The Conference Board lists sustained growth, consistent execution, customer loyalty and innovation as the top issues facing their member companies today. The Strategic Offsites Group® has developed proven frameworks to work with our clients on these and other strategic topics. Our team has the experience to help your executives have a focused and open conversation that will create lasting impact in your company. Most importantly, each offsite is customized to the unique needs of your company, your industry, and the issues you face.

This blend of framework, expertise and customization is embedded within a process of workshop preparation, delivery and follow-up that is unmatched in the consulting industry. The combination of these four factors forms the basis of the Strategic Offsites Group approach.

We create the vehicles for executive teams to have great conversations, debating and discussing their strategic issues in a meaningful and constructive way. At the end of the meeting they leave having agreed on how they will collectively move forward to implement the essential action items that will put the company on the path to success.

Success for us is when our clients look back at their Strategy Offsites and think of them as moments that changed their thinking, their approach, their priorities and their actions – resulting in ‘Pivot Points’ in their work together as a management team.

Although our firm began working with clients in 2003, our Partners and professional staff have been designing and conducting offsites for decades. For more information on some of the best practices we’ve developed over that time, please see our article, Off-Sites That Work in the June 2006 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

OUR PROCESS

The most successful offsites are part of a process that begins well before and ends after your executive team meets. We will partner with you to create an offsite or series of offsites that specifically address your most critical issues, designed around your team, your company and your business environment.

Pre-Offsite

What we’ve heard from clients about their past offsite experiences:

“I walked into the offsite thinking we were going to be discussing our priorities for the coming year. I have no problem talking about our value proposition, but I was totally unprepared for the meeting.”

“I though the entire team shared my point of view on where our growth was going to come from. I was shocked that we were as disconnected as we actually were.”

“We talk about our competitors all the time. And we all know that our industry is changing fast. But we never seem to talk about our company’s future except as a larger, more successful version of what we are today.”

Thorough preparation is absolutely critical to driving meaningful results from your offsite.

We typically begin working with clients four to six weeks prior to the offsite itself, by conducting a series of structured discussions with the sponsoring executives to understand their objectives, issues to be addressed and desired outcomes. This phase also includes gathering industry research and conducting surveys and interviews with offsite participants and other executives. Depending on the issues, other diagnostics and research may be conducted.

These steps help us secure the information necessary to craft realistic and results-oriented agendas, and to bring relevant data and strategic context into the offsite discussions. In some cases we also work with our clients to identify experts whose participation in the offsite will bring required outside perspective into the discussion.

We also partner with our clients’ administrative staff to ensure that offsite logistics are coordinated with the meeting content.

The Offsite

What we’ve heard from clients about their past offsite experiences:

“At various points during our off-site there was confusion as to where we were going and what problem we were solving. This was poisonous to the conversation.”

“The facilitator was interesting, but I had the feeling he shows the same slides to every group he works with”

“We spent three months and several million dollars on consultants, and at the end of the day their recommendations are impractical – there is no way we can implement them”

Some strategy consulting firms work by presenting their recommendations on strategic options. Some academics work by forcing a predetermined framework or solution onto a client situation. We help companies by helping the management team find its own answers.

Through rigorous discussions informed by relevant data and frameworks, we enable true alignment around issues and solutions and clear, concrete action steps. Our professionals facilitate a balance between structured conversations and free-flowing dialogue, while applying selective pressure to ensure that assumptions are solid and decisions are clear. Our strategy consulting expertise allows us to synthesize discussion output into structured strategic outputs, in real time.

One Offsite or a Series?

What we’ve heard from clients about their past offsite experiences:

“We tried to cram all of our agenda into a one-day meeting, and I’m not sure we left feeling like there was going to be follow-up.”

“By the end of the offsite I understood the need to rethink our priorities. But there was no way I was going to start shutting down initiatives without taking the time to explain what we were thinking about doing with my direct reports.”

In many cases clients have strategy issues that are not well suited to resolution in a single offsite. In these situations we work with the responsible team to break the conversation into a series of two or three workshops, each of which builds on the work of the prior offsite and integrates work we jointly conduct with client teams between offsites. This approach effectively leverages executives' time and provides the right setting for optimal decision making and broad organizational alignment.

Follow up

What we’ve heard from clients about their past offsite experiences:

“[Our offsite last year] simply left no fingerprints on the business. Six months later nothing had changed.”

“We always leave feeling like we had a good discussion, but I’m not sure the end results are worth the time we spent.”

Offsites that don’t result in clear action steps with milestones and accountabilities are a waste of management’s time and money.
To ensure that strategic decisions translate to business results, some of the outcomes emerging from offsites will take the form of action steps or initiatives. We work with participants to clearly define ownership and responsibilities, deliverables, and timeframes for this work before the offsites conclude.

Many clients have brought us back for brief follow-up sessions after the conclusion of the offsite itself to help the team track and review progress toward goals set during their offsite sessions.
Other clients have asked us to work with the relevant client departments to help them effectively and consistently communicate the results of an offsite to the broader organization.

All Strategic Offsites Group offsites, including the results of pre-offsite interviews and surveys, are fully documented. We provide this to participants for review and communications purposes.