Surf Office company retreats: How it works

Surf Office started to organize company offsites in 2014. So we have been doing it already for a while. Over the years we started to organize larger and larger events, the startups that were small they became larger scaleups. Then they organize retreats with us. And now we have more than 100 locations across Europe, US, and Central America. We understand how important is for you to build a perfect agenda, because you are meeting once, twice a year. You maybe want to align on the strategy for the company, maybe you want to come with a new product, maybe you want to organize a hackathon, maybe you grew so fast in the last 6 months that you just want to build a culture because that's a challenging part of being remote company. All that agenda for work part of the retreat is already quite challenging - that's why we are here, to help you with all the logistic part. You don't have to think about choosing the right location, choosing the right venue. We want to make sure that this is smooth so you can get the maximum output of your retreat.

First call that we have the most important thing is to understand what the goal of the event is and what you want to accomplish. The initial stage of the retreat planning process is really to set kind of the location and the venue type. We're able to send you right away an opening proposal based on our expertise and based on the conversation we had that matches what you are trying accomplish with the event. The more time an advance that you start looking for the venue the better chance you have for securing the ideal setup. The holy grail for organizing group events is if you get exclusivity of an entire venue and something like this is only possible with a lot of time in advance.

Once a retreat is confirmed we create a dashboard that is basically a one-stop hub with all the information. So it contains information about the schedule, the hotel, the location, also for example team building activities so they can go through the options and see what fits best with their group. It's very useful information that they can later on share with their team. We also simplify the invoicing process so it's very easy for the clients. Everything will just go through Surf Office. Every retreat has one dedicated retreat planner. You've one person to organize basically everything for you. So that person of course will then understand the needs of the clients. If you organize a retreat on your own you often don't really know what is needed. We all want to save you, the client, time in the planning process. And I think with our experience we are able to do that.