Company Culture Doesn't Come From a Slide Deck

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If You’ve Ever Worked at a Big Company…

You may have been subject to the dreaded corporate off-site where some highly paid facilitator talks to you in therapy-soaked tones about culture and empowerment, and vision statements, and romantic big ideals that sound really freakin' good when you're done with them.

But 3 days after the off-site, after the CEO emails telling the company about this bold new vision, everybody goes back to working exactly how they did before this magnificent vision statement or mission statement or whatever was ensconced in a beautiful slide deck.

You Don’t DECIDE Your Culture…

Your culture is what your culture is. It's how you work right now. You can work to change your culture, but you can't decide what your culture is. Does that make sense? Your agency culture comes from the people that work there, it comes from workflow, it comes from internal and external expectations, it comes from the way that you sell, it comes from the way that you manage people, it comes from the way that you communicate with one another.

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You DISCOVER Your Culture

Before you start your business, you might come up with some guidelines to build your culture - the culture that you want. But once you start working, moving, hiring, charging, and engaging with people, your culture grows, most of the time, without your input.

This isn't a fault. It actually might be a feature. Your culture grows out of the people that you hire, and the people that you work with, and the expectations that you create, and the expectations that you meet.

Your agency culture evolves.

Why Even Worry About Company Culture?

Your company culture becomes your operating system in a lot of ways. Now, if you aren't an a-hole, and your team sticks around, and your clients stick around, your culture is probably okay.

But here's the tricky thing about company culture: it permeates everything. It leaks out in your LinkedIn posts. It oozes through your sales presentations. It positively rains down upon your kickoff meetings. It's a tidal wave over your account meetings. It's a tsunami for an all-hands.

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Your Culture Decides Your “Right Fit Client”

That's pretty wild, huh? The way that you sign off your emails, talk to your staff, or the colors that you put in your slide decks (all of which are representative of your culture) have an impact on who your right-fit client is.

At my last agency, we were very, very informal. Believe it or not, we swore like sailors. Meetings rarely started on time, (thanks to me mostly) and we were all super happy to digress from the meeting agenda. In fact, I would say we did that joyfully.

Our sales presentations mostly started on time. (There was one time when I got lost in Canada, but I'll tell you that story some other day.) Our sales presentations reflected our technical expertise and the way that we carried ourselves. They were frequently funny, always challenging, and never too shy to point out something that could be done better or shared a lesson that we learned by screwing something up.

That kind of company culture and presentation, even though we were as good at paid search as anybody in the world, and we were better at data management than any agency not part of a holding company that I ever saw, that company culture of kinetic thinking, digression, jocularity, and vulgarity meant that we couldn't work with some folks. We lost a pitch to a bank because they thought we were too “informal”.

Your Vibes, Vision & Values are your Company Culture Come Alive

I've talked plenty about VVV + V as the most authentic way to market yourself, to attract right-fit clients, to generate content, To recruit great staff, find great partners, making your vibes, vision, and values prominent. The way that you move through the world is an expression of what it's like to work with you and to work for you, for real.

There's so often a disconnect between how a company presents itself and how it is. Prospects will hear, "We are an extension of your team" during the sales pitch. But then find that it's hard to get in touch with your account manager when you need them because they're very busy. Prospects will hear, "We are a partner in your business," but when things don't go well, the agency partner isn't taking responsibility or taking action because they are busy being defensive.

When that disconnect exists, prospects demote themselves to contacts. Clients graduate to being former clients. Employees matriculate to, "Oh yeah, I used to work there."

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When You DISCOVER Your VVV (aka Culture) It Becomes A Magnet

In so many ways, your culture doesn't really matter all that much. There are cultures that are good, there are cultures that are bad, there are cultures that are boring. But the most important thing is that you define what your culture is represented accurately, and if you're not happy with it, you become really intentional about changing it.

The funny thing about culture is that you can't force it into a particular shape. It takes on the shape that it has, fulfilling its innate embodiment. But once you're able to define what your culture is, and you think, "Wow, that's not what I want it to be," you can then start dissecting your culture and figuring out why that happens.

Maybe it's because you don't have enough staff or you have too much staff or you have staff that doesn't play well together or you are not a great manager or you've chosen to work with people who don't work the way that you do, and there's a mismatch between expectations and your output.

But once you find that piece of culture that you want to change, you can! It takes work, and it takes insight, and it takes self-reflection, and it takes an enormous amount of repetition, but you can influence how culture grows. You can't however define what it is. So your VVV has got to be 100% authentic. It has got to be 100% honest. And it's got to be 100% YOU (collectively, of course).

It’s Crucial To Uncover Your Culture

We live in a world of deep fakes, sort of videos and images that have no basis in reality. We live in a time of extremist opinions thrown about like hand grenades.

There is so much about this particular industry that we are in and so much about this particular time that we are in that is amplified beyond all recognition. The thing that will make you stand apart is by uncovering your authentic culture. It's not easy, in fact it's really hard to do, because you have to look at yourself from the outside and from the inside at the same time. There's a whole aspect not being able to read the label from the inside of the bottle.

That's why the first step in our DemandOS program is about uncovering your VVV (aka culture). Because your culture is your positioning. Your culture is your power. Your culture is your marketing. Your culture is your performance. And you can't change, improve, double down, or amplify any of those things until you know what it is. If you want to create the most effective go-to-market strategy for 2026, it starts with understanding your culture. Because that is the thing that defines the clients that you can work with. The clients that you can grow with, and the clients you can succeed with.

If you want a chance to learn about ways to discover, expose, expand, amplify, and shape your culture so that it is bringing your agency closer to your definition of success, book a call. It's free. But understanding your culture is every bit as important as understanding your operations, your finances, your target market. Because all of those functional things come from the function of your vibes, vision, and values.

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