Scaling a business comes down to one thing: treating your people as people first, not employees. Brittany Driscoll, CEO and co-founder of Squeeze, shares how she used that principle (along with documented systems and values-driven culture) to build a nationwide massage franchise from the ground up. This episode is essential for any owner or founder trying to grow without losing the culture that made their business worth scaling.
This episode is part of the Business Strategy & Scaling Your Team series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“There is nothing more expensive than doing nothing because these problems just get bigger.”
“…the cost of doing nothing, now you are in the hole, hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Episode highlights
Why “we’ll deal with it later” is actually your biggest budget leak
When costs rise, team support is usually the first thing cut. Training, coaching, materials, even just taking time to address a performance issue gets deprioritized. Lia names the excuses she hears every day: people can figure it out themselves, they can just use AI, we don’t have time to stop and train, or the team member is a low performer so why bother investing? Every one of those excuses is costing money right now.
The core argument is simple: your biggest expense is employee overhead. If the people on payroll are unclear on their role, duplicating each other’s work, or not delivering, that cost is running every hour of the day.
The math on inefficiency (and it adds up fast)
Lia walks through some grounding statistics. Managers on ineffective teams spend four to five hours a week (likely more) resolving conflicts and miscommunications. That number climbs to 10 or more hours when you factor in redundant meetings and overlapping work. Leaders who cannot delegate end up sitting in 15 to 20 hours of meetings their team should own, just to make sure nothing goes sideways.
Companies with poor team dynamics see customer service complaints rise by 40%. And when someone leaves, replacing them costs between 50% and 200% of their salary. Lose a $100K employee and you are out anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000 before the new hire is even onboarded.
Case study 1: the ops person nobody wanted to train
A founder running a marketing agency came to Lia in April with a clear problem: her ops person had a bad attitude and was not performing. Lia offered coaching strategies and suggested the owner invest in addressing the issue. The owner declined, saying she did not want to invest in someone she might not keep.
Six months later the owner came back. That ops person had driven two team members to quit. She mishandled major campaign launches. The agency lost a big client. Total estimated damage: a couple hundred thousand dollars. The cost of doing nothing far exceeded any training, coaching, or resource investment that could have addressed the problem early, even if the ops person ultimately was not the right long-term fit.
Case study 2: the creative director who was never given feedback
In a corporate setting, Lia watched a creative director who was hostile, hypercritical, and toxic to work with go unchecked. No feedback, no coaching, no hard conversation. The result: 11 people left the team, including Lia. The product the team was building never shipped. The company had poured millions into engineering, marketing, and product development, all lost because one person was never managed.
The cost was not abstract. It was millions of dollars and an entire product line, traced directly back to one avoided conversation.
What to do instead of kicking the can
Lia is clear that the answer is not panic. It is diagnosis and action. Figure out what the actual issue is. Is the person unclear on their role? Do they need better delegation? Do they need direct feedback about performance? Do the team’s priorities need to be communicated more clearly?
Waiting does not make these problems smaller. It makes them more expensive and more urgent. Even if a team member is not someone you plan to keep long-term, supporting them now protects the rest of the team, the clients, and the business until you can make a change.
The mindset shift that changes everything
Lia closes with a reframe: you are not being asked to solve everything at once. You are being asked to plant the tree today. The best time to address a team issue is now, before it costs you a client, a product launch, or your best performers. The New Manager Playbook is the resource she built to help leaders and the managers they manage start diagnosing and fixing these issues without waiting for a crisis to force their hand.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 227: How to get your team to actually care about customer service. You cannot force people to care, but you can create conditions that make it easier for them to. Lia walks through three tools every owner has: setting behavioral expectations from day one, building proactive follow-up into how the team operates, and using recognition as a culture-shifter. This episode is especially useful for anyone with customer-facing team members or anyone whose team’s attitude reflects on the brand.
- Ep 222: What investing in your team could cost you (or earn you). Waiting too long to address a team problem does not make it go away. Lia walks through two real client stories, one that ended in a $250,000 loss and one that produced a record $1M revenue quarter, to show how the timing of your action determines the outcome. This episode is essential for any business owner who suspects a problem but keeps putting off the conversation.
