You can run a successful business with kindness

A few years ago a client asked Ed and me why our proposal was three pages instead of the twenty he was used to getting from other agencies. We told him the truth: we’d cut everything whose only job was to make us look busy. He signed that week. He’s still a client four years later, and he’s sent us two more since.

I bring this up because kindness has a branding problem in business. The word sounds like a poster in an office kitchen, somewhere above the recycling bins. What it looks like in practice is harder. Being kind to a client means telling them the campaign they love isn’t going to work, before they spend the money. Being kind to a team means saying no to the project that would make the agency more money but would burn three people out to deliver it. Done properly, kindness is a discipline for making hard calls.

(We haven’t always managed it. In the early years we took on clients who didn’t match our ideals because we had wages to pay, and I’m not proud of every logo in the old portfolio. The discipline came later, once we’d earned the room to use it.)

The four-day week wasn’t a perk

In 2019, Ed and I bought out our two partners and had, for the first time, full control over how Switch worked. The first real decision we made with that control was moving to a four-day week. Not as a recruiting line, though it has become one. We did it because we’d noticed that our best work came in concentrated bursts, not in eight-hour smears across five days, and that tired people made worse strategic calls than rested ones. Cutting a day forced us to get serious about what actually needed doing.

The unglamorous part: it took us the better part of eighteen months to get the operating rhythm right. We killed most recurring meetings. We rewrote how briefs got handed off so nothing depended on a specific person being reachable on a Friday. Revenue dipped for two quarters while we figured it out. Then it came back higher than before we started, because we’d accidentally built a more efficient agency in the process of trying to give people their Fridays back. If you’re thinking of copying us, budget for the dip. Nobody who writes about the four-day week puts the dip in the headline.

The best businesses I’ve worked with grow because of how they treat people, not in spite of it.

That line shows up on my homepage because it’s the closest thing I have to a thesis, and Switch is the only evidence I’ve got that isn’t hypothetical. We went from a 360° agency doing whatever paid the bills in Malta to a mostly-B2B consultancy working with manufacturing and technology brands across the UK and the US. Nobody planned that migration on a whiteboard. The way we worked started attracting a different kind of client, one who wanted a partner more than a vendor, and over four years the client list quietly rearranged itself around that.

None of this makes us a charity. We fire clients who are cruel to our team, and we’ve walked away from six-figure retainers over it, twice. Both times it felt like a loss for about a month and then didn’t. Kindness as an operating principle costs real money in the short run. So far the bet has paid for itself several times over, mostly in the people who stayed and the clients they attracted.

I chair a Vistage group now, which has taught me the same lesson from a different angle. Every CEO in that room is smart enough to solve their own problems. What most of them are missing is a room where someone will tell them the truth without an agenda attached. Running that room well takes its own kind of kindness: caring enough about someone’s business to disagree with them in front of eleven other people who all know their name. The easy version of chairing is nodding along. Nodding helps nobody.

I don’t think growth and kindness are in tension, and I’ve stopped being polite about disagreeing with people who assume they are. The businesses I’ve watched burn out their people to hit a number almost always hit a worse number the year after, once the good people have quietly left and taken the institutional memory with them. The ones that treat people well tend to keep them. Keeping good people is still the cheapest growth strategy nobody wants to put in a slide deck.

We’re not finished figuring this out at Switch. Every year the team is different, the clients are different, and the specific shape of “kind but rigorous” needs re-earning. But the direction hasn’t moved in a decade, and the results keep suggesting we picked the right one.