011: Sometimes “Retreat” is the Right Answer!

Hey, have you heard there's a new style of CEO on the block. The modern CEO. And she is changing the way businesses are run. She's setting her own hours and her own salary. She's creating a business around what matters most to her. Freedom, family, and impact. And her corner office looks nothing like what you'd see on Wall Street. It's a kitchen t your grandma's lake house, A spacious home office, the living room floor, maybe surrounded by kids and crayons or the local coffee shop. Your business, your way. This modern CEO is here to stay. Because when you embrace your role as modern CEO, you will have more freedom, more profit, and more fun. Most importantly, you'll fall in love with your life and a business in a way you've only dreamed. Trust me, this isn't a pipe dream reserved for only a select few. You are the modern CEO. You are creating a business and life you love because a better business means a better life. Welcome back. I'm your host, Amber McHugh. And I have worked with thousands of women to scale and grow their business with ease. And I am here to help you be free and and get paid. So if you want to do what you love and get paid for it, you are in the right place. Now, just because you're getting paid doesn't mean that you necessarily want to spend all that money. And I wouldn't exactly say that I am cheap. Well, okay, maybe I am. I mean, I spend money like I spend $8 on green juice on the regular. And I love my new computer that I am looking at right now. And I will happily drop $300 for a new outfit if I can walk in the store, see it on the rack. It's perfect. Good. Go. Let's go. Because I wear the outfit a lot when it's just grab and go like that. I know it's in my closets all put together. I got that. But on the other hand, $200 on a pair of jeans? Are you crazy or flying first class? Nah, I'm the type of person who is perfectly comfortable in a middle seat. So I'm not splurging on first class. I'm also not the type of person to buy my kids a ton of toys. My poor kids. For the longest time, their playroom was one side, not even the whole space. But it was just one side of our kitchen pantry. Yes, just one side of our pantry. No, it wasn't even that big of a pantry. It was like a normal closet. Not even a big walk in closet in a bedroom. It would be considered, you know, just a normal walk in closet in a bedroom. Not that big at all. But don't feel bad for them. They're fine, they're fine. They have plenty of toys. But you know, I don't go. I don't like to go crazy on stuff. Not super flashy. I drive a Hyundai. My husband has a nice car. I don't really care what kind of car I drive. But I tell you all of this so you can get a sense of my spending habits, so you can understand what I'm about to tell you. So I'm kind of cheap. I keep an eye on my budget, I keep an eye on my profit margins. So I didn't want to bring my team together in person because that was going to cost us some money and put a dent in our profit margin. And all of this came to light when I thought we should host a summer retreat. And boy, was I going back and forth, get the team together. Because we haven't been together in a while and there's a lot to do. But man, that's gonna come right off our bottom line. But here's where I ended up. Yes. Spend the money, Amber, Spend the money to meet your team in person. Because this virtual world we live in is a beautiful place. But meeting in person with people goes miles for building relationships and growing the business. So spend the money to meet your team in person and heck if you don't have a team, spend a little money to meet real life people that you've met online before but haven't caught up with in person. Spend that money to fly somewhere, spend that money to drive a little bit and meet those people in a coffee shop somewhere. Because we need human connection. So to give you a sense, I've been running my photography business with my business partner Joanna for a whole lot of years. I don't know, maybe we've been doing this for seven or eight years. Started as a side hustle, and as a side hustle, we grew it to 80,000 in revenue. Working on it part time. Not too shabby, right? As it grew, we added team members so we could stay part time in the business. Before this summer, the whole team's only gotten together once before. I remember it distinctly. We were crammed into my home office, all of us working on a Saturday night on what we thought was a really awesome DIY website. One person, Joanna, thought of funny one liners that are still on the website today. Like your cell phone called, it wants you to stop taking selfies in your underwear. I Love that line. It's my favorite line on our whole website. Oh. In case you didn't know, we're a boudoir photography business and that think that's like Victoria's Secret for everyday women, for all of us. Right? And it's such an incredible experience. If you haven't considered boudoir before, definitely check it out, ladies. It's a lot of fun and it's super empowering. Most women come in thinking it's a gift for someone else. They're taking these photos as a gift for their partner and they walk out knowing it is a gift for themselves. You walk out on Cloud nine, it's so, so super empowering. And for an hour you're just hanging out with your girlfriends, getting some super fun pictures taken. So we were, Joanna was coming up with funny one liners, but like, oh, we need a line for this space in the website. So she, she'd pop out something like that one. Your cell phone called, it wants you to stop taking selfies in your underwear. And then my sister and I were playing around on wix. Wix making website updates and popping in photos. So that was the last time that the whole team. And our website's been upgraded several times since then, but we still haven't gotten together in person. So years later, five times the revenue later, three more cities later, we've expanded to three more cities. And about three times the people later, it was time to regroup with our leadership team in a retreat. I told you how cheap I can be sometimes, right? So I really had to force myself into this because, well, profit margins, but it