CULTURE SCHMULTURE!

WHY CULTURE BUILDING IS VITAL!

Let’s talk about culture! No, not international culture or regional culture, lets talk a bit about company culture. What it is, why its important, and how to create and influence it. To start, company culture constitutes the value, the ideals, the attitudes, the spirit, and the goals of your company. If just hearing those things makes you shutter a bit because maybe you don’t really have a clear idea of what those are, good! Its time to start thinking about those things. As you know, we talk about goals and values all the time on this show and there’s a reason why, they’re absolutely vital to building a great company that delivers a stellar product and service and becomes something of real value in the marketplace. Salable and scalable! You hear those words from me all the time. My coaching students hear it all the time because making your business salable and scalable entail having well defined goals, well defined ideals, well defined culture, a clear mission, and a set of core values that inspires, motivates, and drives productivity and personal satisfaction. If you’re not clear yet on some of those things, that’s ok for now, hopefully you’ll listen to me enough that eventually something you hear will wake you up to the importance of starting to think about and document some of those things. Some of you may hear this episode as a one man or woman business and think, ‘company culture is my spare bedroom, Blaine!’ I get it and I understand. Culture isn’t super important with a one person business as much as it is with a 2 or more person business. However, that doesn’t mean not having well defined goals, ideals, a vision, a mission, and some core values aren’t still important for the one person business and I’ll tell you why in a little bit. 

I’m going to give you 4 things to think about in this episode about culture, and whether you’re a 1 person business right now, or a 100 person, or 1000 person business, why this topic is so important. In every business, there are things that are very tangible, like your product or the service you provide. And then there are things that are intangible, like the little things you may do to differentiate your product or service delivery. I think I mentioned in the last episode how every business has a before, a during, and an after unit within the business. The before unit is all of its marketing, its talent attraction and vetting process, and anything pertaining to getting the business ready to create or produce the product or service. The during unit is, just as it sounds, all of the activity that happens while you’re making or doing the thing your clients and customers pay you for. For an appraisal company, the during is everything that goes into producing the appraisal and delivering it to the client. The after phase is anything and everything that occurs after you’ve delivered your product. Its your client follow up, its your thank you cards, its your client communications after the sale, it’s the gatherings and parties or happy hours you have, and its how you extend the good feelings and residue of doing business with you long after the deal is closed. Simple, right? Before, during, after. Much of what you might do in the before and the after units of your business could be considered intangible. The actual things you do, like sending thank you cards, is tangible, but the feeling the thank you card evokes from the recipient and the subsequent raving fan creation process is intangible, to a large degree. And company culture is also one of those vital intangibles that all great businesses have. If you want to be one of them someday, culture is one of the vital intangibles you’ll need to focus on. 

Let me put a myth about culture to rest here and now. Many think company culture happens organically so a lot of company owners take a back seat, a passive role. Others think they have no control over it so they don’t bother. Absolutely not true! Leaving the development and growth of your culture to chance is one of the biggest mistakes I see growing companies making. They’re adding bodies, they’re adding payroll, they’re adding customers, maybe even some new products, but nobody is guiding the culture in a direction that matches the values, ideals, vision, and mission all companies need to have. When does culture building start? With your first hire! I don’t care if it’s a VA in the Philippines or India, your first trainee in your appraisal business, your first licensed assistant in your real estate business, or somebody to count the returnable cans and bottles in your convenience store. It begins at talent acquisition number one. If you can’t articulate and create culture with one, you are going to struggle with 5, 10, and 20. 

The first big reason to make culture a vital focus is that it helps build your brand. I didn’t say its part of your marketing. Remember, marketing is everything you do to attract a client or make a sale. Your brand is how your customers and clients feel about you. In a noisy and competitive world, brand identity, and more importantly, brand differentiation, is vitally important. For my appraiser friends, colleagues, and coaching students listening, when you see somebody complaining about an AMC, low fees, change in the market, or something else outside of their control, they’re actually complaining about their lack of brand differentiation. The psychologist, Carl Jung, taught us that everything we hate about others is something we can learn about ourselves. People complain about things they don’t like in the world, often without making any changes to themselves. People complain about things they feel are outside of their control, often without looking for areas that they can control. Businesses with no strategic differentiation between others in the same business and market will always suffer at the hands of those voting with their dollars, the customers and clients. Your company culture is one of the biggest brand differentiators a business can develop. It’s the personality of the company and it gives you a special edge when your culture is special. Your culture is the soul of the company, and your culture puts your company’s soul on display for the world to see. When you define your goals and values, you’re giving life to what will become your company’s soul. And when you start to define your company’s culture, you’re giving credence and energy to those goals and values. If you don’t have goals or values, or at least ones that are well defined, you will struggle creating a culture that exemplifies those goals. I speak with company owners on a daily basis who believe they have goals, values, and ideals, but they’re all up in their head or their heart. I applaud that, but they have to come out of you and be documented if you want them to become part of something bigger. 

