Elizabeth Shea talks with Houston Goodwin, CEO of Better Impact, about a different approach to growth: entrepreneurship through acquisition. Houston shares how he stepped into Better Impact through a private equity partnership and led the strategic acquisition of Galaxy Digital to expand the company’s impact in the volunteer management space. He walks through the realities of the acquisition process from diligence to integration, emphasizing the value of operational readiness, cultural alignment, and clear communication. Houston also discusses how the two companies built a “better together” strategy rooted in shared mission and values. This episode is for operators and founders exploring acquisition as a path to growth and what it takes to execute it successfully.
Connect with Houston on LinkedIn here.
Elizabeth Shea (00:43)
Hello everybody and welcome to our latest episode of Branching Out. We are very excited to have Houston Goodwin in our office today. Hello Houston, how are you today?
Houston Goodwin (00:52)
I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me.
Elizabeth Shea (00:54)
Yes, we're very excited to hear your story. Houston comes to us as the CEO of Better Impact, a company in town that recently had an acquisition of a company called Galaxy Digital.
Houston Goodwin (01:06)
Yeah, absolutely. Happy to start by giving you a little background on myself and how I got involved with Better Impact and then our recent acquisition of Galaxy Digital that just happened earlier this year.
Elizabeth Shea (01:17)
Yeah, I think that would be great. So, please take us back to where this all began.
Houston Goodwin (01:21)
Absolutely. My journey in software started with Constellation Software which is one of the number one acquirers of vertical market software in the world. So, I got my hands in the operator seat early on in my career and was able to run a portfolio company owned by Constellation and got exposed to the operational excellence of companies as well as started my exposure to M&A. Constellation is always looking to buy companies. So, I was able to do that for a while and did that alongside my college roommate and really good friend who lives in the same city as I. We had worked together on and off for several years and several different roles. He had moved on to a publicly traded fintech company.
We found ourselves at a point in our career where we'd done some startups, we'd done some side hustles. But what we really both fell in love with is just operating good businesses. What we discovered is that neither of us really were the “zero-to-one journey” people. We had done a couple of startups and “zero-to-one” takes a different personality in a different skillset than scaling even one-to-five or five-to-ten, et cetera.
So, through my career, I learned about a concept called entrepreneurship through acquisition. Instead of starting a company, you go buy an established company. Maybe three years ago or so, we explored this and ended up partnering with a private equity group called the Brighton Group and spend about a year looking at companies. We were really looking for companies that one: fit our skill set and two) we felt was good quality of life for us as well.
So, we focused in a sector that we really had a personal interest in and cared about to dedicate a large portion of our time and lives to. The current operating model and the group and the culture was just a really good fit for us. We found that with Better Impact. It was really great. I stepped in as CEO in November of 2024. So, right about a year and a half ago.
Better Impact is a volunteer management system. Its mission was to help unlock the potential of volunteerism. We had clients — everything from large hospital systems and governments and city parks, all the way down to very small volunteer nonprofits with only one or two employees. Our goal was to come alongside the people managing those volunteers and provide them with software and solutions to help them recruit and engage and retain their volunteers. On that journey, obviously we're casting a little bit of vision of where we want to go. It's such a great industry with such great people.
We found that one thing it was missing was really some benchmarking and some data just kind of consolidating it. At Better Impact, we were tracking hundreds of millions of hours across multiple sectors for volunteerism. It became apparent quite quickly that there were a few other people in this space that overlapped us in some ways as competitors. But I always come from an abundance mindset. It was really other people alongside us that were kind of trying to accomplish the same cause. After reaching out and talking to some people, we thought, is there anyone where we would be better together? Could it be one of those things where one plus one equals five? Where coming together we have a little better scale, a little more professionalization, shared resources, and shared data to really make the biggest impact possible in such an awesome industry that really deserves the best foot forward from a software perspective.
I'm based in North Carolina. We had a company that was also based in North Carolina. That was the competitor of ours that I connected with maybe eight months ago called Galaxy Digital. I started a conversation with their CEO and then their board. And as these things go, there's a million reasons to say no. You start out with an intro conversation to see like, “hey, here's kind of where we're headed. Are you all kind of headed in the same direction?” Does it even make sense to continue to the next step to see if there's any interest in us joining forces and what that would look like over the process of call it eight months?
We really worked and did our diligence, and we finished the transaction in January of this year. So, we're about 90 days in post-transaction. And yeah, we're just really excited to be here. Really excited for what it means for our market. Like we don't have a role of strategy or like a big acquisition play, but we just felt like this just makes sense. We fit together; we play to each other's strengths. We have complementary products and we're trying to accomplish the same mission. So, we felt that was a very special pairing. We're really excited for our clients, our employees, and the market at large for what this means for them moving forward this year and into the next years.
