Transcription
Someone asked me the other day, “How do you build culture in a business, um, to be successful?” And the truth is, from the outside it may seem like, you know, I’ve managed to do it so well, and it couldn’t be further from the truth. You know, I spent millions of dollars, wasted millions of dollars building the wrong culture, and it almost destroyed my business.
So, in this video, I’m going to give you the exact raw truth of what it takes to build a culture which will mean everybody loves working there. And not only that, you’ll be able to go and do some amazing things.
And for some quick context, my name is Sean. I’m the founder CEO of Gemflow, a business that I started 9 years ago. Today, I have 130-plus team members globally, and some of my best team members have been with me for five-plus years, and we’ve never lost someone that has ever worked with us for 2 years plus. So, when it comes to building and preserving a culture, everything I’m going to tell you in this video is based on my own personal experience. And, um, let’s jump straight into it.
So we have generated $100 million in revenue, and this is our graph. So I’ve been doing this game for a very long time. So we became a seven-figure agency in 2018, and ever since we’ve been growing year on year, which is absolutely amazing, obviously, to be able to achieve such a level of success. But let me tell you where it all went wrong when it came to culture.
So when you first start your business, you know, it’s just you; you’re doing most of the stuff, and I’m very much in the detail, and it’s working right. But naturally, there was this one thing which was—and I’m sure some of you feel this as well—that’s why I want to talk about this because I always used to think that I don’t know enough, because what do I know, right? Like, what do I know about scaling a business? Surely there are better people out there that have done it before. Every book I pick up is telling me that I need to bring experts in and, you know, give them the infrastructure, and they will get on with it. It will just happen. So that was always in my mind. So I always felt inadequate.
It’s a crazy thing to say, cuz if you might look at this right now, right, if I have $2 million right there, you might be like, “Yo, like I made it.” But the truth is, 2018, 19, 20, business was growing, but it felt like I’m just winging it. I actually don’t know what I’m doing. And that was my own like anxiety slash like feeling in my head, when it’s just, you know, no one will see that from the outside.
So my biggest thing was I need to bring in expertise, and when it comes to culture, and I guess what I’m going to be focusing on is this very big thing, cuz it happened to me, and I learned the hard way—like a very expensive way, $2 million a lost way—that I need to bring in more experienced people than me. So I went out and I hired a bunch of essentially like amazing people on paper. Amazing. Like I couldn’t believe I was even interviewing such people, you know. I’m like, I was younger than them. I’m interviewing them, trying to hire these like absolute like killers, you know, in the industry, from ecom to, you know, HR to strategy, etc., right? The roles that I needed I thought support with to be able to be a better leader, to be a better CEO, to be able to scale my business.
And the intention was, and I did it. So essentially, I went and hired a bunch of people. Cost me so much. I used like recruiters because, once again, everyone’s like, “No, no, no, no, no. If you’re going to hire the best people, you need to go and get the best recruiters because they have people on speed dial, and they’re going to get the amazing people for you.” I was like, “All right then.” Cuz that’s why everyone tells you that is the way to do it. I went and paid 30% recruiter fees. You know, I would hire someone on like a $200,000 salary. You know, I’m paying absolutely shitloads in just fees. And then I went and did it. I went and I went and sat and interviewed and interviewed a bunch of headhunting firms and assembled like this, you know, the—I bought the Avengers in to help my business. And, um, I was excited, you know, I was going to learn off them.
What I failed to realize—and I guess the lesson for you guys is—that everything that we had done up until that point was inherently our culture. And, um, I didn’t—I realized that, and I’m saying this to you because you’re doing this right now, too. There are things that you do today which has made you successful as a person and as a business; that is your culture. But instead, you don’t realize that you—and it doesn’t matter how small or big you are—it exists, and that’s what I didn’t know at that time, so I’ve hired these people to come in and, um, ultimately, almost every single thing that I used to do, they had their own way of doing that, so it meant almost everything started to break; our client communication fell, our quality, our service dropped. Um, and you know, maybe they will disagree, and maybe some of my team members will disagree, but in my eyes, they dropped because the standard to how I was doing stuff.
