Most business owners don't realize the importance of culture until they start to grow. And the team is not aligned with the vision of the business owner. The wheels start to fall off, or they need to find new ways to recruit and retain a top, top tier talent. 

The thing is, company culture doesn't start on day one. 

It starts long before day one.

But it’s not necessarily something business owners think about when starting up. When we  create a business, we're thinking about creating a product or an offering, finding a market and bringing sales to the door.

It's really important that on day one of your business, you should be very intentional around the type of culture that you want to create for your company. That idea needs to permeate every area of your business.

Culture comes from the business’ vision, mission, and values.

They’re not just posters on a wall, they’re the living breathing DNA of any business. They show the world how you operate, both internally and externally. And they’re the yardstick for measuring performance in your staff.

At The Game Changers, our values underpin how the business operates at both a group and individual level. 

We have five core values and they're in the acronym of the word ‘heart’. 

H = have fun

We believe that business should be fun. I see so many business owners that take things way too seriously. For a long time, I was so serious in the way I did business. I woke up one day and realized that if I wasn't enjoying what I was doing, what was the point? 

If I was slaving my guts out just to get a paycheck at the end of the day, which back then, wasn't a very big paycheck. What was the point of doing things? And that's why our core value, the first value is ‘have fun’. 

E = everyone contributes

I’ve been involved with a lot of businesses in the past where the head is the military type dictator. The top dictated to the bottom what needed to be done, when it should be done, and how it needed to be done. 

That structure means you have many employees whose talents were really not being utilized. Because they were being dictated to about how they should show up and how they should do things. 

For me, I felt that having a culture where everyone contributed everyone and was involved in the conversation, rather than having this top tier bottom-down approach management structure, means that everyone works on the same level. This helps every team member feel important and take responsibility for their part in the business.

A = ‘at cause’

As a coaching organization, we see many clients that are playing an ‘at effect’ game. They're at effect of the environment, their effect of their current situation, their effect of their past partners or past employees… and it’s why they're getting the things they are getting. 

But when we're operating in life being from effect, we're not able to control the situation or take charge of the situation because we are pushing away personal responsibility. When we come from a state of being ‘at cause’, we own and take responsibility for everything. 

R = realise potential

I believe that each of us have a responsibility for realizing our own potential. Each of us have a responsibility for realizing that how we're playing the game of business, how we're playing the game of life, relationships, finances, whatever else.

We have responsibility to chase our own growth, to chase our own education and realise our potential both individually and as an organization.

T = together we grow

Alone we can do so little, but together we can do so much. We have a community of over a hundred business owners from Australia and around the world. A whole entire community offering feedback, offering insights, offering suggestions for where they're at.

This group feedback model means that everyone grows faster, because we all learn off each other. Instead of having a one to one information flow, our group share information one to many.