The Importance of Company Culture with Tim Brown of Dakota

The Modern CFO

Culture is the core of every company, but keeping it consistent isn’t always easy, especially in an increasingly remote-first world.

On this episode of The Modern CFO, Tim Brown shares how Dakota prioritizes culture-building and why CFOs should think about the more permanent changes brought on by the pandemic.

Show Links

• Check out Dakota
• Connect with Tim Brown on LinkedIn
• Check out Nth Round
• Connect with Andrew Seski on LinkedIn

Key Takeaways

5:54 – The pandemic caused a shift in business practices for sales professionals

Travel and in-person meetings halted during the pandemic, which meant investment sales professionals had to find other means to connect quickly.

“When the pandemic hit, all that changed. Travel was essentially halted for quite a period of time. People were not taking in-person meetings. The vast majority of people were not working in offices, and it just required a very quick, fundamental shift in terms of how you could continue to be effective in that role. I think our team adapted really well, the industry adapted really well–as did a lot of industries. You can't meet live, you meet over Zoom, you meet over some of these other means where you cannot be in the same location, but still have effective discussions. Certainly, it's an adjustment. If you've spent your entire career on the road, and then all of a sudden you're not able to do that, that’s a pretty significant adjustment. I think the software side of our business actually gave us a little bit of a tailwind. Dakota Marketplace was a means that could help bridge that gap between what investment sales professionals were used to, to what the current situation was.”

8:07 – Lead with culture during the hiring process

It can be challenging to maintain a consistent culture, especially through periods of growth. Transparency into the important parts of your company culture during the hiring process helps build a strong, well-aligned team.

“Culture has always been very important at Dakota. When I joined about four years ago, there were roughly 10 people, many of whom had been at the firm for quite some time. It was very evident from day one what that culture was. As our business has started to grow, we doubled the size of the team in the last 18-24 months. So, coinciding with the pandemic, it's been very important for us to not only formalize or write down, for lack of a better term, what those cultural components are (as opposed to just people understanding what they are), but to lead with [the cultural components] during the hiring process. I think each firm will have a slightly different culture. For the most part, no culture is better than another. I think it's knowing yourself as a human being. It's knowing who you are, knowing who you are as a company, knowing what attributes are important to everyone at that company, and that really helps you identify people who fit well and have similar outlooks of the world, and are likely to be great teammates.”

9:48 – Emphasize what’s important to your company

Recognize which components of your culture are most important to the company. That way, potential hires know what to expect from your business.

“I do a lot of the initial interviews of candidates that we're meeting with. Inevitably, culture is one of the first things that’s brought up. It's one of the things that we like to emphasize. ‘These are the things that are important to us.’ It's just really recognizing what are those components of your culture that are important that you want people to come in and sort of add to and build on. Like I said, for us, it's really led to a greater degree of success in bringing on new teammates. One of the challenges a lot of companies are facing is retaining talent, and it's really helped us retain employees as well. Because we're doing a better job, upfront, of laying out what's important to us and our culture, people are self-selecting into that.”

11:05 – Be a true business partner to your team and CEO

CFOs are no longer just experts in finance. Today, the modern CFO is the strategic confidant to their CEOs and a driver of sustained culture to the rest of their teams.

“For most companies, gone are the days where the CFO is just the expert in the finance organization. I think those are table stakes for any CFO. I think that a modern CFO is really that true business partner of the CEO and the management team in helping to lead a lot of different components of the organization, not necessarily just the finance component. Certainly, culture is a key component of it. A lot of larger organizations will have separate HR departments, but at smaller organizations like Dakota, that CFO will wear multiple hats and the HR recruiting aspect is a big part of that.”

14:33 – Pinpoint where your investors’ incentives and your company’s culture intersect

“A family office of a very wealthy family that may have made money under a certain industry, et cetera, may have a very different perspective in terms of what's important to them than a foundation that's geared towards a specific purpose and is utilizing their investment portfolio to help drive income or other value creation that they can then flow through the foundation towards their purpose. So, each one is going to certainly have different things, but I think there's a component of that, of macro long-term trends, ESG being one of them. Then any given day, week, month, year, there's going to be more components that are pressing for that time. Not that those other things aren't pressing, but what I mean by that is in an environment where we sit today, where everyone's looking to the Fed to raise interest rates, and how people look at their portfolios or what the mix of those portfolios are is ever-changing.”

16:10 – By investment sales professionals. for investment sales professionals

If you want to add value for potential customers, find the tools that will help them be more successful.

“Our target customer for all of the products and services we create is an investment salesperson–A person who wakes up every day to raise money for the investment strategies that they represent. Dakota has a number of people at the firm, including our founder, who have been in that industry their entire lives. I think we have a very good perspective as to what types of tools and services can help that person be more successful in their job. One of the things that's exciting to me about Dakota is that we're never short of ideas of other things that we could do, or other ways that we could help our customers grow their careers. So what's exciting to me one year, three years, five years out is just looking at our product pipeline, seeing what's coming, and knowing that there's a bounty of ideas that will come after those that will continue to help us continue to add value and drive value for our customers.”

17:39 – Give your ideas a shot

Even if you don’t have all the details of your idea worked out, give it a shot. Failing fast is better than not trying at all.

“Not everything has to be a fully-baked idea before you're going to try it. If you have an idea and you have the basics down, give it a shot! What's t...