Glenn Hilton - Part 1

Over 20 years ago Glenn Hilton founded Drupal development house ImageX Media in Vancouver, BC. ImageX is now a full service digital experience agency specializing in enterprise Drupal development with offices in Canada, Ukraine, and Brazil. Glenn is an open source entrepreneur and the President and CEO at ImageX.

How big is your team today?

In Canada, we're a team of 35. We've got 18 team members in the Ukraine and we're starting to grow our team in Brazil. We should be over 10 team members in Latin America by next month.

How do you define organizational culture at the highest level?

I see our culture as the DNA of our company. Boiled down, it’s who we really are and what we stand for. And at ImageX our culture is all about finding people that believe in our core values and want to live them out each day. People that want to work in a company that they’re proud of and that allows them to have the freedom to express themselves and use their skillsets to accomplish things that will allow them to make a difference working alongside the types of people and clients that they admire. 

If you could create the ideal organizational culture with no restrictions like cost or time what are the first three things that come to mind for you?

• Create (an) awesome spaces for people to work
• Give people the freedom to be who they really are
• Launch and sustain programs that promote and integrate core values

Creating an awesome space for people to work and build relationships is important. In your home you need to have that space and you also need to have that in the office (for those that are still able to work from there). For our clients in the digital realm, we’re trying to create experiences for them because in today’s world and the challenges of the pandemic with all the different things coming at us, it’s great to be able to create an experience where you feel like you can still connect in meaningful ways.

We need to create those experiences and spaces for our teams to connect too. We need to consider how different personality types prefer different environments. Where some might flourish in an open office others might need more privacy. Some people are totally good to be fully remote and work from their own space at home while others may really miss real life interactions. We need to set them up for success and help them learn how to optimize it or adapt so that they're able to connect with their team members. We're all learning on that front.

Build a culture that gives people the freedom to be who they really are. Allow your people to act on their capabilities and strengths. A great company lets individuals be leaders in their area. We want to live by the Mastery, Autonomy, Purpose mantra. We want to ensure that our team members feel that their opinions matter, they are validated and empowered, protected, and that the organization is going to go to bat for them. They trust leadership and we trust their leadership. A great culture is transparent and does what they say. 

Finally, truly living our values is so important. We’ve got them posted up on our walls but having our values on the wall isn’t meaningful, unless they’re actually lived by our leadership; permeate through our methodology and day-to-day processes; and drive how we hire people. Our values are powerful and they make our culture sticky. It is one of the things that make people love our company.

We recently held our quarterly “State of ImageX” meeting. In that meeting the leadership team runs a presentation with a video to kick it off. In that meeting we hit on all the key areas of our organization. At the end, we opened things up for team members to share and it was so encouraging. Team members shared some heartfelt feedback including, “this is the best company I’ve ever worked at”, “I love this company”, and more voices chimed in in agreement. It was spontaneous and refreshing, but it didn’t happen overnight. It happened because we’ve been committed to hiring team members with our values and culture in mind and running the company on those values. 

 How big was your team when you first started thinking about organizational culture?

It was about ten years ago. I read the book, Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh from Zappos. He had his 10 core values in there. When he described his culture, I was like, oh my god, that sounds amazing.

I was in Chicago at the time that I was reading the book and I came across the section where they talked about how they provide incredible customer service and though they sell shoes you could really call them about anything you want. The longest sales call they ever recorded was 8 hours and I don’t remember if the person even bought any shoes. So I thought I’d give it a try myself so I picked up the phone and I called Zappos and I said, “Hey, I'm in Chicago and I’m hungry. I hear they’re good at deep dish pizza in this town, do you have any suggestions?” And boom, right away the Zappos employee pulled up a couple of different spots and told me a cool place to eat. I was like, “awesome, thanks so much!” I just wanted to try it out to see if they actually train their people, like they say they do. I knew I wanted to build an organization like that.

How about when setting an organizational vision for your team?

Nailing the right vision can be challenging because it’s got to grab people. But it can’t be too out there either as it’s got to be based in reality. A great culture without vision can cause employees to disengage. They need something bigger than themselves, perhaps even bigger than the organization that they can attach themselves to, be inspired by, and strive for. 

When we started ImageX, sky was the limit, there was still a lot of blue ocean out there. But over the years as competition grew that’s the water has gotten a whole lot more red. I remember when I first saw that MarTech diagram with 5000 different options on it. Just look at the CMS space alone, it’s amazing how crowded it’s become. And when you narrow it from CMS to just get down the Drupal realm, that’s really exploded over the years too. There are literally hundreds of specialized Drupal development shops we compete with today.

So when you layout the blueprints for your company, you really want to try and target your vision for where you can find blue ocean as best you can.  

If you were advising a new entrepreneur today, when would you advise them to begin working on organizational culture? What are the first three things you’d recommend that they do?

I’d encourage them to work on their core values right from the get-go and start their organization by formulating those and getting their values clear so that they don’t have to go through the mushy period of time of figuring that out and recognizing when you are hiring people that don’t align or fit. I would get them to sit down and work on their vision and figure out where they want to go as an organization and what will draw somebody in and make them go, “Dang! That’s something I want to get on board with.” Finally, I’d encourage them to sit down and work on their leadership model. How are they going to provide leadership to their team? How are you going to use your time? There are a lot of different ways to use your time as an entrepreneur and it is your most valuable asset. I’d make sure they read Michael Gerber’s book, The E-Myth Revisited. It’s an awesome book for any entrepreneur.

In the E-Myth one of the stories presented is about Sarah. Sarah runs a pie making business and she used to bake all the pies and she was kind of the technician and she did a great job of baking the pies, but she could never get past baking the pies herself. She needed to get outside of her business and start to make a plan and determine how much time she should be spending on leadership, vision, culture, recruiting, marketing and sales.

When you're first getting up and starting, you have to wear so many hats and you may love baking the pies but if you keep doing that then your business may not grow like you’d like. We all love making the pies because it’s fun and it’s why we started, but to grow our business we may have to stop making the pies. I loved designing the pies I mean websites for my clients. I had the hardest time stepping out of that. I want to go back to it all the time because it’s so fun. If I was still making the websites my company wouldn’t have grown anywhere near where we’re at today.

Glenn and I spoke at length and to share his great insights and keep your attention this will be a two part interview. The second part of my interview with Glenn Hilton will be available soon and it will be linked here.