Culture by Design: How We Use LifterLMS to Shape How We Work

Chris Badgett and Alex Panagis delve deeply into the meaning of corporate culture and how it influences every aspect of a business in this episode of LMScast. They clarify that a company’s culture is its actual conduct rather than merely a collection of words on a “About” page. The founder’s character and principles are the foundation, but as the team expands, each member adds to it.

Culture will develop whether or not you want for it to. The secret is to intentionally mold it with a distinct vision, goal, and guiding principles. Hires, firings, product choices, and even crisis management are filtered via LifterLMS principles, which include clear communication, extreme ownership, continuous improvement, reducing friction, community, and prioritizing student success. Chris compares what seems strange to those ideals in order to determine the mismatch. They also talk about recruiting people based on their character rather than their abilities. Character and value alignment cannot be taught, but skills can.

In order to guarantee cultural fit, LifterLMS incorporates a probationary term into the recruiting process, allowing candidates to grow while being open about expectations. It’s never easy to let someone go, but when they consistently behave against the company’s basic beliefs, it becomes a vital move for both the organization and the individual, who could do better in a different setting. Alex adds that sometimes releasing someone is ultimately beneficial for them, helping them find a workplace that aligns more naturally with how they operate. Intentional communication and organized thought are two other key themes.

Chris describes how LifterLMS meticulously defines and documents projects before creating them using the Shape Up technique, which was influenced by Basecamp’s developers, 37signals. Rather of making a haphazard decision to “build a feature,” they develop comprehensive proposals that include customer pain points, goals, risks, and strategies for implementation.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. Today I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s been a while since he’s been on the show. We’ve got Alex Panus from Scale Math. You can find alex@scalemath.com scale. Math also works directly with Lifter LMS on growth initiatives. It’s been several months.

It’s been awesome. Today we’re gonna dive into culture, IE, company, culture and mission, vision and values, how to shape culture, what you can’t shape, how it can work well, how it can’t work well, how to hire and fire against it and make your life easier. We’re gonna get into a lot of culture topics, but first, welcome to the show, Alex.

Alex Panagis: Thank you. Great to be here. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, this a, this is a fun one to dive into. I have a background in anthropology. So for me, culture has always been interesting internationally and even within the United States where I live, there’s all kinds of cultures and subcultures and all kinds of things, but culture is alive and well in business and entrepreneurship as well.

I think one of the wildest ideas with culture is you have it no matter what. It’s just, it’s gonna be there. It starts usually with kind of the personality of the founder, but particularly as a team grows every member in that business contributes to the culture in the same way that every person in a society or a nation contributes in their own way to the culture.

So you can’t always control it, but it will always. Be there. Maybe let’s start just with a general question. When you look across like history or businesses you love, what’s a company you think that has great culture? 

Alex Panagis: I think it’s hard to point to from the outside companies because I wouldn’t know what the culture is like on the inside.

And if history has proven itself, I would say that typically what on the outside isn’t always a perfect reflection of how the company works on the inside. But I’d say Lyft, LMS is a pretty great example of a company that. I, think the it’s a cringey perhaps saying or phrase, but culture is what you do and nobody’s looking.

And I think, like you say, with employees and the team as a whole, it’s essentially what would the team do if they were to use their best judgment in the absence of the founder? Because ultimately the more the company grows. The less the founder can be involved in everything. Yeah. In our work with Lifter, that’s an example.

If, I’m away and something goes straight to you, can I trust my team to act as an extension of myself without stuff going to you? And. Me having to criticize after the fact, the way that they’ve done things. And I think that’s pretty, like for most types of companies and the work they do, it’s pretty difficult to build that level of trust.

So a lot of them put off trying to do it which I think delays them from getting there. At the end of the day, instead of if they actually actively try to do it and build that culture higher for it deliberately, then I think they’d have a much easier time. 

Chris Badgett: You mentioned an interesting thing where sometimes culture is different on the inside versus what’s presented on the outside in the marketing as an example.

But I find the biggest compliment that I would ever get is if I go to a conference and I meet somebody and they’re like, oh, you seem like exactly the same guy that I met or I saw in content or whatever. Authenticity isn’t necessarily one of our company values, but it is part of our culture. And when you go to a great restaurant as an example where the staff are friendly, you can tell there’s a lot of love poured into the food, what’s happening inside that restaurant’s company culture, it just bleeds out and it becomes part of the experience.

