From the Founder: Our Values
At a strategic offsite late in 2017, the 3C team focused on our values and what we stand for and how we work.
Here’s what we landed on…
Your work matters
This is a statement to our clients that we know the work they do is important. They have a mission and it’s our job to help them achieve it, and because we get the privilege of helping them articulate it. We love working with people who take their work seriously and who have fun doing it, and who have a purpose for coming to work each day.
It is also meant for us on the 3C team. Our work matters. Helping people say what they want is sacred work – we become the stewards of their vision, their message, their mission, when we get hired to help them find their narrative and tell their stories. And, we respect the contributions we each make to keep our company going – we help each other meet deadlines or find just the right word to help a client.
Leave it better than you found it
True for work and true for life. If we cannot help a client with a particular ask, we owe it to them and ourselves to walk away. But when we can use our talents and passion to help a client build a quality relationship with their key audience – employees, customers, partners, investors – it’s up to us to take good to great.
Show gratitude
We are fortunate. We do work we are good at and that we love, and our clients appreciate our expertise and like working with us. We help our clients and we help each other, and we want to express our thanks as much as we like hearing thanks from others. We give back, professionally with our talents and with hearts and hands in our private lives.
Make new mistakes together
When my wife was an early-career attorney, a senior attorney she worked with had a sign on his desk – “Make New Mistakes.” It’s okay to try and fail, or to make an error – but learn from it and don’t make the same mistake twice.
We know that pushing the envelope on a project sometimes puts a hole in the envelope and our commitment is to learn from every failure (and success), to recover and remediate quickly, and to not make the same mistake twice. The “together” part shows our partnership with our clients.
No organization is perfect – the partnership between 3C and each client should make us both stronger and more resilient.
Challenge accepted and Geek out
I love these two – they’re great statements of our attitude and who we are. Challenge accepted? That’s right, bring it on. Got a tough concept to communicate? A skeptical audience to win over? A tight deadline? A need to advance your career by being clearer about what’s important to you, why, and what you want your audience to do about it? Challenge accepted. We love doing the tough stuff, almost as much as we like the feeling when the results come in and we’ve made a difference.
And Geek out? We’re grammar nerds who know when to use “that” and when to use “which.” We’ll spend twenty minutes debating “honest” versus “straightforward” and whether it’s “startup,” “start-up,” or “start up.” (It’s “startup.”)
With thanks to the great team we’re building and deep appreciation for the clients who have invested their trust in us in our first two years, we’re saying we “get” you, we want you to know what you’re getting when you work with us.
We are also excited about growing our firm and helping organizations build great connections with their customers and, in turn, helping customers feel more connected to brands.