Transcript
If you haven’t created any company values, a new thing that’s only for the big boys. This won’t work for me. Nobody’s going to stick to it anyway. No one will care. This week’s episode is all about how we reimagined ours and how we implemented them and how I think you should do exactly the same. Whether your business is just two of you, whether you’ve got outsourced team members, having a collective list of values that you live and work by is and has been a real game changer for us. And this week’s episode is all about how we did it and how we implemented it. Hello.
My name is Emma Mills, and I help business owners get out of their own way. I help them leverage their time, win the week, and focus on the fun stuff. And this week’s episode is about how we focused on the fun stuff. It was our 16th birthday recently at Mi PA. I know I don’t look old enough, and we had a birthday party in the office on a Friday night in March. And as part of that, what we decided to do as a team is redesign our values, our company values. And the reason for this being is that we’ve spent the last four years growing quickly and changing a lot, reimagining our foundations, our culture, ready to scale to the next level. And we are ready to scale to the next level.
And we thought, as part of that, let’s revisit our values and what they are about. And our values that we created on November, on November 2019 were very simple. They were find a way or make one. Efficiency in all things. Love what you do. And they got us through a very crazy, turbulent roller coaster in four years, because COVID was just around the corner and they did a really great job. And now, as it becomes more important every single day to have the right culture, the right people in the right seats, and attracting the right people into the business, we decided to reimagine our values. And the first step is, and I mean, don’t reinvent the wheel like, success leaves clues, as Tony Robbins would say.
And one of the things we did was we looked at videos of businesses who had values that we really admired. And one of this was Zappos. There is an amazing book that goes with Zappos, Zappos values called delivering happiness. And I would highly recommend you read that book because Tony Hsieh, who, unfortunately, God rest his soul, is not with us anymore. One of the things he did was create a business completely based on the most amazing values. And if you just go on YouTube. Zappos culture, Zappos values. You’re going to find the most exciting, fun view into Zappos of how they did their daily lives, how they lived and breathed their values and how all of the team members are the ones that lived and breathed their values.
Because Tony Hsieh actually was a massive, was a massive introvert and he’s like really, really transparent about that. And he knew for the culture to be so special, the team members had to live and breathe the values. It didn’t, it couldn’t just come from Tony because that was, well, one, it’s hard work and you’ve got a huge business, as he did. And two, like, it depends on you. You need the team to all have so much buy in. So we watch lots of Zappos videos. I highly recommend you do this. And if you haven’t read the book, give it a read.
Delivering happiness by Tony Hsieh. Brilliant book. And so we very much based our values around ones that the number that Cesappos had ten, we now have nine. I was a bit reticent at first of going beyond my three because lots of businesses I admire have three strong values. I was like, actually, as long as we live and breathe these and implement them, it’s all cool. So we now have nine values. And we as a team came together and over four sessions we reimagined what our values were, would be. And so our nine values are unwavering reliability, willing to try, fail and grow.
Value creators. We want our team to radiate the energy you want to receive. We are goal getters. Number five. Number six, we are proactive communicators. We are relationship builders. We like to create fun and embrace the quirk. We do a lot of that.
My pain. And number nine, my absolute favorite, how you do anything is how you do everything. And so the main point of Mi TV today is, one, if you don’t have values, highly recommend that you get these implemented. And if you are on your own, what’s important to you. Or you can make it a team effort, but actually, how do you implement those after that? You have the values like, it’s not just a thing on the wall because that is what so many companies are guilty of. So here is what we decided to do. So when we threw a birthday party, because it was our sweet 16, Mi PA is a bratty teenager now, and we threw a party and we said, okay, we’re going to use this party to launch the values. So that night I delivered a presentation.
It was around about 90 minutes. And some of the key things which I just think I’ve talked about before, but I feel like as really, really useful is the first third of my presentation was me telling my journey so far. So I talked about the first roles I had as an exec, assistant, the people that have influenced me so much in my life and being a mentor and the reason why I started my business. What happened in the first five years when it was just me on my own, when I employed my first team member, like, I went through the whole journey and told some of the wild, unwocky stories, stories that have come along the way, which I know we’ll all have, but I’ve said before so many times that for me, really great culture is transparency of numbers and transparency of story, and also them connecting with you on where you’ve come from. Like, I’m aware that people will walk into our business today and they think it’s always been like this, and it hasn’t. It’s been lots of tears in my office. It’s been lots of, like, ups and downs, as you will know. And so being I want to tell that story of my background, where I’ve come from, having big dreams, quitting my job, becoming a freelance va, building up my own.
I told the whole story. And we’ve got team members who don’t, like, you forget, who knows and who doesn’t know. And I’ve got team members that have been with me for nine years and ones that have been with us for nine days. And so the first 3rd was me telling my story and where we’ve come from so far and the values that we’d had at each stage of the business. And a really important part of this story is that between 2014 and 2016, we had a list of 16 values on the wall. They were called Mi Pa’s golden rules. And what I had actually done is just rip these values off from Nigel at the entrepreneur’s circle. I told him the other day, like, he remembered this list he had as well.
