Customer Story Sleeping Giant Capital

Growing Pains

Sleeping Giant Capital’s downtown Kalamazoo office is a rare intersection: investment professionals executing confidential transactions, aspiring owner-operators searching for their next company, and undergraduate students working on growth strategy projects inside SGC’s portfolio. That mix creates competing needs. Their office balances privacy and discretion alongside openness, collaboration, and community relationship-building with business owners and local service providers.

SGC needed a space that could shift modes quickly without losing structure or effectiveness. In a relatively small footprint, the office flexes across public and private settings. It supports daily stand-ups, focused individual work, small-team problem solving, large-group brainstorming, traditional teaching sessions, role plays, board meetings, seller meetings, social gatherings, and events. Each with different requirements for layout, energy, and confidentiality

Designing for Dynamic Flexibility

Haworth partnered with Sleeping Giant Capital to create a hyper-flexible, mixed-use environment. It’s built around a modular “kit of parts” and the idea of scenes repeatable configurations that make the space adaptable and legible. With mobile tables on casters, varied seating, privacy screens, and abundant surfaces for externalizing ideas the office shifts quickly from seminar-style teaching to small-team zones, presentations, and focused individual work without losing clarity or purpose.

Critically, SGC empowers students and employees  to move and reset the space. The kit scales from individual workstations to large-group tables, with lightweight components that encourage experimentation rather than freeze in a default layout. The result is a space that supports everything from head-down work to collaborative brainstorming, role-based teaming, and community gatherings.

To avoid rooms that feel full of potential but lack clarity, the team created a simple playbook of suggested scenes, showing users how to configure the space and where to move unused furniture. This permission, visual guidance, and reset expectations helps people “read the room,” reconfigure the space on the intended mode of work, and sustain flexibility without drifting into ambiguity or chaos.

Turning Ambiguity into Action

Haworth’s approach combined highly mobile furniture solutions with integrated power and a practical reconfiguration playbook. Spaces can shift quickly without losing functionality or clarity. SGC supports the disparate demands of novation, privacy, and collaboration. It gives teams a repeatable system for resetting the environment as needs change. SGC's office accommodates today's operating rhythm while remaining scalable with the firm's continued growth and appetite for innovation.

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