So, for example, if a client messaged us, we had a rule that within 24 hours, you must respond 365 days a year. And it’s what made us great. And one of the guys I hired essentially to, like, you know, lead that side of the business was like, “No, no, no, we don’t need to do that, you know, it’s a weekend, it’s okay, they’ll wait.” I was like, “No, no, no, these are like online businesses; there could be a live issue; we have to be solving it.” So we consistently basically—I was messing up my own business trying to, like, build—trying to build the culture that people say you need to build where you’re not essentially dictating the way things need to be. It doesn’t mean people don’t have freedom. It doesn’t mean people can’t, like, do stuff. Ultimately, you got to have a clarity on the ways meant to happen in your business.
And it all came—coming to me one day when I realized that I need to be like McDonald’s. I need to have a business which does the same things in the same way, regardless of really who’s doing it or who’s even leading it. And it all changed for me when I—I had that realization because, as an agency, as a business, you do things, and you know, 80% of the time they’re going to be very similar when you do it the next time. So there’ll be a process. Every Big Mac in the world tastes almost the same, no matter which McDonald’s you go to. They don’t allow the person to be like, you know, “I’m going to put more mayonnaise now. I’m going to put more cheese.” It’s like, “No, no, no. There’s a way to do it.” And that was my biggest realization when it came to culture. You have to define it.
And fundamentally, a culture is based around the founder. It just is. No one’s going to say that. It won’t say it in textbooks. It won’t say it in podcasts. But the fundamental truth is it has to be built around you. And you have to lead from the front and support from the behind. You got to do both. What does that mean? You got to lead, right? So, I would stand up and I would, you know, speak to my whole company, 100 people, and I would try to inspire them, trying to motivate them, trying to give them a big speech, and I would look around and, you know, I can see on their faces that nobody cares, right? And, um, that—that hurts, you know. Um, I can tell that nobody’s bothered, but I also know that’s my job. But on the other side, I also know when seven of them are in a Slack huddle and there’s some going down, I have to join that. And that’s where most CEOs don’t realize—you got to do both. And that is culture, because that’s how greatness is done. If you got to pull an all-nighter to finish a project, I’m there. If someone called me right now and say, “Sean, we—we got this opportunity. We got to do—I don’t give a—Let’s do it. It’s 11:00 p.m. right now,” I would stay up the whole night. No problem. Anyone—I’m here, and that is such a difference, and what happened, I guess, when I hired that team was they had the complete opposite mentality; they were giving instructions and walking away—classic hierarchy, classic corporate—and essentially was ruining my business, and, um, it’s one of the biggest things for you to look out for in your own journey.
And the thing that I said about how I used to think others know better—I learned the hard way that it’s not true; someone can be in a massive job doing hundreds of millions but actually doesn’t make them good—it’s the business. So relating to that now, you know, I also realized my hiring was a mistake because when I would hire someone, I would be so, you know, impressed by—they worked at Google, oh, they worked at this company—where I—and I would get caught up in that versus that person’s fundamental ability more so than anything else. And again, why not, right? Who doesn’t want people from the biggest companies? I interviewed someone from Tesla the other day; go on the goal—I’m asking—asking the guy what does he do, and he keeps telling me what the company and his like what the—what his department is doing. I had to, like, “I’m sorry, but what have you done?” And he almost had not done anything. We interviewed a developer the other day, and the guy for the last 6 months had just been working on one screen of a mobile app when I finally got to the details. He kept going on about, “We’ve been number one on the app store. We’ve done this. We’ve done that.” It’s like, “No, what’s this ‘we’ business? What have you done?” And that—that flipped it for me, right? Because I made the mistake of hiring people with big badges, big names, big reputations, let them come in and blah blah.
