At the beginning of the year, we posted our first blog highlighting the “people first” culture we are building at Zinnia. Key to this effort are the three core values that drive the Zinnia team: 1) pursue excellence, 2) embrace adventure, and 3) collaborate and win together. 

We established these three values to serve as a guidepost for making the daily decisions involved in building products, hiring employees, and scaling up our business. We deliberately chose values that are simultaneously inspirational and achievable, as well as easy to understand and live by. And we want to introduce you to each of these values and the thinking behind them. 

Today, we’ll dive into the first of our core values: pursue excellence.  

Pursuing excellence is both a mindset and a roadmap. We know that perfection doesn’t exist, but we can each strive for excellence in everything we do. We encourage each other to be bold and to try new things. We are proactive in our pursuit of exceptional outcomes for our clients, and we do the things we say we’re going to do.  

The guiding principles that guide our pursuit of excellence include: 

  • Strive for excellence, not perfection 
  • Fail fast and forward 
  • Do today, not tomorrow 
  • Focus on outcomes 
  • Keep promises to each other and our clients 

We know that there will be bumps along the way, that mistakes will be made, and sometimes we’ll even fail. One of the hallmarks of the ‘pursue excellence’ value is in our response to adversity.  

In our pursuit of excellence, every bump, mistake, and failure are learning opportunities. It’s important to understand what went wrong so that we can figure out what is needed to succeed. We’re proactive and we tackle challenges head on. We have a catchphrase that sums up the Zinnia approach: 

“If we fail, we fail fast and forward.” 

In addition to acknowledging that mistakes happen, this motto also points us forward – to our focus on keeping our promises to clients and to each other, to delivering better outcomes for all. 

Our focus on outcomes at Zinnia touches everything we do. In our pursuit of excellence, we foster a mindset at Zinnia that lights the way forward. It inspires innovation, motivates our teams, and empowers our employees to think outside the box. 

We hope you learned a little more about our team and culture from reading this post. Please stay tuned for our next values post to learn more about how we embrace adventure here at Zinnia.