What makes a great offsite?

I’m a big fan of doing an annual company offsite and have been taking part in this since our early days in business. If you aren’t doing one, I strongly encourage you to start.

The purpose of the offsite is to get the leadership team together, in one place, to strategize, plan, and set goals for the future of the business. Technically, this meeting could happen in your company’s conference room, but in my experience, getting away to a cool spot somewhere out of town seems to help the creative juices to flow.

When we were small and had just a few team members, we had the entire staff join us for the offsite. As we grew, we narrowed the team to just the leadership team. Today, we have several separate offsites for the many different teams that comprise our organization.

The offsite has been one of the keys to our success over the years. Here are the things I’ve learned make for a great offsite:

Location

We’ve hosted company offsites at a variety of different places with different venues. We’ve stayed in really nice hotels, and we’ve hosted the offsite at very rustic places. What’s as important as the venue is to host somewhere where every member has their own personal space (i.e., bedroom and bathroom). We’ve rented big mountain homes before, but unless everyone has their own personal space, it doesn’t always work out too well. Plus, no one wants to get stuck in the kid’s room of a rental home sleeping in bed designed as a car.

Duration

An offsite should be a two-day or two-night minimum. Ideally, it’s good to have some down time, and perhaps a team-building activity, in the middle of discussions. Often, new ideas will arise during an evening break or over the course of a meal, and you’ll want to capture those.

Moderator

It’s important that there be one person who moderates. It may be the principal of the firm or another leader in the organization. Or it could be a professional moderator. From my experience, we’ve had the most successful offsites when we’ve had quality moderators lead us through our time together.

Agenda

You’ll want to nail down one to three top goals. Maybe it’s to set your five-, three-, and one-year goals. Maybe it’s to develop a strategic plan for the current year. Perhaps you want to identify what new capabilities to add in the next year and how to go about it. Having a good idea of what you want to get out of the offsite is crucial to the success of your time together. If you aren’t clear on what you want to accomplish, you may accomplish very little.

Prep work

Do your homework prior to the offsite and get whatever information you’ll need into an accessible format. As an example, if your goal is to add 15 percent more top-tier clients than you added last year, it will be helpful to know how many clients you added the previous year, where they came from, etc.

Ground rules

Set ground rules and communicate those in advance. For example, if you want your team to ignore their phones and emails during discussions, have a rule that phones and laptops be put away.

If you haven’t done an offsite before, or haven’t done one in a while, I’d highly recommend you have one in the next quarter. They’ve paid big dividends for my organization, and I believe they will for yours as well.

Scott Hanson is cofounder of Allworth Financial, formerly Hanson McClain Advisors, a fee-based RIA.