Defining your company culture, your ideals, your values, how and what is important to you becomes what your brand is known for. When you put a focus on culture you’ll start to develop what we call guiding principles. These are the guideposts that help all of your people stay focused on what you want to be known for and how that makes its way out into the world. It also becomes the filter through which all of your hiring and firing goes through. Remember that before phase of your business? When you’re focused on building a strong culture, you think strongly about how new potential hires will either fit into, add to, or detract from the culture you have or are in the process of building. I can tell you from having built cultures in several businesses and industries, this is not something to take lightly. The most poignant examples from my past experiences were with my Aikido academy. With hundreds of students and members coming in and out of the school every day, we were dealing with hundreds of personalities. People with different goals, aspirations, intentions, motives, past histories, and their fair share of quirks. When you are inviting people into a space to get physical with other human beings, to sweat and bleed with people, you owe it to people to make them feel safe, but also give them the latitude to push themselves and their partners. About 2 or 3 times per year, we would find ourselves having to cancel somebody’s membership and ask them to leave because they just weren’t fitting in with the culture we had built. Maybe they were abusing their partners continuously, maybe they were shit talkers in the locker rooms, maybe they were creepers with the female students, whatever the reason we never hesitated to tell them they simply didn’t fit our culture and what we’re known for and they were done. When you work hard to develop a strong culture that differentiates your brand from every other, you want the right people who have the ability to fit into that culture, and then help it spread in a positive way. 

So, building brand identity is one of the first important aspects and reasons to make culture a focus. The next important reason to focus on culture is that it makes your company what I call ‘sticky’. It increases brand loyalty with your external clients and customers, but more importantly with your internal customers, which is the talent you’ve worked hard to acquire and pour into with your resources. A strong company culture greatly increases employee loyalty and encourages them to stick around for a long time. Simon Sinek, author of the books Start With Why, and Find Your Why, said that ‘customers will never love a company until the employees love it first’. Jim Goodnight, the co-founder of SAS software is famous for saying, ‘treat employees like they make a difference, and they will’. He’s speaking directly to building company culture. Culture gives your people a set of beliefs, standards, and a purpose greater than themselves, and even greater than just the product or service to strive for. Human beings want something bigger than themselves to be a part of. Almost every study on employee performance and productivity shows overwhelmingly that enthusiastic employees are more productive, more engaged, more attractive, more inspired and inspiring than their unenthused counterparts. If you’re going to pour your time, your energy, your wisdom, experience, and knowledge into another person, you want them to stick around to get a return on that investment. And if you don’t want people sticking around solely for their own selfish motives, like pay or benefits, then it’s imperative you focus on building a culture that promotes those shared ideals and guiding principles. 

The third reason to focus on building a strong culture of shared ideals, values, goals, and beliefs is for the very thing we just talked about: talent. Having a killer company culture is one of the greatest ways to attract and retain good people. I refer to them often as talent because that’s what every company wants from the human beings they invite inside their creation. You want talented people who get what you’re laying down. We say it all the time, you hire for attitude and train for aptitude. In essence, we hire primarily for a cultural fit. Skills may get them in the door for the interview, although attitude goes a long way I that regard as well, but company culture is what keeps them there. Hiring and training people is a huge investment, everyone who has ever done it knows this. If you want an ROI on your investment, you’d better have something beyond contracts and agreements to keep them around. That’s the role company culture plays in all of this. This part should speak strongly to appraiser mentors. Every potential appraiser mentor says the same thing, “I don’t want to train my competition”, and “they’re just going to leave when they get the chance to go off on their own!” Friends, we all know there are people out there with an intent to get their license and go open up and appraisal shop. Your job is to ferret out those people in the before segment of your business. However, I will also tell you that the vast majority of people who have gone off on their own to start their own company, in any business or industry, did so due to either a lack of good company culture, or a disagreement about the culture, the goals, the vision, and the values. Most appraiser mentors are working out of their house and have no idea how to build culture, much less develop a solid vision, mission, and set of goals for employees to grow and blossom. It’s a very binary relationship: I hire you, you do this for me. If you do this, you’ll get paid. Nothing wrong with that at first, but it does not speak at all to the human component of people wanting to grow, expand, blossom, and have opportunity. A culture that happens by accident will have no opportunity for people to grow. 

