New Creature Finds ‘Vibe’ Drives Profits

Walking into the offices of New Creature, visitors immediately sense a palpable energy in the air, like an electric current that streams from the reception area down the hall to a room filled with colorful cardboard displays designed for Walmart’s Action Alley.

The vibrant purple walls of the conference room, with its guitar pick-shaped table, and rock music emanating from offices add to that sense that something unique is going on here.

Workers at the in-store marketing firm in south Rogers call that energy a “vibe” that vendors, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. executives and others notice and comment on.

New Creature, whose tag line is “Helping Other People Sell More Stuff,” was founded in 1999 by two men who wanted to build a company with that special “vibe.”

Rather than seeking a money-making venture, Patrick Sbarra and Brad Jones started out with an idea for a culture of high expectations and high performance that they could build a business around. Then they found a need that business could meet – in this case, designing and producing promotional displays and special product packaging for retailers and suppliers.

Judging by the numbers, their unusual business model has proven highly successful. For 2000, its first full year of operation, New Creature posted revenue of $600,000. Sales have grown 100 percent or more nearly every year since, and in 2010, revenue reached $43 million.

The company has built a coast-to-coast supply-chain network of 17 facilities comprising 8 million SF, and oversees projects from inception to design, manufacturing and distribution.

To keep up with the increased business, the company has grown from five “Creatures,” as the employees refer to themselves, in 2000 to 30. Yet even as they celebrate the growth, New Creature’s founders continually work to maintain that original culture.

 

Creature Culture Defined

Investopedia.com offers this barebones definition of corporate culture: “The beliefs and behaviors that determine how a company’s employees and management interact and handle outside business transactions.”

Jones, New Creature’s executive vice president, fleshed out that definition in a talk on faith-based culture he gave last October for WorkMatters’ Eight-to-Five Unplugged speaker series.

“A culture is a living thing,” he said. “It’s an environment that you walk into every day. You have to cultivate it, you have to grow it, you have to invest in it, you have to prune it from time to time. You have to put your heart and soul into it, and you have to have some core beliefs and values.”

More recently, Jones said of the culture, “If it’s in you and it’s alive, we hold each other accountable, we pick each other up when they’re down. You encourage but you also push.”

To help keep New Creature’s culture alive as it grew, Jones and Sbarra, the company’s president, enlisted the help of the Soderquist Center for Leadership & Ethics, founded by retired Wal-Mart COO and senior vice chairman Don Soderquist.

A few months before New Creature was launched, Sbarra had heard Soderquist give a speech on creating high-performance teams and maintaining high expectations. He took Soderquist’s message to heart with his own company, and when he needed help, he said, he naturally turned to the Soderquist Center.

Based at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, the center has helped New Creature through retreats and team-building exercises, Jones said. The New Creature staff just had a spring retreat there in early May.

A case study on New Creature written earlier this year by Clayton Anderson for the Soderquist Center notes a number of books address the link between organizational culture and financial performance.

“What researchers have found, time and time again, is that these companies fostering vibrant atmospheres have engaged employees,” the case study states. “As a result, they enjoy returns 2.3 times the market average.”

How all this plays out in real life, says project manager Chrissy Hawkins, is “Day to day we all really try to have a servant’s heart. We come together and brainstorm how to help our customers lower their costs. We come together as a company team, not just a segmented team.”

Hawkins said each person on the staff is valued for their individuality and what they can contribute to the group, whether they’re more detail-oriented, more creative or more methodical.

“You’re not just a number, a fish in the bowl, but you’re valued on the collective team,” she said.

 

Teaching Creature Culture

While Investopedia.com states that corporate culture is typically implied rather than expressly defined, and develops organically over time, Jones and Sbarra chose an opposite route. Besides starting their company with the idea for the culture, they make sure employees are steeped in that culture from Day 1.

On their first day at New Creature, employees are paired with a “culture coach,” a fellow employee who gives one-on-one instruction in the company’s tenets and its “Creaturisms.”

Some of these 20 sayings come from Bible verses, such as this from Ecclesiastes: “Two are better than one for they have a good return on their work.”

Ken Williams, vice president of sales, said his favorite Creaturism is “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another,” from Proverbs 27:17.

“New Creatures believe in the idea of helping to mentor or hold accountable our teammates,” Williams said. “The ability to be honest with our struggles and our successes is a key to our unique culture. It’s easy to celebrate success, but to share our struggles, it takes a special bond.”

Not all Creaturisms are Bible-based, though. Chris Rasche, vice president of business development, said one of his favorite Creaturisms is “Do on Monday what others haven’t even thought about until Wednesday.”

“This is a Creature’s mindset and a reminder to use our gray matter to think proactively about what our customers need before they even realize they need it,” he explained.

Sbarra said the company holds “culture meetings” at least once each quarter.

“In those meetings, we celebrate people’s actions that live out our values and our principles,” he said.

Employees are recognized for their actions that exemplify the Creaturisms, he said. For instance, an employee may get a “Service Above Self” or “I Am Third” award.

 Sbarra said the company initially held culture meetings every Monday, until the pace of business made that unfeasible. But he and Jones say weekly meetings aren’t needed any more because the culture is so ingrained in the staff.

“It now lives inside the people,” Sbarra said. “It’s systemic. It’s ‘in’ the body, so it’s being done every day by the people. It’s just a vibe in the hallway. They live it.”