Building Belongship: Cultivating Trust and Community

So when I think about Belong Ship is that Belong ship is where people feel these three things. They feel that they're trusted, they feel that it's a safe environment, and they feel like you care about them. And again, these three things are, as we all know individually, everybody talks about it. But when they come together in an environment where trust is there, safety is there, care is there, you feel like, oh my God, I can run through walls. And I saw that firsthand at Terminus. [00:05:17]

Picture of success means not that we're going to have a million in revenue. That's what a lot of companies have startup. I want to have a million that's not picture of success. That's like, okay, well, I'm not going to run through all for that, but picture of success today, we are going to change the way marketing and sales is done. So we created a funnel that every marketing salespeople understood, and we flipped it and called it my funnel. Now, that way people knew this is what we are trying to do. [00:08:38]

Extreme focus is the ability to have this one thing that you're super focused on. So one of the things we think, and we did as a matter of fact, was like, you know what? We are going to own the narrative. That was our focus. We are going to own the narrative of challenging the status quo. So we said we are going to do something that no other startup typically does. In the very first year, we are going to write a book on this, and we are going to go Wiley or somebody, big publisher to publish our book so that we get authority on that topic. [00:10:10]

When we actually came out with Terminus, we said, you know what? We need to do an event. That's how startups do. We need to throw an event and tell people that we have arrived. Guess nobody came to that thing because nobody wanted to know about Terminus. Nobody cared about Terminus. Nobody wanted to sponsor Terminus. We were like, what's wrong? What do we do? We have arrived, but nobody cares about us. We literally went and bought the domain for eight bucks, flip my funnel, call the same sponsors and say, Hey, could you sponsor this event called Flip My Funnel? [00:11:51]

We bring in a customer in the office now virtually for our all hands meetings. So we had a customer, I'll tell you a quick story on that. We had Daniel Day, one of our customers come in. This was in the second year of our company. And he said, so he's a business. Owner. He is a marketer who buys our product, he our product. He talks about our product. We are like, Hey, why don't you come and share your experience with it? So we'll invite them to once a month, all hands meeting where the entire company is sitting and the focus is all on the customer. [00:14:30]

We want everybody from the sales person to the marketing person, to the back office person to know who we serve. It is very, very important. A lot of companies completely miss on that. They just keep going, doing their thing. But if everybody doesn't know who we are serving and what what matters to them, they'll change. But here's what Daniel said, Andy, that still today is talked about in the company. He said, Sangram, you and your organization has changed my life. Wow. His personal life, his personal life. And we are like, dude, there's no way. [00:15:03]

I hope nobody misses this part, Andy, the p and e, the picture of success and extreme focus. I think most companies have that. And that's great. That's how you actually hire great people. Here's our vision, here's where we're going, here's what we're doing. You can hire great people, but the A and K, the authenticity and kindness is why your people stay in your company. The good people. The good people. That's why your customers want you around. That's how you actually create loyalty Very quickly, Brian Halligan, who's the CEO of HubSpot, he's an investor in Terminus, and he said, well, how do you do this? [00:18:21]

And you've kind of talked about this, but this is so important, and we talk about this a lot on podcast, but recreating or trying to fix a culture is so difficult. So if somebody says, Hey, this is helping me, because I mean, every organization has a culture, whether you can define it or not, whether it's good or not, you don't have to create culture. You have one. It's there. You've inherited one, you accidentally, the culture is there. So what do you say to the group that says, well, unfortunately I can't start over. [00:19:46]

I think you've said this, something is like what gets rewarded is repeated. I'll say the same thing on that. I'll echo that. I want people to take that home with it because for example, bringing a customer in the office virtually or physically is something that I see 90, 80% of the companies not doing it. I don't understand that you can literally take that and help that customer shape the messaging and what you are stand for. What makes it extremely personal. Extremely personal. [00:20:22]

When I ask people what's the most important meeting, there's all kinds of meetings people talk about. It's actually your one-on-one. That's really where your culture is created, your one-on-one meeting. Because if you're a leader and you're having a one-on-one with somebody that reports to you, that person is going to prepare, that's going to person is stressing about it. That person has an agenda. And if you are late to that meeting, if you don't show prepared to that meeting, and if you are like you just brush off and you run with your own agenda, adding your culture is created in those one-on-one meetings. [00:21:04]

So love, grace, and truth. Out of our core values, we will always have love. We will give grace to each other, but we expect nothing less and nothing more than truth in every conversations we have. And if 10 years, 20 years from now, if that's what happens, that's a great picture of success. So I don't want to go through each one of these letters, but if you think about this idea, this framework is that you apply this to an organization, it'll be a healthy organization. You apply that to your family. [00:28:43]

This whole idea of ship requires somebody to really think about it, take a step back and lean into it. But it's not something that you can just dip your toes in it. You are either all in or you're all out. You don't walk into it and walk out of it. So either you're fully authentic. I cannot tell anybody to be 9:00 AM tomorrow morning. You need to be authentic. It just doesn't work right? You need to be start kind. It just doesn't work. So either you are or you're not, and you have to make that decision. [00:29:36]