The biggest brands in the world become what they are with the help of one elusive ingredient: customer loyalty. In a world over-saturated with scattershot marketing messages, successful companies take the time to truly get to know their customers — their motivations, fears, ideas, and priorities — and tackle customer service with relentless dedication.

If you’re an entrepreneur, this is good news and bad news.

The bad news? You’re likely competing against established brands that have worked for years — or even decades — to build loyalty among customers.

The good news? You can make customer-service commitment part of your company’s mission early on and be hyper-focused on giving a smaller number of customers the best experiences possible.

If you commit to offering better customer service than your competitors, then your customers are far more likely to tolerate growing pains and stick with you as you scale. This is why developing a customer service culture should be a table stakes commitment for all startups.

Power of the People

Over the past several years, there’s been a constant influx of new technologies designed to make the customer service experience better for both businesses and customers.

Often, bigger companies will invest heavily in sophisticated customer service automation tools, quality call center technology, intelligent customer relationship management systems, and vast knowledge databases, hoping to “solve” customer service.

If you’re at a startup with a limited budget, you may think you can’t compete because you can’t afford the latest tools. But the simple fact is that world-class customer service starts with people.

Maybe you’ve invested time and money into building a custom platform to help you serve customers better. Maybe your customer service technology of choice is your cellphone.

Regardless, you need to be sure that the people on your team who regularly interact with customers can communicate with empathy.

As a founder, you should get comfortable speaking with customers in their language and thinking about your product from their viewpoint.

Set the tone, the rest of your team will follow, and you’ll be on the path to developing a customer service culture that permeates all aspects of your company.

Find a Balance and Keep Learning

Especially in the early days of your startup, you’re going to have to do things that don’t scale. But as you grow, you have to balance quality service with cost.

Despite all your best intentions, having your lead developer or top product manager regularly answering customer calls isn’t a good idea.

As soon as you can, either hire someone or transition a current team member into a full-time customer success role. You’ll want this person to be able to handle a variety of customer touchpoints.

It’s great to have live phone support, but it’s not always enough: Live chat and email, along with automated FAQs and tutorials, are all extremely important today.

You’ll often find that what worked one year may not work the next year because of growth, new product offerings, and the emergence of new communications tools.

Likewise, keep in mind that different customers have different communication preferences. Learn what those preferences are early on and coordinate with your team to make sure you’re always up to speed on how customers are trying to communicate with you.

A True Customer Service Culture is an Investment

I speak from experience when I say that investing in customer service pays off.

At Phone. com, we do everything we can to make using our product as easy as possible — offering tools like a customer control panel and self-guided tutorials.

But when customers do need help, we make sure they’re able to easily get in touch with an experienced, friendly customer service rep.

Every day, we have customers both old and new write us unsolicited thank-you notes describing their experiences.

Quality customer service has always been a key component of business success. But it’s arguably more important today than ever before, simply because it’s easier than ever before — anyone can do it, and customers have come to expect it.

Take advantage of the array of tools and channels available to facilitate customer interactions. Avoid making assumptions. Instead, try to get feedback from customers whenever you can — and not just anonymous surveys.

When you’re talking with a customer, ask them how they think you’re doing. Feedback is a gift!

Finally, remember that you can’t please everyone, so don’t try to. Instead, focus on providing top-notch service to those customers who best fit your business.

Stick to your word, do your best, and try to improve each day. Your customers will reward you.

By Ari Rabban on 12/28/2016. Originally published on Startups. co – The world’s largest startup platform, helping over 1 million startup companies.

The post How to Create a Customer Service Culture on People Power appeared first on gothamCulture.

I stopped dieting for weight loss purposes 15 years ago. My brain finally understood what I knew all along; diets deplete willpower, make you fat, unhealthy and unhappy.

Instead of dieting, I’ve been doing the obvious — eat what I want, when I want it, in a balanced way. The results are as expected; better health and consistent weight for over a decade. No restrictions, no stress.

There are a lot of things in life that work the same way. Intellectually we understand a wide range of facts and theories; however, it can take decades before we can truly put that knowledge into practice. Why is that? I think there are many reasons. But one powerful reason is our ability to rationalize everything. We convince ourselves that it can’t be that easy.

But, it is.

Business practices are the same; there is a ton of common sense and wisdom around us but we choose to make things complicated, potentially out of fear. After all, it can’t be that easy, right?

Here’s an example of a business practice that makes total sense but that is hard to find in most working environments. For a bit of context, our team is small and distributed. We have team members in 6 different countries and time zones.

You know what’s complicated?

Trying to control people and their work.

You know what’s easy?

Providing total freedom.

One of the wonderful things about building a remote company is that you have to learn to reject the urge to control and micro manage people. Instead, you have to build real trust — trust that can be tested every day and not break.

Every team member at our company has the freedom to work from any place in the world; they can work when they feel most productive and take time off when they need it. We don’t count hours, we focus on results. That all sounds sweet and cuddly but it works. There is no fluff here. People do better work faster, feel productive and happier. Period.

You don’t need to hear that from Jason Fried to know it is true. You can intellectually understand it and know that it makes sense. In practice, it looks a bit like this: a team member called Juan types in your internal chat:

“Guys, I’m going to take a nap and come back later, I didn’t sleep well and have a headache..”

In a typical business setting, there would be some sort of freak out, some peers would get offended by Juan somehow being lazy and not pushing through the day, others will keep tabs for the next 1–1 session with Juan, and in other companies, Juan would get fired immediately.

It takes a lot of discipline to build a company where Juan can feel confident about the fact that he is doing the right thing for him and the company. It takes discipline but it is not complicated.

Why do we want Juan to be tired at work? Make a bunch of mistakes and have a bad day? Wouldn’t be easier for Juan to go, take that nap and come back when he is ready? This is not new, you know this is the right thing to do. However, managers keep overworking people, making them feel insecure and trying to get the best out them while using fear tactics. This is bananas.

It is not only about the managers. It also takes a lot of discipline from other team members to make trust their default thinking. They have to be convinced that Juan is doing the best for everybody and not playing Grand Theft Auto Five while drinking Bloody Marys at home. Most importantly the team needs to feel confident that Juan will come back at some point, do a superb job and continue doing his thing.

