In this episode of the Wealthy Consultant podcast, Mike Walker talks about the importance of building a strong company culture. He explains that culture is the personality of an organization, and the way it operates, and that a strong culture is imperative for keeping a business operating in a cohesive way. He highlights the risks of not having a good company culture in place, which include a lack of identity and purpose among team members, low buy-in, and high turnover. He also explains that a clearly defined culture can attract higher quality people, reduce turnover, and ultimately lead to better performance in the market.

Mike emphasizes that a company's culture and mission statement are like a lighthouse that guides it through the storms of adversity that inevitably come with doing business. He encourages business owners to put a strong culture in place before they need it, and to see culture and mission statement as crucial elements for success. Ultimately, building a strong company culture is a simple but important step towards running an effective and successful business.

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OVERVIEW:

(1:07) Importance of Having Strong Culture

(2:01) What is Company Culture

(2:43) Consequences of Weak Culture

(6:01) Core Fundamentals

(9:23) How to Lead

(13:10) Examples of Cultural Values

What is going on? My friends, Mike Walker here with you and another episode of the Wealthy Consultant podcast. All right, we've got some really cool things to talk to you here about. It's actually a topic that's near and dear to my heart because it has such strong implications into the success of any business. Hopefully your business, my business, everybody's business. It's something that I think a lot of people are familiar with the term, but they may not necessarily understand the true

critical. I think people would say, oh yeah, that sounds pretty important, but they don't necessarily know the implications if you don't have it in place and what it means when you do. So what we're going to be talking about today is building a strong culture within your organization. Now, I don't care if you're a company of two, you and somebody else, or you and dozens and or even hundreds, the reality is that you have to have a strong company culture in place in order to run effectively.

imperative this becomes in order to truly keep the business operating in a way that is cohesive and in a way that everybody is in the same alignment, kind of heading towards the same objectives and in the same fashion. All right, so let's dive in a little bit. Obviously, let's cover the basics. I always like to take things down to the simplest core values first, and then we can build up from there. So what is culture? What does that actually mean? Well, culture is the personality of the

to the way of operating. If you could take everybody in your team, again, whether there are few or many, put them all together and then wrap them up together with a nice package, that packaging would be your culture. It would be the way that you operate. And the reasons why you operate, the thought process is behind that. And I'm gonna dig into that here a little bit some more. But before we go into that, what I'd like to do is outline why creating culture is so important

or organization, what happens if you don't have it, right? Let's kind of look at the inverse of it. So if you don't have a good, uh, company culture in place, you're going to have a lack of identity and purpose amongst your team members. They're really not going to necessarily know why they're doing what they're doing. They're going to have a feeling of like, well, I'm doing my task and I'll do them. Well, and that's fine, but they don't necessarily have any outside linking them. You know, outside influences linking them to their end results that they're creating. Like, why am I doing this?

How is this actually making a difference in the world? It's really, really important for people to feel like whatever they're putting their time and effort into is that it's making a difference. And when you do, you're gonna get more buy-in, and that's the next point here is, if you don't have culture, a strong culture in place, you're going to have low buy-in or low engagement from the team. Because again, they're just simply not gonna know necessarily why they're doing what they're doing. There's gonna be a detachment between their effort and the outcome that's making that impact.

So you truly want to have a strong culture in place so that there's a connectivity between, hey, these are the reasons why we're doing this. These are the people we're doing it for. And here's how we're going to make this happen, right? Like part of the mission. And that's why mission statement and culture are certainly going hand in hand. I'll speak to that as well here as we move along. The next reality, if you don't have a strong culture in place is you're going to have high turnover. You know, the best in the market, the best players out there, the A

because they're not just looking for compensation. They're looking to be part of something bigger than themselves. They're looking for something where they're going to invest their most precious assets of energy and time. They want to know that that's for a good cause and not just for a paycheck. When you have a clearly defined culture, when you have the things in place that are going to attract higher quality people, then naturally your turnover is going to be reduced and you're going to attract better players on your team and you're therefore going to generate better

