Managing the Culture of a Startup Company with Patricia Miller
Starting a new company is never easy. Just about every entrepreneur dreams to scale up their business, but the journey is always hard.
At the heart of any new and growing business is the company’s unique culture. More than anything else, a company’s culture will determine whether it succeeds or fails. It is therefore critical for any company owner to think through the culture they want to build. At the same time, owners and CEOs must engage their employees in the process of building the culture they want. There won’t be a deeper sense of stewardship and connection between the company and its employees unless the team is involved in building the culture.
In today’s show, we are joined by a talented CEO who grew her company from 5 to 50 employees in just a few years. Patricia Miller is the CEO of Matrix 4, and she shares the core values and culture that she and her employees live by every day. She also shares her secrets of working meaningfully and purposefully and how a leader can embody the company’s culture.
Patricia also shares the differences between managing the culture of a lean, strappy startup company compared to managing the culture of more established, larger companies.
“When we’re celebrating wins and successes, we always link it back to our core values..”
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In this episode, you will learn:
2:25 – The DNA of Matrix 4 – personal definition of culture
3:23 – The company’s culture (raw, honest, authentic, creative, and flexible)
4:32 – The 3 core values of the company
6:22 – Example of make meaningfully, work purposefully
9:20 – The importance of a leader in driving the culture of the company
9:55 – How to engage a team, drive a culture, and what could be the possible outcome
11:50 – Other things that are being done to make the values of the company come alive
and make the employees utilize them everyday of the week
14:32 – The difference between managing the culture of an old, established company
versus managing the culture of a company like Matrix 4
18:55 - Patricia’s advice to listeners based from her experience in managing
cultures
Resources:
Connect with Patricia:
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Episode Transcript:
Speaker 1: From core values to valued culture, here is your host, Will Scott, interviewing another CEO about leading culture in their company.
Will Scott: So today we have Patricia Miller, CEO of Matrix 4 from Woodstock, Illinois. Start by telling us about your business, Patricia.
Patricia Miller: Sure. Matrix 4 is a design and manufacturing house, and we use the medium of plastic. So, we make anything in plastic, across the range, mostly in the consumer space. But for appliance, cosmetic, medical device, automotive, and do things from back-of-the napkin ideation and sketch to full scale manufacturing.
Will Scott: Cool. And how did you come to be CEO of Matrix 4?
Patricia Miller: My grandpa was the owner of the business for thirty-seven years, and he was planning to close it in 2014, and I decided I was at a point in my career and ready to leave Fortune 500 and decided to take it over.
Will Scott: Wow, that's cool. And look, I just gotta ask because everyone's going to wonder, tell us about this fabulous chair you're sitting in.
Patricia Miller: Oh, probably, my passion is definitely design across any of the aspects, but I love interior design, so I'm sitting in my dining room right now and this is a chair that I bought for my dining room table.
Will Scott: It sort of looks like an Alice in Wonderland chair.
Patricia Miller: That was the goal, as you know. I wanted the dining room to be slightly Alice in Wonderland-esque.
Will Scott: Right, cool. Okay, so getting started with the sort of culture side of things. What do you think of when one talks about corporate culture? What does that bring up for you?
Patricia Miller: Gosh, you know, I think it's definitely become more of a buzz word more recently, but when I think about how we define corporate culture I'm thinking of it more as transcendent, and definitely has some implicit and explicit parameters to it. But I think it's more of a frame of reference for us in terms of how we behave, how we conduct ourselves, what kind of energy is in our space, what the space consists of. It really becomes kind of the DNA of Matrix 4.
Will Scott: Very cool. So you call it the DNA of Matrix 4. By the way, do you notice the T-shirt I'm wearing?
Patricia Miller: I do! I appreciate it. Thank you for wearing it!
Will Scott: Well thank you, it's one of my favorite T-shirts. And how would you describe the culture in your company?
