The Culture Multipliers: No Negatrons × Human Events
How Bob Neveu scaled Certify from a founding team to $100M+ ARR—by multiplying good people with shared moments to build a culture where people wanted to show up when it mattered most.
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When Certify needed more—late nights, last-minute travel, big pushes—people showed up.
Not because they had to. Because they wanted to.
That kind of commitment doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when culture is built with intention—and multiplied by design.
Bob Neveu, co-founder and CEO of Certify (now CEO of OurPeople), didn’t scale culture with slides or slogans. He scaled it with a system grounded in two simple ideas:
Hire good people. Then keep giving them reasons to care.
In other words:
Culture = No Negatrons × Human Events
It wasn’t theory. It was practice.
And it compounded—fast.
The First Multiplier: No Negatrons
At Certify, Bob’s culture playbook was simple: hire great humans. And when someone slipped through the filter? They were out—fast.
“You’re in the interview, and you just know,” Bob told me. “You say no.”
There wasn’t a behavioral rubric or psychometric test. There was just a deeply human judgment: Will this person make the team stronger—or drain it?
“We only hire good people,” Bob said. “If there's a $20 bill on the ground and they just saw it fall out of somebody's pocket, they're going to pick it up and give it back to that person.”
That principle extended past hiring. “If someone went negative—on a customer, on a teammate—they had to go,” Bob said. “We didn’t repurpose. We didn’t reposition. We moved on.”
And it worked. By preserving a team of optimistic, integrity-driven people, Bob created an environment where expectations were high and energy stayed positive. Everyone pulled together—because no one was dragging anyone down.
This aligns with findings from MIT Sloan’s study on workplace culture: a toxic teammate is 10x more predictive of attrition than low pay.
Turns out, the best perk isn’t kombucha on tap—it’s not having to work with jerks.
The Second Multiplier: Events as Operating Cadence
The next piece of Bob’s system wasn’t a secret—it was a schedule.
Events. Not as a perk, but as a rhythm.
Certify ran on a quarterly cadence of company-wide moments:
Q1 Kickoff: An offsite that mixed planning with play. No stale slides—just clarity, connection, and maybe a little chaos.
Summer Beach Olympics: East Coast vs. West Coast. Actual medals. Actual smack talk. Actual bonding.
Fall Retreats: Tied to trade shows, budget planning, or team strategy—but always about people first.
Monthly Happy Hours + Milestone Celebrations: Rituals, not afterthoughts. Baked into the operating plan.
These weren’t events bolted onto the business—they were the business. They created space for trust to form outside the pressure of deliverables.
And that trust paid off. When Certify needed more—travel, nights, weekends—people didn’t have to be begged. “They showed up,” Bob said. “Because they wanted to.”
As Bob put it, “People development at Certify took these four stages to heart: Know, Like, Respect, Trust. You need to get to the Trust stage, but you can’t shortcut it.”
This mirrors research from Gallup, which found that employees who feel “connected” to their work are more likely to be engaged at work.
How It Compounded
Put good people in a room together. They hire more good people.
Then you create the right shared experiences—and trust compounds.
Trust doesn’t scale linearly. It snowballs.
And when it does, the business flies faster.
Which is exactly what happened at Certify. Starting in 2008 with a four-person core team from Bob’s previous company, Certify grew organically to $20M ARR by 2017, maintaining a 50%+ CAGR and powered by 170 passionate team members across Portland and San Diego.
Then came scale: a majority recap with K1 Capital, mergers with three competitors, and six strategic acquisitions from 2017 to 2020. The result? Over $100M in ARR and a global team of 800+ across seven countries.
Bob’s final move? Acquiring a small prepaid debit card company—and rebranding the entire organization as Emburse, where the business continues to scale today.
Remote Changed the Game—But Not the Equation
Today at OurPeople, Bob is still applying the same formula.
And while the company is fully remote, the culture hasn’t gone quiet.
“You lose all the accidental connection,” he said. “Now it’s a negotiation: when can we meet, how much notice do I need, what’s your availability window?”
But instead of rewriting the formula, Bob reinforced the same two multipliers:
Hiring stayed sharp—gut-driven, values-aligned.
Events got more intentional.
The company maintains a coworking space. They plan regular in-person team gatherings. They still run off-sites. And they treat those moments as infrastructure, not extras.
“The team still feels connected. But only because we’re intentional about creating that.”
This tracks with what I saw post-acquisition at Gainsight. As a remote-first company, they empowered every manager to run off-sites as needed—no permission required. And they hosted an annual, all-company retreat called Cohesion. It worked.
Culture takes contact. And in a remote world, that contact has to be scheduled.
How to Build Your Own Culture Multiplier
Want to apply Bob’s formula? Start here:
Define your “No Negatron” test. It doesn’t have to be formal. But everyone who interviews should know what a red flag feels like—and have permission to say no. Bob’s team did.
Codify your event cadence. Quarterly off-sites. Monthly rituals. Friday happy hours. Don’t overthink it—but don’t skip it. At Certify, it was baked into the calendar.
Spend real money on trust. Treat team gatherings like product launches. Make them a big deal. Celebrate the team. And budget accordingly.
Culture isn’t a vibe. It’s a system.
Built with rigor. Maintained with rhythm.
Multiplied by people who want to show up—not just log in.
Your Move
What’s one multiplier you can commit to this quarter?
Because the teams that scale best?
They don’t leave culture to chance.
Brought to you by:
ExactTempo—The top 1% of leaders send consistent updates that empower their teams. ExactTempo makes it 10x easier, so you can too.
