The Shortlist Episode 44: How to Plan an Effective Marketing Retreat

Marketing teams—heck, all teams—benefit from having dedicated time to reconnect, recharge, and recommit. AEC professionals often feel like they are waist deep in procurement work, so a well-timed and well planned retreat can provide the space needed to refocus and think critically about the myriad other tasks on their plates. Clearly, we're big proponents of hosting an off-site event, but unfortunately not all organizations prioritize a dedicated marketing retreat.

Whether you're building a case to present to your leadership team on the benefits of retreating with your team, or you're planning your firm's annual marketing summit, now is a great time to explore all of the possibilities. With dozens of marketing and corporate events under their belts, Wendy, Melissa, and Allison share their lessons learned for planning an effective marketing retreat, including who should attend, do you need a facilitator, and how to capture and make progress on the brilliant ideas generated as a group.

CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 2

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to The Shortlist.

We're exploring all things AEC Marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.

I'm your host, Windy Simmons, and each episode, I'll be joined by one of my team members from Middle of Six to answer your questions.

Today, we're talking with Melissa Richie and Alison Tivnan to discuss marketing retreats.

Hi, Melissa.

Hey, everyone.

Hey, Alison.

Hey, there, Windy.

And Melissa, I love the three-person podcast formats, my favorite, and we've got Melissa and Alison, who are, I think, our top podcasters.

I haven't tallied up, but you most of you two have probably been on here the most.

So you're you're my expert panel.

I asked you to join me on this topic because, you know, I'm sure I was just selfishly thinking about our own upcoming Middle of Six retreat and marketing retreats and what makes a good retreat and how do you justify it?

What do you want to accomplish during that time?

And I just thought let's put our brains together on this and share our own thoughts.

Maybe there'll be some good takeaways for our upcoming retreat and also some things that marketing teams out there might consider or if you're a marketing team of one what you might want to consider, you know, as a retreat necessary.

So we can go anywhere with this topic.

The only boundary I might say is that intentionally I'm thinking about marketing retreats, not company retreats or like kind of the bigger bigger picture.

I'm sure we'll touch on that in some ways, but we're really focused on the marketing team and what they need.

So thank you to you both for being here.

And does anyone want to start off with like, why this topic?

Why is marketing retreats an important thing to think about?

I can jump in with my own little odyssey on trying to get marketing retreats accepted as just part of the status quo and operating procedure at the firms that I worked at in house.

The first firm that I worked at back in 2008 to 2010, didn't have marketing retreats.

They had a quasi meeting of the minds of marketing staff as part of an annual retreat.

But it was mainly to just put together almost like a skit for the rest of the staff to understand what marketing was about.

Didn't talk about the day-to-day efficiencies or morale or anything like that.

So it was really just team building exercise.

My dog just yawned, you guys.

I forgot he's in here.

I can hear it, but it's okay.

If you need to kick out the dog, it wouldn't be the first time on the podcast.

Okay, just a second.

Charlie, at about 1.30 every day, needs to yawn and ask for treats.

This is something that we all get to enjoy, so.

Okay, all right.

Want me to just jump right back in?

Yeah.

Okay.

So that was the first firm.

The second firm I worked at had one marketing retreat in the three years I was there.

And it was kind of sprung on us, saying like, hey, hold this date.

We're going to pull y'all out of the office and into this awesome conference space down the street, and we'll introduce you to your retreat facilitator.

And I got some good nuggets out of attending that, but our marketing team didn't have any role in developing the agenda, any chances to play the role of facilitator.

And by the end of it, I think we felt like it was more of a training on how we should think about marketing, unless as all of us coming together to really address whatever issues that cropped up in the team and come up with a shared vision of how we wanted to best utilize our time.

So that being said, by the time I got to my third firm and was the marketing director of it, I advocated pretty hard that we needed to have a dedicated day where marketing could truly unplug, put on their out of offices, get together and talk.

And that involved the entire team being a part of that from the very beginning of choosing the date to meet, all the way through to the end of it.

