"We're optimizing for a sustainable container to take care of the people within it — and to do some cool work while we're at it." - Janel Torkington

Most businesses optimize for growth. Scale as much as possible, make as much money as possible, get as big as possible. It seems like the only option in the playbook.

But that path has never called to us.

Strange Birds has been operating as a cooperative for three years, and six months ago we made it official. This episode, we take a beat to stop and ask, wait, why did we do that? What are we optimizing for instead? Is it working? Also, what are you wearing?

We get into:

• Why our style of consensus-based decision-making tops out around five people
• Why and how we've set up equal pay for equal hours (bonus: patronage refunds vs. dividends! A tiny schmear of tax code!)
• The un-touchy un-feely case for designing an anti-burnout business
• Why we often advise our clients to downgrade their subscription tier with us
• Janel: still detoxing from US productivity culture
• Anna: anti-cutting up watermelon

----

Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a worker owned cooperative. Strange Birds helps purpose driven companies say out loud what makes them worth choosing. We build stronger connections between audiences and brands with the right messaging. Then we implement it across the board.

Find us at http://strangebirds.land