I am nearing the end of a project for a large tractor dealership with 2,100 employees across 34 locations in three states. We’ve interviewed 86 employees, with about 20 of those locations visited so far. We’re speaking with executives, parts and warehouse managers, technicians, sales staff… a little bit of everyone. The goal is a […]
I am nearing the end of a project for a large tractor dealership with 2,100 employees across 34 locations in three states. We’ve interviewed 86 employees, with about 20 of those locations visited so far. We’re speaking with executives, parts and warehouse managers, technicians, sales staff… a little bit of everyone. The goal is a library of modular video, short interview clips and footage the dealership can pull from and recut for marketing and social media for years, not a one-off campaign that gets used twice and shelved.
Usually these interviews produce scattered answers. One person talks about the team, another about the product, someone mentions the health plan. This one didn’t go that way, though I’ll admit that part alone isn’t surprising. Different roles got different questions, but the questions all circled the same subjects, so it makes sense that people landed in the same territory.
What actually struck me was how specific the overlap was. Ask people what safety means to them and you’d expect some version of “being careful” or “following procedure.” Instead I kept hearing near-identical phrasing, “going home just as healthy as you showed up, if not better… all ten fingers and ten toes,” in some form, over and over, from people who’d never be in the same room together. That’s not a topic lining up. That’s a specific message that actually landed and stuck, word for word, across 20 locations and three states.
And yet nobody sounded like they were reciting it. Ask someone why that mattered and you’d get their own story. The tech’s version came from a guy who lost a finger years ago at another shop, and how that changed the way he thinks about every job since. The parts manager’s came from watching a farmer’s planting window slip because a part sat on a truck an extra day. The salesperson’s came from a fifteen-year customer relationship that came down to one thing, trusting the equipment would run when it needed to. Same message, completely different roads to it. That’s the part that told me this wasn’t just a phrase people had been trained to say. They’d taken it and made it theirs.
Safety was the clearest example, but it wasn’t the only one. Customer uptime showed up just as consistently, and so did a third thing that kept surfacing without me asking for it, some version of “it’s just the right thing to do.” Same pattern each time: specific enough language that it was clearly coming from somewhere real, but told through whatever that person had actually lived.
These three things aren’t a mystery inside the company. They’re the mission, vision, and values, written down somewhere in an employee handbook the way most companies have one. The difference is those words didn’t stay on the page. They stopped being something employees were told to know and became something people actually carry. More than one person talked about applying the same standard at home that they’d apply on a jobsite, the same instinct to look out for family that they’d apply to a coworker or a customer. That’s not something a handbook can force. That’s what it looks like when a mission statement actually takes.
On top of all that, people clearly liked their jobs and liked working there. And however they got to it, the fact that they genuinely cared about their customers came through in nearly every conversation.
That’s the part that’s hard to fake and hard to build. A company can write “safety first” on every wall in the building. Getting that same conviction to hold up the same way across 34 locations in three states, with no two people giving you a rehearsed answer, is a different thing entirely.
This project now comes to mind whenever a client asks me to help “tell their culture story” for a website or a recruiting page. Usually what they want is words that sound good. What actually works is finding out if there’s something true underneath first, because that’s the only version of a culture story that holds up once a customer or a new hire scratches the surface.
A few things I’d point to from this one:
Real culture is consistent across the org chart, and across the map. If the answer to “what matters here” changes depending on which department, or which location, you’re standing in, that’s not a shared culture yet, that’s a management goal in progress. Across 20 locations and three states so far, the dealership’s answers didn’t shift based on title, tenure, or zip code.
It shows up in specifics, not slogans. Anyone can say “we care about our customers.” What you’re listening for is the tech who mentions a specific farmer by name, or the parts guy who knows exactly why a particular part being backordered is a real problem for someone’s week. Specificity is the tell.
It travels home with people. A mission and values statement is meant to guide people at work. What I kept hearing was people who’d taken it further than that, past workplace dogma and into how they actually live. Safety wasn’t just a jobsite habit, it was how they thought about their own families. Doing right by people wasn’t a customer service line, it was just how they carried themselves. That’s usually the strongest signal you’re dealing with something genuine rather than a workplace performance.
If you’re a business owner or a marketing lead thinking about how to represent your company’s culture, whether that’s on a website, in recruiting materials, or in customer-facing content, the temptation is to write the culture you wish you had. It reads fine. It just doesn’t hold weight, and customers and job candidates are better at detecting the gap than most companies give them credit for.
I wasn’t hired to come up with a culture story for this dealership. I was hired to point a camera at people and ask them questions, then get out of the way. Whatever came back was going to be the raw material either way, good or bad. It happened to be good, but that wasn’t something I could have built or written in, it was already there before I showed up, across 34 locations and three states, well before I ever set up a mic.
That’s really the only way this works. You can’t record your way to a culture that doesn’t exist. But if it does exist, the camera will catch it, and it’ll hold up better than anything written for a brochure, because nobody can tell you a story is authentic. You can only go find out and let people say it themselves.
Here’s the part that actually affects the deliverable. A modular video library only works if the pieces hold up on their own, cut into a thirty second social clip, dropped into a recruiting page, reused two years from now in a context nobody’s thought of yet. That only works if what’s on camera is true. You can’t recut a scripted answer into ten different things and have it still land, but you can do that when eighty-plus people spread across three states independently tell you the same three things through their own specific, unscripted stories. That’s not just a nice culture finding, that’s the raw material the whole library is built on.
