Throwback to Defining Business Principles
In the virtual Lemonade Stand, we take you back to the past! Crystal and Emily take a deep dive into Lemon Seed's mission, vision, and values - and offer advice on creating your own! They cover the following topics:
0:35 - Defining Your Brand Statements
5:00 - What's Lemon Seed's Mission?
7:00 - Diving Deeper & Crafting Your Own Mission
11:00 - The Impact of Your Vision Statement
16:50 - Our Zesty Core Values
18:10 - Curating Your Values - A Deep Dive into Our Core
31:00 - Checking On and Implementing Your Core Values
32:40 - Bringing Everything Together
If you would like a copy of the trifold brochure mentioned in this episode, email hello@lemonseedmarketing.com with the subject line "FTYC: Mission, Vision, Values Brochure".
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We’ll see you next time, Lemon Heads!
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Speaker 1: 0:07
What's up, lemonheads? Welcome back to another episode of From the Yellow Chair. I'm Emily and I'm Crystal, and this week we're going to talk about some core, foundational pieces that sometimes contractors are just missing out on. We talk about branding all the time, but today we're going to talk about your mission, vision and values.
Speaker 2: 0:24
Yeah, you know, a lot of times I think we're just kind of lazy with this. We have them.
Speaker 1: 0:28
We have a mission. We're showing up to work every day, with or without them.
Speaker 2: 0:31
Yeah, we just need to spend a little time diving into these things and trying to give you guys some inspiration on how you can get these things documented. So let's sip some lemonade, let's do it, let's do it All.
Speaker 1: 0:48
Some lemonade, let's do it All, right. So a mission, a vision and core values. They sound so simple and like you hear these things all the time, but really they can be very powerful. And you know, when you're trying to lead a team, sometimes they need to know where are they going. And so, defining out some of these things having a mission, having a vision, defining out what our core values are, you know, I think it can really shape the culture of the company, sure, and you know it's, it is a part of your brand, absolutely, and so you know brand.
Speaker 2: 1:11
Again, I go back to it can't just be your good looking logo.
Speaker 2: 1:15
And for some of you, good is a strong adjective, but it can't just be your basic logo. We've got to, we've got to complete a whole picture here, and so when we're looking for a mission, our vision and our core values, you know, emily and I were visiting about this and we were like you know, we need to practice what we preach, and so last year, probably last fall, we sat down and wrote these out, took us probably two or three hours to kind of plug through what these things were now we're pretty decisive.
Speaker 1: 1:41
well, and it wasn't haphazardly, we, we did not use chat GPT, we did. It wasn't a thing then.
Speaker 2: 1:45
We came up with it all on our own, the wording and everything, yeah, so now y'all got it easy now, back in the day, walking to school with no shoes up a hill, both ways, you know. But you know, we, we sat down and really what we did is we just were throwing out ideas which, if you've never been in a brainstorming session with crystal and emily, it's entertaining anyway. But, um, if you, we sat down and literally we're just tossing ideas of, like what she and I felt like were important pieces to our company and to our team and to our clients, and how do we bring all that together? So we created our own vision, mission and core values and we wanted to make sure that our team, we wanted to give these to our team. We wanted to give these to our team.
Speaker 2: 2:25
Again, we created them last fall, but we had our team conference where we brought our whole team in in July. So we knew that we had time to get some things done, really mull these over, and then we announced these things to our team in July and you know it, really I think our team was kind of pleasantly surprised at it. And then we challenged our team and our leaders to memorize these. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: 2:47
And we were able to share like our viewpoint behind these and like why we chose these words and why we chose these values, and so I think, kind of hearing that explanation, it helped give them the buy in, but then we also want it to be very top of mind to them. So, you know, we invested in like some very large, good looking signage that you can see every single day, and we printed these little tiny, little tiny trifolds. It's like the size of a business card but that has each of them on there If you're watching the video. Shout out to our social media or YouTube channel, things like that. But yeah, you can see us visually here with these little tiny cards, but it's just to reiterate how important these things actually are and giving our team the resources and the accessibility to them.