And when it’s authentic and not just an act that’s like great culture. I know, I think Apple is a great example of a company that, you know has, there’s mixed reviews on how good of a leader or how nice Steve Jobs was, but clearly Apple has a culture for the crazy ones, the creatives, the people that push the human race forward, as they would say in their marketing.

But it’s true. There’ve been some great people that have worked at Apple and amazing innovations, done on amazing timelines, and obviously Steve Jobs played a big part in shaping the company culture at Apple, both intentionally and just by being himself warts and all. There were bad aspects of Steve.

He could be mean demanding and all those things, and that doesn’t make a valid excuse to not be nice or whatever, but. Culture is complicated. 

Alex Panagis: Yeah, I think, yeah, I de I definitely agree. I would not to run back what I said, but in the sense that obviously it can be inauthentic and come across in a certain way to, from the outside, but like Apple is a, good example in the sense that to us, the company culture that they had worked really well for them.

I think if you try to take the Apple company culture in Steve Jobs era and apply it to. Pretty much any other company now, it probably wouldn’t be a good fit for that company. And I think that’s largely the, uniqueness of Apple as a company. But also if you were to look at scale Math Lifter and other companies in the audience, the, not just the fact that they’re obviously very different from the way Apple.

Operates and what they do. I think there, there are some core values which almost every company can adopt, but like some of the principles, I think the way they would’ve done things on the inside wouldn’t apply in smaller, different organizations. The same as if we, for example, were to try to operate like a company that has 50 or a hundred people, it wouldn’t make sense to try to.

Build the culture ahead of building the team to that point. So I think there’s like that’s an interesting thing where I’m curious what your take is on it. Like how much of culture, in your opinion, should be deliberately built and managed versus at the end of the day, the team grows, we do more work, and as a consequence of that, we shape the culture.

And I’m, yeah I don’t think there’s a perfect answer to it, but I’m cur very curious how you approach that. 

Chris Badgett: I think shaping company culture starts with really being honest with yourself and who you are as a founder or a leader in a company. And when you’re authentically in touch with what lights you up, how you like to work, the type of people you like to work with you culture is not something you install.

It’s something that you discover and then shape. I would also add that. There’s a lot of negative cultures or culture aspects out there. If you think about a cult, which is a, culture, a subculture of sorts, you’re often gonna see a charismatic leader. You’re gonna see like a mission statement of what wrong we wanna right in the world, or what atrocity we want to go after.

You’ll see indoctrination protocols happening when people join the cult and cults have a negative impact. But it’s the same thing that goes on inside of a company. If you’re doing onboarding, it’s not just this is how you do things. It’s also, this is how to think. This is how we approach problems.

This is how we treat our customers. But the first step is to get honest with who you are as a founder. Whether you’re a course grader, a coach, running an agency. You think about what kind of clients do I wanna work with or students, what types of team members do I wanna work with and who are my best clients?

And ask yourself why is that? Why was there, there’s often some kind of cultural resonance that happens there. But for any company, the place to start is to do the che, it’s known, it can be thought of as a cheesy exercise, but to do your mission, vision, and values. ’cause culture at the end of the day, comes down to values, applied to the mission you’re on to achieve the vision that this organization is set out to accomplish.

So the values exercise, it’s not okay. Honesty, integrity, like these are you, those can be company values of yours, but if you really dig in to your uniqueness, let’s just assume those things are table stakes. ’cause you’re, you like honesty and integrity, but what really makes this business work and makes people love working with each other, love working with the customers and enjoy the work they do.

So coming up with those values is a great exercise. And if you’re bigger than one person, that should be done with a team where, and I’ve done this before, where we all just like separately around the table, list out the 10 values we think that make up this company culture, and then we review what everybody said regardless of whether they’re senior or junior in the organization.

And then we look for overlap. Oh, what’s really lining up here? Or, what’s not? Oh, that might just be a unique thing to this one member’s personality, which is cool, but that’s not necessarily a through line through this whole culture. So if you go to a, if you’re building a website for yourself or for your client, the about page is, they should always have your values on there.

The homepage should always have your mission, vision. I ideally in the hero of the mission we’re on. Lifter LM S’S vision is to lift up others through education and our mission is to do that with as many. Engaging LMS platforms as we can with without while helping our users level up and figure out everything they need to do to achieve their vision.