was so worth it. So why do this? Why take the time to do this? Because when you meet with your team in person, your leadership team, if not your whole team, it aligns everyone and gets everyone on the same page and sets them up for success. So everyone's on the same page and we are marching to the same tune. It really gives you an opportunity as the leader in your business, as the visionary in your business, to make sure everyone knows what the vision is. And it gives them an opportunity to buy in to that vision, right? So they are engaged and on the same page and on board with your vision so they can help you execute that vision. In addition to aligning on the vision, you know, people are people. And while water cooler talk can happen in places like Facebook Group and happen on Slack, nothing replaces the wacky inside jokes and the relationships that can be built when you are in person. And engagement and connection to a company and connection to a Vision comes through experiences like that comes through the in person stuff. Not through pushing out systems and processes and checklists. Right. Not through pushing out methodology. It comes through experiences and it comes through relationships. And those can be built much more rapidly in a container like a retreat. Which is why it was so important for us to finally come together again. So if you're thinking about it, I highly recommend it. And we're gonna break down for you in this episode, our behind the scenes and what did to set ourselves up for success in this retreat. And if you want to grab our agenda, you can go to Amber McHugh.com retreat and get the agenda we used. And you'll see that it's a fairly sparse agenda with things just like work, work, work on it. But I'm going to walk you through in this episode what we did to fill in those blanks and why it is structured in that way. So go and get that retreat agenda@ambermceh.com retreat and we'll walk you through it in this episode. And if you can't go grab that right now, don't worry about it. You'll still be able to follow along in this episode. And if you don't have a team or you're not planning on going on a retreat, there are definitely still some ideas in this episode that might apply to you. So come along for the ride. So our goals for the retreat that you may want to consider as well were to tackle some big picture projects and do some vision exercises. Right. We were taking our leadership team and our core team on this retreat. So we wanted to make sure we're all aligned on the vision. Was there any resetting that we needed to do? And so that all of the things that we talked about and worked on during the retreat aligned with that vision. Right. And if something sort of was taking us down another path, we could point back to the vision and say, hey, are we on track? Are we off track? Does that align to our vision? What needs to change? So we could always loop it back in. And we were always on the same page at this particular retreat, we were also going to knock out some work real time. So it wasn't just a relax retreat, it wasn't just a team building retreat. But we had some work that we wanted to get done together. We're always virtual, we're always working on stuff independently. But there were some things that we knew that we wanted to hash out as a team. So we were committed to doing that in person at this retreat. Certainly we just wanted to have some Fun together. And we definitely planned on creating some fresh inside jokes because we have a funny, funny team. I am most certainly the least funny of all of us, but I like to laugh at everyone. Oh my God. I mean that in the nicest of ways. And so we have a funny team. So we were definitely going to have some fresh jokes that were coming out of that retreat. So how did we structure it? Like I said, this was definitely a working retreat for us as well as a half fun retreat. But there are working retreats, there are recharge retreats, there are team building retreats and everything in between. So we planned for a lot of get it done and work, but mandated that there was a pool available. In fact, this was my requirement because this retreat was happening on my birthday week. So I wasn't going if there wasn't a pool. So we had an agenda again that you can Download@amber McHugh.com forward/retreat. But while we were actually going to work on at the retreat, was being voted on by the team when we got to the retreat location. So you're going to see in that agenda, like I said, that there are just blocks of time that just say work, work, work, work, work, work. But we decided on what we were actually working on when we got to the retreat because we're all busy, we can barely come up for air to even plan this thing. So we were making lists of what we wanted to talk about at the retreat as we built up to it. But we didn't want to layer in a level of stress to carve out time to prioritize those topics in advance of the retreat. So I'll tell you more about how we efficiently narrowed down our focus once we got to the retreat. And in just a second, I wanted everyone to feel super taken care of at the retreat and feel ease going into this. So before we got there, we kept the planning list really simple. We booked the location. We got a location on the Eastern Shore in Maryland. And it was a gorgeous, gorgeous farmhouse right on the water with a pool and a little pool house and there was a zip line and there were kayaks and there was a lot to do the hot tub. And I got groceries delivered to my house from Instacart. So I planned a couple of meals. We had snacks. I got juice from the local juice bar. So we were loaded up on healthy juices. We could stay energized and charged up between our work and our fun. And I definitely should have got more chocolate. That was a big mistake. I thought, oh, we're going to want to be healthy. No, we wanted to more chocolate and more chips and dips. So FYI on that. So as soon as the groceries were delivered, we scheduled them to be delivered right before we were hopping in the car to drive to the Eastern shore. So that's sort of the timing that happened there. And then in addition, the other thing that we planned were gifts for the team. So