The four-day week is a strategy, not a perk

When people learn that Switch runs on a four-day week, the first question is usually some version of “how can you afford that?” It’s a fair question aimed the wrong way. We cut a day because tired people make worse strategic decisions, and decisions are what a consultancy sells. The generosity, if you want to call it that, is a side effect.

I run Switch with my brother Ed. Over the past four years we’ve taken the firm from a 360° agency serving anyone in Malta who would have us to a B2B consultancy whose clients are mostly in the UK and the US. Every step of that transformation was a judgment call: which clients to let go, what to stop selling entirely, how to price work in markets where nobody knew our name, which hires we could and couldn’t afford. The four-day week is the working condition that made those calls possible. It came first, on purpose.

The perk version

Most agencies that shorten the week announce it as a benefit, somewhere in the same breath as the beer fridge and the birthday leave. I’ve watched a few of them launch it on LinkedIn with a video and a hashtag, then drift back to five days within the year, usually after one rough quarter or one oversized pitch. Nobody posts about the reversal.

The drift follows from the framing. A perk lives in the nice-to-have column of the budget, and that column gets emptied the moment revenue wobbles. If your shorter week exists to decorate the careers page, it will last exactly as long as the good times do.

A perk is the first thing you cut in a bad quarter. A strategy is what you cut everything else to protect.

Tired people make expensive decisions

The worst commercial calls I’ve made at Switch were all made tired. Saying yes to a client we knew was wrong for us, because the pipeline looked thin and it was late on a Thursday and I didn’t have the energy left to hold the line. Pricing a project low because negotiating properly felt like one conversation too many that week. At the time, every one of those calls felt like pragmatism. Fatigue is good at disguising itself as good sense. (I’d love to tell you I learned this at Stanford. I learned it from the yeses I regretted.)

Strategy is mostly the discipline of deciding what you won’t do, and the tired version of you can always find a reason to do everything. I’ve chaired a Vistage group of business leaders since 2023, and the pattern holds there too: the quality of a member’s decisions tracks how rested they are far more closely than it tracks how many hours they put in. Everyone in that room already knows what they should do. The exhausted ones talk themselves out of it.

Losing a day is the point

Cut one working day from five and you lose 20% of your hours. There is no way to type fast enough to get them back, which means the only honest response is to delete a fifth of what you do. That deletion is the strategy. When we moved to four days, the internal casualties came first: status meetings became short written updates, and the weekly reports nobody read stopped being written. A surprising amount of work, it turned out, existed only so that someone would appear busy. Fake work needs slack to survive, and we had removed the slack.

The discipline reaches client work too. A team with 32 hours instead of 40 has better scope conversations and stops gold-plating deliverables nobody asked for. Our clients don’t buy hours from us anyway. They buy the judgment that comes out of those hours, and judgment concentrates when time is scarce.

What it costs

I won’t pretend the week is free. Client emergencies don’t check your calendar, and a handful of weeks a year the fifth day happens anyway; working with US clients from this side of the Atlantic means some Thursdays run long. It also caps a certain kind of growth. You cannot run a body shop on four days, selling hours in bulk, because you’ve made your hours deliberately scarce. We accepted that ceiling with our eyes open. Scarce hours pushed us to sell thinking instead of time, and thinking is a better business to be in.

There were quarters when it strained and we actually suspended it until things calmed down. People sometimes file our four-day week under kindness, and I’ll take that, since kindness at Switch is an operating principle and this is one of the ways it shows up in a calendar. But it keeps its place in the business on commercial merit.

When we merged our two agencies into one in 2016, Switch was a 360° shop competing for every brief on the island, mostly on price. Today it’s a fully remote B2B consultancy with clients on two continents. The whole rebuild, the repositioning, the move into new markets, every difficult call along the way, happened on the way to four days a week. The fifth day was never where the good work was happening anyway.