Speaker 2: 3:28
Well, and I'll tell you, I was sitting a little story, you know sitting in Austin, texas, I'm pretty sure and in a hotel room getting ready to do a presentation with another marketer from another large heating and air conditioning business, and she and I were just talking and visiting and we were going back and forth and she's like fumbling around in her backpack and I was like what is homegirl doing other than not paying attention to me? Excuse me, Excuse me, hi, you know we're having a whole conversation and I mean like I'm talking like comfortable, like we're sitting on the couch in a hotel room and there's two other people in the room, and so we were pretty comfortable just chatting. But she whips out this little like trifold thing and I was like can I have this? Because it reminded me how immediately I knew that her company valued what was in that trifold card Enough for her to keep it with her. And so I brought it back and was like Emily, you have got to see this, we've got to do this. So we straight up stole the idea.
Speaker 2: 4:21
We stole it, but we modified it slightly. But listen, good ideas are good ideas, and so it brings me to that exact point here. Y'all there's really not just a, it is you can come up with some really cool mission and visions and core values. So don't get me twisted here. What I'm going to say is do not think that this truly has to be this profound doctoral level dissertation paper of a written mission, vision and core values. Honestly, if you're just honest about what you value and what you prioritize, and then now you have tools like ChatGPT and even like getting a content writer to help you jazz it up some, you have plenty of opportunity here. So we're going to tell you a little bit about what Lemon Seed chose, what we chose for Lemon Seed, and so I'll go first with our mission At Lemon Seed Marketing, we strive to provide creativity, clarity and to be the catalyst and spark to contractors in the home service industry through strategy in their marketing plan and execution of their brand.
Speaker 2: 5:20
And so we felt, like you know, with mission. The mission of a company is really like the statement that outlines the purpose and the reason that we even do what we do every single day. So we felt like it needed to be like in real time. In real time. What are we doing right now, every day?
Speaker 1: 5:38
And I think kind of defining, you know what our company does but who it serves and how it operates. I think are also key points what our company does but who it serves and how it operates, I think are also key points. And I like to say points and outlines, just like you said. It doesn't have to be this dissertation, it's a high level thing, but getting it a little bit more concise elevator pitch, if you will.
Speaker 2: 5:55
Well and like actionable language you know, as I was researching the definition of these things. You know an actionable language and then even specific things to what you do. So you know, if you're a plumbing company, that probably should be somewhere in your mission is something around the actual, tangible things that you do. And so, for us, the creativity, the clarity strategy, words like that they're important to us. Creativity is very important to us. Clarity for our clients is important to us.
Speaker 2: 6:24
It's not super easy to really understand what Lemon Seed does as far as the amount of things that we do, but for the most part, if our clients were our potential clients, were to read this mission, they would understand what our goal was to provide them. And then when a team member takes a new seat on the Lemon Seed team, they understand that this is what we do. It's actionable, it's real, it's tangible, and so you know some good examples, like our mission is to provide, and then you state your service, or to help businesses grow, or to help families be comfortable in their homes, or provide solutions for water filtration, whatever that looks like for you. It just needs to be an actionable item, and then I call them fluff words. But again, we don't have to get super crafty here, because if you were to go look up like national ones of companies like Amazon or Nike and things like that, sometimes they're like literally like four words yeah so don't overthink this, right, just start kind of plugging away at writing these things out.
Speaker 2: 7:28
That is a concise, so it can't be seven paragraphs long. Right, it's got to be concise. And then the reason that your company even exists is to do what? Again, I encourage you here, like now taglines, I'm gonna give you a whole different spiel. So if you're about to say family owned and operated and like I'm going to have a sound effect right here, so original.
