What if your people are not your greatest asset?
Challenging the conventional wisdom about people as assets.
How the "odd" concept of borrowing someone else's dog has grown into a significant business with hundreds of thousands of very happy customers!
An interview with Rikke Rosenlund Jacobsen founder and CEO of BorrowMyDoggy.
What is your company's greatest asset?
Having worked in start-up recruitment for the past 15 years I have asked this question countless times to founders and CEOs. Nine out of ten early stage start-up CEOs I ask answer "people."
However when I ask them, "Which one of your team, if you lost them today, would result in your business closing down today" most admit that their team are all replaceable. They recognize that their company would still be the company even if they were to replace their most exceptional employee(s).
So, if your people are not your company's greatest asset, then what is?
The answer to that question, in the hyper competitive start-up world, is also a start-up's greatest asset, its CulturalDNA.
CulturalDNA is the untapped gold mine of competitive advantage - it is the differentiator between a good company and a great company, and more often than not, the key differentiator between success and failure.
The importance of developing the right company CulturalDNA
The importance of developing the right company CulturalDNA is almost universally overlooked in the early stage development of a start-up because it is not obvious how to define it, never mind nurture or develop it.
Too many start-up CEOs do not invest in their culture. Defining fundamental values, motivations and behaviours that influence their business is not on their agenda because they are too busy and do not believe they have the bandwidth to think about it. The problem with not guiding the growth and development of your CulturalDNA, is it develops and grows invisible and organically, whether you like it or not.
From my interviews, executive search experience, advisory work and Seedcamp investor experience I have noticed that the positive effects of investing in CulturalDNA are:
- consistent and impactful communication
- improved ability to hire A+ candidates who fit with the company's culture
- significantly lower employee churn
- higher trust factor across the company
- improved team happiness and satisfaction
- perhaps most importantly, having everyone pull in the same direction during times of hardship
- better overall results, higher growth, greater profitability and exit potential
By defining your company's CulturalDNA – its values, behaviours and motivations and embedding them into your company, your team will glue together and feel empowered to live the values and support the company's vision, mission and purpose at all times because they fundamentally believe in it and therefore live it 100% of the time.
