18 Mar The Shareholder Value in Conferencing

I’ve started using our client list as a guide for my investing. Why? I’ve noticed that a company being on our client list is a great indicator of their future success… Every time I look on lists of best performing companies, I see a lot of names I recognise as ones that do cooking team building events with us.

So why is that? Well, I reckon these are the companies that value their people and always make time for review and planning and reconnecting with purpose and each other. I know that because our cooking team building events are often included as part of company conferences. So I get to see what these companies do and learned a lot about why they are so successful.

Here are a few things these companies always include:

1. Vision, Values & Purpose – everyone needs to periodically stop and reconnect with the main reasons the company exists and the problem they are trying to solve. It’s easy to get lost in the day to day, and lose touch with this essential cause.

2. Theme – the ‘big picture’ for the year. This helps focus the mind and good ones become a bit of a ‘meme’ in the company, a ready reminder of what they’re trying to achieve.

3. Goals – the “big hairy audacious”, long-term goal that gets everyone excited, and the interim steps to getting there. Not too much detail here, but the major milestones need to be known so everyone can take aim.

4. KPI’s – company-wide and team/departmental metrics so everyone knows how they are tracking against the goals, and as the basis for setting individual KPI’s (usually after the conference).

5. Blockages – what is, or has the potential to stop them from reaching the goals?

6. Strategies – how are they going to get over their blockages?

7. Structured experiences – used for a number of different ends. We’re not talking about a night at the pub; while that may be fun, it misses the chance to really maximise the impacts of the conference.

Say you have a dispersed team or one where team mates don’t get to see each other regularly. You want to reconnect people and energise the team for the task ahead. We find that the best time to do this is at the start of the conference; that super-charges the team and gets everyone pulling together for the best results. Watch this video to see what happens when you start your conference with one of our MasterChef Challenge team cooking events.

On the other hand, if you’re keen to feed creativity and focus the team on solutions, experiences should be scheduled when your agenda transitions from the assessment of ‘what is’ to the brainstorm of innovation. This timing will help open people up to ‘Aha!’ moments – just what you need at your conference.

As a final example, if you really want to and cement learnings from the conference and get the team focused on goals, have the experience at the end. A team building idea like cooking lets you build physical metaphors for the theme and learnings from the conference to hone these even more.This is why it takes more than your average chef to facilitate a VictorsFood event – they need to understand business value and be able to connect with your team.

So start maximising shareholder value in your company – let us help you plan your next conference cooking team building session.