170: Crafting Your Company's Heart: Defining Core Values for Creative Entrepreneurs
See the show notes for this Episode here.
This transcript has been automatically generated.
Bonnie Christine:
Hi, my friends. Welcome back to another episode of The Professional Creative. Today, we're diving into a topic that I believe is the very heartbeat of really any business and that's your core values. So now whether you're a business of 1 or a business of 20 or 50 or even a 100, your core values are really the foundation of what you believe in. Today, I'm going to share what core values are, why they matter, my own company's core values, and give you some steps to help you define your own. I also have made an incredible resource for you that goes along with today's episode that I don't want you to miss. We've outlined 50 core values that I think will work almost as a menu for you so that you can get started in determining what you might want to have as your own and you can get those over at today's show notes at professionalcreative.com.
Bonnie Christine:
I'm Bonnie Christine, and this is where all things creativity, design, business, and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains running a multi 7 figure business doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. But when I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today, I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.
Bonnie Christine:
You know, before I had a team, I know that I had core values, but I didn't give them too much thought, meaning they weren't formal. I didn't have them written and I wasn't referencing them often. As a solopreneur, I knew what I stood for because I was the business of 1 and it was really easy for me to run my business and make decisions based on my intuition and really my gut. But everything started to shift when I began to build a team, and that's when I began to realize the importance of defining what we stood for as a company. And that's what core values are. They're the compass for your business, and they guide your decisions, help shape your culture, and ensure consistency across the team as we grow. All of a sudden, my core values didn't necessarily match everyone else's core values, so we had to come together and make company core values. That way we all come to the company with the same foundation.
Bonnie Christine:
Core values are for anyone, whether you have a small business or a medium sized business or a big corporation. You'll come back to them over and over and over again. You know, I think they help us with alignment, keeping us on track, and giving us something to reference when we have big decisions to make. They also help us in every step that we take to make sure that it's reflecting who we are and what we want to bring to the table. Research even shows that employees are more likely to stay with the company for at least 3 years when they have a strong onboarding process that includes clear communication about, you guessed it, core values. So as someone who is super passionate about intentional hiring and putting the right people in the right seat on your team, I cannot understate the importance of having core values in place before you even make your first hire for this reason alone. Okay. So I think I've given you plenty of reasons why core values are a must.
Bonnie Christine:
So if you haven't already defined them in your business, don't worry. I'm gonna help you get there. So I wanna give you an in-depth look at what core values for your company could look like and how they can be implemented into the workings of a thriving creative business. So I'm gonna share with you the 10 core values that we live by here at team Bonnie. We have our core values defined in our team handbook, and we really discuss and reference them often. They come up all the time. They're infused into our conversations and into our meetings. They're top of mind and front of heart in all the decisions that we make with every program that we launch, every interaction that we have in our community, every email that we respond to.
Bonnie Christine:
They've also helped shape the team culture that we've built and even really serve as decision filters when challenges and difficult things arise, both of which I'll be sharing with you more about today. So let's dive into our own core values. Now remember, these are mine. They don't have to be yours, but they might inspire yours. Again, we've got the list of 50 top core values that I think you'll be able to use really effectively to create your own and ideate some as well. Our first is that we're heart driven. Our joy is contagious because we love what we do. We uplift, inspire and encourage others while having fun doing the best work of our lives.
Bonnie Christine:
Our team lives this out so beautifully. In fact, at our most recent team retreat back in the spring, we went on a ziplining excursion to kick off our team together, and the zipline guides were absolutely astonished that we were a remote team. They could not get over how well we all seem to know each other and how much fun we had and how close we were. He said that they have in person teams come through all the time that don't like each other like we do. And so I believe that's because we are a team of heart driven people who genuinely love what we do, and others can really sense that and feel it. Our second one is this. We share our secrets. We teach everything we know to benefit the broader creative industry.
Bonnie Christine:
I believe in transparency, and I always encourage my community to be transparent and share their secrets as well. I think a great example of this is quite literally any program that we have. The immersion course, for example, was born out of my desire to help artists learn what took me so long to master. I felt it was my calling to teach what I had learned and to share my secrets. That same calling really bleeds into every program that we have from my Flourish membership to my mastermind. The mastermind, especially because it's built on the value of sharing expertise and not holding back because, you know what, my friends, a rising tide lifts all boats. Now our core value number 3 is to default to generosity. We lead with generosity serving our community and the world with care and compassion.
