Why “ROI” Is Actually Keeping Your Business Stuck

Want to scale your health practice and get your life back? Work with me 1-on-1 in our private advisory and mastermind - https://go.healthpreneurtraining.com/hp-mastery?el=yt-july5

Most health practice owners eventually hit the same wall. The business is growing, revenue is up, and patients or clients are getting results, but too much still depends on you. 

The next level isn't about doing more. It's about building something bigger than yourself. A business that scales without relying on you for everything.

That's why we created Healthpreneur Mastery.

Mastery is the private advisory board and mastermind for leading health professionals doing at least $500,000 per year who want to build a business that creates greater profit, freedom, and impact.

This isn't for beginners.

It's for practitioners, practice owners, and health entrepreneurs who know they're capable of building something much bigger and don't want to figure it all out alone.

Learn more about Healthpreneur Mastery here: https://go.healthpreneurtraining.com/hp-mastery?el=july5

If the first question you ask before making a business investment is what is the ROI, you are already thinking too small. 

The greatest business leaders in the world, from Bezos to Steve Jobs, never led with that question.

In this Episode I am sharing six reframes that will help you make bigger, better decisions the same way they do.

Most practitioners and business owners default to ROI thinking because it feels safe and logical. 

But ROI measures what you can already predict, and the biggest opportunities in business are always the ones you cannot see yet. 

I walk through real examples from Amazon Prime, Netflix original content, and Apple Stores, plus a personal story of how an $18,000 mastermind investment led to a New York Times bestseller, a multi-million dollar book deal, and business outcomes that could never have been forecasted in advance. 

The six reframes I share in this video cover how to think about upside versus downside, the real cost of inaction, how to evaluate whether an investment builds an asset or increases your capabilities, and why almost every business decision you will ever make is completely reversible. 

If you are a health practitioner or coaching business owner who wants to think and make decisions like a leader instead of playing it safe, this is the video that changes your framework.

🕰️CHAPTERS

0:00 Why Asking for ROI Is Small Thinking
1:30 How Bezos, Hastings, and Jobs Made Decisions Without Knowing the Return
4:30 The $18,000 Mastermind That Led to a New York Times Bestseller
7:30 Reframe 1: If This Works, What Is the Upside?
 9:00 Reframe 2: What Is the Cost of Not Doing This?
11:30 Reframe 3: If All This Did Was Get Me From A to B, Is It Worth It?
13:30 Reframe 4: Is This Building an Asset?
15:30 Reframe 5: Is This Investment Increasing My Capabilities?
17:30 Reframe 6: Is This Decision Reversible?
19:00 Average Business Owners Ask What Is the ROI. Great Leaders Ask Who Do I Become.

🔔 Subscribe for weekly strategies on growing your health coaching or practice-based business: https://youtube.com/@Healthpreneur

🔗 RESOURCES AND LINKS
 Website: https://healthpreneurgroup.com
 Podcast: The Healthpreneur Show with Yuri Elkaim
 Healthpreneur Website: https://healthpreneurgroup.com

❓COMMONLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Why do the best business leaders not focus on ROI when making decisions?

 ROI thinking only measures outcomes you can already predict, which means it systematically undervalues the biggest opportunities because those opportunities have outcomes that cannot be foreseen in advance. The best leaders instead ask who their company gets to become as a result of a decision, which opens up possibilities that linear ROI calculations will always miss.

What is the right way to evaluate a business investment if not by ROI?

The most effective framework involves six questions: what is the upside if this works, what is the cost of not doing this, would going from A to B alone make it worth it, is this building a long-term asset, will this increase my capabilities, and is this decision reversible. Applying these six reframes shifts the focus from short-term prediction to long-term positioning and compounding returns.

How do you overcome the fear of making a large business investment?