- Ep 142: What would happen if you managed your team like a pro sports team?. Treating your team like a professional sports team means paying for top talent, fully utilizing every player, and investing in coaching as a non-negotiable. Lia walks through three lessons from pro sports that directly raise performance, reduce turnover, and build a team that can win when it counts. This episode is especially useful for founders and corporate leaders who keep wondering why results are not improving year over year.
- Ep 130: Why investing in your team is the real secret to scaling your business. Scaling a business comes down to one thing: treating your people as people first, not employees. Brittany Driscoll, CEO and co-founder of Squeeze, shares how she used that principle (along with documented systems and values-driven culture) to build a nationwide massage franchise from the ground up. This episode is essential for any owner or founder trying to grow without losing the culture that made their business worth scaling.
Want to go deeper?
The Ops Playbook. Systems and SOPs for teams that need to scale without breaking.
Full transcript (click to expand)
Costs are going up right now across everything. And we’re all freaking out. Trust me. I am too. And we’re all looking for places to cut back. Right? Electricity is going up. Cost of groceries are going up. Payroll taxes and fees and whatever, everything, credit card fees, everything is getting more expensive. And so what I see happen all the time is we say, well, what can we cut from? Well, we can’t cut from this budget because of this, because of this, let’s cut from supporting the team.
Let’s cut back on some of the things that ways we’re investing in the team, getting training and support or coaching or materials, whatever, because, hey, people can figure stuff out on their own. They can just use AI, ChatGPT, Collage, Gemini, name your favorite robot. And we don’t invest in our team. We say like they should be able to figure it out. Or we know it’s really a problem, but we kick the can down the road. We say, well, people don’t have time.
We can’t possibly stop what we’re doing and train people like they have deadlines to hit. They have products to launch. Or we say, well, my team’s not quite ready. They’re not upskilled enough. Or we say, I don’t want to invest in low performers. I don’t want to invest in people that I think aren’t doing a good job. And these are the excuses I hear every single day when it comes to investing in our team. But the truth is, by kicking the can on the road, we are making an already expensive problem even more expensive.
I want you to really internalize this. There is nothing more expensive than doing nothing because these problems just get bigger. Your cost of employees overhead, that’s your biggest expense. So if you have folks that aren’t delivering, if you have folks that are not meeting the standards, if you have folks that aren’t clear on what their job is, that is going to cost you money every single hour of the day. How are we missing that point? And it can seem like, well, I can’t invest this amount right now.
We can’t stop for a second. But folks that can’t delegate, right, or are working on the wrong things, or two people working on the same thing at the same time when you’re getting like one job for the price of two, how can that be more expensive than to sort that out? So I want to talk today about the cost of inaction, because this is the most expensive cost and the most preventable cost in your team and in your business.
I’m Lea Garvin and this is the new manager playbook, where I share tips, tools, stories and strategies to make managing your team the easiest part of your job. And I will tell you, it can feel hard to figure out what strategy you need. But once you get the right support, everything gets easier. And I got to say, there’s a cost savings associated with that, to not feeling that stress anymore. And that’s why I’m so excited to talk to you about the…
To kind of paint the picture around the cost of inaction. So we can get ahead of it. Because what we’re not realizing is all those inefficiencies, those really add up. I read some stats today that I wanted to kind of just jump through for you, right? Four to five hours a week is spent on managers resolving conflicts, misunderstandings on teams that are operating ineffectively. And that’s probably a low estimate because I’ve been on some ineffective teams and it’s kind of like more like 10 hours a week is spent on meeting a second time because something wasn’t clear.
Two people are working on the same thing. So you got to go and look at, okay, who’s doing what and figure that out. I would say I’ve observed working firsthand in companies and teams that think ineffective managers or when we’re a manager, we just don’t really trust our team yet or know how to let go and feel like we’re kind of being pulled in. We might be spending 10-20 hours a week in the same meetings our teams are in because we know that they’re not going to hit it right when they have to share an update or we’re worried they’re going to say the wrong thing or we don’t think they’re going to communicate the pass down to us.
