by Charlotte Pinckney 
Twenty-five years ago, Insight Global was founded with a simple belief: with the right people, anything is possible. Like many companies, the early days of Insight Global saw humble beginnings. Founders Glenn Johnson and Scott Madden started the company in Glenn’s basement. Working on “borrowed” desks surrounded by bare walls, Glenn and Scott had a vision that this company would one day be the envy of the industry.
Twenty-five years later, that vision remains. Today, that basement startup is a global talent and consulting company expected to reach $5.3B in revenue this year with a global workforce of more than 40,000 full-time and contracted employees across 40 countries. Not bad for a company built off hustle and grit.
Consistency matters. Looking at Fortune 500 companies operating in 2001, 52% of them don’t exist today. Not only is Insight Global still here, but it’s thriving, consistently growing despite industry downturns over the past twenty-five years. What did they do differently?
From the beginning, the people who made up Insight Global believed in themselves when others didn’t. They encouraged each other, pushed each other, and had the courage to hold each other accountable.
“Everybody was young, hungry, and willing to outwork anyone,” said Glenn Johnson. “Everybody jumped in. Everybody competed. Everybody believed that if we worked hard enough and stayed connected to our values, we could create something different than what existed in the industry at the time.”
Those characteristics of hard work and togetherness fueled the company’s early success. As the company grew, it stayed close to its roots while constantly evolving to the needs and challenges of its customers. During moments of market downturns or unpredictability, Insight Global adapted—choosing to act during times of uncertainty. The 2009 financial crisis marked an early milestone in the company’s evolution. With the market down 20%, Insight Global battled through it and grew 14%. When companies were doing layoffs, they increased their hiring. They saw more customers, not less, and put a deeper focus on customer relationships, who in turn trusted Insight Global with its business as conditions improved.
During COVID-19, that same mindset saw the company once again grow during a downturn, this time with the expansion of its services to launch Insight Global Health (IGH), created in response for critical nursing shortages nationwide. IGH has since expanded its impact globally through its Philippines-based delivery center designed to train nurses for careers in U.S. healthcare systems.
But something else happened in COVID-19. The company deepened their purpose to “Be the Light” to the world around them, a mantra popularized by Glenn Johnson’s successor, Bert Bean, who was appointed CEO in 2018.
Under Bert’s leadership, the company embodied this new stance and found another gear to grow yet again while the rest of the industry was collapsing. Through its expansion of services and a renewed faith in its purpose, Insight Global would come out of COVID stronger than it entered, growing 8% compared to market shrinking 16%.
As the world evolved and the technology landscape continued to change, a new era of the company was starting to emerge—one that would shed the company of its previous identity as solely a staffing provider, and instead, a global consulting company. Its customer base needed more than just staffing alone. They needed a single partner that could deliver a wide range of capabilities—from staffing to outcomes-based services. And because “High Character and Hard Work Above All Else” is one of Insight Global’s cherished Shared Values, its people responded with, “why not us?”
Since then, Insight Global made significant investments to expand its existing managed services division into a full-scale consulting engine. By pairing technical expertise and delivery capabilities to the signature talent solutions the company was already known for, Insight Global has become a strategic partner to help customers solve increasingly complex business challenges.
One such hurdle was the rapid shift in workforce models to scale teams globally while managing tight costs. In response to these workforce changes, Insight Global expanded its service capabilities across more than 40 countries to better serve its enterprise customers globally. Today, the company has an expanded global footprint throughout North America, South America, Asia, and Australia, and has opened delivery centers in Hyderabad and Maila, with future destinations planned for Bogota and Eastern Europe.
Because of the company’s fearlessness to address new challenges, Insight Global evolved its business from staffing to building scalable global solutions capable of accelerating transformation wherever work needs to be done.
Today, that same fearlessness continues to shape the company’s next chapter in the age of agentic AI, with Insight Global adapting yet again to stay on the frontier of customers’ needs. With a new global team specializing in agentic delivery, the company is building AI capabilities to help their customers deploy better agents, workflows, and platforms.
The emergence of AI represents the same kind of inflection point the company has leaned into for the last 25 years: moments of disruption create new opportunities to transform and expand.
Behind every expansion, new business line, and moment of transformation over the past twenty-five years has been a consistent belief in its culture and people that has driven the company forward.
“We’ve always believed that if you hire great people, obsess over their development, and create a culture rooted in Shared Values and accountability, those people will in turn take care of your business,” said Bean.
That philosophy has shaped how Insight Global hires, develops, and scales its business. Since January of this year, the company has already made major investments in new talent across its consulting organization, with plans to further scale its technical expertise before the end of the year. Despite the company’s rapid growth over the years, its culture has remained true due to the intentionality of the company’s recruiting, training, and development practices. To join Insight Global in 2026 is the same as 2001: you must have grit, a relentless work ethic, and the utmost care and consideration of those you work with.
Or, as Bean puts it more directly, “If you’re a jerk, you can’t work here.”
Because of this obsession over the culture and development of its people, Insight Global has been able to move quickly and adapt to the ever-changing business needs over the past twenty-five years, building solutions around problems many of its competitors were too fearful to attempt alone.
To founders Glenn and Scott, everything they risked in 2001 to start a different kind of company—one that people were proud of—has paid off.
“When Glenn called me to start Insight Global, we had a vision of building a great company and creating something special,” said founder, Scott Madden. “Seeing the business grow into a $5.3 billion global company is incredibly rewarding, but what means even more is watching so many great leaders and close friends continue to carry the culture and vision forward every day.”
“Scott and I created Insight Global to be the biggest and the best in the industry,” said founder and former CEO, Glenn Johnson. “While the journey is never over, we are thrilled to see the company is stronger than ever after twenty-five years.”
While the company looks ahead to the future, the growing sensation within the company is this is only just the beginning. Within the next fifteen years, the company projects to be $20B in revenue with over 100,000 employees.
But as the company continues to grow, the original Insight Global vison set by Glenn and Scott remains true—that this company would be different. That it would one day be the envy of the industry.
Twenty-five years later, Insight Global still believes the same thing it did on day one. With the right people, anything is possible.
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