What is the purpose of a company’s mission — to serve as office wall art or to guide the work teams take on and shape how they work together?
Fintech company Tilled takes the latter approach. Its mission is to change the payments landscape for the better for businesses, and this high-level goal is distilled by leadership into something tangible for their teams. Increased transparency and honesty are critical pillars of Tilled’s mission, and Director of Sales Tom McHugh said these values have reduced opacity around sales to the point where his team can serve as an onboarding asset.
“With my team, that [transparency] means visibility into our sales process for the entire company to the point where any employee is welcome to hop on a sales call any time they’d like,” McHugh said. “This can be so helpful, especially for new employees, to learn about Tilled and what we’re trying to accomplish.”
It’s not enough for leadership to simply point to the words on a wall and let people take it from there: Missions need to be translated into specific actions or goals. McHugh and three other local tech leaders spoke with Built In Colorado about how they work to turn a mission statement into something tangible and impactful for their teams.
SumUp provides card readers, money management tools and financial software for merchants. Ariana Sverdlik, head of brand and communications, said the company’s mission to help small business owners be more successful makes a direct impact on the projects they prioritize and the goals they set.
What is SumUp’s mission?
SumUp’s mission is to champion small business owners and their success. We do this by creating simple and affordable tools for them to manage payments, finances, customer relationships and more.
We’re able to make the most impact when everyone feels passionate about the work they do, why they do it and how they get it done.”
As a leader, how do you translate your company mission into specific actions or goals for your team?
The benefit of a mission-centric organization is that it allows for efficient prioritization. All of our teams around the world are prioritizing whatever has the most positive impact on our merchants, aka small business owners. From the very start, this sets a clear expectation and common understanding of how we work together.
That said, we also intentionally and proactively work hard to keep our teams accountable to our mission. Because we work across nine time zones in more than a dozen offices, effective communication and collaboration are vital to our success. This is accomplished by using a number of communication tools, regular check-ins, quarterly goal setting and more.
Finally, as the world continues to change, the reality of starting and running a small business also changes. The better we understand our merchants and the challenges they face, the better the solutions we offer them can be. Whether that’s through internal product testing, formal merchant research, or a one-on-one conversation with a business owner down the street, we encourage our teams to stay grounded in real-life applications of our products.
What aspect of SumUp’s culture or values best reflects your company mission?
We have a few core values at SumUp, but the one I talk about often is “we care.” This is my favorite value because it’s reflected in literally every single touchpoint we have, from our products to customer service and security features — it’s even represented in our benefits and professional development resources. We’re able to make the most impact when everyone feels passionate about the work they do, why they do it and how they get it done.
GigSmart is a hiring platform where people can find part-time and full-time work and businesses can connect with local talent. When it comes to the company’s mission, CFO Vince Catino said his style is not to try and single-handedly generate buy-in. Instead, he prefers to create an environment people enjoy working in, one that allows them to naturally gravitate toward the end result of their efforts.
What is GigSmart’s mission?
We are a software development company focused on providing modern solutions to meet the needs of a rapidly evolving economy. GigSmart’s apps, Get Workers and Get Gigs, connect businesses and residential users looking for labor with local workers seeking opportunities.
Transparency, honesty and influence are the keys to creating a team that reads a mission and believes in it.”
As a leader, how do you translate your company mission into specific actions or goals for your team?
Something I think that goes mostly ignored by a lot of leaders is their limitation on directly impacting the culture of their organization or the buy-in of their employees to the company mission and directives. There are countless examples of companies that attempt — unsuccessfully — to create an environment that forces the type of values or characteristics of “success” onto their people. In reality, transparency, honesty and influence are the keys to creating a team that reads a mission and believes in it. That is the environment I strive to support.
As a rapidly growing startup we say, “The only constant is change.” Some people thrive in a setting like that and others do not. It’s our responsibility as a leadership team to make changes as informed and accurately as possible. I believe every person has to enjoy some aspect of their role, their teammates, the mission or the technology. They need something to gravitate toward. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter who you work for or what the mission is. Those are the people I believe are with us today and having success.
What aspect of your culture or values best reflects GigSmart’s mission?
We asked our team to describe their relationships with one another and the characteristics they saw in their peers, and in almost all cases the same themes were present. They all perceived their environment as a group of passionate, innovative and highly collaborative people working on a difficult and rewarding mission. What reinforces that type of environment is the collective understanding that although drastically different in role and responsibility, each function has its own challenges that can be overcome together.
