Q: How do you integrate your values into your business so that they actually make sense?

John-Daniel Trask
CEO & Founder
​Raygun

A: It’s a really good question. I remember this story coming up, and maybe there is some exaggeration, but a company worked on their values and got the first set, then someone went to Woolworths to buy some groceries and realised ‘shit, their values are the same as ours, this is not good!’ And so they went back and redid them to make them more punchy. One of their values ended up being ‘we do rolls royce type shit’; i.e really great stuff. Rather than ‘we’re quality orientated’ it was ‘we do rolls royce type shit’. When you create values that people don’t feel embarrassed by, that feel like they’ve got the grit and the edge of the actual culture in them, they resonate a lot better. One of ours is ‘there is no time for bullshit when you’re building an empire’. People just resonate with it a lot better when it’s phrased that way as opposed to generic platitudes that mean nothing to anybody. You’ve really got to get your own vocabulary around it; they should be fun and edgy. We blatantly went and stole one from Atlassian: ‘don’t fuck the customer.’ A couple of people on the team said “we can’t say that!” But why not? You’re going to remember it, and it’s true. The customers give us the privilege of being able to do what we want do. They’re the last people we want to piss off. But because it’s so attention grabbing everybody remembers it. You can sit there and you might see someone engaging with the customer and you can say, ‘dude, did you just fuck the customer there?’And then they think, oops, I did, my mistake.

Until we put values in place, if my business partner or I were to take issue with something it can seem like it’s a personal thing. But when you refer it back to those values - you go over and say you can’t talk to the customer this way because the whole company is very clear this value is important to us, then it doesn’t feel personal.