We live by the following values. They are the secrets to our success.

Our culture is based on the following values, beliefs and quirks.

We live by them.

1. Culture is the root of all profits

We believe that the best way to increase our profits is to increase the profits of our clients. To do that, we need several things: great people, great processes and great clients. And the best way to do that is to have great working conditions. The following flowchart summarizes how we believe all of those things relate. In short, we believe that great working conditions are a critical foundation for mutual success.

A chart illustrating how having the best culture and working conditions results in having the best people, processes, clients, client successes and ultimately profits. — Great working conditions lead to great profits. This chart (originally inspired by this article by Joel Spolsky) explains our company philosophy, and why we focus on developing excellent working conditions.

We’re constantly looking to hire world-class people (we’re actively hiring now), so we’re always looking for ways to improve our working conditions. “Working conditions” encompasses several overlapping factors, including our team members’ compensation, our working environment, our company’s mission, the work itself, and our culture. Our culture is described in more detail in our culture book.

2. Being the best in the world is seriously underrated

We’re fans of Seth Godin’s book The Dip, in which Godin argues that “Being the best in the world is seriously underrated.” He gives many examples of how, in most fields of achievement, you get almost no rewards until you become one of the best in the world—at which point the rewards come rushing in. One reason for this is because everyone wants the best. When visiting a new town, no one asks the concierge to recommend an average restaurant. They all want the best.

So if we were running a restaurant, we’d want our food to be not just good but the best, and we’d want our employees to be not just happy but the happiest, because being best is disproportionately more fruitful than being second, third or fourth.

We take the same approach to our company. And we help our clients to do the same.

3. Wins are everything

Our company motto is “Wins are everything.” We define a “win” as being an activity that measurably grows a client’s business.

This isn’t just a platitude. Many newcomers to our business are surprised at how obsessive we are about wins. Wins take priority over absolutely everything else:

We believe that the best way to grow our business is to focus on growing our clients’ businesses. We succeed via word of mouth, and our clients are our best salespeople. In fact, many of them kindly offer to speak to our prospects.
We optimize our consultants’ activities so they spend 100% of their time growing businesses. They work remotely, and minimize travel, because we believe that an hour spent on the road is never as fruitful as an hour spent doing work. (This is possible only thanks to the recent proliferation of excellent remote collaboration tools.)

4. Our real product is testimonials

Our philosophy is to imagine that our company’s real product is testimonials from happy, thrilled clients.

With that mindset, everything we do becomes a means to that end. Our service exists merely to delight clients and get amazing results for them.

5. We become deserving of what we want

Does success come to those who deserve it? For most of our lives, the answer has been no. But the world is changing quickly, and we believe that the answer will soon be yes. Good people—and good companies—will be successful.

The phrase “If you build it, they will come” used to be a “falsism.” But the internet has made consumers much better at finding great products and services.

Here’s an example. In the past, a bad hotel in a tourist hotspot could prosper by preying on an endless supply of naive customers. Now, thanks to sites like TripAdvisor, prospective visitors can find out the truth. So travelers go to the best hotels and they avoid the bad ones. The top-rated hotels get almost all of the profits. Because the truth would get out.

So one of our mottos is “Become deserving of what we want.” Consequently, we focus almost all of our efforts on delivering and improving our service.

Our goal is to build a company that deserves to be hugely successful—to be the best—because it’s the best in the world at delivering value. Our two main stakeholders are our clients and our team members, so we deliver two types of value, one for each of them:

How do we come to deserve the best clients?

For our clients, we have the mantra “Wins are everything.” How does our culture help us to get wins? Well, we recruit people who are amazing at getting wins, and we train them in everything we know. We focus on their productivity and we create elegant, easy-to-use processes for them to follow, so their time isn’t wasted. We seek the (sometimes painful) truth by carrying out A/B tests, usability tests, and surveys. And we try to spend as little time as possible doing work that is secondary to getting wins. For example

We all travel as little as possible.
Most of our sales come from word of mouth, not from outbound sales.
Most of our marketing materials are byproducts of our consulting processes—like our case studies, for example.

How do we come to deserve the best team members?

To attract team members, our goal is to make CRE leaps and bounds better than every other job you’ve had. We focus on paying our team members much more than they’d normally get for such roles. We let them work from anywhere in the world (so they can spend time with friends and family). And we give them an environment in which they can do the best work of their lives.

A/B tests are cold and unforgiving. If people are being measured by A/B tests, the last thing they need is an employer who’s also cold and unforgiving. They need support. Our culture is supportive, nice-natured, collaborative, energizing, and forgiving. Our managers are there to define the roles and then to provide support, enthusiasm, and encouragement.

6. We give our clients the same advice we would give our best friends

We approach and treat every business and website we work on as though it were our own.
We provide systems for marketing that are easy to implement, measurable, and effective. No smoke-and-mirrors or “filler material.”
We tell clients the truth, even if that’s not what they want to hear.

Once you’re our client, you can expect the following from us

To work with someone who seeks to understand your situation and then gives the best advice.
To receive a service that’s surprisingly efficient, productive, and professional.
To get an excellent return on investment.

We’ll regularly check that we’re meeting these expectations.

Once you’re our client, we expect the following from you

To be serious about wanting to grow your business.
To be prepared to make significant changes to your business.
To be able to cope operationally when the conversion rate increases.
To give us honest feedback, both good and bad. (Particularly the bad.)

7. We believe in karma

We believe in giving people more help than they might expect. Here’s an example: Recently, we interviewed a consultant who didn’t quite pass the interviews, because he didn’t have enough experience. We told him so, but he was so close to making the grade that we offered to put him through our training course free of charge, on the basis that at the very least he’d benefit from having received the training. After he completed our training course, he still didn’t pass our tests, so we couldn’t take him on. Instead, we asked some of our contacts and put him in touch with several companies that were looking for conversion marketers.

It’s a small world, and it’s getting smaller. We try hard to leave everyone in a better position for having known us.

What’s your goal today?

1. Hire us to grow your company

We’ve generated hundreds of millions for our clients, using our unique CRE Methodology™. To discover how we can help grow your business:

Read our case studies, client success stories, and video testimonials.
Learn about us, and our unique values, beliefs and quirks.
Visit our “Services” page to see the process by which we assess whether we’re a good fit for each other.
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