Uranus

Give your meeting rooms names. Our offices at Ubarter.com had boardrooms named after the planets.

The boardroom furthest from the CEO’s office was called Pluto (the planet furthest from the sun).  Guests would always chuckle when they were told the meeting would be held in a room called “Neptune.”

If possible, engage all your employees in the naming process. Don’t just slap a name on a boardroom without any employee input. Culture should flow from the inside out, not the other way around. And yes, it always got a huge laugh when someone asked where the CEO Dwayne was, and the reply was ‘he’s in Uranus’.

And put up huge positive sayings in vinyl letters or on canvasses you design. Pick words or sayings that add value and mean something to your staff, not lame, obscure quotes that don’t have any relevance to your team. This might not be possible right away, but as you cultivate real work culture, it’ll be a lot easier to speak the language of your employees.

One example is have a ‘Can You Imagine?’ wall – where employees, customers and suppliers can put up great ideas.  Big, crazy, audacious ideas that provoke thinking. Make sure they align with company values, but be open to Also include goals and core values on the wall, that way no one will ever forget their purpose.

If you are building an entrepreneurial company, you need to build an entrepreneurial culture to go with it.

One way to create a culture of entrepreneurship is to treat all the employees as co-owners.  Let them learn all the parts of a company and how it really runs.  Share some of the profits of the company with all employees. Give them the same level or responsibility and accountability that the owner has, too. Everyone will begin to be excited about growth.  Everyone will start to treat the company like they own it.

In 1986, when I was running one of my first companies, I came home from work one day and started to get upset, and my dad said, “What’s wrong?”  And I said, “All of my employees (who were also my friends) are starting to hate me.”  And he said, “Why are they hating you?”  And I said, “Well, they think I’m making too much profit.”  And he said, “Why do they think that?”  And I said, “Well we have these sales targets every month and we go chasing after these revenue goals, and I think they feel that that’s how much money I’m putting in my pocket.”  And he said, “Well don’t you show them your expenses?”  And I said, “No. If I showed them my expenses they’d know how much profit I’m making!”  He said, “Well they think you’re making more than you are.  So show them your expenses as well. Besides you aren’t making any profit yet so what can it hurt?”

I listened to my dad.

Right away, my employees started to see the business differently.  They no longer felt like I was taking advantage of them.  In fact, they were rather nervous that they might be out of jobs if the company didn’t start making more money fast. That impacted profitability and was tied to that cultural aspect of being an entrepreneurial company.

• Deliver What You Promise
• Respect The Individual
• Pride In All You Do

Those were the corporate values of College Pro Painters when I worked for them from 1986-1994.  During those years is when I also really learned how to build companies, core values were part of that.

Those core values stuck with me.  They are clear, simple, and impacting.  They were well thought out by the leadership team who brought them to us.  And I remember calling people on them, including myself & my own boss at one time.  They worked.

Those values still work today.  They are ones that I judge business dealings on frequently.  It’s interesting to me that those values ring so true still for me, even though I have my own values for BackPocket COO below – I occasionally judge the business moves of others based on the first core values I learned to live by – College Pros.

Here are mine:

Do What You Love

Be Authentic

Deliver What You Promise

Balance Is Key

The Love Guarantee

The members that constitute a business community drive the bus and create demand. Providing an innovative product is only half the battle. Sustained success lies in keeping customers happy and coming back for more. Any company can claim superior customer service, but can they walk the walk?

I Love Rewards has been wildly successful in this, and we have the raving fans to prove it. Here’s why every company should develop their own version of our Love Guarantee:

Clients don’t have power, end users do. Clients won’t keep buying a product the user isn’t happy with. Dedicate a team to manage member happiness, and not only will that keep members happy, but clients loyal.

Customers are brand ambassadors. Marketing dollars buy presence and are essential, but reputation and credibility in the business community trump when it comes down to closing a deal. Keep customers happy and they’ll go to bat for you when you call on them for prospect referrals.

Competitors offer a viable alternative (and are trying to do it better). Competitors are well versed in your strengths and weaknesses, so don’t grant them an opportunity to fill a gap in your customer service. Establish a guarantee that is open ended and maintain a stop-at-nothing attitude to take satisfaction to the ultimate level: loyalty.

