While you might think of company culture in terms of morale, productivity, and success, it’s important to consider the deeper, potentially life-changing aspects of culture, too. Your company’s culture is not just about what you do—it’s also about what you allow. What’s acceptable? What’s unacceptable? What’s completely unacceptable? How do you create a culture that honors your company’s mission as well as the people who help foster that vision every day?
Your answers to those questions not only determine the course of your company’s future, but they affect the life of every stakeholder in your company, from your investors to your employees’ loved ones to the person who swaps out the jug on your water cooler.
As the interview with the founder of WP Engine points out, you already have a company culture—the only question is whether you’re intentional about it. Surely, no entrepreneur has said, “I want to start a company where we hurt people and degrade their sense of self-worth—where our employees hate to come to work and where we scam our customers and vendors. That’s the kind of business I envision.”
Quite the opposite: many entrepreneurs went off on their own specifically because they hated their employer’s way of doing business. They wanted to build a wonderful company where people love to work. Most entrepreneurs truly want to create more than just an amazing product—they want to create an amazing company.
The great thing about being an entrepreneur is that you’re in charge. It doesn’t matter what stage of the game you’re in, from simply having an idea to being a solopreneur to managing scores of employees: as the founder, owner, and chief bottle washer, you get to say what flies and what doesn’t . . . unlike, say, the CEO of a decades-old global behemoth.
Unfortunately, “culture” is often an afterthought. It often happens by accident, with little thought as to how it’s shaping up until “the way it’s always been done around here” becomes so entrenched that changing anything is like turning the Titanic around. But it’s never too early to start—literally. In fact, the best time to get crystal clear on your vision for your company’s culture is before you ever start your business. The second best time is right now.
The companies we know best know that growing a great culture is a work in progress. United Airlines can’t change its culture to copy Southwest Airlines’ success and results. Herb Kelleher started shaping the airline’s unique approach to business when Southwest had only two routes: Dallas-Houston and Dallas-San Antonio. Because the company did such a great job infusing the company’s spirit into its early years, it’s taken on a life of its own.
You’ll note the same spirit in the interview with Todd Graves, the founder of Raising Cane’s, now the fastest growing restaurant chain in the U.S. Even when the “company” was just Todd and a handful of part-time college students serving chicken fingers to other college students, he knew how he wanted his restaurant to feel, how he wanted his employees to feel, and how he wanted his customers to feel. The moral of his story is: it’s never too early.
But wherever you find yourself in your entrepreneurial journey, you don’t have to go it alone. What you’re about to read represents some of the best articles from Entrepreneur. In short, these are the best of the best.
Our team of writers helps you navigate the ever-changing world of company culture from how to attract and keep great employees and build morale to taking your in-house culture to the broader community through great outreach. For example, we address the tokens of superficial workplace culture, often using ping pong tables as a prime example of something decidedly not representative of what culture truly is—to the point that we had edit out at least half of the references to keep the repetition at a manageable level. Apparently, we are either sick of ping pong tables or sick of hearing about them. Maybe both.
You’re going to read about the time an entire company’s staff that quit all on the same day, leaving the owner to pick up the pieces. The story of the restaurant with a “best butt” award will surely stick with you for years to come. Perhaps most poignant is the last section of the book that deals with what to do if, like many entrepreneurs, you look up one day and find that you have a dysfunctional culture. What do you do?
You see, this book isn’t about how to copy the vibe of some cool tech startup. We focus on the things that matter—the cultural elements that result in not just great places to work and great balance sheets to boot, but that create a better environment and support a better life for everyone involved. We are serious about doing good while doing well. A great company culture is not just a nice thing to have, but an essential factor in the success of companies going forward. Companies without a strong sense of purpose and direction will be left behind by those whose people love to come to work, whose customers love to work with them, and whose leaders can’t wait to get to work in the morning.
This isn’t a book about culture—it’s about the future of how we do business.