Five Minute Friday: Cultivating Success: Why Culture is King

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Business can be a lonely game. But it doesn't have to be. Welcome to Boutique Chat where we explore community over competition and how to scale your company with the balance and the happiness that we all seek. We'll hear from product based businesses of all types, retailers, e commerce and wholesale brands, along with industry experts shaping the.

Future of our industry.

I'm your host Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat.

You've probably heard people say cash is king, right? And it is, but I think more important than cash and the thing that leads you to more cash is this culture is king. Culture is king. I remember early on in business hearing people talk about the importance of my company values and I thought, well, I don't even have a team yet. It's literally just me. Why do my company values, why do they matter? Well, I quickly realized that company values and company vision aren't just for me and this imaginary team I was one day going to create. But it was for everything I was creating. It was for attracting the right customers, it was for building the right work ethic within myself and it was setting myself up to make my very first hire, even if it was contract labor. And eventually it was the foundation for the entire team that I was about to build, which today is about 25 full time employees around the world. Strong. And your company values, like I said, are gonna directly impact your community, your customers. It's the reason your customers are gonna tell their friends about wanting to do business with you. So I encourage you today to think about that culture is king. When you what is the culture that you're building in your business and what are your company values? How are they related to that culture? Now you've heard me talk about in the Boutique Hub, community over competition. That is a huge motto. It is something we believe in and it's something that we stand for. But behind community over competition. For us, our core values and our company culture revolves around a couple of very important things. Around being hardworking, around being perceptive and understanding the needs of others. It's about being creative, it's about being perceptive. And more than anything for us, it's about servant leadership and really treating other people how they deserve to be treated. And not leading from the front, but leading from within and leading from behind and really serving others as a part of leadership within our industry with no strings attached. Now, those core values and that culture that we're building, this was a meeting that took hours and hours to argue through and create. But then what Then what do you do once you've decided those are the things that are going to drive our business forward, Those are the foundation for everything we work on and everything we believe in. What do you do with those things once you have them? Well, a couple of ideas for you today. Making sure those are on your website. Making sure those are reviewed in each and every team meeting that you have. Making sure when you hire, you're asking about those core values and how people live them out on their daily life. Or maybe they could give you some examples of how they live out those core values. When you onboard, you're working those core values and conversations around each of them into the why as a part of your onboarding process. When you're reviewing and you're rewarding your team on a regular basis, whether you do it monthly or quarterly or biannually or just once a year, you sit down and say, hey, how do you like working here? You also have an opportunity for each of your employees to self reflect on how they perform with your core values and you as a leader, to score them on how they perform with their core values. Now, we've done this by giving people the opportunity to say, okay, I have a plus, a minus, or a plus minus, sometimes I hit it. Or now we're moving to a scale of 1 to 5. How have you been performing with these core values? If somebody wants to have a title change or a raise or promotion and they aren't scoring very high in our core values, it's unlikely they're going to have any type of promotion at all. We expect people to, like, live by what we're preaching, right? And I know you do too. So making sure that's a part of your daily culture is important. Something else that we've done that's been really fun for us is one of our, like, love languages, I'll say, which always starts by some random inside joke, is tacos. We give people tacos. Like, you get a taco platter, you get a six pack and a pound, you get a taco emoji, you get a taco pin. For whatever reason. Tacos are the way that we say, hey, good job. We give them in slack, we give them on team meetings, we do verbal tacos, and anytime we're telling someone, good job, and we're giving them a taco, this weird love language that we've developed, we tie it back to one of our core values. Hey, awesome job on the podcast this week. Way to, like, promote that and put it together and execute on time and all that I'm gonna give you a taco. But thanks for living out our core values of being hardworking and perceptive and being a servant leader by sharing this with the world for the good of others. Right? So everything has to come back to those core values. Now I'll warn you, when you get firm on who you're for in your core values, whether it's inside of your company or externally with your customers, you're not going to be for everyone. And that's okay. Some of your team may quit. You may decide to fire a few. You may decide to fire a few customers along the way. And some customers may not be attracted to you because you have put your line in the sand to say, this is who I am and this is what I stand for. But let me tell you, there is some good attrition in business business once you decide who you are, who you're meant to be, and what your place in this world is going to be. So put your foot down, create those core values. Set your company culture. Because culture is king and the culture is king part leads to the cash is king part. So do this one and the cash will follow. Hopefully this five Minute Friday was helpful guys. Thanks again for listening. I have loved doing this series with you each and every week. Again, let me know AJ Alderson or the Boutique Hub on Instagram Instagram what you think if there's another five Minute Friday topic you would love to hear from me, I am always all ears. If you want to leave a rating, if you want to leave a review and subscribe to the podcast, I'm so grateful. Thank you so much for spending this time with me and I will see you right back here next week.

Thanks for listening guys. I hope you took away all kinds of nuggets and new ideas from this week's episode. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating and review. We love to hear your feedback and and give you a chance to be featured on the show each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and to access guest downloads and bonuses and all the resources we talked about on the show, head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.