 Hi there, so today I want to talk about values. I get lots of questions all the time about how do I know what my values are as a business? How can I communicate to my customers what my values are so that I can make sure that I'm attracting the right kind of customers to my business that I'm not only going to enjoy working with, but that we're going to have a relationship. It's going to be a rapport there immediately. I can engage with my customers without having to try and convert them with no relationship. So really values are so vital. They're the DNA of your business. So my answer to that would be that you really need to think about what your values are, not personally, but as a business. And also the most important thing you can do when you're thinking about expressing your brand through your values is to make sure that you are doing it from a place that comes from you and your business. The worst thing you could do is to think that your customers display a certain sort of value, therefore you try and mimic that and try and pretend that you have that value to attract them. So they're going to see straight through it and the relationship isn't going to last too long after that. So integrity really is the key when you're thinking about what your core values are as a business and as a company. So I've sent you a download which is a values questionnaire and I've come up with a list of the top values I can think of. You might well think of some more. What I want you to do first of all is to make a note out of that list of the top 10 core values that you want to communicate about yourself to your prospects and your customers. Once you've got that down to your top 10, I then want you to narrow it down. You have to lose five. Now this is quite a challenging exercise. I know because we've been through it. We use this this exercise for when we recruit staff, when we are thinking of going into a joint venture, when we are for sure when we're recruiting clients and customers because we want to make sure we're working with people that really get what we're about. You know, our number one core value is quality relationships. That overrides absolutely everything in our business. We even have a little system that if one of us doesn't feel, this is out of myself and Miles, if one of us feels that that potential customer doesn't quite share the same values, the other one will go in. And if we both feel it, we will not work with that customer because having made the mistake in the past of taking customers on who didn't share our values, we always just, it was just a mistake and we always got that feeling. I'm sure if you, like me, have had this feeling, you've just thought, oh God, why, why did I take this piece of business on? I knew this was going to be trouble, but it's usually because of a value set. In some way, those values rubbed up against each other and were misaligned. So our values are quality relationships, integrity and creativity. Now, once you've done that first part of the exercise and you've stripped it to five, why I want you to do is now pick out what your number one core value is going to be. This is absolutely vital and I'll tell you why. When Miles and I joined forces and brought both of our companies together, we did this exercise on our own business because I'd been doing this with clients for quite a while and seeing the results that they were having. Of course, by that point, I had attracted some clients that I really wouldn't have taken on had I have done this exercise first. So we decided to spend time getting this exercise absolutely right. We then brought both of our client lists together and one by one, we went through every single client and we put a mark next to them as to whether we thought they shared the same values with us or not. You can just tell. We ended up sacking 72% of our customer base, which is very scary actually. At first you think, okay, well, what are we going to do with these people? And actually all we did when they came back to us was we referred them to someone else who we felt did share the same values as that person so they were still being looked after but they were being looked after by someone that shared their same value set. And all that did for our business, however, was we started to focus on the other 27, 28% of customers that we really did share values with that we loved working with who always paid us on time. These were the premiership customers and when we started focusing on them, our business just flew. So this is such an important exercise for you to get right and it doesn't matter whether you are doing this at the beginning of your journey and you're just starting a business or whether you're doing it midway through a business, two to three years into your business, 10 years into your business. The most important thing is that you do it because this can make such a huge difference to who you attract as a customer from now on. You may have heard the saying before that the meaning of your communication is the response you get. Well, that's because it's true. If you display a certain set of values to your customers and prospects, that's exactly what you're going to attract. So if you're not attracting the kind of clients that you want to work with right now, it might be because you're not displaying the kind of values that you want other people to have in them. So I hope that this exercise is going to be really useful for you. Like I said, I've posted this already, so you can download this. And once you've got your answers to this, really start to think about now the kind of customers who are likely to share the same values as you. Now, we've got a great Facebook group. We've also got a fantastic blog. So if you go to iceinnovation.co.uk, forward slash blog, you can find loads of information in there about how to build your brand, how to grow your website, how to attract, engage and convert more people online and offline. And also, if you're not already following us on our Facebook group, if you type in facebook.com forward slash branding expert UK, you will find lots of tips and hints and information on there that can also help you to grow your business and build your brand. Do get in contact with us if you've got any questions, because whatever you ask us, it's more than likely going to help someone else too. Take care, have a great day and we'll speak to you soon. Bye bye.