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
“People are hard. People are complicated. And people stuff, it just doesn’t work itself out.”
Episode highlights
The two paths every owner faces
Every team challenge has two possible timelines: act now or sit on it and hope. Lia opens with a blunt reality check. People problems do not resolve themselves. The team member who is rubbing people the wrong way, not hitting their numbers, or not showing respect will not magically improve with time. The only variable you control is when you decide to move.
The $250,000 mistake (and what caused it)
Lia’s first client runs a med spa. She hired an ops director and, when early warning signs appeared, brought Lia in to assess the situation. Lia built a clear accountability plan, tied bonuses to metrics, and flagged directly to the CEO: this hire is not working.
The CEO waited. One month. Two months. Three. Six.
When they finally let the ops director go, they discovered she had sat on $200,000 in unpaid invoices and secretly ordered $50,000 of wrong product, stuffed into facility cupboards with no way to return it. The owner was personally out $250,000. Only after that loss did she call Lia back in to stabilize the team.
The lesson: a clear plan with no follow-through is the same as no plan at all.
The $1M quarter (same investment, different timing)
The second client runs an events production company doing about $4 million a year. She came to Lia proactively: things were good, she had one strong performer and one struggling team member, and she wanted her best year ever before any crisis hit.
Lia and the team implemented two moves right away. First, they set up Snippets, a lightweight Google Doc where each team member logs top priorities for the week, wins, and places they are stuck. This gave the owner a bird’s eye view without requiring her to dig into project management tools. Second, Lia ran direct accountability conversations and coaching with the team member who was struggling.
By end of quarter the struggling team member was stepping up, the strong performer could focus instead of covering for someone else, and the business posted its highest revenue quarter ever, more than $1 million in a single quarter.
Why waiting makes everything worse
When a team member senses that their leader is frustrated but not saying anything, the dynamic shifts fast. In the med spa case, the ops director started sabotaging her own role. Invoices sat unpaid. Wrong product was ordered and hidden. Team meetings happened with no follow-through. None of that was inevitable. It escalated because the feedback loop was broken and no one was holding anyone accountable.
Lia is direct: “These challenges get worse. And if you have a team member that’s struggling, and they can tell that you’re a little bit resentful, a lot of times they kind of start… sometimes they actually start sabotaging their role in different ways.”
Every team member wants to do well
A core belief in Lia’s approach: the team member you think might not be good enough is probably asking themselves the same question. Most of the time they just need clear expectations, honest feedback, and a little coaching. When leaders invest that energy, teams do not just improve incrementally. High performers start giving 10x. Struggling performers step up in ways that surprise even the owner.
If you are unsure whether a team member is the right fit, the answer is not to keep paying them while doing nothing. The answer is to have the conversation, set the standard, and find out.
The case for investing before there is a problem
Lia’s bottom line: you do not have to wait for a crisis to get support. One conversation, one coaching engagement, one process improvement could be the difference between your current quarter and your highest profit quarter. The time to invest is not after you are hemorrhaging money. It is when things are going well and you have real goals ahead of you, whether that is stepping back from the day-to-day, trusting your team, or simply not being the bottleneck anymore.
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 176: What does doing nothing actually cost your team? More than you think.. Cutting team support, coaching, and training to save money is one of the most expensive decisions a business owner or leader can make. Lia breaks down the real dollar cost of inaction through two case studies and hard stats on turnover, wasted hours, and lost revenue. This episode is essential for any founder, team lead, or manager who keeps kicking team problems down the road.
- 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)
She was in the hole $250,000 that she had to pay out of her own pocket. And she brought me in to help clean up the mess. And quickly we were able to get folks dialed in, bring in some more new leadership on the on the client relations side. We moved fast and we turned things around. But it didn’t have to be after this $250,000 mistake. Didn’t have to be then. Welcome to leading small teams, a real talk podcast tackling the ins and outs of leading teams in the modern workplace.
I’m Leah Garvin, your host with a decade of experience driving team operations in companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft, bringing you insider strategies to make you a more confident and effective leader from delegating to feedback to avoiding micromanaging and more. This podcast gives you the tools to empower your team, scale yourself as a leader and grow your business. Whether you’re managing a team of one or 100, everyone is welcome to hang out with leading small teams.
