MBA1245 Q&A Wednesday: How do I choose a location for my team retreat?

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If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar100mba.net Today's question is from Walter and Walter asks, hey, I heard in one of your episodes that you're doing a team retreat. I'm doing my first this year. How do I choose a location for my team retreat? Good question, Walter. And this is our first team retreat actually, so I'm only about a few weeks ahead of you, but no, seriously, we've been doing some serious planning for our retreat and one of the first things we had to do is choose a location. It's going to depend on many factors, but I'm going to share with you the factors you should look into. Whether it's travel time, whether it's weather, whether it's safety, there's a whole lot of things to consider to come up with that location for that retreat. So we get into all that and answer your question in today's Q and A Wednesday. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Walter asks, how do I choose a location for my team retreat? Well, for us, when we chose our location, there were several factors, like I mentioned that we had to consider. The major factor is travel, time and distance for your team members. That we have team members scattered around the world, so it's really hard to find a location that's great for everybody. Somebody's going to have to travel a distance, but we want to minimize it for the majority of the team. Now, this is one of the major factors we had because the goal of this year's retreat is to do the retreat seriously. And we wanted to make sure that that's super clear to not only us, but the whole team is that we've been wanting to do a team retreat for so long that we want to make sure that we pull it off and we do it properly and it's successful and useful. So we want to minimize as much problems as possible, as many challenges as possible. And one of those challenges is traveling to a country. Which country is it going to be easier in terms of travel distances, but also to get a visa for? Depending on where your teammates are located. Now, if you have all your teammates in the same country or in the same region or in the same continent, even that makes things a whole lot easier because travel is not going to be too bad, but. And the need for a visa is probably not going to be a big factor, especially if we're in the same country. Right. But for us, that was the number one factor. How can we make sure that the majority of our team can get there safely with no issues, Minimal time, minimal effort, and no issues in terms of getting into the country visa wise. Number two was, has there been retreats done in this location before? It's great going to a country, a city, a place that is accustomed to doing team retreats for companies. Why? Because you can learn from other people's experiences. For example, as we're planning our retreat, we contacted other companies similar to us that have run retreats. Remote companies like buffer or time Dr. We also looked at a lot of articles and blog posts from companies like ConvertKit. So these companies have run several retreats already. And we kind of learned from their experiences and their blog posts and just their email correspondence. So we wanted to choose a location that people have had retreats before. Why? Because that city that hotel will have some experience and know what our standards are we're looking for, whether it's fast Internet connection, whether it's having clean water, whether it's the level of cleanliness at the resort itself. Hey, if you're traveling internationally for this retreat, these are things you need to consider. The next thing you need to consider, of course, is health and safety. Now, this is not normally easy to judge, but normally, if this city, this country, this area is a tourist destination, is somewhere where people frequent, you're going to be pretty good. You'll be fine. But if you're planning a retreat in North Korea, that's going to be a little hard. It's going to be a little bit dangerous. So you want to keep that in mind. Also, you want to make sure that as many teammates as possible go to the retreat and are not deterred by that kind of feeling of safety. Fourth on the list is cost. Of course, you got to consider cost, whether it's the cost to get your team there and the cost to do the retreat there. The accommodations, the food, the events, all that kind of stuff. A choice that's very popular with a lot of people when they do team retreats is having an Airbnb, a large Airbnb, and sometimes this Airbnb actually in the title, say, a retreat, and they do company treats at this large accommodation, large house with, you know, six, seven, eight, ten bedrooms. This can save you some money even if you're in an expensive city. Now, when we spoke to the team at Buffer, we spoke to Stephanie, who runs their retreats, and one of the things they have in terms of their challenge is that where do we go next? They've done, I think, eight or ten retreats already, so they kind of want to explore new places, and they want to choose something new every single time. So that's something to consider. If this is not your first one. I know, Walter, this is your first retreat. But for those who are listening and they're thinking about their next location, where can you go? Somewhere that is going to give a new experience. You want to make sure that every year it's sort of like a memory, a timestamp. Hey, remember that time when we had a retreat in Thailand? That was very memorable, that was very unique. But also I loved when we did it in Austin, Texas. Total different vibe. And one way you can do this is you can ask your team, you can take a vote, a poll, and you give them some options. Here are three options. We're considering three locations. What do you guys think? Where do you want to go for your retreat and just go majority rules if you want to do that. And by the way, you could do that with different aspects of the retreat like the activities you want to do. We did this with our activities and you know, the activities that we had lined up were not the ones our team actually preferred. And we're glad that they told us through that poll because we're able to change those with the hotel and with the activity organizers. Goes to show you, like how much I will enjoy something but you know, some other people won't. And the point of their trade is the whole team does things that they all enjoy. Now once you nailed the city of where the actual tree is going to be, you're going to have to suss out different places in that city of where you're going to hold the actual retreat, where you're going to obviously hold your team lodging. But as well as how to run the actual retreat, your meetings, your activities, your team building activities, all that kind of stuff. You want to make sure obviously that place has high speed Internet and that it's comfortable and it's easy to access. When we were planning our retreat we had the option of splitting where we actually run our meetings and our activities and our lodging. Like the hotel where we sleep at night, maybe even have our meals will be different. But we actually decided to combine the two and go with a place that does both. Where they have a meeting room, they have an outdoor area where we can do activities. They also will service, you know, breakfast and lunch, we'll have dinner out and it's a great hotel so people can actually go to bed or go back to the room easily. We just found it super convenient. Again, the goal for us was to get this thing done and make sure that the retreat happens and that we actually pull the trigger and make it happen. So we wanted to remove all obstacles and this was a really big helper because we have a point of contact. We have the manager of the hotel that's going to take care of a lot of the facilities, a lot of the logistics. We don't have to worry about a lot of the things that we have to. If we had to split that up, like where we had to go to a co working space and then go to a hotel. This is especially important if you're in a foreign country and everybody's traveling. It's a new place, people can get lost and it's just a whole lot easier when everything is in one place. And then of course you can do day trips Excursions as a group. Now, depending on the size of your team, this is going to be more and more critical. So if you have a small team, four or five people, this is not going to be such a huge deal because it's not that many people. But if you're 10 plus and you have a lot of people to count for, then it's better to simplify things.