in the market is pretty straightforward, right? So again, nothing too revolutionary here, but it is important to understand that a lot of these things need to be put in place before you need them. And here's where I want to spend a little bit of time. I like to consider the culture and the mission statement of a company as the lighthouse. That lighthouse is very much needed in the storms of adversity, right? Which inevitably are going to come as you go through business, regardless of

in the game like myself for multiple decades, the reality is that you're going to confront adversity. And if you consider that those adversity, the storms, the wind and the waves, then you need a lighthouse to align with. You need to be like, okay, even though it's rocky, we're getting bumped around everywhere, we're still heading in the right direction. That's where we're going is we're trying to align ourselves with the culture and the mission of the company. And so where a lot of people have a hard time in business is they get confronted with something, maybe it hits them out

even necessarily aware of the problem. So they have a really hard time coming up with a decision. They kind of get into analysis paralysis phase and they're like, I don't know, this is tough. I don't know what we should do. And then they start to freak out and it's kind of a downward spiral of negative thinking. And as a business owner as a founder, you need to have these pre-established pillars, these pre-established guidelines that you're going to operate on and how you're going to make decisions and why you're making the decisions the way that you are. These need to be built before you need them.

You know, maybe you've heard the old analogy, it's better to build the well before you're thirsty. Well, that's exactly the same thing here is you have to have your culture defined. You need to have your mission statement clearly articulated before it's confronted with adversity. Now over time, you know, some people think like, wow, this is a lot harder than I thought and they get going on it and they struggle with the idea of like, well, what should my you know, culture include and what should my mission statement include? These are things I'll talk about here in a minute as we wrap. But here's the thing.

They can evolve and they probably will and they probably should. Over time, things are obviously going to optimize. You're going to become better as a founder, as a leader. The organization is going to grow. Maybe the change that's in the market is going to force the company to evolve as well. These things aren't concrete, but they should be fundamental. They should be the foundations of which everything else is built. The interesting thing is that some of the tactics and strategies may change, but if you look very closely at, say, our company.

culture codex here at the wealthy consultant, which I'll share with you here is you'll notice that the underlying values are pretty first principle type stuff. They're not going to change. If the tactics and strategies have to change because of the various elements of the market and those variables that we can't control, that's fine. But the underlying value system, the way that we operate, the way that we think isn't going to change. And that's really what you're looking for in a culture and even in the mission statement is elements that are going to be the bedrock of your organization.

that regardless of the adversity that you face, these are the things that you can depend on. You know, and a lot of people are looking for anchors in a storm. You know, most people don't have these things in place in their lives. And so when they can align with the company that does, you'll really attract a strong group of people because they're looking for that type of, you know, strength and just solidity in their operating. So, you know, a really cool quote here

airlines, he says, culture is the sum of all things that people do when no one is looking. And I really like that. Culture is the sum of all things that people do when no one is looking. So this is really key is that you want to embed the culture in your organization. It needs to become the DNA of everybody and how they operate. And this takes time. This isn't something like, hey, I print out some culture codecs and here, read it and now it's you. You know, this takes time to get integrated in and ingrained in the culture, in the

employee base, but it's worth it because again, these are the things that they're going to operate on on a daily basis that maybe you're not around and you want to know that, hey, the company is running at full steam. It's as optimized as it possibly can be. And you obviously want to have that trust built up. Well, that trust can be more solidified when you have that culture established and you know that there's a strong framework for people to operate on and make decisions with. Having that in place is again, like the lighthouse in the storm.

people. All right, so let's dive in a little bit. The last piece I'll leave you with before I actually start reviewing some of the culture codecs that we have here at the Wealthy Consultant, I think by sharing some of this with you, it will really benefit and kind of give you some frameworks that maybe you can build off of on your own. One of the last components is Y-Power. You know, what I call Y-Power is basically the reasoning behind something like, yes, I'm going to work hard and yes, I'm doing it, but why? What is that outcome?

