The traditional strategy consulting model is labor-intensive and expensive: you fly a team to a client site, hang out with the executive team, run some workshops at a company offsite, and send a big invoice.

This severely restricts who you can work with. Fortune 500 companies. Government agencies. International trade associations. Wealthy private clients.

But many of the companies at the forefront of the shorter hours movement don’t have travel budgets and deep pockets. Almost all the companies in SHORTER are small business, with fewer than 50 people.

This is not a big surprise: small companies are more nimble than big corporations, and capable of trying more radical things. When a founder or owner burns out, it can be the death-knell for the company. And even within big companies, it’s often insurgent teams and subversive leaders that experiment with shorter hours, not figures in the C-suite.

So Strategy + Rest was already designing virtual tools to serve smaller teams, creating online workshops, integrating tools like Miro and Zoom, and adapting practices honed in luxe retreats to fit on mobile screens.
Then COVID-19 hit.

In the wake of the pandemic, we’ve accelerated our efforts to make our virtual workshops, put talks online, and create new online content– courses, templates, and articles.

Fortunately, since lots of teams and companies have acquired a level of familiarity with online tools, with interacting with colleagues remotely, and with doing work digitally, we think those offerings will become more accessible and actionable.

Plus, we can offer them at rates that are very affordable for small companies, and businesses emerging from the lockdown.

So if you’re a company interested in trialing a 4-day week, or applying REST in your business, we’re eager to talk about how we can work together– virtually or in person.