Three Decembers running, we've published our goals in writing and graded ourselves against them, misses included. This year's list carries the usual commitments on growth and community work, plus one line we've never said in public before: we're starting the formal process to become a certified B Corporation.
Four goals posts in, and one line we haven’t said before
In January 2023, Elizabeth published the first five commitments under our name, dated and numbered, in "Setting goals we’ll actually be held to." That October, we graded them in public: three hit clean, one short of the number, one missed outright. In December, I set five more for 2024, two of them carried over from the list we hadn’t finished. That’s three posts. This is the fourth.
Every one of those posts has been about the same discipline: say the number before you know if you’ll hit it, then come back and say what actually happened. What’s different this time is the size of what we’re putting on the list. Growing the team and landing nonprofit partnerships are commitments we control end to end. What I’m about to add isn’t. It’s a decision to hand a piece of our own accountability to an organization that doesn’t work for us and has no reason to go easy on the grade.
Where the 2024 five landed
Short version, because the full accounting belongs to its own post: we hit the growth target and then kept going, adding a copywriter in Austin, a designer in Chicago, and a strategist in Houston on top of the seats we’d already named. Motion and film became the two-person practice we said it would. The out-of-state client goal, the one we missed outright in year one, landed this year, our first client relationship built and run entirely outside California.
The nonprofit number didn’t move. Two partnerships again, not three, the same shortfall as 2023. We wrote a quarterly capacity-planning review into how we operate specifically to fix this, and it exists now, on paper and in practice. It just didn’t finish the job it was built for. A process that reduces a problem without solving it is still worth keeping. It’s also not something we get to call done.
What we’re building toward in 2025
01. Grow the collective to eighteen, with two seats named before we fill them. An SEO strategist and a second project management seat, both roles the workload has been quietly asking for since we passed twelve. Same discipline as last year: name the seat, then hire for it, not the other way around.
02. Land four nonprofit partnerships, at full agency rate, hours blocked in the first quarter. The number goes up, not down, even after missing three two years straight. The fix isn’t a smaller target. It’s booking nonprofit hours on the calendar in January instead of scoping them around whatever enterprise work happens to land first. If the mechanism actually works this time, four is realistic. If it doesn’t, we’ll say so in December.
03. Begin the formal B Corp certification assessment process. We’re registering with B Lab and starting our B Impact Assessment baseline in 2025, the self-assessment that measures a company’s social and environmental performance against B Lab’s published standards. This isn’t a badge we’re hoping to have by year’s end. It’s the start of a multi-year process, and we’re saying so before we know our score.
04. Publish our verified baseline score, whatever it is. Not the announcement that we started. The number. Once B Lab verifies our B Impact Assessment, we’ll put the actual score in the Journal, on the record, the same way we’ve published every goal on this list since January 2023.
“Certified B Corporations are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on all of their stakeholders.”
B Lab, "Legal Requirements," bcorporation.net
What B Corp certification actually asks of us
We’ve watched enough companies use "sustainable" and "purpose-driven" as adjectives with nothing behind them to know that saying the words changes nothing on its own. B Corp certification is built to close that gap. A company completes the B Impact Assessment, a detailed self-assessment scored against B Lab’s standards across governance, workers, community, environment, and customers. The score then gets independently audited and verified by a third party, following ISO 17021-1 requirements, the same family of standard used to audit management systems generally. Nobody grades their own homework here.
The part that actually changes how a company operates is the legal piece. Certified B Corporations amend their governing documents to formally weigh the interests of workers, customers, community, and the environment alongside shareholders, not just shareholders, in every decision. That’s not a mission statement update. It’s a structural change to how the company is allowed to make decisions, and it’s reviewed as part of certification.
We’ve built this haus on the idea that a promise nobody can check isn’t a promise. It’s a mood. B Corp certification runs that same principle through people whose job is to check it, not us. That’s the whole reason we’re pursuing it, and the whole reason we’re saying so now instead of waiting until we already have the certificate to announce.
“We’ve spent three years asking you to hold us to our own numbers. B Corp is the same bet, except this time somebody outside the haus is grading the paper.”
David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV
Why we’re saying it before we’ve earned it
The easy version of this announcement waits. Register quietly, complete the assessment, get the certificate, then write the celebration post. We considered that version and turned it down for the same reason we turned down the soft "big plans for next year" post back in January 2023. A commitment nobody can watch us fail at isn’t a commitment. It’s a press release waiting to happen.
So this is the harder version. We don’t know our B Impact Assessment score yet. We don’t know how long the legal work of amending our governing documents will take, or whether the first pass at the assessment will show gaps we didn’t expect in how we’ve been operating. We’re starting anyway, in public, with a number four commitment that only means something if we come back and publish the score once it exists.
That’s the pattern this thread has run since the first post. State the goal before you know the outcome. Come back and say what happened. Two years of practicing that on hiring numbers and nonprofit counts is what makes it possible to practice it on something bigger now.
