A practical walkthrough for founders and managers of small companies who want a culture deck as direct and useful as the famous Netflix one. Covers values that mean something, honest trade-offs, real examples, a tested structure, and how to publish and share the finished deck as an interactive flipbook.
A culture deck is the one document a company can hand to a stranger and say, "This is how we actually work." Netflix published theirs in 2009 and it was viewed millions of times because it read like a conversation, not a poster. If you run a team of 5, 15 or 50 people, you can do the same thing without a big HR department, and you can publish it as a clean, shareable flipbook on Flipbooks AI in an afternoon.
This article walks through exactly how small companies build a culture deck like Netflix: what to write, what to leave out, how to structure the pages, and how to get people to read it.
The original Netflix deck had around 125 slides, mostly plain text on white backgrounds. No stock photos of handshakes. No vague promises. It worked for three reasons:
Small companies have an edge here. You do not have legal review cycles or brand committees. You can be honest in a way a 10,000-person company cannot.
💡 Pro tip: A culture deck is a filter, not a brochure. If nobody reads it and thinks "this is not for me," it is too soft.
Before writing a single page, decide who the deck serves. Most small companies need it for four jobs at once:
| Audience | What they want from the deck | Best page to show them |
|---|---|---|
| Candidates | Honest picture of daily work | Values with examples |
| New hires | Rules for decisions and feedback | How we decide |
| Managers | Language for hard conversations | Performance expectations |
| Investors | Evidence of a coherent team | Principles and hiring bar |
Netflix drew a line between values on the wall and values in practice. The test is simple: ask who got promoted, who got fired, and who got a raise in the last year. Those decisions reveal your actual values.
Gather your team for one hour and ask three questions:
Write the answers on index cards, one per card. Group similar cards on a wall or a table. Patterns appear quickly, and they are rarely the words on your current website.
Most small companies end up with 8 to 12 values, which nobody remembers. Aim for 4 to 6. Test each one with this rule: can you name a person who would be a bad fit because of it? If not, the value is too generic. "Integrity" fits every company on earth. "We say the uncomfortable thing in the meeting, not in the hallway" does not.
Netflix described each value with a list of behaviors. Copy that pattern. For every value, write:
Here is how it looks in practice for a 12-person software shop:
| Value | Looks like | Does not look like |
|---|---|---|
| Say it directly | Giving feedback within 48 hours, face to face | Venting in chat about a colleague |
| Own the outcome | Fixing a bug found after launch, unasked | Saying "it was in the spec" |
| Spend like it is yours | Choosing the cheaper tool that works | Buying a premium plan nobody uses |
| Ship small | Releasing weekly in small pieces | Holding a feature for a big reveal |
✅ Best practice: Use real first names in the stories, with permission. "When Dana flagged the billing error before the customer did" beats any adjective.
This is where most culture decks go soft, and where small companies can stand out. Add pages that answer questions people usually find out about by accident:
Netflix said it hired adults and treated them as adults, which meant no vacation tracking and no expense approval for ordinary purchases. You do not have to copy those policies. You do have to state yours clearly.
Every culture has a cost. A fast-moving team gives up predictability. A flat structure gives up clear career ladders. Write a page called "What You Give Up Here." Candidates will respect you for it, and the wrong ones will leave before their first day.
A small company does not need 125 pages. Between 20 and 40 is plenty. Use this outline as a starting point:
| Deck length | Best for | Typical writing time |
|---|---|---|
| 10 to 15 pages | Teams under 10 people | 1 to 2 days |
| 20 to 40 pages | Teams of 10 to 50 | 1 to 2 weeks with feedback |
| 60+ pages | Larger groups with distinct departments | 1 to 2 months |
The fastest way to ruin a culture deck is to let it sound like a press release. Follow these writing rules:
Read each page out loud. If you would not say it to a new colleague over coffee, rewrite it.
⚠️ Warning: Avoid copying Netflix wording. Their sentences describe their company. Borrow the structure and the honesty, not the phrases.
Do not write the deck in secret and announce it. Use this sequence:
The question "which page is false?" is the most useful one. Employees will point at the gap between what leadership claims and what actually happens.
Netflix's plain design worked because the words carried it. A small company can be just as plain, but a little structure helps. A few design choices make a big difference:
Slides exported as a PDF often get lost in email threads. A flipbook keeps the deck in one place, opens on any phone, and lets you update it without sending a new file to everyone.
If your deck lives in a slide tool, you can turn it into an interactive flipbook in a few minutes. Here is the process with Flipbooks AI:
For a deck built specifically as a presentation, the Presentation Flipbook Designer fits well. If you plan to use the deck for onboarding, the Training Manual Flipbook layout gives you a structure for chapters.
| Feature | Why it helps a culture deck | Plan |
|---|---|---|
| No watermarks | Looks like your own document | All plans |
| Password protection | Keeps pay and performance pages internal | See pricing |
| Custom branding | Matches your website and careers page | See pricing |
| Analytics | Shows which pages candidates read | Professional |
| Offline download | Lets new hires read on a flight | See pricing |
| Mobile-responsive | Opens cleanly from a phone link | All plans |
💡 Pro tip: Keep one public version for candidates and one private version with extra pages for current employees. Both can live as separate flipbooks, and you update each when the document changes.
A deck that sits in a folder is worth nothing. Put it to work:
An imaginary but typical case: a design agency of 14 people had a values list of nine words on its website. After a values audit, the team realized the real rule was "we never hide bad news from clients." They built a 26-page deck around that, added a page on how they handle missed deadlines, and published it as a flipbook linked from every job post. Applications dropped by about a third, but the interview-to-offer rate rose sharply, because candidates already knew what they were getting into.
A small ecommerce brand wrote a 12-page deck. It included one page called "Why we pay above market and expect more," and one on "What we give up: slow weekends." The founder shared the link with the first five hires. Two years later, nobody on that team had left.
| Mistake | What happens | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Writing values nobody lives | Staff roll their eyes | Audit real decisions first |
| Using only adjectives | Nothing is testable | Add behaviors and examples |
| Skipping the trade-offs | New hires feel misled | Add a "what you give up" page |
| Hiding the deck in a folder | No one reads it | Share before interviews |
| Never updating it | It drifts from reality | Review twice a year |
| Copying another company | It sounds fake | Write from your own stories |
Another common mistake is writing the deck to impress rather than to inform. A culture deck should make some people say "no thanks." That is a feature. A good fit saves everyone months of friction.
Netflix updated its deck over many years, and the later versions looked different from the first. Yours should change as you grow. A simple routine helps:
When your company passes about 30 people, you may need to split the deck into a short public version and a longer internal handbook. The same approach works for both, and the Corporate Report Maker is useful if you later want to combine culture with annual company results.
You do not need 125 slides or a famous brand to make a culture deck that works. You need honest values, observable behaviors, a few uncomfortable trade-offs, and a format people can open in two seconds. Write the first draft this week, test it with five colleagues, and publish it.
Ready to put it online? Create your account on Flipbooks AI and convert your first deck to a flipbook. Browse all flipbook tools to find a layout that fits, or compare pricing plans to choose what works for your team size.
