Do You Have Company Values?

But as we are growing as a team, as we are making the jump, it’s so interesting, right? Because the way my eCommerce businesses have run over the past several years have always been me and a bunch of outsourcers. At one point, I had up to 40 outsourcers working on my different companies. From customer service people, to designers to developers to, advertisers to all these different types of outsourced work.

And only a few years ago did I really start building more of a team of internal, full-time, work-on-my-stuff team that was just dedicated to what we were doing here. And as you have people who are working together on a project, it becomes important that there’s cohesiveness within that group. That people like each other, that they understand what they’re working for and why they are doing what they are doing and what it means in the world and stuff like that.

And one of the ways that you can achieve that is by having a mission statement, i.e. what you are even trying to do, and also company values. And so I’ll share a couple of the ones that I’ve written and we will have more. And at some point, we will put these on our website and you can read them.

But I think it’s important to maybe take a day or so and come up with some company values and make sure that everyone in your company knows these things and knows what you stand for as a company because you spend a lot of time working, right? So you should know what you are doing.

We are excited to embrace the ever changing nature of business. Which means that when things change, we don’t freak out. We innovate in the face of change. We get better as things change. And it’s really something I’ve seen over the past 10 years. A lot of things change, right? It was Google AdWords, it was SEO, it was the content network. It was all these different things and things change and people freak out and they clam up or they stop or they leave or they quit. We just innovate and we keep getting better and we keep doing new things. And that’s one of the ways that you can make sure you are going to be successful going forward is that things are going to change and you have to innovate or you have to hang out with innovators, i.e. the eCommerce community and see what people are doing.

We believe that a happy team and happy customers go hand-in-hand. Which means that I believe that anyone who works with me on my team must be happy and fulfilled and having a good time and enjoying what they are doing, or we are not going to have happy customers. Because you know what? My team members are going to relate with my customers. And if my team members aren’t happy and enthusiastic and excited, then the customers are going to feel that. So if you are like underpaying your team members or you’re being mean to them or whatever, that’s not going to work, I don’t think, right? That’s why it’s one of our company values.

We find pleasure and profit in the act of service. And we really do. I do and everyone on my team does. It’s so much fun. And it’s profitable to be of service to people. True service results in pleasure and profit for both sides. So if you’re really serving then everyone is winning, not just you.

And we share and communicate our ideas and feelings, which means when things come up, we talk about them. Maybe I did something that hurt someone’s feelings or I wasn’t clear about what the pay structure was. Or whatever it happens to be, we are not afraid to communicate those things. And we are not afraid to communicate when we have an idea or an innovation that we think would be helpful. Which is how you end up moving so quickly when it’s no longer just you. And you’re like letting your team really run with stuff.

And anyways, I think you should take some time to do that.