Author: Cody Miles

Startup culture is a nebulous term. It means many things but it’s hard to define. It’s clear that the term grew out of a dissatisfaction with corporate culture, and probably with good reason. There is a clear distinction between Silicon Valley and corporate America, and it appears the culture difference is responsible.

Does culture drive financial performance? Yes. That’s what the research says, anyway. According to a study produced by MIT, the value of a company’s integrity (measured by survey responses) directly corresponded to quarterly deviations in profitability. Moreover, research conducted by John P. Kotter and James L. Heskett showed the average revenue growth of firms with performance-enhancing cultures was 682% over firms with without performance-enhancing cultures.

Perhaps our obsession with corporate culture might be justified. I’m convinced culture has a direct effect on company performance. It can boost morale by making the office environment more enjoyable, which translates into higher productivity. Here are three more tips on creating what we’ve come to understand as startup culture:

Create a Collaborative Space.

The physical environment of an office is a reflection of an organization’s culture. This is why I hate cubicles. Cattle stalls for the white collar, cubicles are the symbol of office drudgery.

The modern-day cubicle (originally called “the action desk”) was denounced by the man who actually created it, Robert Propst. While the original design for office workstations was meant to create open and flexible workspaces, companies would soon use them to box employees in to maximize on rising real estate costs. Three years before his death, Propst told the New York Times that ‘the cubicleizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity.”

The workplace is evolving. Companies have begun to adapt the mentality that tech startups already seem to know: employees don’t like being tethered to a workstation. Allowing employees to select the space that best accommodates whatever task they’re working on, companies have begun to offer a mix of unassigned private offices, conference rooms, and formal and informal settings. With higher satisfaction levels in employees, the data doesn’t seem to mind, either.

While a collaborative workspace can mean many things, some of their key features include:

1. An open office layout that encourages accidental interactions through open areas.
2. Common areas such as cafeterias and other non-purpose areas that encourage workers to leave confined offices.
3. An emphasis on areas that hold two or more people rather than single-occupancy offices.
4. “Thinking” areas that encourage workers to do their thinking in the presence of other people.

Google has introduced another concept into their open workspace, “150 feet from food.” In their manhattan office, there is no point where an employee isn’t 150 feed from food. Whether employees are near a restaurant, a large cafeteria or a micro-kitchen, they’re encouraged to snack often. Google suggests that the snacking causes employees to have “unplanned collaborations” which increases their enjoyment, feeds motivation and causes greater productivity.

Manage employee energy, not time.

I worked in my uncle’s restaurant as a busboy when I was 12. During slow times, we were told “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean.” Of course, I learned fast how to avoid that. Instead of finishing my work at normal speed, I learned I wouldn’t have to do other, less enjoyable things if I just worked slower. That paradigm made me less productive. In the end, those other things still weren’t clean.

When I entered the corporate world, I realized things weren’t much different. The people I worked with were under the same pressure to stay busy and were scolded if it looked like they weren’t doing anything. Of course, looking busy does nothing for the profitability of a company. The amount of time we spend on something has zero relevance to our productivity.

It’s time to rethink our workday. What if, instead of managing time, we managed the energy of our employees? I know it sounds strange. But, if the end goal is higher levels of productivity, what if we just encouraged healthier living?

At Brandcave, we’ve developed a 70/30 principle that governs our workday.  It’s by no means a new concept, but we’ve adapted it to our personal culture. In short, 70% of our workday is devoted to making and creating. It’s the tasks we do for our clients and it’s also business development. The other 30% goes to whatever makes us better at the 70%. For us, that translates to roughly two hours of our day spent learning, working out, reading or resting. It’s dramatically increased our personal moral and our ability to focus. I’m resolved; a culture devoted to our employees’ health pays dividends.

Inspire Creativity.

“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.”

That’s a quote from Monty Python actor John Cleese during his 1991 lecture to a group of Norwegian graduates. His lecture, largely based on the research produced by Donald MacKinnon in the early 60s, reveals several interesting characteristics about creative people.

Some may come as a surprise.  First, creativity is almost totally unrelated to IQ (provided you are intelligent above a certain minimal level). MacKinnon showed in investigating scientists, architects, engineers and writers that those regarded by their peers as “most creative” were in no way whatsoever different in IQ from their less creative colleagues.

