What happens when you inherit a company full of people who did not choose you?
You may have acquired the business. You may hold the CEO title. You may have a plan, capital, operating experience, and a clear view of where the company could go next.
But none of that automatically gives you the right to rewrite its culture.
That is the challenge Eric Giesecke faced when he acquired Planet DDS in 2015 through a search fund. He had no background in dentistry and no background in software. The company had roughly 25 employees, a close-knit founding team, a well-regarded dental practice-management product, and a culture that had existed long before he arrived.
Ten years later, Planet DDS had grown to roughly 350 employees, with a revenue team that expanded from three people to about 75. The company serves more than 13,000 dental practices across North America and works with more than half of the country’s 60 largest dental organizations.
But the most important lesson is not simply that the business grew. It is how it grew: not by replacing an existing culture with a leader’s personal imprint, but by listening closely enough to understand what was already working, then helping the organization become more capable of living up to its own potential.
Key Takeaways
Inherited cultures require humility, listening, and respect before leaders attempt meaningful change.
Core values should reflect existing strengths while setting clear behavioral expectations for future growth.
Trust accelerates when leaders pair genuine relationships with visible, collaborative operational wins.
Scaling culture depends on local leaders who reinforce values when executives cannot see every interaction.
When You Buy a Business, You Inherit More Than a Balance Sheet
A search fund is a vehicle in which one entrepreneur, or a small group of entrepreneurs, raises capital to find, acquire, and operate an existing business. Investors are not simply betting on a portfolio of companies. They are betting on the business and on the people who will step in to run it.
That creates a unique leadership situation. The incoming operators are expected to grow the company, improve it, and generate returns. Yet they may know less about the industry, product, customers, and internal history than the people already doing the work.
Planet DDS was a compelling opportunity because it had several qualities that are difficult to manufacture:
A stable, well-defined product with a clear market fit.
A sophisticated customer using the product successfully.
A close team with strong relationships and a desire to win.
A customer-centered culture where people took responsibility for solving problems.
Those qualities mattered as much as the market opportunity. Dental software was, and remains, a large market moving toward cloud-based systems. But market size alone does not make a company worth leading. A company also needs people who care about the work, care about customers, and are willing to solve difficult problems together.
In that sense, the acquisition was not merely the purchase of a software company. It was an inheritance of relationships, norms, habits, commitments, and trust built over years.
What Happens When Nobody Chose You?
New leaders often describe the moment they arrive as “resistance.” But that word can be misleading.
Sometimes it is not resistance at all. It is apprehension.
When an outsider enters a company where people have worked together for years, the unspoken questions are entirely reasonable:
Who are these people?
What do they know about our customers?
What do they know about our industry?
What will change for me?
Will they understand why this company works?
Will they preserve what matters, or destroy it with a PowerPoint presentation?
Those questions become sharper when the incoming leader has little direct experience in the company’s field. In Giesecke’s case, the gap was obvious. He was taking responsibility for a dental software company while openly acknowledging that, at the outset, he had learned only what he could in the preceding months.
That honesty was not a weakness. It was the beginning of credibility.
No experienced team expects a new leader to know everything on day one. What people do expect is respect for the knowledge they have accumulated. They expect the leader to recognize that they understand the product, customers, history, and day-to-day reality more deeply than someone who has just arrived.
Humility does not mean lacking standards or avoiding decisions. It means being truthful about what you know, what you do not know, and how you intend to learn.
“The company has a culture. And that culture has to be articulated by the people who built the culture.”
Listen First, Then Demonstrate You Can Move Things Forward
Many leaders enter a new organization with a 30-, 60-, or 90-day plan. Such plans can be useful, but they should not become a substitute for reality. A plan prepared before joining a company is built on partial information. It should be treated as a hypothesis, not a command.
At Planet DDS, the early priority was relationship-building. The new leaders brought people together, sat down with the founder, explained the transition, and spent informal time getting to know the team.
Importantly, this was not only about work. It meant learning where people came from, what they enjoyed, why they stayed, how they knew one another, and what they valued about the company. A culture cannot be understood only through due diligence documents, organizational charts, or management meetings.
You understand a culture by understanding the people who carry it.
But listening alone is not enough. A new CEO also has to establish confidence that the company can grow under new leadership. That requires demonstrating competence without pretending to have all the answers.
The practical approach was straightforward:
Gather the available data.
Identify insights the company had not previously seen.
Work with existing employees to understand the problems behind the numbers.
Choose a few visible, solvable issues.
Deliver improvements with the people closest to the work.
Even a seemingly basic problem—such as improving how customer support is delivered—can become an important early win. It shows that the new leadership is paying attention, can involve the right people, and can turn discussion into action.
