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Fortune · yesterday

A CEO gave his employees Fridays off. Three years later, revenue is up about 160%

Reported by Fortune. The analysis below is ours.

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Photo: Aimee Giles on Unsplash

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voluntary departures so far in 2026 at Brick Media, against six in 2022, the year before the four-day week

Fortune's reporting on Brick Media, a 25-person Tampa social media agency; the revenue and departure figures are ones the company provided, and the CEO does not credit the schedule alone

The part to copy is not the day off, it is the rule that protects it: no manager takes more than seven clients, and when they get close the firm hires instead of stretching people. A shorter week without a cap on the work is the same week, compressed. What the story cannot show is how much of the growth the schedule caused, and the CEO says so himself.

What did Brick Media change?

In late 2022, Jake Kurtz, founder and chief executive of Tampa-based social media agency Brick Media, wanted a better work-life balance. After seeing European companies trial shorter weeks, he ran a 90-day pilot from January 2023 that gave employees Fridays off without cutting their pay. By April he had made it permanent.

Staff now work four nine-hour days, Monday to Thursday, a 36-hour week, with paid lunch breaks. They are still full-time and eligible for benefits. Most work from home, and only one of the four days requires a trip to the office. That puts Brick between a compressed 40-hour week and the 32-hour model some researchers advocate, and the University of Georgia's Malissa Clark told a Fortune summit that the point of a four-day week is to cut eight hours, not to cram forty into four days.

What are the results, and how far can they be trusted?

According to figures Brick provided to Fortune, revenue rose 73% in 2023, 39% in 2024 and 8% in 2025, which compounds to roughly 160% over three years. Voluntary departures were six in 2022, then two in 2023, two in 2024, three in 2025, and none so far in 2026, while the workforce grew from 15 at the end of 2022 to 25. Of 20 new leads in October, 16 came from referrals. Profit margins have stayed roughly unchanged since 2022, because payroll has risen alongside revenue.

Be careful with all of it. These are the company's own figures, from a very small business, and Kurtz does not claim the schedule alone explains the growth. Fortune also notes that workplace researchers say the four-day week has faded from the hybrid-work conversation, and that some leaders who tried it have dialled it back. A few resignations either way is a small number to read a trend from.

What is the rule that holds it together?

The detail that makes this more than a perk is the workload cap. A social media manager typically handles six or seven clients, with seven the upper limit. When employees approach that limit, Brick hires more people instead of adding more work to the existing staff. Brick served 56 clients in 2022 and 85 in the first half of 2026, so the work has grown by about half and the team has grown with it.

That is the opposite of the way a shorter week usually fails. When the work stays fixed and the days shrink, people either work longer on the remaining days or work on the day off. Brick says small tasks on Fridays or weekends take "five minutes here and there", and that real emergencies needing several hours happen roughly once or twice a quarter. When they do, nonexempt employees are eligible for overtime and freelancers are brought in.

Why does it matter for culture?

Kurtz describes retention as a business strategy and a cultural one. People who have worked together for years can settle in a two-minute hallway conversation what would otherwise take half an hour, he told Fortune, and he believes that efficiency carries through to client relationships. One of his employees, the director of client experience, told Fortune that the team has "found more ways to be more efficient" with its time, and that she prefers four longer days.

There is also a point about an unwritten rule. The agency's field is one where long hours are common: a Muck Rack survey cited in the piece found 55% of public relations professionals had worked more than 40 hours in the previous week. A leader who sets a cap and keeps to it is saying what the norm is, which is more powerful than saying what the policy is.

How can a leader tell whether a balance policy is real?

  • Whether the amount of work was changed when the hours were, or only the hours.
  • Whether anyone is quietly doing the missing day on the weekend.
  • Whether the person who uses the policy is the person who gets promoted, or the one who is passed over.
  • Whether there is a number, a client cap, a ticket limit, a headcount trigger, that tells you when to hire rather than stretch.
  • Whether the leader uses it too.

Questions managers ask

We cannot move to a four-day week. Is there anything transferable? Yes: the cap. Decide the number each person can responsibly carry, and write down what you will do when someone gets near it.

Won't clients object? At Brick, most client work can be planned ahead of time and the CEO says clients have been understanding. That depends on the work. The principle is to find where a pause costs least and say plainly what the emergency route is.

How do we know it is working? Watch retention, referrals and how people describe their week. At Brick, none of those is a measure of effort. They are measures of whether people want to stay.

What MeaningFuel does about it

Before it happensWhat the daily ritual works on, every working day
Well-Being and Resilience every working morning, for the manager and the team on the same two-minute question. A balanced week is easier to protect when the people in it have already practised noticing when they are stretched.
After it hasThe module prescribed to the team that has this
Book Work-Life Balance for the team where long days have become the norm: ten short daily lessons over two working weeks, two ten-minute debriefs its lead runs, and check-ins after. It is written for the point where the work has crept past the hours it was meant to fit.
What management seesThe reading that makes either one provable
Whether people are taking part and whether the insights are landing, by team, against the previous period of the same length. A team that goes quiet at the end of a long week is easy to see in the pattern before it is visible in resignations.

The offsite worked. That was never the problem.

Week six is the problem. The person who ran it has moved teams, the thing everyone agreed has quietly stopped happening, and nobody can name the day it stopped.

MeaningFuel keeps it going: one short insight each working day on the values you chose, and a two-week micro-training for any team that falls behind. You see which teams carry them, pooled, with nobody named.

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