Bonnie Christine:
This one in particular has become almost like a decision filter for us, especially in customer service. Our inbox team gets to use this one at their discretion. And so a great example of this that comes to mind is during our last surface design immersion course launch. We accidentally sent out our exclusive 75% off alumni discount code to a really small group of people who were not actually alumni. And so we realized it that we had made this error when a handful of those people came back and it flagged our system. So from our end, this was a little bit of an expensive mistake, a mistake that no entrepreneur wants to make. Right? And that one felt tricky because it was a really big discount, and those customers shouldn't have used a code that was clearly labeled for someone else and really not meant for them. We reserved that code for alumni only, and so it was really felt unfair to our alumni to let anyone else use it.
Bonnie Christine:
But when we really examined what it would look like to default to generosity, the choice was easy. It actually wasn't fair to them because it was our mistake. We had to take complete ownership there. So we allowed those handful of students to continue forward with the discount, letting them know that we owned up to our mistake and decided that it would be best to be generous and welcome them into the course. Our next one is that creative success is our success. We measure our success by the success of our customers. Every piece of content, every story that we tell ties back to helping creatives succeed. So, of course, as an education company, we are only as successful as our students and members.
Bonnie Christine:
We actually have an entire website dedicated to telling the success stories of our students and we're adding to it all the time as new stories come in. So if you wanna look go look at that, it is value in action over at surfacedesignsuccess.com.
Bonnie Christine:
Okay. Picture this. Have you ever spent hours scouring through your video or maybe your podcast content trying to find that one place that you said that one thing? Or if you've forgotten or never found it and you had to rerecord everything, I've been there. And it's so frustrating and honestly a huge waste of time, but it hasn't happened to me ever since I started using Searchie. Searchie is the software that I use for all of my videos and all of my podcast content because it not only transcribes it, but it makes it searchable by keyword. And so for you to see this in action, I have an example set up for you over on bonnie christine.comforward/resources. Again, that's bonnie christine.comforward/resources, and you can actually play with search and see how it looks on one of our videos. Because once you understand what it does, it's a game changer.
Bonnie Christine:
I also host all of my workshop and my class, my membership, and course material through Searchie as well so students can search for any question that they have and go to the exact time and place where I talked about that one thing. And just imagine this, if I ever do a q and a and they wanna know if I answered their question, all they have to do is search for their name and see if I did or not. It's literally like having your very own personal search engine for your content. So no more wasting time scrubbing through your video or audio to find that one golden nugget. With Searchie, you can easily find what you're looking for in seconds. Just type in a keyword or phrase, and Searchie will pull up all the relevant content. It's a game changer for anyone who creates audio or video content, but, honestly, that's not all. Searchie's new AI powered transcription and captioning tool makes it easy to create accessible content that everyone can get access to.
Bonnie Christine:
And with their customizable player, you can embed your videos and your podcasts on your website or social media channels in a way that looks and feels so professional. So if you are ready to take your video or your podcast content to the next level, head on over to bonniechristine.comforward/resources, and just give Searchie a try. It's incredible. I think you're going to love it, and I can't wait to see how it revolutionizes the way you create content.
Bonnie Christine:
The next core value, number 5, is that we are g rated, and all of our content is family friendly. This one we take really seriously. We have a process in place when anyone in the community uses any language or shares any kind of content or information that is not g rated and we have to use that process a handful of times a year. So it's important to us that as a family first company, that anyone going through any of our programs or listening to this podcast can comfortably and confidently have their children around. In fact, I love it when parents bring their children in to listen to our q and a's and our live calls and things like that. Number 6 is intentional margin. We set boundaries, we rest and rejuvenate to make our greatest contributions. This one shows up in our team wide practices like summer hours.
Bonnie Christine:
Summer hours mean that we go to a 4 day work week during the summer. We also have slack down days, so every Friday is a work day during the winter, but it's a slack down day. And then we also have it represented in our health and wellness budgets. The next one, number 7, is extreme ownership. We own our leadership as both a company and as individuals. If something goes wrong, we take responsibility. We fix it and we learn from it. This hearkens back to that earlier example I shared about the alumni discount mistake.
