Mastering the Art of Success
your enterprise as something you were interested in eventually selling,
the studies we have seen have shown that if you spend the time on the
culture, at exit you’ll walk away with a multiple in excess of twelve
times what you would have walked away with if you had not spent time
on the culture.
The third thing that ’s in it for me is net income—cash and profits.
The studi es suggest that culture-rich companies” income over a ten-
year period have increased 7 56 percent versus 1 percent in the culture
deficient enterprises.
The fourth and last what’s in it f or me, fr om a culture standpoint, is
job growth. Job growth increased 282 percent in culture-rich
companies versus 36 percent in the others.
There is so much to be said to encourage the entrepreneur to spend
time on the area of building a winning, dynamic culture.
I challenge my entrepreneurial clients with this. Do you have a
culture by design or do you have a culture by default? The successful
enterprises today—the successful entrepreneurs—are spending time
id entifying what they want as their culture and then going about making
sure that they have the systems and processes in place to make sure it
lives, day in and d ay out, in their enterprise.
WRIGHT
What are some of the top initiatives we can take toward building a
winning culture?
DALY
I would say that there are four distinct legs to the chair of a
successful culture. One of those legs is recognition s ystems—what are
your systems to ensure regular, ongoing recognition? The challenge
th at I give to my entrepreneurial audiences is to imagine this scenario:
I am the speaker f or the day. All your employees are in a ballr oom
and I ask f or the leadership team to sit in the back. I walk up and say,
“I’m excited to be with you today. I have a lot of good things to share;
but before I do, l et me ask this question: by a show of hands, h ow many
of you are overly recognized?” I think the visual would be a room
without a lot of hands going up. I then say to entrepreneurs, “If, when I