OUR BEST DAY
Eastwick summer kickoff 2015
Every January our clients consume themselves with preparing for their annual sales kickoff meetings. It takes a big effort to pull together and is incredibly important in the quest to meet business goals.
We’re crazy enough to actually do two kickoff-style meetings every year, and a few weeks ago held our midyear offsite meeting. It’s a big commitment in time and money to have our 50 employees out of the office for two days…so why do we do it?
We do it because we think it’s a way to promote continual learning, prevent burnout, nurture our awesome culture, improve teamwork, inspire creativity, and ultimately make our clients fanatical fans. We’ve always believed that our people are our products — treating them well and helping them achieve their goals is the best thing we can do to hire and retain the best, and in turn attract and keep great clients. And with that in mind, this summer’s offsite theme was “You on Your Best Day.”
The content was almost entirely developed and presented by our talented staff — and not the usual leadership team. It was the highest rated kickoff we’ve ever had. Here’s a quick snapshot of the highlights:
Continual learning — The two days were full of opportunities to learn, but two highlights were discovering our StandOut strengths, as well as hearing from director Noelani Price on the benefits of taking risks and stepping out of your comfort zone.
Preventing burnout — Our profession is often cited as one of the most stressful and in today’s fast-paced, always-on culture, it’s only getting more demanding. Associate Kristin Skliba’s Beyoncé-inspired presentation reminded us to celebrate our “badassness” more often.
Nurture our culture — There’s nothing like a little away time from the day-to-day grind — not to mention an open bar at the local watering hole and 1:00am trips to Taco Bell — to boost morale. Every Eastwicker was also celebrated with our take on superlatives: “The YOU Awards.”
Improve teamwork — We’ve rewritten the catch phrase “it takes a village” to “it takes a team.” We focused not only on ways to improve teamwork but also celebrate it with a rousing game of “Fanatical Fans” Family Feud-style. Nothing like getting a little competitive juices flowing.
Inspire creativity — This is a big area of focus for us since we know how important it is to our clients. We’re big believers that getting out of the office and looking for inspiration in different ways sparks creative juices. Our operations manager, Lori Luch’s presentation “What I learned at camp” and director Jason Brown’s session on what his pitch day routine looks like were both inspiring and entertaining.
Looking for help with your next kickoff meeting? Drop us a line.
