February 24, 2014 12:01am, Las Vegas, Nevada, Jordan’s office.

“Well, that’s that.”

We had just finished the 2 week pay period and failed to reach our company goal of 2,000,000 cumulative credits. Mid way through the second week I kind of new it was unlikely. We were at about 1.2 million on Thursday. We’d have needed 4 of our best days ever to hit 2,000,000. At the end we came up short with only 1,637,618 credits. 362,382 credits shy of the goal.

I had a lot running through my mind. I’d told everyone about this goal. I’d bragged publicly, told my family, talked shit to people about it. Everyone was watching, the clock struck midnight, and hadn’t made it.

I felt cooler than any cucumber I’ve ever met.

I think reaching goals is over rated. Humans aren’t great at predicting the future. To me, deciding that some really specific event will happen in the future and then being bummed when it doesn’t is stupid.

For me, the focus is always on trajectory. As long as I keep us on the best possible path, we seem to always end up winning more. Before the pay period began I’d felt what a lot of people had felt about Pandora, a weird mix of optimism and stagnation.

On most of our reports things looked great. Solid earnings, solid level of new talent coming in, stability. But on a few of the reports, this month’s report looked a bit too similar to last month’s report and we were spotting a trend of “not super rapid growth,” particularly in our earnings.

I realized the path had gone from being this cool homogenous team, to a lot of individuals doing their own thing. I realized that path was wrong. I did something to correct that path. I set a really huge goal.

You see, when you’re at the size we are, most experts would say that 65% sales growth in 2 weeks for a company doing 6 figure sales amounts every 2 weeks, is…. ummm..excessive?

I knew it was a stretch. But I publicized this goal anyways. And we missed.

Some people might call that failure. But I call it success. I define success as an outcome. An attempt is made, and an outcome is returned. Failure is when attempts aren’t made.

I don’t think what happened was failure. Because I know what really happened.

What really happened was:

#1. As a group we had our highest earning pay period ever as a company, beating our last pay period by over $40,000. We experienced 30% sales growth in 2 weeks. (record)

#2. Sophia Moore and Evan Matthews really frickin happened. Both beat their previous personal best pay periods by more than 2x in her case and by over 100,000 more in his case. Together they racked up 17 daily contest wins, earning several thousand dollars in bonus money. Nick Caffrey,Cashmere Estrella, and Max Hughes each added their own contest wins (freshest face, Valentine’s, and Male flirt/Humiliation contest respectively). Together a total of 21 contest wins in 14 days (record, record, record, record, record, record, record, record)

#3. 12 new models (added in the last 2 weeks) are going to be getting their first payouts from us tomorrow (record).

#4. 7 people are getting payouts over $1,500. (not a record, but cool)

#5. 55 people are getting payouts from us tomorrow (record)

#6. 9 other models had their personal best pay periods ever.

#7. We received 398 new applications from prospective models, and hired a couple of them ☺.(record)

We didn’t get failure, we got results. Results that suggest our trajectory is right on. So our goals reset with our stats, and once again we aim for 2,000,000 credits.

Thank you for reading,

Jordan Laubaugh
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Snapchat: JordanLaubaugh

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