Two years, one thread, three posts deep

This is the third post in a thread we started without knowing it would become one. First, Elizabeth wrote "Setting goals we’ll actually be held to," five commitments with dates attached. Then I wrote the scorecard: three hit, one short, one missed outright, no highlight reel. Then five more goals for 2024, two of them the same unfinished business from the first list, restated on purpose instead of quietly swapped for something easier to win.

This post lands earlier than the last one did. The one-year post ran in October, closer to the actual date on the papers. This one is going up in September, a few weeks ahead of the calendar square, because four of the five 2024 goals were already resolved by late summer and sitting on a finished scorecard for the sake of a tidier anniversary date felt like exactly the kind of convenience this haus doesn’t get to take. Conviction over convenience means you publish when the answer is true, not when the calendar looks nicest.

So here it is, the second full grading, goal by goal.

What we hit

We landed a client outside California. This is the one that got away twice, first as a spring conversation that didn’t close in 2023, then as a commitment we restated, unchanged, in the December goals post rather than quietly retiring it. In May we signed a hospitality group headquartered in Austin, Texas, a full brand and web engagement, not a small add-on scoped to feel safe. It is not the same lead from 2023. That one still never closed, and we’re not going to pretend it did just because this one finally landed. The goal was to build a real client relationship outside our home state. We built one.

We landed three nonprofit partnerships at full agency rates and full agency craft, the number we missed by one in year one. The mechanism we said we’d fix is the reason this held: nonprofit and community hours got blocked on the calendar every quarter before any new enterprise engagement got scoped against those same weeks, instead of getting whatever time was left over. A youth mentorship organization, a community land trust, and a legal aid clinic, each treated the way a paying enterprise client is treated, none of it discounted craft dressed up as generosity.

Motion and film became a two-person practice. We hired a second motion designer in March, and for the first time we can run a client’s full motion timeline in-house instead of leaning on freelance support past a short cut. That was the whole point of the goal, capacity the haus owns, not capacity we quietly borrow.

The quarterly capacity-planning review is written, scheduled, and has already run twice. It’s not a glamorous goal. It’s the least quotable line item on any list we’ve published. It’s also the reason the nonprofit number and the motion hire both worked this year instead of getting crowded out the way they did in 2023.

“The good”

to-great companies figured out that if you get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then you can figure out how to take it someplace great." — Jim Collins, author, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t

What we didn’t hit

We said we’d grow the collective to twelve people in 2024, and name the seats in advance instead of hiring reactively. We’re at eleven. The second motion and film seat is filled and doing real work, covered above. The first dedicated brand strategist seat, named specifically in the December post, is not. We ran a search, made an offer in June, and the candidate turned it down for a role closer to home. We went back to the search instead of settling for whoever was next in the stack. As of this post, that seat is still open.

That’s the miss. Not a resourcing failure like the nonprofit shortfall last year, not a conversation that fizzled like the Texas lead. A specific seat, named on purpose, still unfilled because the right person for it hasn’t said yes yet.

Why we’re glad we’re a person short

Twelve was never the point. Twelve right people was the point, and the difference between those two sentences is the entire argument of this post. We could have filled that strategist seat in July with someone who was good enough. Good enough is exactly the standard we built this haus to refuse. A brand strategist who isn’t sharp enough to tell a client an uncomfortable truth, or isn’t going to hold the line on craft when a deadline gets tight, doesn’t strengthen the collective. They dilute it, and a diluted seat costs more than an empty one, because an empty seat is honest about what it is.

So we’re eleven for a little while longer, and we’d rather post that number than a rounded-up twelve that quietly includes someone we settled for.

“A number we hit by lowering the bar isn’t a number we hit. It’s a number we lied to ourselves about, and the client finds out eventually, because a diluted seat always shows up in the work.”

David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV

What carries into year three

The brand strategist seat carries forward, unfilled until it’s filled right, same as the out-of-state goal carried forward for a full year before it landed. We’re not setting a new headcount target to replace it and calling the old one closed. Twelve, named seats, still the number, still open until the right person is sitting in that chair.

The other four goals don’t get retired just because they’re hit. Three nonprofit partnerships stays the standing floor for every year going forward, not a ceiling we count as finished business. The quarterly capacity review keeps running, because the mechanism only works if it doesn’t quietly stop the year everyone’s confident it isn’t needed anymore. We’ll set the next full list of dated commitments in December, same as always, and we’ll open that post the way we open every one of them, by pointing back here first.