Trust grows through relationships. Credibility grows through execution. An inherited culture needs both.
Core Values Should Begin as a Reflection, Not an Imprint
One of the most tempting mistakes for any incoming CEO is to arrive with a ready-made culture deck.
There is no shortage of famous company values to borrow. A leader can select a handful of attractive words—accountability, transparency, ambition, innovation, collaboration—and introduce them as if a culture begins when they appear on a wall.
But values imposed this way often feel artificial because they are artificial. They may be admirable words, but they are not necessarily the lived truth of the organization.
The first version of a company’s values should be more reflection than imprint. The leader’s role is to create space for people to describe the culture they already experience:
What makes this company successful?
What do people do here when things get difficult?
What do customers rely on us for?
What behaviors make someone successful here?
What habits have limited our growth?
What do we want to preserve as we scale?
At Planet DDS, the answers pointed toward collaboration, customer focus, trustworthiness, accountability, and a real desire to win. The company was not perfect. No company is. But its existing culture contained virtues worth strengthening rather than replacing.
This does not mean leaders must accept every behavior justified in the name of “culture.” A culture can contain both healthy and unhealthy traits. It can be collaborative but insufficiently ambitious. It can be customer-focused but deliver too much unpaid work. It can value accountability in theory but fall short in practice.
The task is not to negotiate away essential principles. It is to name the organization’s aspirations clearly and use them as a standard for behavior.
If ambition is a stated value, then ambition must become visible in decisions, goals, feedback, and one-on-one conversations. If accountability is a value, missed commitments cannot be treated as irrelevant. Values become real when they inform what gets recognized, coached, promoted, and corrected.
Culture Becomes Real When It Can Absorb Growth
How do you know whether a culture is genuine?
One signal is the organization’s ability to bring in new talent without losing its identity.
Growth requires hiring people with skills the company does not yet have. This can be uncomfortable, especially when internal employees hoped for the role or have long-standing relationships with one another. Yet a culture built around ambition must be capable of saying something difficult: to reach the next stage, the organization needs expertise it does not currently possess.
A strong culture helps people understand that decision. It allows them to see an external hire not as a betrayal of the team, but as an investment in what the team can become.
That is particularly important in areas such as sales and marketing. Planet DDS began with a relationship-driven sales motion and a small team. The product had strong customer support and word-of-mouth credibility, but scaling the business required a broader go-to-market capability.
The company did not need an aggressive sales culture that promised what operations could not deliver. In fact, its commitment to honesty helped prevent that familiar conflict between sales teams and service teams.
What it needed was the ability to tell its story at scale: to turn customer success into repeatable proof, to ask respected customers for testimonials, to build brand awareness, and to help more qualified organizations understand the value of the product.
That required new skills, new hires, and a more developed revenue organization. But it worked because the growth function remained connected to the larger culture instead of becoming a separate organization with separate rules.
One Customer Can Change the Story a Company Tells Itself
Early in the company’s growth, one major customer represented roughly 15 to 20 percent of revenue. When that customer was acquired by a much larger dental organization using a different software platform, the risk was immediate: Planet DDS could lose a significant share of its business.
Instead, the company rallied across sales, support, professional services, leadership, and the founding team. Together, they made the case that the acquired customer’s existing software was the better fit.
The effort succeeded. The larger dental organization became one of the company’s major customers and remained so.
The result mattered financially. But it also changed the company psychologically.
It gave employees proof that they could compete for and serve a much larger organization. It turned an “oh no” moment into a shared demonstration of what was possible. It showed that a small company with a strong product, committed employees, and trusted customer relationships could win business that once felt beyond reach.
That is what a real cultural inflection point looks like: not a slogan, but a moment when people experience their shared capability firsthand.
As the Company Grows, the CEO Must Let Go Without Disappearing
At 25 employees, a CEO may know nearly everyone, understand their work, and know something about their families and lives outside work. At 350 employees, that is no longer possible.
Leadership changes as scale changes.
The CEO’s role gradually shifts away from personally solving every operational problem and toward creating alignment between teams, developing leaders, clarifying priorities, and ensuring that decisions serve the organization as a whole rather than one department alone.
That shift is uncomfortable for leaders who are used to being involved in everything. Yet the company cannot become self-sustaining if every important decision still depends on the person at the top.
The goal is not for the CEO to become irrelevant. The goal is for the organization to become capable.
This requires investing intentionally in leaders who can think beyond their functional lane. A sales leader, product leader, finance leader, or operations leader must learn to consider how a decision affects customers, colleagues, priorities, and other teams—not only their own metrics or budget.
