Business culture, along with the strategy, is an important element of the internal environment of the company, a factor in its success, determines the degree of maturity of its management and staff. This Central element of the internal environment of the company most accurately characterizes the mechanism of management decision-making in the company, and therefore to a greater extent than the strategy or structure determines the actual level of development of the company, and hence the stage of its life cycle. It should be noted that the future strategy reflects not the actual state of the company, but only the expectations and intentions of its management. The strategy can be chosen correctly or incorrectly, this in itself does not change the stage of the life cycle of the company, because the strategy is not suitable for determining the stage of the life cycle. On the contrary, the organizational structure is usually late in relation to the achieved level of development of the firm. The article shows that the sequence of successive types of business culture most accurately characterizes the dynamics of changes in the internal environment of the company, and therefore the type of culture is a suitable identifier of the stage of its life cycle of the company.