Swash Turns 11
Your tenth birthday feels like a big deal. This is true when you’re a kid, and it is true when your small business turns ten, too. Ours was last year, and we went for it — a party for us, special cards for clients and partners, some content about what it all meant to us in a time filled with big emotions and huge global uncertainty. I loved telling our story last year in such a demonstrative way.
By comparison, this year is quiet. I like that, too. I wrote a draft of this post that was much more introspective than this one, and it talked about the future and the past and how the only thing we really have, the only time we can truly live in, is the present. I scrapped it because it felt far more maudlin than I feel.
We had a good year last year. We made some big changes to how we work internally, and we really focused on improving the working lives of everyone at Swash. We also started the work which would eventually result in us moving to a four day work week.
I loved doing that work. I still do. It has been a revelation for me to realize that I loved doing it, too. Over the last few years I’ve discovered that I take real satisfaction in working on the structure of Swash Labs, in thinking deeply and seriously about how we operate, and in trying to find ways to challenge conventional thinking about advertising and business in general.
I mean this both in terms of our own operations as well as how we move through the world of American business in the 21st century. Consultants call this sort of thing “change management” but I tend to think about it as an ongoing experiment in which we use creativity to both tell stories AND to solve business problems. We’ve been doing this for our clients for years, and every time we do it for ourselves, it works.
Big changes to the global landscape of work are already underway, and I think we’re doing a good job of navigating them. The result is that Swash Labs is a pretty rad place to work, and we are well-equipped for the future. I’m so proud of that fact, I could pop.
Other than business development, this kind of work is now more or less the best and highest service I can do for our shop. Over the last four or five years, I tried very hard to give away every other job to people that are incredibly smart, hugely capable, wonderfully empathetic, and obviously better at those jobs than I am. I was the bottleneck for change, and good things really started cooking when I got out of the way.
As we mark the occasion of Swash’s 11th birthday, it is a pledge I make to myself — keep thinking, keep retooling, keep measuring, keep trying. Not because everything always has to improve and grow, or in adherence to some corporate-hustle-culture-nonsense like “NEVER SETTLE,” but because Swash Labs is an enterprise which reflects the evolutionary and revolutionary times in which it exists. To stay still is a disservice to what we’re capable of doing and becoming in the years ahead.