Culture = Brand
Happy Sunday!
I’ve been listening to the Acquired podcast episode on LVMH this week, and the power of the brands owned by LVMH is mindblowing.
I went down a rabbit hole on brand this week and realized two things:
Bullpen’s brand is our company’s most valuable asset, and
The quality of our brand is highly impacted by the culture that is fostered among our team members
More on that below …
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This week at Bullpen …
After removing “freelancer” from our website, we had our biggest week of inbound leads, AND the leads have been of better quality. This is VERY encouraging - my gut was that we’d have considerably fewer leads … I was wrong.
We shortened our sales process, removing a demo call that we added as an experiment at the start of the year. In short, the demo didn’t lead to more engagements, so it became dead weight.
We added a job scoping call to our sales process. Our reputation is highly impacted by our ability to nail talent placements, and that starts with an exceptional understanding of our client’s needs.
Lastly - we’re working on several more web updates to further remove the insinuation that we only support low-level roles. These changes will be rolled out slowly over the coming weeks.
Brand starts with culture
Bullpen’s ability to become a “household” brand in the commercial real estate industry will be highly predicated on MY ability as a leader to foster a healthy culture that grows beyond me.
When you have one or two folks on your team, your natural tendencies dictate the culture of the company. How you speak about clients and other team members dictates culture. Your tendency to micromanage dictates culture. YOU dictate culture.
Since we’ve hired a few extra team members, I’ve noticed a big swing in what dictates culture. Everybody’s natural tendencies have started to play off each other, and the culture has begun evolving in spite of me. In some ways, this has been really good. In other ways - not so much.
With proper guardrails, the company starts to take on a culture of its own, and the founder becomes less and less of a risk to the business.
Without clear cultural standards, the team dynamic can become unhealthy, and customers notice.
Coming full circle… the culture that you create on your team impacts the customer experience, which impacts your brand, which impacts your businesses’ ability to grow. Choose it carefully, and be intentional.
Working backward… Bullpen isn’t the cheap option for finding CRE contractors, but we make our clients’ lives really easy. As such, our culture needs to be hyper-customer-centric. Our customer’s needs should be prioritized over our internal processes (at the same time, we can never make sacrifices that impact a quality customer experience). We must speak kindly about both clients and talent, even when they frustrate us.
That’s all for this week! I’ll leave you with this quote that I liked from Alex Hormozi (and probably lots of other business influencers)…
“When you solve rich people problems, you get to solve rich people prices.”
✌️📤
Tyler
Founder @ Bullpen