Elizabeth Shea (05:43)
That's great. So, you're better together, right? I love it. I love it. I mean, I think that's typically a goal for lot of companies that are looking to acquire other firms. What was the reaction from Galaxy Digital at first? Was there any apprehension or was it, “hey, this might be a really good fit for us?” Not that you need to speak for them, but what do you think it meant for them? The same thing?
Houston Goodwin (05:45)
Yes, I think it's always exciting. I always say like the optimism is easy. You got to be pessimistic a little bit to see like where things could go wrong or what are we not asking? It's a long process to get a deal across the finish line and a lot of diligence and a lot of work. That's why I go to like the mission and the real belief of like, okay, is the juice worth the squeeze? If we get to the other side of this, are we really going to be better together?
We are definitely in a more social good focused sector where like we really are focused — not that other companies aren't focused on their clients — but we really are focused on the impact that we're bringing to a lot of these nonprofits that we partner with and hospitals and governments that are really empowering volunteers to make an impact on their community. Both companies just believe so much in moving service forward and how important services for like social connections and community cohesion. So, I think at the start, it was very important for us that we were kind of aligned all collectively together on the excitement of what could happen if it worked out. And then that overcomes a lot of the hurdles of diligence and what could be seen as things that are painful or things that aren't as fun to go through, et cetera.
Elizabeth Shea (07:15)
Right, right. It's not always fun, but at the end of the day, you can pop some champagne or something, right? So just tell us about the process. How long did the process take from start to finish, from when you first started looking around to when you finally made the acquisition happen and closed the deal?
Houston Goodwin (07:20)
I would say probably like seven, eight months from like initial like first serious conversation where I was like, “hey, is this something worth pursuing” to getting to the closing call.
Elizabeth Shea (07:45)
Okay, so for other companies that are out there that might be looking to make an acquisition or to “grow better together,” if you will . . . is there any advice you can give to them or any things that they should look out for or really lean in on in terms of their own diligence process?
Houston Goodwin (07:57)
Obviously, I wouldn't consider myself an expert in that space. But I can tell you what's worked for us and worked for me and my personal experience. One thing that I learned early on in Constellation is the importance of operational excellence within the company that you're a part of. We could have gotten over our skis a bit with an acquisition where it's exciting or there's a lot of excitement around that idea. But if we really invested during that full eight months, like we made sure we did not take our eye off the ball for improving and getting our internal systems and our internal operations and our internal playbooks to an excellent level as fast as possible.
And what that does is that just allows like this first 90 days to be really awesome. Like meeting the teams, integrating the two teams, getting everyone connected, kind of picking the best of both worlds. So, I think the number one thing for me to give as general advice for others is make sure like your house is in order, before you make any additions . . . because it seems really fun, but there's just so much that can get in your way or get distracted where you actually aren't better together because you can't give people clear direction to get everyone rowing in the same direction, which is such a powerful effect of two good teams integrating well.
And certainly, we've experienced our bumps in the roads and aren't perfect, but the first thing we wanted to make sure of was that we were a company that was ready to take on a task like this for the market. And if we didn't internally focus very heavily on our systems and processes and SOPs and how we were operating as a business, I think it could have been much less smooth or maybe like certainly just not gotten across the finish line at all.
Elizabeth Shea (09:37)
Right. The transaction is important, but it’s crucial to make sure that it works afterwards and that it's a smooth transition. Can you talk a little bit about the cultural aspect of it? How did you align the cultures within the two organizations, or are you in the process of doing that now?
Houston Goodwin (09:53)
Yeah, certainly it's an evolving process. One thing that's so great about this industry specifically is that many people are in it for the right reasons. Everyone's trying to tackle the same problem from different lanes. So, one thing that made this integration easier is that we're both hyper aware of what the problem we're trying to solve is. And we're both hyper aware of the goals that we're trying to accomplish. This is one of the reasons that we’ve said that better together is kind of something that we’ve really anchored in on.
Now it's both companies can do things better and at a different scale and at a different speed than they could have by themselves. And so that's where a lot of the cultural transformation is happening. It’s less about “this was the direction we were going and now we've pivoted to this direction.” It's more, “this is the direction we were going and now we're jumping ahead four years because we're together and we have economies of scale from like vendor relationships, team size, data and customer size, et cetera.”