Patricia Miller: You know, I think it's definitely as much thoughtful as it is organic, and we're four years into a restart, and so it was as much about transitioning a really traditional culture into something that was much more adherent to our current strategy and where we want to drive the business, but if I think about us overall I think we're gritty and sophisticated at the same time, we're a flat organization so we're definitely collaborative, and provide a lot of input. I think raw and honest and authentic really go into our culture as well, and then I think creative and flexible.
Will Scott: OK, and I'm not sure if there's a part of your ... well I actually ... well, let's go on to, you know, you started to define your corporate culture there. Have you defined it using corporate values? Or cultural values?
Patricia Miller: Yeah, I don't think we define culture by core values but we definitely believe that core values are a part of culture.
Will Scott: And, what are some of those core values?
Patricia Miller: So, we have three core values: People first, make meaningfully, and communicate purposefully.
Will Scott: What process did you use to write up these core values?
Patricia Miller: Gosh, a very organic process. So, maybe six months into the business, we were still a really small team, and we were doing one of our off-sites, and my girlfriend, Christine Lemke, was facilitating, and we decided that we wanted to figure out What did we want to stand for as an organization, and what did we want to stand for internally? And so we did a brainstorm around what was important to us, being in manufacturing and being able to build a manufacturing company, and so kind of just did a really large whiteboard exercise on what are all the verbs and adjectives that describe what we're doing at M4 and what we wanted to be defined as. And then we were able to bubble up all of that into the three core value that we have today. And then underneath each of those core values, obviously there's a little bit more description.
Will Scott: Yeah, I'd definitely recommend that to my clients. I think that's so important. I mean, the core values, the actual words that you use are, of course, great. But then you need to say, “What do they mean to us in Matrix 4?” You can't just have a word like integrity, which is so broad, without having some description underneath it about what does it mean in your company. So you did go ahead and add what I sometimes call descriptive behaviors underneath each of your core values.
Patricia Miller: Yeah, definitely.
Will Scott: What's an example of one that supports, for example, "make meaningfully," or "communicate purposefully?"
Patricia Miller: Sure! So make meaningfully is definitely one that we really transcended beyond just a core value but we believe it's how we're making overall. We didn't want to just make widgets. It was really important for me to look at how we were defining a manufacturing company creatively and outside the box and challenging the status quo. And so it's not just we're making widgets everyday, but we want to make meaningfully, things that matter. And so underneath "make meaningfully," we have things like hustle and heart, courage, failure, enjoy the ride. Because we definitely knew we were going to be making not just parts and products, but brands and this brand in business, Matrix 4.
Will Scott: Very cool. How aware are your employees of these core values?
Patricia Miller: I think they're super aware. I think it's always a challenge, though, as we scale and continue to add on team mates, that how do you make sure that that is something that's ingrained across the organization? And so, we try to do things all the way from at every work station on the floor making sure our three core values are there along with our internal branding. And making sure it's in our conference rooms, making sure it's on our walls. And we even as we looked at what our proven process was, as you know, when we were looking at the EOS implementation across that, we were able to bubble up our proven process to those three core values too.
Will Scott: Perhaps it's worth mentioning that, of course you're valued clients of Culture Czars, and you defined your core values before I started working with you. But together, we kind of grew those a little bit and took them forward into like a proven process that brought those things together, which would be a really nice infographic to share with the Culture Czars community.
Patricia Miller: Yeah.
Will Scott: So, if you had to pick a number, what percentage, do you think, of your employees, let's say the office space employees, cuz that's a little easier than perhaps some of the factory-based employees. But how many of them could actually recite those three core values that you have? On the office side?
Patricia Miller: One hundred percent.
Will Scott: That's awesome. And what about on the factory side?
Patricia Miller: I would say probably seventy percent would be able to communicate in verbatim what they are. But one hundred percent know where to find them.
