The Leaving Problem · Part 2 of 2. The exit tax is the wrong tool. Here’s the one lever you actually control… and the rule I hold myself to every time I coach.
In Part 1, I told you about one of my clients walking his capital, his team, and his projects across the border. And I left you with a question.
If you can’t tax anyone into staying, and you can’t change the weather or conjure a dozen new markets out of thin air… what’s actually left in your control?
This is the answer. And it’s the half almost nobody runs.
My Own Sin
Decades ago, when I was a green, inexperienced coach, I had a client who was good. Really good. And I’m not proud of this… I held back. I didn’t hand over the whole playbook. I kept a little of what I knew in my own pocket and told myself it was about standards.
The truth? I was scared. Scared that if I made them too good, they’d outgrow me and walk. That I’d coach myself right out of a client.
So I kept them a little dependent. On purpose. You know what that bought me? A person who never hit their ceiling, and a relationship I quietly poisoned with my own fear.
Then I heard something that rearranged how I think about all of this.
Jack Canfield was talking about Richard Branson. Someone asked Branson the question every fearful leader asks: aren’t you worried you’ll train your people and they’ll leave? Branson’s answer, more or less: train them well enough that they could leave tomorrow… and treat them well enough that they never want to.
The One Standard I Hold Myself To
I sat with that. Then I took it somewhere sharper. More uncomfortable. For me, not for them.
When I work with someone one-on-one, I hold myself to one standard above all others. They have to outperform anything I have ever done.
Not match me. Beat me. Far exceed any result I’ve personally delivered.
That is my scoreboard. That’s how I know I actually added value instead of just keeping someone company while they spun their wheels. If the person I’m coaching doesn’t blow past my own numbers, I didn’t do my job.
That standard, by the way, is exactly why I walked away from the renewal I told you about in Part 1. His next level needed something I couldn’t give. Keeping him would have served me. Letting him go served him. Easy call, when the scoreboard is his results and not my ego.
That’s Not Coaching, That’s Collecting
Because here’s the quiet thing almost nobody says out loud about this work. A lot of “coaching” isn’t really coaching. It’s collecting. Someone gathers a roomful of clients and quietly treats them as a built-in network… a captive audience to sell deals to, or to pull into the coach’s own deals. In my opinion, that crosses a hard line. Coaching and selling opportunities are two completely different jobs, and dressing one up as the other does the client dirty.
Let me be straight with you, because the line is the whole point. Have I ever done a deal with someone I coached? Yes. Rarely, but yes. And when it happens, the relationship changes… out loud, on purpose. We stop being coach and client. We become colleagues. Partners. Co-owners. The day equity enters the room, the coaching is over and a business partnership has begun, and I name that line clearly so nobody is ever confused about which hat I’m wearing.
That demarcation IS the integrity. The problem was never two people who once had a coaching relationship building something as equals. The problem is the coach who never draws the line, who keeps the room full precisely because it’s a captive market. One is a partnership. The other is collecting in a coaching hat.
It’s a cousin of my own early sin. Back when I was green, I hoarded knowledge out of insecurity. The deal-funnel version hoards the client’s trust and spends it on the coach’s pipeline. Different mechanism, same root: the coach’s interest quietly outranks the client’s growth.
The cure is the same either way. Build them to surpass you, on purpose, and measure yourself by whether they do. Not by what you can sell them.
Canada Is Running Half the Playbook
Now zoom all the way out, because a whole country can catch this exact disease.
In Part 1 we settled that the toll booth doesn’t work. You can’t tax a builder into staying. So watch what Canada does instead of fixing the actual problem.
We are world-class at the first half of the Branson playbook. We educate, train, and develop some of the best minds on the planet. TD Economics calls it a “silent brain drain,” and the pattern is brutal: the people leaving are our upper tail, disproportionately highly educated, clustered in computer science, engineering, and technical management. Statistics Canada counted 27,086 citizens and permanent residents leaving in the first three months of 2025 alone. And the Leaky Bucket 2025 report from the Institute for Canadian Citizenship and the Conference Board of Canada found one in five skilled immigrants exits within 25 years, leaving at twice the rate of lower-skilled arrivals.
We train them beautifully. Then we fumble the half that matters. We don’t treat them like we want them to stay. And the moment they eye the door, we reach for the toll booth instead of the only thing that’s ever worked.
Here’s the hinge, and it’s the answer to the question Part 1 left you with.
You can’t change the weather. You can’t manufacture new markets. Plenty of what pulls your best people is out of your hands. But the “treat them so they never want to leave” half? That is ENTIRELY in your control. Always has been. It’s the one lever nobody can take from you, and it’s the one most people never pull.
You don’t keep your best people by making the door heavier. You keep them by making the room worth staying in.
Your Move Today
You’re not Ottawa. You can’t fix the country tonight. But you’re running this same test with your own people right now. So here’s your move today:
- Build someone to beat you. Pick one person in your orbit and invest in them like your scoreboard is whether they outperform you. Teach them the thing you’ve been quietly hoarding. Fear says don’t. Do it anyway.
- Make staying worth it. Ask one person, straight up, what would make this the thing they never want to leave. Then do ONE thing they tell you.
- Answer the mirror. Are you leading to be outgrown, or leading to protect the gap? You already know. The honest answer is the work.
Simple. Not easy.
When I take someone on one-on-one, the deal is simple. I’m not building a roomful of people to sell deals to. My job is to make you outperform anything I’ve ever done. That’s the standard I’m accountable to, not your applause and not my pipeline. If you want a coach measured by your results, book a free call.
The best people will always have somewhere else to go. That’s not the problem to solve. The work is becoming the kind of leader, and the kind of country, they choose not to leave. You can’t tax your way there. You build your way there.
You’re capable of it. So is this place, if it remembers the second half. Let’s go be the proof.
In your corner,
Russell Westcott
#Inspire # Encourage #Love