How where they different? Well, the most creative had simply acquired an ability of getting themselves into a particular mood, which allowed their natural creativity to function. This mood, or way of operating, is an ability to play and explore ideas – not for any immediate practical purpose but for enjoyment. Cleese refers to it as the “open” mode, which he defines as a relaxed, contemplative, more inclined to humor, and consequently more playful mood.

The open mode is something creative geniuses such as Alfred Hitchcock mastered. One of Hitcock’s regular co-writers described working with him on screen plays:

“When we came up against a block and our discussions became very heated and intense, Hitchcock would suddenly stop and tell a story that had nothing to do with the work at hand. At first, I was outraged, and then I discovered that he did this intentionally. He mistrusted working under pressure. He would say ‘we’re pressing, we’re pressing, we’re working too hard. Relax, it will come.’” And, of course, it always did.

Companies who value creativity should take careful measures to encourage their employees to enter the “open” mode when pondering a problem. It’s a top-down approach that requires executives and managers to change their paradigm about creativity, as it cannot be implemented without understanding it in theory.

It may be easier to tell you how to kill creativity, rather than inspire it.  Again, John Cleese articulately shares three tips on crushing creativity in the workplace:

1. Allow subordinates no humor as it threatens your self-importance and especially your omniscience. Instead, we should treat all humor as frivolous or subversive.
2. Keeping ourselves feeling irreplaceable involves cutting everybody else down to size, so don’t miss an opportunity to undermine your employees’ confidence.
3. Demand that people should always be actually doing things. If you can’t anyone pondering, accuse them of laziness or indecision.

If your core values are nothing more than words on a wall, then you can go about your day and do whatever you want. There’s nothing special about words. But, an actual culture has the ability to change your company and the lives of your employees.

I don’t mean the kind of faux company culture that involves Nerf guns, ping-pong tables or beer o’clock Fridays either. Culture isn’t an event. It’s not a product either. Culture is what happens when you know why you’re waking up, tell everyone about it and follow through on it.

Every company has a culture. The question is not whether you have one; it is whether you have the right one. At Brandcave, we value the innovative spirit, collaborative nature and creative thinking that comes from a startup culture. That’s why we’ve decided to foster and nurture those values.

In part 1 of this series, I’d like to demonstrate three ways Brandcave is forming a startup culture while we still are, in fact, a startup.

Keep Teams Small.

As an agency, we’re choosing to keep our teams small. Why? Because, there is a natural tendency to collaborate less when a team increases its numbers.

Small teams make communication easier and leave no room for dead weight. Today, so much more is being demanded of human capital and it’s not enough to have a team of specialists who silo in one core area. In our eyes, every member on our team needs to be as multi-skilled as an MLB infielder.

Besides, hiring a team of experts may not actually be all that beneficial. Research from Harvard Business Review showed that, “the higher the educational level of the team member, the more challenging collaboration appears to be for them. We found that the greater the proportion of experts a team had, the more likely it was to disintegrate into nonproductive conflict or stalemate.”

At the risk of losing valuable talent, we’re also choosing to keep our members local. As teams become more virtual, cooperation often decreases. Compensating for time zones, overcoming technological mediums, and creating a collaborative environment is more difficult when a team cannot work together physically.

Lastly, collaboration is a top-down initiative. At the most basic level, a team’s level of collaboration reflects the philosophy of top executives. When executives invest in supporting social relationships and demonstrate collaborative behavior themselves, they create what is known as a “gift culture.” Gift cultures are introduced when executives embed mentoring and coaching in their own routine behavior. Their investment in the members of their company is seen as valuable or a gift. In my own experience, there has been nothing I’ve valued more than the time previous employers invested in me.

Encourage Side Projects.

In high school and college, I was often teased by my family and adult friends about my obsession with hip-hop. In their mind, a career in rap was a pipe dream (I agree) and I needed to focus on learning actual trades. I listened and got real jobs, but I never stopped making music and producing projects on the side.

I didn’t realize it then, but my commitment to becoming a successful rapper inadvertently gave me all the tools I needed to become a decent creative manager. I didn’t have the money to get a music video, so I learned how to shoot one. I couldn’t afford studio time, so I recorded myself. I needed graphic design, so I bootlegged photoshop. I needed publicity, so I wrote press releases. You get the picture.

Although I’ve never made enough money to rap full-time, I was hired out of college because of these skills – not because of my college degree. That’s why side projects are so important. They make us better at everything. The skills we learn from them extend out and into everything else.

We are robbing ourselves when we do not encourage our employees to have side projects.

