For the past three weeks Zest has been all-hands on deck crafting two critical documents: the Zest extreme-growth strategy game plan and the Zest lean and clean business plan.
These documents incorporated ideas, goals and intelligence collected from all corners of the Zest universe and will guide us as we continue this magnificent journey.
Zest’s marketing knowledge platform is designed for the professional marketing community. So, naturally, its growth will be driven by serving that community.
Our community-focused Strategy and Business plans are ambitious, dynamic, and well-vetted. They were designed with precision yet flexibility. We had created a clear roadmap. But still, despite the plans’ details, a crucial element was still missing.
You see, ideas need execution to grow. And strategies are executed by living, breathing human beings. Our strategy, your strategy, any organization’s strategy is only as powerful as the team that supports it. And teams are at their most powerful when they share a unified set of goals and ideals — their culture.
Of course, as we wrote our Strategy and Business plans, we kept our company culture always in mind. But as Zest grows, as we seek new members of the tribe and as they evaluate us, those thoughts must be put in writing. That was the missing element. Zest needed to define who we are as a community. We needed to define our culture.
This statement by Carter Cleveland, the founder and CEO of Artsy, in his article Why Define Company Values, perfectly explains why even the best plans — including Zest’s plans — are incomplete without a defined company culture.
Cleveland writes, “When a company is small, the high degree of interaction between team members allows people to make decisions efficiently and consistently without having values defined. But as a company starts to grow, communication overhead and reaching alignment around decision-making and hiring becomes increasingly challenging.”
So, as the last — but definitely not least — component of our 18-month plans, we set about to define the Zest company culture.
Zest’s Sunrisers culture: working together, powering growth
Who are the Zest implementers? What is the Zest culture? The answer to these questions lies in the people who work every day to make Zest better. And I’m not talking just about the core team. No, the Zesteam is only a part of the super lemony system that is building itself.
The people responsible for keeping this giant lemon running are found in our micro tribes. The are Zest Chiefs, Content Distillers, and Scouters. Our investors, and the member advisory board are part of this amazing community, too. They are all so involved with the way we are structuring our roadmap, writing these articles, beta testing new product features and distillation process. They all are Sunrisers.
This is who Sunrisers are
1. Sunrisers will not sit and wait for the sun to rise but will proactively bring about our own new day.
2. Sunrisers prioritize performing tasks in a systematic way; organization comes before execution.
3. Sunrisers are not growth hackers, they are scalers; they don’t need to use more resources in order to trigger a significant increase in any parameter.
4. Sunrisers are KPIs oriented, data-driven and make decisions based on measurable factors.
5. Sunrisers are not fighters but a new generation of strategists who master their crafts and excel in execution methodologies.
6. Sunrisers have an ‘always question everything’ mindset.
7. Sunrisers know that there is a time to say no and push back to avoid exceeding their optimum capacity.
8. Sunrisers are mindful about keeping our work atmosphere hyper-fun and supportive.
9. Sunrisers are community oriented, making decisions based on the needs of and with input from the tribes they lead.
Culture is the driving force for Zest’s journey to the top
With this last piece in place, we have identified our roadmap for success and who should join us on our journey.
Zest is growing and the Sunrisers culture is driving that growth.
Are you a Sunriser?
Then you should join us in the Zest tribe! Together we can take marketing knowledge to the next level and fight information overload together.
Email me at yam@zest.is to be part of the Zest movement.
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Bringing thoughts together and taking ideas to the ground are tough (really tough) jobs. This post would have probably remained in our Slack channel and Google Docs’ Strategy folder if Tonya Parker hadn’t pro-actively brought the sunrise to it.
Thanks for that, my lemonsista ❤
