
John Stix and Operations Officer Tracy Fischer
Worldline is the residential division of Fibernetics, one of Canada’s largest telecom companies.
Over the past decade Fibernetics has gone from a three-guys-in-a-basement operation to a major corporation with hundreds of employees and hundreds of thousands of customers.
Starting out, the corporate culture was simple; everyone was on board because they had to be. That is how it is in the start-ups. The fledgling company’s survival depends on all hands being on deck and just getting stuff done.
With time, and success, that start-up spirit tends to fade and is replaced with a certain amount of complacency and sameness due to systems being in place and roles finely defined.
For John Stix, co-founder and Fibernetics president, that’s not the company he envisioned. Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur.
That’s why he decided that the company needed a shot in the arm. An adrenalin kick in the form of a cultural shift.
From the Fibernetics Blog:
How does one become a culture warrior for a company? That’s a question John Stix asked himself 18 months ago when he realized that some of the passion and excitement in and around the company he co-founded was lacking.
He noticed it in himself when he discovered he wasn’t bouncing out of bed to get to the office. He noticed it with some staff members grumbling over their coffee in the cafeteria, and worse he discovered it talking to a customer over a beer, who was complaining about how they were being treated as a customer.
To John, that was the final straw. The company had enjoyed rapid growth over the ten years of its existence, yet it was clear that that exponential expansion was resulting in a few things falling through the cracks. Having an unhappy customer was just not “us,” so John set out to change that.
Typically, he went about the process just like everything else in his business experience: He tackled it as an entrepreneur, developing his own culture initiative around the motto, “I’m in!”
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