This is our third annual impact report. For us, it’s an exercise in reflection and growth as much as an opportunity to connect with our people (that’s you). We’re excited to share our progress. And we’re ready to hold ourselves accountable to the improvements we want to make.

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Or see the text-only version below.

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From our partners

Instinctually, I rush to say 2024 was tough (like 2023, and 2022, and on and on) because running a small business with principles is hard. It takes a lot of energy, takes an emotional toll, and it costs money. Sometimes, it costs money while we aren’t making it.

When I think this way, I try to pause and adjust my vantage. When I do, pride and gratitude always stamp out trepidation. Pride in our team, and what they’re building; how they invest in themselves and take each other seriously; how they see themselves in our collective future. Grateful that they’re willing to keep going as we learn how to crew a moving ship while we’re building it; grateful that they stick to it when friction and headaches come out of that struggle. I relearn daily that our challenges and heartburns aren’t really that concerning, and we’re lucky to have so many opportunities.

In this report, we share how Mediocre leveraged those opportunities and privileges in 2024. We’re excited to have (slightly) bigger problems to chip away at throughout 2025.

—Shawn, Partner

In my second year as a partner, I’m reminded of the privilege we have to vote, with our time and money, for what’s important to us—to ourselves, to our team, and to our communities. I’ve regularly debated whether change comes from our personal responsibility or a movement, and I’m learning that it comes from both. Our responsibility as an agency isn’t to change the world, but each year, our impact report shows that it’s possible to change our daily lives for our better future. While growth is never linear and sometimes feels like trudging through thick mud, I hope we can inspire you to use the power you have to make a positive impact as we continue to do so too.

‍—Sarah, Partner

2024 highlights

Launching a new website

Good work comes from curiosity, exploration, and the willingness to take risks. As a creative agency, it’s risky to redesign your own website — from the time commitment to the certainty that you’ll outgrow it, in some way, in the near future. We did it anyway. And we’ll do it again, because that’s how we grow.

Growing our team

We added two brand-new roles to our team in 2024: lead copywriter and project coordinator. We also made a handful of internal “promotions” (that’s a term we don’t really use, but it gets the spirit across). We want to recognize that when our team members’ skills grow, so does their ability to take on more leadership. We designated two new creative leads and a head of employee experience.

Improving strategy and collaboration workflows

We rethought our approach to creative work to make sure that we’re getting the most out of our team’s skills. We implemented bi-monthly creative team meetings to share inspiration, plus monthly one-on-ones between creative leads and our creative director.

In November, we took a step back. At a retreat in Red River Gorge, we spent time discussing 2024 in detail — from billing and operations to creative strategy. We also hiked, made campfires, ate tacos, and sang karaoke.

Expanding health & wellness benefits

We started offering a monthly stipend to support our team’s health and wellness. Employees can use it for gym memberships, fitness classes, gear and equipment, and more. It doesn’t roll over each month, because we want the team to use it to support their health year-round.

Becoming a more bike-friendly business  

We love biking to the office. Especially when there’s parking. We purchased and installed two u-bike racks on our front porch, protected from the elements.

We also ramped up incentives for biking throughout the year. We offered prizes (cash and AirPods), doubled bike mileage reimbursements for event months, and added group rides.

We saw high engagement with Bike to Work Month (May) and Cycle September.

Our team

We’re a creative agency made of people who care. We’re working for longevity and contributing to our collective future. And we’re having fun doing it.

Governance

Our mission-driven, big-picture work: engaging with our social and environmental impact, ethics, and transparency.

New website launch

Mission & engagement

We designed, developed, and launched our new website at mediocre.rodeo (what you're looking at right now.) A redesign is a risk, not only because we all have opinions on our own brand. It’s a time commitment and an exploration of our identity with rabbit holes down every turn. We committed the time and explored (some) rabbit holes. And we’ll do it again, because that’s how we keep growing.

Annual team retreat

Mission & engagement

In November, we slowed down for a full-team retreat at a cabin in the Red River Gorge. On a sunny morning on a screened-in patio, coffee in hand, we looked at our numbers for 2024: how did we stack up to our expectations? What were our biggest clients, our favorite projects? What could we do better? And, importantly, did we really live out our shared values?

