Most agencies get their core values backwards.

They sit a few founders in a room, brainstorm a list of impressive-sounding words like Excellence, Integrity, Innovation, slap them on the website, and call it culture. But here's the problem: those aren't values. They're decorations. And decorations don't help you in determining how to hire, fire, lead, or make hard calls about growth and success.

Real core values do actual work. They tell you who belongs on your team and who doesn't. They settle arguments about which direction to take. They make decisions for you when you're not in the room. But to get values that do that, you have to build them the right way from the things that actually matter.

Stop brainstorming words. Start with people.

The single biggest mistake new agencies make is treating values as a vocabulary exercise. They reach for the dictionary when they should be looking at their own team.

Values aren't invented; they're uncovered. And the best part? They're already living inside your best people. So instead of asking "how to make good-sounding values," ask better questions:

The Clone Test: If you could only clone 3 or 4 people on your team to build a team of 30, who would you clone?

The Rebuild Test: If you had to burn it all down and rebuild your agency from scratch tomorrow - blank slate, no precedent, no fallback - who are the 3 or 4 A-players you'd hire first?

The Disaster Test: If 3 or 4 people walked out the door tomorrow and left you in the biggest trouble of your life, who would they be?

The same names tend to surface across all three. That overlap is your starting point. The people who, if you had a whole agency of them, would make you unstoppable, and whose absence would threaten its entire existence.

Now, we must confront the uncomfortable truth: Look at the names you just wrote down, and look at who's actually sitting on your leadership team. Are they the same people? If the people you'd clone, rebuild around, and fear losing the most aren't the ones you've put in charge, that's worth sitting with. It might mean your best people are buried in the wrong roles. It might mean you promoted for convenience instead of capability, rewarding loyalty and seniority while your actual A-players and talent do the heavy lifting without any of the authority.

Then comes the real work: ask why those people. And get painfully specific. "They're a great worker” and “I can always trust their input” are not values. “The way they stay calm when a client lights the building on fire” is a value. “They offer to take ownership of new tasks without being asked twice” is a value. “They take hard feedback without making it personal” is a value.

Write down those traits. That list is the foundation for the rest that follows.

Make them "committable," not comfortable.

A value only counts if it's committable. Meaning you'd actually hire for it, fire for it, and reward for it, even when it's inconvenient.

Here's the gut-check: would you turn down a brilliant, high-revenue hire because they violate this value? If the answer is no, it's not a core value; it's a preference. Real values cost you something. They have teeth. If a value never forces a hard decision, it's just a poster.

Take accountability. Easy to put on a wall. Much harder to honor when it's standing in your office doing incredible work. Picture your most talented person. The output is genuinely excellent, consistently some of the best work the agency produces. But it's always late. Every deadline slips. When you ping them, you get "getting it done now" and nothing else. No heads-up beforehand, no ownership after, never a sorry. And while their work is brilliant, the team around them is the one apologizing to the client, absorbing the stress, and adjusting the timeline.

Here's where the value gets tested. If accountability is really one of your core values, the quality of the work doesn't get them off the hook… because the value isn't "do great work," it's "own your commitments." You'd have to address it directly, and if it didn't change, you'd have to be willing to let them go, even knowing exactly what you'd lose.

If you'd never actually do that, meaning if great output buys someone a permanent pass on accountability, then accountability isn't your value. 

And here's the part that should worry you: your team is watching. Every time that person slides on a deadline with no consequence, the message lands a little deeper: this rule doesn't actually apply here. At first it's quiet resentment from the people cleaning up the mess. But over time, they stop believing in the value altogether. Why would they hold themselves to a standard that your most visible employee gets to ignore? Slowly, they stop respecting it, and slowly stop practicing it. And that's how a core value dies. 

A Few Helpful Tips Before You Lock Them In

Once you've mined the traits and drafted some real contenders, keep these in mind before you commit anything to the wall:

1. Keep it to 3 to 5 values. Any more than that and nobody remembers them, which means nobody uses them. If you've got a long, messy list, that's fine to start. Group the overlapping ideas, kill the duplicates, and force yourself to narrow it down hard.

2. Write them as behaviors, not nouns. A value people can act on beats a value people can only nod at. "We over-communicate our work and goals" tells someone what to do tomorrow morning. "Good communication" doesn't. 

3. Get specific. If the agency down the street could copy and paste your values onto their own website without changing a word, they're not specific enough. "Integrity" and "excellence" aren't differentiators. Make your values sound like you - give them an edge, a phrase, a bit of personality your team will actually remember. "Do what you say you'll do" beats "Integrity." "No surprises" beats "Transparency." The more it sounds like something a real person on your team would actually say, the more it'll stick.

4. Make sure each value describes who you are today, not who you wish you were. Aspirational values are just lies with good PR. If you don't already live it, it's not a value yet. It's a goal. Name who you are to grow into the next level.

5. Ask if it would ever cost you something. Don't write values you're not willing to enforce. Every value you publish is a promise to your team and your vision for the agency. Only commit to the ones you'll actually defend.

6. Confirm with your team. Values handed down from leadership get polite nods without much pushback. Open your draft up and ask people what makes the agency different, what behaviors they're proud of, and what they'd never want to lose as the agency grows. They'll catch things you missed.

Values Aren't a Branding Exercise

The point of all this isn’t about good branding; it’s to build something that has actual value. If you’re taking the time to discover these values, they should mean something; they should tell you who to hire, how to lead, what to reward, and when someone's drifting from the standard.

Already have your values nailed down? The work isn’t done. Even the best values have an expiration date. In our post, we break down why your agency's values are probably already outdated, and how to know when it's time to revisit them.

Learn how to level up your agency values with us.