Why a human centered business is good business

One of the strongest therapists I have ever worked with is someone I almost fired twice in his first six months. But Instead I gave him a raise.

Because in his first six months, he stopped showing up for work twice without a single call or text. The second time, he was gone for two days before I even knew where he was.

Most owners would have fired him without a second thought. Instead, I gave him a raise. I want to tell you why, because it is the clearest example I have of something I believe to my core. Taking care of your people is not the soft alternative to running a good business. It is the definition of good business.

He came to Salvation Wellness as a skilled therapist, the kind clients ask for by name. He struggled with some stuff like cleaning his room, getting his sheets to the laundry area, resetting between clients. So we talked with him about it a few times, and for the most part he was a good employee, so we kept working with him on it.

Then one day, he did not come in for his shift. We tried to call him several times, and then we tried his emergency contact. Eventually we called his clients to let them know he wouldn't be in. The next day was the same. No call, no show. Then his son called to tell us he was in the hospital. It was a mental health crisis.

So when he got out of the hospital, we gave him time off. And when he was cleared to come back, we brought him in slowly with reduced hours so he could ease back into the work. We sat down together and built an action plan for what we would do if he ever felt himself needing extra support again. He got better, and for a few months, he was doing well. You would think "oh how nice. Good ending. That is where the story ends."

It is not.

A few months later he seemed a little off one day, though nothing alarming, and we didn't think much of it. The next day, no call and no show again. It took about two days before his son called us. He was back in the hospital.

When he got out, he called me directly, on my personal cell. I could hear how scared he was about his job, and he had every reason to be. Two no-call-no-shows, many refunded and free services to clients, and a few bad reviews in under six months is a serious thing. So I asked him why he had not used the plan we made together. He told me he had not even seen it coming himself. I asked him what was going on, and if he needed any support right now.

And thats when he told me the rest. In the span of a two weeks, his fiancee had left him. His only daughter, who is in the military, had been deployed overseas to fight in the Middle East. His sister had been arrested, and his niece and nephew were about to be placed in foster care. He could not let that happen, so he took them both in, with no idea how he would pay for them, where they would sleep in his 1 bedroom apartment (he ended up sleeping on the couch so they could have a bed) or even how he would get them to school.

This was not a person who needed to be fired. This was a person who needed someone to actually help him.

So that is what I did. I gave him an interest free loan as a paycheck advance, to help bridge the gap of taking In those kids and the system giving him, money to do so, and we agreed It would be paid back later once he was on steadier ground. And I gave him some extra time off to get his new family settled. And then, I gave him a raise. So he could really take care of his new kids, and all those hospital bills. He cried. He cried and he cried, and he thanked me more times than I can count, over the many months that followed. He is now one of our strongest therapists.

So, now here is the part I want you to really consider. If I had followed the standard playbook, I would have lost him. And in the end I think losing him would have cost me far more than it would have cost him.

The numbers on this are not subtle. Gallup estimates that replacing a single employee costs somewhere between half and twice their annual salary, once you add up recruiting, training, and the long stretch where a new hire is not yet up to speed. Across the country, that turnover adds up to roughly a trillion dollars a year. In our field it is worse, because a great therapist is not a generic hire you can swap out. Clients book them by name, and when that therapist walks, some of those clients walk with them.

Our industry has a hard relationship with this. The work is physically demanding and emotionally demanding, and burnout is common (more on this another time. There are so many things that an employer can do to help this). Depending on which figures you look at, the average massage career runs somewhere between about a year and a half and eight years, which is short for a profession people train hard to enter. The spas and studios that manage to keep their therapists for four, five, ten years and beyond are almost always the ones that invest in their people rather than treating them as interchangeable.

There is good evidence for why that works. In one body of research, 84 percent of employees who believed their employer cared about them reported high job satisfaction, compared with only 32 percent of those who did not feel cared about. Engaged teams, the kind you build by actually showing up for people, tend to see far lower turnover and stronger profitability. None of this is complicated. People stay where they feel seen. I am proud that we have very low turnover compared to similarly sized wellness businesses.

I think its because I run my business on what is sometimes called servant leadership, which is a formal way of saying that my job is to take care of the people who take care of our clients. That is not charity, and it is not a snappy line for a brochure. It is a strategy, and it happens to be the one that produces loyalty you cannot glean any other way. The therapist I almost let go is the proof. He did not become devoted to us because of a signing bonus or a clever perk. He became devoted because when his whole life came apart, we chose to help him hold it together.

The wellness industry loves to talk about care when it is pointed at the client. I think we have spent far too little time pointing it at the people doing the actual work. When you take care of your therapists, they take care of your clients, and your clients stay, and your therapists stay, and the whole thing holds together in a way no spreadsheet would have predicted at the start.

Care and heart is good business. To me Its not a slogan. I mean it as the most practical decision I have ever made.