Building a “Cult” Company Culture That Actually Works

Sometimes cultures are torn apart by the mass media because it just seems so weird. But the problem is, it's because average really sucks. If you're going to compare like wework was an incredible company culture torn apart by the media because it was so culty, but you're going to compare it to working for the government or working for a school system or working for a boring architectural firm. That's just culture is not bad. It's just that people aren't used to it. I'll give you the three things that I came in and did with the organization in the first year that really propelled the growth. The first one was I came in with Brian and I said, no one's making money. You're not making money. The franchisees aren't making money. The guys in the trucks aren't making money. We're paying the call center minimum wage. This whole model kind of sucks. So we're going to need to increase our prices. And we raised our prices by 40% across the board in a single week. Every one of the 12 locations raised their prices by by 40%. People thought I was crazy. Franchisee said, we're going to go bankrupt. I was like, we're going to go bankrupt anyway. So we're either going to go bankrupt trying to be profitable or we're going to go bankrupt because we're losing money. So we did it. And there were some things that we did behind the scenes to make it work. And it was very successful. That was number one. Number two was I said, if we're going to have this great growth, we have to attract people, we have to attract customers, attract suppliers, attract franchisees and attract great employees. And to do that, we have to be a little bit more than a business and a little bit less than a religion. We have to get into this zone of a cult. We have to build a company culture that is so magnetic that we pull people towards us. So we created a cult like work environment and there's systems that we can put in place to do that. I used to actually study cults and I understood how to build that cult like environment. So that was number two. And then number three was we had no money for marketing, but we understood how to go to the press and get the media to talk about us, whether it was newspaper, magazines, you know, bloggers, radio, tv, Oprah. So we put systems in place to phone the media and tell them about the future or the vivid vision of our organization and get them to write about us. And that was something that I'd been very successful at with all the companies I'd built. And Brian had had some early success with the rubbish boys. So it was those three things became kind of the flywheel effect. And then I guess lastly it was was obsessing about our franchisees profitability. I knew that the only way we could truly scale. I learned this at Gerber Auto Collision and at College Pro Painters. If the franchisees are wickedly profitable, they'll validate well, they'll buy more locations, they'll tell their friends to buy locations. It'll be fun energy to work with, they'll validate with the press. But if they're not making money, it just gets harder across the board. So we ensured that we focused on helping them make really good money and that just kind of propelled the whole flywheel of growth. I was actually interviewed on a podcast three years ago that's called A Little Bit Culty. And I was interviewed as a business expert who understand cults and understand how to take the best principles and build that company culture without going too far. Right. Where does company culture go too far? And sometimes cultures are torn apart by the mass media because it just seems so weird. But the problem is it's because average really sucks. If you're going to compare like WeWork was an incredible company culture torn apart by the media because it was so culty, but you're going to compare it to working for the government or working for a school system or working for a boring architectural firm. That's just culture is not bad. It's just that people aren't used to it. You know, College Pro's core values, where I learned this and I Left college pro 40 years ago was deliver what you promised, respect the individual pride in all you do and find a better way. If I can recite the company core values from 40 years ago, those were deeply ingrained core values in the company. Alignment with a vivid vision. Right. Having that three or four page description of what your company looks like, acts like and feels like in the future. So everyone is hell yeah. It's a full body F yes. I want to help build this. They're aligned and inspired. That's number two. Number three is a BHAG, that big hairy audacious goal, that 20 or 30 year stretch that you're marching towards. So at 1-800-got junk, ours was to build a globally admired brand. That was the test for everything we were doing. Will this make us a globally admired brand? If it was a no, then we figured out how to make it a yes. And then it was Hiring really great culture people and getting rid of any of the toxic, negative, underperforming people because a players want to hang out with a players. It's why the Boston Bruins hockey team can score goals when they're shorthanded. It's because they put the best four on the ice. They don't have that fifth person in the way. Right. It's why underperformers will rally with each other. It's interesting. I was actually in Dubai in January speaking to a group of 2,500 entrepreneurs at a big conference. After the event, I was out talking to this guy and I'm six foot four. This guy was six foot six. And I'm talking to him, I'm like, what do you do for fun? He goes, volleyball. I'm like, yeah, it kind of makes sense. He goes, yeah, I play professional beach volleyball. I'm like, amazing. I said, I played volleyball in college, just kind of intramural. I said, I have a question for you, you and your professional beach partner. If I took five of my friends from college and it was the six of us against the two of you in beach, and he starts laughing, he goes, every time. I'm like, I haven't even finished the question. He goes, cameron, we would beat you every single game. The two of us would slaughter the six of you. And that's like taking two people and paying them $200,000 a year each. That's $400,000 total salary, or six people at 100,000 each, that's 600. The two A players would destroy the six Bs or six C players. You have to bring that culture and that attitude of, of almost Cirque du Soleil into your company. You don't build a family because some families are very dysfunctional. Sports teams only go so far. But that Cirque du Soleil culture where we have each other's backs, we're driving for professionalism. We only need a critical few people that are performing at the highest level that creates that cult like environment. If you haven't already come, check out the Second Command podcast on YouTube. It's at YouTube. Second in Command podcast. Creating a corporate environment where you care about people. We flipped the org chart upside down where we were there to support people and help them with their skills, their confidence and their connections and not manage them and hold them accountable. Fortune magazine asked me in 2003, how do you hold your employees accountable? And I said, I don't. I hire accountable people. So that's kind of culture. And then I guess the Last one would be creating these systems internally that are like mantras and sayings that from the outside, people don't really understand, but from the inside, it kind of becomes part of your vernacular. So who's doing what by when? Plan, brief, execute, debrief. What are your top five? I'm having a sign up on the wall that had the words, no problem with a big X. Through them, people were walking in going, what's all this mean? But from inside, we knew it was part of our secret sauce. It was part of the 1-800-got- junk way. So it's those kinds of things build that really strong culture. We cast a very wide net with recruiting. We try to bring as many candidates together as we can as possible. And then we don't read any of the resumes. We instantly reply back and we say, thanks for your resume. We're not going to read it yet. Please read the vivid vision of what our company looks like, acts like, and feels like in the future and read this recent article of us in the media. If this sounds like the kind of company that you want to help fly to the moon, reply now. Group interview in the subject line and a two to three minute video of how you can help us make our vivid vision come true. If we like your video, we'll read your resume and bring you in for a group interview. So right away we only want the people that read our vivid vision and go, I want in. If they're not obsessed with that, if they don't want to take the time to do a two to three minute video, we're not going to waste our time at reading a resume because they're just not that in. So that takes the big wide net and it casts it back. Mac Steve Jobs used to say he would show the wooden prototype of the Mac back in the late 80s, early 90s to these engineers and said if he didn't see the twinkle in their eyes, if he didn't see them vibrating in their seats, he didn't care if they had the skills. He only wanted those monomaniacs who were excited with the vision and they had the skills to make it come true. We actually had a guy one day standing outside of our office in Vancouver wearing a sandwich boy board and a blue wig, which was part of our marketing. And the sandwich board said, please interview me crazy. We got the media to write about us. We got the media to talk about us. At one point, we ranked as the number one company in Western Canada to work for two years in a row. And then the year before I left the company, we were the number two company in all of Canada to work for. So we were this cultural phenom in Vancouver. There were only three companies you wanted to work for. 1-800-got- junk, 100 lululemon that was based here and kind of scaling at the same time as we were. And then the Vancouver Olympics, that started the push here in about 2005, 2006, for the 2010 Olympics. Everyone wanted in those three organizations, and that's the culture by design.