Tower Paddle Boards moved its whole team to a five-hour workday in June 2015 — and kept it
The paddle-board seller moved to 8am-1pm days with 5% profit-sharing in June 2015; a year on: Inc. 5000 twice running, 10 people, $9M revenue projected.
What was changed
Tower Paddle Boards, an e-commerce seller of stand-up paddle boards, ran on a standard eight-hour day until founder Stephan Aarstol tested a theory he had carried since before starting the company: in every office a few people do three times the work of everyone else for marginally more pay, and he had managed his own productivity — not his time on the clock — effectively for over 15 years. On June 1, 2015 he moved the whole company to a five-hour workday, 8am to 1pm, framed as a three-month 'summer hours' pilot with an explicit plan to return to traditional hours in the fall if it failed.
The schedule came with a compensation redesign: a 5% profit-sharing plan launched at the same time. An employee making $40,000 a year — $20 an hour across a 2,000-hour baseline — would earn roughly $48,000 including about $8,000 of profit share, but on a 1,250-hour base, lifting hourly earnings to $38.40. Aarstol designed it so the company's expenses would not rise 'by a single dime'. The ask in return: each team member needed to be twice as productive as the average worker, and anyone who could not make the five hours work would be fired.
The feared failure mode — revenue falling with customer-service and shop hours — did not materialize by the founder's account. A little over a year later the schedule was still in place, and the results he cited were external as well as internal: the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing companies two years running, ranked #239 in 2015, and a 10-person team he projected would generate $9 million in revenue in 2016. All figures come from his own first-person Fast Company account, with the Inc. ranking the one externally verifiable anchor.
Why it worked
A five-hour day removes the slack that fills eight: 'time management comes baked into the pie' when the day cannot stretch.
Profit-sharing pays people for output rather than presence — hourly earnings nearly doubled in the example without increasing company cost, so the incentive and the constraint pointed the same way.
The experiment matched the brand: freeing afternoons for the outdoor lifestyle the company sells made the schedule part of the product story.
Framing it as a reversible 'summer hours' pilot capped the downside and gave the team a concrete deadline to prove productivity before a planned return to eight hours.
What can be applied
Cut hours and share profits and productivity has to live inside the schedule: scarcity of time plus shared upside forces output per hour up, trading presence for focus at zero added cost.
Aftermath
The three-month test never ended: over a year after the June 2015 switch, the five-hour day was still company policy, and the founder reported the Inc. 5000 placement two years running with the $9M revenue projection for 2016. The material says nothing about the company beyond August 2016.