Values
on a Wall

I am in a year-long programme for founders run by Stanford, and before each immersive session there is pre-work.

This time it was a template with a box marked Culture, and inside the box were two questions: what are the values your company actually lives by today, and what should they be in four years. It was a Saturday night, the pre-work was already late, and the honest answer took about as long to type as it takes to admit anything.

For anyone who has not met me: I run a company called Buyofuel with two other people, both of them sharper and more capable than they need to be. We buy agricultural waste, the straw and husk and shells that farms would otherwise burn, and sell it to factories that use it as fuel instead of coal. It is a trading business at heart, with farmers and trucks at one end and factory gates at the other, and about thirty people in between.

We have values. They were written in 2022, in our office in Coimbatore, with the help of a copywriter who was very good at her job. Welcoming. People first. Keep our word. Three lines, argued over, agreed upon, and true. They described the company we were, a small team in one office that wanted people to feel at home and meant it. Then they were put in the place values go, which is a slide. In the four years since, we have hired a lot of people and lost a lot of people, run a review cycle every year, and made every kind of decision a small company makes. I could not find a single one of those decisions that touched the three lines. Our hiring has four rounds, and the last one is a conversation about culture with Kishan, our CEO. That conversation has never once mentioned the culture we wrote down. Nobody was hired for being welcoming. Nobody was marked down for not putting people first. The words were true, in the way a photograph is true, and they had about as much say in how the day went.

I wrote all of that down, more or less, closed the laptop and slept.

Sunday morning it was still sitting there, and reading it fresh, what struck me was not that we had ignored the values. It was that the company those three lines described had quietly stopped existing, and nobody had gone back to the slide. Welcoming and people first are what you write when the whole team fits in one room and the question is how to treat each other. Four years later the team is in six states, most of them have never sat in the room, and the questions that decide a day are different ones. Do we take a big order from a buyer who wants three months of credit. Do we promise a plant a quantity we are not yet sure we can gather. Do we pay the farmer on time when the factory has not yet paid us. The sector answered those questions for us, one truck at a time, and the answers became the culture. The slide never heard about any of it.

So the real values were running the company the whole time, unwritten. A buyer wants three months to pay instead of one, and the extra two months of waiting would eat the whole profit on the order, so we say no, even though the order is large and the month is thin. We have done that often enough that the team knows the pattern without a slide. We have turned down volume that would have looked wonderful on a chart because it would have looked terrible in the bank. That is a culture. It was shaped by trucks and credit terms and harvest seasons, not by a workshop, and the thing that did get written was a photograph of a company from 2022.

The sector set the questions, but people answered them, and I should say who. Buyofuel today is about thirty people, half of them in the Coimbatore office and the rest spread across six states, most of them closer to a field or a factory gate than to me. Some have been here since the values were a fresh slide in a new office, through the years when the team was twice this size and the years when it was not. Nobody taught them the rules. They learned them on the job. When a truck is running short, they call the plant first, before the plant calls us. When a farmer is due his money, they do not push it to next week. When a buyer asks for ninety days of credit, they walk away, even when the order is big. Each of those habits was worked out in the heat, one dispatch at a time, and each one has cost somebody a target at some point. They kept the habit anyway. If the five lines below read like a culture, it is because I copied them from these people.

So on Sunday I rewrote them, with one rule. Every value gets a second sentence, and the second sentence starts with "we do not".

The first line of each could be printed on a wall, and I know it. The second line is where the value lives. "We do not promise quantity we cannot source" will lose us a deal some month, probably a month we needed it, and if it never does, then it was decoration too and I will have to come back and try again. Keep our word from 2022 is still in there, if you look. It just grew up and learned what a load is.

I do not want this to read as a company post, because what I learned is not about companies. Most of us wrote our values once, at some age, and they were probably true at the time. The question is whether the person who wrote them still exists. Family first is what you write before you have a family and find out what it costs. Be kind is what you write before the day it means keeping quiet about something you were dying to say. The values do not go wrong. Life just keeps adding second sentences, and most of us never go back to the slide to write them down.

The five new lines go into the next hire and the next appraisal, and about thirty people across six states are going to hear "we do not" more often than they have so far. Whether the lines survive a bad quarter, I do not know yet. That is the honest ending, and also the whole point.

A value is the second sentence.

The first one is a wish.