Lily and myself ordered and picked up gifts from some from some local shops so we could go all Oprah on everyone. Throughout the retreat. The gifts that we grabbed were planners. Sports bras, water bottles, some magazines and some lush massage bars. And here's how we use those throughout the retreat. At the beginning and then at points when energy dropped, we would grab one of the gifts and say, all right, I think energy's dropping a little bit. It's time for a surprise. You get a water bottle, you get a water bottle and you get a water bottle. Everybody gets a new water bottle. So we would just have some fun with those surprises. Nobody knew about them, nobody was expecting them. So it was a way to add an element of surprise and bring energy back up. When we were working hard or we were hitting a point where we got stuck, we just flipped the vibe a little bit. And then the last thing that we, we picked up for the retreat were supplies. And it's a short list because I don't like to waste and well, I'm a little bit cheap. Just kidding, just kidding. I'm not that cheap. I don't totally want that associated with me. But I do watch my budget. We picked up post it notes, pens and little dot stickers for some activities. Again, I'm going to tell you about those in just one second. So at the onset of the retreat, we set the outcomes we wanted by a vote. So again, it was our core team members in attendance at the retreat and we constantly collaborate on big picture and day to day systems we want to update. So everyone has a pretty, pretty good handle on where we're going and then the key pain points that are pulling us down in the business day to day, minute to minute, that if we could just clean those up, we could operate a little bit more efficiently and have more momentum to reach our goals. So because we're all aligned on those, we had everyone write them down at the very beginning of the retreat. So I introed it, I set our vision, I set our goals, I let everyone know how it was going to go down. And then I handed out post it notes and I said, we've been Talking for a while about all of the things we want to cover on the retreat. But now take those post it notes and write down the things that you think we need to cover specifically in the retreat. So take some time and I would definitely recommend setting a timer for this and write down everything you're thinking of on a separate post it note. What do you want to cover during the retreat? So everybody wrote all of their ideas down on post it notes and they stuck them up on the wall. And then there were some things that overlapped, right? So Joanna said something and Megan also wrote that down on her post it note and Maura said something and Joanna also had that on a post it note. So then we started to identify where there was overlap. Then after all the overlap, the post it notes were layered, right? So there might be three post it notes because three people had the same idea. They were layered in one, one stack on the wall. And then let's say there are 50, 50 priorities up there. Then we voted with those circle sticker dots to identify the priorities on the business. What is slowing us down from getting us to our vision? What's going to move us to our vision faster and what do we need to focus on at this retreat to get us to our goals? So everybody took some time to vote and those circle dots helped us identify the priorities and it set our agenda for what we were going to work on during the work, work, work, work, work, work sessions in our agenda. So you see all those times, it doesn't really say like what are we working on in those sections of time. But that was defined at the very beginning of the retreat. So everybody was bought in to what we retreat. Everybody had held space for that. Everybody was aligned to what we were working on. So I didn't come to the retreat saying this is what we are working on. Everybody knew it. And I was totally on board with what they saw. I mean I didn't have any great vision or idea outside of what they were they were seeing and what they thought. Everybody was seeing the same things and we were all bought in and we prioritized to. And that's how co creation happens. And that's how you get people, you get people bought into your vision. So that's how we set out what our working time was going to be. But of course it can't be all work on an agenda or there will be meltdowns because people are people and we get tired and our brains need break. Now I'm not talking about me. No, no, no, not me. I don't get tired. Okay, okay. Maybe. Maybe. I seriously melted down at our retreat, you guys. I went down with a migraine. It was awful. I. Well, no, no, no. I kind of prevented the. The full going down with the migraine. I actually took an anti nausea medication that I had taken before I was going down with the migraine and sometimes anti nausea might medicine will totally knock out the migraine for me. So I don't even have to worry about taking full on migraine meds. And I had taken this particular med before, but I was kind of so out of it because I was in the middle of going down with a migraine that I forgot that this was going to knock me out. This particular anti nausea med was going to totally knock me out. And I took the med and I was feeling better, so that was a good thing. I knew I was not going down with the migraine. But we went back into a working session after some time out at the pool. Yes, we stuck to our pool time as well. And we stuck to our breaks and our long lunch breaks and mid sentence. Talking to Maura, I could tell that something was not right. And Mora asked me, are you okay? I don't think so. I don't think I'm okay at all. Oh my gosh. I think I need to go to bed. So I went upstairs and you guys, I slept for hours. Thank God I have a supportive team. Thank God they get it and we all, you know, have each other's back. But oh my goodness. I went down for hours and thank you. That anti nausea med is apparently also used. I clearly googled it. I'm like, what did I take again? What does this do? It's also an sedation medication for surgeries. So it totally works. I was feeling better. I was not going down with a migraine, but I did lose