Speaker 2: 7:47
Rachel that works behind the scenes right now. She's figuring out how she can have a big like 1995 X. You did not get on the board for Family Feud. You know it's a terrible noise. So, no, yes, it's a great quality. No, it's not a differentiator anymore. So, on mission like provide quality service, Okay, like that's everybody. So let's dig a little deeper than that for what our mission can be.
Speaker 1: 8:11
And I think one thing that we were a little intentional in like, if we even strip down our mission statement even more, it'd kind of be the three C's the creativity, clarity and the catalyst to contractor. So you know, within our mission statement are those three C's and if you can remember those three key things you can get the rest of our mission statement.
Speaker 2: 8:28
Yeah, and you know to speak on that. For a second, let's talk about catalyst. So I was visiting with a client today and I shared this with Emily. It's a potential client and I've worked with this client a couple of years ago. He called inquiring about services and he calls again inquiring about services and I talk him through like what he can do because he has some really good core pieces. He just can't pull the trigger. Yeah, and I went and told him I was like I'm just so disappointed, not for myself, not about the time that I invested in visiting with him. That's really. I'm more disappointed in he's not allowing anyone to help him get off of high center.
Speaker 1: 9:01
Well, and you see the potential that he has.
Speaker 2: 9:05
I just want to like, pull my hair out, or literally like, and this is true I'm so tempted to be like sir, just let me do it for, give me 60 days for free.
Speaker 2: 9:12
Yeah, I know I know, because I'm like I can fix so many things, but at the end of the day we are, we want to be the catalyst, which means we want to be the fire, but somebody else has to actually let us get them started. Yeah, yeah, you know. So being the catalyst sometimes does it, does it not? Sometimes it always requires the partnership side of things, and so that was a very intentional word that we chose because we want to provide hope.
Speaker 2: 9:37
This gets like super emotional for a lot of people, but I'll never forget, like we've had clients call us and say I just never knew what my, what I could really do. Or every day, when I talk to clients potentially considering lemon seed, they are and I hate using this term because it seems so like, so cringy, but they're really lost. Sure, you know, and like, of all the things on an owner's plate, marketing is like one of the most burdensome things, because contractors put so much pressure on themselves to always have an answer for call volume. Why can't I make my phone ring? And I've trusted all these people and these people take me for granted. Or they take advantage of me, or I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not creative, and really it's because they have nobody there supporting them in those things Coming alongside them yeah.
Speaker 2: 10:27
So when we sat back and thought about those things, that's how our mission came about. So mission came about. So for you guys that are listening and you're like, okay, what would be my mission, a lot of you want to be the innovative one, like you're always looking for the newest and coolest thing to bring to the market. You should talk about that. Some of you really like traditional. We're just good service that's timely, dependable and trustworthy. If you focus on being an affordable option, if you focus on being a high-end option with high-end equipment and accessories, all of those things are who you are and why you do what you do. Own it, yeah, just own it and just go with it. Like let's hit the gas. If I've said hit the gas one time today, I've said it 10 times.
Speaker 2: 11:09
I don't know why yes, so okay, okay, so that's mission.
Speaker 1: 11:13
So vision. So a vision depicts the company's aspirations and your long-term goals. It provides a glimpse to the bigger picture and what we want to do to take on the world, you know, to yourselves, to your employees, to any stakeholders that might be in there. And so our vision at Lemon Seed is to be the premier marketing agency in the trades industry to be known for our strategic plans and execution that increases our clients revenue year after year, and to be recognized for our creative, disruptive brands that cannot help but be noticed Boom, mic, drop.
Speaker 2: 11:49
That's why I paused for a minute, you know, for dramatic effect. Yes, rachel, we expect full round of applause right there.
Speaker 1: 11:56
But really the vision. Again, it's that big picture. You know, our mission is what we're doing now, but our vision is where we're going and how we're going to continue to propel this thing forward. Well, and the impact.
Speaker 2: 12:07
Sure, yeah, so you know, and people you know. The other day I was talking to Dave Rothacker from Go Time Success Group. He has a leadership mastermind that we have our mid-level managers going through right now. But I called him one day. I was just frustrated, you know, and I was like, hey, you know, help me walk through this Like cause.
