At Phillips Home Improvements, the ideas were easy. The meeting ended, the quarter began, and follow-through faded. The company already used objectives and key results, or OKRs. It tried online systems, then settled on Google spreadsheets. The missing ingredient was visibility: a way to see whether yesterday’s good intentions had survived today’s work.
- Profit.co connects measurable goals, employee reviews and project delivery.
- Its useful trick: bring progress back into the weekly conversation.
- Copy the customer playbook: pilot with a small group, train people, then expand.
That is a surprisingly ordinary beginning for a software story. Nobody needed another place to put a goal. They needed a reason, and a routine, to look at it again. Profit.co has built a business around that distinction.
The quarter has a memory problem
An objective describes where a team wants to go. Key results provide measurable evidence that it is getting there. “Improve customer service” is an intention; reducing response time gives that intention a test. A task, meanwhile, records work someone plans to do. Finishing the task and improving the result are different events.
Profit.co puts those relationships in one system. Managers can align department goals with company priorities, assign owners, update results and inspect dashboards. Tasks and projects connect the work to the outcome. The practical question becomes: which activities are moving the number, and which are merely keeping everyone occupied?
At Phillips, CRM integration and predefined KPIs helped reduce the effort of assembling numbers. CEO Jason Phillips also used tags to filter the information he needed. The change was small enough to describe without a transformation slogan: the leadership team could return to its goals every week, with progress visible.
“The beautiful thing about Profit.co is it comes right back in once a week at our leadership meeting”
Jason Phillips, CEO, Phillips Home Improvements
A factory floor idea, translated into software
Founder and CEO Bastin Gerald’s background helps explain the emphasis on execution. His published biography describes an early career in automotive process consulting, followed by engineering leadership roles at Oracle and CashEdge. The biography also lists a Wharton MBA. This is a company shaped by business processes as much as software interfaces.
Profit.co emerged in 2018. Its ambition has expanded beyond OKRs into a broader strategy execution platform. Alongside goal management, it offers balanced scorecards and Hoshin Kanri, a planning method that connects longer-term priorities with organizational work. Different management languages can therefore sit inside the same product family.
There is an appealing literalness to the name. The company says it chose “Profit” as a measure of business health. Yet its software spends much of its time on the less tidy activities behind that outcome: planning, checking, reviewing and getting departments to understand one another.
Three connected conversations
The present product sits at the intersection of strategy software, HR software and project management. Its performance tools cover reviews, feedback, calibration and development plans. Its project portfolio tools address delivery, budgets and resources. Employee recognition, surveys and meetings add ways to hear from the people doing the work.
One recurring connection: the check-in.
This breadth supplies its competitive argument. WorkBoard is an alternative in strategy execution; Lattice and 15Five compete for performance management attention. Profit.co’s proposition is that organizations benefit when those conversations share context. A buyer looking only for a lightweight task list may have little need for the wider system.
The customer range supports that positioning. Published stories include REHAU Americas, Tata Elxsi and Phillips Home Improvements. The company reports serving more than 1,500 organizations across more than 70 countries. These are vendor-reported figures, useful for understanding reach rather than predicting what any particular deployment will deliver.
The price includes a habit
Profit.co sells subscriptions, with pricing shaped by users and selected products. Its current pricing page offers a 30-day trial and directs buyers toward a quote rather than publishing a dollar subscription rate. Enterprise options include data residency, dedicated infrastructure, audit logs and identity management.
Training is more visibly priced. Its certification page lists a three-hour practitioner program at $299, a six-hour leaders program at $499 and a nine-hour champions program at $699. Through its OKRmentors relationship, Profit.co delivers training tied to accredited certification. The service exists because software adoption includes learning a management practice.
Capital helped expand that business. In January 2023, Profit.co announced $11 million in financing led by Elevation Capital. Contemporary reporting described $9 million of equity and the balance as bank debt, with the financing closed in August 2022. Treating the full announcement as equity would miss a useful detail about how the company funded growth.
Athena still needs something true to read
The newer layer is Athena, Profit.co’s collection of AI agents. Its advertised functions include drafting OKRs, scoring their quality, summarizing check-ins and preparing project reports. The promise is less blank-page work and faster access to information already recorded in the system. That makes the quality of those records consequential.
REHAU’s account supplies the necessary human counterweight. Initial reactions to adoption were mixed. The rollout included management support, an OKR consultant, an intranet resource page and departmental conversations with an internal champion. After three quarters, the customer reported habits beginning to form. The screen was only part of the intervention. A useful rollout therefore needs time on calendars as well as access to accounts. Someone has to explain what a good key result looks like, answer questions and help departments agree on how their work fits together.
Phillips chose a smaller opening: run a pilot group for a quarter, let people become familiar with the cadence, then bring in the next level. That is the transferable lesson. Pick a meaningful outcome, name an owner, and review evidence regularly. Without honest updates and leaders willing to change course, even a beautifully arranged dashboard becomes another place for the quarter to disappear.