Consistency from you
Your team calibrates to your worst day, not your best one. If the rule applies on Tuesday and not on Friday, there is no rule.
Your biggest asset
Building More Than Just A Great Team
Do you have a team? Are they on the same journey as you? Let me show you how to get your people working harder and smarter for you, with culture baked into the DNA rather than printed on a poster in the lunchroom.
Running a business means worrying about a hundred things at once. Wouldn’t it be great if your team wasn’t one of them? A team that works together, doesn’t need micromanaging, and looks after your clients when you’re not in the room.
I call this killing two birds with one stone. Look after your employees and you keep them longer. Keep them longer and you build a real culture. Real culture creates great service, and great service keeps clients paying. It isn’t complicated, it’s just consistently done or consistently not.
I’ll also give you strategies to lift productivity by genuinely engaging your people and making sure they understand where the business is going and what’s in it for them. Getting an extra few per cent out of your team has a dramatic effect on the business without adding a cent of cost. Happy clients equal paying clients.
Contact RobThe bill you’re already paying
What Bad Culture Actually Costs You
Owners tell me culture is a nice-to-have they’ll deal with once things settle down. Culture is not a nice-to-have. It is an invoice you are already paying, just not one that arrives with a due date.
- Recruitment on repeat. Advertising, interviewing, onboarding and the three months of half-speed output while the new person learns the job. Then you do it again in six weeks.
- Your time. Every resignation drags you back into the work. You stop being the owner and start being the fill-in.
- Client churn. Your clients had a relationship with the person who just left. Some of that relationship walks out with them.
- Knowledge walking out the door. Nothing was documented because nobody had time, so the workaround for the tricky job leaves too.
- The quiet ones. Your good staff notice who you tolerate. One protected underperformer sets the actual standard for everyone else.
- Your reputation as an employer. In a trade or a niche sector, word gets around fast, and the good candidates stop applying.
The work
How I Fix Culture With A Client
This isn’t a values workshop with butcher’s paper. Here’s the actual sequence I run with an owner who has a team problem.
- 1
I talk to your people, not just you
On my onsite visits I speak to staff without you standing there. What they tell a visiting outsider is rarely what they tell the boss, and that gap is usually the whole problem.
- 2
We define what good actually looks like
Most staff underperform because nobody ever told them precisely what the standard is. We write the standard down for each role in plain language, so it can be met or missed, not argued about.
- 3
Fix the pay and the basics first
Before touching culture I check the boring things: is the pay defensible, are breaks real, is the roster fair, is the gear safe and working. No amount of culture talk survives a broken basic.
- 4
Set a rhythm of feedback
A short one-on-one every month with every person, run by you, with three questions and no surprises. Annual reviews are a ritual, not a management tool.
- 5
Deal with the person you’ve been avoiding
There is almost always one. We work out whether it’s a capability problem you can coach or an attitude problem you can’t, and then you act rather than tolerate.
- 6
Give people something to aim at
Progression, training, ownership of an area — people stay where they can see the next twelve months. If the job is a dead end, they will leave for fifty cents an hour more.
The levers
Four Things That Move Culture Fastest
Recognition that costs nothing
Specific, timely, in front of other people. “Good job team” in a group email is worth nothing. Naming what someone actually did is worth a pay rise.
Removing the daily friction
The software that crashes, the process with four unnecessary steps, the form nobody reads. Fix those with better IT systems and morale lifts without a speech.
Hiring for fit, then training skill
Skills can be taught. Attitude, work ethic and how someone treats the apprentice cannot. Most bad hires were obvious in the interview and hired anyway because you were desperate.
The payoff
What Changes In The First 90 Days Of Culture Coaching
You won’t have a transformed culture in three months. What you will have is a team that knows what’s expected, an owner who isn’t the last to know when something is wrong, and a documented standard for each role that survives you being on leave.
In practical terms, that usually looks like this: monthly one-on-ones happening without me chasing you, one difficult conversation finally had, one process fixed that everyone hated, and a clear view of who is on the bus and who isn’t.
I’ve seen retention move from six weeks to more than twelve months with a client doing nothing more exotic than this. That single change paid for the coaching several times over in recruitment costs alone.
None of this happens if you only think about culture at the monthly session. It happens because we build it into the way you run the week. Culture is what you do repeatedly, not what you say once. See how it connects to the other pillars of business success, or read what clients say about the change.
Let’s Fix The Team ProblemLook after your people and they’ll look after your clients. Skip that step and you’ll do both jobs yourself.
Robert Adelman — The No Bullshit Business Coach
Straight answers
Workplace Culture Questions, Answered
We’re only six people. Do we really have a culture?
You have one whether you designed it or not. In a team of six the culture is essentially your personality multiplied, which is why small teams feel brilliant or unbearable with very little in between.
The advantage of being small is that culture changes fast. One honest conversation and one changed habit can shift a six-person team in a fortnight. In a hundred-person business it takes a year.
My best performer is also the one poisoning the team. What do I do?
Decide what you are actually buying. High output from someone who makes three other people miserable is not high output — it’s a subsidy paid by everyone else.
The conversation is straightforward: name the specific behaviour, name the effect, set the expectation and a review date. Some people genuinely don’t know how they land and will change. Some won’t, and then you have your answer. Either way, avoiding it is the expensive option.
Do I have to pay above market to keep good staff?
No, but you do have to pay defensibly. Underpay and nothing else you do matters — people will take the better offer and be polite about it.
Above the defensible line, money stops being the main driver. Respect, flexibility, decent gear, being listened to and being able to see a future in the job all beat a small pay bump. That is where the real leverage is.
How do I build culture when half the team works remotely?
Remote doesn’t kill culture, but drift does. What breaks first is informal information — the things people used to overhear now reach no one, so remote staff feel like contractors within a few months.
The fix is deliberate rhythm: a short weekly team catch-up with a real agenda, monthly one-on-ones that never get cancelled, and getting everyone physically in the same room a few times a year. Booking that is not a perk, it is maintenance.
Should I write down company values?
Only if you intend to hire, praise and fire by them. Values on a wall that nobody enforces are worse than no values at all, because everyone can see the gap and it teaches them what your word is worth.
Three values you actually apply beat eight that sound impressive. Test them with a simple question: has anyone ever lost an opportunity here for breaching one? If not, it isn’t a value, it is a slogan.
How do I stop being the bottleneck for every decision?
Write down which decisions people can make without asking you, and put a dollar figure or a risk boundary on it. Most owners have never done this, so staff ask about everything to stay safe.
Then hold your nerve when someone makes a call you’d have made differently but which still worked. Overturn those decisions once and you’ve trained everyone to come back to you forever.
Can you help with HR paperwork, contracts and awards?
I’ll tell you when something looks wrong and what questions to ask, but I’m a business coach, not an employment lawyer or an HR consultant, and awards are not a place for confident guessing.
What I do is connect you with the vetted HR and legal people in my rolodex so you get it right the first time, and then make sure the advice actually gets implemented rather than filed. Ask me who I work with.
How does culture connect to the rest of the coaching?
Directly. Culture is one of the six pillars, and it sits upstream of most of the others. A stable team makes service consistent, makes systems worth documenting and makes you replaceable enough to take a holiday.
There’s no separate fee for it. Culture work is part of the same flat monthly arrangement described on the business coaching cost page.
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