Will Scott: Okay. And as the leader of Matrix 4, how important is it to you to be deliberate about defining and managing your culture, versus kind of letting it just grow by default, to define itself?
Patricia Miller: I think it's critically important. I think my job as the CEO, and it's in my job description, and as part of my lead manage accountable studying and driving the strategy, and also being the champion of our culture. And so, I do think that even if you had an end of one company and I was the only one working there, I would still be defining and driving our culture just specific to me. So I do believe that just continues to perpetuate itself as you get more employees that needs to be something that's in the fiber of who we are.
Will Scott: Okay. And of course, as CEO, there's a lot of things that you have to pay to attention to and make priorities: managing cash, sales, customer satisfaction, productivity. If you had to sort of say, where's culture amongst those priorities for you?
Patricia Miller: Well, it's in my top three priorities, as I said, from my job description in my LMA. There was a really good article Harvard Business Review did, probably ten years ago when I was still at Lilly, which really flipped the model on its head, instead of focusing on profit, looking at how do you engage a team, and how do you drive a culture. And there is a suggestion, I think it's proven for a lot of companies now, that if you engage your team mates and you drive a culture, people are going to be more engaged, it's going to drive productivity, clients are going to be happier. Ultimately, at the end of the day, you're driving revenue and profit. So I don't really detach sales and strategy and clients from culture because to me, that holistic mentality that it's all driving together.
Will Scott: Okay, great! That's absolutely the message I like to spread as well. We talked earlier about what you've done to sort of make the values come alive and keep them thriving so that people are actually aware of them. So you said, for example, you got little cards at every work station; I know you have posters on the wall, and stuff. Anything else you do to sort of make sure that people are aware of them and using them everyday and every week?
Patricia Miller: Yeah, I think hiring, firing, retaining, developing, and rewarding based on culture and core values is really important as well. And when we do our mid year and end of year reviews, our core values are on there. And we're rating our team mates based on how well aligned they are, as a culture fit, and specifically to our core values. And definitely, when we're celebrating wins or successes, we always try to link it back to our core values and definitely was something that you helped us drive more towards. I know there's a point of view two ways on this, that core values are something internal to an organization. But because we've linked it to our proven process and because we want to be driving a transparent, authentic company, we also communicate it to our clients as well, and challenge that, if they don't feel like we're making meaningfully or communicating purposefully or putting people first, that they can challenge us, and or call us out. Or as we're engaging in dialogue, we say, "Look, it's really important for us to cap conflict for good, or engage in debate. And so we definitely try to make it part of our language and part of how we do business everyday.
Will Scott: That's very cool. And very well said. So you're a great example of a CEO who's not just leading the company, but who's really leading a culture. And that, of course, extends downstream to your customers and maybe upstream to your vendors and your suppliers. And I always say that helps make difficult conversations a lot easier when you're able to bring your culture to play in those conversations. Not just within your company, but without your company too.
Patricia Miller: Yeah, absolutely. And I think having come from a Fortune 500 background, when I was with Eli Lilly, that's a culture that's been ingrained now 135 years. And doesn't really move quickly, right? It’s down in the fibers of their threads. And so for me, it was really great to be able to say, "Okay, yes. We do have this traditional, historical business that we need to convert and there are cultural things that we need to change. But let's put this stake in the ground to do it, because if we don't, then the workplace that I wanted to design and I wanted to work in wouldn't be consistent."
Will Scott: So, since you mentioned that, perhaps, what are some of the differences in trying to manage the culture in an old, established, large company like Eli Lilly, versus a company like Matrix, that has about fifty employees?
Patricia Miller: Well yeah, when I started at Matrix, there were six or seven of us. And so, when you're sculling, even in a small organization, how do you make sure those things remain consistent? And there's definitely pros and cons of both. I think, when you're in an established, well-defined organization, that has a very inherent culture, you figure out very quickly if you fit or if you don't fit into it. And I think if you don't fit into it, the idea of being able to change it is possible as long as you have leadership and a lot of people on board. But it's not as easy as being able to build it. And so, I'm a huge fan of being a change agent, and that's something you can be a catalyst or a change agent at any level.