The worst case scenario of almost any business investment is losing the money, and money can always be made back. Every significant decision in business is also reversible, which means the real risk is not the investment itself but the cost of inaction and the opportunities that are lost by playing it safe and staying where you are.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If the first question you ask before making a business investment is what's the ROI? Then you've already lost and you're making the wrong decision. ROI measures what you can already kind of predict, but the best leaders make decisions based on where the biggest outcomes can't yet be predicted. Hey, welcome to the Health Preneur Show. I'm Yuri Al Kim, CEO and founder of Health Preneur. You are listening to this because you are a health professional or coach who is committed and driven to growing a successful virtual practice or coaching business online. In these episodes, I'm going to give you the best of the best when it comes to marketing, sales, mindset, business growth in general to help you achieve those goals. So without any further ado, let's dive right in. I'm going to share with you six reframes in this video that will help you think like some of the greatest leaders on the planet, including Bezos, Steve Jobs, et cetera. And I'm going to show you specific examples of how they've approached particular investment decisions in their businesses and how they can apply it to you as well. So let me start off by sharing the story real quick of Amazon Prime. Bezos in 2005 decided to launch Amazon Prime, $79 a year. Everyone thought he was crazy. How does this even make sense in the short term? Free, unlimited two-day shipping, like what's going on here? But he wasn't asking what's the ROI on free shipping. He asked himself a different question. He's asking, what kind of customer behavior is this going to create? Now, 20 some odd years later, we've seen the impacts of Amazon Prime and what that has done. Let's have a look at another example. In 2011, Reed Hastings, the then CEO of Netflix, decided to start spending billions of dollars creating Netflix-owned content, right? Like original films on Netflix. Again, everyone thought he was crazy. The House of Cards, as an example, was reported to cost $100 million, right? So they're now competing with the biggest Hollywood production houses. And the question wasn't so much about what's the ROI on this. Instead, what Hastings was asking was a different question. He's asking, what business do we become if we own the content? And we've seen how that's played out since then, right? Big bets outweigh small-term ROI thinking. Let's look at one more example. Steve Jobs in 2001 announced that Apple was going to start opening up stores. And at the time, there were no good examples of tech companies like that with any good examples of having done that. So Dell had done it very expensively and it failed miserably. None of that stuff was working. And Steve said, who cares? We're going to do it anyways. And again, in the short term, it wasn't about ROI. Steve wanted to create an environment where people could touch and feel the art that Apple was creating. And in so doing, they would become evangelical customers for life. And we know how that's panned out. So if we look at these three stories, what they all have in common is most mediocre business owners ask, what's the ROI? That's kind of the baseline of how most people approach life and decisions in their business, whether it's working with an agency or investing in ads or whatever it is. But the great CEOs are asking, who do I, who do we become as a company because of this decision? And the thing to remember is this is a lot of times the biggest opportunities are the ones you can't even think or see now. So I'm going to help you unpack this as we go through this. I'll give you an example for my own life. So back in 2009, after struggling in business for three years, I made the decision to invest in a mastermind. It was $18,000, which is more money than I made in the previous year. I said, you know what? Screw it. I need to do this because I have to do something different to move forward and learn and grow. So I didn't have the money. I put it on two credit cards. I made the investment. And that first mastermind was the domino that cascaded everything else that came from that. Met a couple people. We became very good friends to this day. We've been at wedding parties. We've traveled all over the world together. How do you put an ROI on that? There were business deals that were done in that mastermind that I never could have even foreseen. And I never would have asked the coach, hey, like how do I know I'm going to get any business deals? I didn't ask questions like that. I didn't worry about what the ROI was. I went into that decision knowing I don't know what this is going to look like, but I'm going to make it work because I know this is who I need to become in order to get where I want to go. So the one of the things that I think about with respect to ROI thinking is it's very small thinking. So if I look at that mastermind decision, I stayed in that mastermind for about a year. Then I moved into another mastermind. And in that other mastermind, I happened to run into someone in the hallway who I had known loosely online, but we hadn't really done much business together. We connected, had lunch, and after that, a couple months later, we started doing business together and we become one of their biggest partners in supporting the work that they were doing because we had a lot of synergistic compliments in our businesses. Because of that, I got invited to a small private mastermind they were hosting in New York City. 10 people in the room. I get there. One of the people in the room is the CEO of Hay House. Wow. Years prior, my vision was to write a book with Hay House. So he's in the room, amazing, amazing human, read, and I approach him and I say, Hey, I've got this idea for a book. Long story short, a couple days later, he sends me a proposal. We get the book in order. A year and a half later, that book becomes a number two NeuroTime's bestseller. I get on shows like the Doctors, the Doctor Oz, et cetera. It becomes, it leads to a multiple