CTL + Be: New Bold Values for a Tech Founder Scaling Up

When Joyt Singh founded his tech firm RTS Labs in 2010, he was living his dream of entrepreneurship with a flat, collaborative leadership model. But as his business scaled, he realized he would need to change his approach to culture with a strong foundation that would resonate with the newest hire and his “OG” Coders. He hired our consulting firm to develop and help launch a new path forward. I conducted focus groups and wrote the final product, as well as provided an outline of the ideas that launched it. See the highlights to my approach below and scroll down to read the final product.

• “We are Natural Born Killers” Incisive anonymous exercises uncovered the natural language of the organization to strike a tone that would be genuine to the workforce and not corporate consultant speak.

• Blind Focus Groups were conducted with: leadership, new hires and the OG, high performing coders who built the company to uncover the values they shared and how they articulated them

• Mock Game Show tested the validity of my drafts in a pressure-free, insightful environment. Play is the most honest expression

• Infused coding culture: Instead of values they were called constants, a coding term. I worked to replace one constant with a synonym to create the memorable acronym CTL+Be, since control B is a keyboard shortcut for BOLD, helping aid memorability

• Drafts tested with multiple employees and prospective customers as well as potential employees from outside the company

• Innovative launch with teams creating the values together before the reveal presentation at a local brewery

• CTL+Be acronym approach was able to be scaled into other RTS culture initiatives such as Shift Up, as seen here.