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In 1993, sales hit $140 million, and the company ran an essay contest to find an outside CEO. First place would get the job. Second place received a lifetime supply of ice cream.

In the late 1990s, sales topped $200 million, and a Harris Interactive poll showed Ben & Jerry’s as the number five most reputable company in the United States, with a number one ranking in the “social responsibility” category.

After Ben & Jerry’s sales hit $237 million in 1999, Unilever made an offer to buy the company. Although Ben Cohen opposed the sale, Jerry and the company’s board agreed, and the deal was done. Many fans of the company were appalled, but final terms created a separate board of directors, a commitment to continue all social programs, and a promise to continue eco-friendly packaging initiatives. As many expected, however, some of the social programs have quietly disappeared in the years since, including the 7.5 percent of profits going to charity.With the founders no longer holding the reins and the company now just a division of one of the world’s biggest conglomerates,time will tell how much of the original sense of purpose will survive. Here again, a company propelled by purpose appears to have lost its direction.

Ben & Jerry’s and H-P are two companies you would think are as different as night and day.However, both share a host of commonalities: a strong mythology, dynamic founders, wellestablished
reputations, and a devoted customer base. Yet, all of these commonalities can be traced back to the single most important trait they shared: a strong sense of purpose established at the very beginning, in a garage filled with little more than dreams and desire.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth

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Ben & Jerry’s—Two Hippies Prove That
Good Guys Can Finish First
In 1977, two ex-hippie high school buddies named Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield put together $12,000 to start an ice cream parlor. Their initial choice was bagels, but the machinery was too expensive. Part of their training was a $5 Penn State correspondence course in ice cream making: They received straight A’s because the test was open book. They chose Burlington,Vermont, as the second-best place to start their ice cream venture, after finding that their first choice—Saratoga Springs, New York—already had an ice cream parlor.

They moved into a renovated gas station in 1978 and marked their one-year anniversary with a “free scoop day,” a tradition that continues nationwide today. The company grew at a rate exceeding 100 percent per year, and in 1985, the founders established the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation to contribute to community-oriented projects, to be funded with 7.5 percent of the company’s annual pretax profits. Ben & Jerry’s wild flavors caught on with the public. Cherry Garcia, named after the Grateful Dead member, became a big hit.
After the stock market crash in 1987, Ben & Jerry’s vans pulled up to Wall Street to serve free scoops of “That’s Life” and “Economic Crunch.”

Ben & Jerry’s began to be held up as a standard for good corporate behavior. Besides the institutionalized profit portion that went to charity, the company codified the salary spread between CEO and the lowest paid worker and regularly supported a variety of social causes. The company introduced Rainforest Crunch ice cream to encourage sustainable growth and preservation in the rainforest regions. One of their brownie factories employed only disadvantaged workers, and when Vermont dairy farmers got pummeled by volatile prices, the company donated a half-million dollars to the family farmers who supplied the milk for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. In 1988, President Reagan named Ben and Jerry Small Business Persons of the Year in a White House ceremony. Jerry put on the only suit he owned for the occasion.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth

WHAT DO YOU STAND FOR? (2)

When the partners began building their headquarters, they constructed the building so that it might be converted into a grocery store if the business failed to grow. The product line continued to expand, and revenue topped $2 million, then $5 million, then $28 million as the company went public in 1957, with around 1,800 employees on board. All employees with six months of service or more received a stock grant. The company then moved to a 50-acre hilltop site complete with horseshoe pits, volleyball courts, and a company cafeteria.

In the late 1960s, H-P advertised the first personal computer and introduced the concept of flexible schedules to its offices. The company passed $2 billion in revenue in the 1970s, $11 billion in the 1980s, and $47 billion in the 1990s. In 2000, the company hit number 13 on the Fortune 500. Despite its meteoric rise, everyone understood what H-P stood for. Everyone still derived a sense of purpose from those two innovative tinkerers in a garage.

In 2001, cofounder Bill Hewlett died. Later that same year, with growth hitting a wall, the managers of H-P and Compaq announced an intended merger. A nasty proxy battle ensued between H-P management, led by CEO Carly Fiorina and a group of investors headed by the founders’ families. In the end, after a prolonged PR and advertising battle, management squeaked by with a win. We can speculate that the merger caused a slowdown or the slowdown caused the merger, but it’s no secret that H-P’s big growth days are behind it. Much of the R&D budget is going into projects that
will have an immediate payoff, not ones that will open whole new markets five years from now. With the founders and their families no longer having any influence, a company founded on the principles of innovation and invention is now finding that its sense of purpose has changed.While the jury is still out, I’m willing to bet this change of purpose will not be for the better.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth

WHAT DO YOU STAND FOR? (1)

When you talk about what you stand for, you need to get specific.
Don’t bore your employees and everyone else with corporate babble and doublespeak. People don’t get fired up about “creating value for our stakeholders,” “leveraging our core competencies,” or other generic phrases that belong in boring annual reports. Leave that for the corporate suits who are trying not to offend anyone.

