This is Part 2 of a 3-part series to help grow and scale your HVAC business based on Intrigue Media’s 14-year experience helping companies get noticed and found. Click here for Part 1, and here for part 3.

Your Core Values

Core values are integral to ensuring that as growth happens, the culture you’ve built at your HVAC business remains intact.

Core values help your team by:

1. Creating clarity on how decisions are made.
2. Indicating which behaviours are and are not acceptable.
3. Providing alignment on recruiting new team members.
4. Helping your leadership team identify rising stars.

In Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, core values are identified as one of the factors that help companies take the leap to great performance.

After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years. That was better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world’s greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

Activity: The Mars Test (4 Hours)

Imagine you are taking your HVAC company to a new planet. You can only bring your strongest team members to set it up.

Who would you take with you?

Identify the group as a small and strong sample of what embodies your company. This group are the people who really ‘get it’.

Once you have the group built, have them work on the following questions for a half or full day.

1. What core values do you bring to your work? These are values you hold to be so fundamental that you would hold them regardless of whether or not they are rewarded.
2. How would you describe to your loved ones the core values you stand for in your work?
3. If you awoke tomorrow morning with enough money to retire for the rest of your life, would you continue to hold on to these core values?
4. Would you want the organization to continue to hold these values, even if at some point one or more of them became a competitive disadvantage?
5. If you were to start a new organization tomorrow — outside of the HVAC industry — what core values would you build into the new organization?
6. Perhaps most importantly: can you envision these values being as valid 100 years from now as they are today?

As a heads up: This activity must have full support from senior leadership in your business. The results need to be taken into action once completed.

Use this worksheet resource by Jim Collins for you and your team.

In conclusion, here’s a video on creating mechanisms inside your company to bring your values to life:

Click here for Part 3 of this series to learn more about finding your A-clients.