Exercising Freedom At Work Is Exercising Empathy

Some people work well in the evenings, others early morning. Some people need quiet environments, others need noisy places, some people have to go to the doctor or pick up their parents at the airport in the middle of the week, some suffer from insomnia, some people get their periods and feel crappy. Those things are part of life and making talented people restrict themselves to justify outdated practices is the best way to lose them.

“People are responsible adults at home. Why do we suddenly transform them into adolescents with no freedom when they reach the workplace?” — Ricardo Semler

You may be thinking: …But Sofia, what are you talking about? Where is the hustle? Have you watched the latest Gary V?

My answer is that hustle comes in different shapes and forms. Productivity is not about sweating your butt off. Hustle and speed come from an unbreakable commitment to do our best work and help the people who help us make that work happen.

Productivity for me is to be part of a team I don’t have to control. A team that does more in less time because they are not exhausted. A team that gets involved beyond their job description because they feel good about helping others. No drama, no waste of time, just people learning, contributing and being happy at the end of their working day, whatever that looks like for them.

My guess is that a lot of outdated practices come from people in positions of power who are not self-aware enough to understand how their own insecurities and psychological baggage affect their teams. It is easier to rationalize the need for control than to do the simple thing. Let your team do what they want to do and be who they want to be without micromanaging people.

If your team is driven by learning, by freedom, and by achieving a common goal, all you need to do is to provide the best environment for those things to happen. The rest is noise.

You may say, well… that all sounds great and fun, but you are a small team, you can’t do that in a larger organization and you probably drank too much oolong tea.

Maybe, but here is what I know.

If trust didn’t scale we all would be dead by now. We need to trust each other to function as a society. In business, you build trust by doing small things well, for example:

When Aurora says she is leaving early because she is getting her driving license, you as a leader, don’t freak out.

When Rudolf proposes an idea, you make sure he knows his idea will be implemented or why it will not be implemented. We all need to know WHY.

When a bunch of people are in a meeting, but Carlos has not had a chance to speak, you ask Carlos what he thinks about the discussion. Some people need to know that their ideas matter. Because they do.

When Jakobo messes something up or delivers something late, you don’t assume that he did that intentionally, you assume he was doing his best based on what he knew at the time. You try to understand what happened. No blame. Accountability is an agreement, not an imposition.

If Bedelia is looking upset, you overcome your social awkwardness and ask if she is OK. If she is not OK, you let her know she can take the day off.

When you say you are going to do something, you do it. If you tried hard but couldn’t deliver, then say why. But make sure you did your very best.

Then you say… But Sofia, who are these people? You don’t know what you are talking about, not everybody is like that, I know some people that are nasty and they don’t care at all.

That’s a different problem, that’s a hiring or firing problem. You build trust with people who earn your trust. You can’t build trust with people who don’t want to build it with you. Most importantly, you set clear boundaries and when people fail to see them you kindly remind them why they exist.

Good organizations know how to set boundaries without making people feel caged. Trust is built every day, with small but frequent reactions and interaction.

I’m not saying that all of those small interactions have to feel like marshmallows. Heated conversations are needed. Healthy disagreements are necessary. The trust you want to build is the kind of that lets you communicate that you are annoyed and disappointed with something or somebody without feeling the fear of destroying your relationship with that person.

“Compassionate people ask for what they need. They say no when they need to, and when they say yes, they mean it. They’re compassionate because their boundaries keep them out of resentment.” ― Brené Brown

The same way it took me years of frustration and weight fluctuation to finally decide to stop dieting. It took me many burnouts and failures as a leader to finally understand that the best way to manage people is not to manage them at all.

By Sofia Quintero on 4/26/2017. Originally published on Startups.co – The world’s largest startup platform, helping over 1 million startup companies.

The post Stop Micromanaging: The Art of Letting Go and Fighting the Urge to Control appeared first on gothamCulture.

One of the more challenging stages of the process is a business’ adolescence. It’s no longer a scrappy startup but not yet a full-grown business with established and consistent processes.

Cultivating a workplace culture that embeds the right norms and consistent operations isn’t easy during this stage. The environment is changing rapidly, and like any teenager, the organization is trying to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. Your team is trying to understand what works and what doesn’t. Leaders are managing the tension between growth and stability. And the rapid pace of both internal and external change can take its toll on everyone involved.

These challenges are often amplified for tech startups. The rate of innovation and change in tech moves at breakneck speed, employee turnover is high, and these leaders are left spinning so many plates as their companies grow that one wrong move can mean disaster. It’s no wonder that only one-third of businesses make it past their 10^th anniversary.

Growing Up Fast

As an entrepreneur myself, I’ve seen this shift happen in real-time at my company, gothamCulture. Things change every day as we evolve and grow into a more mature and sustainable competitor in our space.

Jumping to the next bigger pond can be risky. It requires a lot to grow your organization to that next level of maturity and performance. You need everyone pulling in the same direction to see it through and it demands that leaders make some tough decisions along the way.

Charles Ramsey, CEO of San Francisco-based Sauce Labs, knows all about these challenges. He and I recently discussed how his team has cared for a growing tech company over the last nine years.

Customers come first. “I look at the world from a customer first and technology second perspective,” says Ramsey. “However, Sauce has a very strong engineering-centric culture and I really want to preserve that dynamic. In other words, great code that does not solve a fundamental customer problem is just not very important.”

Culture is not a static concept. “Today, we are enjoying market confirmation for what our founders defined as best practices for testing. Like most growing companies, however, the organization had to go through several cultural and physical iterations to get here.”

An intentional culture drives your strategy. “Culturally, we needed to change from being employee focused to customer focused. Further, we needed to move from selling to anyone and everyone to having an enterprise focus. Changes in both culture and market happened in parallel and it helped align the entire team’s direction.”

So, what can we learn? How can you care for your company culture through its awkward teenage years and set it up for long-term success?

