Ep.57: Company Culture in a Dynamic, Young Dropshipping Team

What is the culture in Strat Quad and Dropify?

Charles’ workplace has an average age of 23 to 24. His team is composed of predominantly women, but there are a handful of men as well. 

He sees potential in his team. Since the team is still pretty small, Charles can talk to them whenever he’s in the office. He always asks them two questions: “Is the company’s vision clear?” and “Do you see that the company is growing?”. He sets his expectations clearly almost every day that he can.

He also emphasized his core values in Filipino: Masinop, Masipag, may Malasakit and Mahilig Matuto.

Charles repeatedly talks with them about the vision and the core values. He also strives to have a personal discussion with one of his team members every day. He wants to develop a good relationship between him and his small team.

For now, Charles dons the role of both a manager and a leader which are both essential in a business

What do you do to improve your leadership skills?

One of the factors that Charles uses to see if things will go smoothly is to simply listen. He is not knowledgeable with tech, but he still knows when something that his team proposes is plausible or not.

A good example of this was Charles’ decision to have the Dropify software be created abroad instead of locally. They produced an advanced and easy to use software that is a few steps above what the local software engineering scene can make. 

The decisions that you make as a leader are always in line with the visions. With you helming the process, there will always be a possibility that you will produce good quality output. 

Charles doesn’t read a lot of books. But he believes that if people are smart enough, then they should be able to read between the lines. One of the lessons that Charles learned from his time with Axia that he still applies today, is that everything only needs common sense. 

Things can get complex, but if you sit down and process things, you’ll realize that they’re very simple. He learned this principle from Elon Musk. His failure was that by automating his whole processing line, it got slower. The solution that he thought of was to once again introduce people into the process.

Most things are just a process. Not everything can be done by technology or people alone. There should be a mixture of both.

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