Growth Room: establishing values and a strong culture in agencies

A Quick Word to Start

Last June marked the time for our first Growth Room seminar.
Direction Avignon in a magnificent area, on the program: wakeboarding, tennis, swimming pool, soccer, campfire...

Before that, I had cut my teeth in a start-up, and I was always impressed by how complex the process of creating values and culture was and yet so decisive in the growth of a business.

The problem is that seminars, or the allocation of a large budget dedicated solely to activities and leisure, is rather rare in agencies, a structure that wants above all to seek profitability. In addition to that, in an agency, the vast majority of the team's missions focus on customers. So structurally, it is even harder to create this emulation for teams that have very few internal projects within the company, and in common.

However, there are a lot of agencies and competition. So The difference is necessarily made in the human person.

In this article, I explain the process I used to establish these shared positive values so that the team can thrive to the fullest and transmit this culture to each newcomer.

Our Seminar: It Was the Right Time

Let's go back to our seminar...
It was an opportunity for the whole team to strengthen our ties and to spend great moments together. It was also the perfect opportunity to think together about what the values and culture of Growth Room could be.

In 3 points, it gives this:

• Making everyone feel good, happy, in a healthy environment.
• That they feel imbued with the vision of Growth Room and invested in its development.
• That they show the desire to work on internal projects at Growth Room: monitoring, communication, recruitment, strategy, skills development, etc. What is The defect Usually in an agency model.

I started the adventure with Côme Courteault in 2018. At the time, it was only a side project: A Slack to answer questions from entrepreneurs in their growth strategy.

On February 15, 2020 I decided to leave Dreem, where I had been Head of Growth for 3 years, to devote myself entirely to Growth Room.

The team evolved quite quickly for an agency, going from 3 to 16 gems today.
Here they are, before leaving to wakeboard under the south-east sun:

Our culture-fit process, step 1: information gathering

I was talking to you above about the importance of establishing a culture and shared values in an agency, well Here's How It Took Shape at Growth Room.

Before this seminar, I scheduled points with each person on the team in the streets of Paris. During these exchanges, I asked 3 questions:

• 1. Obviously to start with: How do you feel in the box? (It sounds stupid, but red flags can often be detected and anticipated in this way)
• 2. With the experience you have with it, What is the value that most reflects Growth Room to date ? If you have concrete examples
• 3. What decision (s) would you make if you were CEO?

I was impressed to see that during these exchanges, one to 2 corporate values had already largely emerged.

Our culture-fit process, step 2: analysis

The process from there was logical for me: gather all this information (hyper-relevant), to report it to the team and Start Thinking About 3 Values. The rest was quite logical for us:

• A first value that came out continually and that we therefore already had, we just had to define it concretely.

• A second value that we were beginning to have (which came out a few times in the various points I had with them) and that we wanted to push, but which was not yet fully established, due to a lack of communication and process.
  
• A third value that could answer and help the team on the first point, namely: to feel even better at Growth Room.

The seminar is coming, the opportunity to really define them:

Our Culture-Fit Process, Step 3: Choice and Explanation

The values that resulted from it:

• Kindness
• Proactivity
• The requirement

Let me detail all this for you:

Kindness:

The first value and the one that was 99% unanimous in the team is benevolence.

Kindness is a human and social value, it can be at the heart of the history of a company, and has been since the beginning of the adventure. The interesting thing is that no one defined it the same way.

So we took all the team's examples to do this:

• Mutual aid: It is very important in a team, even more so in an agency, with all the clients we support, we go much further if everyone's knowledge is shared, and feeling supported on issues removes a lot of stress on a daily basis.
• Listening: Because yes, we are human, and it is important to know your work is valued or not to feel belittled when a customer yells. If you do nothing, the mental impact of this type of episode when you experience it alone is devastating.
• Reception: As a junior or a senior, arriving in a new company with people who are there to train, tell about their experiences, their experience, and support with the challenges encountered is essential.

Here, for example, we organize a point with all the members of the team from the first week, on a one-to-one basis or as a cluster team in order to break the ice for the newcomer and to quickly discover the dynamics of the agency. Obviously, combined with a welcome aperitif all together (we always find a good opportunity for the aperitif).

Another example that we like is the regular organization of a surprise activity organized by a pair (chosen randomly). The first was an improvisation course with the whole team, which also had a great impact in revealing the personalities in the team.

Proactivity:

Proactivity (or ownership) for us, It is to take the lead on internal projects that interest us, and to be responsible for their execution.

It's also, getting in the habit of giving any suggestions that could make life easier, or improve something in the business.

A fairly telling example after the seminar: a complete doc and schedule for the onboarding of new consultants, carried out precisely by a person who arrived as a junior, where we find all the resources, information, and details of customer support, in order to quickly develop skills. (Small dedication for Rose Florin, consultant at GR)

The requirement:

Jean D'Ormesson said it was better Be lenient with others and demanding with yourself.

At the beginning of the adventure, we understood that the first sources of disagreement or errors came from a lack of expectations with ourselves: to do something quickly and without really challenging ourselves intellectually, to communicate something about which we are not really convinced...

It certainly takes less time, but it is therefore not very qualified and it is open to mistakes. Who says error, says customer frustration, therefore lack of trust, and mental load to manage on a daily basis.

An example recently developed at Growth Room: a schedule to manage the optimizations to be implemented well in advance of a weekly with a client, the monitoring of KPIs, or even the preparation of a strategy, in order to put maximum intelligence into it into it according to the business and not to repeat something generic every time.

Because there is nothing worse in terms of pleasure than working on a strategy, without conviction (I am paraphrasing here our COO and partner, Charles de Gabrielli)

Our culture-fit process, step 4: implementation

On implementation, one of my advisors often told me: best values = actionable values.

As far as I could see, the concrete examples of the values I mentioned above were already very useful for the team. But at the beginning, it is essential to push the implementation.

Liaison with Internal Communication

To begin with, it's obvious that you have to repeat, repeat, repeat. Indeed, but above all to make connections with day-to-day projects.

That's why, at each team point (we have breakfast with the whole team usually on Thursday morning), we make a connection with values.

Example: when there is a strategy on a client with a very complex market, on which the consultant has spent a lot of time, has challenged himself etc. (we are back to demanding here), we encourage him to present it to us on Thursday morning so that the team himself can immerse himself in it and repeat this good practice on a daily basis.

Valorization of internal projects

The willingness of teams to take ownership of internal projects also depends on the impact that this project can have on the company, and especially on the monitoring of results.

For each project, we therefore place great emphasis on the results and the potential impact. Then, on this famous point on Thursday to take stock of progress and therefore celebrate the completion of the project, and the results if there are any. This was precisely the case with Blanche, Geoffrey, Clement who were on an internal prospecting project for Growth Room, which was a hit.

Operational process

In all our processes (jumble: strategic presentation, tracking, tracking, tracking, tracking, landing page, scraping, ad creation etc.), we are now careful to incorporate these values implicitly. For example, at the end of the strategic presentation templates, we will make sure to integrate a message to make consultants think about asking for feedback from other people (even from other areas).

The Effect at Growth Room

These values helped us push, and we had a great 2022. The challenge now is to maintain this same identity for years to come, taking into account growth.

We have just (again) moved, we swapped our offices in Batignolles (17th arrondissement of Paris) for brand new premises, bigger in... Place Vendôme (I promise, it's not my purpose).

Looking forward to meeting over coffee!

PS: Growth Room is always recruiting talent, if you recognize yourself in these values, that's happening Right Here !

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