Episode 10 - How Company Culture Actually Shapes Business Success | Patrick Smith

Okay.

So yeah, Think about your journey as somebody that's been an entrepreneur at heart.

Obviously, you've grown up and were enterprising before teenage years, which is amazing.

Now that you are leading this organization, tell me what type of culture do you try to instill at Zally? And I suspect it's a lot of what we talked about just now, but I'm less thinking about more of the taglines that would be on like a poster.

But how do you what are the behaviors that you exhibit or cultivate on the ground with your team?

So number one, I created a founder stack that is like 120 pages that I ensure everybody that starts in the company reads.

And then I have 14 days in, I have a conversation with new employees to ensure that they understand it and have their own take on it and what it actually means to them.

So that is one part.

But I'm a true believer that that culture is not built from the founder.

They can set the foundations.

Then if you take a step aside, what happens in the room if you leave the room? That is true culture.

If somebody says that can be on multiple levels, it could be like in terms of the quality of deliver, what would Patrick have done in this situation? And they will answer on your behalf almost because they understand that what is expected.

And then you also need to find great team members.

So we truly believe that we want to build cool shit within our company.

And it's fine that we want to make money as a result of that.

You need that to pay your bills.

But most importantly, we're looking for individuals that want to have fun whilst doing it.

And that means together.

They truly believe they are experts at their field, but they want to build together with other people that are also experts.

and also respect that um and it needs to have um and that's slightly cliche you need to have true values and i think we started out with one set we had three different values yeah lately that one value changed Because we were seeing within our team that there was something that was more important to us than the previous value that we had.

So we made a shift in our core values.

But I think... iterating out as you go.

For me, culture is massive.

And we need to share that.

A lot of early days, a lot of shareholders didn't understand that we shared so much behind the scene of building.