There's, challenges that come up with that, but overall, I think that it's gone really, really well. Part of that is just because we have a lot of people who really want to see our clients succeed. They really want to make an impact in the sector. We talked with our executive team through this process and was like . . . we're very value focused. One of our values was volunteers first. Like we always want to have the volunteers in mind. And we don't want to do anything that's competing with our values, even if it seems like a good idea.
So, fairly early on when the conversation started getting serious where this could be a real thing . . . you have to balance, you don't want to distract the team because there's always a million opportunities that don't turn into anything. But we brought this to the team to say, “do we feel like this matches our values? Are we keeping volunteers first? Are we doing the right thing for the industry by diverting some time and attention to the binding of these two companies?” We felt that was an overwhelming “yes!” I believe that the Galaxy team did as well. We got those conversations out early and that's led to a pretty fun 90 days post-transaction.
Elizabeth Shea (11:55)
Yeah, that first days are always a lot of fun, right? You know, getting to know new people and expanding your services potentially to your client base. Can you talk a little bit about your client base and how the news was perceived? Did you do anything unique there? How did you communicate this change and this opportunity?
Houston Goodwin (12:11)
We tried to do as many small group cohorts of people or one-on-one conversations as possible, but we have too many clients to accomplish that. So, we put a lot of thought into the press release and how we went to market live with this. The number one message we wanted to get to our clients, which is really important is that we were not sunsetting any products. We wanted to communicate to clients that there would be no disruptions to service, like nothing material will change for you as an effect of this, we just want things to get better and things to come out faster and you'd have more opportunities with us as a company.
So that made it a little easier. I think if we bought a company as a book of business and we are migrating all of the customers from their system to our system, that would be a whole other level of customer comms and care. But overall, it was nice because all the message was positive. It was just, “we have more resources to expend to serve you. We have more resources to expend to make our product better.” The product that you're on is staying around.”
I probably met with 200 customers the week leading up to the announcement in a mix of like small groups and one-on-ones. Part of that helps us with the messaging as well. Like you stumble across the messaging the first time, so you pick your customers that are really bought in who will give you a little grace. So that way, by the game day when you're going live to the market, you’ve practiced a little bit and have been able to see what wasn't clear. So, it's not really changing. It's just making sure we're saying things clearly and we're addressing what's top of mind for those customers. Overall, it was received super well. Most of our customers are really excited.
The good news is Better Impact and Galaxy Digital both have been in the market 20 years each. They've been around for a while, so they've got a lot of brand reputation. That really helped as well. Like, you know, get a little social capital from the market to say, “hey, the founders thought this was a good idea. We think this is a good idea. This is what our customers are saying. We're not making any bad changes. We're listening to you. We're hopping on calls.”
We also just had a great team that was scanning the first couple of days for chatter, whether there was like a confusing post. If a question came in, I took all of the calls, which wasn't a lot. I just picked up the phone and called the clients. I had a certain amount that I was going to be able to do with my calendar and then we would’ve passed it to the next, but we ended up not having that many questions. We did a pretty good job.
We had tight messaging and all the clients, once we got them on the phone, were super receptive and understood that we were just trying to support them better. And this is part of it. At the heart of this for us, we want them to be taken seriously and their careers to be taken seriously. And most people, myself included are generally unaware. . . I'm no longer unaware, but pre- me joining the industry . . . of how critical volunteers are for our communities. Like volunteers are utilizing everything. They're a third of the nonprofit workforce.
I would say the general population is not aware of how many parts of their communities are literally held up by volunteers and how little resources they have. Part of our mission is to go fight and get them properly allocated with resources and provide software that helps them get things like industry standards, benchmarking tools to help them do their job, and tell their story as well as possible.
Elizabeth Shea (15:34)
Hats off to you. I think that's amazing. You have two companies that can come together like that and serve a greater purpose. When you talk to your employees, how was that message received? It seems like you were really able to hone in on what your messaging needed to be to the market and reiterate that. did you go about telling your employees?
Houston Goodwin (15:54)
We approached it very similarly . . . like, keep the circle tight in early stages, obviously, because there's confidentiality. Also, we didn’t want to create distractions for people. But as we got closer, we started letting people know who specifically were going to be on the newly formed leadership team, because we really operate as one team. One team, one platform, one culture. So this wasn't like bolt-on or like, “okay, so we have our ‘Galaxy’ folks and our ‘Better Impact’ folks — we're all Better Impact employees. We sunsetted the name Galaxy Digital, but we kept the product names for the customers. It was really fun. We had all hands like the day after close and it was twice the amount of employees that were on either all hands before, because we were about equal size as far as employee count goes.