So your about page is something that should never be just brushed over and do a quick bio about the founder or the team member and their favorite sport and what kind of cats or dogs they have at home. Get, spend some time on the vision. 

Alex Panagis: I completely agree. I’m also really curious. One of the other things that I’ve seen Lifter do really well internally, which more so than most other companies we’ve worked with is internal training.

And I wonder how you built out like. Maybe ev every, a couple times a week or every other week at bare minimum everybody on the management team will update some developer documentation of how to do something internally or how, where to find this thing to deal with a certain pre-sales conversation.

I think that’s something that probably for you feels after doing it for a while and working with people that do it. Feels like that’s actually quite natural and it’s should be the baseline of how every company works. But in reality, it’s quite far from the truth the, like element of, oh, we’ve now dealt with this specific situation of marking a license as a staging license or whatever it is, like a basic thing, which it might have been also in, in some cases.

It might actually have been the fifth time that it happens. But eventually getting it documented. I’m curious if that was something that you specifically. Trained people on and reinforced all the time. Or if that was more so, a hiring decision. Like you can tell when people are happy to document their work.

Chris Badgett: Internal training happens. All companies do it at the wrong time. IE too late. So if I were gonna start a new company. I would start building internal training on day one. To document processes and procedures. But when it comes to onboarding there is a moment where we go over the company values and whatnot. But the truth is, they would, that team member would not even be there if they hadn’t already been screened through the interview and hiring process for values alignment.

So that’s already happened. But in terms of attention to detail all that really comes down to one of our company values, which is continuous improvement. And it really ties into three of our company values. One of them is continuous improvement, the other one is extreme ownership. So if you’re responsible for the documentation as an example.

Really owning that and owning the quality of that is important. And then the other one, the biggest, probably the meta value of lifter LMS is remove friction. And I realized very early on in building software, particularly a complex platform level learning management system, software. There’s a lot of friction and there’s a lot of pain in the space.

There’s all the pain around people trying to figure out which LMS to use. Maybe they’re new to WordPress. There’s all these add-ons and all these different use cases, and they’re trying to figure out how to put it all together. So I see a lifter, LMS mostly not as a software company, but as a friction removal company.

And that’s one of our core values, remove friction. And whenever we’re working on new add-ons or improving what we already have, it’s always filtered through that lens of removing friction, which ties into another company value, which is. Student results first, which means none of this matters unless the end user who’s taking a course or in a membership on a lifter LMS powered site gets what they want.

So we’re always trying to, we care about our customer and our users, but we actually care even more about their customers and users. ’cause if we don’t make that person happy, nobody wins. So when people come in to the company. Even though those values bleed through in our language, like we had a call earlier and we were talking about communication with partners and stuff.

Clear communication is an important part. It’s an important value. And part of what we do at left LMS, whether that’s on a support ticket and a marketing message, a landing page, partner communication, social media. How we write project plans for each other and ourselves, that communication is everything.

And in terms of the hiring and firing, it’s to me, it’s so easy. Since I’ve been doing this for a while, I’m not looking for a job. But if I was looking for a job, the first thing I would do is go to their about page and I would look for their mission, vision, and values. Then I would honestly ask myself, am I personally and professionally aligned with that mission, vision, and values?

And if so, once I get into the application, I’m going the questions in lifter LMS job applications are, all just screening across our six core values. That’s how you get an interview. And then if we’re, let’s say we have two to three candidates for one position. All we’re trying to do is find out who is the most in alignment with our culture.

And by the way, the people that work at Lifter LMS are very diverse from all over the world with different religions, backgrounds, time zones, all that stuff. It’s not about demographics, it’s more about psychographics, like how we think, how we. Work how we approach problem solving and things like that.

That’s what we’re looking for alignment on. So it’s, more of like a internal culture of how we work and how we think than what we look like or where we live and that kind of thing.

Alex Panagis: Yeah, I think so. Just to share from my perspective on core values as well. I’ve always thought of them and I, this was in our 2025 year in review post. The one we, I wrote for scale math, which is probably one of the more fun things I do every year is to reflect on everything and. We spoke about this before we started recording, but I think it’s also worth mentioning here is because we work with different companies, it’s quite the culture aspect of culture in building a company.

I think I see it probably at a faster rate than a lot of companies do because we are affected by. Perhaps let’s say at any given time. Almost a dozen or so, different cultures of companies and the way the leaders decide to run them. Obviously in a, in the cases where we do our is a customer a good fit for us?

