Many factors drive your company’s value. An important factor is how your business would perform without you. To help your company flourish when you’re not around, you need an owner-like effort and mindset from your team. Creating and inspiring owner-like efforts results from developing an exciting culture inside your business.
What Is an Owner-Like Mindset?
An owner-like mindset is when leaders and team members act like owners. Management and team members take accountability for business responsibilities and relationships. They have the same investment as the owner in caring for the business.
Getting Your Employees to an Owner-Like Mindset
Helping your employees have an owner-like mindset means you role model how to be invested as an owner. Creating an owner-like mindset involves making a valuable culture for your business, which is critical to the short and long-term success of the business. You’re building a culture of goodwill. The inherent value of a company is not only its profitability but also the people who create the company. How you treat your employees and how they reflect company values creates your business worth. To create an owner-like mindset, you need to value what is most essential—the people who work for the business.
Three Ways to Build a Valuable Culture
There are several ways to build a valuable culture, but three are having a common purpose, providing perks others can’t, and gamifying your business to create value in your workplace culture.
Having a Common Purpose
To build a valuable culture, you need to know creating a good workplace culture is about the employees. Understanding your employees humanizes the workplace. Listen to your employees’ interests. Your business is also not just about work. You need to provide ways for your employees and management to connect, such as company events, whether those activities are sports-related, such as a baseball team or annual get-togethers.
Common purpose also works when you define common objectives. For example, meeting sales targets or other goals. However, if you don’t have a baseline emotional connection with your employees as a team, these objectives won’t work. You must show your employees their value before you can work toward a unified purpose.
Perks
Benefits are an essential way to retain employees and build a valuable business culture. Some benefits you could consider are health, including mental, dental, and vision, paid time off, remote work, and educational benefits. Perks help build a valuable culture with employees being invested in the company’s well-being when their well-being is considered.
Gamify Your Business
Another way to inspire your employees is to give owner-like effort to gamify your business. Gamifying your business is to create a contest. An example is Josh Davis, the founder of the freight brokering company Speedee Transport. For this business, brokering freight is all about gross margin. Gross margin is the difference between what a business charges the customer and how much it costs to hire a driver to move goods. Davis made a game of this difference. He created quoting software with a virtual gross margin scoreboard for his employees to see.
To encourage company engagement, Davis then tied employee compensation to gross margin. The software gave each employee a public, objective, and transparent scoreboard they could follow daily to know whether they were winning or losing each day. This created a healthy competitive culture. After gamifying the business, the company saw tremendous growth. Within two years, Speedee Transport grew from two to forty-five employees. An acquirer, noticing the company’s growth, offered to acquire Speedee Transport in 2019.
Why You Need a Valuable Culture
A valuable culture has worth when you are engaging customers. When your business has a solid reputation for valuing its employees, your customers will see your company as worth their attention and customer loyalty. For those wanting to sell their company, a company with a valuable culture enhances business value. A buyer is more likely to purchase a company where employees are already invested in working hard and staying with the business.
In Review
One of the secrets to building a valuable company is to get your employees to work as hard as you do. Owner-like effort comes from making your people feel like part of a shared mission and giving them a working environment that brings out hard work and retention from your employees. With a common purpose, perks, and gamification, you can bring a valuable culture into your company.
Contact our team at Twelve Points Business Advisors today to discuss creating a valuable culture in your company.