Give your employees, customers, and partners a reason to care. Tell them why you are different. Tell them why what you do matters.

TWO PARALLEL PATHS
Let’s look at two legendary companies that came from far different
backgrounds but have a lot in common: Hewlett- Packard (H-P) and Ben & Jerry’s. Both were once scrappy little companies founded by two people with strong beliefs. The legends were a big part of the brand—the founders werelarger than life. In the end, after nasty struggles about who they were and where their future was going, the identities of both got swallowed up by larger entities.

Hewlett-Packard—Innovation in All Areas In 1938, Stanford graduates Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard formed their own electronics company just four years out of college. With $538 in working capital, they started out in a garage behind a house in Palo Alto, California. They flipped a coin to see whose name would come first in the formal partnership name. As the company grew, the founders became known for “management by walking around” and “management by objective,” both unusual practices at the time.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth

FINDING YOUR OWN MYTHOLOGY (4)

I have a friend who has traveled the world reviewing hundreds of hotels in different countries. Surprisingly, the company he thinks has the best identity is not the Four Seasons or Ritz-Carlton, but The Oberoi Group, based in India. They are known for the stunning luxury and professional service that are assumed at this level of hospitality in their properties scattered from Mumbai to Melbourne. What he finds most fascinating, however, is that if you ask any employee of that company to tell you what the founder, M. S. Oberoi, was like,
they will immediately tell you a favorite story that defines his character. Interestingly, his biography is much like an American success story:He started off poor,worked his way up from a busboy position, bought a single hotel with the help of some of his wife’s pawned jewelry, almost went bankrupt several times, but then eventually became hugely successful. In the middle are many tales of overcoming great odds and developing innovations that kept him ahead of competitors, including deep-pocketed international chains.

The maids and gardeners are required to learn these stories, not because they are some kind of hero worship, but because they define where the company came from and why it matters.

There is another layer on top of this, however, in that every single hotel has a story as well, which the customer-facing employees are known to rattle off every chance they get. If the property is in a building that is 250 years old, the employees know all the major events and turning points that occurred in the past within those walls (edited for interest). If the resort was built five years ago, they will tell you how the architecture was inspired,what the statues out front represent, and where the artifacts in the lobby came from. Everything has a story, and everyone who works there knows it. It’s a core part of the training, and nobody talks to a guest until he or she has it all down.

I’m a big fan of the Ritz-Carlton chain of luxury hotels. In fact, I give a great example of where they shine in Chapter 6. But I don’t know the Ritz-Carlton foundation story. Maybe they are so big that they don’t need to push it now. It’s hard to argue with their success. I still come at this from a small business person’s perspective. To me, the foundation story is merely an example of a thousand other ways in which a sense of purpose becomes instilled in an organization.

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FINDING YOUR OWN MYTHOLOGY (3)

I know these are all big company examples, but they all started out as fast-growth small companies. I bring them up because they show the power of building a good mythology. You can be the Ray Kroc in your niche or segment, propagatingyour own legends that will be passed down from employee to employee and customer to customer.

Figure out your mythology. Leave in the good parts, take out the bad parts, and create compelling tales that make a point. Tell people about the defining moments, the overcoming of adversity, and the beating of the long odds. Tell us what made you as a company who you are. Before you know it, you’ll have your own great American success story.

These legends are something to latch on to, something that transcends the slogans, the mission statements, and other hitor-
miss verbiage. They provide direction and a sense of belonging to your employees and partners. They give reporters a narrative to talk about. They guide your marketing and your planning. They remind you of both your grounding and your future.

Once you have these legends pared to compelling tales you can rattle off consistently, keep talking about them.Make sure every new employee hears them. Make them a part of your training. Make them a part of every interview. If everyone connected to the company knows these tales by heart, you will have a powerful message. You will also have a serious leg up on your competitors. Also, keep your ears open for the antimyth. I knew a company where the mythology that was passed from the old guard to the new guard entailed dramatic instances of “sticking it to the client.” Regular water cooler
conversations included tales of buried expenses and inflated time sheets. The mythology perpetuated an “us versus them” attitude toward customers.Needless to say, this company is no longer with us.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth

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I’m sure there are a few skeptics who look at all of this as new age mumbo-jumbo and think it’s really just about the products and the service. A good story can’t define a company or a brand.However, how many of these have you heard to the point where they are permanently stuck in your head?

• Ray Kroc, at 52 years old, invested his life savings to become a milkshake machine distributor. One day he visited a hamburger joint called McDonald’s that was using eight of the machines at once. He liked the way they had standardized processes and said, “You could do this anywhere!” He joined them as a partner and opened the second McDonald’s in 1955. A worldwide icon was born,
and the rest is history.