You’re busy, you’ve got a lot going on. And hey, yeah, maybe you don’t want to deal with your team stuff. You’re just trying to get through the week. But the longer we wait, the longer we don’t take action on what we know and know needs to be dealt with, the worse it gets. And I’ve got to give you some tough love today because there are two completely different situations that I have supported folks through when they waited too long to deal with a challenging situation on their team and when they acted proactively and the results.
Well, for one of those examples, that client lost about $250,000 from an employee that was mishandling their role and the other have the most profitable quarter ever in a business that’s making $4 million a year. That means they brought in over a million dollars in revenue in one quarter. Which do you want to be? Simple math, right? Losing 250 or maybe making a million or more in a quarter. It is literally your choice because when you sit on something and you know it’s not good and you say, I don’t want to invest my team.
I don’t want to slow down. I don’t want to figure this out. I don’t want to deal with it at all. Which I get it. It’s natural. But when you take that stance, things just get worse. I wish it wasn’t the case, but we’re dealing with people here. People are hard. People are complicated. And people stuff, it just doesn’t work itself out. When you see that there is a challenging situation and you’re like, I hope that with time something gets a little bit better or I hope when they get a little experience, even though they’re really rubbing people the wrong way or they’re really not listening or they’re not showing respect, that stuff, that doesn’t get better.
Let’s talk about the first case of a team member gone wrong. So I have a client who runs a med spa and they asked me to connect with their ops director to evaluate, hey, is this person really able to kind of move the needle, held people accountable to hitting their numbers and metrics? And so I met with the ops director and I said, you know, there’s some big accountability issues that I’m seeing. And I shared an outline of where I saw the gaps to be and what we really needed to do to turn the team around.
Things like setting clear metrics that folks really could own, having more accountability, tying bonuses to performance, things like that. And I made a really clear plan with the ops director and I communicated that to the CEO. And so the ops director, they were left, you know, on their own and they did not implement this plan. We came back together a few months later and I said, hey, where are you at with the plan? And they had one excuse after the next.
And so I told the CEO, I said, you know, I’m really nervous about this hire. I think we can take a little bit more of a hands-on approach. I can come in, I can implement these different things, but this person’s really not taking responsibility. I’m nervous about this hire. I think it’s not a fit. They said, okay, I don’t know. Let me wait on it. And they sat on this, even with a clear plan of what to do.
For one month, two months, three months, six months, they sat on it. And then they came to me crying when they finally fired this ops director and they found out she had sat on $200,000 of unpaid invoices that weren’t accounted for, had bought another $50,000 of product that was the wrong product for the med spa and literally shoved it into different cupboards in the facility, hiding it. And there was no ability to return it. And so when this person left, she was in the hole, $250,000 that she had to pay out of her own pocket.
And she brought me in to help clean up the mess. And quickly, we were able to get folks dialed in, bring in some more new leadership on the client relations side, on the guest services. We were able to implement some simple processes to get folks feeling more accountable. I had one-on-ones with team members. We moved fast and we turned things around, but it didn’t have to be after this $250,000 mistake. It didn’t have to be then.
And I know that because in the second example I want to talk about, a client brought me in. She had a high-performing team, just a few team members. She runs an events production company. And she said, hey, we want to have our best year ever. I know I need to figure some of this stuff out. I know my team, there’s one really strong person and one person that’s struggling a little bit. And I really want to make sure that person’s held more accountable.
I said, well, this is the best situation possible because you are investing before there’s a problem. Now in that, we set up some processes out of the gates. We implement snippets. I talked about this on the show. Snippets is a really lightweight tracking tool. I should say, it’s just a Google doc where we can have clear visibility into top priorities for the week, wins, places folks are stuck. And that was actually one of the issues that she wasn’t sure folks were always working on the most highest priority things.
So we implemented snippets. We did some coaching with the team members and some real deep accountability conversations with the team member that was struggling. And we made some clear goals and action plans. And I coached her through that. If you’re anything like me, you’ve had those nights where you wake up at three in the morning, wondering, gosh, are people working on the right things? Or what’s the status of that project? And obviously you can’t email folks at that time, but the tools you’re using ClickUp or Asana or Slack, it’s just too detailed.
You need a bird’s eye view. Enter the snippets template. At the end of each week, your team member fills out the highlights from the week, any places they’re stuck and the top priorities for next week. So you’re never wondering, are folks working on the right things? Are there things that they haven’t brought up that really should be on my radar? And most importantly, what wins can we celebrate as a team? Grab your copy at LeahGarver.com slash snippets.
