Scaling up people, values, and spend culture: Lessons from Astrid & Miyu and Payhawk

What is corporate culture?

Corporate culture is the collective personality of an organization. It represents the shared values, beliefs, and practices that influence how people work together and how decisions are made. At its core, your corporate culture will shape everything — how employees collaborate, how leaders inspire, and even how your business interacts with customers and partners.

In scaleups, where growth and change happen fast, corporate culture plays an even more critical role. It’s what will help your organization navigate ambiguity and keep your teams aligned as they tackle new challenges. A strong culture fosters engagement, trust, and innovation, all of which are key ingredients for sustainable growth.

As Alexia and Aya shared in the Unboxed episode, embedding the right culture early creates a foundation that scales with your company; so while it may not always be a founder or investor’s priority, it will likely pay off, as it ensures you can grow in a way that supports overall goals and growth.

The right time to bring in people leadership

With all hands on deck and growth as the biggest driver; what’s the optimal time to bring in dedicated people leadership, like a Chief People Officer? The general consensus was that it's important to get the foundations right before any rapid scaling:

For example, Alexia joined Astrid & Miyu during the COVID-19 lockdowns when the company had only 30 out of 100 employees working. Connie felt this was the right time, as waiting any longer would have meant "firefighting" rather than proactively building a people infrastructure

For Aya at Payhawk meanwhile, a key priority was establishing the leadership philosophy and values to drive connection across the organization, regardless of size

Defining and embedding company values

Defining and embedding company values is essential for creating a strong, cohesive culture — especially for your fast-growing business. Both Alexia and Aya shared valuable insights into how they’ve approached this process, ensuring values aren’t just “words on a wall” but are deeply ingrained in their organizations.

Here's what they’ve learned about making values meaningful and actionable.

• Let your values emerge organically from employee success stories (rather than be imposed top-down)
• Don’t just define the values, but clarify the associated behaviors that bring them to life
• You must actively reinforce values through every touchpoint, think hiring, performance management, and day-to-day leadership
• Create a behavior matrix (like Astrid & Miyu did) to make values more tangible

Getting the right culture fit in hiring

Connie, Aya, and Alexia also delved into the complex challenge of identifying and addressing toxic behavior, whether it stems from high-performing individuals, new hires, or elsewhere.

They emphasized the importance of surfacing issues early through open communication channels such as anonymous feedback loops, exit interviews, and maintaining an open-door policy. Explaining that by fostering an environment where employees can raise concerns without fear, your organization can address problems before they escalate and negatively impact team morale or performance.

When it comes to hiring, the guests advised that your People Team should look beyond technical skills and focus on traits like self-reflection and learning agility. Prioritizing cultural fit alongside competence will help
you ensure that new team members align with your organization's values and contribute positively to its environment. The approach above underscores the critical role the People function plays in fast-growing scaleups — building strong foundations and fostering a values-driven culture that supports sustainable growth.

How spend culture connects to company culture

As Aya from Payhawk highlighted during the discussion, corporate culture serves as the foundation for scaling any business. And within that, spend culture is an essential pillar; connecting organizational values to daily financial decisions.

In many ways, your spend culture will actively bring your company culture to life by demonstrating which behaviors your employees should value, how they should prioritize resources, and where they fit into the bigger picture.

A robust spend culture will help your employees see exactly how their role aligns with the company’s financial goals and helps avoid micro-management, misunderstandings, and out-of-policy spend. You can build trust by encouraging transparency and shared responsibility, empowering employees to make confident, informed decisions.

Clear guidelines (supported by technology) will also give employees both accountability and autonomy, so they always know where they stand. And with a properly ingrained spend culture, your employees (both
finance and non-finance) can focus on their work instead of worrying about the mechanics of spending.

Examples of spend culture in action

Spend culture looks different across different organizations of course, but here are some examples of how it manifests in real-life settings:

• Empowering decision-making: Companies that trust employees with smart corporate cards — combined with automated spend controls — empower teams to act quickly and stay agile, while adhering to budgets and avoiding fraud or overspend.
• Transparency and accountability: Organizations like Wellpointe Inc. have implemented Payhawk for spend management so employees can record and track exactly how and where money is being spent, fostering a culture of accountability.

George Kutnerian, CEO at Wellpointe Inc., says:

Payhawk helps us free up the accounting department from what I consider a "non-value-add" activity… We've empowered our spenders to code their own transactions with Payhawk. Our chart of accounts actually lives in Payhawk, so anyone who's spending can leverage the chart of accounts and code the transaction appropriately. Eventually, we’ll get to the point where all spenders code expenses at the point of purchase — with Payhawk, I've given the team a tool to reinforce that expectation and help us build a transparent spend culture.

• Data-driven decisions: Real-time spend analytics can help you spot trends early on, keep track of budgets, stay autonomous over spend, and even redirect funds to areas of higher impact, ensuring every expense drives value.

Stephen Johnson, Finance and Operations Director at Astrid and Miyu, says:

As a Finance Director, finance literacy outside the finance team is super important and with the implementation of Payhawk we've been able to change the spend culture internally and really make everyone autonomous for their own budget.

• Policy adherence without friction: Use integrated spend platforms (like corporate cards and expense management from Payhawk) to embed spend policies into every transaction, reducing the manual effort of approvals while still maintaining policy compliance.

How Payhawk supports spend culture

At Payhawk, we’re built to help businesses like Astrid & Miyu (and yours) create and sustain a strong spend culture. By removing the manual mechanics of spend management, we help you empower your teams to focus on what matters most: growing the business.

With Payhawk, you can build and support a robust, spend-savvy culture in multiple ways, here are just a few:

1. Streamlined spend processes: Get automated expense reporting, invoice management, and reconciliation, reducing the burden on employees and finance teams.
2. Real-time budget visibility: Use tools that provide instant insights to stay aligned on budgets, and make proactive, data-driven decisions.
3. Smart corporate cards with controls: Let employees spend confidently within pre-set policies as the point of spend, ensuring accountability without micromanagement (or overspend).
4. Time saved for strategic work: Avoid repetitive tasks, we give finance teams back hours (and even days) every month to focus on higher-value initiatives.

With solutions like ours, scaleups can embed financial discipline without slowing down growth, fostering cultures where spending is efficient, transparent, and aligned with business priorities.
Scaling a business isn’t just about increasing revenue or headcount — it’s about scaling people, values, and culture, including your spend culture. With Payhawk, you can embed a spend-savvy culture that empowers your teams with clarity, accountability, and autonomy, while eliminating manual processes and out-of-policy spending.

Request a demo with one of our experts to see how our solutions can help your growing business stay aligned, agile, and ready for sustainable growth.