I ran my agency for fifteen years before I wrote down what we believed.
Fifteen. I had a logo, a tagline, clients, payroll, an office, and a tax bill. I could tell you our pricing model in my sleep. But if you had pulled me into a conference room and asked me to write our values on a whiteboard, I would have stalled, sweat through my shirt, and given you something I made up on the spot.
I told myself the lie a lot of owners tell themselves. I know what we believe. The team knows what we believe. We don't need a poster on the wall.
That sentence cost me more money than any line item on any P&L I have ever signed.
Why I waited
Looking back, I waited because writing values down felt like a corporate thing. The kind of thing a Fortune 500 HR department does on a retreat. It felt like theater.
What I missed is that values are not a poster. Values are a decision filter. They are how you make fast calls in dark rooms. In twenty-seven years of running a business, I have been in a lot of dark rooms - Y2K, the dot-com bust, 2008, Covid, and now whatever 2026 is going to be called when we look back at it.
People say they are afraid of the dark. They are not. They are afraid of what's in the dark that they cannot name.
When you write your values down, you are turning the lights on for your team. You are saying, here is what does not change when the room gets dark. Here is the cornerstone. Everything else gets aligned to it.
The Tom Barrett moment
I finally got serious about it because of a guy named Tom Barrett. He runs a process called StratOp, and he sat across from me with a legal pad and made me put words on paper.
He did not let me get away with anything. Every word I tried to write, he pushed back on. "Is that actually true? Or is that what you wish was true?" He had me name three real decisions from the last twelve months and asked which value would have made each call easier. Half the time I did not have a value to point to. I had a mood.
That is the difference. Without written values, you have moods. The mood you are in when the email comes. The mood you are in when payroll is tight. Moods make different decisions on different days. Values do not.
The exercise I would recommend to any owner is the one Tom ran on me. Pretend a smart, skeptical outsider is sitting across from you. Hand them your draft list. Let them try to beat it up. Every value that survives a real outsider is a value you can actually use.
What we landed on
We landed on six. Three are about work. Three are about life.
Commitment. Experience. Quality. Joy. Faith. Family.
I will not pretend they are perfect. They are ours. They are the ones that, when I read them out loud, I do not flinch. They are the ones that have actually made decisions easier when the room got dark.
Patrick Lencioni has a line I think about a lot. There is a difference between core values and aspirational values. Core values are who you actually are right now, on your worst Wednesday. Aspirational values are who you are trying to become. Both matter. But you have to be honest about which is which, or you will lie to your team and they will know.
When I look at our six, Joy is on the edge for me some weeks. I know I have not always been a joyful boss in October when receivables are running thirty days late. I do not get to take Joy off the wall for that reason. I get to grow into it. That is the point of an aspirational value. It is a stake in the ground that pulls you forward instead of letting you drift.
action
1. Pick one real decision from the last thirty days and write the value that drove it. 2. Block a Saturday morning to draft five to seven words you actually believe. 3. Bring the draft to one trusted person and let them push back. 4. Print them. Hang them where everyone can see them. 5. End every leadership meeting for 90 days with: which value did our biggest decision reflect, and which one did our worst decision violate?
The wall is the work.
