The Phases of Building a Startup Culture Code
Our journey in building our Culture Code
As a co-founder of Easyship, the platform that simplifies international shipping, I wanted to share my learnings about laying the foundations of a startup culture.
Easyship has been around since the end of 2014 (you can read my previous post about how we got started here), but it’s taken us nearly six years to get our culture code to where it is today. That’s because as the company has moved through different phases, the culture code has consistently evolved to keep up.
What Took So Long?
To understand why it took us almost three years to create a culture code, you need to understand where we came from. Our journey has gone through four different phases:
- Survival — doing what we needed to do to get the business off the ground;
- Building the Basics — laying down the foundations of the company and business;
- Growth — scaling up our business;
- Improvements — adding processes to make the company even better.
Phase 1: Survival (Less than 10 people; in incubation)
In the first six months, our company consisted of three founders and six to eight interns from top-tier universities. We were focused on doing anything we could just to get through every single day.
This was an exciting period for Easyship; every day was an achievement. There were plenty of milestones, too: landing our first client, scoring our first partnership, and sending out our first 100 shipments.
At this stage, hustle and survival were our culture. We didn’t feel the need — or have the capacity — to elaborate any further on the company culture.
Phase 2: Building the basics (Less than 20 people; opened our first office)
Winning the “Tech in Asia” Award got us a lot of recognition from the region’s startup community. Thanks to this, we started to receive funding from global investors. It gave us the space to take a breath and start thinking about the building blocks that make Easyship what it is today.
During this period we:
- Leveraged all the learnings on the product side and designed Easyship 2.0 from scratch
- Built our proprietary back-end system: “SUPERship”
- Moved out from the incubator and moved into our first office
- Hired our first full-time employees, who we called “sherpas”
- Implemented an agile management structure where teams work together to achieve shared goals
- Implemented weekly roadmaps to set our goals for the week
- Ran midweek meetings for the entire office so everyone could share what they’re working on
- Started the Friday drinks tradition of enjoying a beer to celebrate the end of the workweek
During this period, we weren’t just growing. We were also building the foundation of our company, both in terms of our business and its culture. The defining aspect of our culture was human capital — that is who we were hiring, who was let go and why, who was being promoted and why, what types of behavior we valued, and what we wouldn’t tolerate.
Phase 3: Growth (less than 50 people; multiple countries)
Once we started to see a real product-market fit, we decided to take on international expansion. First, we expanded into Singapore; later, in early 2018, we opened our office in the United States.
During this time, the company went through massive changes. Our revenue grew tenfold and we hired an additional 10 sherpas. Our headcount jumped to 30 people (and 12 nationalities!) working from four different international locations.
It was at this point that we felt the need to properly establish a culture code. We were starting to see signs of small issues that could potentially become bigger issues, such as:
- Processes not being enforced in all countries
- Different office dynamics
- Miscommunication
- Office cliques
Phase 4: Improvements (less than 100 people; even more global offices)
These days, Easyship has grown into a truly multinational company with over 80 employees in seven offices. Most recently, we’ve opened offices in London, Canada, and Australia. This has forced us to really hammer out a cohesive company culture and begin implementing processes that improve the company and the work lives of our sherpas. Here are a few improvements we’ve made:
- Moved many manual employee processes online to make them easier to access
- Created an employee handbook (that includes our culture code in black and white!)
- Automated the onboarding process
- Launched a global company summit to connect our Sherpas
- Hiring interns for different departments (some of them have even gone on to become full-time sherpas!)
- Given all employees in all our offices medical insurance
- Encouraging sherpas to stay healthy by offsetting part of the cost of gym memberships
- Started running regular CSR activities in all offices
- Created a “freemium” pricing model for Easyship so that businesses of all sizes can use the platform
So, how did we go about creating our culture?
Mission statements are typically set by the founders since it relates directly to the vision they had when they created the company.
Our purpose from the very beginning was to simplify international logistics for SMBs and allow them to sell globally; this is still our guiding ethos today. So, when crafting our mission statement, we wanted to be specific in what we were doing; we wanted to focus less on the where and how, since we knew we would evolve in the future.
However, for our values and principles, we wanted to use a more collaborative approach that took some input from our sherpas. This is because they are actively contributing to the Easyship culture and living it on a daily basis.
We drew inspiration from a few Best in Class culture codes from Tettra to help give context.
Then, to give some structure and framework, we listed the following values that we (the founders) thought would characterize Easyship:
- Fun
- Hustle
- Diversity
- Results
- Taking Initiatives
- Ownership
- Humble
- Remarkable/ Excellence
- Resilience
After presenting these values to the company, we sent out a survey where we asked everyone to:
- Vote for their top 5 values and explain why they chose that value
- Add one value of their own that wasn’t listed but should be, and why
- Write 3 catchy do’s and don’ts that defined Easyship behaviors for them
This was actually one of the most interesting and nerve-wracking moments I’ve experienced as a founder. I felt as if we were waiting to find out if we passed one of our final exams. I couldn’t help but think, “Is our vision of Easyship skewed? Have we lost track of who we are as a company?” We were really curious to see the results, and thankfully we were not disappointed!
Here are the values that were added:
We believe that the message sent by our sherpas was that the values we listed were all extremely business driven and lacked the human component, which they felt Easyship also encompassed.
Note that gender equality is in red, as at this point, there was still a significant gender imbalance. Now, we’re proud to say that women make up 45% of our company, which is above the startup industry average of 24% for startups with no female founders.
When it comes to the top 5 values, the results were the following:
We were very surprised about the numbers we saw for “Hustle” and “Humility”. After taking the time to think about it, we came to the following conclusions:
Hustle
When we started Easyship, we still had remnants of our Rocket Internet days. We were always proud to be hustlers, do-ers, and have a “whatever it takes” mentality. So, we were quite surprised when this value didn’t make it to the top five. But, after doing a deep-dive through the results, we noticed something pretty interesting.
The sherpas that were around during phase 1 and 2 always placed “Hustle” as one of their top values, while the newer sherpas didn’t. This made a lot of sense because, during the “survival” period, everyone had 10 different jobs on their plate. Then, as we grew and matured as a company, the hustling aspect took on lesser importance to other values such as “Results” or “Taking Initiative”.
Humility
Seeing this value come in at rock bottom was a blow to us founders. While we’re happy to help power sellers make their logistics even more efficient, we’ve always had a soft spot for helping small business owners go global from the very beginning. We believe we are humble in this respect. However, we noticed that when we communicate this vision, our tone sometimes comes off as ambitious and, at times, a bit assertive. So, how do we stay humble but still show that we’re confident in what we have to offer? This is a challenge that we continue to face today.
So, after several years of growth, hammering out our mission statement, and collaborating with our sherpas, we present to you Easyship’s culture code.
We’re pleased with our efforts thus far and look forward to taking this rocket ship to even greater heights!
