GamEffective’s Six Year Journey to Become Centrical

Gal Rimon shares in this post the realization and process to rebrand the company he founded in 2013 and still leads. He also offers the market-driven rationale behind the shift from GamEffective to Centrical and how it better positions the company for future growth as well as the future needs of its current customers and those organizations that will benefit from working with Centrical.

By: Gal Rimon, Founder & CEO, Centrical

GamEffective’s Six Year Journey to Become Centrical

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Anyone who’s been involved in creating a company knows about the process to name it, to create its brand. In a manner of speaking, it’s like naming a to-be-born child. It’s exciting. It’s filled with expectation and anticipation.

Now consider rebranding a six year-old company. As a process, it’s akin to changing the name of your six year-old daughter. It’s not simple, nor easy. Imagine your sweet little girl morphing into a headache-inducing obstructionist always hollering “why does this even need to happen?!”.

You shouldn’t change the name of a six year-old girl. But you can with a company name. Especially if there are compelling, market-based, reasons for it. And that was the case for the company I founded and still lead. My baby, so to speak, was born in 2013 as GamEffective, a reflection of our focus at the time, gamification. Six years later, things have changed; in particular, our value proposition.

Creating a new brand name with a new brand promise isn’t for the faint of heart. To successfully reach the end of that journey expect a few emotional roller coaster rides and plenty of intellectual gymnastics. Let me emphasize, it can’t be a vanity project. It needs to be about your employees, partners, investors and, of course, customers. Because they’re the ones that got you to where you are.

Before launching the company, I had been heavily involved in Business Intelligence (BI). It’s a great way to gain deep insight into how a company is doing, where the performance gaps are, and more. It also lets managers know how employees are doing. Interestingly, it was difficult to turn those insights into action, where it mattered most, at the individual employee level.

It occured to me that since employees were the ones doing the work, it made sense to place them at the center of a process that improves their performance on a continuous basis. That realization motivated me to form a company dedicated to engagement and employee performance.

Our initial effort centered on showing employees how they were performing and then, using gamification, motivate them to try and do more. In the course of working on more complex challenges we saw the need to add more functionality to our platform — microlearning, ways to better manage employee performance as well as more tightly align employees’ KPIs with company goals. We found that when these elements are holistically blended, they simply worked better together than as stand-alone pieces.

As our platform — and the programs we worked on — evolved, I had another realization: the company needed a new brand name that better represented what we had become — a platform that empowers employees to do their best work.

In working with customers, which includes many of the world’s great companies, we were hearing of the challenges to engage their workforce on a sustained basis, to learn in an individualized way, and understand and reach employees’ goals.

We found that for companies to meet those and other challenges they needed to make employees the center of their business success. And that’s why I changed my six year-old business’ name to Centrical. To represent more to the businesses we serve and be more relevant to the ones that should work with us.

So what’s Centrical? It’s the next-generation employee engagement and performance platform. It reflects our firm belief that for any company to improve employee performance it must use the three core elements of our platform holistically. Advanced gamification, our way to produce engagement on a sustained basis. Personalized microlearning, an in-the-flow-of-work approach that recognizes each employee needs to learn different things and in different ways. And, real-time performance management that lets employees know where they are tracking against their KPIs in the moment so their next actions can yield better results, and where manager-employee meetings become coaching not catch-up sessions.

Each element influences the other to create an ongoing process of performance improvement as well as a culture of continuous learning. It means with Centrical, companies will see better motivation, better learning, and better feedback. Because they simply work better together.

And better together is how Centrical works with customers. We help them understand what motivates their employees and then design a program, based on proven methodologies and best practices, to build and maintain engagement over time, advise on how to create learning content that gets better adoption and retention by making it fun, bite-sized, and personalized to what matters most.

We’ve also found that when employees embrace the challenge of excellence, understand their goals and how to achieve them, they feel better connected to the larger whole that is their organization. They become better together with their employers. And are more likely to be the center of their companies’ business success.

That’s why my company is now named Centrical.

To learn more about how Centrical is better, click here.