All small businesses aim for growth and sustainable profit, but how you get there is important, too. Your company culture can reflect your values--or it can spin out of control, creating a toxic environment. The decisions you make early in the life of your business, and in running it day by day, play the largest role in establishing your business culture.
Running a business without setting goals is like going on a road trip without a map. You might have fun, but you won't get where you need to go. If you start your business with specific goals in mind, your company culture will reflect those goals--even those not directly related to making a profit.
A mission statement is a brief--and hopefully inspiring--sentence or paragraph that clearly communicates your goals for your company. Some mission statements read more like ad copy, or folk song lyrics. Though pretty, these do little to affect company culture. Specifically define where you want your company to go, and how you plan to get there.
This characteristic does more to help or harm culture in company operations than any other aspect of how you run your business. If you make decisions that are congruent with your goals and mission statement, your employees will probably follow suit. For example, you can't ignore EPA laws with a mission statement about green practice and expect your employees to act with integrity. If your decisions show that you have little respect for the goals you claim to espouse, it will lead to a cynical and opportunistic business culture.
This consideration includes making congruent decisions, but it goes well beyond that basic start. Culture in company operations includes not just what the company does, but also how you do it. If you have an aggressively business-like attitude, your employees will adopt the same. If you care about your employees, it will create a business culture in which they care about your customers.
A growing company inevitably reaches a point where you can't play a role in the day-to-day job of everybody in the business. At this point, you can lead by establishing "best practices"--methods of work and approaches to problems that support your goals and mission statement. As long as your employees understand these practices, and understand why they're in place, your company culture will likely continue in your original vision.