Troon is the world's leading golf and golf-related hospitality management company, operating hundreds of locations across the globe. From its founding, Troon built its reputation on a culture of service — a belief that people with a genuine service orientation, aligned to the company's values, are what separates a well-run facility from an exceptional one. That culture served as a competitive advantage for years. But sustained growth through acquisition introduced a familiar challenge: every new company that joined Troon brought its own norms, habits, and performance expectations. Culture no longer happened organically; it had to be actively managed.
"If you grow — whether organically or inorganically, meaning buying things — the culture can get diluted."
— Tim Schantz, President & CEO, Troon
Today, Troon is PE-backed, operating under the same performance expectations that come with institutional ownership: disciplined execution, clear accountability, and measurable improvement across every portco under management. The question Tim Schantz faced was how to maintain the culture that drove Troon's success while scaling at the pace a PE timeline demands.
Troon was already running the standard toolkit: annual performance reviews, nine-box talent assessments, and broad employee engagement surveys. Each had value; none had teeth.
The annual review was backward-looking and slow. The nine-box produced results that were shaped as much by relationship dynamics and personal advocacy as by actual performance.
Leaders in the room fought for their people, argued over placement, and produced outcomes that were — in Tim's words — "a little bit colored." The survey told him people felt under- resourced, but not who was causing it or where it was happening.
More fundamentally: none of these tools could tell Tim how his culture was actually traveling. In a company growing by acquisition, with 35,000 associates across hundreds of locations, he had no reliable signal for whether the values Troon was built on were being lived — or whether the people driving performance were the ones he thought they were.
"I've never been a real fan of the traditional review process. I feel like that process doesn't always answer all the questions you're looking to answer, and it doesn't happen in real time."
— Tim Schantz
Troon launched Incompass across its top 200 corporate employees — senior directors and above, through the officer group. Tim ran it in parallel with the Gallup engagement survey and the nine-box talent review, intentionally keeping the three tools separate. No one in the nine-box room had access to Incompass results. The outputs were compared only after each process ran independently.
Tim and his CHRO reviewed the Incompass results separately, creating an aggregate ranking across five assessed behaviors. When the nine-box review came back, Tim used Incompass as a calibration check — holding the two outputs up against each other to see where they agreed, and where they diverged.
The correlation was, in Tim's words, "uncanny."
Every person placed in the lowest nine-box category appeared in the bottom 10% on Incompass. Every person in the top tier of the nine-box was in the top 20% on Incompass — including the 25 people Tim had privately identified as the organization's best performers going in. The tool confirmed not just who was performing, but how broadly they were regarded across the organization, regardless of function or reporting line.
"Every time — every single time — the people that were in the least positive box were at the lowest level in Incompass. To have a non-biased tool that correlated exactly with what could be a more biased situation... it really opened my eyes."
— Tim Schantz
In the nine-box room, there were arguments. People were defended. Placements shifted based on who was in the room and how vocal they were. The bottom-performers who were ultimately placed correctly got there only after "a lot of give and take and a lot of angst." Tim's question — whether some of those people might have been moved up the grid without the Incompass data as backup — was direct: yes.
Among the most actionable findings: the gap between how individuals rated themselves and how their peers and managers rated them. Top performers consistently rated themselves lower than others rated them. The reverse — employees who rated themselves highly while peers and managers rated them poorly — correlated directly with underperformance. That gap became a leading indicator Tim hadn't had before.
The data surfaced something unexpected: how much someone participated — both in giving and receiving reviews — was itself a performance indicator. Top performers gave the most reviews and received the most. Underperformers gave few or none, and often avoided the tool entirely. Participation wasn't just a compliance metric. It was a window into organizational engagement.
A recurring theme in Tim's experience: the value of seeing how people showed up outside their own teams. The traditional review captures performance within a reporting line. Incompass captured how people were experienced across the organization — what Tim described as the difference between knowing how someone performed in front of their manager versus "how you show up when your manager's not in the room."
Following the Incompass run, Tim personally met with the top 25% of scorers — individually. Not to share the rankings, but to acknowledge their contribution and reinforce what he was seeing. The conversations weren't performative but rather specific, grounded in data, and aimed at amplifying the behaviors that were driving culture forward.
On the other end of the distribution: many of the people who appeared at the bottom have since left Troon as it gave leadership the confidence to act on what they already suspected, and removed the friction that typically slows decisions made on instinct alone.
Troon is preparing for its second Incompass run, this time with AI-generated commentary enabled. Tim's stated goal: run the tool multiple times a year and use it to replace the traditional year-end review entirely. In his model, continuous behavioral feedback through Incompass makes the annual review redundant — conversations about development happen in real time, and the year-end meeting becomes what it should be: a discussion about goals and compensation, not a surprise.
Beyond corporate, Tim sees significant potential at the facility level — deploying Incompass at individual clubs large enough to benefit from cultural assessment. His goal is to demonstrate that what worked at the corporate level translates to operations on the ground, then make it available across Troon's managed facilities.
Tim has worked with five PE sponsors. His read on how Incompass fits the PE context is clear.
PE firms are mathematically oriented. They want tools that produce data, not opinions. An anonymous, 360-degree behavioral assessment that generates statistically credible signals on culture health and talent quality is precisely the kind of instrument that earns trust at the board and sponsor level — not because it tells the sponsor something the management team doesn't already know, but because it removes the subjectivity that makes talent conversations hard. The investment thesis from a sponsor's perspective: if you can benchmark organizational culture at post-close, you have a baseline. If you run it again at 12 months, you have a trend line. That's not an HR output — that's an execution risk indicator, surfaced in a form a PE firm can act on.
Curious to see what objective talent data looks like in your organization? We'd love to chat.
Incompass is the talent intelligence platform that cuts through bias, so leaders can make fair talent decisions — fast. By gathering input from across teams and calibrating it with data science, Incompass delivers bias-adjusted, percentile-based insights that employees trust and leaders can act on in days, not months. The result is a clear, shared view of who is driving impact across the organization — grounding decisions about growth, opportunity, and risk in evidence, not instinct. For PE-backed companies and their portcos, that means objective talent visibility from post-close through the hold.