Do we want to partner with a company in the first place? We tend to screen for mainly that like founder, fit. If I don’t have the fit with the founder, which I think in the lift RMS case is probably as close as it’s ever been, then it tends to be. The standpoint of not being the best start for a relationship doesn’t necessarily rule it out entirely.

And I think there are ways to make working with people which have different cultures work when the need and the desire for that is there. But the way I always explain, and I like to think about it, I think AI has made the analogy a little bit easier. And I think this is, in my view, at least for the foreseeable future, predictions are probably not a good business to be in when it comes to ai.

But I think decisions are one of the, final things that will remain is like that. If you, if we were to distill work down into like a, the as bare bones of a nutshell as we possibly can work is a fundamentally a series of decisions, trade-offs, bets and dealing with ambiguity and pressure. And I think when I meet somebody and I, interview them or I want to hire them, or we start working with them together on probation, the main thing that I’m evaluating for is how would they deal with.

Making a good decision when making the good decision isn’t necessarily the easy choice. So if they’ve messed something up and they have to come clean about it, they have to communicate upfront, are they gonna be able to take the right decision? I think in a, in an ideal company where everything is super easy.

And everything goes right. They never have to do that. But I think that’s why you like only challenge the core values when stuff becomes difficult because that’s when people will try to, circum will have the upside of not necessarily obeying a core value, let’s say communication or if you have one, which is like extreme ownership, people will do something wrong and an initiative won’t go the way that it does. So then their mindset is, I don’t want to be responsible for the way that this turned out. So they’ll deflect and they’ll put the responsibility on something else, for example. I think it can manifest in many different ways.

So I think one of the other questions that I think is worth adding is in terms of. Do you think that there’s anything different or more difficult? And I know I think the answer is yes, but perhaps more what is vastly different? Because you’re building lifter LMS remotely as we are as well, fully remote.

I think that it is a little bit more difficult to build culture when you’re fully remote. But to me it’s, been the natural way to do it. Are there any elements of not being able to meet your team in person? And I think you do meetups once a year if not more, so that might become more possible, but I’m curious if you have thoughts on that.

Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Building culture online is both harder and easier at the same time. It’s easier because you have, you can control the environment. Like we’re talking to each other through Streamy Yard. I can see a three feet window into your world as you can into mine. We’re not sitting in an office together.

I have had the pleasure of meeting Alex several times in person over the years. But it’s easier because in an office environment you’re basically always on stage, which is good and bad because you can. In the online world, you can put your best fit forward through your three foot zoom window, and you can control the environment in a way that you can’t in person.

But this comes back to authenticity. If you’re putting on an act, whether it’s online or in person, it’s exhausting. That doesn’t mean like sometimes a leader needs to step off the stage and just like collapse and rest ’cause they’re tired or they’ve been out front for a long time. But yeah.

The best thing that could happen when you start blending offline and online is that when you do get together in person, it feels exactly the same, if not even better, because now you don’t have the three foot window. You have the 360 degree view in real time with each other, and you can break, bread together.

But there’s a saying I love from, I don’t know, it comes from some anthropology thing. What people are looking for when it comes to culture is a sense of belonging, number one. But number two is a sense of quote, finding the others. So this, has happened to me many times where I’ve run with a lot of different groups of people, whether.

The mountain climbing community, the long distance hiking community, the dog mushing community, the WordPress agency community, the WordPress product community, the course creator community, the affiliate community. When you find the others, it feels great. And this is the cool thing about online is that it connects everybody all over the world.

It’s no surprise that. Lift our team is really spread out because we’re pretty niche and specialized in what we do and how we do it. But when you find the others, when you have that sense of belonging, what you’re actually feeling is culture fit. So I remember the first time I got out from behind my computer after building an agency and in the very early days of Lyft all mess.

I went to my first WordPress conference, which was actually I didn’t know it at the time, but I jumped over the whole Word Camp thing and went straight to CaboPress. Where in Mexico, where some of the some of the great WordPress product companies of the time the founders were getting together and.

I got there and I realized oh wow. There’s a bunch of men and women just like me who have the same weird entrepreneurial interests. And like we have, we share a language, we talk about things like working on client projects or terminology we use in software and marketing and things like that. And it feels oh my gosh.