seven-figure two book deal right after that with Rodale Press. And that leads into a whole other cascade of things. So why am I sharing this with you? Is because if I just asked myself, what's the ROI I'm going to make on this initial $18,000, that would have been so limited in my thinking. Because the thing is, I would never at the time have been able to imagine all of the things that would have unfolded by putting myself in the environment, by making the commitment and then making it right. And with that said, I want to lead into six reframes that will help you make better decisions so you don't limit yourself with small thinking that is linear and only focused on ROI. So the first question you want to think about is this your approach with the decision to make, right? You're hiring an agency, you're going to run some ads, you're going to join some type of whatever it is. If this works, what's the upside? Okay. I want you to think about this because a lot of us humans tend to focus on the downside. We catastrophize things. Oh my God, what if this doesn't work out? So let me just use the example I gave you earlier. I'm approaching an $18,000 investment. What if this doesn't work out? I lose $18,000. But like really, like I have to be really retarded not to be able to get some type of value from an $18,000 mastermind. Okay. So the the worst case scenario, in anything you do, the worst case scenario is you lose that money. You can always make the money back. You can always make the money back. Never forget that. Okay, so what's the upside? The problem is that we can't, we don't know what the upside is, but we know what the downside is. So $18,000 is the worst it can get. Okay. It's the worst it's going to be. But the upside is infinite. There's no ceiling on the upside. As an example, we had a client a number of years ago, Ryan came into work with us. He was struggling in his practice. He had a family of six to feed, took out a $40,000 loan just to survive. He invested a portion of that to work with us. Coming in, um, he's starting at zero. Three months later, three months later, he goes from that to making $356,000 per month. This is during COVID. By the summer of that year, 2020, they're now what $1.2 million per month. But one year later, more than $3.2 million per month. So what was the worst case scenario in that situation? Worst case scenario was he would have lost the investment and made no money. Okay, well, it is what it is. It wasn't going to be much worse than where he was. Best case scenario, he couldn't even have fathomed the growth that he had in the amount of time that we worked together, let alone who he gets to become in the process. Two, what's the cost of not doing this? So things might be good, your practice is doing well, revenue is good, maybe you're busy, maybe you're not. I don't know. Like you have to get associated to the cost of inaction. And the problem with doing well is that you settle for mediocrity. I don't, I don't care where your business is at. I'm sure it's doing well, but there's always another level. We typically work with practice owners, practitioners who are doing, you know, half million plus in revenue, but they're not satisfied there. And it's not about not being grateful. You can be grateful for what you've created, but high achievers and winners want more, not necessarily because they're greedy to make more money. It's because that's just who they are. They want to make more, they want to contribute more, they want to grow. So, what's the cost of not doing this? The real cost is continuing to play small. And I don't care how much money you're making. If you're a million dollars a month, five million dollars, it doesn't matter. You're still playing small. And I want you to get associated with that feeling of insignificance because you might think you're the like God's like gift to the world. That's fine. But you're still playing small, just like I am. Right. I'm not saying like, I'm not trying to make you feel bad. I'm just saying like all of us are playing small. And by not doing the very thing that we know internally might be the right decision for us to move to the next level, the cost of not doing this is not just a financial cost. It's a cost of you not being able to spread your message and share your greatness and build a bigger legacy or whatever is important to you. Okay. Um, as an example, uh, I've gone to see a number of World Cup games, um, Canadian. So I've obviously supported the Canadian team. And like a lot of these have been like last-minute decisions to like jump on a plane and spend a couple thousand dollars to go watch a game. I don't have to do that. But the cost of me not doing that has been losing out on really potentially amazing memories. I don't know if they're gonna win or lose or play like shit, but I'm willing to take the bet because what's the upside? Well, the upside is amazing things can happen, just like it happened the other week when I randomly walked across, you know, the team hotel, see the team coming onto the team bus. I happen to know the CEO of Canada Soccer, I didn't know they're staying there. I ended up sending him a text. We get together that night just to connect in person because we hadn't done so in person up until that point. And all this cool stuff happens as a result of that. That never would have happened if I decided to stay home and just play it safe. Okay. So, what's the cost of not doing this? It's tricky to answer truthfully because you don't really know the cost, because you don't really know the upside. But I'm sure to tell you that the upside is absolutely infinite, and the cost of not exploring that should eat at your soul. Hey, hope you're enjoying the show so far. Just popping in real quick to let you know that I am on Instagram. If we're not connected yet on the good old ing, hit me up. I'm at healthprinter, not any of the other fake accounts, but just at healthprinter. Be sure to follow me on Instagram and send me a DM letting me know how you like the show or really anything else you need help with to grow your virtual health practice or coaching business online. So, once again, that's at Healthprinter on Instagram. In the meantime, let's get back to the show. Okay, third reframe with respect to making