Med Spa Running in Circles in Illinois

Dear Dr. Amy,

I built my med spa from one room into four locations and forty employees. I am proud of it. But in the last year, twelve people have walked out the door. Revenue has hit a ceiling, and my marketing manager keeps telling me nothing is changing. Here is what really gets me: every time I hire someone new, someone else quits. I am starting to wonder if I am the problem, or if I just keep hiring the wrong people.

Running in Circles in Illinois

Dear Running in Circles,

First, take a breath. You are not the problem, and neither are your people. The fact that you are asking tells me you care about the people inside what you built.

Think of your business as a fish tank. When one fish gets sick, you look at the fish. When a third of the tank is struggling, you test the water. Twelve out of forty is a third of your tank.

Your most telling clue is that hiring makes people leave. I would guess your most loyal provider was asked to train the new hire on top of her full schedule. Then she watched new bookings drift to the newcomer's open calendar, and felt her income slip a little. She never said a word; she just quietly decided she was not safe here anymore.

When we work with an owner like you, we start with the Trajectory Intelligence Assessment, or TIA, a 61-item look at your organization. It listens to your whole team at once. I suspect yours would show two things happening together. Your people are worn down by too much work and too many decisions funneling to you, which we call Execution Drag. And they are quietly pulling back because they no longer feel secure or seen, which we call Commitment Drift.

From there, we use our Organizational Diagnostic Manual to put a precise name on what is happening, just as a good doctor names the condition before writing the prescription. My first guess for you would be one we call Internal Competition. It is what happens when a shared business starts to feel like a contest, where one person's win is experienced as another person's loss. In your spa, the prize is the calendar. When a new provider arrives, everyone else quietly does the math, and the people with the most to lose leave first.

Once a pattern has a name, it has a path. One intervention we would reach for is called The Shared Scoreboard. Instead of each provider watching only her own numbers, the whole team rallies around a few measures they can only win together. When everyone scores as the business grows, a new hire stops feeling like a threat.

Until then, sit down with your longest-serving people and ask them gently: When we bring someone new on, what changes for you? Then simply listen.

You do not need better fish. You need clearer water, and that is completely within your reach.

Warmly,

Dr. Amy Wilhelmi, LMFT

Diagnose the System. Strengthen the Returns.