Creative Team Building Ideas for Your Team

Welcome back. In this episode, I'm going to share with you 3 team-building activities that you can choose from to roll out with your team this month. I'm going to share a few things that are new over here at Guru as we celebrate our 10-year anniversary this month, which is crazy to think about. I'm going to share a quick review of a book I'm reading right now and many other nuggets along the way. Thank you for joining me on Culture and Compliance. My name is Matt Beatty. I'll be your host as we look at all things trying to help you grow a business that's meaningful and not only maintain compliance on the human resources side, but create the type of culture that attracts, retain, and engages top talent. Thanks for joining me. Let's dive right in. All right. So, what's new at Guru? Let's start out there. I think the biggest thing new is what's old around here, right? So, we are just hitting our 10-year anniversary. And to give you a perspective of how much I pay attention to this kind of stuff, on August 1st, somebody had to— which was the actual 10-year anniversary. That was the first time we ever got a check was August 1st, 2014. I'll never forget it. I still had a— technically was still working at the time. I hadn't put in my 2-week notice just yet. And I got that check. I was done the middle of the next month. That to me was the signal that, hey, we can go. We've got paying customers. Honestly, as I put on a LinkedIn post recently, I probably could have kept this as a side hustle way longer than I did. I started to feel guilt around like moonlighting or something, which was fine and fair. I didn't want to take anything from my current employer, but I wasn't working during the day. I was doing my job. I could have kept doing that job. I just felt this urgency to go and burn the boats and go all in on starting a business. Listening this and you're thinking about starting a business, I would say, hey, evaluate the situation, really do the math and crunch the numbers on can you moonlight with this, do it nights and weekends for a while until it gets some legs and you validate your idea. Um, I probably had another, honestly, 6 months I could have been doing that at a minimum and still maintain, uh, you know, my integrity, have been doing a good job for my old employer, uh, and, and and fulfilling a 40-plus hour work week while also just doing this. It just did not require a ton of time early on with those first few clients and, um, would have maybe made me prioritize even more. So what's the leeway around here? 10-year anniversary. So what are we doing? We've got some team building stuff on the agenda for this month. We're sitting here coming up close to middle August right now. We've done a few things already. I'm going to, uh, cover 3 things that we've got coming up that I think you can steal for your organization, and they're You know, they cost money, each of them, but they're not super expensive. And they definitely each have their own way of engaging and building a team. So I'm going to get to those in just a couple minutes. Now, I will tell another quick story about our, our evolution as a company here. So we're looking back 10 years, I got a lot of stories from over those 10 years, as you can imagine. But what I like to tell people all the time is about our office space. So for the first— I don't remember now, it's been 10 years— year or so, we were in my bonus room. And we was me and my two kids. And then my wife started working in the business and eventually I hired my first employee. I don't think it was too far in. It was somewhere in that 6 to 12 month range, part-time person working remote from her house. And she would crack me up because I would talk to her and she would say, look, I got to go lock myself in the closet when a client calls because I got three boys here at the house and they will chase me down. They will find me anywhere. When I'm trying to work. And so I can just picture her still to this day, locked in the closet answering somebody's payroll question. And that's how things start. It's not pretty. And our first office was the perfect example of it not being pretty. I went back to an old building that I used to be in. Actually, I was in the building with one of our competitors when I used to work for them. And I was like, hey, do you have any space available? And she was taking me to these office spaces that were 1,500, 2,000 square feet, which does not sound big and it's not big. But at the time, I mean, that was a couple grand a month and I didn't have a couple grand a month. So I was like, look, I'm really looking for more like an executive suite, just a room that I can put a desk in and have an address where I can get mail. And, you know, I'm, I'm not going to be here every day. I don't have a team that's local. And so they found this room that was just an empty room off of somebody else's office that they leased that for whatever reason they had turned it into a a shareable conference space for the building. There's a tiny table in there with like 6 chairs. It was about a, I think a 10 by 12 room. So it was tiny. And she was like, hey, you can have this room for $150 a month if you want it. And we'll take this conference table out of here and you can have it. And so for $150 a month, I had my first office space. It took creativity. It took some humility because I'll tell you what, one time a CPA sent somebody over. They had another client with us and they were like, yeah, these guys will do your payroll. Drop in at their office over there, ask for Matt. And so he sends them our address thinking it's a proper office. And the guy opened the door and about hit me with the door because again, it's just a 10 by 12 room. And so you'll see the sign in the hallway that said ERG Payroll and HR, which was our name back then. And he swings the door open thinking he's walking into a big office suite and he about drills me with the door because there's nowhere for me to go. I had one standing desk and That was it. Two— I had two of those, uh, folding chairs like you'd bring to a sports event, like you'd bring to watch your kids' soccer game, those $7 chairs you buy from Walmart in there. And I'll never forget, I had to interview a woman, brought her in for a payroll specialist role, interviewed her in there and sat in those two folding chairs. And I'm pretty sure she thought she was going to get murdered in that office that day. So a lot of good times early on. I hope for those of you that have made it, I guess, out of that initial phase, which I'm assuming most people listening to this have. You've got your own cool stories. I'd love to hear them. I'd love to hear kind of the evolution of growth. And, you know, for us, the final phase of that is we just bought the building we're in. So we went from the bonus room to a single space to leasing multiple spaces over the years to buying a building. And we still maintain— it's a very practical building. It's not big, it's not flashy. It's well located. It serves our team's needs. There has never been a need for fancy office space in our world. And honestly, I don't really understand when people invest a ton of money in it. But I guess if you got that kind of margin, we don't got in the payroll and HR industry. So good luck to you with that. But that's not our story and not our, our