Well, when we got to the end of the quarter, she came to me and said, oh my gosh, like this is, you know, I knew this was helping, but I didn’t realize to what extent. Because the team member who is a little bit spread thin making up for the one that was struggling, she was able to focus on the right things. The team member that was struggling was actually stepping up now. And the two of them were able to produce again, way, way more than anticipated, leading to their highest revenue quarter in a $4 million a year business.
This is what you can have when you’re proactive. And I’m not tooting my own horn here. I’m not saying that you need to hire me to do that. But you’ve got to deal with the stuff. And when you don’t deal with it, you’re on the other side of that because these challenges get worse. And if you have a team member that’s struggling, and they can tell that you’re a little bit resentful, or you’re like a little bit fresher with them, a lot of times they kind of start, I would say you can have a number of different scenarios, but where maybe they get better because I don’t want that.
But sometimes, and what happened in this case with this ops director, she actually started sabotaging her role in different ways. And she just like didn’t care anymore. And she was just there to collect a paycheck, order the wrong supplies. Well, I don’t want to deal with this, shove them into a cupboard. Invoice came, I’m late, I don’t know. So just like didn’t pay those. And they were just like sitting unaccounted for. Team members, she’d have a meeting with them, wouldn’t follow through.
They felt like, well, who’s the leadership here? All of these things happened because this team member wasn’t getting the feedback. And after we had a clear plan, the follow-up, that’s the most important thing, right? So it’s not about saying someone, okay, what do I need to fix? And just knowing it, it’s actually doing it. It’s actually implementing it. That’s the important thing. And in the second example, saying, okay, I know that there’s some stuff on my team.
I’m not really looking under the hood. There’s someone that’s struggling. I know I need to get a little bit sort of more balanced across the workload. Let me bring in an expert to help figure this out. Then we were able to go, boom, boom, boom, surgical approach, remove the issues, and to be literally like a rocket ship around the production that the team had. And everybody’s happier. And so I think, again, what I wanted to share these two examples is you don’t have to sit on a problem.
You don’t have to be the one that’s losing more and more and more time and money and your own freaking stress and overwhelm through the roof because you don’t want to deal with it. I get it. It sucks to have to go, is there stuff that I could do differently? Where do I need to step in? Do I have to? You’re running this business. Yeah, like you do have to do it, but you bring in someone like me, we make it so much easier because you have someone that understands your vision, understands where you’re going and says, okay, let’s figure this stuff out.
What are the things that we need to fix right away? The low hanging fruit. What are some more structural things that we can implement? And just how do we make communication flow and things easier from top to bottom? That’s what we do. It’s not about me telling you a bunch of stuff you’re doing wrong. No, because that doesn’t help. And it’s certainly not about telling the team all the things they’re doing wrong either. No, it’s neither of those.
And so if you’re thinking, well, I don’t want to invest in support because I’m, you know, I don’t even know if I have the right people here. Well, if they’re on your team longer than you are already investing in that, so you might as well figure out if they’re the right people. Or I’ve heard people say, well, I don’t want to invest in my ops manager or my marketing manager because I’m not sure that if they’re good, like why would I spend money on it?
It’s like, you don’t know if they’re good, then you shouldn’t have them on your team. Then you should hold them to a higher standard or you should set clear expectations and you should have a conversation with that person to figure out like what’s going, what’s working, what’s not working. When we have team members and we think, I don’t know if they’re good or not, like that’s when you got to figure out if they are good or not.
Because a lot of those things, they can be resolved. I like to give folks the benefit of the doubt. I think every team member wants to be good. They want to be operating their best. They want to be doing a good job. And so if you’re thinking they’re not good, there’s a good chance they might be thinking, am I doing okay? And they just need some feedback. They need some clarity. Maybe they need a little bit of coaching.
And when I’ve gone into situations like that, the team feels such a relief. They’re so re-energized by the fact that you’re investing energy and resources into them that they start stepping up so much more than you even thought they would. It’s really remarkable. And when you’re investing in high performers, they don’t just give a little bit more. They start giving 10x and they start crushing it and they start blowing you away and they start bringing in new ideas.
And that’s when we want to be fueling on our teams. And so you can get support when you’ve already realized, oh my God, I have literally lost some hemorrhaging money and this is a nightmare and I want to close my business. I want to fire everyone. Okay. But what if you were like, hey, things are going well and we really have big goals and I really want to be able to step away from the business and work fewer days or go on vacation with a family or not be the bottleneck or be able to trust my team, the people I’m paying to do those jobs actually not have to also do those jobs.
