How’s your culture?

Originally sent out: 30/01/25

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I’m writing this newsletter to you having just come out of a team meeting where we discussed our agency’s Vision, Mission, and Values for two hours.

Two hours discussing that? Surely you’ve got better things to do…

Well, we do indeed have lots of work to do, but sometimes you need to think about the bigger picture.

You see, we’ve got several new team members, and rather than simply telling them “This is our agency vision, mission, and value statement…”

I thought I’d use the opportunity to reinforce our culture by asking new and existing team members to look again at our Vision, Mission and Culture statement and ensure it still reflects who we are and where we’re going.

The meeting we’ve just had was incredibly enlightening.

So many ideas and new perspectives.

We deliberately delayed this team meeting until the end of January, as I wanted to give everyone this first month back of the year to settle into their rhythm and think about what Evergreen means to them.

Now, we’re only a small business and so you may be thinking “Aaron, this all sounds a bit woo-woo”.

For me, I think having the right culture in a business is critical.

Every business has a culture, it’s just whether or not it’s one you want/like that can be the issue.

Whether you employ 10 people or 1,000+ people, I think having a strong culture is integral to a successful and profitable business.

In the meeting we’ve just had, we got the whiteboard out, we had sticky notes and an open and honest conversation about what makes Evergreen, well Evergreen.

Vision: “To be the go-to paid media and creative agency for home, garden and lifestyle brands.”

Above is our current Vision statement. It is good, it says what we want to be, but through conversation, the team decided they wanted to simplify it and distil exactly what our vision is.

After deliberation, they decided they wanted to change our Vision into simply “What we do” and came up with this:

What we do: ‘Grow home, garden and lifestyle brands.’

It’s beautifully simple and effective.

Next, our Mission: “Evergreen’s mission is to create a dynamic and forward-thinking agency environment that allows us to partner with ambitious home, garden, and lifestyle brands to accelerate their digital growth.”

That has been our mission statement for some time.

It articulates the mission we’re on as a business, but again the team collectively decided they wanted to simplify it and after discussions for the best part of an hour with many ideas tossed around, they decided to articulate our Mission as simply “how we do it”.

Below is a perfectly succinct way for our team to describe how we do what we do.

How we do it: ‘Support clients with profitable and scalable paid media and creative strategies.’

Arguably, the biggest and best takeaway from the session though was when we got to our Values, which up to now had been a collection of five mini-statements entitled:

– Be passionate

– Be innovative

– Get involved

– Be honest

– Love what you do

This is where the sticky notes came into their own, as we looked on the whiteboard and saw lots of recurring themes and words that the team all felt encapsulated Evergreen. Words like:

– Fun

– Drive

– Honesty

– Transparency

– Creativity

– Passion

– Greggs (a joke, but to be fair it’s accurate)

Then one of the team piped up and said, “We should create a T.E.A Tree with all of these words as the branches”.

Everyone loved that.

Within the space of a couple of hours, we’ve gone from a business with a Vision, Mission and Values statement, that truth be told I doubt any of the team could truly recite…

To a brand new Evergreen Culture statement that will showcase:

Who we are. What we do. How we do it.

Best of all, everyone has been involved in this process, this culture statement now belongs to everyone.

It’s not Aaron’s, it’s everyone’s.

That is how you create a winning culture in a business in my opinion.

So, before we move into this week’s content, I want to ask you: What could you do to reinforce the culture that you want in your business?

The more you involve your team, the more you’ll get from your team!

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