Combating “The Big Quit” or “The Great Resignation” is a family affair for the Sloan’s of Atlanta, who have come together to create the Go Beyond platform.
Go Beyond is designed as a tech-driven way for employees to find their individual purpose. In doing so, they hope to create more engaged employees and help companies build stronger, more resilient teams.
The purpose of the company itself is deeply personal for the Sloan family. Husband Greg, wife Katherine, and son Jonathan co-founded the tech company and bring unique skillsets to the executive table.
“We take a lot of inspiration from Abraham Maslow was a psychologist in the 1940s,” co-founder and CEO Greg Sloan told Hypepotamus. “Originally, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs had self-actualization at the peak. Well, ultimately Maslow realized 20 years later that self-actualization was not the highest peak. There’s a higher peak called self-transcendence, which is once you’ve achieved certain things, you want to help others do the same. Well for me with my son, helping him to become a successful entrepreneur…I don’t know that there’s a greater feeling for me that I could accomplish.”
While they officially launched a couple of years ago, Greg said the origin of the company dates back to 2007 when he resigned from his role as a VP at Goldman Sachs.
“I just wasn’t fulfilled,” he told Hypepotamus. “Having grown up as a poor kid in Hawaii, having a business card that said Vice President at Goldman Sachs…you would have thought I would have achieved this place of fulfillment. But I wasn’t.”
It took time for him to figure out his ‘purpose statement.’ But doing so launched him into the entrepreneurial scene as he built up his own wealth management firm. After navigating that firm through the ups and downs of the 2008 financial crisis, Sloan said he started to “incorporate purpose into my financial planning clients.”
That meant helping clients one-on-one align their purpose with their career and other financial decisions.
Over the years he looked for ways to scale that one-on-one experience with a tech platform. Ultimately his son Jonathan, an engineering student at Vanderbilt University at the time, jumped in to build out the beta version of Go Beyond.
Users of the beta version were mainly younger students using the platform to college-focused decisions. They ultimately pivoted into the small and medium-sized businesses with a guided way to help employees fully engage with work.
Behind The Go Beyond Platform
The Go Beyond team doesn’t believe you need a personality test based on colors, animals, or letter combinations. Instead, the platform focuses on helping employees discover individual purpose statements.
Employees join a cohort and go through micro-learning video lessons, called The Purpose Journey, that have been created in partnership with another Georgia-based company, Rali Solutions.
Ultimately, Go Beyond is a software that guides employees on telling their own stories. “And as they tell their own story, they’re essentially learning why they are who they are, and then more importantly, why they believe this life purpose statement is the best definition of the best version of themselves.”
Go Beyond sees the tech sector and the healthcare industry as two verticals where employees can specifically benefit from the platform.
It could also help incubators and accelerators really understand a founder’s driving purpose.
Admittedly, there is a chance that employees find through the process that their purpose doesn’t align with their employers and they decide to leave. But for Sloan, this helps companies ultimately build better teams.
“In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins said if you want to move from a good company to a company, you’re number one have to get the right people on the bus. And number two, get them in the right seats and of us. We are currently more focused on number two,” Sloan added. “We’d like to think maybe there’s a different seat on the bus for you as opposed to quitting and getting off the bus. Can you use this [tool] to have a discussion with your manager and say: Here’s what I see my purpose and my strength. How I can best serve the organization and make a great comeback. Is there another role? Or is there a modification or a flexible nature of the role?”
Combating burnout is big business, particularly as companies of all sizes look to recruit and retain talent. While new stats and research on the “Great Resignation” come out each day, we know that upwards of 30 million people have quit their jobs over the last seven months. Many have left because they are unfulfilled by the gig or the position didn’t align with their individual needs.
More and more startups are looking to build better work retention options. And venture capital has followed; Investment in the HR and WorkTech space tripled to $17 billion between 2019 to 2021.