And the learning experience from that was that we were exponentially better, more bonded together, and way more focused after having done that.

And the firm, I think, saw the value of it.

So we ended up doing the retreat every single year.

And I would recommend it for any firm to do likewise.

That's really good thinking, Alison.

And also, you know, not surprising knowing you, but also a bold step to say, this is what I experienced before.

I appreciated the time.

This could be done differently to add way more value to the actual attendees.

And it's brave to stick your neck out there and then like, I'm going to create the agenda.

I'm going to find the people.

I see the value in getting your marketing team out from under the day-to-day pressures that are happening in the office without having executives or principals in.

So you're really able to speak freely, talk about the challenges, talk about the successes, and think about what you as a team want to accomplish in the year and how you're going to help the company achieve the goals and getting that focused time away when you're truly unplugged is a great technique for accomplishing that.

Do you think that there is a certain right time to do a marketing retreat?

Kind of popped into my head, Melissa, as you were saying, you to think about what you want to accomplish in the year.

Would you recommend to tie in it to strategic planning or looking always one year out?

I don't know.

Either anyone has, if you've had experience with kind of thinking about the timing of when to plan a retreat, I'd be curious about that.

Seems like there's always some other deadline or priority that comes up no matter when you plan it.

But my experience from waiting till further into the end of the year is then it really keeps getting pushed as you're trying to get financial information from accounting.

And they're like, oh, well, the taxes are due.

So that's going to take priority or getting you financial information.

So then you do it at the end of the year, you end up kind of pushing further into the first quarter as you're waiting for data to help make decisions that is controlled by accounting and not whatever tracking you might be doing in marketing.

Yeah.

And I think that there's a lot of value to doing it at the beginning of the year, not only because you've got the handiness of having a 12-month set calendar in front of you, but because we kind of think in that way, like, okay, this is the beginning of 2023, or in this case, for those listening, hopefully, the beginning of 2024, you sit down together and you think through, ideally, elements of the strategic plan that your firm has in place.

If they have one, a lot of firms don't, unfortunately, have a real defined strategic plan.

But getting together to decide what your desired outcomes and goals are going to be at the retreat is, of course, extremely important.

But there's also a lot of value in putting up a timeline on the wall.

I really love that butcher paper.

You can roll it out, tape it up on the wall, and literally draw a line from one end to the other, and just hatch it out by month, and start thinking through not only quarter one, quarter two, but as you're having that conversation, like, do you need to blow up your website and redesign it?

Are you opening up a new market or a new office in some other place?

And putting those things on there, you can start to see, well, it goes quickly.

Is this something we're going to do in June, or is this something we're going to do in September?

Reverse engineer it back.

Like, having that kind of visual on the wall is really helpful.

And having a visual that people really just kind of subconsciously already understand from January to December, I think makes the planning a little bit more streamlined and easy for everyone to wrap their heads around.

That makes a ton of sense, absolutely.

Being a linear planner, starting with the beginning of the year, just as an anecdote here, though, Middle of Six's retreats have been in April and we've moved to September this year.

And the decision behind that was that we felt like September this year was actually just going to be the right timing.

It was going to set us up for what we were going to be doing the next year.

Again, we'll have to test it and see if we like that time, or do we like the spring when everything feels fresh and new?

And maybe there's just some encouragement that you can test different times of year out and see what makes sense for the cadence of your own company or the workload.

Well, to Melissa's point, I think that's really smart.

If you push it too far, are you getting into a season when people are out of the office, unavailable, the weather stops people from being able to travel to those locations?

Anything like that could make it more challenging.

But anyways, just sharing that we've done mid-year Q2 or Q3 to do our planning.

So who should attend your marketing retreat?

Just your marketing team, outside speakers, facilitators.

Let's talk about who might be in the room.

Alison, you already mentioned that you had the experience where you were maybe being presented to or trained as your retreat.

Love to hear your thoughts on what kind of that ideal makeup looks like.

I would love to see everyone who's part of your marketing team attend a marketing retreat.