More than in years past, we focused on bonding. Some of us are fully remote and rarely get face time. It was fun to catch up and cut loose. After all, humor doesn’t always translate over Slack.

Workers

Our impact on our team: financial security, health and safety, wellness, career development, employee satisfaction, and more.

Team growth

Career development

In 2024, we welcomed a lead copywriter and project coordinator. Both are brand-new roles for our team. We also recognized team members’ growth, designated two new creative leads and a head of employee experience.

Professional development

Career development

We stepped up our conference game in 2024. Building on momentum from our expanded professional development structure in 2023 (a cash stipend of $750, three days of PTO for attendance and travel), our team found some exciting events — both virtual and in-person.

By the numbers: we spent $4,074 on tickets and travel; $4,176 went unused. We clocked 48 hours of professional development PTO; 168 went unused. In 2025, we want to put the entire budget to use.

Here are the conferences we attended, for the curious-minded (we recommend checking them out):

• Creative South
• Brand New
• ConFig
• AIGA Design Conference
• Harvard Business Review: The Future of Business

Paid skill-building

Career development

We provide each full-time team member with one paid hour per week to focus on professional skill-building. In 2024, we tracked a total of 351 on-the-clock skill-building hours.

Here’s what our team has to say:

• I have been learning to use Adobe Creative Suite to help with minor design revisions for clients. This has helped me learn more about what our design team does on a daily basis and makes me feel like I'm lessening the load on them once I have it nailed down.
• I learned a lot about how to design and set up user interfaces in Figma through SkillShare, which has been very helpful as we move over to more frequent use of Figma in day-to-day tasks.
• I've also used the time to keep up-to-date on the ever-evolving features of core programs like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
• I've started to focus on improving my knowledge of print design, researching more about specific print processes and how to better optimize files for hand-off to printers.
• I completed SkillShare classes for productivity, and worked through several Adobe Indesign Basics Tutorials.
• I’ve been focusing on skills that may contribute to a sense of belonging & understanding for people in the Mediocre community (clients, team, audience). So far, I’ve been learning Spanish and have started reading Design for Belonging to gain more understanding of how design can impact a sense of belonging within a community.
• I took SkillShare classes on writing for expression, humor, and joke writing. Our work can sometimes feel mechanical or repetitive. For me, practicing different ways to approach writing helps break out of that and encourages me to take a more creative approach.
• I put a bunch of hours into an Advanced Figma course, and now feel so much more literate in designing effective and dev-ready UI/UX.
• A few of our team members learned about recycling practices by touring Lexington’s recycling facility.

Four-day workweek

Engagement & satisfaction

Since we switched to a four-day, 32-hour workweek in 2022, we’ve seen more enthusiasm and less burnout from the team. We’re now entering our third year of this model, and we’re not looking back.

Average employee satisfaction score of 4.78 out of 5

Engagement & satisfaction

For 2024, we set a goal to more consistently and thoroughly examine team engagement and satisfaction. We set up an anonymous monthly survey on a range of work-life topics designed to get a comprehensive view of employee satisfaction. The average score — 4.78 — is a combination of all scored responses.

Questions revolved around the following topics, on a rotating basis:

• Teamwork
• Management
• Autonomy and ownership
• Recognition and performance
• Learning and growth
• Morale and retention
• Benefits

Every month, the management team meets to review feedback and create action steps to address it. This year, those steps included:

• Installing a “Meeting in progress: please mind your volume” illuminated sign in the office to signify that a communal space is in use
• Sharing resources — books, audiobooks, podcasts — on topics like career advancement, time management, and work culture
• Walking through our shared financials to more clearly explain how financial decisions are made and where are money is going

Well-being stipend

Health, wellness & safety

Even in the best situations, it can be hard to focus on yourself. We wanted to find more ways to support the team’s work-life balance. We started to offer a monthly well-being stipend for things an employee might choose not to purchase on their own, but add a lot of value to their overall health and wellness. Think gym memberships, fitness classes, or gear and equipment.

