TEDxLincoln - Jay Wilkinson - Company Culture

you thank you very much I was worried that y'all might forget to do that after the break because people were off talking and forgetting things so in 2002 I was fired as the CEO of my own company in June of this year just a few months ago as the CEO of that same company I was able to celebrate as we were named as one of ink Magazine's top 50 small company workplaces in America thank you the journey has been a fascinating experience very humbling very exhilarating and I've learned along the way that people more than business plans or physical assets are really what makes a strong company and I've learned that leveraging by deliberate design a company culture a company has opportunity that goes far beyond what they can imagine but let me go back to the beginning of this story in the mid 1990s many of you may remember this Al Gore had invented this thing called the Internet remember that and it was a fascinating time the world around us was changing at a rapid pace and people were starting to use websites for the first time in a commercial way for our companies and for our businesses and we were really excited about this we were able to create an opportunity to launch a company that that developed websites and we were one of the first in the United States that was doing this in a commercial level we called it level 100 communications and when we started we spun off of a printing company that I had owned at the time and about four or five of us literally operated in the basement of this printing company there was no air conditioning no heat nails were sticking out of the ceiling we basically took a concrete mess and cleaned it up and we called it home and our biggest fear at the time was if one of our customers might want to come and visit us because we were terrified at the thought of them figuring out where it was that we lived so we developed quickly some really fantastic tools and opportunity we were able to build technology that made it possible for people to modify and update their websites with a click of a button and and just drop and drag simple and at that point in time no one else anywhere in the country was doing something like that and we were very excited about all the things that we had in front of us in fact we were so excited that we decided we wanted to leverage and ramp things up back in these days if you recall it was before the bubble burst and companies like ours were getting really high ridiculous valuations and we decided we want to take advantage of this and we're going to leverage and grow quickly I'm gonna go court some venture capitalists so I spent many many late nights until 3:00 4:00 in the morning with kind of an unhealthy daily ins with Microsoft Excel building spreadsheets and forecasts and models and did lots and lots of business pitches and we finally found someone who would give us the money and it was one of the most surreal experiences I've had in my life to date when I remember logging into my bank account the day after we closed that and I looked and I saw that we had more than a million dollars in cash sitting in our bank account waiting to be spent so I spent it we added technology we added lots of people in our company perhaps the biggest thing we did is we expanded quickly into ten cities all around the United States by adding people in offices everywhere we could reach and we started to really think this is where our growth is going to be this is where it's at and we started to really quickly learn the difference between our vision of growth and what the money guys that had come in thought we should be doing one of the first things you learned when you have other people's money and you're running your business using other people's money is that you don't always agree on how you're spending it the thing is when I look back all these years later I know that they were right to a large degree and we started this infighting and jousting back and forth over what we should be doing and what we should be doing and in the middle of all this 9/11 happened the economy completely tanked and one by one like dominoes falling the offices that we'd opened up all across the United States started to fail and closed down and the infighting with my investors and board continued and got worse and worse until the guy from the money shop we were working with called a meeting with our board of directors there were seven members of our board and there was a 4-3 vote and they voted to remove me a CEO of the company because I wasn't managing it properly and replace me with a management committee you can't even imagine how it felt to walk out of the office that afternoon which I did with a couple of co-workers that I was really close to and went over to a local pub and I sat down and I told him you know look I've been fired I'm not the CEO anymore what are we going to do over the course of the next several months I leaned very very heavy on the people in our company the people that I had learned to grow and trust the people that were there with me in the beginning and we started to slowly figure out how to get control of this and over time we were able to put a plan together and with the help of some other people including my father and my brother who are my business mentors we figured out how to find new capital private investors and some bank financing and eventually was able to regain control of the company so all of this time went by now fast forward seven years firespring today is a thriving and profitable company we have more than 75 employees 3,000 customers around the world in 12 countries and we're just now preparing to begin the build-out of our new corporate headquarters at 1201 Infiniti court here in Lincoln we're very excited about that it's been a long journey and what I'm going to share with you today is how that amazing ride that I've taken how we were able to get from there to here and the first thing we did in this process was literally open the kimono and share everything with our team we told everybody everything we told them the things we did right we told them mostly about the things we've done wrong and we shared our financial statements which is something we still do to this day every month we get together as a team and we share our financial statements with our company we share everything we open the door we're authentic and we're genuine and we're real about what it is we're experiencing because we knew that the only way we could make this and get through this is if we had this mentality that we're all in this together because you know building a company culture it's not about you know having free soda in the break room it's not about you know I'm putting putting food out on the table so people feel like you're giving them these friend benefits it's not about that at all building a company culture is a built building a team of people who are committed to the same purpose the same passion and the same ideals and building a company culture is something that is possible if you're really focused on doing all those right things and it has a huge ROI you know I I've I've been so inspired by a lot of the business leaders in our community and one of the things that we did during these years is we opened our mind to education to learning I think the first sign of intelligence and someone is they start off admitting they're stupid and when you start off that way you know that you can learn from everyone there's not a person in our company that I don't feel I can learn something from and so