So, you’re a B2B SaaS business and you’ve got your company culture sorted.
People are rallied behind your mission, they’re using your guiding principles to inform their decisions, you’re measuring and maintaining your culture, and (thanks in no small part to this cultural alignment) your business is growing. Hats off.
But growing businesses hire more people – some even acquire other businesses. Which presents you with a new problem: how do you develop your culture as your business grows?
You have a few tools at your disposal: your mission, values, hiring and onboarding.
This blog will talk you through all of these, and how to leverage them to maintain the vibes and value you’ve worked so hard to create.
Let’s dig in.
“One of the most important jobs of a CEO is to set the culture of their organisation.
Because if you don’t, someone else will.” - Lars Stugemo
Clarify your mission and vision
The first step to keep everyone rallied behind your culture is to decide how to articulate your mission and vision. Why do you exist? Where do you want to go in the long term? It’s important that you can translate this to a message everyone can get behind so all your people (old and new)
know:
- Why you do what you do
- Where the company is heading
- The problem you solve (‘the what’ of your company)
- Your product (‘the how’ of your company)
- What makes an ideal customer
- What makes you different from the competition
That way, no matter how quickly you grow, everyone has a clear touchstone for their work and behaviour.
Set your core values
Once you’re clear on your mission and vision, you can use these to inform the next step – your core values.
For example, if your focus is on transparency and ethical practices, you might choose ‘integrity’, whereas if creativity and new ideas is essential for your progress, you might choose ‘innovation’. Make sure they relate to your goals, and aren’t simply generic terms that your people will struggle to remember.
This is important because these core values will become the principles that guide how you act, take decisions, expand, recruit – and everything in between. They’re an outline of the behaviours you believe will bring your company goals to fruition in the most effective way.
Take time to onboard
Onboarding employees to your culture is all about patience. Software businesses move fast so it makes sense that you want new recruits to hit the ground running. But rush the cultural onboarding process and you’ll soon find you’re causing culture damage – especially if your new recruits are senior hires or if you’re merging workforces after acquisitions.
This is where doubling down on culture carriers and culture bearers is vitally important. Set the standard and give new recruits the time they need to understand things and get up and running.
A great way to kickstart this process is to match each new starter with a buddy who can help model behaviours that will uphold the company’s core values.
It’s also crucial to give people across the company opportunities to contribute to your culture – this helps them feel involved in the development of the company overall.
Check for culture clash before you acquire a company
When you approach an acquisition, get rigorous with your cultural due diligence process. Approach the acquisition as if you’re hiring the other company and everyone in it. If they’re not a good culture fit and culture add – be prepared to walk away.
Culture is not one and done – it’s a living, breathing part of your organisation that you need to keep an eye on, especially as you grow.
If you don’t actively curate your culture, it’ll do the hard work without you (and the results will be mixed at best). Luckily, hiring and onboarding are the perfect points to take a temperature check of your culture and purposefully keep it in line as you add new people to your business.
Whether you hire for culture add or focus on your current cultural carriers, everything you put into this part of your business will pay dividends further down the line.
Take the time to shape it and you’ll start to see it doesn’t just support growth, but a solid culture can actually propel it.
Want a full breakdown of how to build a winning company culture?
Read our field guide to turning vibe into value here.
We're Monterro, an investment firm (of the get-your-hands-dirty with strategy and operational support variety) that helps Nordic software companies hit their biggest growth goals.
If that's you: let's talk.
