Integrating Your Key Values Into Your Business

Steve Hubbard, Sales & Marketing Director, Lighting Enhancement Corporation

How can you ensure you’re integrating your key values and vision into your business? This article teaches you how to achieve this by creating a business culture, building partnerships, being more sociable and living your vision and values.

• Establish and solidify a vision. While we all may have strong values, not all of them will translate well into every business venture. Careful planning and debate with partners, family members, mentors and community members can certainly help turning values into core business principles. Write them down on a website, corporate materials, office spaces etc.

• Create a business culture. Once established, an even bigger challenge can be to find ways to bring values to life on a daily basis in your business. Hiring like-minded people and rewarding them for actions that promote core company values can help create a culture that exhibits that vision and embeds it in and beyond the workplace.

• Build partnerships. Find organizations that share certain values with your business and reach out to them to share ideas and advance your vision. At Lightenco we wanted to ally ourselves with organizations like The Recycling Council of Ontario or the Ottawa Centre Ecodistrict or Green Circle Salons that shared our visions of sustainability and conservation.

• Be sociable. While we might not always have time it’s important to remind the outside world (clients, community etc.) of what we stand for. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media tools can help in a big way. As a salesperson I often found that speaking about our company’s values improved chances of closing a deal as potential clients appreciated that we had a solid vision in a market space where others often didn’t.

• Work it, Live it! It is very important to take the values you establish at work and live them at home and in public. In our space of sustainability and conservation it goes without saying that we should recycle our waste, teach our children to turn the lights off etc. I’ve seen many business owners/entrepreneurs who don’t personally believe in what they sell or do in the business world.

Hey mentors! Want advice on how you can support your mentees vision and values. Check out this crash course.