Values Shape Vision
"Are you running your business or are your employees running your business?”
These words hung and stung in the air.
My coach was speaking the honest hard truth, which of course, is what I pay her to do.
And yes, for those of you who are wondering, even coaches need coaches.
It's like sports. So long as you're in the game, it's amazing to have somebody to hold you accountable for doing the hard work that it takes to up your abilities. Entrepreneurship is lonely — more than most people we need and deserve to have someone who is a confidant, a support system, and a sounding board.
This question really made me look at myself. It made me look at where my company was going and where, in some ways, I had lost my way.
The challenge for us as CEOs is that, in essence, we are the creators of our companies.
We're responsible for guiding them and for shaping them into their next era of evolution. For me, the biggest challenge of being a CEO is not usually the creation part. I live for that part of the work. I love making new things that didn't exist before. I love bringing them to light and life in the world.
The challenge for me sometimes is carrying out that vision, holding true and fast to it, even as the company evolves, as things grow, and as people join the organization or leave it. That vision needs to stay true, regardless. But I know that it is my responsibility as CEO to be the keeper of that vision and to make sure that my team understands it, owns it, and can be accountable for bringing it to life in everything that we do.
But where does that vision come from?
What makes it worth being a part of?
What makes it something that inspires us on days when we are so busy just doing the work?
And most importantly:
How do we come back to that vision when we lose it along the way?
For me, my vision for my company truly comes from my values.
The vision for Fearless Foundry came to life after a season of creating enormous amounts of educational content for service-based business owners. It was something that lit up my passion in a way that I had never known before. It allowed me to tap into a love of speaking and training.
But back in 2016, when I was creating all of this content for the company I worked for in the accounting industry, I realized that I was only speaking into a certain subset of topics that I wanted to dive into and that there was so much more that I felt called to do to support early-stage entrepreneurs. However, because of the nature of the company I was working for, we were crafting content all around what it meant to be an advisor. At the end of the day, our goal was to sell software, which meant the topics that I was able to touch on should ultimately come back to core features inside a product.
For me, there was an emptiness to the content I was creating.
In my personal life, I valued the types of content that dug deeper and focused on the personal development side of the equation just as much as the hard-hitting business development aspects. I knew that there were a lot of elements around what it takes to scale a business and build a brand that couldn't necessarily be taught in a blog post or a single webinar. I saw a shift happening in the accounting profession where more and more business owners struggled to build this skill set, and I wanted to go deeper.
I built Fearless Foundry to be able to do that.
The company came out of my belief in the value of offering more meaningful coaching, community, and consulting work for entrepreneurs as a way to help them navigate and sustain themselves on their journey to grow their businesses.
But that is just one of the many ways my experience and values shaped what the company has become.
As someone who built the first chapter of her career as a “woman in tech”, I knew the lack of opportunity, access, and funding that exists for other professional women looking that want to build the skill set that I had been privileged enough to cultivate over the course of my career. Working in an industry dominated by men, I had been lucky enough as a young woman to have worked for leaders that saw my potential gave me opportunities, and allowed me to build knowledge that I now can pass on to other women.
In order to do our part to level the playing field, I put a huge emphasis inside my company on a value that we refer to as female first, which means that we primarily hire, partner, and work with women in order to increase their access and visibility across industries. This is more than a core value to me. It shapes the vision of what my company has become, where I now have a team of five women collaborating together and we have built amazing relationships with clients and industry partners who feel deeply connected to us because they share this same core value.
As my company has grown, my beliefs have continued to blossom and come into my own identity more fully. Over the past few years, I deepened my commitment to supporting and uplifting folks from BIPOC and the LGBTQ+ communities, and in turn, my company has done the same. As a queer founder with the privilege to be out proudly and not have my identity impact the success of my business, I’ve made it our mission to be a beacon for underrepresented founders, and to make giving back to founders from more marginalized experiences a core part of our operating rhythms so that we can elevate voices that often don’t have access to the same opportunities as cis, white founders.
Another core value that has shaped my company over the last five years is the idea of citing your sources. For me, so much of what I've taught and learned throughout the course of my career is the result of work that other people have done before me. Maybe it's just the academic in me, but I've never felt comfortable taking credit for somebody else's work. In turn, I also believe in the importance of collaboration and that if other people are creating great work that makes sense for my audience, it's not something that I need to go out and copycat or recreate. Instead, we put a focus inside our company on collaborating with others so that we can bring even more amazing education to light for the folks that we serve. We're currently putting this value into action throughout our community member offerings, weekly newsletter highlights, and all of our Journal content.
But I know it's not just enough for me to sit here and talk about my core values. For them to truly lead to impact, it is required that my team and I understand them fully and embody them through action.
One of the biggest things I see lacking in organizations is a lack of understanding of what their true values are, and it becomes a barrier to their ability to thrive. Some people think that values are something you create one time and put up on your website or the wall of their conference room. When they aren’t landing clients that align with their values, folks think this is the result of their branding being off or that they simply need to redesign their website and suddenly they'll start attracting the types of clients they actually want to work with.
I can speak from more than a decade of experience starting and scaling brands and say that's not the case. If you build branding that doesn't mean anything to you deep down, it isn't going to solve this problem or start accelerating the number of qualified clients that come your way. What it comes down to is understanding your values first and then shaping a vision for your company from them to drive actions that align what you believe with what you do.
That is why branding is, and always will be, core to what we do at Fearless Foundry.
What I want you to take away from all of this is that if you're a leader or founder, is that it's your responsibility to guide the vision of your organization.
If you’re wondering how to tap into that vision, it starts by looking within and asking:
What are the values that matter most to us as a company?
My hope is that in uncovering these values, you are able to begin sharing them with the world and with your team so that together you can move forward with a mission and a vision that is deeply meaningful to you and to anyone you work with.
And of course, if you need some guidance along the way—give us a shout.