I looked around the community and I see these amazing businesspeople some from a distance some I know well people like Steve keen who are building just amazing companies right here in our backyard and and today I'm so inspired by you know friends of mine that are building these amazing companies like like Eric dinger and Bradley Walker and and all the people that are really working hard to make a difference because we all know that building a company with a powerful culture has a huge ROI a big return on investment so we ask the question is a company's culture determined by default or design how much work do we have to put behind this well we put it straight and simple bluntly it takes a lot of work to build a company culture if you don't build a culture by deliberate design then what happens is it defaults into taking on the personality of whoever you're most vocal employee is so you really have to think about it let me give an illustration somebody in our company this person here in the middle her name is Wendy Schumann she's clasping a ball of rice at a luncheon learned we did on making sushi Wendy started in our company nine years ago she basically was coming on board as I was getting fired thank goodness she didn't know it at the time she probably would have accepted the job offer so Wendy last year got a call from a company that was looking for programmers and people that did what she does and she was an average she talked with them they offered Wendy a substantially higher amount of money than we were able to pay her in our company she toiled over it for days and and she came in and talked with us about it with with tears in her eyes and I do I don't know what to do she talked with her husband went back and forth and finally made the decision it was in the best interest of her family if she takes this job so she shed more tears she gave us hugs and she said goodbye and Wendy went off into the sunset 72 hours later phone rang and it's Wendy can I come back she was whispering from the desk of her new job well she had to have a couple more days there to work out her first week but she came back we now affectionately refer to this time period in our company as Wendy's vacation and here's the interesting thing in our company today 10% of our entire workforce are people that have worked for us in the past gone on in their careers to do other things and then come back home that is a testament to culture and today I'm going to share with you three steps that we use at fire spring to design a sustainable company culture that we can build around and do something big with and the first thing is to define our values we first need to know what values our values are the guiding principles of your company the things that are meaty and tangible that you can really understand and sink your teeth into and once your values are clear decisions are easy there are typical core values that most companies tend to subscribe to and I'm showing a list of them here innovative team players excellence integrity passion I bet that your company probably has at least one of these in their list of values what's the most common thing or what's the the most important thing to know about this list of values well they're unimaginative they're uninspired they're bland and they don't work because people don't internalize these things they're too generic everybody says this think about it can you think of a single company on the planet who wouldn't say they're innovative we yeah we tend to be more stifled here at our company we're not really innovative and integrity that's not really our thing you know we're more cheaters liars stealers whatever I mean companies say they have all of these things right so don't start off with the bland simple ones dig a little bit deeper and you know in in the words of Apple think different here's how to discover your values this is the exercise we used at fire spring to go through the process and I call this the reality-show exercise and think about doing this in your company gather the people in your company together and put them around in a room and say that you've got a reality show coming in and they're going to be filming three of your employees every minute of the day all week long everything that they do and they're going to be filming them based on their actions because there's no audio on this film when we watch it back we're not going to hear anything we have to see by their actions so you need to choose three people in your company who best embody the values that you believe in the things that you want to be known for as a company have everybody in your company do this exercise and think in their heads they don't have to say the names out loud that gets a little creepy right but they think of the names and they start writing the words down they envision themselves watching the tape back and writing the words down that they think of when they're watching this employee at the end of that exercise you have a really good idea of what your company values and it comes from everyone inside the company not just the CEO or one person thinking about it and then you put it through this test you decide is this value distinguished is it different is it unique are you obsessed with it can you build an obsession around it will it outlive you the owner the manager the employees of the company can you actually live this value every day and are you willing to sacrifice sacrifice profit to protect it if you answer yes to all five of these things then you have an opportunity to build around that value it's that simple to create it the second thing we went through is we started focusing on hiring for our values this sounds a lot simpler than it really is to hire for your values back in the day in those dark days as we call them now when we were going through the struggles there were a couple holes on our management team I had to go out and impress venture capitalists which is a hard thing to do and I thought the best way to do that would be to hire a few people that could fill in some of these holes they had big impressive looking resumes but you know what I knew from the day that I met them and started the conversation in my gut that they were not good culture fits for our company but I did it anyway because I thought well they look good on paper and we need these people there are things they know that we don't know and I knew from day one that they weren't good fits and every time I've made that decision or any one of our managers in our company made that decision we've lived to regret it we've lived to regret it every time so now we hire first for culture fit and second for skill fit and we all know that there are angry people in this world right the people that come up behind you in the car start leaning on their horn screaming around maybe maybe even if there's a wheelchair ahead of you they are nasty mean people you know haters gotta hate they're everywhere they're there crawling around in the subculture of the internet creating havoc and they're all over the place well I have two ways to deal with haters and it's a silver bullet you might want to write this down because it's really a great way to deal with these people number one don't hire them and I know that sounds really simple but you can get a really good sense of who complains all the time in an interview just by asking the right questions number two if it's too late fire them immediately these are the people in your company that become cancers that make it impossible for you to build a culture around the third