Tipping the Scales: Investing vs. Ignoring

By Josh Law

The other day, my son’s new bike got a flat.

It happened right in front of me. Just the sound pshhhhhhh and the bike sinks. Total bummer. (Picture was taken right before the catastrophe)

It wasn’t the end of the world, but he definitely wasn’t happy. He had just gotten the thing, and suddenly he’s back inside, stuck on a screen, the bike just stuck on the sidewalk.

I thought—do I really want to make a run to the store for tubes and tools today? But as I stood at the checkout with $40 worth of bike maintenance purchased, I said something half-joking to the cashier:

“Well… that’s the cost of bike ownership I suppose…”

But on the way out the door, it struck me. No—this isn’t the cost of owning a bike.

This is the investment in keeping your kid active. Away from screens. Burning energy. Feeling free to be a kid.

It’s $40 toward movement, growth, and joy.

Which made it all so much better, even an easy decision.

That got me thinking: this is too similar to what happens in business.

We know something’s broken—something’s costing us—but we don’t always take the time to assess whether fixing it is actually worth it. Or we assume it’s just “the way it is.” But often, we’re not even fully aware that some of these problems can be fixed.

And that’s the thing.

As leaders, we’re busy. There’s little time for deep reflection when the day-to-day is demanding everything we’ve got. But we need to get better at identifying the hidden cost of the status quo. Just because a problem has become familiar doesn’t mean it’s harmless. Familiar pain still hurts—and often, it costs more than we realize.

That’s where I see a lot of businesses can get stuck.

We normalize problems. We adapt to them. In many ways, we are resilient—to work through the pain, maybe even embrace it. We may convince ourselves that fixing them would be too expensive or too time-consuming—without actually running the numbers. And too often, we let the assumption of overwhelming expense outweigh the real cost of not fixing it.

Recently I had a conversation with a prospect/friend about this. We were talking about in-depth storytelling and how it could help their workforce—build culture, bring people together, clarify their identity. They were into it, but they admitted: “It’s tough to get something like this approved. The accountants don’t always love spending money on things like this.”

I get that too. On paper, culture work can feel fuzzy.

But I responded—respectfully and directly:

Accountants also see the cost of turnover.

They see what it costs to hire out of desperation or keep people out of fear.

They know what it looks like to pour money into a system that isn’t efficient—or effective. Accountants want productivity too.

The person on the other side of the table paused and said, basically, “Touché.”

Because deep down, people don’t usually disagree that much about solutions.

People disagree about problems. What’s causing them, or how serious they are. Or what a problem might be costing them if they leave it alone.

That’s why at Only Co., we always start with a diagnostic. Not to sell an idea—but to clarify a reality.

To get a room full of leaders—each with their own perspective—aligned around a shared understanding of what’s actually going on, what it’s costing the organization, and what’s possible to do about it.

Because once you do that?

Agreement becomes easy. Momentum starts to build.

I call it tipping the scales. You don’t have to oversell the solution.

You just have to make the cost of the current problem undeniably heavier than the price of fixing it.

And nowhere is this more clear than in workforce issues.

Turnover. Disengagement. Open roles that sit vacant for months. A revolving door of bad fits. Not enough applicants. Not good enough applicants. Bad attitudes.

These aren’t just “people problems”—they’re business problems. And they’re expensive ones.

We like to call it a labor investment—not payroll or overhead. Because when we really believe our people are an asset, we’ll actually invest more into them. And we’d stop normalizing systems that don’t work just because they’ve been that way for a while.

It takes intentionality to build a workforce you can rely on.

One that your customers can count on. One that your other team members can count on.

And when you start to add up the cost of misalignment, inefficiency, turnover, or burnout, it becomes pretty clear: investing in fixing the problem is far cheaper than continuing to ignore it.

That’s all we’re really trying to do at Only Co.

Help leaders get clear on the real problem—and recognize that these workforce challenges are costing them more than they think. And they’re absolutely solvable.

Kind of like that flat tire.

It might look small, but the impact is bigger than you think. I’d be relegating my 6 year old to life of indoor mediocrity! No one wants that, especially his mom :)

Once you invest in solving the actual problem instead of putting up with the ongoing symptoms - life gets a whole lot better. Works for bikes and business.

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