When Is the Right Time to Start Over?

There is a moment in every organization when the familiar stops working. Processes that once produced results start producing friction. Markets shift. Competitors pull ahead. The team keeps executing, but the scoreboard tells a different story. Recognizing that moment — and having the courage to act on it — is the leadership skill Scott Reid has spent decades refining.

Reid is the National Vice President of Technology Strategy and Sales at Radiology Partners, and he brings a career shaped by healthcare, food manufacturing, academic administration, and competitive athletics into a conversation that is equal parts operational and personal. The through-line is the same question he returns to in every context: when do you know it’s time to stop improving what you have and start building something different?

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

Reid traces his thinking on organizational reset back to his years as a high school football coach. Every season began with an entirely new group of players, a new set of strengths and gaps, and the requirement to build a team culture from scratch. There was no carrying last year’s momentum forward. The only option was honest assessment: What do we have? What does this group need? What has to change?

He applies the same framework to business. In his work in food manufacturing, he watched lines drift into underperformance not because of a single failure but because no one had stepped back to ask whether the process still matched the conditions. “Unless we step back to really reassess what’s happened, what has changed, what’s causing us to have the problems we’re having now, we would never improve,” Reid explains. “We would end up drifting into mediocrity.”

The signal that a reset is needed is not usually a crisis. It is something quieter: declining output, a competitor gaining ground, results that were once normal now feeling like a stretch. Reid’s advice is to treat that signal seriously and to involve the team in diagnosing it. “It’s not you as the leader coming up with a solution, but facilitating the team looking at and evaluating and coming up with the ideas of how can we change what we’re doing to be better.”

Technology as a Competitive Requirement, Not a Cost Line

Reid is direct about how he views technology in the context of competitive performance. When asked to rate its importance on a one-to-ten scale, he doesn’t hesitate:

“Technology is easily a nine or 10 on the priority scale. It plays a crucial role in communicating and supporting the delivery of efficient, high-quality, and highly leveraged services. Technology is high-profile, critical, and a must-have in everything we do.” — Scott Reid

This isn’t a theoretical position for him. Early in his career, he made the case for installing one of the first exchange servers at an academic medical center — a project that required political buy-in, a new hire, and a willingness to test something unproven. The outcome validated the investment and created space for further innovation. He has repeated that pattern across sectors, most recently with AI-powered prospecting tools that surface organizational buying intent before a sales conversation begins.

His broader point is that organizations that treat technology as a supporting function rather than a strategic asset are accepting a structural disadvantage. The question is not whether to invest but how to evaluate whether the investment is working — and when to change course if it isn’t.

What You Will Hear in This Episode

• Why the tipping point for a reset is usually about falling behind competitors, not hitting a wall
• How Reid’s coaching experience shaped the way he leads teams through organizational change
• What it looks like to use data and regression analysis as a competitive edge — in football and in business
• Why wireless-first connectivity is becoming an operational necessity for healthcare organizations
• How the shift to remote selling during COVID forced a productive reset in sales methodology
• Why continuous evaluation of team performance matters most when things are going well, not only when they’re falling apart

The Bigleaf Connection

The questions Scott Reid raises in this conversation sit at the core of what Bigleaf Networks is built for. When a healthcare organization’s connectivity fails — a T1 line cut in rural Alaska, a wireless dead zone in a multi-site radiology practice, a network that can’t intelligently route traffic across multiple ISPs — the operational consequences are immediate. There is no graceful degradation. Care delivery stops.

Bigleaf exists to eliminate that single point of failure. Its SD-WAN technology continuously monitors all available connections, routes traffic based on real-time performance, and fails over without user-visible disruption. For organizations managing the kind of distributed, connectivity-dependent infrastructure Reid describes, that reliability is not a feature. It is a requirement.

The reset Reid advocates — the willingness to evaluate what is working and replace what isn’t — applies directly to network architecture. Organizations that are still relying on a single ISP or managing manual failover processes are doing the equivalent of running the same play long after the defense has figured it out. The better choice is a network that adapts on its own.