Growing Three Businesses Without Losing What Made Each One Work
How Gig Talent, helped Goal Investment Group build the structure, feedback loops and leadership capabilities to evolve culture intentionally across three growing businesses.
The Challenge
Growth was happening on multiple fronts at once.
Goal Investment Group was scaling three distinct businesses: a services business, an investing business and a lending business. Each had its own culture and operating environment.
The challenge wasn't simply to support growth. It was to evolve the organizations without losing what made each one successful in the first place.
Leadership wanted to maintain culture as a competitive advantage while bringing employees along as the businesses, teams and expectations changed.
The Approach
Gig Talent began by understanding the businesses and their strategies, then looking at the organizational capabilities needed to support them.
One of the first priorities was creating a culture committee across the holding company structure.
The committee brought together a cross-functional group of employees who could provide an ongoing feedback loop between employees and executive leadership.
Rather than treating culture as a one-time initiative, the committee became an ongoing mechanism for helping the organizations:
- Stay connected to their core values as they evolved
- Hear directly from employees across the businesses
- Test internal communications and important decisions
- Identify what was working and where gaps were emerging
- Help employees see their role in the organization's growth
Our Gig Talent Certified Executive Entrepreneur™ also trained culture committee members in behavioral-based interviewing, giving them a practical role in protecting and strengthening culture as the companies continued to hire. For leaders weighing how to bring in the right people at every level, that kind of shared ownership of hiring matters.
The Impact
The work created structure around something that can otherwise be difficult to manage during rapid growth: intentional culture evolution.
The outcomes include:
A stronger foundation for growth. A structure for intentionally evolving culture across three businesses while staying connected to core values.
Greater trust between employees and management. A direct, ongoing channel for employee perspectives to reach executive leadership.
A focus on employee health. Greater attention to both physical and mental health as the organizations evolved.
Stronger hiring decisions. Behavioral-based interviewing helped the organizations identify people who were a stronger fit for the desired culture.
Greater employee ownership. Employees had a clearer understanding of their role in supporting the organization's growth and work environment.
A trusted sounding board for leadership. The culture committee provided a mechanism for testing communications and key decisions with a representative group of employees before they moved forward.
More Than a Project
The initial culture work became the beginning of an ongoing relationship.
Today, Gig Talent continues to support Goal Investment Group, Goal Solutions and Ascent Funding across a range of needs, including:
- Fractional CHRO support
- Professional development speakers
- Leadership development programs and facilitators
- Leadership coaching
- HR and talent strategy
The relationship has evolved alongside the businesses, from an initial need to strengthen culture to an ongoing partnership supporting leadership, talent and organizational growth. You can see the full range of how we work with leadership teams across the organization.
The Gig Talent Perspective
For Gig Talent, the work illustrates an important principle. You can't build the right organization until you understand where the business is going.
That means starting with the strategy, understanding what the business is trying to accomplish, and then identifying the people, capabilities, leadership and organizational structures required to get there.
Culture isn't separate from that work.
When it is treated as part of the business strategy and given the structures to evolve intentionally, it can become one of the things that helps an organization scale.
That's the work Gig Talent does: helping organizations connect strategy, people and execution, and bringing in the right expertise as the organization evolves.