Some of you may have seen the recent announcement that WorkXO, the company Maddie and I created with Charlie Judy back in late 2015, has recently been acquired by the online survey company, QuestionPro. Several people have asked Maddie and me about our reaction.

Our reaction?! We’re super excited!!!! A company that we helped create just got acquired. How cool is that?!

And even better, Charlie is still running WorkXO as part of QuestionPro, so the Workplace Genome® culture assessment that we continue to use in our consulting is still in place. So practically speaking, for us not much has changed. We still get to use the Genome with our clients like we did before, and we think it’s only going to get better from here.

Maddie and I knew the CEO at QuestionPro before we even created WorkXO, and we have always been a fan. Over the years we have regularly collaborated with Vivek and QuestionPro on webinars and other projects. We think they make a great home for the Genome and WorkXO.

WorkXO was an amazing two years of my life. The path leading to WorkXO was long and winding (see the origin story here), but once we launched, it was a full-steam, drinking-from-a-firehouse, insert-your-overwhelmed-metaphor-here sprint to create a company and an online platform that we could eventually sell. That was new for Maddie and me. We already had a successful consulting business (which continues today in the form of Human Workplaces), but selling a software company was something else. It pushed us, we tried new things, we learned a lot, and we are very proud, of course, of the company we helped create. But you know what one of my biggest lessons was in all of that?

I love consulting.

Building a software company is cool, but it’s not particularly what I want to do. I want to help people see what they couldn’t see before, so they can then do what they need to do. That takes a lot of forms, and a consulting company gives me the space to develop all of them. It lets me do deep work with the client, walking beside them, figuring things out. I love that. And I think Maddie does too. That’s why we’re excited about both where WorkXO is headed AND what we’re building at Human Workplaces.