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We make sure the right thing happens—whether you're in the room or not.

CultureSmith is the proven leadership framework that builds culture through daily practice that sticks—over one-off workshops that stall. Leaders of nonprofits and founder-led companies apply our tools to:

Align everyone on what matters.
Create accountability without drama.
Know when to step in and when to step back.
Hire people who make everyone around them better.

Leading people will never be easy. But it can be made simple. It only takes 30 minutes to learn why you’re feeling stuck — and if our approach will lead to change that finally sticks.

Trusted by 200+ leaders of nonprofits and founder-led companies since 2014.

One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together.

Daniel Coyle

The Culture Code

Your job’s not to make things easy for people. It’s to make it simple for them to do hard things.

Our job is to simplify the four things that make your job harder than it needs to be:

You need everyone in the room to understand what ‘the right thing’ is

Every growing organization hits a point where assuming what ‘good’ and ‘right’ mean feels safer for people than asking to be sure. That’s when mission statements, core values, and job descriptions fail to shape how people act, creating mixed messages that quietly pull teams in different directions.

You need ‘the right thing’ to happen when you’re not in the room

When your best people know what’s ‘right’ but most of the room is doing something else entirely, staying on mission feels risky. So people wait for you to weigh in or they move ahead without checking. Work stalls or goes the wrong way, leaving you to clean up or firefight.

You need ‘the right thing’ to happen when you’re in the room

You step in when things feel important and step back when you want people to grow. But they don’t see your intent — they feel your title. Give direction and they’re afraid to challenge you. Ask for answers, they fear being wrong, and the room goes quiet. Either way, people manage their perception of you instead of saying what’s really going on.

You need ‘the right thing’ to happen when you add people—and rooms

As you scale and work gets more technical so you add people with specialized skills. Without a benchmark that makes culture fit as easy to assess as skills, you hire on résumé and gut feel, risking poor hires. Even when you land the right specialist, others feel unqualified to question them. Experts become ‘right’, silos form, and growth starts to pull the company apart from the inside.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

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Midsize firms quietly lose over $1.3M a year to untreated people problems. (SHRM, McKinsey)

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Those same firms spend six figures on solutions that treat symptoms over root causes. (EOS, HBR, ICF)

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Proven solutions and bundling discounts means we only need to re‑engage 3 people to generate a return on our fees. (Gallup)

Get a sense of your actual issues, including an estimate of your actual costs from an actual person, and see firsthand how we are committed to improving so much more than your bottom line.

CultureSmithing means making sure ‘the right thing’ happens—no matter who is in the room—in four proven steps:

Culture

We reshape your culture so ‘the right thing’ becomes unmistakable.

We make ‘the right thing’ impossible to ignore in every room, especially when stress makes ‘the wrong thing’ feel easier.

We give one clear meaning to what matters, so when things get hard, people still agree on what the right thing is.

We anchor what matters to four simple standards, so what should happen actually happens without you needing to step in.

We make the right thing matter so much that people feel secure pushing for it — even when it means challenging you.

Colours

We make it simple to understand how and why people act the way they do under pressure.

Our Cognitive Colours^TM system gives people a simple blueprint and shared language for how they tend to behave under pressure.

People learn how they and others are likely to act under stress, so they stay on the same page instead of misreading or avoiding each other.

Simple profile descriptions make it easy for everyone to adjust how they work together, so they handle tension themselves instead of pulling you in to referee.

Your people learn to separate your authority from you as a person, allowing them to raise uncomfortable points with you, instead of letting your title push them to be silent.

Cadence

We create a structure that turns intent into real behaviour change.

We build simple patterns of rituals and tools organized into daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual rhythms, making it simpler for people to follow through on the behaviours they’ve agreed to change.

We build clear expectations of what behaviours must change — and how — into each rhythm, so no one’s forced to hold it all in their heads.

Curriculum-based training is replaced with daily conditioning — tailored micro-skills under 5 minutes a day so small steps stack into real change.

When people know what should be happening, it’s easy to spot when leaders slip, safer to tell them — and safer for them to own it too.

Climate

We change how you hire so each person you add makes everyone around them better.

Your culture is what matters to you and why. Your climate is how much that shows up in people’s behaviour each day. We make sure your culture shapes who you hire, instead of new hires slowly reshaping your climate.

We turn your culture into a clear hiring benchmark and use it for assessment, evaluation, selection and onboarding, so the meaning of “fit” stays stable instead of sliding over time.

Cognitive Colours^TM help hiring managers see their own tendencies, patterns in their team, and each applicant’s stress response, all in plain terms, taking the guesswork out of hiring.

We run every hire and onboarding through the same steps, questions, and rituals, so all candidates are evaluated the same way allowing all stakeholders to fully trust every decision.

Whether you’re adding people, adding rooms, or trying to shift how people behave in your existing rooms, we can show you the right way to make your ‘right thing’ happen. Find out today.

Frequently Asked Questions:

How time-intensive or disruptive is your approach?

When it comes to leadership and culture, what you put in truly does determine what you get out, so we struggle to give firm estimates.

What we can say is this: all issues of time are actually issues of priority.

Leadership and culture should always be at the top of the list. We understand the pull of urgency. We know first hand what it means to be firefighting when issues pop-up. But we also know that if what you’re already doing was working, you wouldn’t be here.

If urgency will always outrank importance within your culture, it’s best you know up-front that our approach won’t work for you.

If however, you’re just unclear on why this work should take priority over everything else - that’s what the Discovery Call is for. Book one, we’ll discuss your exact challenges, and let you know with full clarity what working with us will look like for you.
How much do you charge?

We offer 100% transparent pricing. After a Discovery Call, all service options, what each does, and why it matters is fully-explained in plain english, along with bundling discounts, and staged-approaches designed to match costs to impacts.

In truth, anyone can get started for free by following us on LinkedIn and subscribing to our newsletter. We openly share our insights through these channels every week.

On average, most organizations seeking our direct influence should budget between $50,000 to $100,000 for a full year, depending on how fast they’re growing and how quickly they need to scale their impact.

What we will say is our pricing model was intentionally designed to align with conventional alternatives whose approaches lack many of the enhancements we offer, while also remaining below 5% of the approximate long-term costs of ignoring the problems we solve.
It feels like the people on my team who may need this most are the one’s who’ll push back the hardest. How do I get buy-in?
We’ve already begun work on culture and leadership. Can you tailor your approach to fit what we’ve already done?

The short answer is ‘no’ - the longer answer is saying yes to requests like this taught both us — and those who asked — some very expensive lessons we don’t want future clients to repeat.

The truth is, if you’ve begun work in this area, you need to ask yourself two questions;

1) What’s motivating you to switch to our approach, and;

2) Is protecting the continuity of what you’ve done, and avoiding the tough conversations about changing course worth more to you than the results you’re after?

We know our way works. We canot say with certainty what happens if we change any variable. Even if a client is willing to accept that risk — we respect our discipline too much to agree.
What questions am I not asking?

This is probably the best question of all.

Here’s one thing you’ll learn if you work with us in any capacity: all behaviour is a tool to do a job — and your subconscious is designed to ensure you NEVER use anything less than the best tool for the job it BELIEVES you’re doing.

Right now, hesitation is the tool doing a job for you. If you’re hesitating, it means two things—you know you need help, and you believe this might be the answer. If either wasn’t true, you wouldn’t feel the tension.

Book a Discovery Call. We’ll you get to a definitive yes or no — confidently — no matter which one proves to be true.