8.2023 Edition

Hey Reader,

As promised, in line with this month’s “Build in Public” theme for these monologues, I wanted to share an important concept with you that I’ve been going deep on: your business’s values.

Don’t get these confused with your own personal values - those might influence your business’s values, but they should be separate.

Your business’s values should help you make decisions. They help new team members know what to expect of the culture. They’re often meme’d to be called “the Kool-Aid” that people drink at your company. They dictate who you partner with. They influence how you market your products & services. You have them, regardless of if you’ve formally done the work to outline them or not.

Here’s my beef with values…most folks either:

Pick words out of a hat that “sound good” and claim those are their values
Lie to themselves and lack integrity with their values (in this case, I define integrity as the discrepancy between what they say and what they do)

I fell into this same trap. When I was the co-founder in an event production company, we were growing quickly, had profits to spend, and wanted to invest in our team.

My business partner and I cared about our culture a lot, and it was time for us to “grow up” and really formalize how we operated things.

We hired an expensive “strategist” to come in and spend 3 full days with our leadership team in order to nail down our “brand identity”. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t worth it, and I’m happy to expand on what I specifically learned in another monologue (just reply to this email).

Since I respect your time, here’s my preferred 3-step method to work out your values (that won’t cost thousands of dollars):

“Word spaghetti” the wall - this is what Seth Godin calls “thrashing”. It’s a messy, unorganized, free-flowing process where you just spitball. Throw out words that you think might be your values. If you’re feeling stuck on inspiration, use Taylor Pearson’s list. Research some of your favorite companies (ie: Nike core values). Stop at around 10-15 words.
Invert the Value - here’s where it gets interesting. Take your list and give the inversion of that value that someone might pick as their company's value. Innovation inverted is Tradition. Scale inverted is High-Touch. Oh, did you get stuck on the “fluffy” words like “Responsibility” or “Integrity” or “Trust”? That’s the point. To me, if you can’t give a compelling reason why someone would value the inversion of your value, it ceases to become a practical value for your business. No one is going around saying “we value lying to our customers” or “we prioritize making empty promises and not delivering on what we said we would”. Sure, you have certain businesses that aren’t trustworthy or don’t take responsibility all the time out there in the world, but having the word “Responsibility” put up in the hallway on an inspirational poster isn’t gonna fix the problem. Ideally, you’ve narrowed this list down to 3-6 values at this point after this inverse thinking.
Tool-ify your 3 values - now it’s time to make them useful, condensed and non-negotiable. Which of these words do you already use to make decisions? Which of these values do you look for when hiring someone? At a tricky crossroads, how could your values show you the right path? Let’s take a value from Acquisition.com as an example: Competitive Greatness.
1. Quick proof of point #2: The inversion of this might be Helpful Assistance. A business that values Helpful Assistance doesn’t need to be the best. They don’t need to grow 20% year-over-year. They’re more than happy in being helpful and just staying in business. They might even choose to NOT hire someone who displays “competitive” qualities because it’ll clash with their culture.

Back to Competitive Greatness…the recruiting team might ask themselves when looking at a candidate: is this person able to be competitively great? Have they displayed examples of competitive greatness in previous positions? And if the answer is no, they aren’t getting hired.

Let’s do another example related to decisions…when it’s time to decide what product to launch next, they’ll ask: which of these 2 options helps us be more competitively great? Easy choice.

I know in point #1, I mentioned these being “words” because it’s easier to brainstorm this way, but this last step is where you add some thoughtful or clarifying adjectives to your values. “Greatness” is fine, but when you say “Competitive Greatness”, I know what I would expect to see if I walked into that business. I might see leaderboards on the wall, celebrations for whoever got the most sales that week, teams researching competitors so they know what “the other guys” are doing, etc.

As you start to rule out contenders, see if you can condense values together in order to make them more clear. Gary Vee uses “Kind Candor” as one of his values, so that he’s able to give firm feedback while also being a nice human being in the process.

Hopefully this “tool-ifying” process will rule out certain ones on your list that are either redundant or not helpful, because your goal here is to land on 3 non-negotiable choices. Think of these like a stool - all 3 of them must be present in your organization.

Do a thought exercise where you envision what your business would look like if just 2 of those values were present. This is similar to the “Fast, Cheap, Good…you can only pick 2” exercise, except because you’ve cemented these values, you actually CAN have all 3. A great pizza place might give me incredible pizza (Good), at a solid price (Cheap), in less than 15 minutes (Fast)…but there’s constantly a line out the door (it’s missing Scale as a value).

If you do this 2-legged stool exercise right, you should be able to hypothetically describe 3 scenarios (1 & 2, 1 & 3, 2 & 3) where your business is missing one of your core values that you couldn’t stand. For example: it would really irk you to have that “Good” pizza place that’s “Fast”, but if you had to charge $150/pie, that’d make you upset.

With that, you’ve landed on your three values! These are immensely useful in making decisions, putting to words why something doesn’t “feel right”, and creating a culture inside of your organization.

It might feel weird at first, but I promise, you’re going to have to do this eventually if you plan on growing your business.

