Our Values

2025. What a year! It gave us a chance to reflect on 25 years of storytelling and innovation and, just as importantly, to look ahead. And I'm so excited for where we're going. As the song goes, and as I truly feel, “The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.”

 As we turn the page into a new chapter for the Squad, it felt like the right moment to kick off a new Squadland series focused on our company values: ideas that have been with us since day one and continue to guide everything we do. In 2025, we spent time refining our values and, in the coming months, we’ll be sharing a series of posts reflecting on how they come to life every day in our company and how they frame everything we do. 

These values reflect who we’ve always been, and they also represent a promise for who we’re becoming. 

So, without further ado, our new values are: Great Work, Possibility, Communication, Kindness, Acknowledgement, and Me & We.

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I’m so excited for the LaunchSquad team to bring these values into the light. They emerged from a separate but closely connected effort we completed last year in defining what we call The LaunchSquad Work Standard: our shared definition of what great work looks like here. That process helped us clarify the qualities our teammates bring through the door (and online) every day. Along the way, we noticed clear overlap between our work standards and our values, which gave us the opportunity to recalibrate. And the outcome was, in my view, six beautiful ideas that capture who we are, how we show up and how we move forward together.

We started LaunchSquad to do great work for incredible companies that were shaping the future. We wanted to build a company that challenged us, welcomed us, made us feel amazing and created an undeniable and beautiful sense of connection with one another. If we could do this, we thought, we could do anything. 

As we were getting started (just three of us), we received some very direct advice:

“It’s the most important decision you’ll ever make. Write them down.”

That’s what my Uncle Elwood said to us after we questioned how important it was to have values when we were just three people. He said, “Every new person you add creates an exponential increase in the complexity of decision making. Your values give you the essential framework you need now and for the lifetime of your company.” 

My uncle was a college professor, administrator and organizational development expert who studied with the founder of Visa, one of the first companies to bring corporate values to life in a meaningful way. We listened. We wrote them down. We embraced the advice. It was the most important decision we ever made. It gave us the essential framework we’ve needed to grow a company of high quality work, acknowledgement and a true sense of acceptance and belonging.

We’re now in our  26th year in business. We’re 110-strong, spread out across the country (and even as far as Australia), and our culture and values have never been more salient. They shape how we make decisions, how we work and how we develop people. These aren’t just words on a page. They show up every day, baked into how we operate and who we are. 

Take Acknowledgement, as an example, which has been a value from day one. It was part of creating a place where people felt appreciated and welcomed. Even as a company of three, four, five, etc. Acknowledgement was vibrant. We’d set aside “acknowledgments” for every weekly company meeting and reinforce these moments through emails or in everyday conversations. Today we honor this value with a company slack channel devoted to the practice of acknowledging wins daily. These acknowledgements don’t just embody our culture of appreciation, but all our values, with many of them underscoring the way in which the work was done and the space between that might mean Kindness, Possibility, or honest Communication. Our company is most alive when we understand the interdependence between what we do, how we do it and why we’re doing it in the first place. It is these principles that drove our company’s inception and still guide us today. 

Or, take Great Work. Our focus last year on redefining the LaunchSquad Standard was empowering. It gave us a moment to gather tons of emails, documents, and various decks that attempted to capture exactly what we mean when we say Great Work. It took into account our development framework and how people move through phases of learn–do–lead to grow at every stage in their development. And it gave us a distilled, consistent vocabulary to define the simple word: great. It also provided the opportunity to abstract our values away from our company standard, allowing both to develop more concretely and, in turn, to inform one another more energetically. 

When we evaluate the quality of our work, we ask ourselves “would I show this to my toughest critic?” This is material impact. It impacts who we hire, what clients we choose, the quality of our work, and how we grow. It’s a difficult thing to write about but it’s not difficult to feel and to see in how we work together, what we achieve every day and how we feel when we’re working late hours or extending ourselves to make magic happen. It's a true collective energy and force that, in my opinion, makes everything we do possible.

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The development of these values was a magical experience that unlocked through months of work among a small team. We completed the initial work last Fall and presented our recast values and work standard to our team. The reaction was electric, engaging, emotional and full of all the things that make us LaunchSquad. 

Now, we’ll be sharing this work externally for the first time. The next months’ Squadland posts will bring our values to life in engaging, emotional and personal ways, illuminating our recast framework for the next chapter in our story. Each post will feature LaunchSquaders sharing a value and the way it impacts our work every day. 

We spend most of our time focusing on the present and the process. Work hard. Be kind. Make an impact. Together. If we do this, good things will happen.

Jesse