Kill Your Office Budget and Put It Toward Retreats Instead
“I’m here.”
A local commercial real estate agent let me know he had arrived to pick me up and we were on a mission. Our objective? To find a home for Front Lines Media.
It was October 2016 and we were just concluding our first year in business, bootstrapping from $0 to over $1,000,000 revenue in less than 12 months with a team of just 5 people.
We had made it this far without ever having an office, and not getting an office was an easy decision — fresh off our previous startup’s failure, we had no money. But now that we were generating revenue/profits, it seemed an office was the next logical step, right? How would anyone take us seriously without one? How would we scale our team? How would we train new hires? How would we develop a culture?
As we jumped from San Diego high-rise to San Diego high-rise, I couldn’t help feel excited. We would soon have our company name on the wall, a big conference room for daily team meetings, and a kitchen full of cold brew and kombuchas. It felt like a major milestone for the company and for myself as an entrepreneur.
Then we found the one. Measuring 2,600 square feet on the 17th floor, this $7,400-per-month office could be ours with a two-year lease! If I signed my name to the contract, we could finally become a “real business.” I readied my pen while the agent sent over the paperwork.
But then I started to feel nervous. It wasn’t nerves at the expense, but at the change I was committing to. After more than seven years of working from home (I call it “robe life”), I had a great routine in place. I had a home office with a standing desk and an entire wall filled with books. (Like a real office, I even had my diploma proudly on display from the prestigious Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry - the only diploma I actually hold.)
If I signed the lease, I’d be obligating myself to be in the office at a certain time each day, would have to wear real clothes instead of bathrobes till noon, and surround myself with other people and external distractions all day long. As I mentally prepared myself for this change, I started wondering why. Why do we need an office?
It turned out, all the reasons I thought we needed an office were complete bullshit, based on limiting beliefs and hollow excuses. Four walls were not going to solve the problems we were facing. Thinking through the idea of being a virtual company, I did what I always do in the face of a tough decision: I read. In this case, I read Remote: No Office Required by Jason Fried. Early in the book, the author asked, “When someone really needs to get a lot done, what do they do? They go into the office early or stay late.”
And that was it. We would have no office and would commit to being a virtual company. I didn’t view this as a decision that we could easily change our mind on later. We couldn’t build a team on a virtual foundation and then one day transplant them into an office. Surprise! See you from 8 AM to - 5 PM every Monday through Friday!
I listed all the problems we thought an office would solve, then developed an action plan to address them from a remote work perspective. One problem proved more challenging than others: culture. How do you build a vibrant company culture when your team is remote?
After more than four years of running a virtual company with no shortage of culture, I think our answer is company retreats.
How We Do Retreats
Every 90 days, we fly everyone in to a place somewhere in the US to stay in a huge rented house for four to five days of working, hanging out, and optional wine consumption.
Here are a few of the places we’ve gone and the homes we’ve stayed in over the years. Airbnb is amazing.
When it comes to our retreats, we have two very different types:
Quarterly retreats:
Our quarterly retreats happen every April, July, and October. They’re rather intense and exhausting. We begin with a review of the past quarter's objectives, KPIs, wins, and challenges. Then we do two-hour breakout sessions to explore an opportunity or issue that is preventing us from hitting our goals.
We end each of these retreats by reading our 2020 Vivid Vision out loud, which we first wrote in 2017. The 2020 Vivid Vision details the type of company we endeavor to become: our why, our culture, and our three year objectives. Everyone who joins the team receives a printed copy.
These quarterly retreats consistently prove to be productive bonding time, and have had a major impact on our success.
Annual retreats:
Unlike the work-focused quarterly retreats, our annual retreats are for adventuring, having fun, celebrating the year, and recovering from all the pain it took to make it that way.
Three years ago we went to Hawaii.
Last year we flew the team to Peru and explored Machu Picchu, Urubamba, and Cuzco, driving ATVs around the local villages.
This year we’re freshly back from seven days of exploring Colombia, where we completed a two-day river rafting trip, sleeping in hammocks in the middle of the jungle without any Wi-Fi at all.
Went to Guatape to explore Pablo Escobar's mansion (bombed in 1993) and eat the best Italian food we’ve ever had. We still can’t figure out why Colombia is such a hotspot for delicious Italian cuisine.
Then ended in Medellin, where we rented a house overlooking the entire city from the mountains. It turns out this wasn’t just any Airbnb — it had a special history. Rick Ross had recorded a music video at the house and spent four nights there, we learned from the owner. (It’s pretty disturbing to sleep in a bed that once hosted Rick Ross, but the view was nice!)
Why we do company retreats
While we are a virtual company, we form real friendships during our limited days together each year. Want to get to know someone? Try sleeping next to them in a jungle hammock while everyone’s surrounded by bugs, smells like a river, and has no Instagram access. That’s where the relationships are formed, and that’s where true culture comes from.
It doesn’t come from sitting in an open office for 40 hours a week, playing ping pong every once in a while.
Retreats are the ultimate way to take a team out of its collective comfort zone and get to know everyone at a much deeper level than an office can ever allow. Our approach to company retreats takes us out of our element and pushes us into exciting situations we’d never find ourselves in otherwise. They furthermore give us the opportunity to take a little break before the craziness of another quarter (or year).
Retreats are everything for us and I don’t know where we’d be without them. If our decision to be a remote company didn’t include retreats, I don’t know if we’d have become successful.
Offices are stupid and remote work is the future
After operating a virtual company for so long, offices offend me. I could never bring that upon myself and would never expect an employee to. Offices are just one step up from a prison cell. The only difference is that they have a ping pong table, paleo snacks, and you get to leave every night.
Just ten years ago, being a virtual company would have been hard. But tools like Slack, Trello, and video chat make it easier than ever to manage a distributed team.
Office space obviously works for a lot of companies, and I don’t think all companies should just dump their offices overnight. I’m not a know-it-all business guru. I only claim 12 years of entrepreneurial experience and a degree from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, after all. But I do know that forgoing office space worked very well for us.
Why should a company limit its talent pool to just one city? Employees and founders nowadays have the freedom to work from anywhere — it’s an amazing gift that we didn’t have before, but now we do. Why not take advantage of it?
Does it cost a lot of money to go on these retreats? Hell yeah it does. We spent over $80,000 on them last year alone, and the cost goes up every year. But if you compare this to the costs of having an office with free cold brew, it’s a steal.
By renting out epic mansions and traveling around the world with our team, we save money. So why do you have or need an office? To look professional? Bullshit. We’ve never won or lost a deal due to where we our work actually took place. Maybe you don’t trust your team to get work done outside of an office. If so, you’ve got problems an office can’t fix. Worried you can’t build a robust culture with virtual work? It’s worked pretty damn well for us.
The thinking that causes most companies to spring for office space is built on limiting beliefs. If you aren’t regularly meeting clients in your office, or having customers visit in person, then it's worth at least asking yourself, why? Why do we need an office?
If you’re a journalist, account strategist, CMO, or market researcher reading this while trapped between four walls, message me.
We’re hiring and I can get you out of jail ;-)