The Story Behind Affinity’s Core Values

At Affinity, we believe that being the best managed services provider for businesses in the Greater Nashville area means striving toward a mission and vision that helps us focus on serving the best interests of our clients and keeping our team excited about their work. At every team meeting, we begin by reading every bullet point in our mission and vision, and discussing ways we have succeeded in—or could do better at—living up to them.

To help us carry this practice with us into our daily work managing, supporting, maintaining, and strategizing our client’s IT, our owners, Sean and Betsy Wright, decided to boil the essence of our mission and vision down into a single core values statement. With input from everyone on our team, they crafted this statement to define Affinity’s DNA as a company—to make clear to us, our clients, and our community what values Affinity stands for:

Striving to serve and empower with excellence, in a gracious manner.

To get a feel for what this means to us as a company, let’s break the statement down, bit by bit:

Striving

 A key component of Affinity’s mission is “to foster a culture of continuous improvement.” To us, this means always striving to be a better technology provider than we were yesterday. Striving to reduce the number of IT issues our clients experience. Striving to improve our internal workflows to prevent things from falling through the cracks. Striving to package our services in ways that incentivize us to focus on our clients’ best interest.

For us, striving toward continuous improvement means always increasing the value that we provide to clients, and that our team members receive from working with us.

To Serve

Service has been part of Affinity’s DNA from day one. Sean and Betsy Wright succeeded in building this company from scratch because on top of Sean’s considerable technical expertise, they knew how to listen to and even anticipate the needs of their clients. Now, through our hiring practices, mentoring and training, and processes that keep us true to our core values, Sean and Betsy’s focus on service has been amplified throughout our company.

And Empower

 For us, being an outsourced IT provider means a lot more than keeping our clients’ technology afloat. We find the most meaning in our work—and can provide the most value—when we focus on transforming technology from necessary evil to competitive advantage—equipping our clients to improve and magnify the work they do and grow as a result. Furthermore, we want our team to be empowered to achieve their full potential—and their dreams.

With Excellence

 We know that we cannot truly serve and empower our clients if the service we are providing is not founded in excellence. The desire is not enough; it has to be backed by hard work.

For us, excellence begins in our technology service. Our team must be qualified, and they must stay on top of trends through ongoing training. To truly thrive, our clients need technology professionals who are equipped to optimize their systems in the most effective way possible. Furthermore, they need an IT approach that is based on industry standards and best practices, with processes for aligning their technology with those standards.

But, of course, excellence extends beyond technical skill. Because the nature of our work centers around collaboration—both internally among our team members and externally with both end users and client executives—excellence in communication is critical to our success. And so is excellence in service—our responsiveness, our efficiency, and our ability to find and address the root of issues.

In a Gracious Manner

 Far from the stereotype of an aloof or unpleasant IT professional, the Affinity team strives toward gracious interactions at every level of our contact with client employees—from end users to executives. We cannot achieve our mission “to delight our clients daily” without making sure that our interactions with them are honest and empathetic. In other words, it matters to us that our clients genuinely like talking to us and working with us. Not only does this make for a better client experience—it also improves our ability to collaborate toward our clients’ success through technology.

Interested in Learning More?

Want to hear more about how our core values shape the work we do as a managed services provider, to our clients’ benefit? Contact us today!