Speaker 2: 12:24
I love he's, he's philosophical to me and sometimes just his insights very, very well read, and sometimes his insight just makes me think differently. And he was like gosh Crystal, I've been looking for a company like Lemon Seed to help contractors and I'm just so appreciative that I found you guys and I think you guys are doing a great job. And I was like, yeah, but I'm not winning every time. We're not winning every time we're making mistakes or we're killing it with these, or the contractor can't find value in this piece. And then on the other side it's like all of these other contractors are like thank you, thank you. It's kind of a weird place to be.
Speaker 2: 12:58
Yeah, so I know contractors that are here. You know you feel the same pain that we feel as business owners. You know you've got gosh. You can't seem to make some homeowners happy. Some of your employees are never happy, that's just par for the course, but when we're talking about the impact that we feel like we can have on the industry, so for Lemon Seed, our industry is the marketing and advertising side. You know we have to tell the people this all the time. We don't do websites. Today I had to call and explain. We had a new client that was calling their web company like sorry, we're going with Lemon Seed and I was like sir, you do not want me building out your website.
Speaker 1: 13:31
No, no, we need them. We need them Like. No, no, we need them, we need them Like. Bring them back we work alongside of them.
Speaker 2: 13:36
Yes, so it's like, you know, like your kids, sometimes you'll say something like in the car to your husband and your kid will hear it. Then I'll go repeat it. So you know, I teach Sunday school and anytime I'm like who has a prayer request? I'm like not about your mommy and daddy's business. So sometimes you'll have like a candid conversation with a contractor and you're like hey, and they'll run and tell their digital company like y'all suck, we're leaving and I'm like absolutely not Bring it back, sir.
Speaker 2: 14:02
But you know when we're talking about the impact. So for Lemon Seed, the impact that we wanted to have was just really recognized our clients recognized for their disruptive brands. It's one of those things like we want to be behind the scenes supporting contractors being successful in their own markets and it's so fun to watch these contractors that really trust us with their whole vision and how they're pushing things forward. But the vision side of things can also be daunting. If you're trying to figure out what my mission is, that's the same as my vision. So when you look at vision you have to think, like Emily said, bigger picture and further out. You know, is it to revolutionize? There's words that you can look up that really change the impact that you're trying to have on the marketplace.
Speaker 1: 14:50
Yeah, and to me it's something that hasn't been done yet, you know. So, like I was reading Microsoft's vision statement from, I think, back in the 80s. But theirs was very simple but a personal computer on every desk.
Speaker 1: 15:03
Yes, you know so super simple, but like that was something that was unheard of at the time. But they had this little glimmer, this little vision of what their product could be, and so you know they made that their vision, and so you know we worked hard to define that for us. But contractors like you can be thinking like, what does that look like for your community or in your state or in your region? And then what services is it? Is it to be everything to every home? Or you're more defined. You know there's so much potential, and so to me that's a big difference between the mission and the vision.
Speaker 2: 15:33
The mission is what we're doing now but the vision is where we're going and you know, like, for right now, a lot of you like I know some of you that are you know up on trends, you know it's on the thermostat, on the home right, and so some of those things are really coming to be. So if you've bought into that vision and you want to be a part of it, I would start writing those things into our own visions and I just encourage you and maybe it's things other than just work-related like maybe you want to be very impactful on your community, maybe you want to provide tons of growth for your employees that can also be a part of your company's vision and just keeping it in line with what is important to you. So don't fake this.
Speaker 1: 16:13
No, absolutely not.
Speaker 2: 16:14
So, if you're not passionate about being an eco-friendly company? Please don't put that to provide green solutions. Yeah, and I'm like sir you just you don't even have a cardboard compactor. You're out there just throwing away aluminum equipment you're rolling up in your hummer, yeah sir, let's back it up.
