A cafe near my kids’ previous pre-school used to be our weekday breakfast spot — $8 to $10 every morning, then we’d drop the kids off next door in school.
One Monday I peeled a chicken wing for my kid and realised it was Friday’s. Re-fried, dried out, sitting in oil that had been recycled so many times that every fried dish on the menu tasted the same kind of stale. Someone had done some stupid math: re-fry the leftovers, save a few dollars, nobody notices.
People notice.
We stopped going, and we weren’t the only ones — the place closed not long after. My read is that the wings were a symptom, not the disease. The disease was a business that decided its customers wouldn’t know. I UNDERSTAND it’s also about waste, limiting costs…but this…this isn’t acceptable, because it could risk disease, and if someone dies…
You know, customers and people aren’t dumb – they always know. You cannot hide degraded quality — not in this era, not ever. The corner you cut quietly costs more than it ever saved, because the thing you spent was trust, and trust doesn’t show up on the P&L until it’s already gone.
So in my own clinics I run the opposite playbook, and I pay for it on purpose.
If a patient isn’t the right fit for us — if someone else can do a better job for what they actually need — we send them to our competitor. We lose the revenue. We do it anyway, because it’s just bad business to TRY to do something we’re NOT good at, just to keep revenue – it’s simple really:
- if we can treat competently, we treat
- if we cant, we send them (even to competitors) who can do better
Cos my #1 interest is alignment and to get them better…keeping someone who we cant treat well, is really bad practice as a business owner, professional and even a human being.
Doesn’t matter if they dont find out.
I KNOW, and that’s enough for me to decide what is good FOR THEM. These people who come to us, they’re not like just ATM or milk cows for me to milk dry, I feel and think a sense of duty and care towards them.
Proper.
In fact, if the good ones that should see us, and for whatever reason, if they’re not happy with a session, they get a free trial with a different therapist, or a goodwill refund. And here’s the part that actually costs: I still pay the therapist for that session. The patient’s trust and the therapist’s pay both come out of my margin — not theirs.
That’s the price of the principle, and I’ve decided it’s cheaper than the alternative.
None of this is generosity.
It’s arithmetic on a longer clock. The cafe optimised for one Monday’s margin. I’m optimising for whether that family still trusts me in ten years — and whether the people they talk to do too. Short-term grab versus long-term compounding. The wings were the whole lesson on a plate.
There’s a quieter reason underneath it. I’m accountable for more than this month’s numbers — to the people who trusted me, and to a standard that doesn’t switch off when no one’s watching. Except someone always is. That’s not a threat; it’s the most freeing constraint in business. You stop trying to get away with things, and you just build the thing right.
The default move, when margins squeeze, is to protect the dollar and hope. The build is to protect the trust and pay for it.
Decide now which one you’re running.
Your customers already know which one you are.