

The higher up the chart, the more buyers (more bad pitches as well).

The further down the chart, less buyers (but more selective pitches).

Can you do the same exercise for your business and find some very niche strategies that you’re positioned to execute?

Focus on High-Profit Activities:

• Just like the top 5 poker hands, identify your most profitable business activities. These could be high-margin products, services with recurring revenue, or customer segments that generate the most profit. Analyze your data to see where the money is coming from.

• Allocate resources towards these high-profit activities. This could mean investing in marketing for those products, hiring more staff to service those customers, or streamlining operations for those services. By focusing your efforts, you can maximize your returns, just like focusing on playing strong hands in poker.
  

Define Your Pitch. What exactly does the perfect pitch look like, and how can you set up a system to ensure that you ignore all the other pitches that come along?

The lesson:

• Analyze your past successes and define the criteria that made them great opportunities.

• Reject anything in the future that doesn’t look like your definition of the perfect pitch.

“Patience can cook a stone” -African Proverb