Speaker 2: 16:30
You know again, sir, ma'am, let's back up. So it's, it's one of those things. It needs to remain true. So there's nothing wrong with a little jazzing it up when it comes to documenting it. But listen, don't get wild here, don't? And again, y'all know I'm from East Texas with these Sunday school answers, but you know we don't have to have the Sunday school Bible answer here. It's more around writing something that's thoughtful and something that's true to who you really are. So we're going to jump into our core values next. This was easy for me. Well, this one was my favorite part. Yeah, well, it's because we get to make it branded, of course. And then, when you want to learn things, I have always taught myself acronyms that help me learn things, and so, of course, the acronym that we created for this is ZESTY, and so the only tricky part was coming up with a word for Z, but we had no trouble. No, ironically.
Speaker 2: 17:22
And I think it perfectly depicts us. It does. It does so our values are. Our ZESTY approach to marketing and strategy is rooted in these core values. At Lemon Seed, we will be. Z is zealous for creativity, e for experts and strategy, s is for servant-minded advocates, and we're going to come back to these.
Speaker 1: 17:41
T. We're going to be thorough and timely and Y we're going to be yielding results.
Speaker 2: 17:47
So when we jump back into each of these letters, we really were able. I mean, I don't know what was happening with us. We were just on it that day because we were rolling these, rolling through, these rolling through because we had a charcuterie board in front of us.
Speaker 1: 17:59
That's all we need, guys. So some of y'all.
Speaker 2: 18:01
So I know some of you men are like I don't know, dang charcuterie board, so I'll get some beer and pretzels, or whatever it is, I don't know tamales, I don't know where y'all live, but go for it with whatever makes you happy here and sit around with some other creative people that are business-minded and just like rock these things out. So Z was zealous for creativity, and so what that meant for us is we need our team every day, hungry for the opportunity to be creative and not just the design team.
Speaker 2: 18:29
like everyone on the team, you know social media content, writers, even human resources, Like how can we be creative in adding additional benefits to our or adding additional perks to our benefits package? How can we be creative at our company holidays and things like that, and it sounds silly but really like we wanted everybody just hungry for creativity and collaboration. And then the experts in strategy. When we wrote this, you know I'm We've gone through some growing pains, just like any growing company, and one of the things we've realized is I have constantly, I, constantly, I need to be putting our account management team and project coordinating team through as much exposure as I can, Because to be experts, you have to be overeducated in all of these things.
Speaker 2: 19:16
And so it did motivate us to relaunch a training, almost a daily training structure, which sounds ludicrous, but it's pretty much. If it's not daily, it's every other day that we are jumping in with the strategies part of our team here at Living Seed and training on different topics. When I see that a new CRM has dropped, a new offering, we jump on. We talk about it. When we see that other things are happening in the marketplace and behind the scenes, we talk about it so that we can be on the cutting edge of those things.
Speaker 1: 19:49
Well, and you know we could have made this like a double E like experts in everything but like in reality, that's not our goal or our vision to be everything you know. And so we stripped it down to experts in strategy. You know that was in our vision and our mission statement, that strategy piece, and so stripping that down and focusing on that and the branding aspect is what Lemon Seed wants to do.
Speaker 2: 20:09
Yeah, and we tell people this all the time. We have to tell people that we are responsible for the over picture, overall picture of how you are going to grow your business and so making our team experts in those is an ongoing everyday thing. And then servant minded advocates. This one was also an easy one for us to pick because, again, I have a very servant minded spirit about me, or I try to. I love to serve people. Now I'm bossy.
Speaker 1: 20:39
Okay, no, but you are very in every aspect of your life.
Speaker 2: 20:42
You know it's kind of an important. It's important to me, like morally and religiously, to be servant hearted, servant minded and have a servant's heart. And I have also realized we have a lot of team members that have a servant's heart. They naturally want to serve their friends, their teammates or whatever whoever's in their lives. Serve their friends, their teammates, their whatever whoever's in their lives. And so what we realized is, if you're one of those people that this is the way it is, sir, sorry, like we can't do it then you're probably not going to work well on the lemon seed team, mainly because we make concessions for clients every day. We serve them in ways that.
