This past weekend, all Wish Group associates and myself got together for our annual Summer Reunion Retreat. At Wish, we choose to get together every quarter from all of our offices across Canada. This includes the executive team: Ezio D’Onofrio – Wish Group president & COO, Teri Scott – Peoplesource president, Matt Ley – Streaming Network president, Mike Soragnese – Mike Agency president, Marie-Claude (MC) Hebert – Evolve Collaborations president, Wishtel team, as well as our corporate trainer and other suppliers.
In January, we hold a Winter Kick-Off meeting for a couple of days where we review Q4 results and communicate our top objectives and goals for the year. Following April, we meet to cover Q1 results, at Reunion we cover Q2 and lastly at Fall Enterprise in October, we review Q3 and get ready to close off the year strong – as Q4 is generally our strongest quarter in most of the business lines.
This August and last, we traveled to Kempenfelt Conference Centre http://www.georgiancollege.ca/community-alumni/kempenfelt-conference-centre/ located in Kempenfelt Bay, Lake Simcoe. The 20-acre property is embedded in an abundance of natural woodlands with over 1,400 feet of private shoreline, which creates the ideal cottage-like natural setting we desire!
A retreat can be a great technique to explore new perspectives, learn from experts and other entrepreneurs, simply refresh your thoughts and most obvious – get away from the daily grind. Based on this, I had to evaluate what I truly wanted my team to take in from this corporate gathering. A common factor is that a ‘retreat’ is to either emphasize motivation, create a more social breeze between others or its one long infomercial.
I narrowed it down to two things that made it a successful retreat: the right people and the right agenda.
To begin, it was both an inspiring and emotional event for all of us, as we were celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Wish Group. I am a firm believer that it’s important to have each and every member present at a company retreat if you are striving to get a strong message across, sharing company success stories and acknowledging past accomplishments.
With all this said, having the right people goes hand in hand with having the right agenda. Our agenda looked something like this:
- 9:00 AM – Arrival & Reception
- 9:30 AM – Welcome Address – Frank Cianciulli
- 10:00 AM – Company Break Outs
- 12:00 PM – Lunch
- 1:00 PM – Undercover Boss – Evolve Collaboration
- 1:45 PM – The Apprentice – Sweet Success PT 2 “The Pitch”
- 2:30 PM – Undercover Boss – The Wish Group
- 2:45 PM – The State of the Union – Ezio D’Onofrio
- 3:15 PM – Undercover Boss – Peoplesource
- 3:45 PM – Marketing Update
- 4:15 PM – The Big Picture – Frank Cianciulli
- 5:00 PM – Awards and Recognition
- 7:00 PM – Dinner
- 9:00 PM – Managers Reception & Party
As you read the list above, you may be concerned what the whole ‘Undercover Boss’ and ‘Apprentice’ spiel is all about. Being the primary leader and agenda-maker for over 30 retreats in the past years given, it’s been brought to my attention that to keep your audience engaged in an interactive and informative way – we must create videos!
Matt Ley and his video production team put together these videos that show our company culture, provide an informational background of the company and ultimately, to have a good laugh at ourselves.
After the videos, we dive right into the marketing update. The focus of the update is to give recognition to past projects, update us on current projects and plans for future projects.
45 minutes later, the spotlight’s on me and I present “The Big Picture”.
Every retreat, it’s important for me to remind my employees about our company culture and values, who we are, what we’ve become today and what I expect from all of them. Sometimes, you need other people to help you see things differently – and that’s what I was trying to get at with this speech.
With modern day success, I wanted to remind everyone of the ‘work-hard, play-hard’ emphasis. I like to share with my team the story of how it all started and the hard-times I’ve experienced before becoming a successful entrepreneur. During my reunion speech, I said something that really drove home, “life is happening for you, not to you”. What I mean by this is: if something negative approaches you, let it happen to you and let it benefit you.
You have probably heard of the phrase, it’s important to find ‘grace’ in everything you do- this brings me to my next point: thinking positive and what’s possible.
Although, we all struggle with this because positive things don’t happen to us all the time – I myself will admit that it’s not always easy to see the positive. But, as Tony Robbins famously said, “when you realize that problems happen for you as opposed to you, then you won’t ever have another problem in your life.”
Turn one negative into one positive.
See you at our next retreat!