E781 | Why Staff Turnover Is Normal And Necessary

Staff turnover is often seen as a negative aspect of running a business, but the truth is, it’s a natural and necessary part of growth. Whether someone leaves your company to pursue other opportunities or you decide to let them go, turnover can serve as a catalyst for improvement. In this blog, we’ll explore why staff turnover happens and how it can benefit your business in the long run.

1. Outgrowing Team Members

As your business grows and evolves, so do its needs. Early hires often join at a stage when your business is smaller, more relaxed, and focused on a different set of goals. However, as your vision becomes clearer and your business scales, the pace and expectations shift.

Sometimes, team members may not align with these changes. They might prefer the earlier, smaller version of your company and decide to move on. Alternatively, you may realize they’re not the right fit for your evolving needs. Both scenarios are common and a sign that your business is maturing.

Key Insight: Turnover often stems from growth. When expectations and goals change, not everyone will be on board—and that’s okay.

2. Maintaining High Standards

Hiring the right team is essential, but sometimes your initial hires don’t meet the high standards your business needs as it grows. When you bring in stronger, more talented employees, it often highlights weaknesses in your existing team.

If underperforming staff don’t improve, it can negatively impact the rest of your team. High performers may lower their standards or become frustrated with the lack of accountability. Addressing this ensures your team maintains a high level of excellence.

Pro Tip: Regularly evaluate your team. Ask yourself, “Would I rehire this person today?” If the answer is no, identify areas for improvement or consider making a change.

3. Employees Pursuing Other Aspirations

It’s not uncommon for talented employees to leave and start their own ventures or join other companies. While this can feel frustrating, especially if they’re within your industry, it’s a reflection of the high-caliber people you attract.

If your business can’t meet their long-term goals, it’s natural for them to seek opportunities elsewhere. Instead of viewing this as a failure, recognize that supporting their growth is part of being a great leader.

Key Insight: High achievers may outgrow your business, but their departure doesn’t diminish your success as a leader or business owner.

4. The Opportunity in Turnover

While turnover can feel disruptive, it’s also an opportunity to refine your team, improve systems, and align your business with your goals. Bringing in new team members allows you to:

• Set clear expectations from the start.
• Avoid entrenched habits that don’t fit your vision.
• Build a stronger, more cohesive team.

Think of it like pruning a plant—sometimes you need to trim back to allow for healthier, more robust growth in the future.

How to Navigate Staff Turnover

1. Evaluate Regularly: At the end of each year, assess your team. Would you rehire each member? If not, identify areas for improvement.
2. Be Transparent: Set clear expectations and communicate your vision. Let your team know where the business is headed and what’s expected of them.
3. Don’t Fear Turnover: Understand that turnover is normal, even for great businesses. Use it as an opportunity to improve and align your team with your goals.

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Podcast Transcript

Danny:  Hey, real quick, if you're serious about starting or growing your cash based practice, I want to formally invite you to go to Facebook and join our PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. This is a group of over 6, 000 providers all over the country. And it's a pretty amazing place to start to get involved in the conversation.

Hope to see you there soon. Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skill set in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot. My name is Danny Matta, and over the last 15 years, I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession.

I've been a staff PT, I've been an active duty military officer physical therapist, I've started my own cash practice, I've sold that cash practice. And to date, my company physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale, their own cash practices. So if this sounds like something you want to do, listen up, cause I'm here to help you.

What's going on? Dr. Danny here with the PG entrepreneur podcast. And today we're talking about why staff turnover is normal. So what I mean by staff turnover is either you're having to let somebody go or somebody is leaving your business. And they're, moving on to to another job. When I started my clinic with with my wife, Ashley we felt like we wanted to build a business that was such a fantastic work environment, such a fantastic clinic and opportunity this sort of utopia for clinicians in particular.

That no one would ever want to leave. That was the goal. And that's obviously a great goal and something that, we even strive to do with the businesses that we have today. W with our with our team. But the reality is a couple of things are going to happen. That are very normal and the sign of a business that is, just growing.

One of those things is that you might outgrow a team member. And here's what I mean by that. You may have somebody that you hire on. Early in your business and they come into a business that at the stage that they come in is different than where the business might be a few years later, and that's the sign of a business maturing.

So there's a few things that can. To drive these changes. Number one, your vision might become more clear. You may decide instead of just a small, you and one or two other clinician business, like you want to grow into a bigger business. And because of that you have bigger growth goals.

The tempo of the business is going to be ramped up. The systems have to be tighter. Everybody has to be, they have to elevate their. In order to work towards the goal that you have and your vision might be different than where somebody came in. So somebody might've come in and this business that was just like a super chill, slightly bigger than a lifestyle business.

And that's, what they thought they were. Getting involved in and all of a sudden you decide, nope, we're going to, we're going to change the tempo of this. We're going to, we're going to expect more out of everybody. And you may have some people that don't, that's not what they signed up for.

So they decide, all right this is not what I was looking for. This is different than what, when I first started. So I'm going to. Move on and I'm going to go get a different job. And that is a normal thing. In fact, I think that right there is what I see the most. Maybe not that they decide that they want to leave, but that you decide you need to make a change in these types of positions.