Speaker 2: 21:16
Are they necessarily paying for everything? No, and I know I get beat up on a P&L sometimes because I'm like, oh, we spent an extra three hours on that client. But you know what we have to decide is it worth it or not? And to us it was important that contractors have somebody that's advocating for them and serving them. So, yes, I needed a little extra help getting a Christmas party invitation out. Did it hurt Lemon Seed? At the most part, no. Did people take advantage of it? Probably, but at the end of the day, we needed people on our team that understood the importance of servanthood and ultimately that's what people came to Lemon Seed for.
Speaker 1: 21:49
They came because I need help. I need someone who can help me do this and things like that, and so the servant-minded advocates was very important to us. For the T, we want to be thorough and timely. This is one that we definitely have to preach. It does not come naturally to all people, especially creatives. On the thorough part, okay, we like to be wild and free, but the details matter, and doing it in a timely manner, like we can't just get to it when we get to it you know the season's already passed her We've done Miss Summer, you know, if we're taking months to get these things out, even weeks, you know we have to be very intentional to find the details, find the little caveats. It's like, uh-uh, we can't do that, we can't push that out with that. That doesn't have an expiration date, we're going to get taken advantage of there.
Speaker 2: 22:30
Yes, yes, learning those things. And again, y'all, it's a challenge when you allow yourself to have a custom agency, like we do, and you turn around and then you have to remember all the caveats for every state and every. It gets challenging, but we have to do our very best every single day. And also, like Dan Antonelli I showed this to Emily the other day we admire him, we love what he does, for branding in the industry, but he made this post the other day and Emily has said this same literal exact thing to me all the time.
Speaker 2: 23:03
Why are people leading, making all of their decisions, I'm sorry. Why are people making all of their decisions by committee?
Speaker 1: 23:10
and how it slows everything down and like and he said it in his post, it was a hundred percent accurate, you know. But it was like the best way to kill a brilliant idea or to do something cutting edge and differentiating and stuff. Get on a committee, ask everybody they're paid to make the safe move and the safe bet. But you know what thing was ever excellent or had exponential growth or anything? Playing it safe, that's right. Staying in your comfort zone, yes.
Speaker 2: 23:34
Playing what's already known and been done, you know and it's it's different because, you know, I sit back sometimes and I'm like you know, people think that what they should do is trust other people on their team to help them make decisions. So I understand the natural tendency to want to do that. But listen, people aren't naturally risky OK, most people aren't. And so when we're like you know what you should do, you should put a gigantic apple on the middle of your vans, you know, and invest all this money, and you know, and the client's like I love it, I love it, emily. Like great idea, your team did a great job. They turn around and they're like I'm just going to show my husband tonight. The next day they're beat down Guys, this just isn't going to work. Like there, guys, this just didn't get to work. Like there's another company that you know they have a banana on the very bottom piece of one of their doors. And what if people confuse the fruit?
Speaker 1: 24:25
And then we're like my, the coworker, the CSR. Her son doesn't like apples, Like he threw up from an apple one time. Like you're, like sir you conjure up all these things that prevent you from doing something.
Speaker 2: 24:36
Yes, and let me let me break another thing, and I know we're stepping on toes with this because a lot of people we had another client who they all this. We created this whole new maintenance plan, this whole new launch, and we were really methodical about what did we want to offer and how we were going to set it up in service Titan and the graphics and the look and the feel and the name and all the scripts and everything. And they were like well, let me go show it to my team. And literally I said you're gonna, you're gonna want to change every piece of this because the team, you can't ask for 30 opinions because you ask them, they feel obligated to give you some opinion, whether it's valid or not yeah.
Speaker 2: 25:10
So we don't ask, we announce that's right. Okay, we don't ask, I'm writing that down, okay, we announce what we are going to do and listen. We've learned this with our own team. Sometimes it's too.
