Hippie CEO Life #16 - Having Audacious Goals

July 29, 2022

When Hila and i went out on our own to start 33 Sticks, we had a lot of discussions around the type of business we wanted to create, the type of culture we wanted to foster, and probably most importantly, the type of lives we wanted to live.

What we decided, very early on before any formal company was formed, was that we were both committed to taking a different path, a path that perhaps would not end in monetary riches, a path that perhaps would not create a lot of recognition for our brand, but a path that both of us preferred to the alternatives. A path that would allow us to create a different kind of company, the type of company that the two of us would want to work for.

And so from the very beginning, we built a habit of setting what seems like incredibly audacious goals.

One of the first audacious goals we set was to build a company in which our services could never be purchased by the hour. Right away this goal was challenged when we found it very difficult as a new business to sell prospects on the idea that they couldn’t purchase a bucket of consulting hours from us, we had a set fee for our engagements and that was how we would get paid. Paying by the hour is something that companies buying services have been so accustomed to for decades, so for many of the prospects we talked to, buying services using something other than hours was foreign and in more than one instance, something they simply couldn’t do — business policies for how one can buy services or something like that.

Even though Hila and i were not making a lot of money, we never wavered, we never tried to justify taking just this one engagement by the hour so we can get some money coming into the company. Our thought at the time, and still is, was that if we were able to make an exception just this one time that went against our vision for what we wanted to created, there would never be an end to the exceptions we would be willing to make.

To be audacious, we needed to commit to doing things that from the outside may have appeared risky, bold, or even stupid but were things that would push us further down the path that we wanted to take, not what other’s wanted us to take.

Rejecting the billable hour was just the start, we set many audacious goals over the years, we’ve made many decisions as a company that any business management consultant from McKinsey would instantly label as horribly bad decisions but decisions that again helped to create the type of company that we wanted, this was our dream we were building, not McKinsey’s vision of what makes a company, a good company.

In continuing in our tradition of going against the established system, we are once again setting some audacious goals as a company, goals that will fundamentally change how our employees live their lives.

My goal is to continue to grow the company to a place where we will be working much less hours, the target is less than 20 hours a week, but are making 2-3x what we are making today. Not just Hila and i, every single employee at 33 Sticks.

In the beginning, they said we were crazy, they said our hippie ideas would never work, that we would never even get the company off the ground but here we are and we are ready for more.

LET’S GO!!!!

✌🏼💛