How a Sucessful GC Firm Turned Personalities into Culture

By

Katie Boyer

and Taylor Riso

Last Updated Feb 6, 2026

By

Katie Boyer

and Taylor Riso

The culture at Ryan Gootee General Contractors (RGGC), a successful construction firm based in New Orleans, was never something the company had to invent. It was always there. Woven into jobsite conversations, team rituals, and the day-to-day decisions people made without thinking twice. Leadership modeled it, teams embodied it — and results reflected it.

As the company grew, that unspoken culture started to become harder to explain and even harder to teach. Project managers handled tasks their own way. Subcontracts, submittals, and internal processes varied from team to team. New hires had to learn by osmosis because there wasn’t a consistent system to follow. Everyone was reaching the same finish line, but they were taking different routes to get there.

This led to a key question: How could RGGC protect the culture it valued while building a business that could grow beyond the people who founded it?

In this article, we’ll look at how RGGC recognized the limits of personality-driven culture and how they began building the foundation for something stronger and more scalable.

A Strong Culture, But No Playbook

At RGGC, culture showed up in the way people worked together, supported one another, and delivered projects. It wasn’t something that had to be taught, at least until the company scaled.

What had once been intuitive became inconsistent. Project teams were reaching the same goals, but getting there in different ways. Subcontracts were written one way on one job, and another way down the hall. Submittals were managed with varying formats and timelines. Even the language used to describe workflows varied by team.

As new team members joined, RGGC started to see those inconsistencies slow the company down. What had once been second nature now required detailed explanation. The team never wanted to rely on a training manual, but with technology evolving and a new generation of builders entering the workforce, “figuring it out” was no longer an option.

Everyone did things just differently enough to be confusing for trainees. We were all meeting the same expectations and delivering expected outcomes, but the lack of process consistency made it harder to train new team members and slower to onboard experienced ones. Our values were real, and our culture was strong, but  our processes were varied. And that made it hard to explain, teach, or protect as we grew.

Katie Boyer

Director of Operational Excellence

RGGC

For those who had been with the company a long time, the culture felt obvious: processes were based on the culture and core values.  

RGGC’s culture had always been a strength. However, the systems behind it had grown organically, shaped by the autonomy each team member had to work in their own way. For newer hires, that meant a culture that was deeply felt but not always clearly documented.

When the Culture Gap Became Clear

For years, RGGC’s culture was closely tied to its founders. Ryan Gootee, Michael DeGruy, and David Barbier set the tone through their values, their work ethic, and the way they showed up for the team. It worked because they were in the room.

But as the company grew, Ryan, Michael, and David weren’t in every room or running projects anymore. They had built a talented team, but how could they empower them to carry the culture and same level of high expectations?  

That question came into sharp focus during Procore’s Culture Academy. Director of Operational Excellence Katie Boyer and Michael DeGruy attended together, looking for leadership tools to bring back to their business.

They left with key cultural strategies, "chief repeating officers," and clarity on their core values. They realized culture must live within the entire organization, not just within the people who built it.

That kind of culture works until it doesn’t. If the company’s identity depended on individual personalities, it couldn’t outlast them. That was the wake-up call. To protect what made RGGC special, the team needed to shift from relying on instinct to building intentional systems. 

From Personality to System: Naming the Gap

Back at the office, the question raised during Culture Academy stayed front and center: How do we make sure our culture and core values thrive across every project and team when founders aren’t in the room? 

For a long time, their leadership and founding members had been enough to carry the culture. People learned how to lead by watching them work, but couldn’t articulate it on their own. That kind of culture depends on proximity. 

To future-proof the culture, founding members needed to educate their team members on the origin of the culture. New team members needed to understand the foundation before they could approach systems and processes.

Culture was living in the atmosphere, but explaining how our processes are rooted in the core values bridged the gap between feeling and standards. Culture could live in the business itself, documented, reinforced, and taught like any other operational system.

The shift wasn’t about creating something new. It was about giving structure to what was already there: naming the behaviors, values, and expectations that had always defined RGGC, and building the systems to carry them forward.

Stay updated on what’s happening in construction.

Subscribe to Blueprint, Procore’s free construction newsletter, to get content from industry experts delivered straight to your inbox.

Subscribe

Building a Culture That Lasts

Culture exists whether it’s named or not. For RGGC, the shift came when they realized that the very thing that made their company special, the strength of their relationships and values, could also limit them if it stayed informal.

By putting words to what had always been intuitive, they created something they could teach, reinforce and grow. Not a new culture, but a shared one that was clear enough to scale and strong enough to last.

Written by

Katie Boyer

Director of Operational Excellence | RGGC

Katie Boyer is the Director of Operational Excellence with a distinguished background in project management and a proven track record of delivering successful construction projects. In her current role, Katie drives organizational performance by coaching team members to reach their highest potential, implementing best practices, and ensuring the company’s core values are embodied in every aspect of operations. Her comprehensive approach to excellence bridges internal processes and external deliverables, creating a culture of continuous improvement that translates directly to superior client outcomes and sustainable growth. Katie’s unique blend of technical expertise and leadership skills enables her to transform operational challenges into opportunities for innovation and team development. A New Orleans native and LSU graduate, Katie carries her love of learning into everything she does. Outside the office, she embraces new challenges through new recipes and various DIY project. If she hit the lottery, you’d find Katie on the ski slopes every day listening to good music and chasing fresh powder with her husband.

View profile

Taylor Riso

Contributing Writer

93 articles

Taylor Riso is a marketing professional with more than 10 years of experience in the construction industry. Skilled in content development and marketing strategies, she leverages her diverse experience to help professionals in the built environment. She currently resides in Portland, Oregon.

View profile