Speaker 2: 25:24
People naturally are skeptical of things that they're unsure of, right. So if you are sure that you need to rebrand, let's use that. Or if you're sure that we need to put out a new maintenance plan for you or whatever that looks like for you, you know and you go and you ask. They're going to constantly give you different opinions and different ideas, and not out of meanness or malicious intent, just out of like. Well, have you thought about this? Yes, we thought about it. We decided the risk was greater than the reward was greater than the risk, and so when we say thorough and timely, we try to not dwell on things.
Speaker 2: 26:00
So we're going to look at numbers Numbers don't lie Math before marketing and we're going to say, hey, you're only talking to your existing customers. We must start acquiring new customers. You're only talking to your existing people. We've got to bring a new rush of people in. A business without new customers is a dying business. So we are going to push you in a timely manner to be successful, but also just projects being timely. On our side, I tell my team every time we better not be waiting on ourselves, we can be waiting on the contractor, but we really and we try hard. Do we win that every time? No. Do we have team members that miss deadlines? Yes, absolutely, and you know what Life happens to them Kids, flat tires, houses, flood all kinds of things happen to our poor team. But at the end of the day, we are responsible for making sure that we are thorough and we are timely, and that should always be our goal, you know, yes.
Speaker 1: 26:53
And then, lastly, is yielding results. You know that is ultimately the goal of Lemon Seed is to be yielding results for our clients. You know, if they aren't successful, we aren't successful. Our success lies in them being able to see their business grow, them to be able to make some moves, and things like that, and so we want to always be making sure that our efforts are moving the needle for them and helping to benefit their lives and their companies, whether it's just by us taking things off their plate and doing it for them, or it's the actual ROI and call count and things like that. It's a combination of things, but we should always be yielding results for them.
Speaker 2: 27:28
Yeah, and you know, again, I was looking at the definition of core value, so you know things like that. But one of the things it says core values are the fundamental beliefs and ethical standards that guide a company's culture, behavior and decision making. And you know you'll learn this about me, like I'm not a micromanager. Sometimes I let people be too free on their own, but the reason that I do that is because if they've watched anything that I've done or that Emily's done, I want to know that I modeled behavior that I would want them to replicate. And so the same thing here, like if they have a question about anything like is this timely?
Speaker 2: 28:02
Am I being thorough? Am I yielding results? Am I being a servant? Am I learning to be the expert in strategy and am I always hungry for creativity, them zesty to make sure that they're hitting these points and understanding, like we tell them all the time make a decision. If it's the wrong decision, 99% of the time I can fix it, right, right, but sometimes we can't. You know what If you commit some sort of heinous crime against marketing that we can't fix?
Speaker 1: 28:34
Well, and that's only if it was wrong. 99% or a good percent of the time, you're going to actually be right or it's going to have good results, but then we can still fix it if it is wrong and you've got to empower people.
Speaker 2: 28:44
So these core values too like you know, it's how your company is going to operate what are important to you. And again, guys, I know that it's easy, but we want our team to be trustworthy. Well, yes, so let's think about the things that should be obvious to us now.
Speaker 2: 29:00
You know, obviously you're an honest company Now again, don't get me wrong that you can't have these incentives and things like that. We pride ourselves on honesty, loyalty and trustworthiness. Ninety nine percent of y'all should be able to copy and paste that right into a core value. Now, that little one percent of y'all that are not I don't know't know, put on there that you're shady. I try to look into, like what is the opposite of that? Okay, so if people aren't zealous for creativity, what are they? They're stagnant with creativity. We see that with agencies all the time that people are coming to us from.
Speaker 1: 29:32
I'm just gonna be honest, to me, the best part about the core values is it gives you a baseline, it gives you something to measure up against, and so so, like for our own team. Like, did they fit into our culture? No, they aren't zealous for creativity, they are stagnant. They're doing just the bare minimum on their creative approach. Or they're not an advocate, a servant minded advocate. They're very too self-centered and stuff to serve our like. Then they don't fit our culture, they don't fit our core values. They don't fit our culture.
