Is your MSP’s company culture crummy or nonexistent?
If you’re the leader, that’s a you problem, according to Arnie Malham, an 8-figure entrepreneur and best-selling author of Worth Doing Wrong, “The culture you have right now, the one that exists right now in your company, is the one you absolutely deserve—and there’s no way around it. You are the leader. You are responsible for your culture.”
Why should you care about creating a great culture when you have an MSP business to run? Because it’s critical to growing your business, said Malham, who’s also founder and CEO of BetterBookClub, where he helps companies, leaders, and individuals build a strong culture that both attracts the best people and rewards those who seek personal growth within the organization. He spoke recently at a peer event for top-tier members of TMT, now part of Kaseya.
Developing and nurturing a great company culture helped Malham grow one of his companies, cj Advertising, to more than $60M in annual revenue before he sold it. “The culture allowed us to grow in a way that gave us the value that we needed,” he told the audience of MSPs.
Malham didn’t always see it that way, though, which he readily admitted. “For 10 years, I pushed a rock uphill, and I bitched about everything in my company that was wrong except the right thing, which was me. I was doing it wrong. I was trying to make people do stuff. I was begging them to see what I saw as opposed to just leading them there by providing them an environment where they could grow, where their voice was heard, where they got to cheer for their teammates, where they got to do things for other people that made them and their teammates better.”
How did he do it? Malham shared some lessons he learned that MSP leaders can adapt and apply to their own workplace culture.
3 Secrets to a Building a Successful Culture
Every culture is unique, Malham stressed, and it either attracts the employees you desire or repels the ones who will never be a good fit, which is “the magic” of culture. He has three recommendations for building a successful, structured program:
- It has to be supported from the top. “Be the leader. Take the actions that you want your teammates to take by participating in the programs and by making sure that the people running those programs have everything they need to be successful,” Malham advised.
- Recognize that every new program will be met with skepticism. Onboarding a culture program will take time, “not a little bit of time, not nine days, not nine weeks, [but] nine months,” said Malham about his own company’s timeline.
- Every program needs a champion, a checklist, and it must align with your company’s core values. “A champion for a program is someone who will get it done as a priority and not as a pain. A checklist means that they’ve documented everything it takes to run that program … and of course the alignment with your core values and purpose. If you can’t tie it together, it doesn’t make sense and you’re wasting time,” Malham stated.
Getting Started – What Makes You Unique?
Your culture is everything that makes your company unique, so what worked for cj Advertising may not be right for your MSP, he acknowledged, but the concepts can be adapted. In Malham’s case, what made them unique included things like an office that was dog and kid friendly, gifting of 5-year tenure jackets for employees, celebrations, morale surveys, profit sharing, unlimited PTO, and a book club that paid employees to read and share what they learned. He stressed that it’s important that everyone knows what the culture is, so they created a poster to represent what their culture encompassed and displayed it prominently.
“This poster that we created then goes in our lobby so that everyone that walks in our office, whether that’s team members, friends of the team members, their parents, prospects, customers, our vendors, people lost … if you walk in our business, I want you to know that this is our culture and we care about it.”
In addition, the company created a second poster showing how the company invested in its people and hung it beside the culture poster. “I wanted everyone to know in our organization we believe in our culture and that we train our people to the very best of their abilities.”
Getting Employee Buy-In
Employee buy-in is critical to a successful culture, Malham stressed. At cj Advertising, every new hire had a 60-day onboarding checklist. It was that new hire’s responsibility to schedule and meet with each program’s champion, which not only gave them time to absorb the culture but also served as way to meet their colleagues.
As CEO, Malham would then meet with them and go over the checklist and ask them if they were committed to the culture. He gave them a day to think about. That came with an offer to help them find another job if they decided the fit wasn’t right for them, plus two weeks’ pay.
“In the five years I did this, no one took the out, but they appreciated the offer,” he said. “The 60-day checklist is that time for you to understand who they are as a future team member, get them oriented. This person is a potential future champion. They’re a potential deal maker. They’re a potential problem solver. Everything you want in your company. Bring them along.”
Holding Yourself Accountable
As the CEO or owner, the buck stops with you if your culture isn’t working.
“If someone is upset, it is not their fault. It is your fault,” Malham said. “You did not communicate well. You did not hire the right person to be their manager. You did not ask the question before you implemented a stupid policy. You didn’t tell them with enough time in advance; you did something wrong. This is the mindset. You have to have to be a leader of a culture where you want people to want to come to work and not have to come to work.”
To hold himself and his leadership team accountable, Malham started monthly morale surveys, with just one question: On a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best place you can imagine working and 1 being the worst, how do we rate? A response of 4 or below had to be explained, so the company could address it.
“All the comments come in anonymously and all the information goes back out to everyone, so everyone in the organization sees the score, they see the participation rate, and they see every comment and every response,” he explained. “We took negative conversations away from the water cooler and we exposed them to sunlight, and we were able to deal with them.”
The results were posted every month for all to see.
“If you don’t want to do this because you’re scared of what they’ll say, you have a whole other problem,” he noted.
What’s Your Excuse?
Business owners who haven’t thought about, or have put off, cultivating a company culture, have a variety of excuses, Malham said.
Excuse #1: When we make more money, then we’ll invest in culture.
“This linear process of making money and then creating culture can be problematic because the culture is what you need to get your people right to get your business right,” he said.
Excuse #2: If we had better people, we would have a better culture.
“I spent the first eight to 10 years believing that the problem with my culture and my business was my people,” Malham recalled, “blaming everything except the right thing.”
Excuse #3: Your culture is not going to work for us.
“It probably won’t,” he said, “but think about how it could work for you, how you can modify it, how you can make it work in today’s world, because if you don’t think it’ll work for you, then your competition probably thinks it won’t work for them and it could be an advantage.”
Excuse #4: Only successful companies do that.
“Of course the most successful companies on the planet make culture a massive priority,” he stressed, “because they know how valuable their team is, they know how costly turnover is, they know how hard it is to hire over and over again as opposed to keeping the people that have helped you be so successful in the first place.”
A Healthy Company Culture Is a Virtuous Circle
For Malham, the culture that led to a happier team, with low turnover, high tenure, and higher performance, also led to happier clients and higher margins.
He says the work, time, and investment in culture pays off on many levels and encouraged MSPs to prioritize their own cultures.
“We as a leadership team had a mindset of growth. We wanted to become better as leaders. We wanted our team members to become better as team members, and we realized that as they got better, we got better.”
To learn how one MSP revolutionized his company culture, see From Culture Shock To Cultural Revolution: 5 Steps To Improve Company Culture.