So we’re spending maybe 15-20 hours in things that we don’t have to be doing as managers. And that doesn’t even count the hours our team members are spending on the wrong things. They also say that companies with inefficient team dynamics, customer service complaints go up by 40%. Customers aren’t happy. So how is that affecting product sales, launches, services, when you have dissatisfied customers? It’s going to cost you a lot. And then I’ve said it before, that it costs between 50% and 200% that person’s salary when someone leaves.
So that’s the cost of turnover. So if you have an employee that was making 100 grand and they leave, now you got to spend 50 to $200,000 replacing that person. And that comes in terms of the lost productivity, other teams having to get involved in job descriptions and interviews and onboarding, your time and all that. So think about it. All these things that show up when your team’s inefficient, when the team’s ineffective, when you as a manager can’t be doing your best, when your own managers aren’t doing well in your organization, this is so expensive.
It adds up so much. And I think it can feel like we can kick it down the road because these costs seem abstract. Maybe we’re spending meetings, maybe we’re not adding it up. But for the small business owner, especially listening, this stuff adds up like literally immediately and it’s coming out of your pocket. And for the corporate manager and corporate leader listening to this, this kind of thing adds up in, I would say, especially in that turnover point, which also ends up being the most expensive.
Because high performers don’t want to be on low-performing teams, like, no thank you. Okay? And they’re going to be the first ones to walk. I want to share two examples of where I saw this show up. With a small business owner, last year, a business owner that ran a marketing agency, she came to me and had some kind of coaching programs and things like that. She came to me and said in about, I think it was April, yeah, April.
She said, my ops person, she’s really not good, she has a bad attitude, and I really don’t feel like she’s effective. And I said, okay, well, what can we do about that? And I talked about some ideas for coaching her and some things that this business owner could be doing and investing. And she said, well, but this person, I don’t think I want to keep her. I don’t… She’s… I don’t want to invest any money in this.
Like, that seems like a big waste. So she did nothing. And we talked about a couple options and she was not ready to invest in that team member. Six months later, in April, I hear from her again. And I said, hey, whatever happened with the ops manager, what did you guys figure out? And she said, oh my god, this last six months, it’s been a living nightmare. She was responsible for two team members leaving because they just couldn’t stand working with her.
Some of our launches that we were doing in our big campaigns, she really mishandled it. We weren’t tracking the right things. So we lost a big client because of it. And we really frustrated a lot more people beyond that. I said, gosh, how much do you think that costs you? She’s like, I don’t know, at least a couple hundred thousand dollars. The cost of not training this ops person before, even when she didn’t want to keep this person because they weren’t very good, it cost her a couple hundred thousand dollars.
I want you to think about that. There are ways to train and help a low performer get better, even if that’s not the person you’re going to keep. Because the cost of doing nothing, now you are in the hole, hundreds of thousands of dollars. So if you’re not ready to let someone go that day, if they’re not the right person, or you’re not able to, or you haven’t given them feedback so they can improve. If you’re not doing those things, then that is the cost at the other side of it.
And it is way more than investing in any training, any coaching, any book, any resource, anything. It’s going to cost you so much more. The cost of an action, there’s nothing more than that. I think the second example I wanted to share was, in the corporate world, I said it can be more abstract how people are costing you. When I was on a team years ago, where there was one team member, it was a design team, the creative director, he rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
He was not giving feedback productively. He was really critical of people, really mean. And it ended up costing, I think when I was on the team, I was one of 11 people who left that team because he was so hostile to work with. Now on that team, this creative director was never given feedback. He was never told that he couldn’t operate this way. We never had conversations about how to work through that. 11 people left the team.
The product that we worked on, it never shipped. Folks distributed across the team that never saw the light of day. And think about that from a corporate perspective of 12, 14 person team, how much money had been invested in building this product and shipping it and getting all the marketing resources and all the engineering only to have a product not ship because there was no team to build it. That’s the cost. That’s millions and millions of dollars because of a lack of feedback that manager had been giving that person.
