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.
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?
Building a business is like raising a child. We see them grow up over the years, go through hard times and good, learn from each success and failure, and eventually blossom into something more wonderful than we ever could have imagined.
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.
We’ve all read the stories about startups making waves in their industry, and how they’re doing it from a once-destitute warehouse on the south side of town. We’re prone to conclude that these companies are sustaining high performance because they’ve broken down the (cubicle) walls that bind our ability to collaborate, innovate, and achieve our full potential.
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.
I know there are many entrepreneurs out there who aren’t funded to the gills. They’re no strangers to making every penny count toward realizing their vision. And if you can relate to this in any way, you’re probably like me— forever working to find ways to maximize efficiency and to deliver more value to your customers.
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.
You have a million things to consider when investing your startup’s money. Developing your product is just the beginning. Then come the marketing, sales, and accounting considerations. But throughout all this, you can’t overlook the single most important financial consideration: your team. Your employees, after all, become part of what you sell.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that it’s going to take more than a beer keg and an in-house masseuse to drive sustained performance of your startup.
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?
2006 was a memorable year for a lot of reasons. Facebook opened its doors to the general public. Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi during the World Cup Final. And for some reason, Americans paid a total of $62 million to watch Snakes on a Plane.
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.
Leading a successful, rapidly growing organization can be one of the most thrilling, liberating and stressful things a person can do. Those of us who have taken the plunge into the world of entrepreneurship know, firsthand, that this life is anything but boring.
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.
Entrepreneurship has exploded in the U.S. market in recent years. According a recent Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report, there are now over twenty four million entrepreneurs in the U.S., making up 14% of the total population.
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 12th 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.
source: Gallup
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.
