Last Thanksgiving we thanked the people who backed us within walking distance of our first office. This year our team stretches from the Pacific to the Gulf Coast, and the gratitude list got longer without losing its address. Here's who and what we're thankful for in year two of being everywhere and nowhere else but home.
Bigger doesn’t have to mean farther
A year ago, thanking the people who built HAUS XXIV meant thanking a handful of Long Beach neighbors. This year, that list runs through time zones. We hired a copywriter in Austin who edits like she’s daring the sentence to waste her time. We brought on a designer in Chicago whose first project made our brand system look like it had been sitting in a drawer waiting to be finished. A strategist joined us from Houston who spent a decade inside a category we’d never touched and made our first pitch into it sound like we’d been doing it for years.
None of that was the plan when we opened our doors. The plan was Long Beach, full stop. But the work kept finding people who could do it better than we could do it alone, and most of those people didn’t live within driving distance of Fourth Street. So we did the thing that felt obvious once we stopped resisting it: we let the haus grow to the size of the talent instead of the size of the zip code.
What we didn’t expect was how much better the work got because of it. A remote team spread across six states doesn’t share a commute or a coffee order, but it shares something more useful: six different sets of eyes on every problem, six different markets’ worth of instinct about what reads as bold and what just reads as loud. Our Houston strategist caught a tone problem in a Southern client’s copy that nobody in this office would have known to flag. Our Chicago designer pushed back on a layout because it would have looked cramped on the monitors most of that client’s team actually uses. Specific knowledge, earned somewhere else, made the work sharper here.
“"We didn’t build a nationwide team because it looked good on a deck. We built it because the best person for the job kept living somewhere other than Long Beach, and we’d rather do great work with people spread across a map than average work with people who happen to share our zip code."”
David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV
Long Beach is still the reason any of this works
None of that growth changes where the haus keeps its heart. Long Beach is still the place we open the laptop every morning, still the city where two of our founding clients are within a fifteen-minute drive, still where our dogs, Sapphy and Hachi, show up to the office more reliably than half our meetings do. Heritage, not a cage, is a line we wrote before we had a nationwide team to test it against. It held up.
We’re thankful this year for the same Long Beach small businesses who’ve kept trusting us since before we had a track record worth trusting. The coffee shop on Fourth Street that hosted our first client mixer hosted our second one too, and this time we paid full price without being asked twice. We’re thankful for the nonprofit partners who keep reminding a growing team what the work is actually for, because it’s easy for scale to make you forget who you started building for in the first place. We’re thankful for the city itself, for a market that never once made us feel like we had to leave to become something bigger.
Being nationwide didn’t loosen our grip on that. If anything, it tightened it. When your team is scattered across a map, the one fixed point matters more, not less. Long Beach is that point. It’s the return address on every piece of mail this haus sends, even the ones that get opened in Austin or Chicago or Houston first.
“"Being remote made us more Long Beach, not less. When you’re the one constant your team can point to on a map, you take that job seriously. We’re not letting go of it."”
David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV
The list, said plainly
So here’s the plain version, the kind we’d say out loud at a table instead of typing into a caption. We’re thankful for the teammates who joined us from cities we’d never set foot in and made the work better for it. We’re thankful for the Long Beach businesses, nonprofits, and neighbors who kept showing up for a haus that could’ve stayed small and safe and didn’t. We’re thankful for a founder who refused to choose between growing the team and keeping the roots, because it turns out you don’t have to.
Next year the list will be longer again, and we’ll say the names again, because that’s what real thanks does. It doesn’t get quieter as you get bigger. It gets louder, and more specific, and it keeps pointing back to Long Beach every single time.
