Why Culture is So Crucial at Metal Toad

Since the start of my finance and accounting internship at Metal Toad, the first thing that I noticed is its unique and influential culture. The combination of friendly staff and a cozy working environment make Metal Toad a community-like company. Additionally, we can see just how much effort Metal Toad makes to build a friendly company culture. I started to think — why is culture such a crucial thing for Metal Toad?

My personal short answer is that Metal Toad is trying to build a strong brand by building a strong culture. Corporate culture is an essential part of a company’s brand and plays a key role in the process of building a brand. Brands help tech companies primarily on the production side, which includes attracting high-quality talent and clientele. I believe it’s the brand’s attraction power that adds the most significant value to tech companies. Now, brand appeal can be comprised of many factors. In this blog, I will be focusing on three major factors; employees, clientele, and users.

Attracting high-quality employees is a tough job. A strong brand helps the firm to attract talent to join the firm, which in turn helps the firm to build a better product and create more value. Unlike in traditional product industries, most tech firms do not have inventory or lots of solid assets — their success highly depends on their employees’ performances. A group of highly innovative employees are the core competency of a tech firm nowadays. By building up strong culture, Metal Toad can then attract more talent to join the company and then retain that talent, increasing Metal Toad’s value relative to other tech firms.

Strong attraction power for clients and users is another centric value builds a brand. For those tech firms involved the business-to-business profession, a strong culture and brand attracts clients. With good corporate culture, clients will have more confidence in the people they work with, and by extension the final product those people create. For those user-based tech firms that depend on network effects, such as Facebook, a strong culture and brand also helps them attract users, which improves its product by enlarging the user base. A good (but converse) example would be Uber — with the deteriorating of Uber’s brand, they are offering a boost to their competition Lyft, as fewer users are willing to use Uber’s service and use Lyft as an alternative.

Strong culture builds a strong brand. By building up a friendly and strong culture, Metal Toad attracts highly qualified employees and clients. As people are the essential part of tech firms’ success, the answer is clear why Metal Toad is dedicated to build a friendly and strong culture.