Successful Pest Control Companies Need Core Values

Why Core Values Are Important to Growing Your Business

Firmly establishing the core values of your pest control business is an important step in growing your business. If you don’t do it, your employees will, and there will be no guarantee that their core values will align with yours.

Core values are critical to identify and define because they form your company’s culture, and culture is everything. It directly impacts three of the essential areas of business:

1. Hiring: Company values will attract top talent and promote successful recruitment. You hire by probing for how a candidate will handle certain situations and their stance on specific scenarios. Hiring is geared around company values to help determine which candidates are likely the right fit.
2. Expectations: Core values are the glue that holds your business together. They will be woven throughout onboarding, initial training, and growth and set the bar for what is expected.
3. Accountability: Core values are how you hold your team accountable. They guide attitudes, outcomes, corrective actions, coaching, and even firing or helping your employees find employment elsewhere when they don’t abide by your core values.

Finding Your Core Values

How do you identify your pest control company’s core values? Regardless of how big your business is today, the fact that it exists means it already has some established values. Identifying them will require some footwork.

• Catalog Your Values: Create a list of what you consider to be your company’s core values. These might include accountability, commitment, integrity, loyalty, and innovation. Spend time contemplating the values that drove you to start your business and any that you have discovered along the way.
• Compare Notes with High Performers: Talk with the leaders and high performers in your company. Ask them what values drive their work ethic and which they believe represent the company. As you compare their feedback to your notes, you will find similarities and differences.
• Identify Which Matter Most: Use all the information gathered to pinpoint the core values that are already driving your business in the right direction and start to elevate them through definition.
• Define Your Values: Your definition of a core value may not be the same as someone else’s, which is why defining your identified values is critical. Each chosen value needs a precise definition, much like how you must create a clear picture via your vision statement.
• Keep It Simple: Aim for identifying and defining three to five core values. Strive to make them easy to remember, so employees know them.

Using Your Core Values

As the biggest, most important thing in a business, your core values must be used daily. They need to be discussed regularly. They should be referred to in every meeting and printed and put on the business walls—everywhere.

Be creative in how you showcase yours and do it often. The Ritz Carlton, for example, focuses on a daily core value or word of the day to keep their values in focus. Zappos lists its values in every email.

What works for your company culture? Share your successes (and struggles) in the comments.