In 1995, a fellow named Chris Klebba decided to open a gym in his hometown of Northville, Michigan.

Fitness had changed his life, and he wanted others in small-town Michigan to have the same experience.

But the problem with gyms is they can be intimidating.

It's the ultimate irony.

You go to a gym to get in shape, but if you're out of shape, you feel like you need to get in shape just to show up.

That's why as many as 50 percent of gym members quit within the first year, which is fine if you open a gym in New York or LA with millions of people.

But in a small town, you might simply run out of customers.

Now many gyms try to solve this problem by making it difficult to quit.

So now not only am I feeling guilty about not going to the gym, but I’m stuck paying 100 dollars a month, and I’m still not getting any thinner.

But Chris decided to do something different.

Chris decided to invest in his workers.

He hired overly helpful, overly friendly employees who at any moment were eager to step in and help you learn how to use a piece of equipment without making you feel like you're being judged.

The idea was for the 55-year-old mom or dad, who'd never been to a gym before in their lives, to feel welcome and comfortable immediately.

Now my question as a private equity investor is: Could this really be profitable?

There's an old joke about a man who's had too much to drink looking for his keys under a streetlight.

A cop comes by and offers to help and asks where he thinks he lost them.

"In the park," comes the response, "but I'm looking here because the light's better."

That's a little how we investors look at companies today.

We know that value at companies is driven by people, but we focus on short-term profit because it's so much easier to measure.

I've worked in and around private equity for 25 years on six continents, and I've seen this error in thinking again and again and again.

In private equity, we buy companies and seek to improve them so we can sell them at a profit.

But very often that improvement comes in the form of cutting costs, especially labor costs.

Private equity employs roughly nine million people and has cut over a million jobs in the past decade.

Too often we ask a company for their org chart just to figure out who is getting fired.

Now I think investors should take pride for helping to make companies lean, but I'm worried that we may have done our job too well and are now at risk of starving companies of the people that they need to be successful.

So the big opportunity for investors, for executives and for you is to create rather than cut good jobs.

Creating good jobs is now the focus of my work as a social impact investor.

But to create good jobs, you first need a definition of a good job, which was surprisingly hard to find.

Spreadsheets and numbers are comforting, but people are complicated, which is why impact investing can sometimes feel squishy.

Good for the soul, perhaps, but risky for the pocketbook.

But my partners and I work at a company that prides itself on using data to solve problems.

So we spent the last two years looking at all the academic research, reading all the case studies.

We interviewed human capital experts and surveyed workers across hundreds of companies.

And from that work, we developed a common sense definition of a good job, one that correlates with worker productivity and helps us to build better companies.