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

In late 2022, Jake Kurtz, founder and CEO of Tampa-based social media agency Brick Media, wanted a better work-life balance. He had a wild idea: What if everyone worked just four days a week?

After seeing European companies experiment with shorter workweeks on social media, he launched a 90-day pilot in January 2023, giving employees Fridays off without cutting their salaries. By April, he had made the schedule permanent.

Nearly four years later, Brick’s revenue has grown dramatically. According to figures the company provided, revenue jumped 73% in 2023, another 39% in 2024, and 8% in 2025. Compounded, that’s roughly 160% growth in three years.

Kurtz believes some of that success traces back to the four-day workweek, though he doesn’t claim the schedule alone explains it. He bets that giving employees a reason to stay makes the company more efficient and more competitive, even as workplace researchers say the four-day week has faded from the hybrid-work conversation and some leaders who tried it have dialed it back.

How Brick’s four-day week works

At Brick, employees work four nine-hour days, Monday through Thursday. That’s a 36-hour week, four hours short of the traditional 40, with paid lunch breaks included. Employees are still considered full-time and eligible for benefits.

That puts Brick between a compressed 40-hour week and the 32-hour model some researchers advocate. At Fortune‘s Workplace Innovation Summit in May, University of Georgia psychology professor Malissa Clark argued that the point of a four-day week is to cut eight hours, not cram 40 hours into four days.

Brick’s schedule also contrasts with the long hours common in the related public relations field. Muck Rack’s State of PR 2026 report found that 55% of PR professionals surveyed had worked more than 40 hours the previous week.

Social media doesn’t exactly take weekends off, but Kurtz said clients have been surprisingly understanding of the arrangement, and most content shoots, meetings and other work can be planned ahead of time.

Employees still occasionally handle small tasks on Fridays or weekends, which he described as taking “five minutes here and there.” He estimated that more serious emergencies requiring several hours of work happen roughly once or twice a quarter. In those cases, nonexempt employees are eligible for overtime if they work more than 40 hours in a week, and the company brings in freelance contractors when needed.

The rule he goes by: Don’t bury employees in work.

Brick served 56 clients in all of 2022, compared with 85 in just the first half of 2026, according to Kurtz. A social media manager typically handles six or seven clients, with seven the upper limit.

Once employees approach that threshold, Brick hires more people instead of piling more work on existing staff. That’s one reason revenue has grown so quickly. It’s also why profit margins have stayed roughly unchanged since 2022, Kurtz said, as payroll has risen alongside revenue.

Employees also work from home most of the time. Only one of the four working days requires a trip to the office.

Why Kurtz treats retention as a growth strategy

For Kurtz, keeping employees happy is as much a business strategy as a cultural one.

“If I can keep people here longer, and they like their job, and they’re communicating with similar people all the time, it just makes the business a lot more efficient,” he told Fortune.

Experienced employees don’t need everything spelled out. Kurtz said colleagues who have worked together for years can sometimes resolve something in a two-minute hallway conversation that might otherwise take 30 minutes.

He believes that efficiency translates into better client relationships and, ultimately, more business. Of the 20 new leads Brick received in October, 16 came from referrals, according to Kurtz.

The company’s resignation numbers suggest employees are increasingly willing to stay. Brick recorded six voluntary departures in 2022, before the schedule change, compared with two in 2023, two in 2024, three in 2025, and none so far in 2026, according to figures provided to Fortune. Its workforce has grown from 15 employees at the end of 2022 to 25 today.

Asked whether Brick could have achieved the same success with employees onsite five days a week and working frequent overtime, Kurtz said, “No, I really don’t… I think people would leave Brick Media for like a $5,000 raise.” He said he knows some employees have had better offers and chosen to stay.

“People have a hard time leaving the four-day schedule once they experience it, because they start to realize that life is way more than just the salary,” he said.

It’s the same case ThredUp CEO James Reinhart made on Clark’s panel at the Fortune summit, where he warned that companies sticking with five-day weeks will lose the competition for top talent.

An employee’s view: same work, fewer days

For Andrea Echeverry, Brick’s director of client experience, who has been with the company since before the schedule change, switching to four days hasn’t meant doing less work.

“I think we have just found more ways to be more efficient with our time,” she told Fortune.

She doesn’t mind squeezing the same workload into four longer days. In fact, she prefers it. Echeverry said “hustle culture has played a role,” explaining that people her age are still willing to work long hours but take a different approach to the traditional “work hard, play hard” mentality.

She is a working mother whose husband also works full-time, and Fridays are now for spending time with her child and running personal errands.

To Echeverry, it’s part of a generational shift in attitudes toward work. Rather than accept traditional workplace arrangements simply because previous generations did, she believes younger workers are more willing to question the norm.

She isn’t alone in ranking balance over pay. In Randstad’s global Workmonitor 2026 survey, 46% of workers named work-life balance as their main reason for staying in their job, compared with 23% who cited competitive pay and benefits.

“We’re sort of like redefining work-life balance,” she said.

Kurtz’s advice to other CEOs

Kurtz doesn’t think every company needs to give employees Fridays off. Instead, he advises other CEOs to “think about what would make your employees want to work at your company.”

“I just think that there’s a happy middle ground where you can still have a really good life and a really good business,” he said. “And if you can also extend that to your employees, then it’s not only a feel-good thing for the culture; it’s actually a business advantage that your competitors won’t have.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com