While you’re building your business, you’re probably buried in the minutiae and administrative details: figuring out how to use spreadsheets, considering your pricing structure, what to add to your website, how to buy Facebook ads.
But have you given much thought to what your values are?
What some business owners fail to consider from the beginning are writing down the values they can turn to all stages of business growth, the very things that they can use as a concrete foundation.
Think about building your business around any or all of the following: courage, respect, inspiration, loyalty and purpose.
A carefully crafted “framework of objectivity” helps guide your decision making. When you have these core values, you can better support your own vision and eventually, as your business swells and you bring on more employees, shape your culture. These core values will reflect your company’s values as a whole.
To find your core values, consider your own personal values that reflect your own identity. What are your principles? What do you believe? What are your philosophies? These are the underlying competencies that will make sure your business not only launches successfully, but keeps running, strong, smooth and sure.
Your core values will ensure that you stand behind the quality of your work, the services you provide.
Your core values will teach your clients about what you are about, personally and professionally. When your values match that of your clients’, you gain a competitive edge and advantage — it’s why they’ll always choose you rather than someone else.
Your core values will not only gain you clients, but will also help you retain them.
The above listed values are helpful for anyone starting a business, but if you’d like to do some deeper soul searching, ask yourself the following questions:
- What values are important enough to you that they’re fundamental to your being and your business even if no one else praised or rewarded you for them?
- If you were promised all the money in the world for discarding or dismissing these values, would you be okay with that? What values are so important to you that money could not create a divide between you and them?
- Do you foresee that these values will be as important to you when you’re operating, for example, a multi-million dollar business as when you only have a single client?
- Even if you were disadvantaged as a result of maintaining these values, would you still find them of personal importance?
Remember this, coaches, as you build your businesses: core values are fixed. They should never change, regardless of time and other factors. These values will affect everything you do, from the birth of your business to when you have created an entire organization filled with team members and leaders. Although strategies and procedures and processes change, your core values should always remain the same.