When leaders genuinely develop and care for the people around them, businesses perform better.

Our story

Why we exist

Bad leadership doesn’t stay at work. It follows people home. The Sunday-night dread, the confidence chipped away over months, the good people who burn out or quietly check out and stay. We’ve felt it from both sides, and we’ve seen what it does. It wears people down, and it costs the business that allowed it.

The reverse is just as true. When the people in charge genuinely develop the people around them, everyone is better for it, the people first and the company right behind them. It’s one of the most widely held beliefs in the working world, and one of the least proven. Closing that gap, between what we know leadership does and what anyone can actually show, is the problem we exist to solve.

The problem is gravity. The answer is a system.

Every program starts with gravity on its side. People are inspired, picturing the leader they want to become. Then the training ends, everyone goes back to their desks, and gravity reverses: the inbox, the next deadline, the way it’s always been done, all of it pulling people back to how they already worked.

By most estimates, 80 to 85 percent of what’s taught in a leadership workshop never reaches the job. Gravity never rests, so anything that pushes once loses to it: a survey, a nudge, a job aid, a one-off refresher. A piece can’t beat gravity. A system can.

That’s GrowthBud. We build the whole environment around the learner and their manager, and we put it into the job itself. Structure, triggers, reinforcement, and the measurement that proves it worked. The new behavior finally has something holding it in place. We turn the leadership training you already run into real, observable behavior change, and the evidence of what changed. As that evidence builds, it begins to draw a line almost no one has: the one connecting how people lead to how the business performs.

Why us

I came up in software, but people are what I’ve always cared about. I’ve worked for leaders at their best and their worst, and the difference stayed with me. The idea came from my wife. She works in leadership development and kept hitting the same wall: the training ends, everyone goes back to work, and most of what was taught is gone before it reaches the job. She lives that problem every day. I thought I could help build a way out.

The longer I sit with it, the clearer it gets who it’s for. Not an industry, but the people rising in it: a new generation in L&D who got into this work to change how people lead, and are tired of struggling to show it. My wife is one of them. My goal is to build the tools people need to develop leaders.