Love Made Visible

let me tell you about the time WCA bought $28,000 worth of needles (at once)

Khalil Gibran wrote, “Work is love made visible” and I thought of that yesterday, as I was contemplating WCA Cully’s meeting room. If you’ve ever been there, you know that historically it’s been a magnet for ailing recliners and other kinds of flotsam and jetsam. Don’t know where to put something? Drop it in the meeting room! Which is to say, it’s been kind of a dump. But recently Sonya did an amazing job of cleaning and re-organizing it, in order to make room for — deep breath — $28,000 worth of needles.

I couldn’t fit them all into one photo. You’ll have to take my word for it that boxes of needles are squeezed into every possible crevice.

A few posts ago, I wrote that WCA (like every other acupuncture business) was worried about tariffs. What could we do about the potential impact of 10-20% tariffs on our most crucial supply item, which is needles? In 2024 we provided more than 50,000 treatments. If you estimate 20 needles per treatment (which is low for WCA and yeah, we need to work on that), that’s more than one million needles.

We decided that one thing we could do was to stock up and give ourselves a cushion: a whole year’s worth of needles. For all four clinics.

There were some logistical issues with a needle order of that size, and we couldn’t have done it without help. This is a good time to publicly thank Noor Khan and Acu-Market for their support of WCA, POCA Tech, and community acupuncture over the years.

For a lot of WCA’s life, this kind of proactive move wouldn’t have been possible even with help, because we didn’t have $28,000 lying around for contingencies like this. From 2002 until 2015 or so, we didn’t have any savings to speak of — maybe the equivalent of one payroll in reserve. Like many other small businesses, we squeaked by month to month — or if we were really lucky, quarter to quarter. Keeping cotton balls in stock was sometimes a stretch.

As I’ve said before, I often felt sure that WCA — even as it steadily got busier — was going to run out of money. I would look at our bank account and think, okay, right this minute we have enough money for what we need, but NEXT month? I think we’re going to run out of money next month. Once next month arrived, it was the same story, and it just kept going. (Right around the time we opened in 2002, someone opened a barbecue restaurant down the street and they hung a wooden sign that said, “free barbecue tomorrow” but of course tomorrow never arrived. It was like that.)

As regular readers of this newsletter know, I basically worship incrementalism, the idea that gradual, imperfect changes can add up over time to something significant.

Progress with acupuncture — especially for chronic conditions — tends to look like incremental improvements that build on each other. First someone’s sleep gets a little better, then their energy gets a little better, then maybe they can move a little more easily which means they can get a little bit of exercise, and a little bit of exercise helps them sleep better. It’s a virtuous circle. Rinse and repeat, and it just keeps going like that until it looks like a better quality of life, full stop. Occasionally there’s the one-off miracle treatment that fixes everything all at once. But mostly it’s about hanging in there with people, feeding the virtuous circle one treatment at a time.¹

Small business is like that too. There were so many times I thought, this is so hard — is it supposed to be this hard? Am I doing this wrong, should I give up? (Plenty of people definitely thought I was doing it wrong and they weren’t shy about saying so.) But hanging in there and surviving month after month, year after year, eventually led to milestones like being able to buy a year’s worth of needles, not to mention passing 5NP legislation.

For WCA, increments of survival added up to stability. Just like our patients, WCA inched its way to a better quality of life. And just like for our patients, it doesn’t look particularly dramatic from the outside. A year’s supply of needles, so that we don’t have to raise our prices, just looks like a lot of neatly stacked boxes.

It means a lot to us though. A year’s worth of needles is like stability and patience and love made visible. All we had to do was not give up.

1. For anyone who’s new here, please check out Atul Gawande’s essay “The Heroism of Incremental Care”. It’s not about acupuncture per se but it does describe what WCA aims for.