We launched the stipend in June. Over the rest of the year, we spent $1,944. $1,556 went unused. In 2025, we hope to use the full budget.

Our collective health pursuits included the following:

• Community-supported agriculture (CSA)
• ClassPass
• Gym memberships (YMCA, Orange Theory Fitness)
• Meditation app subscriptions
• Vitamins and supplements
• Trail running shoes
• Running shoes
• Rock climbing shoes
• Bicycle helmet
• Direct Primary Care (DPC)
• Counseling/therapy
• Therapeutic massage

Bike to Worth Month + Cycle September

Health & wellness

We kept the gears turning with special events and incentives for Bike to Work Month (May) and Cycle September. We logged a total of 323 rides, cycled 1,384 miles, and saved 470 pounds of CO₂. Read our blog post for more information (and sweet action shots).

Our community

Our impact on our communities: civic engagement, supply chain management, economic impact, charitable giving, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

We’ve said it before: we value community over profit and connection above all. Part of becoming a certified B Corp is following an impact business model — a formal commitment to creating positive outcomes in a specific area. Our impact model is local economic development, meaning that our company is designed to strengthen our local economy by committing a significant portion of our procurement and/or sales to remain local.

Paid volunteering time for team members

Civic engagement & giving

We provide each full-time team member with one paid hour per week to volunteer. In 2024, we collectively tracked 357 volunteering hours on the clock. At our standard billable rate, that’s over $70,000 in donated time.

Here’s what our team has to say:

• Friends of the Lexington Public Library provides financial, advocacy and volunteer support to the Lexington Public Library. I volunteered for them by sorting book donations at the Friends Book Cellar.
• Friends of Shelby Park and Bottoms is a nonprofit partner of the Metro Parks Department. They're responsible for forest restoration efforts, plant pollination through bee keeping, and trail construction/maintenance in Nashville. I have volunteered by doing invasive species removal, event support, and trash pickup. I have very much enjoyed working with this nonprofit. The community outreach and volunteer leader, CD Paddock, is really inspiring to me as a production manager. She manages to keep volunteer events organized and fun, and I never feel like anything is overlooked or overengineered. She consistently strikes a perfect balance.
• Lexington Humane Society dog walking: literally just spending two hours a week walking dogs, but it helps so much with the dogs' well-being and adoptability, especially with big dogs. Not only do I get some extra walking in, but I always leave filled with a lot of joy from the time spent with them.
• Smithsonian transcription: transcribing documents from a digitized version into plain text, this makes them searchable and machine-readable, and thus more accessible to a wider audience. I'm a firm believer that knowledge should be shared and these are small things I can do to help further that cause. My favorite documents so far have been technical notes from women astronomers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for Project PHaEDRA.
• Endurance rides: I spent a weekend camping down at Big South Fork, spending my days volunteering at the vet checks for the endurance ride. These rides are a driving force in keeping trails well-maintained for public use and they spend weeks beforehand (and after) working with the park staff to clear and repair the sections they will be using. My support role was in helping vets ensure the health and fitness of participating horses before, during, and after their ride.
• Iris bed care at the Arboretum: The Blue Grass Iris Society maintains a bed of a wide variety of labelled iris for all to enjoy and I appreciate that the Arboretum has provided a place where people don't have to pay a fee to have an accessible outdoors space.
• I've been focusing most of my volunteer time on helping at my local Makerspace, in Berea, which provides communal-use tools and equipment for its members and provides workshops and orientations to teach people how to use them. I help by running the orientations for the wood shop, which includes teaching general safety and the safe use of equipment like table saws, band saws, jointers and routers, among others. I also help with cleaning the space regularly and helping to set up for community events. The Makerspace is open 24/7 to members and is a great third space for many people. It's helped many people by giving them affordable access to tons of tools and materials that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive or bulky.
• In a Bluegrass Greensource clinic, I built a rain barrel for the office to reduce toxic waste (roof water) in street drains and ultimately keep our rivers clean.
• I cleared approx. 16 bags of litter from bike trails & river ways from around Lexington both on my own and with a group.
• I focused on getting connected with bike communities around town such as KYMBA trail cleanup, Womxn & Femme Mechanic Night at Brokespoke, and Broomwagon bike clinics. I’m still figuring out how to break into this world, but am thinking spring & summer will open up more opportunities for volunteering.
• As a part of a bike repair station grant received in spring 2024, we scouted for bike repair station locations around town for new installation & current station repairs.
• I started reaching out to Lex Center for Creative Reuse & Lexington Library’s Marksbury Makerspace to begin conversation about becoming a knitting tech in their spaces.
• I continued on as Neighborhood Fridge's main designer, and we've seen a lot of growth! We have plans to expand to Tampa, and we quickly met our fundraising goal for it! We're launching a new website at the end of this month! We've rescued ~90,000lbs of food to date that would've otherwise gone to landfills, and made it accessible to people experiencing food apartheid.
• I started working with Missing Maps. I traced satellite imagery in Mizoram, India to help Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders provide aid to people displaced due to conflict in Myanmar. I also traced pre-conflict imagery in Bint Jbeil, Lebanon to support humanitarian work there as people attempt to return home.
• I learned some mapping skills using OpenStreetMap and learned about the efforts I was helping support. It feels like I was able to make an impact, in some small way, for situations that would otherwise feel completely out of my control.