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Team retreats are an incredible opportunity for you to build some rapid fire rapport with your team so you can really bond with your team, you can grow as a team, and you can actually work on something together during your time together. But you want to minimize distractions. And one of the biggest distractions that your team can have is discomfort. You want to make sure they're comfortable as possible and they feel safe and they feel like this is a good time. So spending a little bit more on your location, on your accommodations can go a long way. Even if that means, you know, shortening the retreat. Instead of having it for, you know, 10 days, you can have it for seven days. Instead of having it for seven days, you can have it for five days. Go for quality. Go for a better experience over, you know, the quantity or length of time. This retreat is part of the value of working at your company. So make sure you convey that value and say, we appreciate you and we're gonna go all out and make sure that you're comfortable and you're having a good time and you go home safe and sound. Walter, I hope that helped you and hope that answered your question here on Q and A Wednesday. If you're listening and you have a question, just email me over@omar mba.net and I'll answer your question right here on Q and A. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you want to hear more, just hit subscribe so you get all the episodes automatically. Also, if you hit subscribe on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, you get access to our archives. That's over 1200 episodes of the $100 MBA show, a library of lessons, and the only way to access it is to hit subscribe. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Team retreats take forever to plan. We started planning our team retreat, I believe, 11 months out, almost a full year and it's still a crunch. Now, mind you, this is the first retreat we're doing, so we're going to learn a lot in this process, and we're going to be able to repeat a lot of the systems and a lot of the procedures that we're creating right now, or even just the documentation and the templates, like the schedule for the retreat. That's a document that we have to create. So this is your first retreat. Try to start planning as early, as early as possible. A year out is not too early. And if this is not your first retreat, giving yourself more time is really going to help you feel a bit more relaxed as you approach the retreat. If you can afford it, if you have the budget for it, if your company has gotten to that point where you can hire somebody to actually manage this retreat, that's the best solution. Even if it's just part time, there's a lot of admin work that you're going to have to take care of, and getting a helping hand can really help. All right, thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll. I'll see you then. Take care.

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