path forward either. So 10-year anniversary, big thing happening right now. Let's next, let's go into what am I listening to or reading at the moment. I'm about done with a book called Unreasonable Hospitality. It is by— I'm going to flake on the guy's name. I'll buy some time— Will Guidara. And it's a good book. It's about a— they started a restaurant in New York City. They are somebody who's put a ton of focus and time and energy into being unreasonable service and hospitality to the guests. One example of that that I remember a lot from the book is they would actually ask you when you go in to talk to the host where your car is parked. If it's metered, they would go out and feed the meter for you when your meter was about to expire, if you were still seated at your table. And so there's just little things like that sprinkled in throughout the book. Honestly, it was a little long. It was a little too much of his story, which was fascinating and interesting. Don't get me wrong, but I was looking more for the nuggets of, okay, what are concrete examples of things that we can do as an organization to improve our level of service for our clients. And again, I still got a little bit left on the audio, so maybe there's going to be a lot more actionable stuff towards the end of the book here. But so far it's kind of been one of those books that I've just powered through because I started it. I'm, you know, I'd say it's about a B to B- for me right now, but I'm finishing that up and always looking for ways. So if you have book recommendations for customer service, for client success, for things that are going to help us to delight our customers and stay ahead of the curve, Always love to hear them, so drop me a note if you do. All right, so let's get into the main topic. Let's talk about team building activities. I know at this point you've probably done it all like us. You're doing all the little stuff, the things you can do virtually, the things you can do in person. You're playing the games, all the fun things. But for us, we had a couple new things that we're going to do this month, and we— the first one is a scavenger hunt. And so this is a scavenger hunt around Columbia, South Carolina. And we have a company called Stray Boots that set it up for us. Stray Boots is awesome. They're a client of our, of my other company, Underdog Digital. If you're not familiar with Underdog Digital, go check it out. Unlimited marketing tasks for less than a virtual assistant per month. But so Stray Boots works with us over there. And so the more we're looking at all their stuff, we go, man, we should do one of these scavenger hunts. And it's been really cool because they did not have a hunt set up in Columbia, South Carolina. So if we gave them, they were like, hey, if you give us a 2-week lead time, we'll set up the hunt. It'll be in the app. And then you guys can just go do it. It's relatively inexpensive to do. It's gonna be awesome. It's something I, I've done scavenger hunts inside of cities before. I remember on my 30th birthday, my sister took me out to Las Vegas and had a scavenger hunt set up that took us all the way down the Strip and had us stopping at a bunch of different places. If you've never done one in a city like that where you're active and you're moving around, I can't suggest it enough. And I mean, heck, if you just go to strayboots.com and check out all of their testimonials and all that, you'll see why I'm so excited about it. It's definitely going to be a fantastic team building opportunity and one that you can take advantage of as well that's relatively low cost. The next up we're doing is a game show night. So this came from a good friend of mine, Joshua Standridge, who owns Christian Brothers Automotive here. They're over in Lexington, South Carolina. If you're in this area, go check them out. But the, they did a, I believe the name of the company is gameshowchallenge.com. And if you search game show activities in your city, I know this is just one of several franchises. If you're in the South Carolina market, this is a good one. But he could not stop raving about this. Basically, you've got an hour and a half, 2 hours of just game shows. So you're doing game show competition with your team. I think the max people you can have in there is 14 people, if I'm not mistaken. And you're going through things like Wheel of Fortune, things like where you're, uh, just going back and forth trying to get answers. It is really, really neat concept and idea, and I'll report back some of the, uh, results of that and how much fun we have here. We're doing that at the end of this month. And then finally, you just cannot go wrong as it relates to team building with some swag. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but if you're like me, you wear the swag, right? Like I wear— my wife kind of busts my chops all the time. She's like, man, every picture is you in a Guru shirt, an Underdog Digital shirt, or a Growth Summit shirt, which are kind of my, my 3 babies that are not from, uh, my marriage. And so, you know, we're getting a handful of things this month that are gonna be awesome. Our teammates are gonna love them. Some 10-year anniversary t-shirts, some sweatshirts and these really dope hats from Branded Bills. Definitely check out Branded Bills. I went to a lad dad camp with some friends 2 weekends ago and the guy with me was wearing a Branded Bills hat. He had like 3 different Branded Bills hats and everybody we walked past kept asking him, hey, what brand hat is that? Where did you get that from? And finally, after a little while, I was like, dude, I got to, I got to reach out to that company and see if they make custom hats. And sure enough, they do. They're high quality. They've got the row pads, they've got the patch hats, they've got all the different styles that are hot right now. And so get your team some swag. It's not— it's a good way for them to have more integration into the company brand, make it more immersive. That's a big focus for us right now as well as we're making kind of a little mascot dude, for lack of a better term, a little Guru guy that's going to kind of be our cartoon. Really leaning into not just, you know, us being gurus, but us empowering our clients to be gurus and trying to build more community. And again, immersive branding around the guru concept of what is a guru and what does a guru stand for, what are the values that a guru, uh, lives by. And again, not just limiting that to our internal team, but also sharing that with our clients who we're trying to help become gurus by helping them to do things like I'm doing on this podcast, have become HR experts, you know, servants of their team, leaders that are trying to create an awesome place to work so that their people can serve their communities and live a positive and wonderful life. But so that's it for today. Those are a few team building ideas, a couple of things that we've got shaking loose over here at Guru. If there are specific topics you want to hear more about, I know we've recently covered hiring, we've covered some compliance issues. Don't hesitate to leave a comment or drop me a note. It's matt@guru.co. I love to hear from you and I appreciate the time. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you hit 5 stars or thumbs up on your player of choice. Thanks again for stopping by.