Group volunteering

Civic engagement & giving

About once a quarter, we get together as a group (of those who live locally, at least) to volunteer together. This proved to be a bit tricky to organize in 2024, but we navigated the nonprofit red tape to make an impact when we could. We cleaned up trails in the Red River Gorge alongside the Forest Service and took a kayaking trip on the Kentucky River to pick up trash.

Charitable donations

Civic engagement & giving

In 2024, we gave $3,341.37 (or 6% of our net income) in charitable contributions.

Services for local, independent clients

Local economic development

91% (40 out of 44) of our billed clients in 2024 were local businesses, confirming our commitment to serve at least 75% local, independent clients.

Purchases from local or independent suppliers

Local economic development

We purchased 63% of our core products from suppliers owned locally or by a member of a minority population. Thankfully, we already cultivate partnerships with clients that lend themselves to trust. Most of the time, our clients defer to us for printing, production, and sourcing vendors.

We stick to local suppliers when possible, minority-owned suppliers when there isn’t a local option, and suppliers that fit none of these standards only when necessary. When clients handle production, we’re always looking to talk shop about standards for partnership.

Our planet

Our impact on the earth: environmental management practices and their impact on air, climate, water, land, and biodiversity.

Bike-friendly initiatives

Air & climate

Our team cut down on carbon emissions by bike commuting for a total of 212 work-related miles. Five team members received company-paid bike tuneups. And together, we spent $2,029.73 on bicycle gear, parts, labor, and incentives — not including the two new bike racks we installed at the office. In 2025, we’re looking into incentives for walking to work and ways to better measure our impact. See the “In the works” section below for more.

Feasibility Study Grant

Environmental management

We completed conceptual drawings for the LFUCG Stormwater Quality Projects Incentive Grant Program, Class B Feasibility Study. We worked with Ridgewater, and Jason Zavala Design to create conceptual drawings that identify and implement Best Management Practices (BMPs) capable of reducing the impact of pollutant loading and flooding at 712 & 714 North Limestone Streets. The feasibility study will be finalized and submitted in 2025. These conceptual drawings are available on Box.

Design and Construction Grant

Environmental management

We received partial grant funding of $217,681.95 for the LFUCG Stormwater Quality Projects Incentive Grant Program, Class B Design and Construction. We’ll use our findings in the feasibility study to begin design and construction of parking lot retrofits, rainwater harvesting systems, and infiltration BMPs (permeable pavers, bioretention basin, and native landscape areas). These updates will decrease impermeable surface, reduce building flooding, improve stormwater quality, and remove invasive species of plants.