Patricia Miller: But I think it's a lot harder to shape a culture that's already existent to be able to build one from scratch and I think being a single CEO and the only owner of Matrix 4, made it easier for me to define and design what we wanted this company to look like: strategically, in culture, in DNA; versus when you're in an organization that is very well-established with 40,000 employees, being able to shift that requires a lot more energy and effort. But that's not to suggest that when I came into Matrix 4, it definitely wasn't something I had to put thought and effort into, because Matrix had been around for 47 years. The culture and mindset and strategy that was existing there for those years, was not consistent or aligned with what I wanted to drive Matrix. And so, we did have to take a very proactive approach to start getting that cultural shift. And a lot of it was determined by what people were we bringing on board and how were they aligned to the culture to help drive that change.
Will Scott: Right. So congratulations on your success by the way, going from six employees to fifty employees in just a small number of years. Do you have a favorite story that you could think of and relate for us from the culture or from the use of the core values that worked?
Patricia Miller: I don't know if there's a favorite story, but one thing that always sticks out for me is having grown up and observed this company from afar, because my Grandpa was running it. To no judgment for how he drove the organization, he was intelligent and successful, and he built a company and a culture that was consistent and aligned to him. But what I did observe was that it was very hierarchical, and not everyone had equal seats and voices at the table, which is one of our values underneath "people first," and it was negative. I think seeing what it was like, and a lot of people saying, "Well, that's just how Matrix is. That's just what it is." It's been really refreshing to be able to see, with thought and practice and intention, that you can shift an organization and have it be a very different energy and dynamic and culture inside it. We hear from anyone who comes now that this house is definitely running very differently than it was, and you can feel the energy shift. And I think that's just all intentional in the design of the strategy and a culture and a space.
Will Scott: And I've been to meetings myself where I've actually heard you say, "Listen, it's equal voices at the table. Everybody speak up," and I know that's definitely a culture that you live by. So that's very cool that you would recite that example.
Will Scott: Is there a piece of advice that you would share with our listeners? From your experience managing culture in Matrix?
Patricia Miller: I think it's definitely been very interesting for me to look at how do you manage culture in a very traditional industry that's not defined by being a tech company where there is ping pong tables and beer in the cafeteria and other things. And I've shifted my point of view on this slightly over the years, which is: I don't think there's any bad culture. I think that you can be a very traditional and conservative and hierarchical organization, if that is aligned to the culture you want to create. And I think you could just as easily be a very flat start-up company, different energy, different mentality, and have a culture that's defined by that.
Patricia Miller: I think sometimes we get very judge-y to suggest what is a good culture or bad culture, but different things work for different people. And I think it's really figuring out how do you find an organization that is aligned with your thoughts and beliefs, and how do you want that culture to be played out on a day to day basis. And then how do you get people that are aligned to that? And if they're not aligned to it, and it's not a good fit, that's okay too. And they can probably find another organization and another culture that is more aligned to them. And just like it doesn't make sense to keep someone in your organization that isn't a good cultural fit, I think it goes both ways. And so, there's probably a hundred ways to skin the cat on what good culture looks like, and how it's defined, and what adjectives do we use, and what energy, and what does this phase look like. But ultimately, at the end of the day, you've really got to make it your own. And whatever feels good about that.
Will Scott: Yes, I quite agree. It's not something you can judge or score or say is it good or bad, but the point is, as you said, to make it your own.
Will Scott: Thank you very much for being a part of Culture Czars CEO Culture Interviews. And it's great to learn about the culture at Matrix. And again, congratulations for what you've built there. And I look forward to following your progress as the company keeps growing and you keep maintaining keeping your culture alive so it thrives. And literally using it to drive performance to your company.
Patricia Miller: Thank you!