Why values are the foundation for a successful business

One of the biggest oversights we can make in business is not being clear about our values.

What do you stand for?

What are your values?

Most business owners forget to set the foundation for their business before they set off to make money.

It’s not surprising. We need to pay our bills after all.

And yet being clear on our values is a critical part of the foundation of our business success. Otherwise, we could be building on sand.

We need to work with people who share our values.

We need people in our team who share our values.

Unless we’re clear what our values are and communicate them clearly to our stakeholders from the beginning, we can run into problems as the business grows.

As our workload increases and the orders pile in, we recruit people, or outsource work to others. Before we know it we’ve got a huge team and a huge pipeline of work.

But unless people know what we stand for and what our values are, we could be attracting people who do not match our values.

We’ll end up with employees who are disengaged and behave according to their values that are not necessarily aligned with ours. They could be losing us profits hand over fist from the way they behave to colleagues and to our customers.

Likewise, we could end up with customers too who are not aligned with what we stand for. They complain (a lot), don’t pay their bills and take up too much of our time.

Our values are like a magnet. When we clearly state them and insist that our stakeholders are aligned with them we’ll attract our:

- ideal target market customers

- ideal suppliers

- ideal team players     

It’s never too late. Get them in place!

But remember that seeing is believing.

It’s not good enough just to put a picture of your business values up on the wall or on your social media page.

People need to see your business walking the talk. Values need to be reflected in the behaviours of everyone working in the business.

When this happens, everything gets easier.

If you’d like a chat about this, or any other aspect of business, please just get in touch 😊