For years, I thought I wasn’t very good at company culture.

I’d see other franchisees posting pictures of company barbecues, holiday parties, happy hours, and employees hanging out together after work.

We tried some of that.

But nobody really wanted to come.

At first, I thought this meant we had a culture problem.

Eventually, I realized the opposite was true.

We had a very strong culture. It just didn’t look like theirs.

I don’t love loud parties. And, probably not coincidentally, I had hired a lot of people who weren’t either.

Our employees tended to have families and full lives outside of work. They worked hard while they were there, cared about customers, helped each other out, and then wanted to go home.

Me too.

That was probably my first real lesson in company culture:

Company culture tends to mirror the person running the small business.

If it doesn’t, it feels forced.

If you’re naturally social and love having everyone over to your house for a barbecue, that might become part of your culture.

If the thought of spending Saturday afternoon with the same people you just spent Monday through Friday with makes you want to put a paper bag over your head, perhaps don’t build your culture around Saturday barbecues.

You don’t have to.

In fact, since I’ve worked with over 30 franchisees this year to help them hire staff, I’ve seen 30 different cultures.

No joke, they’re all incredibly different.

Some cultures are incredibly organized and process driven. I know this even before starting the search because the owner sends me a PowerPoint outlining the role, company and training plan.

And some cultures are more free-flowing, just like the laid-back owner I meet on our discovery call.

Neither is necessarily better.

Culture is also just a bunch of traditions.

I think sometimes we make “building culture” sound much harder than it needs to be.

You can create culture by deciding once how your company does certain things.

Then keep doing them.

Birthdays were a good example in our office.

We used to realize someone’s birthday was coming up and scramble around looking for a card. Someone had to buy a gift card. Then we’d pass the card around the office trying to get everyone to sign it without the birthday person seeing it.

Way too much work for a birthday.

So we bought a Plinko board.

At the Tuesday production meeting before your birthday, you played Plinko, just like The Price Is Right.

Wherever the little Plinko disc landed determined how much birthday cash you won.

$20. $30. $50.

Done.

Nobody had to remember what we’d done for someone else’s birthday or figure out what to buy this time.

Around here, this is how we do birthdays.

And eventually, Plinko became part of our culture.

We did the same thing when someone new started.

Rather than suddenly realizing the night before, “Shoot. John starts tomorrow. We should probably do something,” we decided once what would happen.

We bought gold gift bags in bulk on Amazon.

Every new employee got one with a handwritten note from the owner, their new phone, some pens, candy, and a few other things.

We kept the supplies in a closet.

New employee starting?

Grab a bag. Fill it. Tie it with a bow. And put it on their desk.

Again, nothing earth-shattering.

But that’s sort of the point.

You don’t build culture by sitting in a conference room and coming up with a mission statement to put on the wall.

You build it through hundreds of little things that quietly tell employees:

This is how we do things around here (H/T to Seth Godin for this phrasing).

How do we celebrate birthdays?

Plinko.

What happens on your first day?

There’s a gold gift bag welcoming you.

How do we handle a customer who’s unhappy?

We run toward the problem.

Pick things that actually fit you and the kind of people you want working for you.

Repeat them long enough and, without really trying that hard, you’ve built a culture.