Day 1 Every Day.

When we established Catapult just six years ago, we had four clear strategic goals in mind:

To put the customer at the heart of everything we do
To challenge our industry to do better
To invest in technology, systems, automation and data
To set new standards around lead time, cost, quality and service in an ever changing marketplace

Six years on, those are still our goals, and I am still passionate about delivering on them. To borrow a concept from Jeff Bezos and Amazon, we have nurtured a ‘Day 1’ culture at Catapult, and as we grow, embedding that culture at every touchpoint is more important than ever.

What is Day 1?

For those who don’t know, Jeff Bezos attaches his 1997 letter to shareholders to every Amazon annual report. In the letter, he mapped out a vision for Amazon’s future success, which involved ‘maintaining a long-term focus, obsessing over customers and their needs, and boldly innovating to meet those needs’.

If that sounds a little familiar, it’s because those principles directly correlate with our vision and aspirations at Catapult. But the synergy doesn’t end there. Day 1 doesn’t just refer to Jeff Bezos’s original statement that it was ‘day 1 for the internet’ back in 1997. Much more importantly, the idea is that every day is Day 1, requiring the same creativity, customer focus and commitment to driving positive change, whether the company is starting out, or scaling up.

Taking Day 1 into Year 7

For Catapult – and for me personally – Day 1 thinking is the very core of our culture. And the challenge is to ensure that it’s not just embedded in how the senior team leads our organization and our strategy, but in how each and every person on our team understands what we do and why we’re doing it.

In a business that is constantly evolving, against the backdrop of a commercial landscape that never stands still, a shared culture and clear vision are critical elements of success. It may seem like a contradiction, but the Day 1 principle that we are in a constant state of newness and fresh thinking is the fundamental constant in the Catapult business as we scale up, innovate, and continue to disrupt our sector.

To deliver that constant across every department and every employee, we need clarity and consistency, which is why I have been working recently with our branding agency to define our employee value proposition (EVP) and establish a blueprint for our company culture.

Intrinsic to that thinking is the focus on getting better as we get bigger. Improvement is not an admission of past failure, is an acceptance that there is always scope to achieve more. As we grow, we don’t want to move away from the passion and ideas that set us apart; we want to build on them exponentially, making every day at Catapult as exciting as the first.

Culture, Not Cut & Paste

Catapult is not Amazon, and we don’t want to be. A key element of our culture is that we don’t follow; we lead the way with Day 1 enthusiasm for the positive change we’re creating.

We are scaling fast, with new people joining us at every level and new customers being onboarded week by week. We are now at a point in our growth trajectory where it’s vital that our culture is not just championed by the leadership team, but running through the veins of our business. When we add new people and new capabilities, we must never water down our culture; we must build it up.

Culture is defined and led by a company’s senior team, but it is lived by every person within an organization. As CEO of Catapult, my remit is not to tell our employees what they should think and how they should behave, but to help them believe in our shared mission and intuitively behave in ways that deliver it.

That’s my goal as we move forward to our next era of growth with our new EVP in place. We have nurtured a Day 1 culture, we have given people a reason to believe in it by delivering the change we promised and continuing to scale up. The next step is to support our colleagues in adopting that culture – as individuals and as a team – as we continue to make every day Day 1.

If you’d like to know more about our EVP, why not take a look at our recent blog.