And I took the golden rules, put it onto a big laminated sheet, put my pa on it, and those were our values. And I, until I found a picture of them, didn’t remember them. And nobody else who worked here at the time remembered them either. And the key thing that was so important was that nobody in the office had any input into them. And so nobody bloody remembered them. Like, they were like, did we have those at that point? And so I just. This is just a kind of a story in that if you don’t put the energy and effort into creating values, which means something to they don’t work. And that two year period of time, nobody remembered those values.
They remembered all the other values we’ve had, like consider it done, like efficiency and all things. Like, we had four key words of trust, courtesy, teamwork. And they remembered all of that. And the picture that went with it on the wall, but the one that we didn’t have any input and I just went, this will do. Nobody remembered. So that is a word to the wise. You must put an effort into your own values. So back to my story.
We had our birthday party. I delivered the presentation which was about my story. Then we launched the values. It was nothing exciting, but I thought it was exciting the time we had some dramatic music for each value. We did a little explanation of each one and we delivered the nine new values to the team. And then the final third of the presentation was about how we want to get to 2 million revenue and beyond where we’re going with the business, what the key plans are for this year, what my role is in that, and growing my personal brand. Like, I brought them along on the journey with me. And this is important for culture, it’s important for implementing values, it’s important for harnessing your team.
You need to be transparent with your story, with as much as the numbers as you’re comfortable to share and also where you’re going and what that means and how you’re going to get there, because you need to harness whether there’s one of you, two of you, whether it’s outsourced team members. Like we do this with our outsourced team members as well, who support us. Like you need to get them moving in the same direction. So we had our party, we had our presentation, and then I just wanted to pick up on how we’re planning to implement this as well within the business. So our implement, our implementation plan is this. Number one, we created wow, checks in the business. And I am just showing you how we’ve started to implement this because I hope it is helpful to some of you who are starting to want to get that culture, that values piece in your business really, really strong because it does make everything else so much easier. So we created some wild checks from the bank of recognition.
And basically these are given by team members to each other and they write on it the value that’s been demonstrated. Demonstrated so that from our nine new values, we want our team to be giving these out because they have been go getters or because they have demonstrated unwavering reliability. And this is just one way that the team members can do this themselves, but it prompts them to write down what value has been demonstrated. So we really simple got these designed and printed. And yeah, the team are loving them. We’re giving them out and we’re also reading them out on a weekly basis. And there is a prize for one that’s drawn out of the box, the hat, whatever they do at the end of every month. So our wow checks with our values demonstrated on them is the first way that we did it.
Number two, we have gotten them up on the wall. Obviously. I know that’s simple, I know that doesn’t mean anything, but it would be remiss to not have them up on the wall. So we just had them made into a really big canvas board for everybody to see as soon as you walk into the office. And what we are doing from that in step number three, is that every week we are just going to pick one of these values as a whole team and really focus on it and find examples internally within the office, in our team meetings, in our day to day. And this is driven by, obviously myself and the leadership team to come up with examples as well. But we’re picking one value per week on a cycle and we’re going to really focus on all in every week so that everybody can see examples and it being demonstrated within the business. And then most importantly, I think we have worked them into two other areas of our business and we’re very aware that this is an ongoing process.
You know, we don’t just create nine values, get them up on the wall and everybody’s like talking about being a goal getter and how you do anything is how you do everything and embrace the quirk. Like, we know that doesn’t just happen. So it has to be repetition, repetition, repetition. But what we have done as well is that as soon as anybody comes into our sphere to work at Mi PA, our values have been worked into our interview questions and they are clearly like asked about for examples, how important they are to us. And they are worked into conversations and interview questions as part of our process. So we make sure that one of the key things for having new values was to protect our culture and to only add in people that we knew could, would demonstrate and believe in these values. And on the flip side of our interview questions for our team that are part of Mi PA, we have worked into our quarterly reviews and we have a self assessment review, if you like, of the values. And each team member gets to rate themselves where they think they are on the values and how they’ve demonstrated them.
And that’s done like with a kind of a mirror image with their team leader or team manager on what their perception of it as well, and how we get that to meet so it matches up if it doesn’t. But basically all of our quarterly reviews now include the values as well. And this is an ongoing project that is not just going to be a march thing, an April thing, it’s a whole year thing, it’s a forever thing as long as we have these values. But I just thought that today why we redid them, how we, how we decided on them, by basically watching videos of other businesses and taking inspiration, like don’t fix what isn’t broke, take inspiration from successful businesses. And then how I told my story, implemented it in the team, I thought might be helpful to you too. Because whether you are a solopreneur in a van, like running a trade, or whether you’ve grown a business with five people, ten people, I just think having some semblance of the values and what you stand for is really important. It’s your business. You get to create the rules, play your own game, and it can be fun while you’re doing it as well.
I hope this longer episode of Mi TV on why we changed our values and how we implemented them helped you. And I will see you next week for a shorter, snappy one. See you then. Bye.
