Five Decembers running, we've put our goals in writing and come back the following year to grade ourselves against them, misses included. This year's list closes the loop we opened in September on B Corp certification, sets a specific number for growth and for community work, and adds something we've never written down before: a commitment to stay exactly as odd as we are right now.
Five posts in, and the one item that isn’t a number
In January 2023, Elizabeth published our first public list. Five commitments, dated and numbered, the kind you can actually get caught failing. That December I set five more for 2024, two of them carried over from the list we hadn’t finished. In December 2024 I added a line we’d never said in public before, that we were starting the formal process to become a certified B Corporation. In September this year I came back with the deep dive that line deserved: what B Corp certification actually requires of a company, legally, and exactly where we stood nine months into a process I’d said would take years.
This is the fifth post in that line. It carries the usual numbers on growth and nonprofit work, and it carries the B Corp commitment forward to the next checkable milestone. It also carries something I’ve never put in a numbered list before, because I didn’t think it needed one until I watched us grow past the size where it protects itself automatically.
Where the 2025 four landed
Short version, because the honest version has to include the part that didn’t finish. We hit the growth target. The collective sits at eighteen people across a half dozen time zones, the number I set in December 2024, reached without lowering the bar to get there. We hit the nonprofit number too, four partnerships at full agency rate, hours blocked on the calendar before the year got away from us. That one mattered more than the others, because it was the fix for a miss we’d owned twice in a row. In 2023 and 2024, the nonprofit target came up short both years, two partnerships against a promise of three, because enterprise work kept getting scoped first. We wrote a quarterly capacity-planning review into how the haus operates specifically to close that gap. This year it held.
The B Corp line split down the middle. We did begin the formal assessment process, registered with B Lab, opened the B Impact Assessment, and by September had finished a full pass across all five scored areas. What I said in December 2024 we’d do by year’s end, publish our verified baseline score, isn’t done. We’re not there. The assessment is complete on our end and under legal review alongside it, but the third-party verification that actually makes a score real hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not going to round that up to a win because the rest of the list looks good.
What we’re building toward in 2026
01. Submit our completed B Impact Assessment for third-party verification, and publish the verified score the day B Lab hands it back. Not a self-scored number. Not a paragraph explaining why the audit is taking longer than expected. The actual, checked, independently verified score, published whether it’s one we’re proud of or one that tells us exactly where we’re still short.
02. Grow the collective to twenty-two, with two seats named before we fill them. A nonprofit partnerships lead, the first seat on this roster built around community work full time instead of squeezed in around paying accounts, and a second motion editor to give Devon real backup instead of a permanent solo shift. Same discipline as every year on this list: name the seat, then hire for it.
03. Land five nonprofit partnerships at full agency rate, hours blocked in the first quarter. The number goes up again, not because four wasn’t already hard-won, but because the mechanism that got us there this year is built to hold more weight than we’ve tested it against yet. If it doesn’t, I’ll say so here in twelve months, the same as always.
04. Protect the parts of this haus that don’t scale by accident. Growth doesn’t automatically keep a company weird. It usually does the opposite, quietly, one reasonable-sounding compromise at a time. This is the goal I’ve never written down before, and it gets its own explanation below because it doesn’t fit in a sentence the way a headcount number does.
“A verified score is the only version of this commitment that means anything. We could have written ‘pursuing B Corp certification’ on the website in January and called it done. Instead we’re publishing exactly how far the process actually got, a full year later, before we’ve earned the badge.”
David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV
What staying weird actually looks like here
I want to be specific about this, because "stay weird" is the kind of phrase that means nothing the moment it becomes a slide in a deck. Here’s what it actually means at eighteen people, headed toward twenty-two.
It means Hudson and Houston still come to work. My golden retriever and my bernedoodle have sat under more than one strategy session that decided how a client’s brand voice should sound, and neither of them has ever once cared how big the account was. It means we still run this haus with collective leadership instead of a single creative director whose word ends every argument, a structure that got harder to hold as we passed five people and then eighteen, and that we chose to make sharper instead of simpler once it did. It means we still turn work away. We did it in writing in 2024, and we’ll do it again in 2026 if the wrong client shows up with the right budget, because a discount on the standard isn’t a discount, it’s a different company wearing our name.
None of that shows up on a growth chart. All of it is the reason the growth chart is worth looking at in the first place. A haus that hits every number on this list and quietly stops being the haus that wrote it in the first place hasn’t succeeded. It’s just gotten bigger.
“You can watch culture erode one reasonable exception at a time. Someone asks if the dogs can stay home for a big pitch, just this once. Someone asks if we could really use one person who has final say, just to move faster. Every one of those asks sounds harmless in isolation. Our job is saying no to the ones that would add up to a different company by the time anyone noticed.”
Camille Fontaine, Director of People & Culture, HAUS XXIV
Why the miss stays in the post
Camille’s right that the erosion is gradual, and the same is true of the discipline that keeps a public goals list honest. It would be easy, this year especially, to fold the unfinished B Corp line into softer language. "Significant progress toward certification." "On track for verification." Both of those sentences are technically defensible and neither one is checkable, which means neither one is actually a commitment. It’s a mood wearing a commitment’s clothes.
So instead: we said we’d publish a verified score by the end of 2025, and we haven’t. That’s a miss, named plainly, the same way we named the nonprofit miss in 2023 and 2024 before we fixed it. The fix this time isn’t a new process. It’s finishing the one already in motion, submitting for verification, and reporting back with whatever number comes out the other side. Specific, not vague, is one of the twelve disciplines in our Code of 24 for a reason. A vague goal can’t be checked, which means it can’t really be held. Ours can be, every one of them, including the one that’s still unfinished.