I'm doing this and why am I doing it in this fashion? Right. When you can establish these for people, it's really going to give them the clarity to move forward more effectively and more independently because it gives them the freedom to make decisions autonomously and go, you know, this is the organization. This is the culture. This is the framework that we were operating with. These are how we make decisions. This is what we believe about our customer base. They're going to operate at a much higher level than if you don't have these

of cultures, culture fit built into your organization. So it really, really is pretty critical. You know, last quote here for you, the culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate. That's a big one, right? The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate. So this goes back to, you know, if you have a lot of employees and whatnot, you need to understand that they're all humans. Everyone's

Everyone's got their own things, their own ways of operating, their own past experiences, their own hiccups and all the things that go along with it. You just need to understand that by having more and more clearly defined mission statement and culture codecs, it's going to allow these people to know, am I on baseline? Am I in alignment with the company and how it operates or am I not? If you don't have these, it's like you have no rules. It's plain football with no rules. It's just every man for himself or every woman for herself, right? So you need to have these things pre-established again before you need them.

dive into our culture codex here. I think this will give you some insight into how we operate as an organization and why it's such a powerful piece of our, you know, daily operations here. So culture codex, we innovate daily, creating new ways to serve our clients in what makes you happy. Things that worked last year must be proven again this year for us to keep teaching it every quarter, every year, every season, and in every process, ask how could this be better than make it better? Okay.

So we innovate daily again, it's a perfect way of injecting the DNA into your culture is like look, we are all innovators, right? Now, whether that's true for you or not, again, these are just our frameworks, but you can use them for, you know, as an example and build off of them. Another one is we have high initiative. We act quickly to solve customer and client problems. We don't need to be asked or told what to do. If it serves a client and makes their lives or

permission to do it, just move. Okay, so again, creating high initiative, independence among the team. Say, hey, you are a leader here, you have the power, you have the right, you have the responsibility to act independently and focus on the end objective, which is to help our client help our customers. All right, I'll leave you with two more. We know our numbers, you know, to experience leadership or promotion, you need to know your data. If you're in a client service, this means client satisfaction and retention and all the other metrics.

If you're marketing, this means CPM and lifetime value and cost per acquisition. So if you're in operation, that means revenue per head, average time per hire, the people who check out and say someone higher up must know that number are people who will never be promoted and they don't wanna expand to learn new things. So again, basically this is putting the responsibility on the individual like, look, we run on data here. We use KPIs, key performance indicators to monitor whether we are above baseline

low baseline. And you must know those numbers. If you don't know those numbers, it's like flying a plane and not knowing how to read the dials, right? So it's really, really critical to have predefined KPIs for each division of the company, but then make sure that your leadership, your managers, and even your employees, they understand what those metrics are, what they mean, why you're measuring them and then how to actually read those numbers so they can make independent decisions on their own. Here's another one, and an important one too. We have fun. Straight up. We have fun.

who have fun doing what they do will always do what they do better than people who don't have fun doing what they do. So this is fun. It says read that five times fast. Have fun, right? So again, you can see how we've embedded a little bit of humor, a little bit of brevity and lightness into something that is so important. And that's another key point that I'll leave you here with is as critical as the culture is, make sure it's not all too serious. Like build

Again, people are attracted to a company, an organization, a team that is having a good time. They like what they do and no one wants to show up every day in some kind of drudgery. They want to feel impactful, they want to feel important and they want to feel like what they're doing is meaningful both to their lives and the lives that they are touching via the work that they do. Make sure you have fun with it, guys. It's a really, really key piece. Okay.

Basically it guys. So I want to wrap on that, building a strong culture within your organization. It's such a key component to any group. And again, regardless of size, small or large, this is something that you're going to want to build now before you need it. Build that lighthouse before you need it. All right guys, we'll see you in the next episode. Take care.