Walk into a Monday standup at most agencies, and you’ll hear the same phrases: “alignment,” “ownership,” “transparency.” Walk into one at Perfogro Ltd, and the words sound familiar — but the conversations behind them tend to look different. That gap, between values on a wall and values in practice, is where Perfogro’s team believes culture either lives or quietly dies.
Based on the findings of Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends study, 71% of leaders see concentrating on teams and work groups as key to success, while only 12% believe they do it successfully. Addressing this issue does not come from a new slide presentation; it comes from small actions that any team member can articulate.
This piece is less a manifesto and more a walkthrough: what each of Perfogro’s stated values actually looks like on a Tuesday afternoon, when a campaign is misfiring, and a client is asking for answers.
Why Stated Values Often Stay on the Wall
Most companies don’t have a value problem — they have a translation problem. The words make sense in the abstract but never get rewritten into observable behavior. Experts highlight three common reasons values stay decorative:
- Values are framed as feelings (“we care,” “we trust”) rather than actions that team members can repeat.
- No one is responsible for noticing when a value is lived or ignored.
- The company hires for skills alone, then expects culture to absorb the gaps on its own.
The most applicable approach for companies is to transform values into sentences that start with verbs. Thus, “transparency” will be transformed into “we show the dashboard to the client before he/she asks for it.” This seemingly insignificant transformation makes us look at things differently.
Value 1: Results-First Thinking — What It Looks Like in a Briefing
When a new campaign kicks off, the first question on the table shouldn’t be “what should we make?” — it’s “what does success look like in numbers?” The results-first principle shows up most clearly in three habits:
- Every campaign brief opens with a measurable outcome, not a deliverable list.
- Creative and media teams sit in the same kickoff, so no one optimizes for the wrong KPI.
- Post-mortems compare actual results to the original target on the first slide, not the last.
The distinction lies between “the campaign ran” and “the campaign succeeded.” When numbers start the discussion, the arguments over taste diminish and the arguments over data increase – and that’s a much better place for a team to focus its energies.
Value 2: Creative with Purpose — How Aesthetic Decisions Get Made
Many agencies talk about creative integrity. Perfogro puts it a little differently: creativity must earn its place in the sales funnel. A beautiful ad that doesn’t move a metric isn’t punished, but it does get re-examined. That is why creative reviews work best when they include both a designer and an analyst in the same room — not sequentially.
On a typical week at Perfogro Ltd, this plays out as:
- Concept reviews that pair visual critique with a hypothesis about audience response.
- A/B tests scoped before the asset is finalized, not after.
- Retired creative is archived with notes on why it stopped working, so the lesson outlives the file.
Tying creative decisions to performance data is one of Perfogro Ltd’s campaign analytics essentials — without the measurement layer, even strong creative work becomes guesswork.
Value 3: Agility & Adaptability — In Practice, Not in Theory
Perhaps one of the most overused words in marketing is “agility”. But at the same time, this value is so easy to falsify. A team that holds three-week status meetings and calls itself agile is using the word as costume rather than method.
What agility actually looks like at Perfogro:
- Weekly performance check-ins where any team member can flag a campaign for redirection.
- A standing rule that no plan survives contact with the first 72 hours of live data without review.
- Decision rights pushed to the person closest to the dashboard, not the most senior person in the room.
Perfogro suggests agility is mostly about who gets to say “let’s change course” — and how quickly that suggestion gets taken seriously.
Value 4: Partnership Over Service — Inside Client Conversations
This is a value that sounds gentle until one sees it in action. In a service-oriented firm, the customer demands, and the employees deliver. However, the team members are supposed to challenge the demand when the data contradicts the demand. Partnership works when truth-telling does not feel risky.
Day-to-day, this means:
- Internal teams rehearse hard conversations before client calls, so the message lands clearly.
- Recommendations come with the reasoning, not just the conclusion.
- Quarterly reviews include what didn’t work and why, not just what hit the target.
This is where experts believe most agency relationships either deepen or quietly erode — in the moments when a team has to choose between agreement and accuracy.
Value 5: Global by Design — Built In, Not Bolted On
Working across markets is not the same thing as translating a campaign. A “global by design” team works with language, currency, and culture from the first draft onward. This means that who is involved early on gets changed – localization is not an afterthought but a process from the concept phase.
Companies have to test their global readiness with one simple question early on in the brief: “If we ran this exact concept in three markets in a row, what would break?” The answers typically reveal work that could lead to emergency rework two weeks before launch.
How Perfogro Ltd Ties It All Back to Outcomes
According to the research conducted by Deloitte, companies that have unique team cultures are 1.8 times more likely to meet human benefits goals and 1.6 times more likely to meet their business goals. The experience of Perfogro confirms this conclusion: values will be a competitive advantage when they become part of decision-making rather than decoration. It is not enough for values to sound well during all-hands meetings; the question is how well a junior team member will use them in a difficult situation.
For companies looking to do the same exercise internally, Perfogro suggests three starting moves:
- Pick one value and rewrite it as a behavior, not a feeling.
- Identify one meeting where that behavior should be visible, and watch for it.
- Ask the people closest to the work whether it shows up — and adjust based on what they say.
Values aren’t a branding exercise; they’re a working document. That’s the only version of values worth keeping.
David Prior
David Prior is the editor of Today News, responsible for the overall editorial strategy. He is an NCTJ-qualified journalist with over 20 years’ experience, and is also editor of the award-winning hyperlocal news title Altrincham Today. His LinkedIn profile is here.
