06/06/2026
Cancer in business.....
What do you do with cancer? Do you negotiate with it? Do you ignore it and hope it’ll go away? In either of those instances it’s most likely going to have a very detrimental effect to your body. Cancer can come in a lot of different forms, but in a small business is most often manifests itself in an employee’s attitude.
Here’s what you do with cancer, you treat it. If it doesn’t heal then you treat it again… Then if it’s still not showing any effects of clearing up or getting better then you do the next and final step… You cut it the f #$k out of your body! There I said it, just like in surgery you take that malignant tumor and cut it out.
Guess what? The healing hurts. So many times we put off cancer surgery because we know that the road to healing might actually hurt us worse than the cancer eating away at us. And you know what, sometimes it does ..... sometimes the road to post operative cancer surgery is hard ....it’s going to make you work double and triple shifts , it’s going to make you feel pain, It’s going to make you feel exhaustion, it’s going to make you dig deep to find strength you didn’t know you had.
But in the end, you will recover after you have removed that festering malignant mass from your organization. See here’s the thing about cancer, it’s not just happy being its own cancer. It wants to spread, it wants to share it’s cancerous cells with those around them, it wants to turn other good people into cancers as well.
For those of us who use booster pumps let me use this analogy. Remember when you first got your booster pump, plugged it in and you were like “oh my God, I didn’t realize something could spray so awesome”...Then we use it for a few months, maybe a year, and the calciums and the sodiums start building up on the impellers, the diffuser plates start to break down, everything starts dragging and the pump becomes a little less efficient and then it becomes more inefficient and more so until it finally is barely able to produce a solid stream. We then go and rebuild the pump, we replace the impellers, we clean off the gunk that’s built up. We reassemble it, flip the switch and once again are like “oh my God”I forgot how good this thing sprays.”....By the way the same analogy works for a pressure washer, a 12 V, or whatever your choice of pumping apparatuses may be!
See cancer doesn’t just come in and change your organization overnight, it insidiously eats away at it bite by bite, making things run less efficiently. Just like the booster pump we don’t notice it immediately! We may notice a little less performance every day, maybe every week, but that performance dies down just a little bit.... just enough to be a nuisance. That’s like cancer, just slowly eating away at your company, until one day you flip the switch on the pump and nothing happens...Or the stream that’s coming out of the hose is too anemic to get any real work done.
So getting back to the original thought, you don’t negotiate with cancer, you don’t try to appease cancer. You find it, you treat it by way of a stick or a carrot, and if you are a forgiving boss maybe you treat it a second or even a third time, but when the treatments don’t work you cut it out of your organization.
Here’s a newsflash.... when the cancer decides to “kill you” (Meaning it finally manifests itself into your company to a point of dysfunction and infecting other employees) it maybe too late to cut it out. It could mean the success or demise of your whole organization, and I promise you the melt down will never come at a convenient time. It will come when your schedule is jacked out of the frame for 4 to 6 weeks, it will come when you have an important meeting with investors scheduled, it will come at absolutely the worst possible time!
It just recently happened to me. I knew there was cancer and dysfunction in Spray Wash, However I thought I could appease the cancer with bonuses. I thought I could negotiate with the cancer by wearing kid-gloves. I knew what needed to be done, but frankly I was scared of the cancer surgery. I knew the healing from the surgery would take an incredible toll on me and upset every aspect of my life. But still in the end cancer does what cancer does....It’s a malignant disease that tries to infect everything around it. So the cancer was removed, and already one week post cancer surgery I feel amazing (albeit tired from all the extra shifts). The operations of the business side is already running more efficiently. Just today we did a building in one shift that was taking my “cancerous” crew two days to complete. I might be walking with a limp, I might have a sore back from the “incision And removal”, But I can already tell that my life is amazing now that the cancer is gone!
Get Cancer out of your business!
Ray Burke
Spray Wash Academy