Speaker 2: 29:57
They don't fit lemon seed so I know like some of you want the guys that are kind of, uh, technically, very versed, technically, like you pride yourself on your company being technically advanced. So then that would be. One of my core values is that you are, you are hungry for more technical knowledge, or you are in a constant state of learning. Right, and we used an acronym, because that's how we could teach ourselves and memorize it and that's how we feel like our team could do it. But these core values really shape the way that your employees are going to make decisions, how they're going to interact with you, and it should naturally bleed over into the success of the company in general. But it's a continuation of our brand you.
Speaker 1: 30:36
It is Visually language wise, but then also like in our soul, our essence, you know.
Speaker 2: 30:42
You know, one little last thing on this here. You know, you may not have but two or three core values. You may have 10 core values. As I sat with my brother the other day and Trey and I were trying to plug through some stuff for his company, now you know, they had like a list of about 20 things that they were core values for them and that wasn't their, their, their finals. It was just these 20 things kind of matter to us and it was like some skill sets and some emotions and things like that. So what we were able to do is we were like, well, this word and this word are very similar and, honestly, this word is more true, so we're going to get rid of this word.
Speaker 2: 31:18
This is a discovery process, sure, and so Emily and I have been toying around of, like offering this to our existing clients, like how can we help you get this documented and really what this is. It is truly a discovery process of who you are, sure, as the owner and as the leader who are you are. That then spills over into your company, that then spills over to your team and then spills into your clients, and it's important that those things are relatively stable and consistent, other than as you grow. So when we meet, emily and I plan on meeting, probably around November, when we get done with show season, and sitting down again reviewing this, do we need to add, do we need to edit it? Probably not right now, just because we just did it. Really, we've only been doing it about a year.
Speaker 2: 32:00
But are we implementing this? And so that's the next step. Is we made a little promise to ourselves that we're going to start talking about this every single month with our clients? Well, you know, have we been great at that? Not really. We've gotten better than we've gotten better than we've ever been at it. Sure, but now we've got to keep reiterating it, and so it's the same thing that we talk about with brands. There's got to be a continuation. So don't just make a mission, vision and core values and stick it in a drawer or stick it up on a wall and never talk about it. You've got to reinforce what you build. That's right. That's right, and you know making these cool signs that emily put up in our office and making this trifold, and you know, making it a part of like. Maybe some of this stuff could be a part of our company meeting.
Speaker 1: 32:39
Like you kick off the company meeting saying it or something you know lots of lots of cool things there, so.
Speaker 2: 32:45
but a mission outlines what a company does and who they do it for. A vision sets the future oriented direction and inspires the team members and your clients. And then core values define the guiding principles that shape the behavior and decisions of your company.
Speaker 1: 33:02
So, with all of these elements, you can create a very cohesive framework that defines your company's identity, purpose and your path forward, and so I hope you guys yeah, I hope you got something from this. I hope it maybe inspires you to sit down and do some soul searching and actually pin this out, actually document it and write it out.
Speaker 2: 33:22
And you know we'd be happy to send a copy of this like a little mock up of what we did, these little trifolds that we're talking about. So if you want to email hello at lemonseedmarketingcom and ask for our little branding trifle that you heard about on the podcast, we'd be happy to send that over to you and let you see what we did. Sharing is caring around here, that's right. That's right. This is not like it is I'm going to. It is lemon seed proprietary information, but it is not.
Speaker 1: 33:48
So, but we hope it inspires you to make your own..
Speaker 2: 36:11
all right, guys. Well, thank you so much for listening. You know, what would really help us is if they would push us on social media. Right, emily, that's right.
Speaker 2: 36:26
Thanks for listening to another episode of From the Yellow Chair. We will see you guys next time. Bye.