a few hours at the retreat, which was totally unfortunate. And that's why you want to have an agenda and a game plan. That's why it can't be all work, because people will melt down. But if people do melt down and you have an agenda, people can continue to work the plan and keep the bus moving even if you aren't there. So get that agenda and get that in place so that things can keep on moving. And this is an important right thing to consider for your business overall. If you set the vision, if you have guidelines in place, if you have a plan in place, people can keep on moving and keep the bus, keep the train driving on the tracks, even if you go down, even if it's just, you know, for a few hours that you go down, things can keep on moving. So we teed up the goals and the vision for the business first. It didn't take us long to get those up on the wall with the post. Its because we're very aligned. So that's a really good thing. It underscored that if your team isn't aligned to the vision, leave more time for that exercise and you may want to structure that exercise more if they're not aligned. So in addition to that vision setting exercise at the beginning and getting aligned and the work, work, work, work, work prioritization exercise we did and then blocking in our pool time in our meal time, we did have some other structured exercises and activities in there. And you know, I don't know about you, but thinking back to like corporate days, you know, people sometimes make fun of team building activities. You know, where you're building bridges out of paper clips or you're building Lego castles in silence with a team of people for some communication exercise. I know, I know, I know they can be cheesy, but they can also add value and give a fun, non obtrusive way to call out things and have conversations around topics that can sometimes be a little bit difficult to have. So we did a couple of excellent exercises. Actually we planned on having three exercises, but one of our exercises got cut short again because of my migraine. I was supposed to be leaving that exercise, but we didn't get to have our team talk exercise which was all around communication. But I can link you up to that over@ambermceh.com retreat. So we'll have that exercise for you as well. A team communication exercise. We also did a values exercise to define our values. Right? And again, we're working pretty closely together. Our team knows our values, but to really get clear on our values and know that, hey, we are basically operating like BFFs, right? We're hanging out, we laugh, we debate and have tense moments and there's, you know, sometimes fear that's coming up and there's emotion that's coming up. Same thing happens for our clients when they walk into a boudoir photo shoot. There's fear, there's emotion coming up and we lighten that mood and we want them to know that they are hanging out with girlfriends for the next hour and we are going to have a blast. And so one of our values is, hey, it's like hanging out with your BFFs, right? Boudoir best friends forever. And it is so true. It's a transformative experience. But what does that look like when you turn it into action? So we did an exercise to define our values, and then we talked about what does boudoir best friends forever look like when we actually put that into action. So for us, that looks like, right, Breaking down the barriers right away. And not necessarily saying, hi, nice to meet you, when someone walks through the door for their boudoir photoshoot, but instead we say, hey, we're so excited you're here. This is gonna be so much fun. And we give that person a big hug instead. Right? So we immediately start breaking down barriers. We treat that person like we've known them forever. And like, this is going to be the most amazing hour of our lives because it is going to be the most amazing hour that they have ever experienced, and they're going to walk out feeling like a million bucks. So what does that look like? How do we create that value and turn it into action? How do. How does that actually happen? What does it feel like? What does it look like? What does it sound like? So we broke that down and we did an exercise for that. If you haven't broken down your values for your company and talked about what they look like in action yet, I would highly recommend that. And we have a list of values. And we talk a little bit about this in our Fresh start workbook@freshstartworkbook.com if you need a jumpstart or some assistance on that, too. So that is a summary of what we did at our retreat. And on Thursday afternoon, oh, I mentioned we had that Teen Talk activity. I'm going to link you up to that one as well. And I think it is so important that we actually ended up doing an exercise like this virtually instead of in person, because it is hard when we are in virtual environments, right. To read through messages on the Interweb. Sometimes things come through mean and that's not how it was intended. Or sometimes we sound short because we're in the middle of a variety activities and we're moving quick. But again, it wasn't intended to sound short or quick. So we had a whole exercise planned around that, and we ended up doing it virtually instead. So if you're thinking, and I'm not going to be able to meet with my team in person, you know, you can translate some of this and schedule a virtual retreat as well. But I would highly encourage you when you are thinking that it might be time to get your team together in person and you're wondering if it is the right time. And you're wondering if you're ready for it. If you have that inkling, go for it. Because it is so helpful to propel your business forward to get everyone on the same page and create some amazing momentum so that your team can rally and bring the vision of your business to life so you can serve more people in a bigger way and in a better way than you have ever imagined. So go on over to ambermcugh.com retreat and get yourself that retreat agenda and let me know how your retreat goes. Whether you do it in person or you end up doing it virtually, it's all good. And meet some people in person. I hope to see you both in person and virtually soon.