Bonnie Christine:
Ultimately, though we hemmed and hawed over that decision, the only way forward was to own our mistake. The next one is that simple is better. You know, simplicity is powerful and so we aim to make complex things really simple and that's difficult. I think that simple is so difficult because I can really easily complicate things. I think making it complicated is easier, and so we have this saying that we use sometimes like, what if it was easy? What would this look like if it was simple? And sometimes we'll begin stripping things down to make something really complex simplified. Number 9 is collective entrepreneurship. Now we treat our team members as entrepreneurs within the company quite frankly, because most of them are. Each person owns their work inside the company and that also means that they own the outcome.
Bonnie Christine:
This is true both from a company perspective and also from an individual perspective. So on the team, we give ownership to each person in their role, meaning that we do not micromanage. We try to equip them with what they need to succeed in their role, but ultimately, they're leading the charge in their department, and it's so beautiful to watch. Now, of course, we'll step in if we need to. If someone needs help or I see that they need to be managed a little bit, we're there for it. But in general, we have a team of self managing people. From an individual perspective, almost all of our team members really do have their own business or a side hustle. In fact, we have a Slack channel called Side Hustles, and that's dedicated for the team members to share and celebrate what they're up to in their own businesses.
Bonnie Christine:
I love being a champion for them, and I also so dearly appreciate the skills and ownership that they bring to the table as entrepreneurs. Number 10 is integrity. We practice unyielding integrity with honesty and transparency in all aspects of our business. Trust and integrity is the most important element of our culture. We trust and believe the best about each other. Okay. So one example that comes to mind is that every single person on the team receives a team credit card because I trust the team members to use their cards responsibly adhering to the guidelines that we've outlined in the handbook and exercising integrity in every transaction. So, of course, we have things labeled and and itemized, but at the end of the day, we're trusting our team members.
Bonnie Christine:
Okay. So those are our 10. Now that you've heard mine, it's time for you to start thinking about your own. Now this process might feel a little overwhelming, but remember, I've broken it down into the freebie for today. So you can go grab 50 different core values to choose from or to spur your own brainstorming process. So you'll grab that again over at the show notes at professionalcreative.com. Here is the steps I think you should follow. 1st is list, kind of brainstorm all the potential values that you think could be yours.
Bonnie Christine:
Start by writing down any words or phrases that resonate with you both personally and professionally. You don't have to worry about filtering yet, just get everything on paper. Then you'll categorize and group. After you've listed those values, start grouping similar values together and you'll start noticing themes and patterns emerge, some that you might even be able to consolidate into 1. Then you'll begin to really select your key values. From those groups, choose the values that mean the most to you and your business, and I would aim for 5 to 10. Another way to look at this is, are any of the ones that you have listed, by doing one of them, does that mean that another one kind of also gets taken care of? Meaning, if I had integrity and honesty on the same list, well, I could probably choose integrity and know that that really means that honesty is also included. Then you'll work to define each value.
Bonnie Christine:
Give each core value a clear personal definition. It can just be something that reflects its meaning to you and your business. Okay, my friends. Once you've defined these core values, it's time to put them into action. We've discussed how important it is to have them and they'll help you from the way you interact with your customers to the perks you offer to your team. Let's go a little bit deeper. For example, one of our core values is intentional margin and that's led to a lot of team perks and let me tell you, that might just be my favorite thing I've implemented in my company. Some of the perks we've introduced have been to, again, implement the 4 day work week during the summer.
Bonnie Christine:
We call that summer hours so that the team can enjoy the summer and work on their own business and spend time with their families. We also have a perk called the paid paid vacation. We incentivize employees to take a vacation every year, and if they book a week long vacation, we give them an extra $1,000 towards that vacation. We also have a health and wellness budget that team members can use to pay for gym memberships or apps and even purchase something like a walking pad or a Peloton. One of our favorites is the housekeeping budget. We reimburse our team members monthly for their housekeeping fees to take one more thing off their plate. So if you can see, I really used our values to inform our team perks, and so that's a great way to look at this as well. If we have these core values, well, what does that mean? How do they show up in the way that our team functions? And part of that should be or could be team perks.
Bonnie Christine:
So there you have it, my friends. How to define your company's heart through core values. These values will shape the future of your business and help you stay aligned with your mission. I hope that this episode has inspired you and really given you some time to reflect on your own values. Don't forget to grab the freebie. That's over at professionalcreative.com. My friends, create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world, and remember, there's room for you. Bye for now.
