Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast
I am fortunate to have been / be part of great teams in my life. One is the GSV (@gsvcap) team and the other is my Campus Solutions (@c_solutions) team from college. I saw several former Campus Solutions teammates in SF recently and began to reflect on what made our team special.
Our story began when I was 18 years old, a freshman at Northwestern University, and a friend asked if I would join him on an adventure to create and build Campus Solutions, a storage and shipping company serving students moving in and out of campus housing.
In the 4 years I was actively involved, we built a team of 20 student managers. This team of full time students working a seasonal business generated over $600,000 of revenue with an approximately 20% operating income margin.
It’s been four years since my Campus Solutions days and I still draw on the lessons learned through that experience and through my past two years at GSV.
Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast
Culture is the strongest force in an organization. Strategy can change; culture shouldn’t. In fact, strategy must change over time for a startup to address the latest customer needs and market opportunities, but culture is the unifying force to get things done.
Strategy implies a certain number of decisions must be made by the founders and managers, but there is some upper limit to the number of decisions these few people can make in a given time period, especially in a fast moving company. Having a great culture allows founders and executives to leave more decision making to the team and trust that people will choose to do things that are driving towards a shared end result.
At some point, other students jokingly called our Campus Solutions team a cult. To which I ask “where do you think the word ‘culture’ came from?” Seriously though, while we never had odd rituals, we did share fundamental beliefs that bonded us together as a team.
You might expect me to say that everything about culture was done as a team, but to me, much of a team’s culture starts with each individual, complemented by what we did as a team.
- Excellence. Each person coming into the team should want to do excellent work for excellence sake. We looked for people who have always strived to be great at something in their life whether that’s academics, sports or work. Each person hired into the organization wants to achieve greatness. We would put candidates through dozens of interviews before bringing someone on. Hiring was the most important thing we did every year.
- Mission. We brought on people who cared about our mission. At Campus Solutions, our collective mission was to build the best student services company at Northwestern. As GSV, our collective mission is to invest in the most dynamic and fastest growing companies and be great partners to the entrepreneurs building those organizations. When everyone is on a team for the purpose of achieving a core mission, people make decisions that are aligned to that common goal.
- Family. We saw our team as an extended family. Whether it was doing off-sites or just having meals & drinks together, we spent both work and plenty of non-work time together which built our sense of care for each other beyond just as co-workers. This sense of care turned into accountability towards each other. People may talk about accountability to do things or put monetary incentives in place, but when you love your work and your team, it never really becomes an issue. You want to get things done for each other.
With the right culture, a team will focus on its core mission, do excellent work and commit to customers and to each other. In other words, with the right culture, success takes care of itself.
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