One of my favorite times of the year is business planning and team retreat season. It's inspiring to see how far we've come as an organization, and to chart our course to reach our next destination!
This time last year, our Ilumni team rented a house at the beach and spent three nights together. Our agent services director (aka, "team mom") grocery shopped and meal planned, and we made dinner together, listening to music, drinking lots of wine, and talking about everything from hair color to politics. The next morning, we took a walk, enjoyed our coffee, and then "got to work" at 8:30am, reflecting on our personal "why," our personal goals, and our 1 year, 3 year, 5 year visions.
We spent two complete days examining the business - defining our holes and areas for improvement. We pretended we had all the money, time, and resources to create our dream experience for our members and students. What would a seven-star experience look like? That was a powerful exercise!
We dove into our individual strengths and challenges. What makes each of us tick? We took a hard look at how can we pool everyone's talents together and create as close to a seven-star experience as we can, while providing the most rewarding and purposeful work for our team.
And then we got very tactical. We outlined the initiatives we would be launching in the next 16 months. We decided who would lead what, and how we would measure success.
We came away with clarity. We were bonded together as a unified pack. It was like having a GPS for our next 16-month leg of our journey. It was our anchor for guiding us if we got off track, and it was our mile-marker to reflect upon the next time our annual retreat rolled around.
Today is the day for Ilumni's fourth annual retreat. It won't be in a killer beach house, and we won't all be together. And when we look back at what we'd laid out for 2020, we've stayed mostly on track even though we've had some bumps along the way. We will be spending two days together, on Zoom, guided by an outside facilitator, charting our course ahead.
No matter what, friends, always have a dream. No matter what is happening all around us, there is hope and promise for the future.
Where do you want to see yourself in the next 1, 3, and 5 years?
