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If we want an 8–9 figure exit, we don’t get there by being the hero. We get there by building a business that makes good decisions without us standing in the hallway refereeing every moment.
That’s why I care about this: build a company culture system—not as a “soft” project, but as the thing that dictates how free we can be inside our own business.
Here’s the common belief: culture is a vibe. The feel of the place. The fun stuff. The barbecues. The holiday party.
Here’s what actually happens: culture is the operating system your team runs when the script breaks. And the script breaks every day.
I love the example of a family that got hit with a serious, off-script situation. They had about 30 minutes before their kids came home from school and they had to decide how to handle a hard conversation. They looked up and saw their family values printed on the wall—specifically, the idea that they could talk to anyone about anything without judgment. That wasn’t decoration. That was a decision-making framework under pressure.
That’s what we’re building in a business too.
Culture Isn’t a Vibe. It’s the System Running When You’re Gone
We’ve all watched culture form by default. And when we don’t design it, it almost always follows the founder.
If the founder is laid back and social, the shop might feel fun and loose. That’s great… until “laid back” turns into missed deadlines, low standards, and that quiet sense that nobody’s really accountable. The team doesn’t do it because they’re bad people. They do it because that’s what got reinforced.
Culture is built the same way a mountain is built—grain by grain. Reinforcement. Repetition. Routines. One small decision, repeated enough times, becomes “just how we do things here.”
And if we can’t describe our culture in plain language, we can’t expect the team to carry it when something goes off script.
Rules alone don’t fix this. We can write rules all day, but rules without context collapse the first time the power goes out. If all our people know is “flip this switch,” they freeze when the switch doesn’t work. Culture gives them the context: we’re trying to get light in the building, so solve the problem.
The 3 Cultures We Accidentally Build (And the One Buyers Pay For)
A lot of owners try to motivate with pressure. It’s understandable—we’re under pressure too. But pressure usually buys compliance, not commitment.
There are three common cultures that show up when we’re not paying attention:
- Fear: People do the minimum. They hide. They play defense. They’re trying not to get yelled at or fired.
- Duty: It’s transactional. “You pay me a fair wage, I give you fair output.” This is where scorekeeping lives.
- Love: People do things because they care. They take ownership. They hold higher standards, even when it’s hard.
There’s nothing “wrong” with duty. Many people show up and do a good day’s work for a good day’s wage, and that can be stable.
But if we’re building something we can sell—something that runs without our constant oversight—love is the level that creates excellence. It’s the difference between a business that needs the founder’s nervous system to function and a business with a steady heartbeat.
The Culture Stack: 4 Layers That Make Behavior Predictable
If we want to build company culture system that doesn’t depend on our personality, we need a structure. Here’s the four-layer stack that keeps it tangible.
Start With 5–7 Values—Or Your Team Makes Up Their Own
We can say “we have values” all we want. But if they aren’t written down, they don’t exist in a way the team can use.
Five to seven values is usually enough. Not fifty. Just the core set that guides how we operate, communicate, and make decisions when things get messy.
And things get messy. Customers get frustrated. A job goes sideways. A team member misses a detail. In those moments, our people need a framework that isn’t “wait until the owner shows up.”
Slogans Make Values Stick (Because One Word Is Too Vague)
One word can mean ten different things.
Take “growth.” Growth can mean anything—so we tie it to a slogan: “Just get better every day.” Now it’s usable. It sets the standard without turning into a debate.
Or “optimism.” That can drift into fake positivity if we’re not careful. So we use the line: “Every cloud has a silver lining.” That doesn’t mean we pretend nothing’s wrong. It means we look for what we can learn and how we can move forward.
There’s a reason slogans work. Big brands do it because it sticks. But it’s even more powerful inside a company because it gives people shared language they can actually repeat.
A slogan is a value you can use on a Tuesday.
North Stars: The Phrases Your Team Borrow When They’re Stuck
We don’t need perfect people. We need shared judgment when things get hard.
That’s what maxims do—simple sayings that echo through the business.
Two examples that change how people show up:
- “Before you’re good at something, you’re going to be bad. Let’s get through being bad.”
- “To become what you can be, you must let go of what you have been.”