What if you were over there and you got that freedom? Again, this is what we can create together. This is what you get. And this is what you get when you invest in support. Again, whether it’s me, whether it’s someone else, whether it’s going through a program, a mastermind, there’s a lot of ways to figure this stuff out. And I really strongly encourage you to figure out the one that’s right for you, but to do something.
So when you recognize either, I’ve got some issues and I think I might be, you know, something’s a little bit off here, or you’re thinking, gosh, I want to get to the next level, but I know that there’s some things, I don’t know what I don’t know. These are both moments to invest, but why not start earlier? Why not start before there’s a problem? Because you could, you are literally could be one conversation, one coaching engagement, one workshop series, one like fractional support away from having your highest profit quarter.
Who wouldn’t do that, right? It’s not too late and it’s also not too early. And if you want to talk, helloatleagarver.com, send me an email. I would love to hear about what your team’s going through, share some ways that I can support you or things I recommend if I’m not the right fit, right? I have a ton of resources across all of the different spaces. If you’re needing fractional HR support, got a lot of folks I recommend there.
If you’re looking for more of a community, got a lot of recommendations there. So I assure you will come away with an idea of, okay, here’s how I need to move forward next. And if you’re liking the show, follow, subscribe on Apple, on Spotify, on your favorite platform. Subscribing helps to reach more folks so that more people can find ease in leading their teams. And that’s the mission. Let’s make leading our teams a little bit easier.
See you next time. Thanks for tuning in. And I hope this podcast makes leading your team feel just a little bit easier. If you liked this episode, check out my most popular tool for staying in the know of what your team’s working on without having to micromanage at leagarver.com slash snippets. And if you’re looking for more support for yourself as a leader or for the team you’re managing, don’t hesitate to reach out at leagarver.com. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
What happens if I ignore a struggling employee and hope things improve on their own?
Waiting almost always makes things worse. In one real example, a founder delayed acting on clear warning signs about an ops director for six months. By the time she finally let that person go, the employee had left $200,000 in unpaid invoices unaccounted for and hidden $50,000 of wrong product around the facility. The founder ended up $250,000 out of pocket. Team members who sense they are being avoided rather than managed can disengage, stop following through, or even start quietly sabotaging their role. The missing piece was consistent follow-through on a clear plan, not just identifying the problem.
How much of a difference can investing in your team early actually make to revenue?
Acting before a crisis hits can be the difference between losing money and having your best quarter ever. One founder of a $4 million events production company brought in support proactively, before things fell apart. By setting up a simple weekly tracking tool called snippets, having real accountability conversations with a struggling team member, and rebalancing workload, the team produced their highest revenue quarter ever, bringing in over a million dollars in a single quarter. That kind of result does not happen when you are in cleanup mode. It happens when you invest early.
Is it worth investing in a team member if I'm not sure they're the right fit?
If someone is already on your team, you are already investing in them through their salary. The real question is whether you have given them clear expectations, honest feedback, and a fair chance to step up. Most team members want to do a good job, and if you think they are struggling, there is a good chance they are wondering the same thing and just need clarity or coaching. Getting that conversation on the table often leads to a noticeable improvement. If things still do not change after that, at least you will know where you stand and can make a confident decision.
What is the snippets tool and how does it help a small team leader stay on top of things?
Snippets is a lightweight Google doc your team fills out at the end of each week. Each person shares their highlights from the week, anything they are stuck on, and their top priorities for the coming week. It gives you a bird's eye view without having to dig through detailed project management tools or send messages at three in the morning wondering if people are working on the right things. It was one of the first tools put in place with the events production team, and it helped redirect a team member who had been spread thin onto the highest priority work, which contributed directly to their record revenue quarter.
When is the right time to bring in outside support for my team, before or after a problem shows up?
The best time is before a problem becomes a crisis. If you are waiting until things are clearly broken, you are already paying a hidden cost in lost revenue, wasted time, and your own stress. Two situations make it worth reaching out: you sense something is off and you keep hoping it will resolve itself, or things are going well but you have big goals and you know there are gaps you cannot quite see yet. Either way, one focused coaching engagement or a clear accountability structure can move a team from stuck to having their highest profit quarter. The earlier you start, the more upside you are able to capture.