I'm so proud of our team for being certified as a Great Place To Work

A & A Customs Brokers was recently certified as a Great Place To Work in both the USA and Canada.

This is a huge achievement for us.

I'm so proud of our teams on both sides of the border. We've definitely learned a lot.

It has been a long road with many ups and downs to get to this point, and I feel like we're just getting started.

Our current "Book of the Quarter" is "The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth" and they use a term called "Refound" - to describe the Refounding of a company that has been around for a while and needs a 'reset'.

A & A Customs Brokers has gone through a refounding after a major reset a couple of years ago.

As we start a new decade, I'm reflecting on 2010 to the end of 2019.

We were having some trouble with growth and profitability a few years ago. We felt stuck in the mud. We had good intentions, but we couldn't execute.

In The Founder's Mentality - they describe the 3 internal crises of growth:

1. Overload
2. Stallout
3. Freefall

We've been through all 3!

As we looked around, we realized that we had a lot of people that were just wrong for our company.

They were nice people, they were capable people, they just weren't aligned to our Vision and Core Values. They didn't believe in the company, they didn't believe in me, and that started to shake my confidence. That's never a good thing.

We did a number of things to change our culture, but mostly, it was:

1) Share the Vision and Goals of the company with everyone.

2) Use radical transparency throughout the company so the people know what's going on. Don't hide bad news - they often know it before you do, anyway! Take the hard questions, answer them.

3) Bring the Core Values to life within the company - Hire, Fire and Reward around the Core Values

4) Get really serious about #3 - if people don't fit the core values - you have to take action really quickly. This means improving your hiring process to identify people who live your core values - and then removing very quickly people who don't.

The latter part of that last sentence cannot be stressed enough. If people are not living your core values, they are not likely to change. So if you mis-hired, you must 'hug the cactus', own the mis-hire, and move them on. This means your turnover goes up, but it's crucial to the company to keep the culture intact.

The energy that is created by people that are aligned to a common Vision, share the same core values and genuinely like each other is simply incredible!

We believe a great culture is made up of great co-workers.

I always say to our managers that if we hire someone negative, they will literally ruin the most positive people in the room - you simply can't overpower negative people. So we have to act quickly to keep the culture intact. To read a brutally frank post on this, go check out Barbara Corcoran's post titled 'Shoot The Dogs Early'.

When you are all aligned behind a common Vision, share the same Core Values, and genuinely like each other - you go from being stuck in the mud to asking each other: "What do we want to do next?" - because you can count on each other to execute.

When we looked around for certifications for A & A, we looked at a number of different ideas - Best Managed, Great Place To Work, etc., and as we did our investigation, we liked the sounds of Great Place to Work for a couple of reasons:

1. The company needs to have a high % of employees TAKE the survey (never mind their results) for the results to be considered. For example, you can't just have 10 of your biggest supporters take the survey - it needs to be a really high % of your people who complete the survey. What this tells us is that our people are engaged and CARE about the company and they genuinely want the company to get better by participating - how wonderful is that?!
2. Of that high % of employees that take the survey, a high % of those people need to have a positive sentiment about your company - basically, they would recommend other people to work there. We love this as well because when you compare it to a sports team - the best teams want the best players - and how did Anthony Davis end up on the Lakers? Well, Lebron James helped recruit him, of course! This is one of the best compliments our people can give us, recommending a friend come join our team.

Our team engaged, they voted, they told us the truth, and we've been certified as a Great Place To Work by our own people.

And this is just the beginning! You get wonderful feedback through the survey from the very people who care about your company. They have told us how we can get even better. They have told us where we are strong and what we should keep doing. They have told us what is important to them.

Now it's our job to continually improve, continually listen, and continually adjust.

We can also see publicly how we've been doing in our people's eyes with the Glassdoor Reviews that we've been receiving. (And if you want to see some doozie reviews, scroll back in time to some older reviews to see how far we've come.)

I personally respond to every Glassdoor review - I really enjoy it and always learn something, even from the super negative reviews. Learn and Grow!

I love this quote from John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile US :-)

As we enter 2020, I'm looking forward to implementing our people's suggestions to make us an even better company to work for. All you have to do is listen and act.

Graham