An I Love Rewards member, Michael McNamara, recently redeemed points to surprise his wife with a night at the Horseshoe Resort for a birthday, wedding anniversary, and Mother’s Day celebration. Unfortunately the redemption certificate was slow to arrive and upon booking his stay the reservation was refused based on a new two-night minimum policy.

His call to Member Support brought a happy ending. Within minutes one of our representatives found the problem, and an above and beyond solution. The bad news was that the vendor had failed to communicate the resort’s policy change. The good news was that they offered to cover the cost of the second night. We took an extra step to have flowers delivered to the room. In response, we received these words of praise from Michael:

“As a manager for front line Call Center employees I can be very hard to impress as my expectations are extremely high. I am very happy to say you not only met but exceeded every expectation I had”

The Love Guarantee Lesson: The Love Guarantee is our secret ingredient, ensuring that clients and their members love everything about their interaction with our company. Our promise to customers is, “We’ll stop at nothing to make sure your program members love everything about their experience”. We convert system hiccups and member concerns into opportunities to exercise the outstanding service and make continuous improvements. We welcome and challenge you to borrow our idea to do the same.

When it comes to paid vacation, the U.S. and Canada don’t get it.

Giving two weeks paid vacation to employees says you’re a mediocre employer, at best.

In fact, most people would never work for someone for years if they knew they only got two weeks of vacation.

Two weeks of paid vacation is particularly hard to swallow if you characterize your company as being “like a family.” Really? You call that family.

Would you really want your siblings or parents only getting two weeks of vacation? You know that would really suck. So, don’t do it.

European and Australian employers give five to six weeks’ vacation.  The argument in the 1980s used to be, “Yeah, but look at the productivity of Americans—they only give two weeks of paid vacation!” But we can’t in good faith argue that point anymore. Productivity has declined because we give our employees less and expect more, and that has to change.

The companies attracting and retaining the most qualified employees all give more vacation than their mediocre counterparts.

If you really want to be a great employer, here is one easy way to do it that doesn’t cost you any more money that you spend on people today: Give all of your full time employees five (yes, five) weeks’ vacation. Include sick days in those five weeks off.  In addition to those five paid weeks’ vacation, they obviously still get the other statutory government holidays like Christmas, New Year’s Day and so on.

Why does this work? Vacation time that includes sick days means employees won’t come into work as often when they are sick.  They know they have enough time off to cover those days, so they won’t come in and infect everyone else.  The number of sick days per year for your company will drop. You are also going to find that the only people who don’t love this are the people who smoke or are unhealthy and perpetually sick.  Well, you don’t want them on your bus anyway.

No one is going to quit.  Why would they?  Where else can they get such a great vacation package?  With lower attrition rates and increased retention of employees, your employee training costs drop.

Everyone knows that the most productive day at the office is the day before vacation.  So the more vacation you give people, the more days they’ll have those “before vacation” productivity gains.

Give all employees the same vacation time, too, otherwise if you give tenured staff more vacation time you’re saying, “we like them more than we like you.” Not a good move.

pic: Wayfaring

Greig Clark, my good friend and founder of College Pro Painters, used to say that in order to build a truly great company, it has to be slightly more than a business and slightly less than a religion. It has to be a cult.

The cult-like culture starts with people who have a fantastic cultural fit, who are strong leaders, have proven ability to perform their roles, and will do it at one hundred miles an hour.

To build a cult-like workplace find new employees that raise the average skill set of the entire group.

A business’ hiring process is just like when you’re rebuilding a sports team.  You need to get rid of the wrong players and bring in those that raise the average of the team. A sports team never considers bringing in a bunch of C players – they obsess about bringing in better players to win the cup.

All champion teams have a cult-like environment.  Your company should be structured the same way.  And in our lifetime, the Toronto Blue Jays will win the world series again.  My dad says so!!!

This question of the week is from CEO Jamie Scarborough of Sales Talent Agency.  He asked “A lot of companies seem to focus heavily on collecting “logos” like “Fastest Growing Company”, “Best Employer” etc…

I’ve covered the rest of his question & answered it here for you…

A cool lesson from the movie ‘The Secret’ is ‘like attracts like.’ It also repels the opposite of like, too.