That second one hits especially hard for owners. The journey from owner-operator to owner-investor is a letting-go process. What got us here won’t get us there. We have to release the habits that saved us early so we can build something bigger than us.
Culture Spreads Through Stories—Not Posters
This is the underrated one.
A new hire joins the team. They hear the owner talk about integrity or accountability. And then they do what all humans do—they look to the person next to them and ask, “Is that real here?”
That answer is the culture.
Stories move sideways, employee to employee, faster than any memo we can send. So we have to seed the right ones.
Sometimes that’s telling the story of a tough customer situation and how the team handled it according to the values. Sometimes it’s making a big deal when someone exemplifies a value—acknowledging them, celebrating them, even rewarding them—so the rest of the team knows what matters.
And sometimes it’s a wild story that becomes legend. Like the leader who promised an audacious reward—he’d do a backflip off a conference table if the team hit the goal. They hit it. He did it. And the story lived on because it proved commitment in a way nobody could forget.
Stories make culture portable.
How We Reinforce Culture Weekly Without Turning “Corporate”
This is where people get nervous. We introduce structure and someone says, “You’re going corporate.”
No one wants to be a bureaucrat. But we’re not building bureaucracy—we’re building alignment.
We’re not trying to add another meeting. We’re trying to stop carrying culture in our head.
Here’s what works: a simple weekly rhythm.
Once a week, the team meets. There’s a planning component where people work on the business—making their role and the systems better next week than they were this week. Then there’s a short values segment: two to five minutes, every week, and it rotates through the team. In a team of about ten people, that means the leader might present once every ten weeks.
And then there’s the story segment—five to ten minutes. That’s where we share client wins, struggles, lessons learned, what we’re seeing, and where we’re going. Honest when things are hard. Celebratory when things are good.
That weekly drumbeat compounds. Offsites are fine, but the real shift comes from repetition.
We can also build cadence around it—annual “state of the union,” quarterly alignment (even every six weeks), monthly bonding (especially for remote teams), and weekly reinforcement. If we’re remote, even something simple like an online game or an escape room once a month helps people see each other as humans.
And if we’re changing an existing culture, we layer it in. First establish the weekly meeting. Then add a couple minutes of values. Then use values in hiring. Gradual beats chaotic every time.
Hire for Values First—Because Blame Spreads Fast
We’ve all tolerated someone because they were “productive.” Maybe they sold a lot. Maybe they were technically strong. And we told ourselves we’d manage the attitude later.
Then later shows up as turnover.
Blame is the fastest way to rot a culture. In interviews, one of the simplest filters is asking: “Tell me about a time something went wrong. How did you handle it?”
If the answer is blame, blame, blame—boss was terrible, coworkers were incompetent, I was the hero—that’s not accountability. That’s cancer. And no skill set is worth letting that spread.
Culture is protected at the door.
When Does the Team Start Telling the Stories Without Us?
We all want a clean timeline. Six months? A year?
The easy answer is: start telling the stories as soon as you have a forum to do it. The real answer is: different people absorb it at different speeds.
Some people catch the vision immediately. They’re proud. They’re in. Others assume it’s talk—until they see consistent behavior over time. That’s when it becomes real. Not because we announced it, but because we lived it long enough that the team started repeating it without us.
If We Don’t Tell the Future Story, Our Team Will Invent One
Change is scary when people don’t know where they fit.
New technology is a great example. If our team thinks they’re going to get replaced, and we stay quiet, they’ll fill in the blanks. Usually with fear. Especially on the front lines where uncertainty hits hardest.
So we tell a future story that includes them. We frame change as support, not replacement. We talk about growth. We talk about investing in people so they’re more valuable in five years than they are today.
Because good people have options. If they can’t see themselves in the future we’re building, they’ll go find a future somewhere else.
Either the business runs on a system—or it runs on your nervous system.
If we don’t write the rules, our team writes them for us. If we don’t tell the stories, someone else will—and we probably won’t like the version that spreads. So pick one small drumbeat this week: a value, a slogan, a story in the weekly meeting. Then repeat it until it becomes “just how we do things here.” That’s how the company starts running without us—and that’s the kind of business someone actually wants to buy.