If you want to people to stick around with you long term, there must be a strong reason and having a strong culture is one of the best reasons a company can offer. In the appraisal business specifically, most trainees are being trained by well-intentioned folks who want to good by the trainee, and they also want to receive some kind of benefit in the way of increased efficiencies, increased income, increased time, etcetera. The problem is that there exists an unseen axis of growth and effort rarely taken into consideration by mentors. They tend only to see the amount of effort that they have to put in on the front end to get a trainee up to speed, so to speak. When the trainee is growing and learning, their income tends to reflect that effort on the mentor’s part. However, there comes a point in every relationship like that where the trainee no longer needs the day to day, or maybe even the week to week guidance from the mentor. And although their pay has likely been increased at this point, it will almost always reach a point where the trainee starts to really question things, but a subtle shift has occurred that often goes unnoticed. At the beginning of the relationship the trainee knows they are being paid. However, once the trainee crosses a certain point on the training and mentorship axis, the subtle shift that occurs is that they no longer see themselves as being paid by the company, they start to see it as how much of their income they’re giving up for the opportunity to continue working for the company. It went from being paid by the company to paying the company for something. If there is nothing valuable to keep them there, like really strong company culture, it will be a battle for more pay or else. And that’s when people leave. The myth of appraisers creating their competition is primarily due to a complete lack of culture building and leadership. They didn’t create their competition, they simply failed to provide strong leadership, adequate opportunity for growth, a reasonable pay structure that takes into consideration the fact that the mentor is no longer needed for guidance. The trainee is no longer a trainee, they’re a fully autonomous and self-sufficient appraiser capable of operating independently. Why would they stay? That’s the million dollar question you have to answer to build a killer company culture. 

Killer company culture helps attract and retain killer talent. But the 4th reason to focus on culture is that it makes that talent raving fans of the company. An awesome company culture makes your people advocates of the business, and not just because more business maybe means more income for them. When the culture becomes a living, breathing thing, and it’s a conscious focus, your people want to genuinely tell the world about it. The added benefit of that is that good talent who is excited about the company they work for attracts other good talent just like them. Good clients and customers attract more like themselves. I read an article in Inc. Magazine years ago that was talking about company culture and the author wrote, ‘encourage your people to talk positively about the company’. Sorry friends, if you have to encourage your people to speak positively about the company that gives them an income, a lifestyle, a living, I would say you’ve missed the point. You shouldn’t have to encourage or entice your people to speak positively about the company, they should be tripping over themselves to tell people about it because they love it so much, and that’s your job. One of my mentors used to always say that you can never demand loyalty, you must command it. The same spirit applies to building a company culture. You can’t demand that your people become raving fans of the business, you must command it by having an actual plan, a vision, a set of guiding principles, and a focus on building people up. Be clear about your values and reiterate them often, like every single meeting! Have you ever played a game with your friends where you dare somebody to use a particular word or phrase with a waiter or waitress? If not, start playing it today! You will become a master of communication when you can do it with conviction. 

You have to be able to reiterate your company’s values, the mission, the goals, and guiding principles on a regular basis if you want to positively infect your people with them. Before we go, I want to talk briefly about one of the challenges in today’s working environment, and that’s the overwhelming digital aspect of what we all do. Many companies operate partially, or completely digitally. Meaning, their people communicate via text, phone, email, Slack, Trello, Monday, Asana, Teams, Zoom, Skype, or some other digital method where being there in person is not necessary. We do it to a large degree, like many of you, but culture is super important to us, which is why we have at least 2 meetings with everybody every week via zoom, and a physical meeting in person at least once per month. Appraisers are already out on a lonely island with little interaction with humans on a daily basis. If you’re not meeting with your people every single week using some form of video method, you’re making a mistake. Add at least one meeting per week using a video format in order to build some semblance of culture. If the only reason to do it is for you, the owner, to ask your people how they’re doing and what you can do to make their jobs and lives better, it will not be wasted time. Start it today!

If you want to dig deeper into killer company culture, I highly recommend that you research Disney, Nordstrom, Zappos, Southwest Airlines, Dream Works, and Squarespace. There are some others out there well known for killer company culture and how that has affected their growth and ability to attract and retain people. I hope this has been helpful for you and that I was able to add some value for you my friends. Don’t hesitate to reach out to me if I can help you in any way and, until then or until next week, I’m out…