7 Things Every Awkward Teenage Company Needs

1. Choose your clique carefully.

Is your client the primary customer? Is it your team? How about your shareholders? You may need to please multiple stakeholder groups as your company grows, and being very clear about your primary customer will help everyone in the organization prioritize their efforts.

2. Figure out what you want to be when you grow up.

Your teenage company may not know what it wants to be. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure story, there are so many possible directions it’s easy to get drawn down the wrong path.

For Sauce, this finding their direction meant maintaining focus on automated testing before the market had embraced it. “It’s about discipline and rigor in the planning process,” says Ramsey. “There are only so many things that any company can get done in a year and it’s critically important to remain true to the vision without being dogmatic. Again, this is a dynamic and fluid industry and as a SaaS company, we must deliver value or we are going to underperform.”

3. Manage the peer pressure.

As a leader of a growing company, you’ll often take on more future-focused activities while your team members are managing the day-to-day. This is okay. So long as you hire and develop a highly-skilled team that is clear about your intent, you can focus on steering the organization toward the future. Bringing people along with you is essential to ensuring folks understand what your role is and why you’re doing the things you’re doing. Some may try to stop you or change your course but it’s up to you to remain stalwart in your vision.

Ramsey adds, “We have a process that we utilize to track and evaluate market changes, competition and ‘where the puck is going’, as Wayne Gretzky used to say, over the next 12-36 months. It’s important to have a consistent process. We talk to customers and prospects regularly to course correct. And while that feedback is incredibly valuable, at the end of the day it’s not their business to tell us what to do. We have to make some hard decisions, with good but never complete data, and make those changes quickly.”

4. Run for class president.

Part of growing up is making hard decisions that allow the organization to concentrate on one, maybe two things, and do them very well. “Our ‘hard thing’ was committing to and focusing on what was required to be a great enterprise vendor,” says Charles. “To punch above our weight. It was a particularly challenging decision because when we made it, the majority of the software vendors and the investment community focused on low friction, low cost web and inside sales as the ‘model of the future.’ But there is no ‘one model’ and I am 100 percent convinced we made the right decision for our customers.”

5. Workplace culture: nature vs. nurture.

Your culture will happen whether you’re intentional about it or not. And if you dive into the work without first defining who you are and how you want to grow, your startup culture can quickly grow out of your control. Once it’s solidified in the company DNA, it’s a challenge to go back and break the mold.

“This is hard work that never goes away,” says Ramsey. “The filter that every employee uses to examine the company when it comes to the important things — like the opportunity for advancement, learning, fun and growth — changes continually. One of the hardest parts of being a CEO or leader of a team is that you own this and it needs to be examined religiously. If you don’t take care and think about these things, your employee’s next employer will!”

6. To thine own self be true.

“It’s important that Sauce employees believe in the market, the vision for the company, and the fact that we are solving a real customer problem,” Charles explains. “As an executive team, we focus on how we deliver that in an honest and credible fashion. Getting the team to embrace the challenges of building, marketing, and selling an enterprise product has been hard but healthy. When a customer pays 6 to 7 figures a year, they expect you to help them be successful. We are dealing with our customers’ careers. They are betting on us. And our organization needs to understand that it is more about them than it is about us.”

7. Let’s talk about your feelings.

As your organization grows, you as the founder will find it more and more difficult to keep everyone rowing in the same direction. Consider creating space for your leadership team to come together on a regular basis to align around what’s most important and help them develop the capability to communicate the message throughout the organization.

Enjoy The Journey

Taking care of a company as it grows up is no small feat. And if you’re one of the fortunate business leaders who has led your company through nine or ten years of growth, take a moment to celebrate. Everyone on your team is working hard to move the company in the right direction, so taking a moment to pause, reflect, and give yourself and your team a pat on the back can help boost morale during this trying time.

To steal a line from Ferris Bueller: Life in a growing teenage company moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

The post How to Care For Workplace Culture Through Its Awkward Teen Years appeared first on gothamCulture.

Unfortunately, misconceptions about high performing culture develop from these stories, and many well-intentioned business leaders have tried to emulate these startups in their quest to improve their culture and performance.

Let’s dig in and dispel some popular myths about what you need to have in a high-performance culture:

#1: A “cool” vibe.

While it may seem that a waterslide snaking through your office will promote innovation, it usually just leaves you all wet. Many high-performing companies do have “cool” vibe cultures, but their sustained performance is attributed to much more than the free mocha coolatas.

Startup cultures tend to be manifestations of their founders and leaders — entrepreneurial, risk-taking, and intentionally provocative. And these outward characteristics predicate high-performance when they are founded in values of determination to succeed against all odds, an underdog mentality of never being satisfied, and a youthful exuberance that imitators just can’t match.

Don’t try to be something you’re not. Seek to understand what is truly valued in your organization and ask yourself how those values manifest themselves in the day-to-day. Are these manifestations going to help you or derail you from achieving your goals? “Cool” doesn’t necessarily mean high-performing, and trying to be “cool” when you’re not certainly won’t end well.

#2: A charismatic leader.

Another common myth is that organizations need a charismatic leader at the helm in order to inspire greatness in others. In fact, more recent thinking is quite the opposite. Highly successful CEOs tend to be those who shy away from the spotlight; those who are maniacally focused on the success of the business and who are never satisfied. If your charismatic CEO spends more time on the speaking circuit than in the office contributing to your organization’s success, you may be in trouble.

#3: A startup mentality.

While all organizations must be adaptive to meet the changing needs of the market (an attribute often associated with quick and nimble startups), this is not a prerequisite to success. It may be more challenging to turn the rudder on an ocean liner rather than a dingy, but mature organizations are still able to foster innovative thinking that keeps them competitive. It’s less about a startup mentality and more about understanding your objectives and how your organization’s culture is going to help get you there.

#4: Only leaders can create change.

Leaders can often institute change in existing systems and processes a bit more easily that others in an organization. But, I’ve met a great number of internal change agents over the years who affected sustainable change through influence rather than authority. By focusing their efforts on little victories and on influencing the thoughts and behaviors of one individual at a time, they were able to create a groundswell of support that catalyzed significant change.