better decisions in your business is how I think of things. And what I've noticed the most successful business owners that I've known and worked with over the years, they all have the same mentality. They're not looking for A to Z. They're looking for A to B. So the question is if all this did was help me go from A to B, not necessarily A to Z, would this still be worth it? And the difference there is that very successful people just they just need one idea, one nuance, one tweak, and it's all paid for itself because they have so much leverage in the ecosystem they've already built. Whereas people who are starting from scratch and really struggling and expecting everything, they have so much work to do that they have, they need everything. And so therefore, it's like there's just so much at stake if they made the wrong decision. A number of years ago, I invested $60,000 in a speaking mastermind, which I was not really impressed by. It was not a great setup. And initially I was pissed. And then I said, Jerry, don't be a little bitch, put your big boy pants on and make the most of this. And I got, I asked myself, okay, well, this isn't maybe not exactly what I wanted in the way that I thought about it. But if all this did was give me one opportunity to speak on stage, I'm sure this will be worth it. And that's exactly what happened. I ended up speaking at a nutrition conference. It ends up being an unbelievable opportunity that opened up business and just impact beyond what I could have thought about at the time. So even though the investment in that particular mastermind I wasn't too enthralled by, that one opportunity was worth all of it 10 times over. So I don't go into any decisions or relationships with I got scammed before. No, because if you got scammed before, and I'm not saying there's some shitty people out there, for sure there are, but it's are we willing to give it better meaning? Are we willing to find the golds as opposed to focusing on the dirt? Because even in the shittiest of experiences, there's always light. And it's whether or not we're gonna focus on that or focus on how someone, you know, pulled a fast one on us. Number four, is this building an asset? I loathe social media. I created uh posted a video recently about like why I loathe it. When I look at social media, I'm thinking about like Instagram and TikTok and the short form nonsense. And listen, there's some value that I get. I can't stand it personally. I don't like creating things that disappear because the thing I value more than anything in my life is my time, just like I'm sure you do. You can always make more money, you can never make more time. So if I'm looking at investing in anything, I'm looking at is this building an asset? So why would you own a home instead of renting? Just think about that. Okay. If you own a home, why do you own the home? Because at some level you know it's an asset. And what does that mean? Well, an asset appreciates over time, but more specifically, an asset puts money in your pocket. A liability takes money out of it. So the ironic thing about owning a house is it's actually not an asset. It's a liability because you're paying for it every month until you sell it, in which case it becomes an asset. So what's funny is that most people will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars as a down payment, in addition to thousands or tens of thousands a month in recurring mortgage payments, thinking that's an asset. And it's nothing more than a liability until the point where you sell it or cash flow it. Yet when it comes to business, they're like, well, what's the ROI? Like, hold on, dude. So let me give you an example. With YouTube, I will venture to say this, and you can put this on record. Creating valuable content on YouTube is the single most important asset you can build for your personal brands and your business. If you are not creating useful content consistently on YouTube, you will become as irrelevant as dust. And I share this with all the love in the world, and I'm sharing this for one specific reason. A lot of people that we speak with, they're like, what's the ROI on YouTube? And my answer is, well, what's the time frame? It's I'm telling you, it's small fry thinking. You're thinking small, and small thinkers don't become big leaders. Let me give you an example. So, in my previous business, I built my channel to 300,000 subscribers. I posted a shit ton of videos, half of them I don't even know what the hell I was doing. Eventually I kind of got into, you know, understanding how to do that. And I didn't realize the impact that those videos would make. Several years later, after I sold that company, started Healthpreneur, about two to three years in, I had a client come into our mastermind. And in one of our coaching calls, he's like, Hey man, do you know, do you know the story about how I found you? And I said, I have no idea. You saw an ad? He's like, No, no, I actually saw one of your coffee enema videos on your previous channel because I had a health business. A coffee enema video that I was, you know, doing coffee enemas for a moment. So I shot a video about that. He comes across that video. And when he saw he told me, he's like, when I saw that video, I said to myself, I'm gonna work with this guy. Not from a coffee enema perspective, but from a building a health business perspective. So amazing dude, Kevin. He's gone on to build an absolutely amazing business helping people with osteoporosis. He's become the leader in this space. He's impacting millions of lives. Millions of lives. So if you think about like, is this building an asset? I posted videos. I created videos like this. I posted them years ago. I didn't even know who they're helping. And randomly I get some person coming to my world to help them with their business who saw one of the assets I had posted maybe six or seven years prior. Is that worth it? Uh you better fucking believe it's worth it. Like we built our house in Mexico. I'm building an asset that I can cash flow forever. And then I can also use for business retreats and all sorts of other cool things. Is that an asset? Yes, it's an asset. Number five. So sometimes you might not be building an asset, but it might be building something else, which