John Briggs of Incite Tax argues that company culture must be deliberately built, not left to chance. He uses a tax firm that protects employees from abusive clients instead of following "the customer is always right" as an example. Regular meetings, embedding values into hiring and operations, and protecting staff from toxicity directly impact profitability and retention.
How do you create a long-lasting culture? The first thing is it has to be conscious. Too many business owners get stuck in the day-to-day, working more hours than they should, basically going from fire to fire, and they don't ever take the time to consciously create their culture. Well, the culture will get created But if you don't have a say in it, it's not going to be the culture that you want. When I bought a gym a few years ago, the culture existed and it was terrible. It was a culture of entitlement where the coaches felt like they ran the gym. The owners didn't have any respect because they just assumed that everything was happening the way they wanted, despite never telling anybody how they wanted it or following up and providing training on how things should be done. So instead, each coach kind of did their own thing. So you gotta be conscious about it. And part of that is you need to remind yourself and your team often what is your culture. So that usually means you need to have regular meetings with your team. We have a weekly team meeting and we try to have regular one-on-one meetings with each of our team members and their supervisor as well. In those meetings, we reinforce culture. We talk about it. We share how our vision, which is very directly tied to our culture, affects what they do on a day-to-day basis. In addition to regular meetings, the culture needs to be baked into everything that you do as a company. So for example, if you're training your team on how to do something, share with them how The how matches the culture that you're trying to build, how it maintains it, how it improves it, how you protect it. Like, even in a tax firm, the way we handle customer complaints is very much related to our culture. And we explained that, like, yes, we want the client to be happy, but we also want to protect the professional. 'Cause in our industry, it's very common for the accountant to become abused, not always purposely, but they do become abused by the way the client tries to treat them. And we are always gonna protect our team first. We do not have a culture of the client is always right. If we did, clients would go to jail, we would go to jail. When we owned a gym, clients are not always right. If we did, You know, it's like, Bob, don't do that lift that way, you're going to injure yourself. No, no, I got it. No, you don't. Don't do that. No, but I'm right. Okay, customer's always right, and then he gets injured. So that's not our culture. Our culture is to provide a great service that gives the client the ability to grow their wealth through tax and accounting savings while protecting our accountants from abusive relationships. And so when we train our customer complaint team member how to handle those, that is what she's looking at. Like, let's gather all the facts. Let's kind of figure out where did we make a mistake. We'll improve that. Is the client being unreasonable? Are they— and worse, are they being abusive? We in our company actually have culture training videos that all new hires watch. And so that's another way to create a lasting company culture is show them on their first week, this is who we are. Now, of course, if you interviewed the right way, they're not going to be a surprise on your culture training videos. So you want to bring your culture into the interview process as well. So for us, when we're interviewing candidates, we want to make sure they can handle professional, but also be irreverent. We're, Anti-traditional. We don't wear suits and ties. Our culture, some, I would call it stiff and stuck up, snooty. Others might refer to that as the Ivy League culture. Let's be prestigious and refined. That's not us. We also don't want to take ourselves too seriously. So in the interview process, we play improv games with the candidate to see if they have a sense of humor. And to see if they can handle our company's sense of humor. So those are a few ideas on how you can create a long-lasting culture. I do always want to tie it back to cash and profitability. It will be devastating to your company if you don't consciously have influence and direction over the culture that you want to create for your company. Because in every case that I've seen, when the owner is not purposely building a culture they want, the culture is a poisonous culture because the squeaky wheel gets the grease is what they say, right? Well, in this case, the poisonous team members are the ones who take all the attention. They're the ones who cause all the drama, and that is going to perpetuate without any sort of control over it. So that's devastating because now you have great team members who aren't going to put up with the poisonous team members. So they leave, and replacing A-players is very costly. So remember, profit is a choice. Have the courage and wisdom to choose it.