’cause in my hometown. I’m just a regular guy who works from home who like there’s not a lot of digital entrepreneurs around where I live. So when I step into an environment, even if it’s just a pop-up moment in time, you feel that culture fit and it’s really refreshing. I think one of the biggest tragedies and it’s also a privilege when it goes the other way, is to actually love your job and like your work and the people you work with.

I don’t know the exact statistic, but I would hazard a guess that somewhere around 95% of people hate or tolerate their job. Because they have to. And that’s unfortunate and there’s not like an easy fix to that. But one of the things I love about Lifter LMS is we’re in the business. Of helping people love their job.

Like when they have this entrepreneurial project that’s successful, not only do they create income and impact in the world, but they get the creative freedom to be the person they really want to be and work with the people they wanna work with. That’s why it’s so important when you’re. When you have an agency or you’re a course creator or a coach, that your clients that you like, your clients, if you have this opportunity to design an entrepreneurial venture, do it with a culture that you like working with.

It’s so important and, but obviously it’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Yes, we need safety and we need a roof over our head and we gotta make money. But always keeping your mind that aspirational goal of. Once you have the roof over your head and we’ve all done it, we’ve taken client projects that we, where we just did it for the money and it wasn’t a great culture fit, but we did what we have to do.

But never forget the, goal of creating that kind of positive cultural re resonance. 

Alex Panagis: I think that’s such a important point because I think at the end of the day, running a business is difficult enough as it is that if you make choices that deliberately go against making it an enjoyable experience it, you’re, it’s.

Making it impossible because it’s already, I would say the, again, the stats, we don’t know the specific numbers. But the stats of companies that make it past the first year. Let alone the th second, third, and then fifth year are incredibly low. I think, again, a big part of that is it’s very difficult.

It takes a lot outta the founder to run a company. And if you have the ability to make small decisions. Whether that’s in hiring a specific person because their personality is quite significantly more aligned with the way you think, and that means that you are excited to get on a meeting with them as opposed to looking at them as just a series of can they do more work necessarily?

And yeah I, think that fundamentally wouldn’t that’s what the beautiful thing of, running your own company is that you get to choose that and you get to build it. But in, in a way, it’s also the curse because as you do it you’re doing it you’re learning it as you’re doing it. So if you fail to do it necessarily in, the very beginning.

It often feels like you can’t fix it. And I’m actually super curious because you mentioned that you had some lessons about that when you, in the past I, made hiring decisions related that what you would have to go back on because they ultimately ended up somehow making it past all the steps of your screening process.

Then still didn’t end up being a good fit long term. Or maybe they were I dunno what the case was. Were they a good fit for six months a year and then they just started slipping and they lost the like mindset that you need to have for lifter LMS.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So this is, I’ll give two examples here. One that would not related to hiring, but when you filter things through the company values, everything gets so much easier.

Like last year we, LifterLMS had a security release that was important and we looked across the space and we saw that some companies with the same kind of release did not communicate it. And they just swept it under the rug. But like our value of clear communication is like we have to communicate it.

We also have a value of community, and part of community is holding space and protecting your community. So we needed to roll this thing out in a way that we protect all our user sites, while also giving them time to update and communicating what was happening and encouraging people to update. And that whole decision of what do we do here?

Should we say something? Should we not say something? It was so easy if you just filter it through the company values. The same is true when something’s not working out. If, I as a founder or CEO have like my intuition’s, like something’s up with this team member or this group we’re working with I’m not sure what it is, but I just have this feeling in my gut.

What I’ll do is I’ll look to the company values and be like, which one of these is not being met? Are they not communicating well? Are they not really owning the work they do? Are they actually increasing friction and not removing it? Do they care about our customers and our end customers? Do they care about commu all the different kinds of community interactions we have?

And I’ll always find it. So what? And also, we’re not ruthless. We’ll give people a chance to correct. And something might be like something simple if you’re working on a support ticket and the communication from the ticket in question is not great, we’ll just use that. It’s usually just a training opportunity, so it’s Hey, we value clear communication and removing friction.

This is how we could improve this ticket. And that’s just part of training and onboarding. What you’ll see is most people will just improve. It’s like in a cult, it’s called indoctrination, right? But you’re doing the same thing in a company culture. You’re just reinforcing and indoctrinating the values.

You can train the skills. But you can’t train the character. So we always hire the character, and yes. They need to have some skills for the role. We care way more about the culture fit, ’cause we know a lot of those other things can be improved. When it comes to working with people. You mentioned the term probation earlier, it was Seth Godin who said that the only way to hire people is to work with people.

