What Would You Do If You Couldn't Fail?

Years ago I owned a business with a good friend. We were making it work in the sense that the bills got paid and the customers were happy, but we weren't paying ourselves much of anything. My wife's income was what actually sustained our family. I'd like to tell you we had a bold growth plan. Mostly we had a plan to not go backward. 

My friend's father had been watching us for a while, and he told us what we already knew. We were both doing everything, which meant neither of us was doing the one thing that would actually grow the business. He said we needed to hire an operations and marketing manager, someone whose entire job was to bring in revenue and take the operational weight off the two of us. 

We told him what every small business owner says. We can't afford that. 

So he did something I couldn’t imagine...he put a full year of that position's salary into an account and told us emphatically to “find someone.” So we did (no one said “no” to “Spatch!”). 

 Four months after we hired this person, as we were talking to my friend’s father, we told him to take his money back.  Our new hire was paying for herself several times over.  We never looked back. 

The money was never really the problem 

What stands out to me about this lesson is that he didn’t give us a better idea. Hiring that role was already the obvious move and we had talked about it more than once. He didn't hand us market research or a smarter hiring process or a spreadsheet that made the math work. All he did was take away the fear of failure, and within about three weeks we did the thing we had been avoiding for almost two years. 

The only thing standing between us and a much healthier business was fear. In our case, it was the fear of making a payroll commitment we might have to walk back. 

Ask yourself the question  

“What would you do if you knew it couldn't fail?  If someone handed you a signed guarantee that it would work, what would you do in your practice? 

I have asked people this and most of them answer pretty quickly. They already know. What I hear: 

• Can I expand? 

• Can I sell? 

• Should I change my business model? 

• Should I hire an office manager so I can focus on the patients? 

Almost none of those are technically difficult. There is no engineering problem in that list. They are emotionally difficult, and the reason they stay unanswered usually sounds more like this: what if I hire someone and have to let them go in eight months, what if my partner or my spouse thinks I panicked, what if I put money into this and it's gone, what if the whole thing lands on me and everybody watches it happen. 

We say "impractical" when we mean "frightening" 

Before we hired her, I would have called that hire impractical. It was the honest word as far as I was concerned. The revenue wasn't there yet, the cash flow was thin, and adding a salary to that picture looked reckless on paper. 

But impractical isn't really a verdict. It's a description of how something looks from where you're standing right now, with the information you have and the nerve you have on that particular day. Plenty of the best decisions I've watched practice owners make looked impractical the week before they made them. The clinician who cut her patient load to build a specialty program. The owner who let go of his largest referral source because the relationship had gotten expensive in ways that never showed up as a number. 

The next time you catch yourself saying something isn't practical, it's worth asking whether you mean the math doesn't work or whether you mean it scares you. Those need completely different responses. Bad math needs a better plan. Fear needs smaller stakes. 

Doing nothing carries a cost too, it's just a quiet one 

We tend to treat waiting another year as the neutral choice, and it isn't. It's a decision with a real price attached, but the price never shows up on a report. 

Consider the practice that hangs onto a bad-fit payer contract for six more years because renegotiating or resigning from it feels risky. Nobody ever has to stand up in a staff meeting and defend that one. That's exactly why it survives. Failure by inaction is invisible, and the invisible mistakes are the ones that stick around the longest. 

You won't get a guarantee, so make failure survivable 

Most of us don't have a friend's father funding an escrow account. You can build your own version of what he did, though, and the goal isn't to talk yourself into being braver. It's to make being wrong cheap enough that you can afford to find out. 

Start by writing down the actual worst case in one sentence. Fears get noticeably smaller when you're forced to be specific about them. "We lose about $6,000 and I feel dumb for a month" is a very different thing to carry around than the vague dread you've been living with. 

Then ask whether you could undo it inside 90 days. If the answer is yes, stop deliberating and go. Save the long careful analysis for the genuinely one-way doors, like a building lease, a partnership, or a piece of fabrication equipment you'll own either way. 

Where you can, structure it as a pilot with an end date. One clinician, one payer, one location, 60 days. A pilot that concludes isn't a failure, it's information you didn't have before you started. 

And decide up front what calling it off looks like. Pick the number or the date that means stop, and say it out loud to someone. Committing to the exit in advance is what makes starting feel possible, and it's essentially the escrow account you're building for yourself. 

Your team is reading you 

Nobody on your staff is going to take more risk than you do. They're watching how you talk about your last miss and drawing conclusions about what happens to people who try things. 

The most useful thing you can do is talk about what didn't work as a normal part of a Monday meeting, without any drama attached to it, and keep a firm line between "we made a bad call" and "you are a bad employee." A lot of practices blur those two and then can't figure out why the ideas stopped coming. 

It's also worth putting the question to your team directly. If we knew this would work, what would we do here? Ask it, then stay quiet long enough for somebody to answer. 

Nobody is funding your account 

I still have things I'm sitting on, and the reason isn't time or money. I can't quite picture them going well. That old business is my reminder that my picture of how things will go has been badly wrong before, in my favor. 

No one is going to put a year's salary in an account for you. You can shrink the stakes until being wrong doesn't really hurt, though, and then go find out. 

So what's your answer? I'd like to hear it.