Sean encourages entrepreneurs to be intentional with the culture they create in their businesses. To build a great culture in a company, the business owner must decide the culture, hire for it, talk about it, reinforce it, reward it and promote it with management.
Culture is Everything
This weekend I am taking my company on a fishing trip.
What’s funny about that is I do not own a fishing pole and I do not like to fish…so why am I going on a chartered fishing trip? Because my company is filled with tons and tons of contractors who like to fish and guess what? That’s all that matters. I know the culture of my company is important. What is culture? The culture is the behavior and attitude of your company.
We have a great culture within our company and I want to reward it by getting everyone together for this trip. We have so many divisions within our company that I just thought it’d be great to get everybody in one place at one time which is hard to do that. So I said, Hey why don’t we have a fishing trip.
We’ll get a big charter boat. I think I have a better chance to catch a fish if they take me. I won’t have to find the fish, I’ll just tell the captain to drop me right where the fish is. So on this charter, we’re going to have all our employees and all the partners. I’m excited about it because the culture is important to me and I want to tell you how you can build a great culture and how I built a great culture in my companies.
I went through a culture turn-over years ago. We had a horrible culture. It was nothing but gossip and I was not creating the culture we needed. I didn’t want to go to work. I was embarrassed by the culture.
One day, I walked in and one of my staff members hung up the phone and said a statement that was so vile that my stomach turned after I heard it. I went outside in the parking lot with one of my partners at the time and I said that will never happen again, and that person will be gone within the next 48 hours, we will get this place like a fish. It’s funny because that’s what I said. We’re going to gut this place like a fish, and I’m going to rebuild from the ground up. We did just that and it was the smartest decision I’ve ever made in business, but also one of the hardest decisions I ever made in the business.
How Do You Build a Culture in Your Company?
First, you need to decide that you want to have a great culture. What kind of culture do you want? I wanted a culture with the following:
- A culture that is helpful to our clients. This meant a very service-oriented culture.
- A culture that does not have gossip. I don’t want to hear about your Facebook or anything to do with that. When I go to work, I don’t care who you hung out with on the weekend.
- A culture that creates a team atmosphere. If somebody in our partnership group needs you to go help this person, even it’s in a completely different division in a completely different city, you go help that person.
- I like likable people. I let go of someone who performed great in his job for about three months and eventually I got tired of looking at his sad face every day and I let him go.
- I like an attitude of excellence, I like to be around people who are exceptional at what they do. They don’t want to be average and they want to do exceptional work.
That’s the kind of culture I want.
Choose Your Culture
So you need to decide what kind of culture you want in your company. Do you want an aggressive culture or one that is very laid-back? I’m not saying what’s right or wrong but you need to decide what the culture is going to be.
Hire for the Culture
I know the culture I want so when I’m interviewing people I share with them the qualities I’m looking for and I try to discern in the interview process whether they’re going to fit within our culture.
Talk About the Culture
I talk about our culture all the time to customers, to vendors, to new interviews. I talk about it within our office and in our meetings. I love the culture we have and I talk about it.
Reinforce the Culture
It’s in our marketing. It’s in our hiring, it’s in how we do business. It’s reflected in how we treat customers.
Reward Those Who Reflect the Culture
If you fit within our culture and you excel, you’re likable, you’re positive, and you’re a team player, then guess what? You’re going to make a lot of money with us. I reward people that reflect our culture. Those are the people that I want to end up being partners. I love people that work for me, but I like even more people that work with me. So, if you reflect our culture and you endorse it, you’re probably going to be a partner at some point.
Promote the Culture
We hand surveys to every customer that we do work for in one of our companies. One of those questions will let us know that you fit the culture. Did you exceed the customer’s expectations? Did you perform here? Were you professional and timely? That fits our culture. When I get a card back that shows one of my employees was fantastic, I go talk to him or her and tell them.
I own the company and I do very little within it, but my staff put survey cards on my desk like it is the literal arc of the covenant and they’re bringing into the temple. Nobody gets those before I get those and I go through them every single week and write notes just like a happy fifth-grade teacher saying Good job, John! in sharpy.
If one’s not as good, I immediately give it to the partner. I say: This needs to be resolved within 24 hours. Why did this happen? I want to know this is resolved.
That’s our culture.
I reinforce it, I reward it, and I promote it. When somebody can perform and endorse and they fit everything about our culture, I want that person.
Stay away from culture killers. We see it in sports all the time. Antonio Brown was a culture killer towards this end of his career and Pittsburgh didn’t last very long in Oakland. Some athletes are so talented but they are culture killers. They’re the opposite of everything that the team stands for. When you have a culture killer and a bad culture, you’re just never going to be a great company.
So I encourage you to take on some of these things that I have said about how to build a great company culture. I chose the type of culture I wanted, I hire for it, I talk about it all the time, I reinforce it, I reward it, and I promote it to partners. That is how I built great cultures in my companies.
