Culture Saves Legal Fees

I was at a Franchise Expo earlier today helping out our parent company, Design the Planet, that specializes in franchise marketing. During the event, they had a few educational sessions and a speaker said that in his company’s 18 years of franchising, they’ve never had a legal case with their franchisees. While construction isn’t the same as franchising, his reason why does cross over to construction – culture.

He said his company’s culture has prevented them from going to court with their franchisees. He added that they do not call the home office “Corporate”, instead they call it the “Service Center”. What a difference this makes in how you interact with your customers.

Here at Brand Constructors as well as Design the Planet, we do not have clients, we have core partners. Why the change in terms? We find when there is a client/vendor relationship, there is a wall separating us from them. We want to get down to the core of our client’s businesses and their challenges so we can properly help them. We’ll never be able to fully help a construction company if they don’t trust us with their challenges and dirty laundry (trust me, we’ve seen it before)3. Instead of the us vs. them mentality, we have a team mentality.

It sounds simple on paper, but it can be difficult to implement and live every day. Telling a prospective core partner about our philosophy about this up front can be a make or break for a deal. In most cases though, it weeds out the bad clients and leaves us with great core partners.

What is your company’s culture like? Does your culture extend to your clients, subs, and suppliers?