Myth-buster bottom line: A culture of high performance is not necessarily a culture that seems catchy. The key is to clarify what you stand for and who you need to be. Execute on the vision of your organization in an authentic way that elicits the behaviors you and your team need to succeed.

Authenticity with who you are as a leader or founder can make all the difference for you and your organization. It helps you, as an individual, bring your best self to work each day and prevents the mental exhaustion that comes with pretending to be something you’re not. It helps others by setting clear expectations about what is and is not acceptable. It also helps set realistic expectations with potential employees as they assess the fit and alignment between their personal values and the values of your organization.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

The post 4 Things You Don’t Need to Have a High Performance Culture appeared first on gothamCulture.

Whether eliminating waste in your processes or improving the user experience of your website, the entrepreneur is constantly striving to maximize value. Here’s a little secret: The tech world is making some really interesting strides in this effort, and they call it DevOps.

If you’re in the tech industry, you’re probably familiar with the transformation in software development known as DevOps. But, outside of the industry, this concept remains largely under the radar.

For those outside of the tech space, a DevOps style of working can significantly improve performance for businesses in every industry. I’ve previously written about Westpac New Zealand, for example. A bank that’s working toward a DevOps culture and seeing improvement across their entire organization as a result.

How Can DevOps Benefit Your Company?

The concept of DevOps has been around for a while now and several organizations like Puppet and DevOps Research & Assessment (DORA) have been working to understand the true impact of DevOps on business performance. Each year, they release the State of DevOps Report, which showcases the latest research and how DevOps work methods link to business performance outcomes.

The research is compelling and the advantages of adopting DevOps principles are hard to argue with. Some key advantages of adopting DevOps stemming from this year’s State of DevOps Report include:

• Software deployments that are 200x more frequent than competitors.
• 24x faster recovery from failures.
• Significantly higher rates of employee engagement and loyalty.
• Higher levels of quality and 22% less time spent on unplanned work.
• Sizable cost savings.
• 50% less time spent fixing security issues.

While DevOps is a tech-centric concept, it all comes down to removing the label and calling it what it really is: organizations adapting the way they work in order to deliver value to their customers.

Puppet Founder Luke Kanies suggests that DevOps is closely linked to Lean principles. “When thinking about DevOps from a Lean mindset, it’s easy to understand the connection to business process improvement. The amount of time spent on rework, the time to ship (i.e. the time to go from concept to customer adoption), the amount of carried inventory you hold (how much work and investment are tied up in process before you actually see revenue) and recovery time (the time it takes you to right the ship when a failure occurs) are all measures of success.”

How Can Your Organization Adopt DevOps?

So, what do business leaders need to know if they want to move towards a DevOps-style method of working in today’s ultra-competitive landscape? I asked several tech leaders close to the DevOps evolution to share their thoughts.

If you don’t embrace technology, you’re bound to be crushed by it.

Technology is no longer an option in today’s business world. Most people can’t fathom the idea of doing their jobs without the assistance of technology. And this fundamentally changes what software will be able to do in the workplace. Automation of key components help teams stay agile by speeding up development, avoiding human error and minimizing the need to fix problems.

Those organizations that successfully incorporate these ways of working will then be able to reallocate their human resources to other value-add activities that push the organization forward.

Technology and automation are critical, but they are only part of the solution.

While technology and automation are key components in driving new levels of performance, they are not the only factor. Evolving work processes to facilitate the integration of technology and shaping your workplace culture are also fundamental in creating increased value for the customer.

Andi Mann of Splunk, an operational intelligence platform, adds, “If we can help people spend less time on routine work by augmenting them with technology, people can spend more time doing the creative work while also minimizing errors that negatively affect other people further down the chain.”

Business and team definitions of success must align.

“If you ask teams in unsuccessful organizations what they value and how they define success, you will likely get a lot of misalignment in their responses,” Kanies suggests.

In order to drive unity of effort, stakeholders must reshape the way in which they associate their work to the collective definition of success. The days of simply doing your part and ‘tossing the pig over the wall’ for someone else to deal with are over. If we are not successful unless all parts of the system are working, our expectations and behaviors will have to change.

Everyone must have a more global mindset.

To the point above, in order for people within the organization to operate in this way, they must adopt a more global mindset. This requires many organizations to challenge the long-held notion that people are either unable to comprehend the bigger picture or they really don’t care about it. Increasing understanding of how peoples’ roles fit into the bigger picture is critical to help raise awareness.  

Evolving the way work gets done is a culture issue.

If we define organizational culture as “the way work gets done”, then the tools, processes, structure, and behavioral norms all combine to create a cultural system that drives certain values and behaviors. DevOps is about both people and processes and you must address both sides in order to be successful.

Andi Mann adds that, “All business is about people. It’s about how people interact with you and your brand, and DevOps addresses this directly.”

Continuous learning by sharing information is critical to the process.

Steve Brodie, CEO of Electric Cloud, a DevOps release automation company, feels that continuous learning is a key contributor to the success of organizations that have evolved their work methods towards a DevOps methodology. “When you make a transition like this you can’t possibly know everything when you start so you must be willing to learn, experiment, share information, and adapt along the way.”

Anders Wallgren, CTO of Electric Cloud suggests, “Getting all of the right people in the room to map out your end-to-end process—be it your software delivery processes or any other business operation—is critical, so you have a system-level understanding of all the tasks, resources and teams involved, and  are able to identify the major pain points or waste along your process. Otherwise, people are only seeing their piece of the issue.”

Closing Thoughts

“The real question is; how do you teach a culture to value agility?” says Luke Kanies. “How do you get everyone to agree that success in their individual role is contingent on the success of the organization as a whole?”

Like it or not, technology plays a role in your success as an entrepreneur and business owner. Even if you aren’t in the tech industry, there are some valuable lessons to be learned from the DevOps movement as it continues to redefine the relationship between technology and culture.

Chris Cancialosi, Ph.D., is a Partner and Founder at gothamCulture. This article originally appeared on Forbes.

The post Five Things Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know About DevOps appeared first on gothamCulture.

