Creating Corporate Culture – John Assaraf Interview – Part 1

Part I of the series. Subscribe now for updates when the other videos are posted.

John Assaraf sat down with Steven Cox, CEO of TakeLessons.com, to discuss what it means to create and maintain a thriving corporate culture. In this interview, Cox defines corporate culture, outlines steps entrepreneurs can take to define their company’s culture and shows how a strong culture can translate into other great gains for any organization.

Assaraf: Hi everyone, this is John Assaraf, CEO of Praxis Now and with me is a very dear friend of mine Steven Cox and Steven is part of my mastermind group and I’m part of his mastermind group. He’s the CEO of TakeLessons.com which is a company that is serving tens of thousands of idividuals who want to take guitar lessons and really want to find the right teacher online. Prior to this venture, he worked with CollegeClub.com which was a 1990’s company, a very very early social network, before social networks even existed, so if you want to know where social networks may have started, College Club is one of the companys. Steven has got an amazing company that’s venture capital funded. He has got an amazing culture with the people that he has hired, with the people that he works with as far as vendors and the way that they do things. He’s an amazing entrepreneur that’s had some great successes and he’s masterful at creating cultures and teams that drive insane revenues and amazing, fanatical client experiences. What I’d like to do today is really get into Steven’s head on your behalf. It doesn’t matter if  you have an idea or if you have ten or twenty or fifty employees, what you’re about to learn is why it is imperative for you to understand the vital importance of creating a culture that starts with you and continues with every single employee you’ve got. I’m also going to ask Steven a whole bunch of questions about raising money and his entreprenuer skills, but we’re going to focus specifically on building a culture and then we’ll take it from there. We’ve got 90 minutes together. We’re also going to give you a chance about every 15 to 20 minutes to ask questions and Steven might even ask you questions as well, like, do you play a musical instrument? Do your kids play? Steven, thank you so much.

Cox: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Assaraf: So let’s get right into it. Is there anything I missed about your bio or the things that our friends all over the world need to know about that I may have missed?

Cox: No, I think you pretty much hit it dead on. I’ve just been an internet geek so that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing since 1996. It’s all I know. A lot of people are good at many things; I’m good at one thing.

A: The other thing that I failed to mention is that Steven just did an amazing deal with Best Buy so now Best Buy is offering not only to sell people guitars, but when they do, they offer Steven’s company’s lessons to the person who buys a guitar. It’s a major, major, major deal. So Steven, let’s talk about, what is culture and let’s get into why it’s so important. What I ask each one of you to do by the way is don’t write all of this stuff down because you’re going to have access to these slides. Listen to Steven and write your own notes down and then come back to these slides later on if you want to have the actual slides themselves. That’s one of the benefits of being a client of mine. So what is culture?

C: A lot of folks when we first start talking about culture, it seems like this feel-good type thing that’s permeated over the last couple of years, and a lot of folks don’t understand what it is or how it engenders across the whole organization. So I liken it to a very simple concept. The culture of your company is really the personality traits of your company. It’s really based on the values that you have as an individual and as a collective group of people, the beliefs that they have and the behaviors that we do. All of those beliefs we have and behaviors we do end up driving the actions within the company and that really makes up the company, how decisions are made based on the beliefs that we form. All that comes back to the values that we have; that’s the key to this whole thing: setting up the values and making sure they permeate the whole organization.