Company values are excellent things.
And sometimes, they need to be revisited.
Not because they aren’t right: but because in business, as in life, things change. Your perspective shifts. What was the right area of focus before doesn’t fit the way it used to.
I’ve been discovering that’s the case for me and my agency: the values which fit so well many years ago for me now reflect a more personal, slower approach which has begun to change.
I’ve seen a lot of “looking back over the past year” posts, and to be honest I haven’t felt like I had a spare second to look back – and to be even more honest, looking back is a bit hard. The past year has been both amazing and tough.
On the amazing side, PF is feeling the positive impact of 12 years of serving accountants well, and most of our new clients have read The Accountant Marketer and have come to us more educated and more ready to do the work. I’m enjoying getting to work more closely with accountants on their strategy and businesses, and I finally got to move to my island which was a personal goal I’ve held for over 15 years.
On the tough side, everything costs more. Buyers are more nervous, taking their time, a little less sure. Clients change their minds faster and need results even faster, too. I tried several routes to move me further out of the business, and some of those helped immensely and some failed spectacularly. We got a bit top heavy, with more leaders and heads and org charts than simply a group of people serving accountants.
(If you’d like to hear about some of the fails, which might help you to bypass similar fails and get it right for your company or agency, please ask!)
So I’ve taken the tough decision to take my own advice, and focus my agency as a smaller core team made up of expert strategists, who can then call on our connected designers, content writers, web developers, SEO experts, social ads experts, and more as we need them.
We’re going to focus more on the four areas we are AMAZING at, which are: Education. Strategy. Identity. Assets.
Education: How marketing works (for accountants)
Strategy: What approach will help you reach your business goals?
Identity: Helping your brand fully reflect who you truly are
Assets: Designing & crafting what showcases that brand in a way which is appealing to your favourite clients
As we’ve done this, I’ve considered the changing client needs and behaviours, the world at large, and who we are as an agency.
And I discovered things are quite different than they were years ago when we rebranded and set the values.
None of the values we had before were bad, or wrong: but in the new structure and the new year, we need to be clearer than ever about what matters to our clients – and therefore what matters to us.
So the new values will be expressed in this way:
Experimentation.
Impact.
Decisiveness.
Creative space.
Care.
These reflect what our clients need, yes: and they also reflect what my agency needs – and what I as the owner and leader need.
That’s the biggest part of taking your own advice. What do YOU need, to do your job in the best possible way?
And both I and my team – and our clients – need to be able to experiment. Play. Try things. Build our own AI. We need to let ourselves fail on our road to success.
We need to see results, impact: or else why are we doing this? Financial impact of course, but also an impact on our own personal world and the world we occupy. We want to help make this place a better one – so our businesses, our marketing, have to work for us.
This means authoritative decisions. We don’t have time to mess around, and many of us don’t have loads of spare cash flinging around right now. Yes or no. In or out. Go or stop. Good decisions based on experience, so we can move forward.
At the same time, along with all this speed and decision-making, we still recognise the need for rest. Breathing room. Space for creativity. We have to plan for the extra room to do what feels unproductive. Walk around, think, stare into the distance, write, listen, do nothing.
And above all: care for the humans we are honoured to live and work among. This can be tough as a business owner, because we’re here to do business and make a profit. But we can still recognise our own, and our team and clients’, humanity: because otherwise why are we doing all this?
So there they are, the five new values. You’ll see them appear on PF’s site and in our marketing soon, but most of all I trust you’ll see them lived out as we do business together.
How about you? When was the last time you revisited your values, and do they fit who you and your clients are today?
