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Posted on July 1, 2026
Effort is a commodity. Results aren’t. Value isn’t.
Let me be precise because that line gets misheard. Effort was never the enemy — but effort without results is. Effort pointed at a result is the whole game. It’s effort without outcomes that has become the commodity.
That distinction is most of the reason this firm exists, and it took me most of a career — and a changing world — to say it that plainly. Growth has always been the point. It’s why companies hire us, why investors back the businesses we shepherd, and why I put the word in the name of the firm. But I mean something specific by it: not growth for its own sake, and not just revenue. Real growth rests on a foundation — knowing who you are, what you do, who you serve, and having the strategy and structure to deliver — and it shows up in many forms.
This is the first of an ongoing series of commentaries on the world we work in — healthcare, and the people, capital, technology, and market forces remaking it. Canton is a growth acceleration firm by discipline, but healthcare is our arena, and it will be the predominant subject of these commentaries. I want to start where the firm starts — with a pivot we made out of conviction, the lessons that made it non-negotiable, and why we were already moving this way before AI made it obvious to everyone else.
I’ve spent more than thirty years in and around this industry and started six companies. Three were good exits. The others taught me more. Add the turnarounds and the distressed businesses I’ve been called in to fix, and you get a particular kind of education — the kind that comes from watching companies struggle.
The lesson that stuck - companies almost never die from a lack of effort. They die from mistaking effort for results — confusing motion with progress, activity with value, scale with advantage, revenue with health. They exhaust themselves managing the cost of doing things, calling it discipline, while the work that creates real value goes unattended.
There was a second lesson, and it sat in my gut for years before I could name it cleanly. The business of advice — the professional-services world I’ve spent my career in — was built on asking clients to pay a great deal of money without much clarity about the result they’d receive. I came to see that for what it is: the enemy of alignment, and it takes two forms. Bill by the hour, and you’re rewarded for taking longer. Bill by the deliverable or the milestone — for process rather than results — and you’re rewarded for activity that may produce nothing at all. It’s the same distinction healthcare has spent years working through in value-based care: paying for process measures versus paying for outcomes. Either way, your incentive and your client’s quietly pull apart, and the deep, embedded, long-term relationships I value become almost impossible to build. You can’t be a true partner to someone while your meter — or your milestone — runs against them.
There is exactly one place where a firm’s interests and its client’s interests truly converge, and that is enterprise value. Everyone in the room — founder, operator, board, investor — wants the business to be worth more. Tie your model to that, and alignment stops being a slogan and becomes arithmetic.
That is what our pivot to value through growth is really about: organizing the firm around the one result everyone shares and driving outsize enterprise value as the bottom line.
And this is the part worth being clear about, because it’s easy to assume this is an AI story. It isn’t — or it didn’t start as one. We pivoted before we thought hard about AI’s full impact.
What we were reading were other signals. The gig economy was already rewriting the relationship between work and pay, pricing labor by output rather than by seat, by result rather than by hours logged. COVID didn’t create that shift; it exacerbated it, the way a shock accelerates a trend already underway. It pushed us to think seriously about labor markets and labor productivity — what work is really worth, and what people are paying for when they pay for it. And our own clients were telling us the same thing: more and more of them were asking for guarantees. They didn’t want to buy our effort. They wanted to buy a result.
We were already pivoting toward that world. Then AI arrived, and it didn’t change our direction. It proved it and put the whole thing into fast-forward.
AI does to commodity effort what nothing before it could. The long middle of knowledge work — the research, the analysis, the first drafts, the diligence, the build — is collapsing toward free. The work still gets done; it just stops costing what it used to. The most expensive consulting firms in the world already feel the floor moving, shifting their fees from hours to results, because you cannot keep charging for busy work once busy work is a commodity.
The principles never went away. Strategy, structure, the hard thinking still must happen, and they are still how growth gets built. What collapsed is the price of the activity around them — and the right response to that is not to protect the inefficiency. It’s to let efficiency win. When technology lets you deliver better results with far less effort, you embrace it, and you get paid for the impact you make and the value you create, not the time you spend making it. AI and deep industry experience simply get you to the substance faster, allowing you to work smarter, not harder – as they say.
Healthcare is the industry that has resisted market discipline the longest, priced scarcity the hardest, and left the most value stranded — which makes it the place where commoditizing the busy work and paying for real results changes the most, for operators and buyers alike.
There’s a word for a market that rewards results over motion: meritocracy. The old model wasn’t one. It paid for activity whether or not the activity produced anything, which quietly protected mediocrity — it rewarded the firm that looked busy over the firm that delivered. Strip out the commodity work and that cover is gone. What’s left is merit: you create value and you’re paid, or you don’t, and you aren’t. I’ve always believed that’s how it should work. For the first time, the economics are forcing it.
Results-directed effort rarely wins through grand gestures. It wins by getting deliberately better, a percent at a time, letting each gain earn the next — and technology speeds every increment, so the returns build faster than they ever could. You don’t have to solve everything by next quarter; you have to keep building, because small gains relentlessly applied are what compound into outsized value over time.
Here’s the part I find most compelling because it runs against fear. The story everyone tells about AI is subtraction — what it takes away. The true story is elevation. Strip the commodity work out of a business and what remains is the human part: judgment, conviction, relationships, creativity, accountability — the things no model can manufacture. AI lets you clear away the non-value-added work that clogs every operation and frees your people for what creates value, and for what aligns you with your customers instead of your meter. Used well, it doesn’t diminish the human form. It elevates it.
That’s why the firm is Canton Growth Partners, and why “Growth” isn’t decoration. We named it after the goal, not the activity.
We don’t sell hours into a dying model; we create value, tie ourselves to our clients’ enterprise value, and accept the discipline of being measured on whether it shows up. We made that choice on conviction, before the market demanded it—because a firm that wins whether you do or not isn't truly aligned with your success.
And the same trap has our clients stuck. Healthcare companies and their financial sponsors I talk to aren’t short on effort. They’re working harder than ever, watching costs more carefully than ever, and growing slower than they want to. They’re optimizing the nickel when they should be compounding the value.
They can feel the old levers failing — add headcount, add activity, add motion, and none of it converts into growth the way it once did. Underneath the slowdown is almost always a missing foundation: a company unsure who it is, who exactly it serves, and what message actually lands — questions that were never answered at the beginning of an organization’s formation now run through the whole go-to-market engine and into strategy, operations, talent, and how it uses, or fails to use, its data and AI. The growth problem and the operating model problem are the same problem.
So that’s the conviction the firm is built on, and what you’ll be hearing from me about: where growth is moving in healthcare, what AI and digital innovation are doing to the least disciplined, lowest-productivity corner of the economy, and how to get on the right side of a shift that won’t wait for anyone to feel ready. I’m a market optimist about all of it — what AI brings to healthcare is fundamentally abundance. The most scarcity-priced industry of all, with the most still locked inside it, and a consumer who finally stands to collect. The disruption is a threat only to those who keep counting. To everyone willing to grow, it’s an invitation.
Most of our peers are hoping the old model has a few good years left. At Canton Growth Partners, we’re building for the one that replaces it — aligned with our clients on the one number that matters, paid on results, and done counting nickels. We’ll build it the way value accrues: a bit at a time, compounding, over time.
Effort is a commodity. Results aren’t. We know which one we’d rather be measured on. Until next time.
— Don
Canton Growth Partners is an operating partner for companies pursuing transformational growth. We partner with leadership teams to navigate complexity and deliver sustainable results by translating strategy into disciplined execution. From go-to-market strategy development and execution to strengthening commercial capabilities and competitive positioning, we help organizations accelerate growth and expand enterprise value.
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