thing that we did is we began to live our values every day at fire spring we have a daily meeting it's called the fire starter and it's at 11:11 every day that lasts for 11 minutes so tomorrow is going to be a cool day on 11/11/11 at 11:11 right so we have this meeting every day and everyone in the company have one person from every department will report on the different things that they're working on as a company to make sure that we're staying on track so we all know what everyone else is working on all the time and then we recognize each other we call each other out in public on this person did a great job they're really carrying this person's accountable we we actually share how our how we're interacting with people in the in the office every day and then on an ongoing basis we have this grid and I love this grid it's one of the most important discoveries that we've made as a way to really understand and assess how we're doing as a culture so at the top of this grid you see your high level performers at the bottom you see your low level performers that's pretty simple right you're going to put everybody in one column or the other and then from right to left we have people who live our values to people who don't live our values if you do the exercise even if you're an employee at your company and you're not the boss put everybody in your tart in your department and your team in one of these boxes and see where they fall and then it's easy to evaluate from there well these are your high-level performers and live your values these are your superstars you want to build your company around them these people down here that are Lola performers but have great value let's coach them and teach them how to do their job the people down here in the corner why are they in your in your company they should not be there move on move past them it's this upper box the one that causes 95% of all the problems in every company every one of the companies that we work for these people that are high level performers but they don't live the values of our company they're like a cancer eating away at the culture of our business and that's what we need to focus on and get rid of those people so few things on fire spring and action here this is just some pictures of around our office when somebody comes to our office they see that we are a fun culture we like to have a good time we like to poke fun at ourselves and we we really value learning as well but we also do very serious things we have a theme every quarter that makes it possible for us to rally the entire company around a common goal and last quarter it was about 300 Wow's we wanted to get our customers to say wow or amazing or you guys are great or something we had we had some approved phrases and every time they did we'd write it down on the piece of paper and add it to the wall of wow we had over 500 by the end of the quarter it was an awesome promotion and we have a group in our company that is the arbiters of culture we call them the culture club and our culture club is not led by Boy George it's led by my boy Randy here and Randy and I have worked together for nearly 20 years and we can nearly you know finish each other's sentences so I trust him implicitly with being the steward of our company culture and together as a team the culture team makes decisions about things that go beyond planning the company party when we have to make a decision on updating or renewing our insurance policy these people sit down and they help us make the decision of what insurance carrier we're going to use and then we have things like Cinco DeMayo well this year we changed it up to Cinco de mustache and we gave an award to the person that grew the best moustache congratulations Brian that was pretty awesome and we have the fire spring putt-putt classic where the whole team gets together and they build out holes and people come around in groups of four and they golf and we give awards for the most creative and most inspired in most challenging holes last year the group that won the most creative was a group that themed their department around a fraternity party and they all had matching shirts and paddles and of course they had a compiled with her house mother Oprah on it as well and the winner of the green jacket you know is somebody that's revered throughout the year because it's a coveted award we paid a dollar 50 for it at a thrift store somewhere and this is one of the most coveted awards we have every year and yes we have a holiday party but the thing that's most important to us is the one that we created back in the days when we had no money we had no ability to do anything and the employees created their own party on their own money they used you know they brought potato chips and beverages and did their own thing my favorite tradition of all time though is our Thanksgiving event we get the entire company around one table the company provides the turkey and the staff all brings the sides and the and the desserts and it's really an opportunity to create fellowship among our staff so to us like life culture is a journey it's not a destination it's about all the little things you do in life and I'm very inspired by by Steve Jobs and in his commencement address in 2005 at Stanford many of you I'm probably I'm sure have watched that he said your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work and the only way to do great work is to love what you do if you haven't found it yet keep looking don't settle as with all matters of the heart you'll know when you find it and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on so keep looking until you find it don't settle you know the fascinating thing to me is that you know we know that the things we really need to be passionate about are friends and family and faith you know the things that are core to our being but the average person spends more waking hours at work than they do anywhere else why wouldn't you want to live in a place that feeds you rather than deplete you of energy and so I'd like to finish with just this email that if a co-worker shared with me this came to me last August just out of the blue and it says Jay I was getting ready for work this morning excited for the waffle breakfast and it occurred to me that I look forward to quite a few things that are related to my job I have a tendency to gush about fire spring I rave about the company the work the people our clients the fun things we do sometimes I get thrown so enthusiastic I feel like a cheerleader on speed I'm so eager to express my happiness and contentment to family friends and neighbors but I really that I've never actually told you the person who made it all possible this is my thank you I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the opportunities to work at such an extraordinary company my cup runneth over so how would you thank how would you feel if you woke up every morning knowing that this is the sentiment of the people you work with this these are the values that you live every day and this is this is this is an average common day this is what happens when you don't leave culture to chance this is what happens when you don't settle this is culture by design and anyone of us can be the architect thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 1,125,600

Rating: 4.9666896 out of 5

Keywords: ted talks, tedx talk, ted talk, ted x, tedx, ted, Jay Wilkinson, Company Culture, tedx talks

Id: WDFqEGI4QJ4

Length: 21min 10sec (1270 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 19 2011