I’m having the same conversation with clinic owners, over and over, right now.
Recruitment. Retention. The exhausting, expensive churn of finding good clinicians, training them, and then watching them leave.
And out of that pressure comes a flood of genuinely good ideas. New-grad programs. In-house training academies. Mentoring pathways. Scholarships. Ways to attract talent before your competitors do.
I like these ideas. Most of them are smart. Some of them are the exact right move for the business proposing them.
But there’s a question I keep asking, and it’s rarely the question people expect.
Not “is this a good idea?”
Not “will this help?”
What is the return you’re actually looking for, and have you defined it before you start?
Here’s the trap. When an idea is values-aligned, when it helps people, solves a real problem, feels like the right thing to do, we tend to skip the step where we get commercially honest with ourselves. The good feeling substitutes for the analysis. We say yes because it feels responsible, generous, forward-thinking. And then, eighteen months later, we’re running a program that costs more in time and energy than anyone budgeted for, with no clear sense of whether it’s actually working.
Return on investment doesn’t have to mean money in the door next quarter. A new-grad program’s return might be retention eighteen months from now. It might be your reputation as the kind of place good clinicians want to work. It might be a pipeline that means you’re never again scrambling to fill a vacancy. All of that is a legitimate return.
But it has to be defined. On purpose. Before you start. Not discovered by accident once you’re three months in and wondering why you’re exhausted.
Can I confess something?
I built Purple Co on lovely ideas. Genuinely, I don’t regret the instinct. I saw needs and I filled them. Clients who needed support got it. Referrers who needed something got it. Ideas that helped people got built, again and again, because they were the right thing to do.
What I didn’t do, for a long time, was cost them properly. I didn’t define what return I expected before I said yes. I just trusted that helping people was, in itself, enough of a reason.
It wasn’t that the ideas were wrong. It’s that I never stopped to ask whether they were commercially appropriate for the business at that time, with the capacity I actually had. So I kept saying yes. The direct cost of that never showed up on a P&L. It was me. I was overfunctioning to make good ideas work that had never been costed against what they’d take. And it caught up with my health before it caught up with the business.
I don’t tell you that as a cautionary tale about ambition. I tell you because I think a lot of clinic owners are standing exactly where I was, right now, with the recruitment and retention pressure making every “great idea” feel urgent and obviously worth it.
It might be. But you won’t know unless you stop and define the return before you build it.
So before the next good idea gets a green light in your business, a few questions worth sitting with:
What return am I actually expecting from this? Would I recognise it if it showed up?
What is this going to cost me, honestly? Not just budget. Time. Attention. Energy.
If this doesn’t produce that return, will I know when to stop, or will I keep going because stopping feels like giving up on something good?
Good ideas aren’t the problem. Ideas we never priced properly are.
That’s where the work begins.
How can I help? Reach out to me at hello@jomuihread.com to set up a time to chat