Your Values

If you accept the behavior of others, you accept it within yourself.

I learned that sentence the hard way, in my own life and not in business, and it took me years to see how directly it applies to a company. Every time you let a behavior slide in your business, a rushed job, a white lie to a customer about why you were late, an employee who is rude on the phone, you are tolerating it, and you are telling everyone, including yourself, that this is who we are. Values are the answer to that. They are the behaviors you refuse to accept, written down before the moment when refusing gets expensive.

Values versus preferences

People treat these as one thing and they are not. A preference is something you like: clean trucks, a certain font, early starts. A value is something you will pay for. You will lose the job rather than violate it. You will fire a good producer over it. You will refund a customer who was not technically right because it was the honest thing to do.

Here is a quick way to tell the difference. Take anything you think is a value and finish this sentence: “We do this even when…” If you cannot think of a real situation where it costs you something, it is a preference wearing a value’s clothes. “We are honest with customers even when it means telling them they do not need the repair” is a value. “We care about quality” is decoration until you add the “even when.”

Why does this belong in a branding track? Because the brand is the customer’s judgment, and customers are remarkably good at smelling the difference between a company that says a thing and a company that pays for a thing. A roofer who tells you the roof has five more years in it, and walks away from a job, has just built more brand than a year of ads could buy him. He did that with a value, not a logo.

Values decide who is inside the building

The book spends a lot of time on this in the hiring chapter, and I want to pull the point forward here. Hire for how people act, not who they are. Someone who will not act on the values you wrote down damages both the culture and the brand, because the two are closely linked.

When you interview someone, you are not only checking whether they can do the work. You are checking whether the way they answer questions lines up with how things get done in your business. Ask about a time they disagreed with a boss. Ask what they did when a customer was wrong. Ask what they would do if they finished early and nobody was watching. Their answers will tell you more about how they act than their resume, and how people act is what protects the brand.

The same goes for who you partner with. The vendor who cuts corners on your behalf, the subcontractor whose crew swears in front of the homeowner, the referral partner who oversells: they become part of your image the moment a customer connects them to you. They need to believe what you believe. If they do not, no contract will make up for it.

Finding yours honestly

Do not start by writing a list of admirable words. Start with the stories. Think of the moment in your business you are proudest of, the one you tell when someone asks why you do this. What value was being honored? Then think of the moment that still bothers you, the time you let something go that you should not have. What value was being violated? You will usually find three to five values hiding in those stories, and they will be yours rather than borrowed.

Then write each one as a behavior with its price attached. Write “we tell the customer the truth about what they need, even when it costs us the sale” instead of “integrity.” Write “we do not leave a job we would not sign our name to, even if it means coming back on Saturday” instead of “quality.” The price is what makes it real, and it is also what makes it teachable.

Check them against your vision and mission. If your vision is premium and one of your values is “we always find a way to say yes,” you have a conflict, and it will show up as a customer who got a discount they should not have and a crew that learned the rules bend.

Your next step

Write three to five values this week, each in the form “we do X, even when Y.” Then look back over the last month and find one moment where you accepted a behavior that violates one of them. Do not beat yourself up. Decide, in writing, what you will do the next time it happens, and tell the people it involves.

It takes a couple of hours to write and costs nothing. Living them costs more, and it costs in exactly the moments when it would be convenient not to. A value that never costs you anything is not doing any work.