While you absolutely need to keep an eye on earnings and burn rate, human capital is ultimately the fuel that makes the machine run. The ability to attract, engage, and grow talented employees makes the difference between the startups that thrive and those that die.

Talent development can even strengthen a company’s investment portfolio. Organizations that made strong investments in talent development outperformed the S&P 500 by 15 percent over two years, according to a study performed by Laurie Bassi, CEO of Bassi Investments, for KnowledgeAdvisors (which has since been acquired by CEB).

Companies that commit to their teams succeed because they attract hard-to-recruit talent like Brianna Crab, a data engineer at Capital One. Crab says she was swayed by the company’s culture of continuous learning — not the perks or salary — proving that employee development hones the sharpest competitive edge companies can buy.

Talent vs. Training.

As a startup, you’re doing things that have never been done before. Job postings often target specific roles and skills, but you also need quick learners who can grow at the same fast pace as your company. Your business plan needs to set the course for how you invest in your team.

What do you value most about your employees? Does your budget reflect that? Depending on your startup’s needs, it can be a toss-up on whether to hire for attitude or skill.

WeVue co-founder Taylor Wallace told me he doesn’t have a lot of time for training in the competitive software development industry, so he hires the “naturally curious” to fit with the company’s product-oriented business model. He wants to hire “someone who is not afraid to go figure it out on her own, who has the capacity to discover what is needed and then present the business case for how to get that skill.”

On the other side of the coin is Kent Barnett, my former employer. When he founded ClientLoyalty, Barnett leveraged the proven skill sets of his first two hires to attract more funding from investors. His investment in human capital was as much a part of his business plan as market opportunity and fundraising.

How to Make Human Capital Work for You.

Whether it’s hiring or training, any investment in talent that’s aligned with your business strategy and learning can only benefit your company. So what’s the best way to create your dream team?

1- Study your game plan.

Always sync up your training and hiring decisions with your business model: Do you want to be the next Nordstrom of customer service, the next Microsoft of tech products, or a model of operational efficiency like FedEx? Don’t forget to consider your level of funding, too. For some startups, the right approach might be to hire people at a lower cost and have them wear a lot of hats. Others may need a high-level new hire to start things off with a bang.

Barnett says he’s seen both tactics work to launch high-performing startups. One of his most memorable hires was a very talented — and expensive — employee who joined the company with a one-year commitment to do a specific job. On the other hand, Barnett recalls a former co-worker hired as a utility player who offered immediate returns.

2- Prioritize your needs.

Take a look at the competitive landscape to figure out what specific knowledge or skills will rocket your startup forward. Don’t stop at the technical skills. Dig deeper to determine whether you need an employee who can work autonomously, for example, or someone who can follow directions and excel at documentation. Do you need to recruit a new hire to achieve your vision, or does someone on your team right now show the potential to develop into a key player?

When Chris Cancialosi, founder and partner at gothamCulture, first began hiring for his team, he took into consideration the fact that professional firms often have long or uncertain sales cycles. Given the industry’s low tolerance for risk, Cancialosi recruited for cultural fit above other attributes, realizing that employees with passion and sharp problem-solving skills were even more valuable to him than those with technical know-how alone. He continues to recruit this way 10 years later.

3- Protect yourself.

In a startup, in particular, employees own a lot of the company’s future success, WeVue’s Wallace points out. If your startup offers expensive professional development opportunities, consider attaching terms to those investments to ensure your new hires don’t turn around and walk out the door with their shiny new skills. For example, have them agree to two years of service upon completing a coaching certification to avoid repaying it.

Losing an employee can cost up to 60 percent of his or her annual salary. That’s tens of thousands of dollars in lost knowledge, productivity, and time spent recruiting and onboarding a successor. Safeguarding your company could be worth it down the line.

As a startup, you’re always breaking new ground. A team of amazing employees is the most important tool to help you do it. Used wisely, the time and money you spend nurturing your team will never go to waste. Investing in talent is the single best way to help your startup thrive.

This article originally appeared on youngupstarts.com.

The post 3 Ways To Ensure Your Startup Has A Top-Notch Team appeared first on gothamCulture.

Beyond the perks and window dressing that business leaders adorn their exposed-brick workspaces with, what can be done to solidify certain ways of working that guide behavior to tangibly drive the results you’re looking for?

Most articles out there about startup culture focus on some of the very important basic foundations that help align people in organizations: Creating a clear and compelling vision that creates a fire in peoples’ bellies about what you’re trying to accomplish. Articulating an intentional strategy where every individual can clearly see how their day-to-day behaviors support the bigger picture. Creating a non-negotiable set of core values that help members of the group understand what’s important and help guide decisions at the point closest to the issue.

Right now, some of you may be saying to yourselves, “We’ve done that. Now what?”

Well, let’s go there.

Beyond the Basics of Organizational Culture

First off, the concept of organizational culture is a bit different from many of the other concepts leaders navigate in business. This is because many of the concepts—particularly those having to do with the people side of things—focus on individuals. Compensation, performance management and employee engagement all focus on the person as an individual.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. All of these efforts serve a purpose in the organizational system. But, they are fundamentally different from culture at the outset, as culture, at its very core, is a collective concept.

If a group develops a culture; a certain way of doing things that guide the behavior of individuals in the group, it stems from the learnings of the collective: what works, what doesn’t, and what they should or shouldn’t do in the future for success. As the group learns what works, those ways of doing things become embedded in the collective understanding (the culture) and they begin to serve as a framework, or a recipe, for success that new members of the group learn when they join the organization.

The key here is these lessons about what works and what doesn’t are learned through collective experience. This takes time. As team members work together and learn what methods are most effective, they begin to solidify their practices based on these shared learnings.

So what can you, as a business leader of a startup—which, by nature is limited in shared experiences—do to help create opportunities for collective learning so these shared ways of working can begin to take shape more quickly?

Seven Tips for Shaping a Collective Startup Culture

The good news is; it’s going to happen anyway. As time goes on and people have shared experiences and learn a certain way of working, this will inevitably develop. But if you’re not the type of leader who wants to sit back and just wait for things to happen, here are a few tips to consider.