I think where you start making decision points is if you have separate marketing and business development staff, do you want to have BD staff there as well to get their input?

Certainly as marketing, you are putting forth the promotional activities and supporting the business development staff and winning that work.

So what business development has for their goals for the year are important to be supported by what the marketing plan looks like.

So that's kind of a judgment call with the structure of your firm.

There's certainly a place for executive level participation in any meeting or a retreat that happens.

But I think I'm a proponent for if you can get it approved to just have it be the marketing team.

So then you can be building camaraderie, feeling able to speak freely amongst the team and kind of knowing it's a safe space where you guys can all kind of get everything out on the table and then come together with a decision point of what are we going to communicate back?

What did we work through?

How did we bring value?

Yeah, I think that that term safe space is really important in this conversation we're having today.

Because if you think of an alternate definition of the word retreat, like in the battle sense, sometimes you retreat because your soldiers are completely fatigued and exhausted, and you need to regroup and you need to retool.

And I kind of think of us as the same in some ways.

If you're on the front lines on the day to day responding to proposals, dealing with requests that come in kind of like curveballs and disrupt your procurement activities and all of the different little things that add on to our plates.

And it's hard.

It's hard mentally.

It can cause people to detach a little bit.

They don't know if they've been effective.

They might just end up feeling like they don't understand the long game of their firm or that their role truly is just reactive.

And I think getting just marketing into a room, ideally, you have a leader on your team.

Some firms have that flat organizational structure where all of their marketers are of the same title and no one is given the opportunity to lead or to be the voice to leadership.

But ideally, you do have someone in the room that can basically be the conductor and convene the group and set the tone and make it that safe space and keep the technical staff out and let you just decompress together, reflect on what the current conditions are at your firm, and make space for people to maybe share things that they don't think are working very well, you know?

And of course, you're going to do that when you do a SWAT analysis or a SWATO analysis, which I think we might get into a little later.

But opening it up so people can really just get that baseline, how are you doing, is much easier to do when you feel you're among friends and compatriots and not amongst people that have positional power above you.

I'd also add that that leader can help defend the time out of the office.

That's an important job to figure out how resources will be used.

I mean, I know that sometimes things happen, and there absolutely has to be a deliverable that falls during a retreat.

But how do we shift or focus or pull together so that it can get out of the way and we can refocus?

So in an ideal situation, the leader would carve out those two days, have the agenda, get buy-in from leadership, and then you would all be free to be out of office for a little time.

And do some of that recharging, renewing piece because you don't have the weight of, I have to check my email before we go to dinner so I can get that last whatever out the door, which can happen.

One other note I'll say on it, because you'd asked about who else should attend, if there should be any external folks.

I like to detach trainings from retreats.

I think marketing staff absolutely should get trainings, but I don't think that they should be necessarily coupled with this idea of retreat.

To me, retreating is all about assessment and planning.

And training can get us out of our own heads.

And the focus is on something that is way more academic.

When it feels like if you actually get that precious time where you can turn on your out of offices and be quote unquote away from the office, what you want to have come out the other side is something extremely tangible that people can wrap their arms around.

Trainings are really important, but if you have someone else coming in and chewing up a lot of the bandwidth of the time that you have, it seems like that might not be the highest and best use of everyone's time in that particular setting.

I was chatting with a listener of The Shortlist in preparation for this episode because we put a call out there.

If anyone has comments and wants to do a brain dump for us, we'd be happy to hear.

And their take was that they do have training in retreats, but the deal is that that outside person needs to be just the most absolute trusted resource.

They have to be integrated into the company.

It's not like they're just going to Google some facilitator and bring them in to do some training.

The bar for who they would bring in and put in front of their team was really, really high.

And I like that, that thoughtfulness, the intentionality of finding the right people and not just filling a gap, you know, this 90 minute period because we want to learn about this thing.

So that might be a way to think about it too and be very discerning about how you're going to use, you know, do you have four hours, eight hours, 16 hours to spend?

And don't, don't try to fill those chunks with whatever.

Sorry, my phone rang.

