Sean: Next question, how do you build and foster the right company culture? Alright, here we are on the hard part.

JM: I think it really starts on the company's mission and vision, and the important values of the company as well. So I think the foundation itself is very crucial in order for you to really have that map. Right? Because if you don’t have a roadmap about the company's culture and even values, then you won't be able to lead your people and build from the foundation that you already have.

Sean: Company culture, it's usually a very elusive topic. You hear a lot of people talking about culture and company culture. It's something that you feel, you smell, kind of, when you enter a place. You just know they are different, what's different about them, the culture, but you can't really say, what that is.

And how to build a culture is two ways. Number one, just let it happen. Culture will happen, whether you are intentional about it or not. And oftentimes the result of that first way is, it is a culture that you would not like. There's toxicity, bureaucracy, red tape, politics, you name it. The second way of building culture is you build it intentionally. When you try to form culture intentionally, how that looks like is, you put processes in place. Culture can be defined as how we do things. That's how it can be defined. How we do things is our culture. It usually starts through processes.

How SEO Hacker, for example, has built the culture is, we make sure that everyone knows the core values, everyone knows the vision, and everyone knows the mission. And what I mean by “knows” is not just memorizing them, but knowing them on a deep level - why we have them, why it's important for your work, what the vision has to do with your day-to-day activities. We define that. We take the time to define these things where we cannot put it as an ROI in our balance sheet that, “Oh, we defined it that’s why we have an ROI.”

That's not the case because when you do these things and you know, the world calls it soft skills or soft things in a business, there's no direct return on investment, such as when making a sale or such as when running an ad and checking how many views you got, how many clicks you got, and how many add to carts you got. It's not measurable in numbers. But if you're not intentional about that culture, it will make your company a place that you wouldn't want to work in sometime in the future.

So I think that the cost is great about not being intentional. And the benefits are huge when you're intentional, because you attract talent and people who are just the kinds of people you want in your team. And one of the things that you could also do is, make sure that you are getting them at a rate that is fair, because there's a lot of piracy in the market. Sometimes other companies would just pirate some of your people. That's tough. That's a tough game to play. Now, we don't want to play in that game. And what we do, we just build a culture where people like us would really want to work there. That way we don't need to compete in the salary market because no amount of salary will pay for how people feel when they're in my team.

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