What makes someone choose to work for your company?
The job description matters. The salary matters.
What makes them stay is the feeling they get when they walk through your door. When they meet your people. When they hear how great it is to work with you - and when they have the experience that backs up the reputation.
It's brand. And it's culture.
Two things that are definitely not the same, but it’s hard to build one without the other.
Culture is what you feel when you show up. It’s the internal representation of “who you are and who you’re for" in many ways.
Brand is how you tell that story to everyone else. If culture is the internal identity, then brand is the outward representation of your company. It’s shaped heavily by your people and the culture they cultivate.
Most businesses have a culture and a brand, whether they define it or not. People develop shared ways of working. Unspoken rules form around how decisions get made. There’s a vibe that either attracts people or pushes them away.
The question is whether you're shaping these foundational elements intentionally or letting them form by accident.
Mission. Vision. Personality. The tone of every communication. The visual identity that shows up in every piece of marketing. The stories you tell about yourselves.
When you bring that together and share it with your entire team, something shifts.
You see it in the small things. The intentional design choices that reflect your values without shouting them. A welcoming environment that you can feel, not just read about on your website.
You feel it in the big things too. Like when leadership actually listens to employee feedback and makes changes. Or when you give people at every level the tools and authority to solve real problems, not just follow scripts.
When employees help shape the solutions, they become champions for the change. They're more engaged because they had a voice. They stay longer because they feel ownership.
Through the last two years, implementing the Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS) has given us a few tools to revisit and reinforce our brand and culture:
Level 10 meetings, among all our departments and business functions and for our senior leadership team, give the opportunity for everyone to raise Issues and contribute to solutions that get implemented across the business.
Our Vision/Traction Organizer is a living document that distills our focus as a company, our target audience, and more foundational principles of brand into their simplest form.
Our Core Values — Follow the Golden Rule, Be a Lighthouse, and Light Up Those Around You — show up everywhere, internally and externally. And as the years go on, I think we all have developed a unique understanding of what those values mean to each of us.
How many companies put their core values on swag items to share with others?
The hard work of brand and culture? You have to live up to it. Every day. Without compromise.
Get both right, and you're not just building a business. You're building something that lasts. Something that attracts the right people. The ones who share your values. Who want to stay. Who'll help move your vision forward.
The foundation built by brand and culture, the foundation you can't see, is what holds everything else up in your business.
Want to Keep Learning With Us?
The Beacon is going to be a weekly newsletter showing up in your inbox with our team’s perspectives and stories. In time, it’ll become more than that.
While we’ve done several podcasts and video series over the past years, we’re bringing those under the same branding, the same umbrella as this newsletter. The Beacon is the place for our storytelling as an organization.
Podcast conversations with our team, and our friends from the Buffalo business community and beyond, will resume soon.
And when you subscribe to this newsletter, you’ll get each episode straight to your inbox too - in addition to YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you like to tune in.
While we get the podcast back up and running, this week’s story was inspired by a conversation between myself (Joe Ray) and Rachael Brown last year for Level Up With Lighthouse. We had a lot of fun connecting the dots between brand and culture, marketing and sales, technology and talent.
What We’re Recruiting For Today
Our Technology Talent Managers are always tuned in to the market, creating opportunities for technology professionals and innovative businesses to connect.
Here’s a few roles we’re recruiting for for this week:
Python Developer (AWS/MDM): A 6-month, contract-to-hire, remote job opportunity with periodic travel to Charlotte. (Warm weather, anyone?) Our client is seeking a Senior Full Stack Developer with expertise in Python and AWS cloud services to design, develop, and maintain scalable full-stack web applications, cloud-native services, and modern front-end interfaces.
Scrum Master: We’re always open to connecting with contract Scrum Master professionals; opportunities like these come around every so often. This one in particular is a a 6+ month contract opportunity and will be hybrid in Buffalo.
Cybersecurity Infrastructure Engineer: This is an exciting 12-month-plus contract role supporting Proxy, Active Directory (AD), AD Reporting, Group Policy Objects (GPO), and File System technologies.