Gestus will help you grow your company culture into what it wants to be rather than what traditional frameworks claim it should be.
“how are you supporting us?”
Few college classes have stuck with me. But I still remember, like a high definition video in my mind, a windowless basement theater. I’m standing in front of the twelve other students in my directing seminar after presenting a scene, stuttering through an answer to that question.
"How are you supporting us, your audience?" my professor asks.
"I'm giving you a show. It's what you paid your money for," I respond.
My professor laughs. "People don't pay to see the show, they pay to know that the show is there for them."
I loved this professor, but it took me years to understand what he meant.
Through my work in entertainment at Paradigm Talent Agency, FX Networks, independent film companies, and still as a writer and filmmaker, I saw and contributed to the painstaking work that ensures shows are there for audiences. Not just giving people what they want to see, but making sure they can settle in. That the story moves the way it promised it would.
But an audience can only relax into a show if the people making it were held first. You can feel if a production is made under duress. Something goes thin and nobody in the seats can name why the whole thing isn't landing. The care an audience receives is downstream of the care the company received. The feedback I received in that basement began to coalesce.
At ReadySet, as a principal consultant working with Fortune 100 corporations, leading advertising agencies, unicorn tech companies, Broadway shows, and Oscar-winning production companies, "the show being there for them" became "the workplace being there for them." I saw how guiding organizations to take care of their people and stay true to their values ultimately led to their success by many metrics.
But the usual tools to help clients do that didn’t always work for companies like the ones I'd come up in. Standard processes and solutions felt, to them, like being asked to speak a new language. “Best practices” became hurdles and were ultimately ignored. There needed to be another way in.
That's what drives Gestus.
It can be hard to see from inside an organization if daily work has drifted from what the company means to be. It shows up in the decisions, habits, and pressures that tell your people something different from what organizational values mean. Maybe the organization doesn’t even know what its mission or values mean in reality in the first place. Gestus finds that meaning with you, and helps bridge the distance between what you mean and what you actually do, building changes that sustain because they're made from what already motivates the company.
The result is work that's there for the people doing it. That, in turn, makes it possible for what you create to be there for everyone else.
So where do you want to start?
Jesse Turk
Founder
the approach
Every engagement starts with context. This is the deliberate work of understanding how a specific organization currently functions and how its people navigate it. How are decisions made and shared? Where are there areas of friction? How do people handle said friction (or not)?
From there, we build our work together. A partnership might include leadership advisory, strategy development, program design and implementation, custom workshops and facilitation, or communications guidance. What connects all of these pieces is a commitment to solutions that integrate seamlessly into how your organization runs and what energizes your people.
Two guiding principles distinguish this process.
Evidence, applied with judgment. Recommendations draw on well-founded data, established organizational research, and on pattern recognition built from years of engagements. But research produces trends and averages. High-impact, innovative organizations often operate in exceptions. Applying evidence well means knowing which findings will create the change that makes sense for your organization and which will not.
Built for sustainability. Many consulting engagements introduce new structures to optimize efficiency. At companies that run on subjectivity, creative process, and experimentation, that kind of solution tends to wear out. Gestus builds from the cultural cornerstones already motivating the company, so the work can self-sustain and evolve. Examples of this include culture strategies that balance accountability with agility, content evaluation frameworks that match the way the content is made, and workshops that prioritize interactive practice rather than semantic theory.
Gestus clients span entertainment, technology, telecommunications, nonprofit, mental healthcare, and more. Gestus is based in Los Angeles and works with clients everywhere.