Yesterday I shared a short piece about the Cupshe story. If you missed it, the quick version: a new employee – four days into her job – sent a racist email from the company’s system in response to a business enquiry. The fallout was significant and is still running.
I wrote about the gap between what a company believes about itself and what its systems actually produce.
Today I want to go deeper, because this isn’t just a story about a single brand and a badly handled email. It’s a story about something most business owners are sitting on without realising.
Your values are probably not operational either
You have values – it’s part of what brought you to this work, and it’s part of what makes running a business at this level feel harder than it looks from the outside. You care about how you treat people. You have a clear sense of what you will and won’t do. You built something you’re proud of, partly because it reflects who you are.
But here’s the question that the Cupshe incident asks: are those values yours, or are they the business’s?
Because there is a difference. And it matters a lot.
Your values are operational when they show up in how your business behaves whether you are in the room or not.
In how your team speaks to clients, in how new people are brought into the business and in the emails that go out when you’re on holiday.
It’s in the quality and the feeling of the work that gets done when you’re not watching.
Most businesses I encounter – good ones, run by people with genuine values – have a version of the Cupshe problem. Not at that scale and not with those consequences. But the gap is there. The values live in the owner. The business runs on something considerably less defined.
The instinct is to fix the people
When something goes wrong – a team member handles a client badly, a piece of work goes out that doesn’t represent you, a conversation happens that you would have handled differently – the instinct is to address the person. Have a conversation, correct the behaviour and move on.
And that works – until it happens again. Or until a different person does a different version of the same thing. Or until you hire someone new and realise you are having the same conversation from scratch.
The pattern repeats because the system that would prevent it doesn’t yet exist – you are the system. Which means the moment you step back – to take a holiday, to focus on growth, to work on the business rather than in it – the gap opens again.
Granted, firing the individual is fast and building the system that makes the individual’s failure impossible is slower and less satisfying in the short term. But it’s the only thing that actually holds when you are not there yourself.
And then there’s you
Here is where I want to push a little further, because this is the part the Cupshe story doesn’t tell.
Most of the business owners I work with believe they are leading by their values. And they are – when they’re present, focused, and in full possession of themselves. But when I ask them to describe how their values show up in a specific Monday morning conversation, or in how they responded to a difficult client last month, or in what they said yes to last week when they knew they should have said no – the answer is often more complicated.
Values that exist as feelings rather than decisions and statements have a tendency to bend under pressure. Under tiredness and the weight of a full inbox, or a team member who needs something and a client who is unhappy. And a cashflow decision.
The business owner who cannot step back from the day-to-day isn’t just a bottleneck in operational terms. They are the only means of their stated values turning up in what the business actually produces. The moment they’re not there, the gap shows.
This is not a criticism. It is what happens when a business is built on the owner’s presence rather than on something more durable.
So what does operational actually look like?
It looks like your values written down clearly – not as a list of nice words, but as specific, usable guidance that someone new to your business could pick up and understand.
It looks like those values present in your website, your onboarding, your client communications, and your team conversations – not referenced occasionally, but woven in.
It looks like your AI tools knowing what you stand for. If you use AI to create content, write emails, or support your communications – and most business owners now do – have you taught it your values? Have you told it what you will and won’t say, and why? Generic input produces generic output. And generic is the opposite of what your clients chose you for.
It looks like a business that behaves like you, not just when you’re watching, but by design.
If any of this has landed, here’s what I can offer
I work with business owners to get this done properly. Not as a workshop to attend and forget, and not as another document that lives in a folder nobody opens.
One focused day – working directly with you – to identify and document your values clearly: the way they actually operate in your business, not the aspirational version. We turn that into something usable: guidance your team can reference, language your website can carry, a foundation your AI tools can actually work from.
Then 30 days of direct support from me to help you embed it – so it doesn’t just exist on paper but starts showing up in how the business runs.
The investment is £1,297.
If that sounds like the right next step, reply to this email or message me directly and we’ll talk through whether it’s the right fit.