1. Share learning through dialogue. Create opportunities for the group to come together face-to-face to share their learning around what’s working and what’s not working. Not only will this help to solidify shared methods of operating, but it will raise potential issues so that they may be corrected quickly.
2. Let folks ride shotgun. The assumption that people may not be interested in or may not find value in conducting a ride-along with you on that next sales call or during your next financial review can be strong but it’s time to start questioning those beliefs. In my company, we’ve found tremendous gains just by being intentional about including others in activities that help them gain new skills and experience or just simply to increase their understanding of the organization from a different perspective.
3. After action reviews. The US military is phenomenal at this. After every event, the unit involved comes together to conduct a formal process to share lessons learned so that changes can be made in processes for next time. These lessons are also captured via a comprehensive knowledge management system to allow others to gain value from the experience even if they weren’t a part of it.
4. Look for opportunities to cross-pollinate in serving your customers. In my company, I am always on the lookout for opportunities to put different people together on project teams who aren’t used to working together. This helps them develop shared experiences across boundaries that serve to align the collective.
5. Play together. Not all shared experiences need to be directly related to work. Seek out opportunities for members of the team to develop shared experiences outside of the office to help develop deeper, interpersonal bonds. This will also allow for the norming of expectations and attitudes relating to how group members interact.
6. Memorialize best practices. As productive ways of working emerge, solidify them in the organization. Formalizing processes, systems and standard procedures help to drive consistency. There are plenty of best practices and platforms to help you do this effectively.
7. Knowledge management. To help new members of the organization understand the “right” way to do things, effectively managing knowledge transfer can be core. Investing in an effective way to transfer knowledge may, in the least, save you some headaches and, at the most, save your business.

Perks are helpful for attracting talent, but don’t make the mistake of assuming that they will help create a deeper, collective understanding within your growing organization. And if you’ve already taken the first steps by defining a compelling vision, a set of non-negotiable core values, and a clearly aligned strategy, don’t stop there. Use these seven tips for creating a more meaningful, sustainable, culture for your startup.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

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But the most important event for me in 2006 was founding my company, gothamCulture.

Last month marked my company’s ten-year anniversary. And as I reflect upon my journey of bootstrapping and growing a professional services firm, I came to the conclusion that what I’ve learned might benefit other entrepreneurs out there who may be growing their own businesses.

I learned many of these lessons the hard way, and I hope they help you avoid the same mistakes.

1. There is a difference between being self-employed and being an entrepreneur. I learned this lesson from a mentor in 2009. It’s a difference that can be illustrated by answering one question: Do you spend your time working in the business or working on the business? Those who are self-employed tend to work in the business, delivering the goods or services that the company provides. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, focus on growing the business and letting other professionals deliver to customers. It may seem like splitting hairs, but I can tell you from experience, this is a fundamental distinction that had a profound impact on the future of my entrepreneurial journey.

2. Hire the best people for the job at hand. This goes for employees as well as key vendors who can help you focus on the things you do best, like accountants or lawyers. You’re not an accountant, and while you may think that you’re being fiscally responsible by trying to do everything yourself, these activities are likely not something that you’re a) passionate about doing right and b) not something you have the right skills for. Having the right team enables you to focus on activities that have the most impact. Learn to rely on experts so that you can move the business forward in other ways.

3. Leadership is not role-specific. I’ve experienced this throughout my professional life, both in the military and the civilian worlds. I’ve also seen that it’s a terrifically underutilized resource. Just because someone holds a lower role in your organization doesn’t mean they don’t possess tremendous ability to influence others. The trick, I’ve found, is to identify these people and to develop them for roles where they can use that influence in the best interest of moving the company forward.

4. Demand excellence and remove roadblocks quickly. High-performing people often begin to resent those who don’t bring their A game every day. By creating a culture where exceptional performance is the goal and team members are mutually accountable, we’ve created an environment where people are free to raise challenges and concerns and work out solutions to roadblocks. If someone on the team doesn’t meet our mutual expectations, the message is clear and quick. If that person doesn’t get on board, they don’t last long. Your culture isn’t going to be for everyone.

5. Always have a contingency plan (or three!). Things very rarely go according to plan. Rather than rolling the dice and hoping for the best, I learned early on to be very intentional about planning for contingencies. They say in the military that your plan only lasts until the first shot is fired. After that you have to rely on your training. You must be able to adapt in very uncertain environments. Preparing for contingencies rarely results in you having a perfect plan for any possible outcome, but it does help ensure that you’re thinking critically about the variables and you’re not relying too heavily on your primary plan panning out no matter what.

6. It’s all about relationships. People do business with people they know, like and trust. I learned this lesson from a former janitor at the University of Michigan who went on to found and grow one of the largest janitorial services companies in the state. Developing and nurturing honest and mutually beneficial relationships is what makes the business world go round.

7. The structure of your compensation model has a significant effect on day-to-day behavior in the organization. Make no mistake, every system and process in your organization will have significant impact on behavior. I’ve become a self-taught expert on the topic of compensation planning over the years, as I have seen the unintended consequences of these plans play out in surprising ways. Take extreme caution when designing your systems and processes to ensure that they are reinforcing behaviors that align with your values.

8. Every decision we make in terms of our processes is made with the field consultant in mind. Everything we do must from a support standpoint must relieve our field staff from administrative tasks. While we’ll never completely eliminate administrative tasks from our folks in the field, we make every effort to design our systems so our team can spend their time doing what they do best: serving our clients. It’s surprising how quickly a bureaucracy can develop that saddles people with activities that add no value. It’s something you must constantly be on the lookout for. Give your team the tools and support they need to do what they do best.

9. Transparency allows for honesty and trust. My company is an open book. This transparency removes doubt and establishes trust. It also allows for honest dialogue that engages the entire team in providing their ideas and input in ways that have more impact. Because they understand the details of the business, they are able to inform their thinking and provide much better input to help drive the business forward.

10. No matter how well you think you’re communicating; myths will begin to form. These myths may hold people back if they aren’t surfaced and talked about. I make it a practice to listen very carefully to not only what my team says, but how they say it. Minor variations in wording can send clear signals that myths and fables are beginning to spread. This is my trigger to refocus my communication efforts to set things straight. If you don’t actively manage the collective narrative, you may wake up one day to a company that bears no resemblance to your intentions.

