A Stardust Global colleague, who has already introduced several talented people to the business from her own network, told me recently that she’d bring her best friend in to work with us.
She wasn’t asked, and she said it in the middle of a rough stretch, while we were still trying to lighten a workload that had become too much. I thought it was a lovely thing to say, but it didn’t need anything from me, so I filed it away and got on with the week.
Then I read a post that told me what her comment really meant.
Hard Hats and Heels set out ten principles that define a “legendary culture”. Every single one jumped out at me. The ones that landed hardest: hire people who give a damn, have stupidly high standards, let your best people run. And the final principle, phrased as a question: would your best person tell the most talented person they know that they have to come work here?
I was blown away. I was reading my own beliefs back to me, in words I had never found, all tidily arranged in a carousel. I’ve been building this “legendary culture” at Stardust Global since 2023, when I decided I needed support in the business.
I’ve been near culture work before. As a very green graduate at Deloitte, I was exposed to a few culture development projects, and somewhere in every culture presentation was the same slide: a photograph of a fried egg with “culture eats strategy for breakfast” across the top. (The line is usually credited to Peter Drucker.)
Close to twenty years and a business of my own later, I still haven’t found anything in that line to argue with. You can write a genuinely good strategy and then watch the culture quietly refuse to execute it, while executives refuse to accept the real reason for the pushback. (The Deloitte directors I worked with all those years ago are silently applauding right now.)
The difference now is that there is no office with a values poster to glance at. Stardust Global is a remote network of people who spend most of their week with our clients. The levers I have available are who I let in, and which rooms I send them into.
Who gets in
Skills can be taught. Caring is a much harder thing to install in someone who doesn’t already have it.
Everyone in the Stardust Global Network is here because they chose to be. Nobody landed with us because a restructure spat them out, or because they’d run out of other options, or because they’re quietly counting down to a pension. They picked this over easier work and over salaried predictability. And I chose them because they are exceptional at what they do.
In a big organisation you can hide inside a job you stopped caring about years ago, and the structure will happily carry you for a decade. At Stardust Global there’s nowhere to hide. The work is either excellent or it isn’t. It’s either delivered or it isn’t. The same logic applies to which clients we take on. In a consultancy, the culture is shaped as much by the clients you say yes to as by the people you bring in. I don’t want the brilliant humans on this team exposed to toxic cultures. More than once we’ve had hard internal conversations, put our happiness above the revenue, and walked away.
Standards
This is the one where I’m becoming less reasonable and more passionate about changing the narrative.
Stardust Global delivers world-class work. I want our work measured against any work in the world, and I want it to hold its own or come out ahead. The reason is more than being an over-achiever.
We’re based in South Africa, and I will not make peace with the fact that some people hear that and quietly adjust their expectations downward. I’m on a mission to prove them wrong, and I won’t settle. The talent in this country is extraordinary, and it gets underestimated mostly by people who have never actually bought from it.
So the standard isn’t high because I’m difficult. It’s high because I want the surprise to stop and I want investment in South Africa to grow. I want to play my part in changing an outdated and untrue narrative.
Work that matters
The post makes the point that nobody loves working for a company because of the free lunches. We’re remote, so there are no lunches, but the idea underneath it is one I defend fiercely.
We won’t do work that doesn’t matter. It’s a value, and it costs us to stand by it. We don’t work with businesses whose only reason for existing is profit. We will walk away from an opportunity if there’s no real reason to wake up on a Monday morning and give a damn about helping that company succeed.
Where it shows up is a bit odd for a commercial document: we put it in the conclusion of our proposals. We tell the client, explicitly, why we chose to write the proposal for them. It’s the most honest signal we can send about what kind of firm they’re about to hire.
My team knows which proposals we’ve turned down and which work we’ve walked away from. I hope that does more for how they feel about working here than any benefits summary I could write.
Letting go
That culture of trust was put to the test earlier this year. In early 2026 my capacity became a genuine constraint, and I had to pull out of every client engagement I was involved in, inside a matter of weeks. It wasn’t a leadership experiment. I had no other option.
I tried to resign from one client.
They said no. Not in an entitled way at all, but in a partnership one. They said they’d figure it out with me, then they came back with ways to make it work. I built this business to get away from the transactional agency model, where you’re a supplier who can be swapped out after a bad quarter, and that was the week I found out I had achieved it.
After that I had almost no view of the day-to-day. I had to take it on faith that the work was landing where I’d have wanted it to land if I’d been in the room. It was, all of it.
The neat version of this story is that I chose to start working on my business instead of in it. What actually happened is that I was forced into it. Autonomy was handed to brilliant people who could handle it, and who just wanted to get the work done.
The test
Which brings me back to my colleague.
She’d bring her best friend into this, and she said so in a week when her own workload was the thing we were trying to sort out. Not because everything was fine, but because what sits underneath it held strong while things weren’t fine.
Stardust Global’s culture was developed through a long run of decisions about who to let in, what work to refuse, what I’d never tolerate in how people treat each other, and what kind of company I wanted to work in myself. Outside of four specific and intentional values, I never wrote down a culture plan. Turns out I didn’t need to. Culture isn’t what you write down, it’s what someone else says about working in your business when you’re not in the room.
Inspired by a post from @hardhatsandheels_ on Instagram.
