Giving A Sh*t
When we embarked on a major company restructuring in 2022, we started the process with a positioning workshop to help us understand where we align best in the market and how we show up there. Until now, Week of the Website has been in a period of start-up culture, and it was time for us to grow up into a “real company,” as we like to say. After nine years in business, it was high time for us to dig in and start focusing on what really matters.
The first exercise examined our company's core values and adjusted them to reflect who we are now — something we hadn’t done in about eight years.
After spending three hours in a collaborative brainstorm to hone in on our updated values, we discovered something interesting: Our core values hadn’t shifted, and more than that, they started with the idea of simply caring. Or just generally giving a sh*t, as I like to say.
When we founded our company, we intentionally focused on building it around us as people and letting it serve as an extension of what we value.
The result is extremely personal — which can be both a good and bad thing. Every decision we make — including how we operate, structure, hire, and work with clients — starts with caring about what we do, caring for the people we work with, and being a good citizen. We’ve chosen good people over money more times than we’d like to admit. We work asynchronously to allow for flexible schedules when life gets in the way. We’ve opted for health care and restructuring over our own payrolls (which is admittedly a big no-no, but when your work is tied to your values, it’s a no-brainer).
We started adding to our team about five years ago, and many of those folks are still tied to us in some way today — even if they’ve moved on for whatever reason. We hire intentionally, finding people who care about other people just as much as we do. Many of our best candidates came to us citing, “I just want to see my clients succeed” as a major motivating factor. It means we work with people who will always try their best to find a solution that works with you instead of against you.
So why do we start with caring? Well, we have to live with ourselves. And to do that, we need to know we are contributing to ourselves, our company and our community in a constructive way.
It means decisions are often harder because the stakes are higher and we are committed to walking the walk. It also means we’re going to make mistakes from time to time because we cannot always predict how life will go. It also means we're going to make the occasional mistake when it comes to building a business, because despite a finely tuned process, we can't always predict how life will go. Those moments are when you really see how much we actually care.
When we are willing to step back and say, “For this to be mutually successful, it’s probably best we don’t work together.” Ultimately, that means we leave space for those clients and relationships that mirror our commitment to caring. When people care, the results are better. It’s the whole reason we have been able to do this 700+ times so far — and why, armed with our new structure and reinforced values, we're set to take WOTW to the next level.
