Authenticity is living consistently with your core values.
Building Your Core Values
Starting a business is exhilarating. Everything is fresh and moldable, giving you complete control over how your business looks and operates. It’s a big responsibility, and it takes focused planning to get everything right.
As you fill out your business plan, you’ll come to a blank page that represents the essence of what your business will be—your core values. These are the principles that will guide you as you make decisions, work with clients, expand your services and whatever else businesses do as they mature. You can think of your core values as guard rails on a highway. If you stay between them, you’re safe. Venturing beyond them, however, means trouble.
Your core values should reflect your vision for your business and keep it moving toward those goals. They are the metric by which you make every decision.
How do you decide if a new project is a good fit? Compare it to your core values. Is a new employee right for your team? See if they demonstrated your core values in their previous roles. Core values are indispensable, which is why you need to plan them, write them down, and live by them in your business.
Being True to Your Core Values
I kicked off July 2019 by chatting with Matt Kreikemeier, founder and technical director of Leverage Marketing in St. Louis, Missouri. When Matt started Leverage in 2010, he settled on three principles that would guide his agency:
Be Useful.
Be Kind.
Be Fearless.
Throughout our conversation, I could tell Matt—and, by extension, Leverage—lived and worked by his core values, giving him a client-first mentality that happily adapts to new challenges. Here are three principles he shared with me that will help you shape and live by your core values.
Be humble enough to accept help and kind enough to offer it
The people around you will have a greater impact on your long-term success than any book, class, seminar or course you could ever pay to take. People—not information—are the key to success, especially when you’re just getting started.
Before Matt started Leverage, he built the website for his brother’s landscaping company, Green Guys. Recognizing his talent and passion, Matt’s brother pushed him to start his own business—even giving him free access to an office within the Green Guys space. This act of kindness propelled Matt into what would become Leverage Marketing.
So many successful businesses have similar origin stories. A friend or family member gives them a space to work. A mentor guides them through the struggles of getting started. An investor gives money toward an idea.
The early days of your business require a lot of humility. Don’t convince yourself that you have to do everything alone for it to truly be your success. Be humble enough to accept help when it is offered and kind enough to offer it to others in need.
As your business grows, you’ll gain more knowledge, experience, connections and influence. Never forget how you feel right now as the person just getting started. Soon, others will start their businesses, needing the same help that you need now. Be willing to help others, just like others helped you! It is the Golden Rule, after all.
During our conversation, Matt pointed to his brother’s kindness as a motivator to help other people (like me) who want to learn and grow. If he has expertise or resources that will help someone else get started, he tries to offer it whenever he can.
Accept new opportunities—even if you don’t know how to do them (yet)
Taking risks is essential to continual growth. If you settle into a comfort zone without ever pushing your boundaries outward, you will never reach your full business potential. That might mean looking for opportunities to do something new. Other times, it will mean accepting an offer to do something that you’ve never done before.
You’ll notice a cool trend as your business grows—if you do great work and make your clients happy, they’ll want you to do more for them. At first, your clients might ask you to do more of what you’re already doing. However, they’ll eventually ask you to take on new responsibilities and projects that you might not have any experience with. Are you ready to accept new opportunities and figure it out as you go?
I asked Matt how often he takes on something he doesn’t quite know how to do (yet). “Oh, man… every day! Knock on every piece of wood in this office, we haven’t crashed and burned yet!” was his response.
People are constantly asking him to solve new problems and create new solutions. It’s the nature of a rapidly evolving industry. Every day, new problems emerge and the Leverage team has the confidence to take them on, discover a creative solution and make it happen.
The myth of specialization
David Epstein’s new book, “Range,” argues that specialization is overrated. Instead, it is best to work as a generalist, solving problems for people across industries. In a recent interview on the “Building a StoryBrand” podcast, Epstein cites an experiment in which two groups of people are trained to solve problems. The first group works on the same problem repeatedly until they master it, then move on to the next problem. The second group never sees the same problem twice.
At the end of the study, the second group felt like they hadn’t learned anything from the exercise, while the first group believed they had practiced enough to master it. However, after a few months, they brought the groups back and tested their problem-solving skills again. This time, the group that never saw the same problem outperformed the first group—even on the problem the first group had “mastered.”
The puzzle of problem-solving
Matt’s fearlessness in accepting new opportunities equips him to solve new problems. Working with different industries, different problems and different services gives the Leverage team a broad knowledge base to draw from. They can then piece together inputs like a puzzle, creating solutions that get the job done without coming straight from a Marketing 101 textbook.
As your business grows, you’ll also have the opportunity to accept new challenges. Be fearless. Take them on. Don’t let imposter syndrome prevent you from learning new skills, solving new problems and providing incredible value for your clients. I guarantee that you are more equipped to take on new opportunities than you realize just from the many different problems you solve in your everyday life.
Make great use of your (free) resources
Starting a business in 2019 is much easier than it was even 10 years ago when Matt started Leverage. The incredible amount of information available for free online is astounding—you just have to know how to find it (and sift through the nonsense masquerading as value).
Your solution to any problem is only a few keystrokes away. Search engines are smarter and the library of freely available information is much more expansive than they were just a few years ago. If you know how to use keywords on Google or Youtube, you can learn just about anything for free.
You no longer need to spend years specializing in a particular field to be useful in it. Universities are posting free classes online and experts are sharing their knowledge in Youtube videos or on their blogs. Quora collects answers to common problems in all industries from people all over the world. Solving problems for your clients is as easy as searching online, spending a few hours (or days or weeks, depending on the problem) learning and understanding the solution.
Wrapping Up
Matt Krekemeier and the team at Leverage Marketing are authentic—holding to their core values with ferocity. They own their identity as a small but powerful team as the best way to serve their clients and live according to their values. They are useful. They are kind. They are fearless.
Are you known by the principles you live by? When you start your business, you have the opportunity to craft your core values in a way that reflects what you hold dear. Think hard about them. They will guide your business’ interaction with clients, decisions about growth and path into the future. Choose values that you are proud to display and proud to live by—then do it.