In this episode, Rick and Matt discuss Alloy’s new simplified core values and character traits for teammates and franchise partners. You’ll learn why we updated and simplified our core values and character traits.
Business core values are not just one of those nice things to have. They are important as they define who you are, your franchise culture, and differentiate you as a business.
Core values communicate what’s important to your business, influence behavior, and desired action within your team. Ultimately, they bring people on a team together on a mission to succeed.
In our case, our franchising business is growing with new franchises coming up, and we are also scaling our corporate team. Considering this, we had a recent iteration of our core values to update and simplify them.
Alloy Core Values – Simplified
- Do your Job
- Have a Good Time – Humor with a touch of crazy
- Keep it Simple
Alloy Character Traits – Updated
- Unimpeachable Character
- Sincere Candor
- Competitive Spirit
New Simplified Alloy Core Values
1. Do Your Job
It came from a documentary with football coaches, Bill Belichick and Nick Saban. Nick Saban’s first job was coaching for Bill Belichick. He was already married, and they moved into the Belichick’s home while they were looking for a place to live. They got to be really close friends. They created the statement about doing your job. Rick liked the saying so much that they became a core value and created Alloy t-shirts.
The core value “Do your Job” now encompasses both of the former core values of own your job and bring your ‘A’ game. Do your job is all-inclusive: be a good citizen, give back, show up for your teammate, show up for your family, show up for your customers, and show up for your community.
“One of your jobs is to be the best part of that person’s day that’s in front of you.”
– Rick Mayo –
For example, Matt’s job is to produce great programs, build an amazing customer experience, and help our franchisees understand what to do. That’s the literal job, but there are other parts to doing your job which are to show up every day and bring your A game, not just for your customers, but for your teammates as well.
Alloy is in the business of changing lives, which is exactly what we do with our personal training. We all want to make the world a healthier place,
2. Humor with a Touch of Crazy – Have a Good Time
We kept the next original core value of “Humor with a Touch of Crazy.” The Alloy team fought and believe in having a good time with their passion, the personal training business and because fitness is fun.
Dealing with people that have busy lives, there’s always stuff coming up. If you are doing your job as a personal training coach on the floor, one of your jobs is to be the best part of that person’s day that’s in front of you. They may have had a tough day at work, they may have some personal things going on, and if you can just bring a bit of sunshine into their life by being the best part of their day. So you need to approach the job with a touch of humor and don’t take yourself so seriously or take anything personally. Have humility while having a good time doing it. That it what it means to us.
3. Keep it Simple
Last, we kept the most important one, which is to keep it simple. It is probably the most difficult. Feedback from Alloy franchisees was they like how the franchise concept is very easy to understand and simple to implement. This is a massive compliment, because we had to work really hard to not complicate things. It is refreshing to work with prospects because they say the Alloy concept is simple, straightforward, and easy to understand.
We do a lot of education on the psychology and the habit of change. You can’t just take a client from no exercise to completely changing their lifestyle to working out 6 days a week and changing their diet. So like, keep it simple. We will start out with strength training, because we know that in one of the top things you need to be doing. Next, we get you moving more outside. We continue to stack on small additions to the clients prescribed program, then other self efficacy habits follow. It also allows clients to imprint behavioral changes into their lives. Super simple. Just show up and do your job.
That’s why we went from five to three core values. It’s also a lot easier to remember three, which makes it easier for everyone. It helps us keep a simple framework for the Alloy culture to move forward.
In addition to core values, we also updated the character traits for the Alloy franchise. When we bring franchisees in and team members onto the team, we need to make sure we can work together really well because it’s a fractionalized partnership.
Updated Alloy Character Traits
These are really non-negotiable traits for us. If we are sitting down with a franchise candidate, and they’re not completely honest about the process, then it is hard to form a trusting partnership relationship. Maybe they’re looking at another franchise, but they don’t disclose that. They’re not telling the truth and they don’t have unimpeachable character.
1. Unimpeachable Character
It is the same with team members. There need to be non-negotiable characteristics that you require. A potential team member might be a really top performer, but what if they’re just not a good person? It will eventually cause problems with your success. You don’t want them on the team. You can find somebody who’s a really high producer and a good person to hold out for hiring.
2. Sincere Candor
You can communicate clearly with anybody on the team about anything with sincere candor. It means you will need to provide and accept feedback sincerely. Not radical or hurtful. We have a business coach take us through an exercise from the book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. We sit around the table and somebody was in the hot seat, and everybody else at the table gave them that person feedback. They say three positive things about this person and everybody at the table takes turns talking about the positive. Then you talk about one thing the person could improve on. It really pointed out that the hardest, probably the biggest, dysfunction on any team is like peer-to-peer accountability.
That’s where sincere candor comes from: if you can’t accept feedback or give feedback that you’re going to struggle on our team. If you’re not doing your job, which is our Core Value #1, then we’re going to bring it up, we’re going to talk about it, and we’re going to help you. It’s a coaching opportunity and there should be no ego around it.
To share honest feedback and take honest feedback is important to create a better work environment with sincere candor. It sounds tough, but we’re all here to win.
3. Competitive Spirit
Business is like a big game, so by nature we have to be competitive. Even though the results of our game are altruistic because we’re helping people get to a healthier place, we still have to be very competitive on our team. For example, you have a pre-sell and you’re at125 members. We say how can we help them get them those five more members? Because you get your “Rock On Trophy” when you hit 130 members. So we want the franchisees to be at 130. In reality, the altruistic reason is we’re helping five more people, but there is an underlying competitive spirit to chase that important metric for the franchise’s grand opening success. Check out the Winning Components of the Pre-Sales Process, one of our franchisee’s success story, Rami Odeh.
You’ll learn why core values are important, why we updated and simplified the Alloy core values, and why having updated character traits are critical for your business.
- Why we iterated our core values (02:18)
- Do your job (04:25)
- Humor with a touch of crazy (09:08)
- Keep it simple (11:00)
- How to keep your culture intact as you scale (15:12)
- 3 Alloy character traits (16:07)
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Mentioned in this episode
Alloy Personal Training Franchise
Previous Core Values
- Number one: Own your role; be your own boss
- Number two: Bring your A-game every day –Working yourself out of a bad mood by acting nice, upbeat, and happy
- Number three: Humor with a touch of crazy
- Number four: Drive change
- Number five: Keep it simple
Previous Character Traits
- Character
- Skillset
- Belief system