When I started Sorbet, I had had about four different businesses before and with each one of them I was really fascinated by and focused on culture. I was determined to see if I could build the brand around the culture rather than the other way around.

The cultureneering framework starts with the sociopolitical environment as the foundation, it is the purpose of work, the reason for being and the core values.

There's only one way to do it and that is to ask what the impact is on the beneficiaries of what you do. How do you impact the lives of people?

When you buy a book, you don’t buy the paper. You're buying the education. There is always an ultimate reason and an ultimate beneficiary. So we always need to be clear about who we are serving.

If you're a beauty therapist or nail technician, you are really touching people's lives and making them happy. They have a massive impact on people's lives. Huge. Once we get therapists to understand and recognise that and get them to start building relationships with people, then all of a sudden things start turning.

Common purpose flows from a sense of belonging. If everybody can have a sense of belonging, then we can create some kind of common purpose, which is really the ultimate objective.

The first is they need to have an element of intuition. The next thing is courage, because you need a lot of courage to be an entrepreneur. Then you get the fear factor. You can't be afraid as an entrepreneur to fail. Finally, there is determination for the long haul.

It really is as simple as reaching out and understanding why people think the way they do and then coming to some sort of compromise. Until such time as we have addressed the problems and got to understand how we got into this mess in the first place, we cannot deal with it. And the only way to deal with it, is to talk about it.

Leadership needs to be inspirational. We need to be training people on the importance and power of culture-driven leadership. What does it mean to be a leader these days? You must be a leader who serves, you must be a servant leader.

When your focus is on building the business, you tend to allow a culture to develop by itself, instead of you setting it up. It's a bit of a holistic process that you want to start at the beginning if you can.