Badger CPA finally reached a place Shannon Badger once would have begged for: steadier forecasts, stronger managers, and fewer surprises. But with the company running so smoothly, did โboringโ mean they had stopped trying?
Today, Shannon Badger is co-founder and managing partner of Badger CPA, a firm that provides accounting, tax, fractional CFO and controller, and advisory services to small and midsize businesses. The company has grown from zero revenue to roughly $11 million with around 60 employees.
Shannon started the firm knowing how to be a good accountant. Then came everything else: Hiring, firing, building a team, setting expectations, creating accountability. Learning how to run a company while already responsible for clients, employees, and a family.
She remembers feeling like she was failing on a regular basis in those early years. Over time, one thing did change: she got faster at recovering.
A mistake could still sting, but it stopped defining her. She could learn from it and keep going.
The early years took a lot out of her
Shannon and her family went all in on the business. They remortgaged their house. Vacations became home exchanges because money was tight. At one point, they were willing to move into a smaller house if thatโs what it took.
She was at home with her kids without really being present. Work was still pulling at her through calls, deadlines, and whatever needed attention. Looking back, Shannon feels like there were years when her family got less of her than she wishes they had.
Shannon doesnโt tell these stories like trophies. Theyโre part of why she sees the early years differently now. She knows how easy it is to get used to operating under pressure when pressure is all youโve known.
A system made the hidden problems harder to ignore
Shannon found mentors, peer groups, and coaches pretty early on, which helped the leadership team narrow its focus and stop treating every new idea like an emergency. But inside the company, too much was still fuzzy.
Roles werenโt always well defined. Expectations were uneven. Leadership was still trying to keep things together without one shared way to run the business.
Then Badger CPA implemented EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System.
Implementing EOS was a big light-bulb moment for Shannon and her team. But at first, things almost felt worse. They were finally seeing problems they hadnโt recognized or dealt with before.
People were in the wrong seats. Some employees probably shouldnโt have been there at all. Expectations that had been vague had to be spelled out.
Shannon wanted more structure, and getting it meant dealing with things the company had been working around.
That included one of her own habits.
One more hour from Shannon wasnโt going to fix it
Shannonโs natural move was always to jump in. If work was behind, she could help. If a client needed something, she knew how to do it. If somebody was stuck, she could pick up part of the load.
Then she got a reminder of how much the company had grown.
Roughly 40,000 employee hours were flowing through the firm in a year. If something was breaking down somewhere inside all of those hours, Shannon adding one more hour of her own was barely going to move anything.
Her husband put it bluntly: โYou working harder is not going to move the needle.โ
That didnโt mean she stopped helping. Shannon still jumps in sometimes when a big client issue or deadline calls for it, but now she looks past the immediate problem.
Why did this happen? Is the process broken? Is the role unclear? Is somebody in a job that doesnโt fit? Is leadership avoiding a people issue because itโs easier to keep covering for it?
Owners can spend a lot of time working around people problems instead of dealing with them. Everyone else picks up the slack, and the issue stays right where it was.
Shannon also started noticing another side effect of always being willing to help.
Helping too much taught people to hand work back
An employee would bring Shannon a hard problem. She knew how to solve it, so she would take it on. Over time, her team learned that if something got hard enough, Shannon would handle it.
Shannon calls it upward delegation.
The owner gets frustrated that everything keeps landing back on their desk, but sometimes the team is only doing what the owner taught them to do.
One of Shannonโs favorite questions now is, โWhat do you propose we do about it?โ
The employee still gets the help and expertise they need from those higher up, but they have to think through the answer first. Shannon can coach, question, or disagree without automatically taking the work back.
If your team keeps bringing every hard call to you, have they learned to solve problems, or learned that you eventually will?
As Shannon started leaving more decisions with her team, she had another question: Did her managers know exactly what was expected of them?
The team needed more than a Scorecard
Badger CPA already had Scorecards and plenty of data. Managers could see whether work was getting done on time, whether people were spending enough of their hours serving clients, and whether jobs were taking longer than they should.
Leadership thought seeing the numbers would be enough, but it wasnโt.
Too many people were still missing important targets, so Shannonโs team got much more specific about what doing a good job actually meant. Performance reviews were tied more closely to the work each person owned and the behaviors the company expected.
Then the company changed manager incentives, too.
Quarterly bonuses became tied to team results and the revenue each manager was responsible for. Shannon says the difference was โnight and day.โ Managers paid closer attention to their numbers, spotted problems sooner, and took more responsibility for their teamsโ results.
It reinforced something Shannon had learned in other parts of the business: What feels obvious to the owner might not be obvious to everyone else.
Could the people on your team explain what doing a great job in their role actually looks like? If they canโt, expecting them to hit the mark is probably asking too much.
Stronger leaders gave Shannon room to step back
Shannon says the middle layer of company management is where โthe water is really carried.โ
Those managers are close to the work, but theyโre also responsible for other people. Being great at accounting doesnโt automatically make someone great at leading accountants.
Shannon thinks owners often wait too long to put strong people in those roles. They worry about the salary. They worry the person might leave. Sometimes theyโre uncomfortable hiring somebody who might be better than they are at part of the work.
Her take is pretty direct: there are better accountants than she is. There are better plumbers than the owner of a plumbing company. Why wouldnโt you want those people working for you?
As Badger built a stronger management team, Shannon no longer needed to be involved in every decision.
The timing mattered, because the company had also reached a goal she had been chasing for years.
Hitting $10 million shook things up
For a long time, Badger had a big target: reach $10 million in revenue. When they hit it, Shannon found that simply choosing a bigger number to reach next didnโt do much for her.
She cared more about the quality of the work, the experience clients had, the kind of place Badger was for employees, and whether good people had room to grow.
Her own role was changing too. Badger began working through a plan to move another internal leader into the Integrator seat. Shannon jokes that she became Integrator because she was โless bad at itโ than the Visionary. Now the company has someone whose natural strengths fit the role much better.
That leaves Shannon with something founders donโt always expect after years of trying to grow: Just because she can do something, does that mean she still needs to be the person doing it?
Maybe boring is a good thing
Badger now looks very different from the company Shannon remembers from the early years. Forecasts are more dependable. Scorecards are working. There are fewer surprises. She isnโt spending every evening reacting to the latest issue.
For someone who spent years getting used to pressure, the calm felt odd.
Shannon knows there are business owners who get bored and throw a โgrenadeโ into the company just so they have something new to clean up. She understands the temptation. Fixing problems feels productive, especially if youโve spent years getting really good at it.
But her view now is pretty straightforward: โBoring is good.โ
Shannon has more time with her family. She coaches her daughterโs volleyball team. She can be home in the evening without work pulling at her the way it once did.
Shannon still has plenty of ideas for what comes next, from acquisitions to starting a podcast. She isnโt done growing the business. Sheโs just learning that growth doesnโt always have to come with more chaos.
If your business finally gave you some of your time back, would you know what you wanted to do with it?
To hear more from Shannon about building Badger CPA, breaking the upward-delegation cycle, and getting comfortable with a steadier business, listen to Episode 27 of the Hitting the Ceiling podcast.
For more ideas, questions, and lessons from inside the Visionary seat, subscribe to Mark OโDonnellโs Clarity Break Thoughts newsletter.
