How a restaurant app became the recognition platform HR leaders rate #1
The founders of Guusto, Skai and Joe, grew up together in a small town just North of Toronto. They both went to the University of Western Ontario, where Joe studied Psychology and Sociology, while Skai studied Engineering and Business. After graduating, they both travelled the world for a few years before landing back home in the middle of the global financial crisis.
Working in restaurants, we saw the need for an app that would allow you to send a drink to a friend for a celebration, or a client to show appreciation. From this Guusto was started with a handful of partner restaurants and customers.
We teamed up with the One Drop Foundation to donate a day of clean-water access for every Guusto reward sent, so recognition inside your team does some good outside it too.
When HR teams and Managers started to use Guusto to reward and recognize employees, we leaned into our core customer base and worked closely with HR leaders to build more robust employee recognition tools. We focused our energy on our customers and solving their problems.
When researching what customers were saying about us online, we came across a 1-star review on our Glassdoor profile. This was the moment we realized that if we wanted to really succeed, we first had to build an amazing culture where people loved to work.
The irony was that we were selling employee recognition tools, but not using them internally. So, we switched to focusing on our people first, recognizing them consistently for demonstrating core values, and intentionally shaping a great culture.
#1 Highest RatedThis new focus on building our team and culture completely transformed our business. Employees started delivering amazing results, we attracted superstars to join us, and things really took off.
Over the next couple of years, Guusto skyrocketed to the #1 Highest Rated Recognition Platform on G2 and grew over 250%. We learned the hard way, but now fully understand what separates great companies from the pack: you can’t leave culture to chance!
As revenue grew, we reinvested in growing the team and transitioned to a fully remote company. We took everything we learned from years of working with hundreds of HR leaders, and completely rebuilt the product to better meet their needs, improve security, scale integrations, and add enterprise grade controls/reporting.
We continued to double down on culture and were proud to be designated a Great Place to Work.
To inspire genuine appreciation in every workplace so that employees from head office to the frontlines feel valued, empowered and motivated to do their best work.
Building simple recognition tools that bridge the gap between management and frontline teams to transform workplace culture, drive daily engagement, and reduce turnover.
A world where employees from head office to frontlines are celebrated as the backbone of every organization, leading to environments where people love to work.
Everyone at Guusto strives to embody our core values in the work they do, the actions they take, and in how they interact with each other every day.
We strive to create safe environments for people to share honest thoughts, often saying “tell me more”, and showing appreciation for their comments. We encourage others to challenge our ideas, but we do not need consensus to make decisions. We respect people expressing diverse opinions and support an equitable and inclusive culture so everyone can be their authentic selves.
We ditch the ego, admit we don’t know everything, voice problems and ask questions. We seek wisdom through books, podcasts, courses and mentors. We carve out time for deep focus work to quickly acquire new skills. We further our learning by testing ideas to see what actually works. We ask colleagues to review our work to identify mistakes and opportunities for improvement.
We take an interest in them as people. We set clear expectations and inspire them with our passion. We are quick to assign credit for successes and take accountability for failures. We develop trust by being authentic, transparent and reliable. We support them when needed, recognize them for their contributions, and give honest feedback that will challenge them to grow.
We aren’t afraid to take risks, as we know failure leads to innovation. We have a bias for action and ship daily, making things happen before making them perfect. We make decisions and commit. We keep the big picture in mind and focus on opportunities over problems. We set ambitious goals and strive for high standards with everything we do. We stay scrappy by trying to do more with less.
