Defining the core values of your business

Defining the core values of your business

Founding a new startup usually starts with a great business idea. But to become a successful company you need more than just a good idea. To begin the process of creating a brand, building an effective team and forging an identity in the marketplace, you need to know WHY you’re in business, and clearly set out the core values that your new business will be based on.

Hassan Behcet provides his insights on how to identify the values that are most important to your business, and why entrepreneurial passion should be at the heart of everything you do.  

 

Defining your core values as a business

Core values sit at the heart of your business. It’s these values, aims and attitudes that define the true make-up of the company, and the brand that your customers interact with. What do you stand for? What do you want to achieve? What will you bring to your community?

We’ve recently defined and introduced renewed core values at Haines Watts, so this concept is something that’s been on my mind a lot recently. I listen to a lot of business audiobooks while driving to work, and company values is a theme that comes up regularly. So, it’s got me thinking about the values we hold as business owners, and how these have evolved and changed over time.

The Covid pandemic has been a challenge for all companies over the past year, but I don’t know if the crisis has necessarily changed our underlying values. What it has done, though, is change our outlook of the businesses and customers that we deal with.

If you’re dealing with a customer who can’t pay your bill, for example, you know the frustrations of poor cashflow. We’re all going through a difficult time at present – so we can show more empathy. It’s made us a little more open-minded and tolerant. We can certainly put ourselves in our customer’s shoes and take a more human approach to that late payment.  

 

Understanding your own motivation as an entrepreneur

Most people that go into business think they will do it with honesty and integrity, and with some genuine passion for their business idea. But does this lead to a culture based on good values?

The driver, the spark that inspires us to start a business, will be different for each entrepreneur:

• Some people are wholly profit-driven and start a business with the sole intention of building it up, adding financial value and then selling it on.

• Some people want to have a fun environment to work in, with a valued team of people around them.

• Some people have a great business idea and find a niche where they can provide a solution to a widely shared problem or can improve on a certain process.

As an owner-manager, you set up your business for all the right reasons, and you have that personal drive and belief in the business idea. But do your own values and core drivers carry over to your team, your products and your brand?  

 

Setting the key values of a successful owner-managed business

As an adviser, you get a sixth sense when you’re talking to a client as to whether someone is in it for the money, or whether they really believe in their product. But the bottom line is that you wouldn’t go into business on your own unless you had that profit driver in there somewhere.

If you’re setting up a business, it’s not to change the world, necessarily. If you do have that desire to do good in the world, you’re more likely to consider setting up a charity or a social enterprise. Even if the profitability is only a small part of the venture, you won’t take on that risk unless there’s some form of gain at the end of the journey.

So, what other core values do you need beyond that profit driver?

• Integrity –it’s important to have real integrity behind your business model. Be honest in your dealings with staff, suppliers and customers and display that integrity through the way you apply your values across the business.

• Passion – passion as a core value is fundamental. If you want to develop the next big app, or become the next Facebook or Google, passion is vital. The companies that succeed are the ones that have identified an opportunity and put their heart and soul into achieving that goal.

• Creativity – when I work with successful owner-managed businesses, I see many examples of creativity. They’ll see a business opportunity and will innovate to create a new solution or will use their creative skills to develop a new product, carve out a new niche or disrupt an existing sector or industry.

• Entrepreneurialism – to be a success, you need real business acumen. That ability to spot the opportunity and run with it is something you can’t really teach. You either have this entrepreneurial ability, or you don’t. As an adviser, I can tell you how to improve your cashflow, but I can’t make someone into an entrepreneur. That’s in the blood.

• Empathy – it’s important to put ourselves in others shoes, so empathy is critical. It can be difficult to see things from another person’s point of view. But as an owner, you should be good at seeing other points of view, understanding your target audience’s mindset and knowing how to provide a solution to their needs.

Hiring people who share your values

As your business grows, you’ll need to hire employees and create a wider team. And if this team is going to replicate your vision, it’s important that they share your own core values.

I was talking to a friend of mine, recently, and his mentor gave him an excellent piece of advice. She said that you don’t hire a person’s CV, you hire the person, and that’s an important distinction. When you interview a prospective new hire, you usually get a feel for a person’s values from what they say and how they act.

You want people to be a good fit for your company and know that they share your core values. You need a team to work together and share a common motivation – if they don’t it becomes a distraction and the impact of one ‘bad apple’ can start to cause disruption. As such, it’s important to communicate your values clearly, and frequently, to underline your vision.

In large corporate environments, it’s usual for the company’s core values to be communicated and shared on a regular basis. With smaller businesses, it’s a rarity for the team to be sat down and talked through the values. It may happen in an induction or in new starter documentation, but you get told the value pillars and they are never reassessed.

In a way, many owner-managed businesses don’t ‘live’ the values they’ve written down, but it’s important that these are living and breathing values that drive the course of the business.  

 

Keeping on top of your evolving values

Social values don’t stand still. If you look at how values have evolved over the decades, there have been huge changes, both in our social and business lives.

As a society, we’ve focused more on greater equality for all people, better understanding of mental health and more celebration of our individual differences. Your core values can’t be written in stone 20 years ago and never revisited. For your core values to be meaningful, they need to evolve, change and move with the times.

At Haines Watts North London, we can help with the value-setting exercise. As an adviser, we take the time to understand what makes you and your business tick. That can help enormously with defining your goals, strategy and the core value drivers that the company should be based on.

The better you understand your values as a business owner, the easier it will be to run a driven and determined team of people and attract the right kind of customer. It’s important to talk about those foundational values early and, where possible, have them recorded in some way, to drive the future success of the company.  

 

Talk to one of our North London Advisers about defining your core values as a business.