Founder Friday is a weekly guest post written by a founder who is based in or hails from the Silicon Prairie. Each month, a topic relevant to startups is presented and founders share lessons learned or best practices utilized on that topic. January’s topic is company culture.
About the author: Joe Petsick is the co-founder of Proxibid.
Proxibid’s 28,000 square-foot space (above) features an open floor plan, low-level desks, collaboration spaces and meeting rooms.
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The word is thrown around rather frequently in the world of startup businesses, and is largely regarded as being pretty important, but at times, I’m not sure everyone defines it the same way when they process the word – culture. What is culture? For the purposes of this post, let’s agree on this definition:
cul·ture [kuhl-cher] noun – the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular group working toward a common cause.
I recall during an extensive interview process for a particular key hire at a critical, high-growth time for Proxibid, that culture became a significant part of the discussion with the candidate. The candidate was asked that after having some exposure to our company, how he would define our culture. He chose two words that to this day we believe to very accurate – casual intensity. At the end of the day, defining your culture, whether it be in a few words, as a concept, in a mission statement, etc., is a very important, if not the most important, step you may take in building your company. Perhaps more eloquently stated by J.W. Marriott, “Take care of your people, and they will take care of your customers.”
There are several ways in which one can go about defining and creating your culture. I thought it might be useful to list a few of them and relate each to how they manifest at Proxibid.
Physical environment
The type of workspace you provide should connect to the way you expect your team to work together. At Proxibid we recognize that for us to achieve our short and long-term goals, we must collaborate a great deal within, and between, each of our departments. Our leadership team also believes we work best when we immerse ourselves into the business and into the team. This shaped Proxibid’s move to a 28,000 square-foot space, where we removed all offices and cubicles and replaced them with an open floor plan, low-level desks and several different collaboration spaces and meeting rooms. Our executive team sits at the same type of desk as every other team member and we are located in the middle of the open floor plan. Not only are we accessible to the entire team, we can absorb tacit information and easily get up and immerse ourselves into each department and connect with each employee.
Flat organization
Keep your organizational hierarchy as flat as possible. The more layers and levels of management, team leaders division heads, etc., that you have in your company, the more challenging it becomes for information to travel throughout the organization, and the more people are likely to become territorial. Proxibid has worked hard to allow the layers of information to remain minimal so we can empower people to provide solutions and to be directly attached to all of our company goals.
Push decision making down
Try to push decision making down to the lowest level of your organization. If you allow the people in your company who are directly connected to the problems that emerge, to be able to make decisions to fix those problems, you typically will get the best solutions. More succinctly put, the people who encounter the problems all of the time, usually know the best ways to fix the problems. We learned that if you do not empower those who encounter the problems to be able to make decisions in how we fix them, then ultimately everyone just develops “work arounds” and the problem gets greatly delayed in being resolved.
Transparency
Share as much information as possible about what is occurring within organization with all of your employees. The more people can connect to the big picture, the better they often understand why they are doing what they are doing each day. One way Proxibid addresses this issue is in frequently having all-company meetings where we share updates and results related to the strategy set forth by the executive team. We share financial information related to the company’s performance and encourage employees to ask questions about anything they feel is important. This transparency frequently helps employees better connect to their work and projects.
Vision
Creating a vision for the company and then turning it into a statement allows the entire team to focus their individual and team efforts in one direction. In a sense, you create a self-fulfilling prophecy for the team to accomplish your vision. Proxibid’s vision is to the be world’s most trusted marketplace for high-priced and specialized assets. Each time our team is presented with a dilemma related to how to solve a problem, we can always test the options against how each will help toward achieving the vision.
Hiring
When interviewing candidates for any position, make sure to qualify that they fit into your culture. A candidate can be the most experienced and qualified person within your pool of applicants, but they likely will not survive within your organization if they do not fit into your culture. As an example, if your employees happen to bring a great deal of passion to work every day, and you hire the most qualified person, and they do not possess the ability to become as passionate about their work, the culture will likely spit them out. To protect both Proxibid’s culture, and the candidate, Proxibid has at least one member of our executive team interview every person who we may hire. Our goal with this meeting is not to qualify the candidate’s skills or experience, but to simply qualify how they may fit into our culture.
Tactical versus strategic
It is important for you to be aware of mode in which your company is operating. Furthermore, it’s important that everyone understand the difference between the two. By definition, a startup must be tactical and frequently make short-sighted decisions – thus requiring everyone to understand that its very likely you will pay down the road for decisions made today. Being tactical is related to surviving. The way people make decisions in each environment are very different from each other. In our early years, Proxibid became the king of the short-sighted decision. We could almost pinpoint at the moment we made each of these decisions and the time in the future when we would have to pay down the road. Also, the process of switching our mindset to become more strategic as our company grew and developed provided to be a challenge to our culture. Where being agile and nimble were initially assets, they later became liabilities as our customers’ needs and perspective about our services evolved.
In the end, the culture of your company becomes its backbone. It is the one thing that holds everything else together and will allow you to accomplish incredible things, even if you do not have every other resource you wish you could have at your disposal. Every hiring decision, strategic move, and company goal should answer back to the question – is this in line with our culture?
Credits: Photos courtesy of Proxibid.
About the Author: As vice president of business development for Proxibid, Joe Petsick is responsible for seeking strategic revenue opportunities for the Company. Since co-founding Proxibid in 2001, Petsick has served in several roles, all with the singular goal of helping to grow the company and to foster its mission of connecting buyers and sellers in the world’s largest online marketplace for high value and specialized assets.
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