MBA1846 Why We’re Running A Virtual Team Retreat

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I want to start today's lesson with a little story. Back in 2011, when I was a educator, as a full time chair department at a university, I was building businesses on the side. At this point, I did not transition into full time entrepreneurship. But one of the things that pushed me over the edge, I kind of said, hey, I want to do this full time, I want to build a business and I want to leave my long career in education. One of the big reasons was I just wanted to enjoy the people I work with every single day. I wanted to be able to hang out with smart people, people that make me smarter. I wanted to genuinely have fun at work. If I'm being completely hon, most of the people I worked with were just people. I didn't enjoy their company. There are many people that I did enjoy, but let's just say over 50% of the people I had to work with every day, it just wasn't pleasant. And it's for good reason. I didn't choose to work with them, the organization did. And this is one of the best things about being an entrepreneur is that you get to craft the perfect team. You get to craft the relationships you have with everybody you work with. You can make sure when you make a hire, it's a great culture fit for everybody else who's already on the team. And you could build a culture so strong that actually people self select. We have people that have left our company because they're like, you know what, you guys are a tight team. You guys are go getters. This culture's strong. I don't think I fit in here. And that's a valid reason to leave. Hey, that's not. We're just not their people. And that's okay, now, building a strong culture in your business is huge because this will allow you to move, motivate your team members. Even when you're not washing, those people will go to work every day, working hard for your business. That doesn't happen by accident, that happens by design. You have to actually build that culture. You have to instill that culture. And it takes a lot of time, a lot of work. One of the things that speeds up that process, that reinforces it, makes it super strong. It's kind of like a booster shot is a team retreat because you're spending a condensed amount of time with people doing a lot of activities, stepping out of your normal work routine, doing things for fun, doing things to get to know each other. You build bonds, you build connections, and that culture becomes even stronger and stronger and it happens very quickly. This is what I love about team retreats. Now, this is incredibly powerful in person, but it doesn't mean just because you can't do it in person, you shouldn't do it at all. And this is the conclusion we came up with. We want to run a virtual retreat because we know a virtual tree is better than no retreat. It's not the same. We know we're not in some exotic location, you know, sipping cocktails in front of a beautiful pool, you know, doing fun activities in person, whether that's ATVing or bike riding in a rice paddy, whatever it is, all that stuff sounds amazingly fun. And doing it over a video call is just not the same. I get it, but even if I get 50% of the results I get from a in person retreat, that 50% of the result is better than 0%. This is what really drove Nicole and I to say, let's do a virtual treat. Now, what does that even look like? So you can't just treat your virtual treats like a real life in person retreat because it's just not the same. So what we're doing is we're actually just running a retreat week and we're not doing the retreat the whole week. We're actually going to carve out a couple sessions every day, three days a week. It's going to be retreat week. And we're going to take time off our busy schedule. Everybody in the company for a few days that week to do this retreat, do these retreat activities, which are fun, which are team building, which will also be informative, where we'll talk about the future of the company and what's coming down the line, but also have a lot of fun doing team building activities, having dinners, having parties, Getting to know each other. And because we're a growing team, there are new team members that join all the time, and we need to get to know them. We got some old hands on our team, and they're great, but they need to get to know the new people as well. So one of the things that we started to do when we're planning this virtual retreat was Nicole and I and Romina, our executive assistant, we're starting to plan activities, plan a schedule. We felt this burden of, like, man, we don't know if this is good or exciting or if our team is going to like it. So we decided, why do we have to guess? Let's get them to participate. So we called on, said, hey, we want to form a retreat planning committee, just like the party planning committee on the show the office. Except this is funner, less bickering. And really, we're going to empower our own team members to build the retreat they want. We'll give a bit of guidance in terms of what are the goals of the retreat. But how they achieve those goals is going to be up to them. How often they meet, what they spend the budget on, all that kind of stuff. And this relieves the founders of the company from thinking, oh, man, we're going to build something they don't like or offer something that they're not going to enjoy. Well, get the team to do it. And people enjoy and remember things that they worked on together. They actually value things more because they put some effort into it. This is why it's so hard for us to get rid of our IKEA furniture. We took some time to put it together. This is actually a real thing. It's called the IKEA effect. So I encourage you to incorporate your team in planning this retreat. And who knows, if this goes well for our team, we might get the retreat planning committee to help plan, you know, a physical retreat one day. But the point here is this is their thing, so let them plan it. What I do recommend, though, is trying to make it at least a 50, 50 split, meaning the 50% of the time during the virtual team retreat should be fun, should be team building games, should be just partying and drinks and, you know, even it's over video calls, having lunches together, having social hour, you know, maybe do a little show and tell and people can share what's going on in their house, their families, maybe their last vacation picks. The other half could be also fun and exciting, but in an informative way. What's coming down the line for the business? What are Some of the ideas you guys want to see, Maybe you can have a session where they come up with the next ideas for your business. The next offers, the next products. The sky's the limit. But the point here is that you gotta make time for this. You gotta schedule this or it's never going to happen.

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To wrap up today's lesson, we are so happy that we are having a virtual team retreat because we understand that you can't control what's happening in the world, what's going on around you. We don't know when we're going to travel next. So let's work with what we have. Let's make the best of what we have. And what we have is actually a lot. You can make a real fun, cool retreat for your whole team to remember and enjoy, even if it's virtual. Just think about all the things that you would do in retreat, like take pictures or have a video montage. You still can do that with a video retreat at the end and show a great montage of all the wonderful activities you did. A lot can be done, even when it's virtual. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now so you never miss an episode. Don't forget to we're on every single podcast app, so wherever you love listening to podcasts, hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Your team is one of your biggest assets in business. These are the people that are going to build your company, that are going to build the best products possible, that are going to help you compete with the competition. They're going to help serve your customers, invest in them, and this is an investment. It's not a waste of time. It's not, you know, a week of partying. It's a week to say, hey, you are important to me. Let's spend some time together. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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