Don’t Let Your Company Culture Die With One Person

Sheila Hupp leads a three-and-a-half-million-dollar towing company from Indiana while the business operates outside Dallas. Her grandmother still owns it. This year, the general manager who had been with them for 15 years died unexpectedly on the job. The loss created an operational gap, but more importantly, it left a hole in the company’s culture. Now Sheila is trying to preserve the legacy her grandparents built from a single truck and a phone in their living room — without any family members physically present on a day-to-day basis.

The Problem with Informal Culture

Sheila admitted that the company’s values had never been written down. They were passed along informally through stories, through the general manager’s presence, and through the occasional visit from her grandmother. That worked as long as the people who lived those values were still in the room. But when the general manager died, the informal transmission line broke. The new general manager was promoted from within, and the team has vision and drive, but there is no longer a living connection to the founding story that most employees can touch directly.