When you’re building a company, you have to consistently rally people to the mission.
Rituals are as old as time, and there’s a reason for that. They work. The bind people together.
As a leader in a small company, you need rituals or ceremonies to mark important events. They give people a sense of rhythm and chance to celebrate successes.
One of the more common rituals is to “ring the bell” when your company makes a sale or acquires a new customer. You might get a real bell, and actually ring it. Get everyone together, announce the customer, give those responsible a pat on the back, then ring the bell. Or you might do it in other ways, with cupcakes or beer (or both!). Be consistent. Do it the same way each time.
At Endeca, we rang the bell up until about 100 customers or so, and it got so frequent and the company got so big, we couldn’t pull it off.
It doesn’t have to be a sales event, it can be an engineering milestone or some other frequent event. At goby, as a first time CEO, I had three ceremonies. First, after every board meeting I bought champagne for the team, a “tongue in cheek” celebration of keeping my job. Every Friday I bought beer for the team. Every Thursday, I bought pizza for a “lunch & learn” session where someone either did a tear-down of a competing product, talked about an academic paper they read, or something else vaguely work-related but not specifically about what they were working on.
Ceremonies help mark progress and celebrate victories. In startups, victories are hard-won and don’t always happen that often. Be sure to celebrate them when they happen — don’t let them slip away.
