Exceptional Culture
How Beyond Blue Media Built a Culture Where Values Are Lived, Not Decorative
The Fort Collins agency built a workplace around five values that actually mean something, then put it to an independent test to find out if their team would describe it the same way they would.
Company
Beyond Blue Media
Contact
Marcos Perera, CEO
Industry
Digital Marketing
Location
Fort Collins, USA
Overview
Why Agency Workplaces
Intention Is Not Enough on Its Own
Marcos is direct about why BBM sought external validation: culture is too important to be self-assessed. The agency had been intentional about building a place where the team could thrive, but he knew that intention and experience are not always the same thing. What leadership believes about the culture and what the team actually lives in can diverge without anyone realizing it.
Partnering with Agency Workplaces offered something specific: an independent benchmark run by people who understand agency life. Not a generic employee engagement survey, but a process designed for the particular pressures, dynamics, and culture patterns of agencies. That specificity mattered.
The goal was to find out whether what they believed about their culture matched what the team actually experienced. It did, mostly. And where it did not, the gap was clear enough to act on.
What We Learned
Strong Signals, and a Few That Pointed the Way Forward
The strongest signals in the results were affirming. The team pointed to flexibility, mutual respect, leadership's genuine care for people, and the strength of the team itself as the things they would applaud most. For an agency that has made those things central to how it operates, hearing them reflected back carried real meaning.
The more instructive learning came from where the responses softened. Three themes surfaced clearly. The team wants greater clarity on growth pathways and how decisions around compensation get made. They want more visibility into where the agency is headed beyond the immediate quarter. And they want tighter practices around documenting decisions so that information lives in shared, accessible records rather than in personal notes or informal conversations.
There was also a quieter signal: part of the team wanted more confidence in the agency's growth trajectory, which aligned with feedback about pipeline and positioning. None of it was news to leadership, but having it surfaced directly by the team gave it weight and confirmed that the operational and strategic work already underway is the right priority.
What's Next
Sixty to Ninety Days, Then Recurring
1 | Use the results as direct input to leadership planning, with the strengths leaned into and reinforced across the team. |
2 | Address the identified gaps intentionally over the next 60 to 90 days, with clear ownership tied to the specific areas surfaced in the feedback. |
3 | Commit to running this kind of culture audit on a recurring basis, treating culture as something to measure and nurture continuously rather than as a one-time exercise. |
Tips for Building Great Culture
What Beyond Blue Media Would Tell Other Agencies
Start with values that mean something specific. If your values could be swapped onto a competitor's website without anyone noticing, they are not yours yet. Make sure your team can articulate what each value looks like in practice.
Hire and promote from within whenever you can. It sends a signal that there is a future at your agency, not just a job. People invest differently when they can see a path.
Invest in the things that make people want to stay: mentorship, professional development, flexibility, and team experiences that build real connection. These are not perks; they are infrastructure.
Be honest with yourself about whether your culture is something your team would describe the same way you would. If there is a gap, close it. When culture is real, recruiting and retention stop being problems you have to engineer. They become byproducts of a place people genuinely want to be.
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