By implementing proper management and use of stormwater from both properties, we’ll supply harvested rainwater for non-potable uses in the buildings. We’ll also help increase pedestrian safety and improve the outdoor experience for Mediocre employees, Seedleaf programming and participants, and the neighboring communities. Estimated completion for this grant is in 2026.

Waste reduction

Land & life

These figures are for our Lexington office (714 N Limestone), a space we share with Seedleaf.

• Garbage bags of landfill “wet” trash produced: 34 (up 3 from 2023)
• Garbage bags of landfill “dry” trash produced: 10 (down 1 from 2023)
• Unbagged bins of recycling produced: 44 (up 22 from 2023)
• Bags of litter cleaned up on/around our premises: 38 (up 28 from 2023)
• Compost bins: 14 (we did not track this in 2023)
• We also separate out e-waste and take that to designated collection points.

Our clients

Our impact on our clients: customer stewardship, product quality, ethical marketing, data privacy and security, and feedback channels.

Average client satisfaction score of 4.78 out of 5

Customer stewardship

We want to better understand what is working, what’s not, and how we can make meaningful improvements.

We asked our clients to answer the following questions using a rating scale from 1-5, with open space to provide comments or context. The average score — 4.78 — is the average response to all questions below.

• Has working with us helped you see positive changes in your business? Why or why not?
• Do you feel like we've really understood your issues or problems and offered helpful, impactful solutions?
• What could our team do better?
• Did you feel clear on expectations (both yours and ours) throughout the duration of the project?
• Did we successfully understand and incorporate your feedback?
• Did we leave you with everything you needed to continue implementing the changes/progress we made together?
• What’s one word you would use to describe us, and why?
• How likely are you to recommend working with us to others?
• Please share any additional thoughts or feedback, if you’d like.

We operate on a small enough scale that we were able to follow up 1-on-1 with clients who completed this survey, to get more details or insights into their answers (especially atypical ones). We folded that feedback into our team goals for 2025. Most of it was operational/functional.

Mission-driven organizations

Customer stewardship

Our services can help expand the social impact of the organizations we work with. These non-profit, pro bono, and/or community-focused clients in 2024 carry an impact beyond the deliverables we handed them.

• Box2Box
• 250Lex
• Beauty Table
• Bike Walk Kentucky
• Breck Create
• High County Conservation Center
• Kentucky Equine Education Project (KEEP)
• Lexington Art League
• Lexington Philharmonic
• LFUCG’s Recycling Campaign
• LFUCG’s Safe Streets Campaign
• Paducah Symphony
• Shreveport Symphony
• Spirited Biomaterials
• Vote Yes for Parks!

Collectively, we worked 1,284 hours for these clients in 2024. That’s roughly 11% of our total hours tracked for last year (11,425). As we made this list, we realized that we sometimes fall short in tracking pro bono work. We just do it. We are planning to address that in 2025 — starting now, we’re committing 5% of our work to pro bono projects.

In the works

The work doesn’t stop here. These are initiatives we’ve started (and we’re excited about), but haven’t yet made measurable progress on.

Social & environmental performance training

Mission & engagement

Until now, our social and environmental performance training has been largely self-directed. Team members are encouraged to seek, find, and participate in pursuits of their own choosing. We offer three additional days of PTO each year to complete ongoing education and direct engagement with anti-racism or equity work — like trainings, workshops, or conferences specifically aimed at social improvement.

In 2024, we used 0 hours. For 2025, we’re creating more direct prompts and accountability measures, including personalized goals and quarterly check-ins with management. We’ve already seen results using a similar approach for volunteering and skill-building efforts.

Reducing carbon emissions: walking to work

Air & climate

Several of our team members walk to the office or a coworking space near their home. We set a goal in 2025 to track this walking data alongside our biking data, creating a more clear picture of when our team opts out of vehicle use in favor of zero-carbon transport (and more time outside). Plus, we’ll offer fun incentives for hitting the sidewalk.

Waste reduction: remote workers

Land & life

With a handful of fully-remote employees, we’re looking into ways to track non-office waste reduction. We don’t have anything to report yet, but it’s in the works for 2025.