are skills and capabilities. So is this investment going to increase my capabilities? So if you think about how we make decisions, and I learned this from my coach Dan Sullivan at the time, uh it's called the four ski framework. We all start off with a commitment. We're gonna commit to doing something. Then it requires courage to do the fucking thing. Because on the other side of courage are capabilities, and the capabilities lead to confidence. But the thing is, everyone wants confidence. They want to know for sure that this is gonna work, that they're gonna have the skill and like whatever the outcome. But that's the last piece of the puzzle. First, you need to commit because in that process, you have to go through the shit to build the capabilities. So when you're investing in a coaching program or a mastermind, or if you work out with a trainer, is this investment gonna help me increase my tapabilities? If it's gonna help you increase your capabilities, then why would you not make the investment? I've invested millions of dollars in self-education, not schooling, which is a complete waste of time post, you know, once you have your degree. I'm talking about like actual learning about personal development, business, marketing, like how to be better. Every single one of those investments helps me increase my capabilities, my capabilities to become a better communicator, better at sales, better to lead my team, better to figure out marketing, all these different things. So whether I'm buying a $500 course or a $50,000 mastermind, I'm always thinking about will this increase my capabilities? And the answer is obviously yes. So maybe in this case, investing in a mastermind, like the example I gave you earlier, is not increase, it's not building an asset for me, but it's helping increase my capabilities. Why is that important? Well, if I become a more skilled and valuable contributor to my business or to this world, then I make more money. So anything you can do to increase your capabilities is important. Now, I would venture to say that a lot of practitioners make the cardinal sin of over-indexing on more certifications and degrees and letters behind their name, which quite honestly don't make a difference because you already know how to help people. And I would index a little more heavily on personal growth and learning how to run a business because those have the biggest asymmetric returns. Like if you get one more certification about how to do something, that really doesn't change anything for your business. But you understanding how to generate demand changes the rest of your life. Sets you up for like generational wealth if you know how to do this properly. And the sixth reframe to help you make better decisions as opposed to just relying on ROI is very simply is this reversible? And the answer in pretty much every situation is yes. Okay, like if you get married, it's reversible. Most people get divorced, right? If you build a house, is it reversible? Technically, yes. I mean, you could just sell it, no big deal. I guess the only one that might be less reversible would be a gender change. I mean, but even now, who knows? But I'm I'm I'm using these as an extreme example because in your business, you might engage with an agency, you might run some ads, you might invest in something, you might hire someone. All of that, you're not, you're not tied to for the rest of your life. Right now, obviously you want to do your best to follow 300 commitments and making sure things work, but just understand that if things don't work out the way you want them to, it's fine. You can always make the money back, right? You can always change and pivot if you have to. It's not the end of the world. $18,000 to me at the time felt like all I had. So, yes, like subjectively and relatively, it felt like a lot of money, but in the back of my mind, I knew that I would always find a way to make this work. So it wasn't like, man, like this is it. It's over, like there's no way back. Every decision you're making can be reversed. I don't think you should back out of commitments. I don't think you should be a flaky type of person like that. I think you should commit and follow things through, but understand that it's you're not tied set in stone for the rest of your life. Okay. So these six reframes have helped me personally navigate some really important business decisions and life decisions over the past, you know, 20 somewhat years that I think have helped me out a lot. But I also study a lot of very successful leaders, like some of the examples I gave you earlier. And they all have these very, very similar traits. Very, very seldomly do they look at what's the ROI. Instead, they ask the fundamental question who do I, who does our company become, get to become because of this decision? So as we finish this off, I just want to leave you with this. Average business owners ask, what's the ROI? Great leaders ask, who do I become because of this decision? So the question I'm gonna leave you with here is do you want to play it safe or do you want to build something great? And if you're a health practitioner and you want to build something great, then you can click below this video to learn more about our healthprunter mastery. If you're interested in scaling your business with this level of thinking and my help specifically in your business. Hey, thanks for hanging out with me in today's episode. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have, here's what I'd love for you to do next is if you're not already subscribed to the Health Brunner show, go ahead and hit that button wherever you're listening to this to make sure you do not miss a single episode coming your way. And while you're at it, why not leave a rating review? It would mean a lot to me. And here's why. Because I lay in bed awake at night wondering, are you enjoying this show? Do you get a lot of value out of this? And I never really know until I hear from you. All kidding aside, I would really appreciate a rating review because, as you know, the more people know about this show, the more people we can help. And your ratings and reviews make a huge difference. So thanks for hanging out with me once again. And I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.