An Interview With Susan Bellows

Susan Bellows answers some questions about her business in an interview with Kim Grassfield, manager of a New England based design company.

I just read what a client, a company General Manager, has said about you. Why is he so happy with what you've done for him?

Oh, that's Larry Goldberg from Rock 102 in Springfield, MA. What he liked about us was our no-fuss, no- muss, get-to-the-point, get-the-job-done attitude. In this case, the task was to help them come up with a company vision, a purpose, some goals, and some guiding principles so that everyone at the radio station would have something to shoot for over the next few years.

How did you work with them?

When I work with company staff, we all become part of the team, and I coordinate the team, using some brainpower to get the best out of everyone. We began with three half-day sessions -- one day off-site at a hotel. We talked about their core values, the values that the company stood for. They had a lot of new people on the management team, and I wound up asking them what values they thought were important. I handed them a list of popular core business values and asked them to select the top three that applied to them. We came up with a long list and kept asking ourselves if it applied to the station.

What do you mean by "core values"?

A core value is non-perishable, no matter how your business changes. Core values might be integrity, honesty, impeccability, things like that.

How can you decide?

We had to really narrow it down to some core values they could live with. Everyone in the room had to agree. Then we worked on the guiding principles and philosophy that the company agreed on concerning the way they would treat each other, their customers, their listeners. These values extended to how they would treat their advertisers and the listening community. Guiding principles endure in a company no matter what a company is doing. Rock 102 is a rock music station right now. But let's say at some point they were taken over by someone else, or the radio industry experienced a spate of mergers, etc. What then?

I'm imagining a fairly short list of core values. You said that when you solicited responses from everyone you came up with a long list...

That's because everyone had different things they stood for. But a core value had to be something that was universal for the station. That was the hard part to agree on. For example, one person wanted the focus for the company to be "entertaining people." That isn't all they do. So in the end "entertaining" became a value way down the list, not at the core. Being solution-oriented, creative and fun, those values topped the list. For another client, a major value was being heart-centered. Every company is different. One guy kept asking me, "What's going to make these words different from anybody else who has these same words written down?" When I interviewed him later, he said, "Though the words are the same, what they stand for is an internal thing for our company and for us. They mean something for us because we picked them."

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