Pick Teammates Who Paddle Together

Let’s talk about culture.

Building company culture, I think, trumps operations because if you don’t have the right people, it doesn’t matter what processes you have in place. Culture has the power to push your company forward to a whole new level; even though I’m finding continuing to establish the right culture is a bit challenging in my own company right now.

People to fill the slots

But generally speaking, if you have a great product, you’ve got a great service, you’ve got all of these things that are going for you, but you don’t have the right people to fulfill these slots and to be a part of the shaping of the organization and how everybody feels about it, you’re setting yourself up for failure — big time.

This is a major problem for a lot of organizations and a lot of startups nationwide. I had a quick conversation one afternoon with one of my buddies and he said, man,

“You know, I feel like I’ve built out the technology. I’ve built out these ideas, the processes, and the entire CRM. All of the stuff is operationally sound, but it’s not working. What’s not working? What’s not clicking? It’s like I’m seeing the sales, but what do I have to do differently?”

I responded with…

“What about your people? Do your people love being there? Are you people like championing your brand? Before you have raving fans for your brand, you need internal team members raving about your company. If you don’t have that, you’re not going anywhere.”

My paddleboat

I can equate that to like a paddleboat. I remember the summers in Michigan, I used to go to the lake with my family and I used to jump on a paddleboat and if you didn’t have everybody working that wheel on the paddleboat and they weren’t paddling all together in sync, the boat wouldn’t get very far.