When you are your business, as most small business owners are, people want to know who you are and what you stand for. If you’re a solopreneur, after all, that will inform everything you do, and if you have employees, you should be ensuring that all your people reflect how you want to run your business.
Unless we examine ourselves, though, we might just be making assumptions about who we are — most of all, about the values we hold and want to carry over to the business.
Last month, I had an exhilarating session with the wonderful Caroline J Andrew, in which we established what my core values are. We started by brainstorming as many as possible, examining both myself and the people I admire, and then gradually narrowing it down to the three most fundamental.
And they weren’t the ones I came up with initially.
My Three Core Values
Honesty
It’s easy to overlook honesty as a value, because it’s so obvious. Everyone from business owners to job applicants proclaim it as something that’s important to them — which is a little pointless, since it’s really a minimum requirement in business, not an added bonus.
Honesty is a lot more, though, than just not lying. It’s also about being authentic. This doesn’t mean, of course, that you can’t have areas of your life that you keep separate, but it does mean that, in each individual setting and context, you’re being yourself and not pretending.
Integrity
Integrity is closely connected to honesty, of course, and you might even say it’s impossible to have one without the other. That doesn’t mean, though, that they’re the same thing.
While it has to come from within, integrity is more to do with your dealings with others. Integrity involves doing everything you’ve promised when and how you undertook to do it. At root, though, it’s the standard you hold yourself to, an assumption that it’s right to do everything to the best of your ability.
Curiosity
This was the one that took me rather by surprise, because, although I certainly knew it’s always been central to me personally, I hadn’t thought of it as a business value. As Caroline and I worked through other values, however, it seemed to come back to curiosity.
Curiosity is what lets me get enthusiastic about your business, however far it is from my own experience. It’s what’s let me get enthusiastic about techniques for underpinning, the Average Clause in insurance policies or why soffits are vital for your roof (and what they even are, come to that). Because there’s nothing better in the world than learning something new.
The Importance of Values in Your Business
Those weren’t the only values I came up with, of course, during the brainstorming process, and some of the others were dropped not because they’re unimportant, but because they’re to some extent contingent on one or more of these three. These included, for example, reliability, empathy, caring and creativity.
These values aren’t just add-ons to my business — nice to have as an additional extra. As the tired old (but still entirely true) cliché says, people buy people, and most of us prefer doing business with people we trust and relate to. Big corporation spend millions trying to fake that kind of image, but small business owners can use who they actually are for something that’s both image and reality.
My values are the reason why I work the way I do, and they’re behind everything about my business. They’re why I’m not just Nick Blatchley Copywriting, but also the Word Wizard.
So what are the most fundamental values you bring to your business?