Earlier in my career, I found myself sitting at dinner with leaders of a large manufacturing company we were working with, along with their spouses. At some point in the conversation, I said to one of the partners sitting next to me: I can’t work with leaders I don’t share values with.

He looked at me and said, “Aren’t you too young to be so sure?”

Instantly, in my head, I thought “No.” Too young to have integrity? Never. But I had to stop and think about his perspective, and whether I was taking his question out of context. 

What he meant, I think, was that certainty about values is something you earn later, after the money is made and the position secure. That when you’re early in your career and building, with a young family to support, you compromise.

I understood the implication. I just didn’t agree with it. And I wasn’t operating on idealism. I had seen, up close, exactly what it costs when values exist only on paper.

The brand only your employees know

They had come to us for help not with their external brand, but with their internal brand. What their employees believe about the company. Sales were strong and growing. The external brand was…fine. They had a five-star rating with customers. But their own employees gave them a one-star rating. 

As a result, they faced a retention crisis. People weren’t leaving for better opportunities. They were “walking across the street for ten cents more an hour.” That’s not a compensation problem. That’s a culture problem.

High turnover and low employee engagement had real consequences for the company. They had strong customer demand, with plenty of opportunity to grow sales and market share. But low productivity and constant workforce turn acted as a drag on the organization. As a result, they couldn’t ramp up manufacturing to meet that demand. 

While touring the plant floor, I learned a lot more about the culture. When the company was younger, one of the co-founders knew every employee by name and held an annual holiday party that people genuinely loved. As they neared 1,000 employees, that level of personal engagement from the founders just wasn’t possible. At the time I visited, the other co-founder hadn’t set foot on the floor in seven years.

I didn’t need a survey to tell me there was a culture problem. In my experience, you can feel it within minutes of walking into a building. The signals are everywhere if you know what to look for.

You notice whether leaders move through shared spaces or stay behind closed doors. You watch how people respond when a senior person walks into the room, whether the energy lifts or goes quiet. You pay attention to how physical space is allocated, whose comfort is considered and whose isn’t. You look for interaction between tiers of the organization, or the absence of it. You notice whether anyone on the floor makes eye contact with visitors, and whether people seem engaged or just enduring.

None of these things are definitive on their own. But together they tell a story. And in my experience, that story is usually consistent with what you find when you start asking questions.

What does all this have to do with brand? Everything. A strong brand starts with the way employees understand, envision and embody it, from the C-suite to the shop floor. If the brand does not live in your people, it’s just hollow decoration. 

Building the brand from the inside

Before I started working with this client, I was fortunate to work closely with someone who had led some of the largest food companies in the world. He became not only a client but a friend and a mentor. He taught me more about the importance of culture, and the steps you take to build it, than I could have learned in any management course.

He believed that company culture isn’t just a checkbox. It’s a strategic asset, maybe the most important one a company has. He showed me that culture isn’t about fun perks or a list of values etched on a wall. It’s how those values are lived every day and at every level of the organization. And it’s about a shared vision and purpose that everyone understands and believes in, from the mailroom to the boardroom. 

I applied those lessons with my client. We started where the real work was: inside the building. Extensive stakeholder dialogues helped us understand what employees valued, what they needed from their leaders, and where the gaps were between the two. From there, we did visioning work with leadership: what did they want this company to stand for, and what would it look and feel like to work there if they got it right. We looked at competitors and at aspirational brands outside the industry—companies with strong cultures—and dug into how they got there. That internal foundation became the basis for everything that followed, including, eventually, the external rebrand.

As a result of our initial discovery and branding work, management was able to develop new strategies for recruitment, internal communication and employee engagement, informed by real insights into employee needs. They understood what motivated employees to work for them and what made them want to stay–or not. A refined recruitment strategy and employee engagement efforts resulted in lower turnover and higher productivity. In the end, they not only maximized production at their existing facility, but built another large manufacturing facility to support new product lines that met emerging customer needs. Higher employee morale translated directly into added value for their customers. 

We ultimately completed a full rebrand, external as well as internal, and I’m proud of the strategy and design work that went into that. But what made that rebrand real was something much more fundamental: a shift in how the team across all levels understood and embodied the values, vision and purpose behind the brand. 

Your culture is your difference 

With a strong company culture, everything else gets easier. That’s why we say culture comes before strategy.

Before you can show up consistently for clients, for partners, for the market, you have to get your own house in order. Shared purpose. Shared vision. Values that actually govern how decisions get made, and how everyone is expected to communicate and behave, not just how the website reads.

That company engagement, and the mentor who shaped so much of my thinking, gave me a framework I’ve worked from ever since. It informed how I ran Summerfield Advertising from that point on and how I’m approaching the work of building Genetica Creative today.

Next time, I’ll get into what that framework actually looks like in practice.