Don't try to fill those chunks with whatever.

Oh, yeah.

Melissa, any thoughts on or good experiences, bad experiences with outside facilitators or just kind of getting that agenda built out to hit on the right topics with the right people in the room?

Well, my experience with an outside facilitator was not specific to a marketing retreat, but the takeaway for me was how much more the marketing department knew than the facilitator that was brought in.

So, so to me, that says at least about the company and inner workings and history.

But what that says to me is I think there is value in the marketing department coming up with the retreat and building that out and at least something we've done at Middle of Six that I think creates buy-in as we give everyone on the team a part of the agenda.

And it's there, we might give them a loose framework or we have this block of time.

Do you have ideas?

So I think there's a value in involving the whole team.

You get better participation, people are thinking about it, and then you get to really see your team perform in a way maybe they don't on the day to day.

So I'm pro, keep it internal for a marketing retreat.

Yeah, I like that too.

It's worked out really well for us.

So sorry, I'll just echo that piece is getting your team involved with things that they can contribute.

You know, it might mean that there's a bit of a research thing or they can use that time to prepare.

Like I've been thinking about this.

I've been doing this work for so long.

I want to report out on it.

And I feel like we come away from our retreats just so much better informed on the inner workings of the company.

Because everyone has taken that deep dive into what they own and then shared it out.

And that's awesome.

It's also awesome as a leader to not do all the talking.

Right?

That's the extra bonus of sharing.

Okay, so what if you are a very, very small department?

What if you're a department, marketing department of one or two, which is not unusual, but it would be small, right?

What is the value in retreating?

Can you retreat if you're just a marketing department of one?

I think you absolutely can.

Again, it's retreat from the office, retreat from your desk, get out of your typical space and into one that is conducive to having creative thoughts and just space to think in ways that are detached from the day to day.

I don't know about you, but every once in a while, if I have an assignment that requires some original writing or even early stage planning where you kind of don't know where to begin, sometimes going to a coffee shop is really, really helpful.

Even if it's just for an hour or two, clear your head.

Something about that ambient noise can be really helpful at focusing your thoughts.

I don't recommend that for this particular exercise.

In this case, getting a study room at the library or some other firm's conference room, if they let you have it, somewhere that is different than your typical space and having that agenda, again, of what you want to get out of the day.

But honestly, I think it comes down to that strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities.

I know a lot of people say SWOT analysis.

I think it's because it sounds better.

I don't know why we end on threats personally.

But going through that exercise, even if it's just you, can be extremely helpful to center your thoughts around the forces that work against you, the things that are working for you, and where the solutions exist between them all.

I will say one other thing, though.

It can be helpful to have someone else in the room, even if it's for part of it.

We've been kind of kicking that idea around, like how could a firm like ours support marketing departments of one that just need a thought partner, someone to bounce ideas off of?

There is potential of engaging someone who you trust, who can come in and almost be like a counselor to you as you're talking through your job and your constraints and the ideas and things like that.

But long story short, in my opinion, I think it's as necessary and critical for departments of one to have at least just one day a year to exhale and kind of knock all the chess pieces off the board and think in a macro way about their job.

Yeah, I think that department of one, that's a place where you can talk to mentors or colleagues, or maybe you're in a roundtable group with your S&PS chapter, where you've just got some people that you trust that you don't work with in your firm that you could bounce ideas off of, or here's the agenda for a retreat that I will hold by myself.

What do you think?

Or here are some of the things that came out of this retreat.

Can I bounce some ideas off you and get some inputs?

I think that's an area where you can lean on your network if you're a department on one.

What if you are needing to convince leadership?

Like if you happen to work at a firm where they don't see the value in just a team going off or an individual going off on their own for a focused marketing retreat, they say, well, we just had the all staff.

What else do you need?

What are some tools you might use or how might you position this to kind of show the value in dedicating some time to focus on marketing?

I'm a huge fan of analogies and metaphors, which you probably know and people who listen to this podcast probably sensed.