11. Play like someone else’s sole mission in life is to eat your lunch. I consider this lesson to be my personal key to success over the years (and it may have stemmed in no small part from some kid taking my lunch in elementary school). At its core, it’s really about passion and hunger. If I can attribute my personal success to any one thing, it would be that I never rest. I never stop to pat myself on the back and I never take my foot off the accelerator. This is because I realize that there are other folks out there who get up every day determined to stake their claim and put us out of business.

I certainly don’t have all the answers. The lessons I’ve learned over the years have come at a cost, but they have been invaluable. I’ve made mistakes (BIG mistakes!), but each one has taught me a critical lesson that I’ve been able to apply in the future.

There is no one right answer in the life of an entrepreneur. No one right path or recipe for success. And it’s exactly this fluidity that make entrepreneurship so appealing to me and others I’ve met over the years. What are your biggest lessons learned? I’d love to hear your own story in the comments section of this article so that we all might continue to learn from each other.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

The post What I’ve Learned In Ten Years as a Bootstrapped Entrepreneur appeared first on gothamCulture.

As I’ve watched my business grow over the years, I’ve often reflected on the sheer number of decisions I made each day and the priorities that had to be juggled in order to stay nimble in the face of tremendous competition. And I’m not alone.

I’m extremely fortunate that both readers and new entrepreneurs often reach out to me to share their stories and lessons learned. I always appreciate the opportunity to meet and interact with so many fantastic entrepreneurs and to learn from each of their experiences.

Can I Answer This Question Alone?

When originally conceptualizing this article, I started with the intent to try answering the question, “What are the greatest priorities for a rapidly growing company?”. But as I began to think about my own response to that question, I realized that the answer may not be valuable or applicable to everyone.

Instead, I feel the best way to find the answer is to ask other successful entrepreneurs who are in the trenches, leading their own organizations through rapid growth. This way, we can explore the commonalities and differences that may exist across several successful, growing companies.

These entrepreneurs come from all walks of life and represent a wide variety of businesses. I asked each of the CEOs three simple questions in order to gauge not only the types of priorities they each had, but also to see if there are any similarities or key differences to be gleaned from multiple perspectives.

Jonathan Raymond, CEO of Refound, a leadership training company that offers membership coaching support to managers who want to become mentors. Jonathan is also the author of the new book, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team is Waiting For.

Nathan Munits is President of Longwave Financial, based in New York City. Longwave Financial provides financial advisory and asset management services.

Bruce Eckfeldt is CEO of Eckfeldt & Associates, a New York City-based consultancy and coaching practice.

Taylor Wallace is the cofounder of WeVue, a SAAS-based platform designed to help companies actively engage their employees in idea generation and decision-making.

Here’s what these CEOs had to say about their journeys in the wild lands of growth and prioritization, along with my own thoughts on the topic.

Question #1: What are your biggest current business priorities?

Raymond: My biggest priority is developing a truly great customer onboarding experience. We’re a startup and are blessed to have a core group of highly motivated clients, but we’re always looking for ways to make it simpler and more fun to do business with us.

Munitz: For us, growth is the number one priority.  I’m always happy to invest in staff and systems but it all flows from new business coming in the door.

Eckfeldt: Identifying key/new customer needs that are not being serviced by traditional learning and development companies. The high-tech, new-economy business world, coupled with the new workforce generation and trends towards a free-lancer economy, is changing professional and career development. We want to find needs and fill them with innovative products and services.

Wallace: Sales and improving our products to better serve our customers and our market.

Cancialosi: For me, it’s about continuing to scale the company in order to solidify our brand as a major influence in the industry. In order to accomplish this, we’ve heavily invested in the development of our team members so that they can provide consistent, high-quality services to our clients.

Question #2: How have these priorities changed since you started your business?

Raymond: When we first started, which was only eight months ago, we didn’t know who we were yet. We were still developing what we call the Refound Philosophy, and figuring out who our ideal customer was and how we could best help them. We’ll never stop asking that question, of course, but we’ve shifted our focus a bit to the experience of the people who have found us to make their world better and trust that the rest will follow.

Munitz: I have maintained growth as priority one since day one.  The difference is with so many more demands today that it is a continual challenge to maintain that focus.

Eckfeldt: We’ve evolved from coaching individuals to addressing the broader organizational needs of high-growth businesses. We’ve had to think and act more holistically and strategically with our services and products and how our customers use them.

Wallace: As a software company, we have gone through phases of market research, pure development, and heavy fundraising. But once those priorities were advanced we needed to work towards continued revenue growth.

Cancialosi: When I started out, the priority was survival focused. Get clients, generate revenue and add value as we did it. As we matured and scaled, we became intently focused on building out a solid infrastructure (systems, processes, etc.) to lay a sustainable foundation for growth. Now the focus is on developing the team so that they can successfully and consistently execute on the framework that we’ve established.

Question #3: Where would you suggest leaders of rapidly growing businesses focus their energies to ensure their continued success?

Raymond: Accountability, accountability and accountability. You’re setting the tone for the culture of the future and there is a risk that the choices you make now are based solely on the fact that they may be easier. Looking the other way on an underperforming employee, letting bad founder behavior slide, etc. will come back to bite you later. Oh, and don’t overpromise equity and incentives. The right people don’t go to work for those things in the long run, and it really just serves as an easy band-aid to cover up deeper cultural issues.

Munitz: A close second priority for us (aside from growth) is creating process. A great piece of advice I once read is that if you need to do something more than twice, you should create a process around it.  We try to instill that in our people so we can continue to maintain a high level of service, even while we continue to experience rapid growth.

Eckfeldt: In our experience, growth is generally limited by a very small set of factors at any given point in time. The trick is to find the true bottlenecks to a company’s growth at that moment—it could be people, money, operations, or strategy—and focus your efforts on removing that constraint. Then as you do, to keep watching for the constraint to shift to some other area, which it will. As a business leader, the goal is to find the right thing to focus on now, and to stay vigilant for shifting constraints.

