Don't Ignore the Yoghurt

The value of culture August 13, 2025

Ask most founders, especially when they’re just starting, about what their culture is and they’ll usually laugh and say they don’t have time to worry about it as they’re frantically working all hours trying to get things off the ground. This is a mistake. As Olivia Leong says in this clip (1) Post | Feed | LinkedIn your culture is your business DNA. It guides everything you do internally and externally and is how you deal with all unexpected as well as expected situations. It’s what drives your business growth. Ignore it at your peril.

Culture in business is no different to culture in yoghurt- it will grow naturally whether you like it or not. You can choose to proactively take charge and deliberately steer and create it. Or you can choose to let it grow naturally and see what happens. The latter is generally a disastrous idea.

 As soon as a single person either agrees to join your startup or a single potential customer agrees to test your product you have created a culture, intentionally or not. If a person joins your startup it’s because they have bought into you, your vision and your dream. They will attempt to help buy sub consciously emulating how you approach business and customers. Even if their usual behaviour is quite different, they will modify it to align it more closely with yours, often without even realising it. If a potential customer agrees to test your MVP it’s because they have bought into the idea. They will understand it what you are trying to offer or solve and will consider the product within the context you have preseneted. In both these instances you have now created a cultural norm.

 You, initially, are your culture.

It's important you ask yourself is that how you want your business to behave and be seen to behave by clients? What do you want clients to expect?  How do you want your team to behave with each other? What do you want your business to be known for? It doesn’t matter whether you have a reputation for being hard-nosed, transactional and ‘ rough around the edges but gets the job done’ or collaborative, patient and provides excellent client experience. Both are absolutely fine as long as they are aligned with how you want your business  to be perceived. The answer to the above questions is your culture.

Once you have decided the culture that you want- I went for fun and fast growth- you then need to decide on the values that will guide and shape that culture. Here’s where it can get tricky and where simplicity is key. I’ve lost count of the numbers of small startups I’ve come across who with great excitement and the best of intentions set up a company  offsite to decide on their company values. These are often complex long sentences that try and be something to everyone while containing every buzzword going. After much deliberation they are announced with great pride and six months later when you ask a new or old  team member what they are, no one can remember.

 Keep it simple. As opposed to long sentences, use short phrases or even better use simple one word values. Make them memorable. Make sure that they apply internally and externally as well. Communicate them constantly. Use them as benchmarks to assess your teams daily, weekly, monthly and their annual performance. Finally, coalesce them around a single umbrella word or symbol.

 Ours were fun, fast and lean. In all our interactions with each other internally and externally with our clients our goal was to be fun, fast and lean. We celebrated anyone who did this on a daily and monthly basis. We used it to judge and assess our performance constantly. We grouped it all around an easy to remember cartoon character that was fun, fast and lean. We stuck posters of them everywhere in all our offices. Our business goal was to grow rapidly based on being fun, fast and lean ( i.e. without too many processes, staff or unnecessary meetings) and we grew at 50% year on year for our first ten years. The values helped drive the growth. It was simple, easy to remember and effective. 

Olivia Leong at Verra Asia took it to a new level by naming her business after her values. Her vales of value-centricity, efficacy, responsibility, resourcefulness and advocacy literally make up the name of her business. She has cleverly made her business name her values and in doing so has embedded them into her brand DNA. Everything she and her team do is guided by their name and hence their values. This super smart approach means that both her team and her clients know in advance how they will always approach any work and behave accordingly. It is also what guides their annual performance reviews.

Tony Hsieh, founder of the unicorn Zappos, wrote a book Delivering Happiness that explains how important it is to establish a core-value-based organization and to hire new talent who are purely in sync with those values.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter which of the above approaches you prefer.

What’s really important with both your culture and your values that drive it, is that you decide proactively at the start what they are going to be. They exemplify how you and your team will behave internally and externally. They are easily communicable and celebrated and most importantly they will help get you to your business goal and vision.

If you leave a pot of yoghurt in the fridge it will grown its own culture – don’t do that with your own business, it’s too important 😊