So the cost of an action, it feels like it’s nothing. It feels like we’ll kick it down the road. It feels like we’ll deal with it later, but it is the most expensive thing. Most expensive thing that shows up on your teams and in your companies. And so what do we do about it? We invest. We figure out what is the actual issue with the ops person and with this creative director. They needed some hard feedback that they weren’t performing.
With other team members, they need more clarity on their role. They need to figure out, we need to really communicate their priorities and what they should be working on. With other folks, maybe they need to be delegating. We’ve got to figure out what the issue is because when we see something that’s not quite working on our team, we think, I don’t have time and energy to worry about this. All we’re doing is creating a bigger problem later.
And it’s not even that much later. It’s probably like weeks and months later, years later. So you’re still going to have to deal with it on the other end. So I just want to empower you with this information, not scare you. It’s like, gosh, you have the opportunity right now to figure this stuff out so it doesn’t haunt you down the line. It’s like that saying, the best time to plant a tree was yesterday, or 10 years ago, excuse me.
The best time to plant is today. Plant your tree today, fix your team, get support. Because this stuff, it doesn’t go away. It doesn’t get easier if you don’t deal with it, but it can be easier if you start today. And that’s why I wrote the new manager playbook was to give you a tool today that you can use and start fine tuning. Okay. Diagnosing those issues. What are the strategies? Get the book for your team members if you’re managing managers, give them something.
Don’t kick the can down the road. Even if you feel like, yeah, they’re not the team members I want to have forever, support them now. Fill that gap so that when you have the right folks, you can keep them. All right. So check out the new manager playbook, leahgarver.com slash new manager playbook. This is going to give you a tool or a tool to give to your team members, your managers on how to figure all this stuff out because you cannot afford to do nothing.
I’m telling you, there’s nothing more expensive than inaction and it’s not that hard to solve it. We just got to start. Yeah. Yeah.
Questions this episode answers
What does it actually cost my business when I ignore a team problem?
The cost is bigger than most owners realize. Ineffective team dynamics lead to things like two people working on the same task, leaders sitting in meetings they don't need to be in, customer complaints going up by 40%, and eventually, top performers walking out the door. Replacing one employee can cost between 50% and 200% of their salary in lost productivity, recruiting, and onboarding alone. The costs feel abstract until you add them up, and by then you're already in the hole.
Is it worth investing in a team member I don't plan to keep long term?
Yes, and the real-world cost of not doing it proves why. A marketing agency owner chose not to invest in coaching her ops person because she didn't think the employee was worth keeping. Six months later, that same ops person had driven away two team members and mishandled campaigns badly enough to cost the business a large client. The total damage came to roughly $200,000. Investing in feedback and support for a low performer, even temporarily, is far cheaper than leaving the problem alone.
How much time do leaders waste when their team isn't running well?
A lot more than they track. Leaders on ineffective teams can spend 10 to 20 hours a week sitting in meetings their team should be handling on their own, simply because they don't trust that updates will land correctly or that communication will flow without them. On top of that, resolving conflicts and misunderstandings eats up four to five hours a week at a minimum. That's time that could be spent growing the business instead of putting out fires.
What happens when you never give a difficult team member honest feedback?
The fallout spreads further than you expect. On one design team, a creative director who was hostile and gave harsh, unproductive feedback was never told his behavior was a problem. Eleven people left the team because of him, including strong contributors. The product they were building never shipped, and all the engineering, design, and marketing investment behind it went nowhere. Millions of dollars lost because one person never received honest feedback. The missing system was the feedback, not the person.
What should I do first if I notice something isn't working on my team?
Diagnose the actual issue instead of waiting for a better time. Is someone unclear on their role and priorities? Are they failing to delegate? Do they need direct feedback on how they're showing up? Once you identify the real gap, you can address it with the right support, whether that's a conversation, coaching, clearer expectations, or a resource like a management guide. Waiting weeks or months doesn't make the problem smaller. It makes it more expensive. Start today, even if the fix feels small.