Your Culture Got You To $5M. However, It Definitely Won’t Get You To $100M.

You probably know that your current culture won’t get you to 3X, 10X, or 20X of where you are today. Yes, it has to change.  And, if you are serious about scaling, there is a big lesson to learn before you start modifying your culture:  You have to match the speed and the level engagement needed to the amount of change your organization can handle.  Too slow and you don’t grow, too fast and you break things.  A lot of things.

The Mistake

I learned this the hard way at a NASDAQ-listed company 20+ years ago.  My company was acquired and as part of that acquisition I took over their entire sales organization.  The company that acquired my company was growing 5% YOY, while their competitors were growing 50% YOY.  The expectation was that my team and I would drive rapid growth, now.

I inherited an established and very reactive customer service-oriented sales team of over 200 representatives who erroneously believed they were great outbound sales reps.  That culture in no way, shape or form was going to get us to the next level.  It had to change, and change into one that was a proactive, outbound lead focused group that constantly hunted.

I immediately got to work.  I created new compensation plans, trained the leadership team, coached individuals, led town halls, drove hard for changes in behavior and implemented almost all of that with the first six months.

It was all the right stuff to do, but there was a problem.  I did too fast, and while I thought I had a handle on the communication, coaching and reinforcement strategy, it wasn’t enough.

The result? Breakage. Discontent. Lower morale.  Expected turnover, but too fast.

I learned a valuable lesson and one that I haven’t repeated.

How To Do It Right

Here’s what I do differently now.

First, I diagnose where we actually are. You have to get close to where the current culture sits, not where you think it sits.

Then I build a four-part evolution plan.

1. Define exactly how you want to evolve. Get granular. Not “more creative” or “more customer focused.” What behaviors will people actually need to do differently?
2. Create a communication strategy with 10x the engagement you think you need. People need to hear things seven times before they believe it. Then seven more times before they act on it. CEOs and executive teams who communicate once and wonder why nothing changed are skipping the compounding work.
3. Build training and development that supports the migration. Asking people to change without equipping them is a setup for failure. What capabilities does the new culture demand? Go build those.
4. Set up ongoing reinforcement. Catch people doing the new culture right. Call it out. Celebrate it. Make heroes of the early adopters. because the rollout is just the opening act, and real culture change lives in the months after, when new behaviors get named and repeated every single day.  More handholding than you expect. More communication than feels reasonable. More calendar time than the board wants to give it.

When you get it right, though, you build a culture that scales with your ambition.

Start with the diagnosis. Everything else follows from knowing where you really are.