And we're just trying to over-communicate. Right now we're doing a weekly newsletter. We do a weekly lunch-and-learn on Fridays where different people are sharing different parts of the company. We're doing monthly all hands. We're just trying to give people as many avenues as possible to reach out, connect, and specifically be in virtual. We have employees all over and our support is 24 hours, five days a week. So, we follow the sun. We have a big base in Australia and the UK. Time zones make a challenge, but just making intentional efforts to get on with the Australian staff or the UK is much easier for this.
We're in the East coast. So, it's fairly large overlap for us, but yeah, a lot of intentionality, a lot of bumps in the road. We always say, just come from curiosity. So, assume good intent when we make a decision that we didn't know how it affects you. And if it's not the best decision in every respect, assume that we weren't intentionally trying to do something wrong and let us know and we're open to feedback. I would say: firm opinions loosely held Like when you make an act, have a strong opinion on it, but hold it loosely. So, if you get presented with new facts, you're easy to let go and make a change.
I think for our employees for the most part on both sides, cultures are very similar. So very bought into the mission. Almost all of our customer support staff were users of our products in a nonprofit as a volunteer coordinator that we hired on board to be a member of our team. So, that drives really well with the industry and the culture.
Elizabeth Shea (17:59)
That's excellent. I mean, it sounds like you're the poster child for how things should go well!
Houston Goodwin (18:12)
It's a lot of hard work and there are bumps in the road. But I think that what you focus on expands. So, if you're focusing on what's worth it . . . it's like “man, what an opportunity to create value for us and the customers in the company, because we know that this can be done better. It's not being done as good as it could be. So, let's just do it better. It's going to be so good for us. It's going to be so good for our clients.” I think for us is just keeping that mindset. It is not all rainbows. It is not always fun and easy, but it is important, to keep on the prize of why we're doing this and why the juice is worth the squeeze. That overcomes a lot of the tougher circumstances, for sure.
Elizabeth Shea (18:51)
Right. So, I've heard you say: have your systems in place, have them really buttoned up ahead of time, over communicate, look to be better together, have transparency and openness when you were asked certain questions from either clients or employees. Those are all very good sound pieces of advice to be thinking about probably on either side, if you're being acquired or if you're going to be acquiring another company.
What are some gotchas that you might not have anticipated, or were there any?
Houston Goodwin (19:20)
We put a lot of work into diligence. I would say nothing has come up for either company that was not on our radar. Nothing was out of left field where we didn't expect it, like a big problem that we didn't catch. I think sometimes it’s just when you get into the seat and you're operating a lot of things that you thought were a six out of ten, or now a seven out of ten, or you thought it was a nine out of ten. An instance where something was high on the radar, but you get in and it's like really an eleven out of ten where it's even more crucial or the problem needs to be fixed even faster.
So I would just say it's like a heightened awareness of all the work that you put in diligence, but yeah, that's why I'm really thankful to have partnered with a good private equity group that really helped us with the diligence to make sure that — thankfully for the two acquisitions — there really hasn't been anything we’ve been blindsided with. And Constellation’s playbook is very simple. Like what's your gross retention? What's your net retention? It depends on what you're looking to buy and all that. But as long as you have a mission critical piece of software, that overcomes a lot, right?
I've worked for companies that fall on the line of very nice to have but not mission critical at all. So, they could cancel it anytime. And it really did not impact their business in any way. Like that's much tougher than the mission criticality of — this is a vital piece of software for us to run our day-to-day operations. It gets you a lot of grace where it's like, our customers want us to win, which is so great. And so we want to win for them. Even if something pops up and there's a bump in the road and we get on the phone with them, it's coming from a place of like, we want you to win, we want you to do well, because that's going to help our organization, it's going to help our mission. And our software is a reflection of them to their community.
So that's something that like . . . we're very upfront. We take that very seriously. But that's also really helpful, right? Like if you're in other industries where it's not as mission critical, there's a lot more gotcha moments, I think, because it's just easier for customers to churn.
Elizabeth Shea (21:02)
Right. You can see the vision in the mission that you have, which I think is great because the more critical you are to the marketplace, the more valuable you could potentially be. So, you mentioned a couple of things like recurring revenue. What other things really stood out that are important to you when making this decision?
Houston Goodwin (21:32)
Not to keep it at the service level, but life's too short to get in business with like bad people. Everything on paper can look good, but the people may not be people you want to be in business with. I think that where it comes down is like, do we trust the person on the other side of the table? Do we trust that we both have our interests aligned? That just makes everything in the diligence process go smoother. It makes everything post-acquisition go smoother.
