VCU Executive MBA students run a systems check on culture
A multigenerational robotics company, Cobotiq, asks five VCU Executive MBA students to help define what it stands for.
By Megan Nash
At Cobotiq, a Richmond-based robotics company, the vacuuming takes care of itself. The culture can be a little harder to automate.
The startup helps commercial facilities adopt autonomous cleaning technology—offering not just the robots, but the consultative support to integrate them into everyday operations.
Like plenty of post-startup firms, Cobotiq is lean, fast and optimistic. It’s also multigenerational—home to baby boomers, Gen X, millennials and Gen Z—all under the same roof, trying to speak the same language.
“Strategic planning, risk…” said Jon Hill (B.S. ’85; M.B.A. ’99; M.S. ’12), Cobotiq’s founder and CEO—listing what he could’ve asked a visiting team of Executive MBA students to help with—cut to it: “But when it came down to it, culture is the first step.”
Hill isn’t new to the VCU School of Business—he earned three degrees from the school and was a professor and faculty advisor for the Executive MBA program. But this time, he returned as a client. And instead of handing the team a dashboard or a dataset, he handed them a question that companies dodge until it’s too late:
What makes a company a company?
Each year, second-year Executive MBA students tackle a real-world “strategic dilemma” for a community or business partner. This year’s team—James Crump-Wallace, Ash Franklin, Matt Littlefield, Tyler Mead and Yong Tucker—got a dilemma that didn’t come with instructions.
“Our first reaction was: they’re asking for way too much,” said Littlefield (M.B.A. ’25). “If we try to tackle all of this, they’re going to get a super diluted, broad deliverable that may not help them.”
With guidance from faculty advisor Bob Kelley, Ed.D., the team narrowed their focus: not what Cobotiq does, but who it’s trying to be.
THE CHALLENGE
How can Cobotiq align people and culture to scale without losing its unique edge?
They started with a 36-question employee engagement survey—evaluating communication, leadership, workload and trust. Everyone on staff responded. From there, they conducted six one-on-one interviews using a consistent 13-question script to surface deeper themes.
“Culture means different things to different people,” said Franklin (M.B.A ’25). “We weren’t just looking for the leadership view, we wanted to see if the employees had the same understanding. That’s how we got to the values presented in the final framework.”
What they found wasn’t dysfunction—it was intention. A shared sense of purpose hadn’t been identified, let alone codified. Some employees interpreted expectations differently. Others weren’t sure what values were expected to show up in their work.
“That message was powerful,” said Tucker (M.B.A. ’25). “Especially when we took some of the negative themes and used those to create the recommendations moving forward.”
The findings also pointed to what was already working. Employees described strong peer dynamics, trust within teams and a shared motivation to grow—especially when it came to learning and training.
The real challenge, the team said, wasn’t what they found—it was how to deliver it.
“Investing our time into their employees was not a challenge, but an opportunity,” said Mead (M.B.A. ’25). “The hard part was translating what we heard into something leadership could receive openly. We had to find a way to reflect their employees’ feedback in a way that aligned with the company’s direction.”
The final presentation included a multi-phase implementation plan, a 12-month roadmap with recommendations, data visualizations, anonymized insights and one unifying framework.
A CULTURE BUILT ON G.R.I.T.
The EMBA team proposed four core values for Cobotiq’s culture:
GROWTH, RESPECT, INNOVATION, TRUST
Hill, who joined virtually alongside staff, said the process gave him a clearer sense of where things stood.
“It gave me a baseline—a correlation between what I think I’m doing and what’s actually being done,” he said. “It helped me out to have more empathy and better understanding with my own team.”
Like many startups shaped by the pandemic, Cobotiq is navigating a cultural turning point. It builds automation tools, but the real work happens between people. And with a team that spans four generations, the company is facing questions that often come much later in a startup’s life: What do we stand for—and how do we make it stick?
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, Gen Z now makes up a larger share of the workforce than baby boomers. Across industries, teams are increasingly asking for clarity around communication, values and expectations—not just ping-pong tables or purpose statements.
“If they implement this,” said Crump-Wallace (M.B.A. ’25), “it makes it a better organization—better for the people who already work there, and more attractive to the people they want to hire.”
Hill agreed.
“I was hoping to get something that would help define who we are,” he said. “That’s what they gave me.”
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