And analogies sometimes say it better than several different paragraphs of text that we write down, that we tell ourselves we're going to say each one of these key points when we're trying to argue our way into getting something that we want.

The one that I used with the powers that be at the third firm I was at was, look, we have this gorgeous car.

Everyone loves it.

It's fun to drive, and everyone wants to take a ride in it.

And the engine is kind of shot, and it hasn't been looked at in quite a while.

And I need a day with my team to pop the hood and take this engine apart and really look at it and make sure that we are taking care of it so that it doesn't blow up on us down the road.

And that was kind of it.

That's what we really needed.

And you were talking to a car person.

All right, got it.

Yeah.

Signed off.

Seriously, what could their concern really be?

I think it's they're worried about a mutiny.

I mean, come on.

They're probably worried that you're going to use the time to dream up things that are too expensive to do, or just complain about things, or change processes that they think are working really well, or maybe they really are so short-sighted.

They're like, no, we just need you here in case something comes in the door.

I need you to work on.

But I think if you show them that this is for the benefit of the firm, and that everything is grounded, and how can we perform as a team to the absolute maximum of our abilities, and how do we do that in a way that supports each other, reduces turnover, and is as responsive to the technical staff as possible.

If you use words like that, and then tell them what they're gonna get out of it.

Are they gonna get some sort of a work plan?

Or, you know, you don't wanna get too granular in a retreat and talk about the steps that you're gonna have to take to get any one thing done.

But identifying the activities that can be done in between all the proposals that are going to advance the goals of the firm, having those down on paper, and starting to see that strategic framework build up around them in a calendar of how you're gonna get it done, that's tangible stuff that I think they can wrap their heads around.

And all of that would go towards them seeing that this is a really valuable and important exercise.

The planning that you're doing before you actually get a retreat put on the calendar is really important because you're going to be planning to convince and communicate to leadership.

Also potentially do the research and other things that you need to do to feed that agenda so you can go into a retreat being informed.

And then also, you're creating that agenda that's gonna be some sort of report out at the end.

So hopefully with having a clear vision of what you wanna accomplish and mapping it out, you're just gonna present in a really professional way and you have good leadership who supports that.

I personally would imagine if someone said, if I were running a company of that size, and they said, we wanna have a retreat, we wanna focus on this, I would be overjoyed because I think you wanna take a deep dive and think about how to make the company better and us more efficient and to be better bonded with your teammates.

I mean, that sounds like really good stuff.

So hopefully, good luck to all of you.

And I mean, seriously reach out if you have any issues with this, I bet you we could coach some good tips on how to make a convincing argument in that area.

Okay, so you get the like sign off approved, you can do it.

You think you've got half a year to plan the first one or something like that, right, because you've started this process and it took a little bit longer.

You know, what are some of the logistics or tips you two, and I'll chime in too, have for getting this all pulled together?

What do you need to look at?

What do you think rises to the top of this is super important to create a great marketing retreat?

Lots of food.

Oh, no food comas.

No food comas.

And coffee.

Coffee, food, good air circulation, wherever it is that you choose to go like series.

It's just comfortable environment, that well thought out agenda.

I'm a huge fan of this giant oversized post-it paper, so you can stick to the wall.

And the butcher board paper, we already talked about, that you roll across, things like that, I think, are pretty analog, but you want people to be able to grab that post-it from the center of the table in a Sharpie every time they have a great idea.

And then as far as the location goes, like I said, when we had a retreat in Seattle at one of our satellite offices, the Seattle Public Library is super awesome.

And we were able to rent out one of their meeting rooms for peanuts, like $30 or something like that.

And we had it all day.

And there was whiteboards, there was a table, there was bathroom right down the hall, and it was away from the office.

Away from the office.

I mean, let's underscore that one.

Yes, definitely.

You can have, you can have a, I don't know, I was going to try to think of something clever, right?

Like a retreat in the office is just a meeting, which is probably what it would feel like.

And it doesn't quite have the same power.

There's something about a new space, a new room, a vibe, packing up for the day, all of that stuff.

