How do I choose my company's values?

Intro

I've launched a weekly newsletter.

This newsletter is for people who run a business or want to run a business. I’ll be addressing all of the main questions you will come up against when you launch a business and during the running of your business.

Alongside a deep dive into these important questions. I’ll be journaling the growth and ups and downs of my own agency, Bottled Imagination. These updates will always contain the highlighted version (the LinkedIn friendly version) and then the version of what really happened that week.

This won’t be fortune cookie advice from someone who has already ‘made it’.

These will be practical, real time thoughts and learnings from someone who is doing it right now

Highlights

• It’s a 3 pitch week guys. Yes, we’re so unbelievably desirable that we had 3 pitches last week

• Remember last weeks new business teaser about us getting to the final 2? We won it!
• We were shortlisted for 8 PR Moment awards! Awards are for the show offs, the vain and those in need of constant attention.
• The team just nonchalantly gained coverage on Sky News and Huffington Post for 2 separate clients.?

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Real version

• It’s a 3 pitch week guys. Yes, we’re so unbelievably desirable that we had 3 pitches last week

Juggling delivery and new business is tough. It’s a real balancing act of your time. Unfortunately last week for me that meant trouble sleeping (Or just passing out at 9pm). I’m not sure I quite got it right but the new business pitches went well and I drew up a contract after one of them so I couldn’t have been too bad?

• Remember last weeks new business teaser about us getting to the final 2? We won it!

And I had nothing to do with it whatsoever. All Katy Powell

• We were shortlisted for 8 PR Moment awards! Awards are for the show offs, the vain and those in need of constant attention

I am a show off, I’m vain but I’m not needy…please remember to subscribe to this newsletter above.

• The team just nonchalantly gained coverage on Sky News and Huffington Post for 2 separate clients

Just dead causally messaged me on Slack like it was nothing. We’re raising such a self aware, modest and low key team just like the founders….

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How do I choose my company's values?

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I’m going to caveat this one right from the start. I used to think values were complete bullsh*t. Having them on the wall in the office didn’t make me adhere to those values. I didn’t wake up and live those values of the agency I was working at. There was however an intangible feeling I had working at each place I’ve worked at previously, some of this was set by the founders, some was created by myself and other groups of people that worked there.

As a founder I’m going to separate this into 2 sets of values. The first are more assumptions, a list of things that you aspire your company to be. The second are the values that you pass onto your team. There should be a correlation but they are different.

I’ll start with the list of assumptions that you want or wanted your company to be. When we launched Bottled Imagination. A few weeks In, it was becoming clear that every conversation was a bit of a battle, we could take things personally, even just questions about someone’s area and how that is going to work. I’m not even going to go into the battle of which music we were going to put on the launch video. I’m definitely not going to go into who won that battle as it’s not important…

Things were like this because we hadn’t separated ourselves from the company. Every query or open question was taken as an attack on that individual.

So, we started to write out what we saw Bottled Imagination as, our assumptions and hopes for it before we launched.

They were the below

·? ? ? ? To grow an agency that has a target revenue of ￡700k in year one

·? ? ? ? To put a big focus on strategy and ideation, to get these things right so the execution is smoother

·? ? ? ? Use our imagination and produce different types of campaigns to what other agencies in both Digital and traditional PR were creating

·? ? ? ? To not be Rise at Seven 2.0

·? ? ? ? To have a better work life balance than what we have had in the past

·? ? ? ? To have 3 main packages with a mix of clients in each. In time to double down on the most successful package.

·? ? ? ? To create a great place to work

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If some of these look ill defined it’s because they were.

The plan then in our monthly meetings was to hold ourselves to these things. To Bottled Imagination as a separate entity to ourselves and when we were falling short it was us reporting to Bottled Imagination not to each other.

After 6-12 months our progress was:

·? ? ? ? To grow an agency that has a target revenue of ￡700k in year one

Just under. We had a 3 month period of trading silently which would have effected this. If you looked from the day we publicly launched we were nearly on track.

·? ? ? ? To put a big focus on strategy and ideation, to get these things right so the execution is smoother

Inconsistent. As we’ve been in agencies that have grown in the past, the ideation and strategy, the why we are doing what we are doing take the hit and it all goes to ‘Get results quick’ – we were keen for that not to happen. We realized that onboarding and the first month was vital for making a good impression and getting ahead. This was inconsistent depending on involvements of the drivers of this value.

·? ? ? ? Use our imagination and produce different types of campaigns to what other agencies in both Digital and traditional PR are creating

After 6 months we were like "f*ck PR has got so so competitive and the types of campaigns we used to produce that would pick up 120 pieces of coverage easily are now not breaking through". We realized this was not an easy route to have gone down. We were picking up results from reactive like everyone else was but that’s not why we did this.

The Fake Footballer campaign changed that a bit for us and since then we have 6-7 examples of work that we can say fit the mould and we are doing this now.

·? ? ? ? To not be Rise at Seven 2.0

We didn’t mean this in a bad way. Just what would be the point? That’s a separate part of our career now. I wanted to create something not inherit something. It was our most recent job, we were known from working there, 3 of us had left there, it had to be addressed. We launched with an ecom style site. Our or at least my own marketing needed to be self-aware and self-deprecating at times. We wanted to talk less about results and particularly links and more about how we got there. Like showing the workings out.

It turns out this was something we actually had to address multiple times in new business. Both for businesses with positive connotations and ones with negative connotations.

·? ? ? ? To have a better work life balance than what we have had in the past

I’ve mentioned before I had a 6 month period where I had no emotions, none. I was depressed and burnt out. This could not happen again. Comms were restricted to business hours unless it was something fun or something needed, no slacks after 5:30. It’s not been easy, running a business you have to put a lot of time in but my work life balance is bizarrely 10x better since running my own company. If you’re not in control but have the responsibilities life can be rough. If you are in control you can decide and create your week, doesn’t mean it won’t be busy but it’ll be your doing.

·? ? ? ? To have 3 main packages with a mix of clients in each. In time to double down on the most successful package.

We had a good mix of clients on pure, planned and full imagination after our first year.

·? ? ? ? To create a great place to work

Yeh turns out you have to actually try and define what a great place to work is and not just say it. If you ask an employee if they love working here they are going to of course say yes. We have put some time into this over the past 6 months but our plans are to do loads loads more on this now we have a steadily growing team.

For now I do believe we’ve created a place where employees feel valued, autonomous and free to think creatively.

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The next step was our actual company values. Public facing values and ones we’d try and get our then non existent team to look as their guide to what Bottled Imagination is.

The values were

1)? ? ? ? Use your Imagination

2)? ? ? ? Do good work

3)? ? ? ? Be curious

4)? ? ? ? Don’t be a dickhead

More on how these are going, how to come up with your own and how to implement these values next week.