So, if you’re building a company with a really fun, entrepreneurial culture with a great work/life balance, you’re going to repel boring useless lazy people cubicle drones who have no life (good they’re boring to hang out with).

Herb Keller, founder of Southwest Airlines, got a letter this letter from a customer:
“I need you to stop telling jokes on your airline or I won’t fly with you anymore!”

Herb Keller sent a letter back: “We’ll miss you!”

The practices of Southwest Airlines are so aligned with the vision of their future that they publicly say, “Customers are not #1, our employees are.” And they put it in writing!

Just like offices, communication needs to be open as well. What does that mean? For starters, no hidden agendas and share more than ‘the bare minimum’ of confidential information with everyone.

The more open the communication is across individuals and departments, the more trust that will be built within the company and its teams. Since these steps are an effort and fostering real communication, let’s discuss what staying “positive and open” means for achieving that end.

Communication has to flow top-down, bottom-up, and between peers and business areas, but it’s not always easy to make this happen. However, one of the most effective ways I’ve been able to maintain this flow of communication is to have an “open door policy.” In fact get rid of the freaking door, we know you’re watching porn.

Even though technically, if you have no walls, you won’t have doors, the phrase encapsulates the approach all leaders should take to fielding people’s thoughts and concerns. It shows everyone that leaders are willing to grab some time to listen to the concerns, fears, frustrations and ideas that are percolating throughout your organization.

“Town hall” style meetings also helps with the flow of communication to large numbers of people and back to you. These communication extravaganzas can be set up as an open forum, usually with a few beers being passed around to get people relaxed, and they allow for a top-down, bottom-up flow of information.

Most importantly, leaders have to walk the walk here—you have to be prepared to show people you’re working to resolve issues, or shine a spotlight on the areas that need one. That’s what it means to lead.

Fostering outstanding communication in your company need not be relegated to large-scale efforts like tearing down walls and having town hall style meetings. One of the most impactful things we did at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and then later at companies I mentored and coach like I Love Rewards & Nurse Next Door to foster great communication is running the “daily huddle”

The power of sharing good news each day, the key numbers, missing systems and getting updates from different business areas really allowed everyone to get on and stay on the same page.  Everyone knew what everyone else was doing, and why it was important.

Stop surfing porn, and get rid of your doors.

pic Cartoon Stock

Cameron Herold

I must admit I always struggled with writing down what the core values for my company BackPocket COO would be.  In fact, I found it easier to put them in place for companies I’ve built in the past because I had teams of people.  Now my company is me, and some awesome virtual people doing design, research, assistance, SEM, writing, etc.

A few months ago after helping a client’s company nail their core values I was on a flight home, and I realized the core values for my company were already inside me, I just had to close my eyes, and feel them.  Then in a rush, they came out:

Do What You Love – Be Authentic – Deliver What You Promise – Balance Is Key

Once I scribbled them down, I knew they were right.  They were values I already lived by and felt energized by.  They fit like my Saturday comfy hangover jeans and sweatshirt do.

Do What You Love – is based on the concept of Unique Ability by Dan Sullivan.  Coaching, Mentoring & Speaking are fun for me.  I’m great at them.  I get energized doing them.  And others get energy watching me.  I love em.  And I’d do them for free – but my kids like to eat.

Be Authentic – It drives me nuts when people put on a game face, or a professional voice etc. I’ve always found that when people are REALLY themselves, they resonate with everyone around them.  My energy vibrates when I’m being me.  I become a magnet, and I know it.  When I wear what I want, say what I mean, and let my vulnerabilities out, others are attracted to me – and I am to them.  It feels great being me.  Besides, I might as well be myself, everyone else is taken.

Deliver What You Promise – Period.  Nuff said.  If I need to explain this one – ummm, we can’t be friends.

Balance Is Key – I get one life.  And I’m not going to live it working 65 hour weeks any more.  I once did 117 hours in a week and wore it like a badge of honor.  What an ass I was back then.  Now I try to live by a couple mantras:  1) Remain Interested to Remain Interesting (thanks Jillian Dixon Boxer) and 2) The Lazy Entrepreneur (thanks Dave Feller).  I know ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ but damn it, I do to…

What are your core values ?

Tennis anyone ?