We talked about having a lot of your content, the agenda created by your marketing team, focusing less on training and more about sharing ideas and taking a deeper dive and kind of like poking holes in things and figuring things out together as a team.

That's sort of team building in a way, right?

Where you're learning to arm wrestle politely and find best solutions.

All of that's really fun.

But there can be some benefit in having a facilitator do some things to lead certain sections.

For the Middle of Six team, we've brought in a facilitator for just short little bits when we wanted to do like the personality type assessments, where I think that's kind of hard to facilitate, you know, self-facilitate with your team because I don't know, you're part of the team, right?

So the facilitators, if you're like looking at the team and, you know, just kind of asking questions related to strengths and overdone strengths or whatever it might be looking at, that's hard.

So that could be an opportunity to bring in a facilitator.

I have a funny story around this.

Oh, go for it.

So I had a retreat at my house one year, because it just turned out to be the most convenient place for folks to drive to.

And I had a decent amount of space in our living room to do it.

And I was given virtually no budget for this, other than to buy all that food I was talking about.

And we stole most of the supplies from the supply closet that we needed.

But there is this value in leveling the playing field for certain parts of the retreat.

One, yes, it is good to have a leader in the room that's there to assure everyone this information is making its way back to leadership and to really vet and field people's feedback.

But when you get into doing that strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities analysis, everyone should be coming at that fresh and everyone including the marketing director or manager.

So we ended up having my husband, Eric, who is a mailman and was literally out on his route delivering mail call at predetermined times.

I said, okay, honey, I need you to call us exactly at one o'clock.

I had set things up so that we would begin the SWOT analysis right at that time.

And he called and I put him on speaker and he said, all right, everybody, we're gonna kick off this SWOT analysis and start with your strengths.

So you have 10 minutes to write down everything you can think of that is a strength for your company or your team.

And then he hung up.

And so we had 10 minutes and we all did the analysis and stuck them up onto the strengths board.

And then 10 minutes later, he called back and he did it again and again.

And it was kind of comic relief.

Everyone laughed.

He was super good sport about it.

But it allowed me to not have to be the one to do it.

I could just listen and also have my post-its in front of me and my Sharpie and be thinking.

Even something as simple as that, which was totally MacGyvered and didn't cost anything, was highly effective.

Well, and the other takeaway from that is that you didn't, each person, walk up, everyone write on your own notes.

So you're not getting halo effect of people differing to what the person with the highest positional power in the room has.

So that's another key to dealing with different levels of people in the same room.

All right, Alison, do you want to go into your Swato deep dive?

I know it's a terrible name, Swato, but it's in practice, I believe way more valuable than to do it in the order of SWAT, which is Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

When you're doing a SWAT analysis on a firm-wide level, there's some typical rules that govern what strengths and weaknesses are.

Usually those are internal to your team.

Opportunities are things that are external to your team, and threats are something that's external to your team in terms of your firm, like how the market's performing or your competition or things like that.

But when you're doing this kind of exercise, like for a department within a firm, a lot of it's going to be internal, if not all of it.

So start with your strengths and think about it in every possible way that you can possibly muster, whether it's, well, everyone on our team is really good at copy editing.

That could be one.

You have adopted a CRM recently, and it's being successfully managed.

Massive strength.

We've got three real key technical staffers who have let us know recently that they really value us, and they think we're doing a good job.

That's a strength.

You see, you front load that kind of stuff, and then you get into weaknesses.

Well, we have a couple of folks that really are not feeling very confident in their InDesign skills.

Another weakness could be that you don't have any kind of set way of tracking the effectiveness of your sponsorship dollars.

And everyone starts writing all these things down.

Well, the next thing to do is not go straight into opportunities because your threats should be informing those as well.

So I think jumping right to threats and thinking about those allows you to get everything that's swimming around in your head, good or bad, up on the wall.

And I think anyone who's been through one of these exercises where you have the Post-it notes, maybe have different colors for each of the different boards, you know, strengths is blue and weaknesses is pink or whatever it might be.

You write those down and you stick them up there.