It also requires succession. The healthiest transition is often one in which internal leaders are prepared to step into greater responsibility because they understand the culture and have learned to lead the whole organization.
Why Cross-Functional Pods Can Reduce Dependency
Traditional functional structures remain useful. A software company may organize around go-to-market, customer success, product, engineering, finance, human resources, and general administration.
But functional silos can make it difficult to solve complex customer and business problems. Each team has its own priorities, expertise, and internal pressures.
One answer is to create focused, cross-functional teams around specific outcomes. For example, an integrated payments offering may require sales, account management, support, product, and technical expertise. Bringing those people together around a shared goal—such as increasing adoption or processing volume—creates a more complete view of the problem.
These teams should not become vague committees. They need a clear purpose, measurable objective, and enough authority to act. When done well, they can improve collaboration, flatten unnecessary hierarchy, and reduce the need for layers of management that merely supervise activity.
The purpose is not to eliminate leadership. It is to create more motivated people who understand the goal, have the information they need, and can contribute their expertise directly.
The Hardest Cultural Decision: When Good People Are Not the Right Fit
Culture is not only about hiring. It is also about making difficult decisions when someone is not succeeding in a role.
This is especially hard when the person is talented, loyal, well-liked, or a friend. Yet leadership requires an honest assessment: does this person have the skills needed for this role and this stage of the company?
A person can be good and still not be the right fit for a particular position. A person can have been successful at one stage of growth and struggle at the next. Avoiding the decision may feel compassionate in the short term, but it can lower standards for everyone and leave the person in a role where they are not thriving.
The humane way to handle these moments begins long before the final conversation. Leaders need relationships built on trust, frequent feedback, and candid discussion. If the decision comes as a complete surprise, the leadership process has likely failed somewhere earlier.
When people understand the expectations, receive honest feedback, and know where they stand, they are more likely to see a transition for what it is: a difficult decision made in the company’s best interest and, potentially, an opportunity to find a role better suited to their strengths.
Culture Is Carried Locally, Not Centrally
At scale, no CEO can personally interview every candidate, notice every cultural inconsistency, or know every informal conversation shaping the organization.
This is where culture becomes local.
The people who carry a culture are often not those with formal “culture” responsibilities. They are the colleagues who encourage others in team channels, take new hires under their wing, speak honestly at a happy hour, invite others into community, and model the company’s values when no executive is present.
These people are cultural barometers. They can often sense when a new hire is not aligned, when a team is drifting, or when a behavior conflicts with the organization’s stated values.
Leaders should learn who these people are and keep a pulse on what they observe. They are not “culture police.” They are trusted members of the organization who care deeply enough to notice whether the lived experience matches the values on paper.
Culture is fragile. A few high-performing but destructive people can damage it quickly. Protecting it requires active attention—not controlling every interaction, but ensuring the organization has enough trusted leaders at every level to reinforce what matters.
Lead the Culture You Inherited by Helping It Become More Itself
You can lead a culture you did not create. But you cannot do it by pretending it belongs to you alone.
You earn the right to lead by listening before declaring, by respecting knowledge you do not yet possess, by acting with humility, and by showing that you can help the company solve problems and fulfill its ambitions.
The first task is not to put your stamp on the culture. The first task is to understand the story already being told by the people who built it.
Then, over time, leadership becomes the work of making that story clearer, stronger, more accountable, and more durable—so that the company can grow beyond any founder, owner, or CEO.
Explore Planet DDS Dental Software
Learn how Planet DDS supports cloud-based practice management for dental organizations.
Frequently Asked Questions About Leading an Inherited Culture
Can a new CEO change an existing company culture?
Yes, but durable change begins with understanding the culture already present. Leaders can strengthen healthy traits, address damaging behaviors, and clarify expectations without treating the organization as a blank slate.
What should a leader do first after acquiring a company?
Spend time learning from employees, founders, customers, and available operating data. Build relationships, understand what people value, identify early opportunities for improvement, and avoid pretending to possess expertise you have not yet earned.
How can leaders make core values meaningful?
Use values in real decisions, feedback conversations, hiring, recognition, and performance expectations. Values become meaningful when they shape behavior rather than merely appearing in company materials.
How does culture scale after a company reaches 100 employees?
Culture scales through trusted leaders and employees throughout the organization. CEOs can reinforce values centrally, but culture is primarily experienced and carried through local teams, everyday decisions, and informal relationships.
This article was created from the live video conversation on The Business Philosopher Within You podcast. The episode was published on YouTube under the title “Can You Lead a Culture You Didn't Create? | Eric Giesecke” The article was created with the help of AI after significant input from human intelligence.
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