So I would say 25 percent of the time that individual we'll move on and they'll go and find another job. 75 percent of the time you have to let them go. And that's uncomfortable. That is hard to do. These are difficult conversations to have. And I don't know the best way to put it. Like it is just a difficult thing to do.

Especially when you think about the discomfort of those types of conversations. And the personal relationship you may or may not have with them. So the longer somebody has worked with you, the more, them and their family, the harder it becomes. But when you look at in the people around you in your business, if you don't have the right people in the right seats you're not going to be able to get where you're trying to go with that business.

And the other thing that can happen too, is you may have somebody that's been around for a while, and then you start to, as your business matures, you start to bring in. Other people, other staff members, and maybe because your business is bigger, you're attracting more talented people with higher skill levels.

And all of a sudden you start to realize that person you thought was an A player is a C plus. And if you have a C plus surrounded by a bunch of A players, a couple of things are going to happen. One, maybe that C plus says. Oh, shit. I need to get my, I need to get my my stuff together and they start to elevate their work that happens more often than not, it doesn't.

And if you don't make a change, the a players you have will get frustrated and, or they'll think, Oh, this is acceptable. I can act like this too. And then they start to decrease their. Workability down to, a B or whatever, because they just think that's what you're expecting of them. Neither of her, neither of which are good options.

So to see changes in your business and have staff leave and or staff need to be let go is very normal. And something that I see frequently, especially once people are a couple of years into their business occasionally you make a great hire from the get go and. They're growing with your company and they've been an amazing a player the whole time.

We had an office manager who's still the office manager of our clinic after we sold it. And she's a killer. She's great. Fantastic for the culture. Does a great job. She, has grown with that company. And and that's a good example of somebody that came in early stage that was able to, maintain a position in a company and grow with it and help define the culture in a lot of cases, the early stage people you hire, you still know as much like you haven't hired as many people you don't want to look for.

Sometimes it's at a convenience. You're like, Oh, this person's convenient. I don't have to go through job search or whatever. It's like my my uncle's friend or something, and And you just go for it, right? Cause it's a body, you need a body and you're time poor and this very normal.

But if you don't, if you don't ever see any sort of turnover in your business, like that's not necessarily a good thing. I think low turnover is good, but it also might mean that you just don't hold a standard as high as maybe you should, and there's one exercise you can do, really I try, I do this at the end of every year.

I think to myself would I rehire? The people that are on our team. And if I wouldn't, what things would they need to change in order for me to rehire them? And that's when you can start to work on mentoring your team to improve in the areas that you view as areas that need to improve to be rehired.

And if they don't Make those improvements, then you have to make a decision. You're either okay with the mediocrity of whatever it is that these people are doing, or you need to make an adjustment and you need to find another person to fill that role. And yeah, we've now had to do this in multiple companies with multiple different roles.

And it just happens. The other thing too, is you may have somebody that's a great fit and. What they want from their life is not necessarily what your company can provide for them. And that's normal. That happens too. It's very frustrating. I think for clinicians when somebody leaves and opens up their own their own clinic, but they may have, larger aspirations of what they want to do.

I, listen, I've been there. I've had multiple staff do this. With, within Close proximity of like clinics we're at. It doesn't feel good at the time, but you realize, man, there's so many people to help. These are great clinicians. These are people that, in some ways too, it's like they don't know the discomfort of running a business when they're working for your business.

And it's hard to describe that to somebody about, man, you got a pretty good, you had a pretty good. Deal here with this, with the job that you have. But yeah, if you want to go for it I have respect for anybody that's willing to do that. And they learn a lot more about what you've been doing and probably have a lot more respect for you after the fact as well.

But that's normal too. You're going to get that. And especially if you attract really high level people if they don't see an opportunity big enough within the vision of your company for what they want, then they're going to look. And sometimes that might be doing their own thing or working for another company.

So you'll have some of that turnover too. The last thing I would say is, especially now everybody's a free agent. It's so it's normal. It's almost looked at as a negative thing. If you've just been in the same job for a long period of time, I don't know really why. That's the case. I'm not sure, but I don't think it's a negative thing.

I think if you find a company that you align with and you can grow with, and you feel like you have mentorship and you feel like you have opportunity and you see that path to grow, like what's why try to find something else, like if you're happy. But I think a lot of people here, their friends and their family, and they're like switching jobs every couple of years.

And maybe there's some benefit to that from a upward mobility standpoint. But the grass is always greener somewhere, but it doesn't necessarily mean that's the truth. Like it is what it is. Some people need to make changes every couple of years because they feel the urge to do so to really get it, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you did anything wrong as the business owner.

So keep that in mind too. So turnover is normal. It is a healthy part of the business. It's I am not a gardener. Some of the messes reference up, I like pruning plants back so that they can grow bigger and better. I'll see the next season and in your business, sometimes you have to prune the business as well.

When you have to make some adjustments and it, it can be a bit uncomfortable as you make the transition and maybe it's a bit more workload on you for a short period of time. But as you build a team and better idea of how you want to build it and the systems you want to plug into place, and you have people that are coming in, freshly in terms of, no bad habits, not.

Used to doing things their way kind of thing. And they can plug right into the new systems that you're defining. It can be a huge catalyst for your business and something that in many cases is very necessary.

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