And look, the truth is, you’ll hear people online say stupid things that it’s clearly not people who’ve been operators. They’ll sit and say stuff like, “Oh, as a CEO, your job is just to be a recruiter. Just hire the people, let them get on with it, and watch what happens.” When you hear that, I promise you that person has never actually run a business, because that’s not how it works. You have to work with people more than you can ever imagine. You have to be the best employee in the business. That’s the ironic thing of being an entrepreneur is that you go from thinking, “I don’t want to work with somebody else. Oh, no, I’m 9-to-5 escape matrix.” And on the other side, you literally have to become the best employee. If you ever want to find success in your business, you have to do so many different jobs. You got to be there for so many different people. You got to take responsibility for so many different things. And that is so hard. But that is why the reward is that much bigger financially once you get it right.
But back to culture, that’s how culture is built. Culture is born. Culture is done from within, from your actual actions as the founder CEO. The other big mistake I made in culture was essentially thinking, um, the more like fun stuff you give to people and activities and all that stuff. So when I—I guess first started making a lot of money in the business, we immediately hired mental health therapy. We hired, you know, we started doing events, massages, food every day, you know, big events, whatever. Basically, it was like, “We’re going to be a cool ass company,” right? I watch the movies, you know, I want to be like that, you know, probably not going to have a—or, you know, someone with a bomb or whatever, that kind of stuff. But the idea was we’re going to make an amazing thing. You know, we’re having poker nights. We’re going, “Oh, like whatever, you know, concerts, NBA. I took my team to NBA Lakers. We went to see the Lakers. Went to see the UFC. Like, I’m like being the boss, right? Like the guy that’s going to make everybody happy.”
Honestly, none of that matters. I swear to you, none of that matters. You think it will. None of it matters. The only thing that matters is the feeling of winning, the feeling of success. I’ve spent hundreds of thousands on the stuff I just mentioned to you. I—I booked the mental health thing, um, because obviously we have a very aggressive, you know, uh, growth plan, you know, there were some intense times in the company; we would have like 20%—people have ever booked it, so people would complain, but they will never actually follow through; people would want a big party, but only a certain amount of people turn up to it, so it’s this like—made me really realize that, oh, it’s not real; it’s all just made up; people saying they want something but they really don’t. What people really want—and I figured this out—well, what people really crave is feeling important, feeling valuable, feeling heard, and that’s when things started to change.
The biggest change physically came when we started to win together. So, we started doing stuff which would have massive commercial success, and then it was different. You don’t need no uh events. You don’t need no parties. You don’t need none of that because when you look at each other or when you sit as a team, you’re like, “We did that.” So, you know, we released an app that hit number one on the app store. We released a drink, hit number one on Amazon. We, like, put a video out; it’s trending number one on YouTube. Like so many of those things over the years. And that’s what it’s about. It was crazy cuz no one even wants to leave the office. No one’s saying, “Am I going to get paid overtime if I stay behind?” No one’s saying, “When’s the party?” You know, no one cares about that gimmick. If in your company today you have people that care about that or you’re getting some of this, you just have the wrong people or you haven’t won yet. So, focus on winning together. Do something that’s going to make them win.
Um, yeah. Anyway, look, that was a conversation I literally had with, uh, this guy that kind of asked me this question. It had to be a long conversation. I was like, you know, I’m going to remember this. I’m going to make a video about it because, unfortunately, if you watch my content, I’m always going to give you the real harsh, straight-up answer, uh, because there’s no agenda. I’ve lived through it. Have the battle scars. Um, and this is what I do. If you want to build culture, lead from the front, support from behind. And you actually got to be right there with the guys, winning together, and it will automatically build. No value session, no events, none of that stuff that you think will be the thing. And you can never ever let the DNA of your company ever change from what it is from the moment you began, because that is why you found success.
Anyway, hopefully you found that useful. I’ll see you in the next video.