Culture starts with the “Obvious Stuff”
99% of the time the obvious is not…
I started working with mid-size startups (around 100 employees) in 2016, at that moment we worked with the C-Level teams to get the organization ready to scale before a Series B-C funding round (5–15m USD).
Once they get funding usually startups do one of two things:
- -Spend money focusing on solving problems and increase sales, this means bring enough people to support the struggle, find accelerated ( usually expensive) ways of acquiring customers and try “new stuff”.
- Deploy resources, this means, before the money arrives, you already have a plan on how the company is gonna look in 12–18 months and you start building that.
For us, the idea was to get the organization ready to deploy resources instead of spending money.
So we thought that the most efficient way was strategic planning and implementing improved processes. On paper, everything looked right on, but when we implemented we run with a big problem, the lack of “infrastructure” to run the process. Because of that, we decided to get to the root of the problem; So we decided to see the startup as a city, then we figure out, to move something inside a city you need a highway, so what makes things move inside a startup? we try incentives, hierarchy, bonuses, but none of those worked... Then we realize, what if culture is the highway? And what if the problem is that nobody cares about the highway… well if the highway is broken it does not matter what car you drive.
When addressing culture begins by finding what is the obvious stuff inside the organization:
What do we do?
Who we are?
What is our are biggest expertise?
And work towards creating customized definitions that align and delimit your field of action; In the industry, Airbnb has one of the best descriptions that allow the company and their clients to understand what is and what is not:
