Build a Business That Runs Like a Healthy Body

The real reason most growing businesses break down

So here is something I hear all the time from service providers who are five or ten years in. Revenue is climbing, the team is expanding, and somehow the whole thing feels like it is held together with duct tape. Every decision still runs through you. Good people keep leaving. The culture you imagined when you started looks nothing like what actually exists on the floor.

The instinct is to hire a stronger leader, build a better system, or push harder. And sometimes that makes it worse.

I had a conversation recently with Glenn Bostock, founder and CEO of SnapCab, and it genuinely shifted the way I think about this problem. You can hear the full thing in the full episode. Glenn started as a cabinet maker in a rented barn with his newlywed wife and their dog. He now runs a company with over 140 employees that builds elevator interiors and office pods for companies like Starbucks and Microsoft. But the part of his story that stuck with me had nothing to do with revenue. It had everything to do with how he figured out what was actually breaking.

Problems are reps, not red flags

Glenn frames problems in his company the same way a strength coach frames a hard training session. You tear the muscle so it grows back stronger. You do not avoid the discomfort. You design your environment to surface it faster.

He built something called a Gemba walk. Every day, his leadership team walks every department and reviews boards filled with post-it notes where employees flag what went wrong. And here is the part that really got me. Those employees are rewarded for posting the mistakes. Carnival tickets. A spin at a prize wheel. An extra vacation day.

On the surface that sounds counterintuitive. But think about what happens in most businesses. When you punish people for surfacing problems, you are essentially telling them, do not show me where we can improve. You are flying blind. Glenn flipped it. He created a system where the company can feel its own pain signals quickly, process them at the right level, and heal itself without every issue needing to travel all the way to the top.

I actually nerded out with him on this because it maps perfectly to how the nervous system works. We have reflex arcs in the spinal cord that intercept pain signals before they even reach the brain, so the body can react fast without waiting for a top-down command. That is exactly what Glenn built into his business.

When you punish people for surfacing problems, you are telling them not to show you where the company can grow.

Hiring for love, not just skill

Glenn tried four different senior leaders over fifteen years when the company started scaling. Every single one pulled the business in a direction he did not intend. And he told me something honest about that period: the problem was not the leaders. The problem was that he had not yet figured out what he actually needed, and he had not built a culture strong enough to hold new people to a shared standard.

His fix was to get very clear on his own authentic strengths and weaknesses first. He is great at product design and creative problem solving. He is not a finance person. He is not a detail-and-systems person. Once he stopped pretending otherwise and started hiring people who genuinely loved doing the things he did not, the company became scalable in a way it never had been before.

He also shifted who he was hiring for. His three core values at SnapCab are be kind, be authentic, and be useful. He hires for culture fit first, because he can teach almost any technical skill but he cannot teach someone to care about the community around them.

I think about this a lot in the context of the service providers I work with. We tend to hire out of desperation, for a skill set we are missing right now, and we skip the question of whether this person actually wants to be here. That is how you end up with what Glenn calls a cancer in the body, something growing inside the company that is not aligned with where you are trying to go.

The human body as a business model

Glenn's book, A Human Business, uses the body as a governing metaphor throughout, and I love it because it is the same lens I bring to my work with entrepreneurs. He maps leadership to the head, production to the hands, and operations to the torso. He talks about the immune system strengthening by going through illness, and about how growth requires tearing before healing.

But the metaphor that landed hardest for me was this one. He said the purpose of a business is not to make as much money as possible, the same way the purpose of your body is not to eat as much food as possible. The purpose is to take in the right inputs so you can go do something useful.

That is a reframe worth sitting with. The revenue is a signal that you are being useful. It is the indicator, not the goal. And when you run your business from that starting point, with the goal of creating genuine value for customers and a genuine community for your people, the decisions about culture, hiring, and systems all start to make a different kind of sense.

One thing to pay attention to this week

Glenn started in the neighborhood of what he loved, not exactly where he wanted to end up. He fixed furniture before he built custom cabinetry. He remodeled elevators before he invented a better elevator interior system. Every step was adjacent to the one before it, and he was paying close attention to what was actually working.

That is the move. Not a total reinvention. Just one step closer to the version of your business that runs like a healthy, self-healing system.

If you want to get a clearer read on where your business stands right now, the free 6-Principle assessment at /assess is a good starting point. It will show you which of the six Prime Performance principles are working for you and which ones might be the pebble in your shoe.