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One of BoldBrush's core values is to treat everyone with respect and dignity.  

A company's values generally flow from the personal values of the founder and early employees.  Treating people with respect is one of my own personal core values and I am proud that it has become part of our company's DNA.    

In my mind, treating people with respect should simply be part of the fabric of society.  We shouldn't have to write it down.  It's just the right thing to do.  We're all humans, we're all in this together and, for the most part, people are good and want good things for society.  So treat everyone with respect.   

What's slightly sad, in our modern world, is how surprised people are to see this in practice.  That's because we live in a world where people say and do obscenely disrespectful things to one another on social media and in real life.  Just look at your Facebook feed and read what people on either side of the political spectrum say about the other side. 

So we wrote it down explicitly and strive to instill "respect and dignity" as being essential to the way that BoldBrush does business.  

For us, treat everyone with respect and dignity is a mantra that's a bit like Google's famous Don't be Evil.  In theory, one shouldn't have to remind oneself not to be evil.  But as a company grows, there is a danger of it losing its humanity.  Each team member has a moral compass that he or she  must answer to, but companies are made up of lots of individual people with slightly different compasses.  And each person makes dozens of decisions.  And when hundreds of individual decisions interact with one another and aggregate, it can become something that looks, to the outside world, remarkably close to "evil." 

So we remind ourselves to value respect and dignity in ways both big and small.

Respect and Dignity in Small Ways

For example, let's consider something as innocuous as a email signup popover form.  In the whole scheme of things, that's a pretty small consideration.  What does respect have to do with it?

Well, I've asked many people and everyone hates popover forms.  Proponents claim that they "work."  And perhaps they do.  It doesn't matter.  Each thing you add to your website either enhances or degrades the experience you're trying to create or the story you're trying to tell.  Unfortunately, most websites, particularly news websites, are increasingly becoming a tragedy of the commons.  They take forever to load, crash mobile devices, track your movements around the internet, push popovers in your face, and break articles into annoying tiny chunks so they can show you more ads.  That's because, little-by-little, these sites added bits that "work."

So, to stop that from happening, we must take a step back, with each small decision, and look to our core values to guide us.  Treat everyone with respect and dignity.  The essence of this is, to me, the golden rule:  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  That means, for us, no in your face popovers.  If we know everyone hates them, then we feel it would be disrespectful to our site visitors to use them anyway.   This whole topic reminds me of something Seth Godin said recently, "The time of scammy, in-your-face marketing is over. ...We expect to sell using those shady techniques, yet we HATE it when it happens to us."

It's easy to write it down, but it's harder to live in practice.  Not too long ago we were brainstorming ideas to increase growth and one of our marketing people suggested we try a popover, to test if it would increase newsletter signups.  We were simply talking about a test.  I vetoed the idea.  As explained above, I felt would violate our core values.

Treating everyone with respect and dignity doesn't just mean customers.  It means everyone.  What does that look like, in practice, inside BoldBrush?

Respect and Dignity in Bigger Ways

BoldBrush strives to hire, nurture and support high performers.  So everything that follows is in the context of people who are getting the job done, and who "set high but attainable standards and goals and work hard to meet them" (another BoldBrush core value).  If you want a culture of respect, you have to build a team where everyone is pulling their own weight.  We believe that our jobs, and our company exists to support our families, our health and our lifestyles, so there's no room for slackers in that mix.  But when our people have the right values and work ethic, that allows us a ton of flexibility in a variety of situations.

For example, one of our employees has a family member who was diagnosed with a serious condition that requires a lot of doctor appointments.  It means that he is out during business hours on a fairly consistent basis.   He came and thanked me for being "so understanding" about it.  My response was something like "Family and health always take priority.  It's no problem.  Our jobs and our business is here to support our family, health and lifestyle, not visa-versa."  

Once, when we were smaller, one of our employee's spouses ended up in the hospital on a holiday weekend.  The doctors thought he was having heart failure.  She contacted me, worried about a newsletter that wasn't going to go out.  She wasn't able to do it because, understandably, she was at the hospital and not able to get to her computer.  (And, it was before we had built our newsletter scheduling feature).  My response was "forget it, don't even think about it.  I'm surprised you even called, go be with your husband."  No newsletter trumps a family member in the hospital.  As I recall, I ended up having to defend our decision to one particular customer who was terribly  upset that the newsletter didn't go out, and basically didn't care why (even though we explained the situation).  Like I said, sometimes it creates difficult decisions and situations.

Respect and Dignity Goes Viral

A former employee came to visit our team recently.  He had left BoldBrush about a year prior to pursue building his own startup.  When he left, he told me that "BoldBrush is the best place I've ever worked, I've learned a lot about how a company and its teams should work."  He has since started his startup, has hired employees, and is building their company culture.   As he visited with our team over lunch, he and his wife thanked us.  They explained, "You guys taught us how a company could be, how it can support the lives of the people who work it it, and how important it is to have fun."  We're thrilled that BoldBrush culture has helped another company create their culture.

You see, core values like "treating everyone with respect and dignity" aren't just a way to guide a single company.  They can be, when authentic, a way of influencing others and hopefully affecting positive change in the world.  If we treat others with respect and dignity, perhaps they will begin doing the same thing in their own dealings, and, as it spreads, and "goes viral" it makes at least part of the world a better place.

We encourage you to make treating everyone with respect and dignity a part of the way you do business.  Let's work together to make this world a better place for us all.

With Respect,

Clint Watson

BoldBrush Founder & Art Fanatic