In recent years, technology companies and startups have learned the value of side projects. This has resulted in trends such as Hackathons, where employees work together for days or weeks to create a totally new project out of passion and creative expression. In the end, side projects help create collaborative environments because they reinvigorate our employees and encourage them to take ownership of their work. They create shared experiences. And, not only does it raise office morale, but it sharpens their skill sets.

However, most companies still underestimate how important it is to give employees the time and space to explore the things they are interested in. In our corporate culture where everything is data-driven and measured, side projects are hard to understand. But, if it becomes possible to ditch our obsession with growth, scalability, and financing, side projects allow employees to experiment and become better at their real jobs. It can even save companies.

After all, side projects can be credited for some of our favorite applications. Gmail, Craigslist, and even Post-Its can all thank their creators for working out their own ideas on the side.

Keep the Desk Messy.

When I begin the work day, everything is usually in its place. All papers are aligned, not one is askew. I turn on my laptop and immediately open my web browser. All is calm and right with the world. But, 20 minutes and 100 emails later, plans have changed. And, at this point, I have at least 20 tabs open in my browser and every perfectly aligned sheet has now been sprawled across the table.

I can’t help it. I’ve got a problem. At least, that’s what I’ve been taught to believe.

But, when the Carlson School of Management published a study showing that a messy environment is conducive to creativity, my opinion began to change.

What did the study show? A few things worth noting. First, an organized environment contributed to participants following conventional norms. This means they followed the rules and did the right thing, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But, conversely, an unorganized room actually helped participants break from conventional thinking. It encouraged them to think outside-the-box. Ultimately, their ideas were more creative.

Thinking outside-the-box is essential to a startup culture. That is why we’re choosing to abandon the notion that everything has a place and embrace the idea that inspiration should come from any place.

At minimum, this study should show us that our environment affects our behavior. But, it should really show us that we can tailor our employee’s behavior and encourage the attitudes we want to encounter by the kind of environment we create.

For example, if a bank wants it’s loan officers to follow the rules, we can encourage those behaviors by tidy office spaces. Conversely, a creative agency such as Brandcave needs to have more free thinking, and an unorganized room can help facilitate that.

Perhaps, Albert Einstein said it best. He was famously quoted as having said, “if a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk a sign?” Maybe it’s an organized one. But, if my messy desks helps put me in the ranks of other messy desk owners such as Steve Jobs, Roald Dahl, Mark Twain, Tony Hsieh and Mark Zuckerberg, I guess I’ll take it.

Your employees are making thousands of decisions every day. If your company has fostered the right kind of culture, you’ll know they’re making the right decisions. Stay tuned. Next time, we’ll share three more super important ways to foster a startup culture. Be sure to subscribe to keep updated.

As I write this, I am traveling several thousand feet above the Appalachian Mountains. I am en route to South Carolina, where Brandcave will deliver its first presentation to an international client. My wife is asleep on my shoulder, and my partner Mike is curiously filming out the window.

Without trying to sound too dramatic, the moment is symbolic. It is the calm before the storm. I suppose it goes without saying we are all a little apprehensive; we are not arrogant enough to believe our proposal is a sure-deal. At the same time, I am also acutely aware of the consequences of the opposite. “Winning” this meeting will mean Brandcave has entered that stage where my full-time job is not an option. I will have to leave my current agency.

I’ve been considering my motivations behind Brandcave. Knowing full well, at least in theory, the difficulties and risks of a start-up, why would anyone attempt to do it? After all, I’ve managed to create a comfortable life for my wife and I, given our current lifestyle. We do not hurt for anything. Moving forward with Brandcave would mean I would be temporarily (or permanently) cutting our income in half. The risk is understood.

I’m resolved to say, the motivation isn’t money. It isn’t status either, or a desire to create a better agency than the one that currently employs me. I think it’s deeper; it is something internal that wants to prove to myself that I could do it. Or, maybe it’s a very selfish ambition to become my own boss. Maybe both. Time will tell.

Obviously, this article is very personal. As you’ll come to learn from this blog, most of our attention will be devoted toward inbound marketing insights and research. But, in the months leading to this flight I have come to several very personal revelations that I believe any start-up could appreciate. And, despite numerous meetings with the SBA and hours of their toilet reading material, these 3 points were never touched. Hopefully, this article will be beneficial for others like me, who are willing to risk comfort for reasons they do not know.

Here are 3 revelations I had while launching my start-up.