Wallace: Make sure you start spending time on the business instead of in the business. It’s so easy to just keep your head down and focus on what you think needs to be done, but if you don’t start planning, you can quickly expel unnecessary energy in the wrong direction. We recently started doing focused, 90-day planning that cascades five objectives down from our vision and mission. Every team member knows if they are working on something, it needs to align with one of those objectives. If it doesn’t, they either shouldn’t be working on it or we need to revisit the objectives. It’s allowed us an unprecedented level of focus with no micromanagement.

Cancialosi: My advice? Focus on something. In my experience working with hundreds of business leaders over the last sixteen years, I’ve found that focusing on nothing or, conversely, focusing on too much often leads to little of substance being accomplished. Those leaders who are able to identify their options and carefully select two or three key areas of focus tend to be those who make the largest sustainable gains. When taking this approach, they are able to see tangible momentum and, once they are satisfied with their progress, they can then turn their attention to the next highest priorities.

Four Key Takeaways For Rapidly Growing Companies

These four entrepreneurs come for diverse backgrounds and their businesses are all in different industries. But there are some interesting commonalities and insights that can be culled from their stories.

1. Don’t try to conquer the world. Rapidly growing companies are full of one thing: change. The operating environment can change on a dime and having the ability to quickly assess the situation and triage the most important things to focus on is critical. Trying to tackle too many things at once leaves you exhausted and you usually fail to make significant headway in anything in the way you’d like.
2. Maintain focus until you’re satisfied with your performance. One pitfall that I’ve seen (and I’ve experienced firsthand) is jumping from priority to priority before you’ve achieved the level of progress you need. A laser focus on fewer priorities will help you, and your team, ensure your efforts are moving the organization in the most important direction at that time.
3. It’s all about managing the dynamic tensions. To me, this is what makes being a leader so difficult. The ability to effectively take stock of your current operating environment and prioritize work effort without losing sight of the fact that you’re trying to balance your business on the head of a pin. To drive sustainable success, leaders must focus on the external as well as the internal. We must be consistent while also being flexible enough to adapt to changes in the business environment. Quinn and Cameron’s competing values framework does a masterful job of articulating these dynamic tensions that all leaders must continue to manage in order to be most successful.
4. Planning and prioritization is an iterative process. For most small, growing businesses, the strategic planning cycles that extend past a couple of years don’t seem to hold much water. The business environment changes so frequently and so dramatically today that I advocate for a more short-term planning cycle. This allows for a more rapid cadence of assessing and adapting one’s plan. This way, companies begin to see strategic planning less as an annual process that they have to live (or die) by no matter what happens, and begin to view it as a continuous learning and evolutionary process. An iterative approach like this affords organizations to stay nimble and to prioritize those activities that will have the most benefit to their organizations at that time.

Leading a rapidly growing company is no easy task. In today’s fast-paced business environment, there are a lot of things that demand your attention as an entrepreneur. The ability to understand the context in which you operate, identify all of the areas of possible focus, and be disciplined enough to dedicate your full attention to a prioritized subset of tasks will allow you the opportunity to have more impact in those areas that are most important to your success. Developing this positive momentum will help you step back occasionally to reassess, and adjust your priorities as things in your environment evolve.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

The post What Are The Greatest Priorities For Rapidly Growing Companies? appeared first on gothamCulture.

There may be a number of contributing factors to this trend. Entrepreneurs are often cited as modern day adventurers and explorers. They are willing to takes risks and push innovation. And for many, they exemplify the American Dream. That is, everyone has the opportunity to be successful, no matter how you started or where you might be from.

Unfortunately, glamorizing entrepreneurs—while flattering—doesn’t tell the whole story of what founding and growing a sustainable company entails.

Despite the number of entrepreneurs in the U.S., the country now ranks 12^th among developed nations in terms of business startup activity. American business deaths now outnumber business births, according to Gallup and the U.S. Census Bureau.

As a leader of a growing startup, there are some brutal realities to face. These can include challenges obtaining capital to drive growth, an inability to attract the right talent, or the constant struggle of trying to manage an organization that looks fundamentally different every six months.

In order to grow a successful organization, knowing where to spend your limited resources is critical to success. Startups—especially in Silicon Valley—are often lauded for their culture. And unfortunately, “culture” in this case is many times defined by a set of borderline unbelievable perks.

You Are Not Your Perks.

With so much on the line for your growing business, you cannot put your perks above what you value. Perks seem great at the start, but they tend to lose their luster over time, leaving you with little of substance to sustain engagement, excitement and purpose.

With competitors grappling to offer some wild new perk in an attempt to attract talent, companies are getting sucked into a doom loop. Everyone will end up losing as they try to keep up with the Jones. The perks that were once on the cutting edge become the standard expectation, which only serves to put startups in an even worse position to compete for talent and sustain growth.

Additionally, many startups lack the capital to offer these types of perks, let alone sustain them over time. This puts them at a disadvantage compared to their larger, more established competitors.

Finally, perks and incentives are, by their nature, a manifestation of the core values of an organization. By offering endless perks, startups can send messages about what is valued that may have unintended consequences in the long-term. This can be a real problem if those messages are in conflict with your core beliefs or if those perks are being used as a replacement for core values.

By defining your values and culture based on the perks you offer, you’re sending the message that your company values following the latest trends rather than a being intentional about the deeper beliefs of your company culture. Employees may be left without any clear direction for how business should be done, how customers should be served and what it means to be a member of the team.

This is not to say that all perks are bad. Quite the contrary. Perks can help reinforce meaningful values and help drive the behaviors that are required to yield success in the next chapter of your startup’s journey. When used thoughtfully, in conjunction and in direct reinforcement of your organization’s core values, these perks can prove to be both sustainable and truly meaningful.

Rallying your team around a meaningful purpose and supporting that with appropriate perks is not only a more sustainable way to drive growth. It ensures that the people you attract are people who are joining you for the right reasons.

Values can have deep and lasting meaning for people, giving them a higher purpose. This is something that perks alone can never do.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

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