Our 5th Birthday

On February 4th, Amenable turns five years old. 

From some perspectives, five years is a really long time. Half of small businesses don’t make it to this point, and we’re grateful to have beaten those odds.

From other perspectives, five years is barely a drop in the bucket. In human years, we’ve just started learning how to tie our shoes and write our names.While preparing some birthday content for social media, my team helped collect some statistics about the work we’ve accomplished over the past five years. It was so neat to scroll back through client names and project descriptions, and to appreciate how much our little agency has grown.

Then I tallied all of the client names up, and the total came out to 47.

Forty-seven? Doesn’t that seem a little, I dunno, small?

Now, I could pause here to explain that we often take on multiple projects per client, or that a single project represents months of work. All of that would be true, but it misses the point I want to make here.

That moment of “wait, what?” deserves a name. Let’s call it the “lookback letdown.”

The lookback letdown appears whenever the work you’re doing feels big on the inside but modest from the outside. Inside the Amenable studio, the last five years have felt dense—packed with learning and craft and trial-and-error and trust. But if you flatten that experience into a single number, the richness evaporates. Suddenly, five years of meaningful effort looks…small.

When your internal reality doesn’t match the external scoreboard, it’s easy to let discouragement creep in. You might start to wonder whether the work is enough, whether you are enough, whether the mountain you thought you were climbing is even a mountain at all. Comparison becomes the thief of joy, even when you’re only comparing yourself to your own expectations.

But the lookback letdown has another side to it, one that’s easy to miss if you only stare at the tallies on the chalkboard. Five-year-olds don’t measure life in statistics; they measure in experiences. They remember the big feelings, the delightful chaos, the new skills, the friendships, the first tastes of independence. Child psychologists say five is a formative age because foundations are being poured, even if the building isn’t visible yet.

Amenable at five feels similar. The trust we’ve built with repeat clients, the clarity of our values, the incremental improvements in the work we deliver—these aren’t easy to tally, but they’re real. They’re the beginnings of a shape: the story of what we want to make in the world and how we want to make it. That matters, because once you decide what you’re building toward, the real work is to hold steady.

The lookback letdown isn’t a warning siren. It’s an invitation to get clear about what actually matters, and then to stop second-guessing that choice. The solution isn’t to keep switching perspectives every time the view looks unflattering or to chase metrics that make you feel more impressive. It’s to decide what matters—depth over breadth, trust over scale, craft over speed, whatever your true north is—and then hold steady. Just keep building what you said you’d build. If you don’t let the lookback letdown undermine your values, it won’t be able to touch your achievements.

So here’s how to turn the lookback letdown on its head: instead of thinking, “Wow, that huge important thing turned out to be so small…it must be nothing at all,” try this: “Wow, that huge important thing turned out to be so small! Only imagine how much better it can get from here!” 

If we’ve already worked and learned and helped and laughed this much in only five years, it’s frankly awe-inspiring to consider how much richer it could become.

Trees grow by adding rings, year after year. Each ring builds on what came before—more of the same, just deeper and stronger. The direction you set early becomes the direction you grow. We’re choosing to grow toward the things that feel big on the inside: trust, craft, and meaningful work with clients who become partners. Those are our rings. The metrics will follow, or sometimes they won’t, but either way, we’ll know what we built and why.

Here’s to five years of Amenable, and all the rings still to come.