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Issue 149 · June 15, 2026 · The Business of Women’s Health
The Member Test: how to grow without selling out the people you serveA reader asked how to balance mission and growth without losing trust. Here’s the honest answer — and the four filters I run before any deal. |
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From Jodi · The Business of Women’s Health
The Member Test: how to grow without selling out the people you serveA reader asked how women’s health organizations balance mission and growth without losing trust. Here’s the honest answer — and the questions I run before any deal. When new members join In Women’s Health, I send them one question: what do you want to learn? The answers shape everything, and I love reading them. This one came in a few weeks ago:
We say a version of this constantly in the Women’s Health Mini-MBA: women’s health has a mission, but at the end of the day it’s still a business. The mission doesn’t exempt you from the math. It simply raises the cost of getting it wrong. So here’s how I actually think about it. Partnerships run on abundanceThe founders who grow in this space are the ones who work together. There’s a name for it — coopetition, the idea Adam Brandenburger at Harvard and Barry Nalebuff at Yale pulled out of game theory: compete and cooperate at the same time, and the pie gets bigger for everyone at the table. Women’s health is one of the most genuinely cooperative business communities I’ve worked in. Strangely, that generosity lives on the company-building side and evaporates on the advocacy and nonprofit side, which stays more territorial. More to come on that. Honesty is the operating model, not a virtueWomen’s health runs inside a broken system most people were never taught to read. So to build trust, teach them while they’re standing in it with you. That’s not a courtesy; it’s how trust gets built. When a company tells me, “We have to bill you this way, and here’s why,” they’ve pulled me onto their side of the system. When they stay silent, the frustration doesn’t disappear — it just gets pinned on their brand. People can survive a bad experience. They can’t forgive being left in the dark about why it happened. Incentives and timelines both have to be alignedA partner who makes money when our members get healthier is aligned — and saying so out loud, to everyone, makes it stronger. A partner who makes money whether our members get healthier or not is merely adjacent. Adjacent doesn’t build trust. It quietly spends it. Timelines matter just as much. The clock on your capital is set the day you take it — and the structure of that capital shapes your decisions more than the amount. Traditional venture has its place, but for mission-bound work it’s often the worst-fitting one. Look instead for: Non-dilutive capital. Grants from the government and private sector increasingly target women’s health. Competitive and slow, but they fund the mission without putting a clock on it. Milestone-driven partnerships and revenue-based financing. Working capital tied to traction instead of equity. You keep control, and the terms reward the thing you were going to do anyway: serve people well. Aligned angels, family offices, and foundations. The best early checks I’ve seen come from conviction, not multiples — operators who use the product, family offices with no artificial exit clock, foundations whose charter is your mission. Slower to find, but worth the search. Trust is an asset — build it and protect it as oneI love the line from Maya Angelou: people will forget what you said and what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. In women’s health, that isn’t sentiment — it’s the business model. Trust is the product. Women have been dismissed, under-researched, and sold to for so long that the instant they sense they’re being handled instead of helped, they leave — and they tell ten friends. Acquisition is expensive in consumer women’s health, where the channels are crowded and skepticism is the default. The winners don’t out-spend the skepticism. They earn their way around it: one member who trusts you brings the next ten, at a price no ad will ever touch.
But here’s the part that doesn’t fit on a risk ledger: once you have trust, it stops being something you guard and starts being something that pays you. It compounds. A member who trusts you tells you more — what’s actually going on with her body, her bills, her care — and that information opens doors you couldn’t have found on your own. That’s the flywheel: trust earns you information, information reveals the next opportunity, and serving it well earns you more trust. The business grows and the mission grows on the same turn — not in tension, but because of each other. You just have to start with the core. There’s no version of this where you grow first and earn the trust later. Four filters: is growth feeding the mission, or eating it?1. Does it survive the member test? If I explained this deal to my most skeptical member in plain language, would she nod, or would she feel sold? If I have to spin it, that’s my answer. 2. Is it real value, or just the appearance of it? Am I actually improving her life, or working to convince her that I am? Real value builds trust on contact. Nothing else does. 3. Is the incentive aligned or just adjacent? Does this partner win only when our members win, or do they win either way? Aligned incentives, made transparent, build trust for everyone at the table. 4. Is this capital patient enough for this mission? Some money expects a return on a timeline our work can’t honestly meet. Taking it doesn’t move the timeline — it creates pressure, and pressure makes you decide from a place of growth instead of a place of trust. So what: Growth and mission aren’t in tension. Cheap growth and mission are. What would you add to the four filters? I read every reply. 
Jodi Neuhauser Founder, In Women’s Health |
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Join the waitlists
New Mini-MBA & Career Mastermind dates land soonThe essay above is really about holding a line under pressure — and that’s exactly the muscle both of these programs build. The Mini-MBA gives clinicians and operators the business fluency to make those calls with confidence. The Career Mastermind is the small-cohort room where you pressure-test your own next move with people who get it. Both cohorts fill from the waitlist first.
Mini-MBA — business foundations for women’s health professionals, built for working schedules.
Stay tuned for updates — dates and pricing announced soon. Payment plans available. Alumni and members: email [email protected] for member pricing.
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Three roles worth a closer look from this week’s board.
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