Pretty soon you'll notice a lot of people have the same idea and you start clumping those together.

And then someone has an idea that makes you have a totally different idea.

And it's a wonderful exercise because there's things that you would never even thought of that come out in that.

And once you've got your strengths, your weaknesses and your threads up, where you can look at them all together, it's almost like a constellation.

And you start to see things emerging from it.

And those are your opportunities.

Those are fully informed opportunities.

So I will get off my soapbox, but just rearrange those last two letters.

Your logic makes perfect sense.

You've convinced me.

I will change that.

Moving forward in my life.

No, I like that.

And it's also ending on this positive note too.

These are opportunities.

I love to think of like all these challenges we're faced with, like here's an opportunity.

Yes.

We can make some room here.

We can move ahead.

So that is really good.

What do you do?

I mean, and it could come from the swato analysis, or it could come from anywhere else in the retreat.

What do you do with all these action items, notes?

As everyone, you know, you have like 10 people taking 10 sets of notes.

What do you do?

What are the wrap-up steps, or how do you decide you're making progress?

I think carving out time at the end of the agenda for that sort of summary.

Let's go back through and look for the action items.

I know if I take notes, I put a little like empty box next to action items.

So I would encourage everyone at the beginning to make sure you're using something where you can scan the notes and easily see the action items.

And then let's pull those together in the last, however long period of time you think you need to make sure all of those have people they're assigned to.

If there's some sort of order they need to be done, maybe something needs five things done before you can make a decision, just kind of trying to map that out a little bit and put some realistic timelines to getting those action items done.

Yeah.

And I think that deciding like what is a one and done?

What is something that you can go back and immediately change it and make it better?

Whether it's a practice of how you're saving things into your folders or housekeeping after your proposal goes out the door.

I mean, some of that stuff is just like changing behaviors, but other things are going to be multi-step processes that are going to require the intense resources to get them done, like say revamping your website or going through a branding exercise or a whole new social media campaign.

And those, I wouldn't even go so far as to have people raise their hand to say, I'm going to be the champion for this.

I think it's do that timeline on the wall to kind of figure out what can we feasibly even get done this year and start prioritizing what needs to get done and in what order for the other things to get done.

And you can start to see like, you probably came up with a lot more great stuff than you can possibly get done in one year.

So then it becomes a plan that's probably more like two or three years.

And then you just get into that practice of prioritizing and being very kind and patient with yourselves and realistic around how quickly things are going to be able to get done and just create it in that kind of a tracking spreadsheet that you can then use to revisit at your marketing meetings and maybe special check-ins for special projects.

Yeah, action items and prioritization.

That is, I think that is the magic of making things happen in life.

So we use those techniques for sure.

And even I can think of like, because of our cadence of meetings where we have also quarterly check-ins, we're kind of very frequently checking in on these bigger ideas.

And I don't know if that's part of your own marketing system or not, but it's kind of an easy time throughout the year.

Every quarter, just like, okay, what's going on?

What's coming up in the next 90 days?

What happened the last 90 days?

So some of those systems that can just be built into how you're always working can be really helpful.

As Alison mentioned, you may have way more than you can do, so that could even be turned into making a case for an additional person on your team.

If you can show the benefits and the value to the company, and if we had another person on the team, these are all the other things besides proposals we could get done.

Amen.

Well, let's leave it at that.

That feels like great punctuation for this nice little episode.

Thank you both for sharing your thoughts, your experience on that.

Thanks for anyone who reached out and sent us emails or notes and phone calls about their own retreats.

It was helpful.

And I think there's more to talk about this, like there is on every topic.

But we'll talk about corporate retreats or bigger, you know, huge facilitated things at another time.

But for this point, I hope everyone gets the chance to think about their upcoming retreat or get one on the calendar or start convincing leadership.

It's super valuable.

And, you know, we've always enjoyed it.

So thanks for being here, Allison, Melissa.

Appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you.

This was fun.

Thanks.

The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six and hosted by me, Wendy Simmons, principal marketing strategist.

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The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.