• Bill Gates dropped out of college and started Microsoft in his garage with Paul Allen. Neither of them had any business or management experience. The company moved to Seattle when it had 12 employees and hired Steve Ballmer, another college dropout. Before long, the company had created over 250 millionaires, and Gates became the richest man on earth.

• In 1971, Rollin King and Herb Kelleher got together in a bar and sketched out an idea for a different kind of airline. Kelleher backed the project with $10,000 of his own money. The goals were to leave on time, arrive on time, offer a lower price than anyone else, and make sure everyone had a good time in the process.With competitors
trying to keep them from launching, the company literally took years to get off the ground.When a cash crunch forced the choice of selling one of his four planes or laying off 70 employees, Kelleher sold the plane. To settle a disagreement over an ad slogan, Kelleher arm-wrestled the rival airline’s CEO. He was known to show up for
company speeches dressed as Elvis or the Easter Bunny. The company has been profitable every year since 1973, and when all the other airlines buckled in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Southwest didn’t lay off a single employee.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth

FINDING YOUR OWN MYTHOLOGY (1)

So what’s your story? What makes your company’s founding and growth special? What stories define who you are and how you got here?

To help illustrate this point to groups I speak to, I often use my own family as an analogy. I have a 13-year-old son. This teenager can give you a pretty good synopsis of how my wife and I met, what happened on the first date, what happened in the first year, and the trials and tribulations leading up to the point of his eventual birth.He’s got that story down to a short and sweet, humorous three- to four-minute tale. Like his dad, he likes to tell stories, and he’s pretty good at it.

What fascinates me about the story, however, is that it bears little resemblance to what happened. And that’s okay. For him, it is a unifying element. For him, it is a story with a message. He wasn’t even born yet, and still he feels as if he were part of the team.

All growth companies have a foundation story. I’m not altogether
sure I know why, but they do—all of them. It doesn’t matter if you leave out the part about the original partner absconding with the seed capital or that you started off in insurance and ended up in ball bearings. Those need not be part of the lore, legend, and mythology surrounding your business. If you don’t have a good foundation story, I’m going to suggest you form one. Maybe it gives us the same kind of grounding our national mythology gives us. It’s hard to say exactly. But I am sure that every successful growth company has a wellcrafted mythology surrounding its foundation and growth.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth

THE IMPORTANCE OF MYTHOLOGY (2)

For instance, Paul Bunyan is a uniquely American hero. He took on the frontier with his bare hands and represents the rugged American individualist who won’t give up. Many of our other legendary figures display similar traits: Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and Johnny Appleseed all shaped America in a way that is far larger than their actual accomplishments. Davy Crockett served in Congress, but that’s not why we know him. Instead, he was a great storyteller who enthralled audiences with tales of fighting off bears, protecting the innocent, and otherwise taming the frontier. Dying at the Alamo secured his position as an American legend forever.

We hand down stories of these brave, odds-defying Americans whether they were on the right side of the law (Annie Oakley), the wrong side (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), or somewhere in between (Wyatt Earp). This particular type of character is a polar opposite of the heroes in most Asian cultures. Their legends build teams, they save the honor of their ancestors, and they win only by rallying the troops to a consensus. It’s all about The Seven Samurais, not The Last Samurai. American mythology reflects rugged individualism, self-confidence, overcoming great odds, and going it alone. Perhaps this explains why much of the world has a hard time
replicating our entrepreneurial spi

Our other point of cultural mythology comes from the founding of our country. Search for “founding fathers” in Google, and you’ll get more than 450,000 results. Our founding fathers’ words are used on a daily basis to rationalize actions on the right and left and everywhere in between. People such as Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton still have a profound influence on
where our country is and where it is going. You can follow that path to the next legendary leader of 100 years later, Abe Lincoln, who again embodied all that we hold dear. The ideas these people stood for, especially honesty, equality, and a down-to-earth realness, are still qualities we hold in the highest regard in choosing a leader today.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth

THE IMPORTANCE OF MYTHOLOGY (1)

Any company that has been around for a while has plenty of stories to tell. In the early years especially, private businesses go through all kinds of challenges and experience all kinds of mishaps and thrills. These stories become part of the company mythology and are key to defining who they are.

Every culture in the world has its mythology, lore, and legends that speak to who they are. Many times, these stories teach us values, reinforce our ideals, or highlight struggles we must all overcome. Other times, they give us a historical grounding in where we came from. These stories exist for a reason: They highlight a culture’s aspirations and what it views as worthy and righteous. The Mayan and Aztec legends are still told today in large swaths of Latin America, while the legends of King Arthur, Arabian Nights, and the Greek gods still have a profound impact around the world.

Here in America, we have our own home-grown mythology. It permeates our law, our politics, our business, how our religions are practiced, and most other aspects of our lives.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth