At Gozynta, our company motto is “We understand that all software sucks, even ours. Our mission is to make it suck a little less each and every day.”

This motto developed organically, but it has its roots in the values that I’m trying to build the company on.

• Empathy - Realizing that our software sucks is a form of empathizing with our customers. I’m sure that every one of our customers has had or will have a day where they say “this sucks, why won’t [Gozynta’s software] do this better?”

• Excellence - Making it suck less. This should apply to everything we do. Our core business is making software, so we need to make that suck less. We also need to make our support suck less so our customers have a good experience, make ourselves suck less, and help make the world as a whole suck less whenever we can.

  Excellence and sucking less also feed into:

  • Ethics - Unethical behavior sucks. If we show the people around us that we’re going to behave with a strong ethical code, this will pay dividends in itself.
  • Experimentation - Sucking less requires learning, and the best way to learn is through science. Form a hypothesis, and then test it through experimentation.

Turning this around, I end up with:

• Ethics - Bill and Ted said it best: “Be excellent to each other”. We strive to follow this philosophy in all our interactions with each other, customers, vendors, the wider world, and even competitors.
• Experimentation - We must never stop learning and growing. The best way to learn is to try things. “Move fast and break things” is too cavalier a motto for a company that other businesses trust with business critical services or data, but we must try new things and continue to grow and improve.
• Excellence - We must do work that we’re proud of, and always strive to do better, period. This requires constant effort.
• Empathy - To build the best products and provide the best service for our customers, we need to really understand them. This requires enough empathy to see things from their point of view. Empathy will also have better relationships with each other and with the larger business community, and these relationships will then fuel our success.

Of course, true to our motto, I think these values still have some suck left in them (Ex: concepts missing and unsaid ), and I will continue to work on refining them. It’s hard to always be reflecting on what one can do better, but in all facets of our life pushing for constant improvement is the key to success. We will continue to take that more difficult path and keep improving.

Is your MSP looking to create a motto or thinking about your values?

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