A few years ago we met a founder during one of our engagements. He had placed, at strategic locations throughout the company, several sayings and perspectives that, he hoped, would blend into a cultural view of where the company's principles stood and what were the overall lines that the company culture would not cross. 

One of the lines we read was the title of this post: "It's not our money, it is the customer's money."
The sayings and their positioning made us ask: can you drill a customer culture or do you teach it?

At its most transactional level, Marketing is based on repetition. Most everyone who has been exposed to television commercials can recite a jingle engraved in their minds by sheer repetition from watching their favorite programs on television. Over time, the jingle has stuck, which is great for branding in the most transactional sense: you remember the brand that created the jingle (if it is mentioned in the jingle, which it should be). However, does remembering the brand also mean that you remember the culture associated with the brand? And, if you remember the jingle, does it help you select a product from a shelf, be that a mental shelf or a physical one? Or does the marketing simply becomes part of the mental furniture of the individual and is not brought up as part of the decision-making process for the product at the time of purchase?

Drilling a customer-centric culture and applying it to your marketing needs brings up the same questions. You need a certain level of repetition to make the marketing message stick. However, how do you add the elements of a customer culture to your repetitive message so that these elements will 'activate' at the point of purchase, so the customer, when faced with the decision to purchase a product, will consciously bring up the marketing information as an argument in favor of your product, vs. the competition.

What is the combination of messages that has the best probability of success most of the time in terms of getting to a conversion?

The solution isn't to simply repeat the same phrase over and over again and hope that it sticks in someone's mind. That only leads to the superficial, transactional element of remembering. To go deeper, you have to add a sense of purpose to the activities that your company performs. This demonstrates to the customer that you know what to do with the money that they are about to give you. If they agree with this purpose, and if they see it implemented clearly throughout the organization they can see, then, it is more likely that the repeating message will stick in the mind and is used as a definitive argument for generating a purchase.

The combination of messages we are looking for is precisely that: a purpose-transactional combination that, when added together over time, creates a bridge between the customer's action of paying for a product, and the satisfaction they derive from receiving it from your company. This satisfaction, which includes the satisfaction with the product or service purchased, translates into the kind of loyalty that enables people to advocate for your brand and turns them into something more than just a single transaction on a spreadsheet. 

It makes your customers a partner in the purpose that animates your company in the first place.

In the lifetime of a business, managing the startup culture as the company grows can be risky. The company culture begins to strain because the elements that make a startup feel intimate and coherent begin to spread around the organization. Decision-making processes stretch beyond their initial, intimate boundaries among team members. Branding decisions now cannot be made on the fly, but require careful consideration now that people are actually paying attention outside of the initial confines of the startup hothouse environment.

As new people are added to the team, the feeling of 'this is our little company' does not seem to spread to the new hires, who come to the company (justifiably) filled with the expectations associated with an established, salary-paying organization. New hires make demands that 'older hands' may resent as they went through the process of building the initial company without a safety net, a process that new hires can no longer participate in.

Here are 5 ideas that you can apply, as the manager of a department or even the entire company, to maintain the startup feeling as you increase sales and grow your staff to keep up with the needs of the business:
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1. Do remember that your business succeeds or fails because of its employees and the quality of the work they deliver. The first thing to remember is that this is a real process, with real problems, and that the viability of the company, outside of whether you have a viable product, is the culture that your company/department builds. In a way, a company always creates two major products: an external one, sold for transactional purposes to create and distribute revenue, and an internal one, the company culture, created for relational purposes to create and maintain teams over time.
   
   
2. Communicate the need for process management without sounding like a robot. Process management is a vital part of any living organization. Without some process organization, your internal communications may begin to feel and look like the old-fashioned stock market floor, with everyone running around doing their part with yelling over everyone else. However, imposing a process management process without good, human-centered communication, can lead to failed adoption and cynicism on the part of the employees. This can happen with any size organization, not just large, faceless conglomerates. Avoid this situation by taking the decision at the human level, not at the level of "we are buying a tool so we can communicate effectively with each other." 
   
   
3. Distribute ownership of vital processes to individuals within the organization. And let them distribute vital processes to individuals best suited within their teams to control and manage them. Not everyone you hire is dedicated to create a transactional surplus of value with every activity in which they engage within the business, and not every activity within an organization can be transactional-value-plus. Judging every employee and every activity with a transactional-value yardstick is a sure sign of processes congealing around a fixed structure instead of becoming the infrastructure of a living organization. Distributing ownership of processes to individuals who are likely to flourish through them is a way to create centers of enthusiasm within the organization, and by doing so, you are preserving liveliness within the organization as it grows. 
   
   
4. Ensure organizational flexibility by example. Every three months, examine the results of the programs or ideas that were evaluated for application in the previous three months. Communicate results quickly and directly. It isn't enough to set up a scorecard or a passive screen to 'tell employees how we are doing.' It needs to be done at a human scale so it can be respected and so individuals can see the effect on the business by seeing the effect of the change on its management.
   
   Smaller companies allow their employees to give and apply ideas to the areas of the company that are still growing and changing. Problem solving is a cherished aspect of a startup organization. As departments grow, ideas become scarce because people don't feel they can apply them anymore. Structures have bDecome too complex, and frankly, the risk of changing things may be perceived as too high. An organization needs to build safeguards around building monolithic systems and processes that cannot accept small, incremental changes without 'an act of congress and legislation.' This flexibility needs to be built-in from the start and will ensure that, as new problems appear in the horizon, everyone will feel they can pitch in to propose solutions.


5. Treat your employees as employees, not as family. There is an organization where everyone is considered a member of the family. It's called The Mafia. Organizations require employees and managers and their roles need to remain within those boundaries to be successful. Give people space to be themselves, both physically and mentally, and respect their individuality as decision makers. Avoid open-plan offices to increase face-to-face activities. Families are notorious for getting in each other's faces without regard to the individual needs of its members. For an organization to remain flexible, intimate, and cooperative, it is important to give its members enough room to be themselves, that way, they can feel like they are part of a larger whole while still remaining true to themselves.

These suggestions are a place to start building a company that will have a high probability of remaining productive if these principles are followed and if they are re-evaluated on a regular basis. As with any living organization, ideas can become obsolete and the only way to time proof them is to re-evaluate them against the needs of the business on a regular basis.

Sources Consulted (Highlights):
Open Plan Offices:
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-01/everyone-hates-the-open-plan-office-it-doesn-t-have-to-be-that-way

Entrepreneurial Spirit as You Grow
www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/10/22/how-to-keep-your-entrepreneurial-spirit-alive-as-the-company-you-work-for-grows/#31b11df4c0d4

Don't treat your team as a family
www.virgin.com/entrepreneur/should-you-treat-your-employees-family
​www.inc.com/kevin-daum/9-reasons-not-to-treat-your-business-like-a-family.html