So for us, like the first 30 days or 90 days. Is it’s part of the interview process. There’s only so much you can suss out in an interview. You actually have to get to work with each other. 

And I recommend that anytime you work with somebody or hire somebody or outsource something that you treat that first 30 days or test project or 90 days as it’s just part of the interview process.

And ideally you’re upfront about that where. They know that they’re on probation using, your words. But we’re just making sure, not just for us, but also for them. That it’s gonna fit and our. We’re gonna work together in this culture. Culture doesn’t mean everybody has to be exactly the same.

It’s more just there’s a base level of shared vision, mission, and values that just align and everything just gets. So much easier in that standpoint. And when it’s time to let somebody go, there are usually multiple instances of offering opportunities, pointing to values and areas to improve.

Like in the corporate world, they call it a pip, a performance improvement plan. You don’t have to be that kind of lingo heavy with it, but like you can give somebody, always give somebody the benefit of the doubt to grow and evolve. All that. ’cause sometimes you may be inheriting a great team member who has all the raw materials, but they’ve been traumatized from three, five years of being in a toxic culture.

But you can see the gym inside of them and they’re gonna need time to recalibrate, integrate with a team, absorb the values, relax a little bit, and move forward. So it’s not it’s not like a cult where you’re in or you’re out. It’s, something that happens over time and what’s really cool to see is as you get a little bigger, it’s not just the founder that is creating the culture the leadership, the people in more leadership positions start influencing it more.

And it just evolves over time. But you do wanna keep your. Eye on it to make sure it doesn’t get away from you. Or if toxic elements start creeping in, somebody could just be having a bad day and that’s just a bad day. But if you get repeated violations of the company culture that you’re trying to hold space for firing or termination of an employee is actually, I wouldn’t say it’s easy, it’s my least favorite part of the job, but it will, it’s.

It is much easier to do when you’re. You can just clearly point to the values and then actions that aren’t in alignment with the values, chances to course correct that weren’t done, and then it’s time to call it and let’s just put our best foot forward and move on from each other.

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Alex Panagis: And assuming in a company like Lifter, that’s always been done in a way where at the end of the day, it’s not like you’re doing it from one day to the other, from a week to the next.

It’s, a matter of okay, we’re gonna give you opportunities. And there’s ongoing feedback and a culture of consistent feedback throughout. Every week. So it’s not like the person would ever be surprised that happens. I think it’s more so that Okay. You’ve been at that point. And the way I’ve always, I’ve been told when I started hiring we worked with a recruiter and we had people on probation and.

I was struggling to say I guess un say I could still see them improving, but at that point you have to make a decision. And the way they put it, which I think is a great, how I think of it now, is in a way you’re doing them a favor because if they’re not willing and able and don’t enjoy working the way that you, the.

Want them to work and the culture that we have as a company, then at the end of the day, they will find a better home. Oh. And obviously that’s assuming like a good job market. So that’s the difficult aspect of it. ’cause we, are obviously having the, like sympathy and the care and we still care about the people even if they weren’t a good fit.

As I’m sure is the case with Lifter as well. It’s a diff that part of it I don’t think can be made easier. But the way I try to frame it in my mind is. At the end of the day, they’re not enjoying their work here. So given the fact that they’ve had chances and probably saw this coming I hope that they’ll leave here with lessons that they can use to find something that’s a better fit for them or also just generally improve like a lot of the time.

I. They they, maybe don’t fit into our culture, but because they’ve worked with us for x number of years or months before they were let go, they then moved on to another company where because of the person they developed into over time with us, they became a great fit for that company. And the other the, new company, sometimes you, in a small world, you can even have a connection to the company that they move on to.

I think there’s a funny aspect there. I want to talk I think one thing that you mentioned before is. Quite interesting is the diversity of culture, not necessarily in demographic, but that’s also part of it is in. In skillset and focus and the way that they, they do things, as I think you said, it mostly happens in leadership, but sometimes in individual hires as well, is somebody joins a company because in, in certain co certain situations where they’re hired because of the way they are different.

They have a different way of looking at things. Maybe that is that they have. An obsessive amount of attention to detail and the people currently in the company don’t. And that’s can be quite difficult for the person joining if it’s like something that they have to work against. But again, in, in essence, that’s the value that they then bring to the team.