Every single day workers and businesses tell us how impactful our platform is, whether it’s a single mom able to find shifts that work on her time or a small business that previously didn’t have the resources to scale with seasonality or recent success. These stories are shared internally and give our team purpose, drive and focus.
Durable has an ambitious mission that centers around upending the status quo in artificial intelligence. The company is currently developing its minimum viable product (MVP), and CEO Nima Keivan shared how his team works backward from their big vision to find the “concrete steps” that need to be taken in order to get the company off the ground and realize its full potential.
What is Durable’s mission?
We’re on a mission to make building custom software as easy as interactively writing its specification in natural language. Our world is powered by software, and yet as software becomes more complex it is increasingly expensive to build and maintain. We envision a future where custom, flexible and durable software is democratized and accessible to everyone.
Enabling this capability requires building an explainable AI system capable of reasoning explicitly, interactively clarifying specifications and communicating its assumptions. We believe that in addition to being necessary to power our product, such an AI system is the right kind for the future.
We envision a future where custom, flexible and durable software is democratized and accessible to everyone.”
As a leader, how do you translate your company mission into specific actions or goals for your team?
Although we are pursuing a big vision that will take time to realize, there are concrete steps along the way. We’re focused on a currently unrevealed product that is both a first step along the way and a solution to a pressing business problem with significant commercial potential.
When we plan our yearly and quarterly goals as a team, we work backward from this product and our long-term mission to define objectives and key results. I seldom have to refer to our mission during these sessions as it’s often center stage as we plan. However, there are times that we consider deferring the solution to a mission-critical problem in order to get to our MVP faster. Often this is the optimal choice as it expedites getting real customer feedback, but it delays progress toward the mission. I help the team deliberate through this tradeoff.
What aspect of Durable’s culture or values best reflects your company mission?
If our mission is the “what” then our company values are the “how.” By design, they are not mission-specific. We’ve defined them to serve as a framework for decision-making in different settings, whether it’s operational day-to-day decisions or strategic decisions of significant consequence.
The company value most impacted by our mission is “optimize for enthusiasm.” Our product is challenging to build and we wouldn’t succeed unless we faced the hard problems every day with enthusiasm. Much of that is fueled by our excitement for the potential of our mission and the rest is from a fun and collaborative work environment. This is hard to manufacture and requires a company mission worthy of enthusiasm and a team that’s genuinely enthusiastic about it.
B2B software companies used Tilled’s software to cut out the middleman and directly collect payments from customers. According to Tom McHugh, director of sales, transparency is a company value and impacts the way his team interacts with prospects. In addition to being transparent on the phone, McHugh said he also strives to make his team’s processes and progress as visible as possible to the entire company.
What is Tilled’s mission?
We are changing the payments landscape for the better. With payment facilitation-as-a-service, we empower software companies to monetize their payments, providing a substantial new revenue source for their company without any startup costs, additional overhead or infrastructure while also improving their ability to serve their customers.
At Tilled, we take our mission seriously and that means treating our customers as partners — not just revenue opportunities.”
As a leader, how do you translate your company mission into specific actions or goals for your team?
Our mission is to change the payments landscape for the better for startups that haven’t processed a cent yet to enterprise companies that are currently processing billions of dollars around the world. One of the key components of this mission is transparency and honesty. When we engage with a potential customer they immediately know what our costs are because we pass our costs through to them and share in any revenue generated through processing payments.
This shows both transparency and honesty as we put ourselves on the same side of the table with our partners and only make money when they make money. At Tilled, we take our mission seriously and that means treating our customers as partners — not just revenue opportunities.
What aspect of your culture or values best reflects Tilled’s mission?
At Tilled, one of our highest values is transparency. With my team, that means visibility into our sales process for the entire company to the point where any employee is welcome to hop on a sales call any time they’d like. This can be so helpful, especially for new employees, to learn about Tilled and what we’re trying to accomplish. I also have recently started putting together a weekly report that I share with our entire company about our sales pipeline.
More importantly, I believe that it is not just sales who wins a deal. We rely on every employee to help deliver solutions to our partners so we can both be successful, and the only way to accomplish that is through transparency. When we win a deal, it is truly a corporate celebration because we can only win and change the payments landscape for the better as a team.