1. Who We Are is an evolving statement.

At the onset, Brandcave was positioned to be a digital services firm. However, we learned early on that this wasn’t a successful business model. There were two reasons for this, and both now appear obvious in hindsight. First, in order for us to be seen as more than a freelance/outsourcing resource, we needed to position ourselves differently. Second, the early success of our company would require an on-going relationship with our clients, not one-off projects.

Both of these dilemmas were met with one answer, but the initial failure was upsetting. My vision of an entrepreneur (rightfully or wrongly) was a picture of a resolute leader charging forth no holds barred with a brilliant idea, overcoming obstacles with certainty and clarity. Instead, I was reconstructing our company’s offerings with the business acumen of Donald Duck.

Since then, I’ve discovered that everyone feels like Donald Duck sometimes. Moreover, start-ups should not be afraid of changing business models. In fact, it’s a very healthy practice called pivoting. We resolved our initial failure by re-positioning Brandcave as more than a digital services firm, but a digital solutions partner — an integral part of our client’s online marketing. In other words, we would not only undergird marketing departments with services, but ideas and long-term campaigns. Instead of one-off projects, we now offer a collection of services that work together to accomplish larger goals.

In web development, we use the agile methodology to build and test the applications we create. This method is essentially an on-going cycle of analyzing, building and testing. A few years ago, this practice was adopted by start-ups. It’s called the Lean Start-Up. There is a fantastic resource on the subject written by Eric Ries. Read more here.

2. The law is open to interpretation.

For people like me, who follow installation manuals to the letter, the legal aspects of starting a business can be frustrating. This is mostly because every attorney believes they are right, and every attorney has a different opinion. After meeting with several attorneys and CPAs, I came to one conclusion: there isn’t really one right way to do anything.

For example, the partnership agreement between Mike and I turned out to be more difficult than I expected. One attorney told me there needed be at least a 49-51% split. In this scenario, one person would have the majority share and final decision, which allegedly would protect our relationship. Another said we needed to have a 50-50% split and a trusted third-party arbiter to have the final say. Still another (the one we ended up choosing) said that a 50-50% split is fine, and differences should be handled like a marriage. I suppose this means we say passive-aggressive comments and go to sleep early. My wife says Mike and I act like we’re married anyway.

CPA’s were the same story, except their opinion seemed to have heavier consequences. When it comes to taxes (and who really understands taxes), I trust a CPA’s opinion like the voice of God. But, after speaking with several CPA’s, I realized that even taxes are not as cut-and-dry as you’d hope.

I suppose I should have guessed this would happen. As a marketer, I understand spin well. I just didn’t expect to get it from my lawyers and CPAs. The lesson to learn from this situation is that the personality of your legal affiliate will determine how stringent or lenient they stick to the books. While there is a lot of grey area, some will be more conservative than others. We’re pretty even-keel, so we made a team that matched our personality.

3. Solidarity is most important.

When I first met Mike in our high school freshman IPC class, we unknowingly started a competition of one-upmanship that continues even today. We’ve always been friends, but our respect for each other’s work fuels our relationship. I’ve seen Mike in almost every major phase of his life. We lived together in college. We traveled and performed in a band together. I was the best man at his wedding. We’ve been through a lot. When it came to building a company together, there was no one I trusted more.

But, starting a business with Mike wasn’t just between us. As a start-up that began without any funding, we had to invest from our own piggy banks. This meant that, no matter how much we wanted to be autonomous and run our business the way we wanted, our wives would ultimately become our bankers. And, as co-investors, they have a say in our decisions. This has proved to be difficult for me, because I’m always right.

For people like me, who are shrewd and can often be abrasive, the input of others can seem insulting. Isn’t it? I take the time to calculate every step, and it can feel like an attack to be questioned. But, that’s pride and it’s ugly. When I can set myself aside, I realize that there is a wealth of expertise and knowledge in both Amy and Shawna. They are incredible in ways that I am not. Amy delivers financial, legal and organizational clarity; Shawna understands PR and is an expert content manager. They’re not consequences of starting a business, they’re huge assets. They help Mike and I focus on doing what we’re good at.

I realize everyone goes into business to make money, but I’ve learned that solidarity between our partners is most important. I would rather fail as a business owner than become a sucky husband and friend. Who could have anticipated how much our wives’ input would shape our company? And, as mule-headed as I can be, I’ve learned that their opinions are invaluable to me. This was a hard lesson to learn, but I’m glad I learned it before I lost a friend, or possibly a wife.

Update: We won our proposals in South Carolina. We’re taking Brandcave full-time. Pray for us.