Are there specific examples of that in Lifter that you could point to of we these are people that we brought on specifically for X, Y, Z, that they’re exceptional at these things and it’s a skillset that we don’t yet have. Or not a skillset a culture or characteristic of a subset of a skill set.

Let’s put it that way. 

Chris Badgett: I like to think of the Lord of the Rings to answer this question. So the the elf, the dwarf. The Strider guy, the hobbits, they’re all, they’re, they become a culture on a shared mission, vision with shared values, but they’re, they couldn’t be more different in their specialties and what they do and what, where they excel and where they don’t excel.

So personality whether that’s something like big picture or attention to detail, extrovert or introvert. You can have all this variety of these things, but you’re still like in the same culture. And when you have that diversity it’s nothing bad can come from that only good. For example Kurt on the team is very, extroverted.

That’s great. If I go to a conference, I talk to a lot of people. But I’m also an introvert and I get tired. Whereas Kurt will be jacked up on energy and cool, which party are we going to next? What are we doing? And so it’s great to have all that diversity and I’m, a big student of personality types.

Personality is different from culture, but the most diversity you can get. Personality types or like Chris Lima’s work on the different types of motivation that people have. Those can all be very different while sharing a culture and a common vision mission. So yeah, that I love variety. Variety is awesome.

It’s culture is more about the how and the why than the the what of our differences. And I, just wanna say like the one point and one final question, one of the most important things you can do as a leader, even if it’s just you by yourself as a course creator, is to lead by example. Like to embody your stuff.

And if your culture and your values or in alignment with your true self, that’s not hard to do. You’ll get tired at the end of the day, but you just. Stand up for what you believe in and don’t get steamrolled. And people are watching, like maybe you’re just making marketing content on YouTube or social media, but you are on stage even if it’s you’re a bus, a solo, one person business.

And that you are demonstrating culture. Culture is more demonstrated through your actions than what. You say, so actions speak louder than words, so if you, like lifter you mentioned has a value of extreme ownership. So I really try to, if I have something, I really try to own it. And people, it’s not I, don’t walk around saying I’m owning this.

I just do as best of my ability. And if I fail or let something down, I’ll admit it. You know what, like I messed up here. And that’s also refreshing to a team to see that. Everybody is continuously improving, which is one of our values as well as fulfilling potential. So if I am not continuously improving and I’m not fulfilling my potential, and I’m open and honest about my struggles with that’s really empowering to the team.

’cause we all don’t have to be perfect, but we’re all still trying to move forward and grow into better people, more effective people, and all of that. The last thing I wanted to ask you is lift your LMS is almost 13 years old at this point, so I’ve been here a long time. I’m one of the co-founders and you can’t always see the culture from inside the bottle.

It’s like when you travel to a distant land, you’re very aware of the different culture you’re in because it’s not your culture or you didn’t grow up in that culture. But I’m curious, like what are some of the things we’ve mentioned some of our company values, but what do you think are some of the things that are interesting about the lift, draw, mess, culture and working with the company?

Alex Panagis: I think there, there’s a few core pillars. We touched on some of them, one of the ones we didn’t interestingly I thought it would’ve come up is shape up. I think the, process of working with the idea that you make certain bets on projects that you work on throughout the year and the ShapeUp principle for those who want to read more about it was originally pioneered by 37 signals.

The people behind Basecamp and the way that Lift elements uses it is a variation of that approach. And I think that way of working where. You write up a pitch that essentially outlines a core project that you wanna work on in a given cycle. If it’s something that doesn’t just happen in everyday work, I think first of all, it makes you think about the types of things that you’re doing a lot more as an individual.

Writing the pitch is a, ritual I would say where. As you do it, you shape how? Given the name of the pro like Shape up itself you shape how you’re gonna approach it, and then when you share that with other people, it gets buy-in. It also lets other people weigh in and I think that’s an aspect of it, which you don’t have a lot in a lot of companies, which is.

Why is why some companies are quite painful to work with and why it can be painful to work in some companies is that the teams are very siloed off from each other, so you can’t really get involved in something else. It’s this is my thing, I own it. I don’t want anybody to have like their input because I know I’m right.

And I think nobody at Lifter has that mindset, and I think that’s a really toxic mindset. And then I think the other thing is feedback. There’s. There’s a couple of ways to look at fe feedback. And then the last thing I’ll say is attention to detail on the feedback aspect. We, always have the way of you’re criticizing and critiquing the thing, not the person.

