This episode is mostly for C3 Team Members, but I wanted to share it with the Smart Cleaning School. In the episode, "Introducing the C3 Experience", I laid out the company mission, vision, and values. When I first released that episode, I had no idea it would become a mandatory piece of the C3 Team hiring process. I truly believe that episode was the single most important one that I recorded in the past 18 months! It shares so much about who I am as a follower of Jesus Christ and steward of His business. I remember starting my career with General Electric in 2000. I was so excited to work for GE. I joined the Edison Engineering Development Program (EEDP) and was thrilled to pursue my dreams in my new career. The onboarding process was basically checking off boxes and part of that process included me getting the GE core values on an index-sized piece of card stock. I glanced at it and then pinned it to my cubicle wall. I never looked at it again. I didn't care. That wasn't important. The work was important. The engineering was important. I mean, that's why I was there. Most of America enters corporate settings the same way. Core values are part of the onboarding process, but no one really "lives" them out. That's a problem and most don't even realize it.  

Fast forward. Teresa and I started Carfagno Cleaning in 2005. It was a way to earn income so our family didn't starve as we spiraled out of control financially in 2005 - 2008. It become my full-time career by default and out of total necessity. I never created a mission statement and certainly no core values. Who cared? They were lame at GE and didn't help me make money. But then we started having kids and raising a family. As our oldest entered Kindergarten, we opted to homeschool after much research and prayer. This was in early 2010 after putting Kenny in preschool for a few months. We barely scratched the surface of putting our son is school and we were done! We made decisions all along the way about how we wanted to raise our kids. We thought hard about the type of adults we wanted to put into the world. We wanted to teach and model Christian discipleship in our homeschool and family. We wanted our homeschool to result in independent, creative, problem-solving, entrepreneurial leaders. Without even realizing it, we had created a mission for our family and homeschool. The mission was the table top and the core values were the legs. We then put bible verses to each of the legs or core values and put this up on our family room wall. We truly cared about the future of our kids and realized that we needed to design what that would look like. That's when I looked back upon the core values from GE and realized something very profound. I never cared about their core values because I was never a fit for GE! I wanted to be a part of GE because they were touted as the #1 place to work for engineers. It was the best career opportunity. But in all of my research, I NEVER once read their mission statement or examined the legs of their table. I never read the core values. I wasn't a culture fit for GE, so I shouldn't be shocked that I was fired in 2005. So many young people make the same mistake. They go to work for the biggest company with the best benefits and highest salary and best advancement. This is important, but what if they don't fit into the culture like I didn't fit into GE's?

Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website