Apologies in advance if this also illuminated why things feel chaotic and disconnected at work for you 🫣

Speaking of work, I just did this for Repertoire and I’m stoked to share our values with you in the coming weeks in this newsletter. I’ll be dedicating a monologue to each one, so that if you decide on doing this for yourself, you’ll be able to follow along with my thought process and plant your own flags before the end of March 🙌

Bonus tip: there’s a great aphorism that I try and keep in mind…whenever your organization triples, there’s turbulence and whiplash. Going from 1 person to 3 people…tectonic changes. Same with 3 to ~10. 10 to 30, and so on. You might have to re-examine your values every time your team size triples, in order to stay on top of these and ensure that you keep that integrity in-tact.

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Top Hits 💥

Solo dining – tips for dining alone

Dining alone is becoming a normal experience. What was once to be avoided as a source of shame and loneliness, is now a choice by people who spend much of their daily lives alone and yet are completely ok with it.

Research shows that on average nearly a third of Europeans often eat every meal alone, with the Polish (40%) leading the way. Overall a third (33%) of all Brits eat all their meals alone, followed by around three in 10 German (31%), French (30%), Spanish (29%) and Italian (29%) consumers.

Our Take: You may not have seen the trendy “That Girl” TikToks on your For You Pages yet, but believe me they exist and in abundance. Although eating alone has gained popularity in the mainstream, it has also become a TikTok famous advice… and for good reason!

Think about it, it is so difficult to make friends as an adult, but also find some peaceful time to yourself enjoying your own company.

Let us set a scene for you - tired after a strenuous 9-5 on a Friday night you realise all your friends are busy (chilling at home or amde some other plans). You decide to get glammed up for yourself and go to the nearest sit-down-dinner-place. You sit yourself at the bar, have a few exchanges with the bartender/server maybe find something of interest in common OR you finish reading your book OR mindlessly scroll through the phone.

Eating alone doesn’t have to be “lonely”, it can be fun for one!

Caviar as a Cheaper Snack, Served on Doritos and Cheese Steaks

Caviar has gone from being a luxurious delicacy reserved for the fanciest of occasions, like fashion week parties, supplemental courses on tasting menus and exclusive weddings, to, for some, a flavorful topping served at everyday gatherings like book club readings and tailgate parties.

Even Taco Bell has jumped on the caviar train posting a TikTok video in January showing a guy named Josh filling a Doritos Locos Taco shell with crème fraîche and “spoonfuls of caviar.” “We’ve got to get that thing on the menu real quick,” the video’s host said.

Our Take: It’s important to pay attention to the proliferation and hype cycles of ingredients and how guests respond to them. As a trend reaches peak “euphoria” and you see it everywhere, it might be time to put it back on the shelf.

Look out for the cycle of: Novel/Weird > Exclusive > Trend > Everywhere > Dilution > Eww

Beware of the hucksters that come out of the woodwork in the “Everywhere” and “Dilution” phases and start to give the product a bad name. For most customers, it just takes 1-2 bad experiences for them to write off an ingredient or technique entirely. We’re reminded for the quip with new technologies, “marketers ruin everything”, and the same might be happening to caviar. If you’re sourcing great product and have pride in what you’re serving, now’s the time to double down on telling that story to folks so that your mother-of-pearl spoons don’t start gathering dust!

WTF with Web3 and How the Technology Relates to Restaurants

In the food world, Applebee’s launched a “Metaverse Meal” NFT, Pizza Hut is rolling out Non-Fungible Pizza, and Pringles issued a virtual flavor called “CryptoCrisp.” But, according to a number of entrepreneurs, owners, and advocates, web3 promises benefits to the industry beyond megabrands’ pun-laden PR stunts.

Colin Camac, a founder of Front of House (FOH), a startup working to partner with restaurants to offer “digital collectibles” (they conspicuously avoid “NFT” and other crypto jargon) that confer benefits to buyers, says, “We’re trying to connect [restaurants] with their best guests, people who are interested in having a special experience and being able to digitize that so a guest has this thing that can actually get them tangible rewards within restaurants.”

Our Take: Contrary to the last story’s take about “marketers ruining everything”, this isn’t even close to played out yet. It’s still in the spaghetti-throwing phase (Novel/Weird) where nothing’s stuck to the wall yet. Let’s do some first principles thinking:

Do (actually valuable) rewards encourage loyalty and incentivize great behavior from both businesses and customers? Yes.

Are humans hard-wired to “signal” to each other? Yes.

Is the technology easy to use and widely accessible? No. Not yet.

The second it is, though, it’s going to make dining more fun than ever. Imagine if there was:

🕸️ An interconnected dining network allows for you and me to compare the menus we had at the same restaurant 3 years apart…who the chef was, what ingredients were used, the wines that we had that we can’t seem to remember the name of….

🎁 The ability for a restaurant to see exactly what my preferences are and implement some Unreasonable Hospitality during my experience because my Web3 wallet is connected to my reservation

⭐️ A ledger of record that shows exactly what happened during a customer’s experience so that reviews had to be from real orders and not review-bombers on small businesses

What’s striking to us about this article is the removal of the jargon in service of highlighting the value to the user. If you asked someone to actually describe how WiFi works, chances are they couldn’t do it; they just know it’s valuable to their life and it’s pretty easy to use. Once we get there with this technology, we think it’ll start to take off.

ICYMI 🙌

🍊Ever had pickled citrus supremes before?

🎙️Bonus Podcast Episode! - I breakdown the 2 types of stages and how to navigate them. Listen to the episode to know what to expect for your next stagiaire role!