So go all out and critique the thing, but you’re like, ultimately none of that is meant towards the person. I think Lifter does a really. Great job internally on lift, lifting each other up helping each other progress as people, as opposed to using something as an opportunity to put oh, why did we do this in this way?

Ultimately, something has been done. It’s more about what happened, why did it happen, and how do we go from here as opposed to sitting on an idea or thinking like, oh, we shouldn’t have done this. We shouldn’t have done this. And a lot of companies do that and it makes, it becomes really toxic in my opinion.

And then the last thing, which I just said I completely forgot now was feedback. And then the last thing. Do you remember? I don’t remember what I said. 

Chris Badgett: Feedback, attention to detail. Was it attention to detail? 

Alex Panagis: Yeah, attention to detail. Sorry. Sorry about that. Then attention to detail is the, last one, which I think is.

It comes down from leadership when you can tell that people care about how things are done. The vulnerability is a good example, like a security release and how competitors approach it. We can like shrug off and think oh, that’s like a detail who we don’t really care how that happens and.

I think more founders than we’d like to think are unfortunately, like that they would look at the way something is done and to say oh yeah, we can do it like that. And they treat decisions that are quite important as unimportant, and that’s painful as well because it basically, it means that even the things that are important happen without ceremony.

And it’s not that oh, everything that the company does needs to be. Celebrated and at praise that every, step of the way. But if it isn’t, then eventually people stop caring in the company. And I think that then is how you build bad culture, which is ultimately how lift drill ms. I think I mean, I haven’t been involved for all eight years, but I think that’s a largely how I can imagine lift trail.

L ms has avoided it for so long. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I appreciate all that, and I just wanna highlight for you out there watching and listening, if you’re looking for a value, the one that. I would recommend from our list is clear communication. So Alex mentioned the shape up process we use in the early days of lifter LMS.

As a founder, I might say to a technical partner let’s, build a continuing education add-on. There’s the project, right? That’s not clear communication. So what we do is, this happened in 2025, Hey, let’s build a continuing education add-on. I worked on probably a seven, eight page document using the shape up process of what that would look like.

I interviewed both on Zoom and by email some of our users that were already using lifter LMS for continuing education for their LMS platforms to find out what the pain points were. As a team, we looked at the document and figured out technical things, we need to figure out gaps in our thinking.

So that document becomes like a pretty clear communicating thing of not Hey, let’s just build this software. It’s goes into great detail of what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, how we’re doing it, what the interface is gonna look like. It’s clear communication, embodied. And then once we get to the.

Part where we start prioritizing projects in the shape Up process. And that one bubbled to the top. It’s really ready to roll and it’s gonna be. I already know it’s gonna be successful before we even build it. Which a lot of companies don’t know, they’re just guessing. But when you put your customer at the center of your business, not your product like we do at Lifter, the product market fit. I don’t wanna say it’s easy, but if you actually listen to your customers and care about their pains and observe the friction pattern match against that, where it’s happening repeatedly, it’s not a guess. It’s just a project that needs to be flushed out. Alex, I wanted to thank you for coming on this episode to talk about culture.

I’m lucky to have scale math working with LifterLMS. As you’ve said before, like our cultures, our company cultures are naturally so similar. It’s really easy to work together and do big things, and that’s, the power of like alignment. Whether it’s with team members, your partner. Even your personal life your clients, other companies you work with, and vendors and things, when you feel that belonging and that you’re, you have similar or even almost the same culture, it’s really powerful and it makes life so much more fun and enjoyable and easy, and you can make hard decisions easier by just looking to your culture and your values and your mission and all of that.

Thank you for coming on the show. If anybody wants to connect with scale math, what’s the best way to do that? 

Alex Panagis: The best way would be to check out scale math.com, but I want to turn that around more importantly to say thank you. And likewise, it’s a real pleasure to work with you. And I can say on behalf of the, everybody on that works on the LifterLMS work that we do.

It is a real pleasure to work with you and everyone on the team. And it’s always exciting when we work with a company where there’s elements of things and the way that they operate where we actually want to adopt them versus having to think, oh no, the way this company does it, we want to like, try to not fall into those habits as opposed to with, Lifter, which is what the case is actually like this is a company we’re really proud to work with yeah.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you Alex. 

Alex Panagis: Thank you.

Speaker 2: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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