I haven't personally experienced this, but I've been around people where it's like, if you go play golf with someone and they cheat, it becomes harder and harder to assume good intent when you believe maybe they're the type of person that would do something in malice to purposely hurt you. So, I think the most important thing for me is, let's get in business with good people and we can make the rest work.
So that was something that was really important for us for both. Luckily, like I said, in the sector that we're in, it’s easy to find people that are aligned for a really important mission and are actually serious about that. It’s harder, I think, in some industries than others. But in our industry, I think it's at the forefront for at least the two companies that we brought together. That makes it a lot easier for sure.
Elizabeth Shea (22:40)
Right, well, sounds like you're doing some great things. So many people that I have talked to in the past just haven't really done that part of the due diligence to make sure that there is a culture fit, that there's alignment in mission and values. So, tell me Houston, what's next for you? What's next for you in your “better together” days?
Houston Goodwin (23:01)
Yeah, we're really excited to now have an ecosystem. We're like the only purpose-built platform for the volunteerism industry. We're really excited for some of the stuff that we've working on. We have over 85,000 organizations that touch our software in one way or another to help with either posting volunteer opportunities or managing their volunteer force. We take the responsibility of integration really seriously for our customers. That's something that we're being very open about.
But we want to make sure that we're integrating the two companies well together from a cultural perspective, and then also the systems and the platforms together. You hear a lot of horror stories of people like ‘Frankenstein’ the companies together and they don't talk together, work together, and it's not a value to the customer, it's just a value to the top line. We wanted to make sure that was not the reason for us bringing Galaxy into the fold with Better Impacts.
We want to be able to bring the best service to our clients. Part of that was scaling so we can have enough data to bring some of these benchmarks and create this ecosystem to make a frictionless experience for people who want to get plugged into their communities through volunteerism. This has been our number one focus for at least this year — integrating the teams, integrating the systems, and increasing the speed to which we put products to market that actually creates solutions to real problems that our clients have.
We're trying to navigate this obviously alongside the AI search for every day. I spend my nights when my son goes to bed reading the latest on how people are using Claude or different AI models. There's responsibility for that. We're, ISO27001 compliant. So, we take security super seriously. We don't want to just say AI as a hype word and it brings no value. But we're constantly looking at how can we increase the speed to which we bring products to market. How can we increase the speed to which we answer questions and do bug fixes or do help desk work or solve tickets.
So part of our integration strategy is, how do we as a SaaS company live in this AI-being-actually-useful world? Cause no one knows the landscape right now. Everything's changed. It's moving sand under your feet. So, we're trying to make sure we remain small and agile enough to stay on top of that. And again, it all just flows through to our mission of like, we're doing this because this is what we're trying to do. Someone asked me my posture on AI and I was like, “we're trying to impact communities and move service forward. In as much as AI could help us do that faster, like we're for it. And if it's a distraction, then we're going to pass.” That's kind how we look at everything.
Elizabeth Shea (25:36)
So true, so true. Just curious how you melded your leadership teams together? I assume you have a bigger leadership team now.
Houston Goodwin (25:47)
We run something called EOS, which is the entrepreneurial operating system. That I've done at companies for a long time. Part of that, you build the seats first before you — so don't build like the seats around the people that you have, you build the seats that the company needs. So early on pre-close, we got together with a couple of people from our team, a couple of people from the other team. And we made that model. We discovered like one area we wanted to hire for. So we just brought on a VP of customer experience that came on right at the acquisition close. She's fantastic. The CEO of Galaxy Digital stayed on as our CRO. His background was kind of go-to-market. So, he's still actively involved. And myself and my business partner that I mentioned that went in on this, his background was product. So, he's the president of the company but really stepped into the CPO role really to help speed up products.
It was very serendipitous. Like, we just had really strong teams where they needed some help, and they had really strong teams where we needed some help. It wasn't a lot of hurt feelings. And they both had similar titles! So, we were very fortunate with a lot of it. It was just more specialized roles, but not a ton of overlap. And so that that worked out well.
Elizabeth Shea (26:56)
I love that. Excellent. So how can people find you? Is it betterimpact.com?
Houston Goodwin (27:02)
Yeah, betterimpact.com is our website. My name is fairly unique and I'm on LinkedIn and stay pretty active on there as well. So, I'd love to connect.
Elizabeth Shea (27:10)
You probably have good search engine optimization on your name, right? Excellent! Well, thank you so much. It's been a delight having you on the show, and I appreciate it. I wish the best of your better together.
Houston Goodwin (27:13)
Thank you so much.