Back to the future

Garry and I took time out last month to conduct a strategic planning offsite for our company. It’s been three years since we last stepped back, truly paused, and thought long-term about our business.  We’ve always found it more productive if we book these events in a location that encourages us to genuinely separate ourselves from the business and clear our heads. The last time we did we saw our business almost double in size over the following three years.
 
This year we chose Lord Howe Island for our planning event.  It’s less than two hours flying time from Sydney, offers an “off the grid” lifestyle, and plenty of warm weather and scenic beauty to clear the head and refresh the mind. It’s also part of the state of New South Wales and thus is relatively “close to home”.  To help us stay focused we successfully secured an all-inclusive, special package deal from Capella Lodge.  This package included accommodation, meals and drinks, and access to a separate meeting space during the day.
 

Our five-day retreat (four nights) kicked off with a morning flight from Sydney in a tiny 36-seat Qantas Dash 8 200 series aircraft.  Qantas has two of these aging planes in its fleet. It’s kept them exclusively for flights to Lord Howe Island.  The island has an 880 metre long runway that very few commercial planes can safely land on – the 200 series is one such aircraft.
 
The Lodge collected us from the airport and took us back to the hotel.  The venue was superb. It offered stunning views towards the island's two highest peaks, Mount Gower and Mount Lidgbird.  It was the perfect place to reset ourselves and kick off our first three-hour planning session. Dinner that night was an equally superb affair. By chance, we’d arrived on the same day the lodge hosted a weekly degustation meal. Each course was a genuine treat to behold.

Day Two kicked off with more warm and sunny weather. After breakfast, we took a few hours off to explore the island using the hotel’s complimentary golf cart.  The island is a relatively compact landmass. It’s approximately 11km long and up to 3 km wide with a narrow central isthmus of less than 1km connecting two halves capped at each end by mountains. 

One side of the island features a picturesque lagoon that’s home to the world’s southernmost coral reef.  Lord Howe Island is also home to a host of unique native species including a rare giant stick island and some adorable flightless woodhens.  Our hotel had a family of woodhens living in gardens. We were lucky enough to spot three baby hens on our third day.  With all of this scenic beauty to protect, the island supports a resident population of approximately 350 people, with no more than 400 tourists permitted to visit at any one time.

After exploring the island from one end to the other, we then settled in for another afternoon of strategic business planning and intense debate. Much to our delight, the hotel took pity on us when they heard we were spending most of our time buried in our business. While we were out, it upgraded us to one of its best rooms. This certainly made it easier to focus on our work for the rest of our stay.

Our third day on the island was set aside for a team-building exercise.  It also gave us an opportunity to mull over some of our decisions and reflect away from our laptops and spreadsheets. We climbed up to Kim’s Lookout, the island’s picture-perfect, Instagram-worthy, scenic viewing point location on a hill at the island’s northern end.  The climb involved hundreds of steps that got our hearts beating.  However, the climb was well worth the effort when we reached the summit.  The view from Kim’s Lookout is as magical as every internet image suggests.

We then made our way to Ned’s Beach where the hotel had left us a BBQ picnic lunch.  BBQ outings are a bit deal on Lord Howe Island.  The local council has installed BBQ facilities across the entire island.  After lunch, we then partook in one of the island’s “must-do” tourist activities.  Ned’s Beach is a protected marine zone.  Here you can wade into the water and hand-feed the local fish. 
 
Feeding the fish was a truly memorable experience.  From a business planning perspective, it really got us thinking about how simple changes (banning fishing) can transform something normal (visiting the beach) into something unique. We returned mid-afternoon to our hotel filled with ideas for rethinking our company’s current business model.

Our final full day on the island was spent working on the business and concluding our planning offsite.  Sadly, the day started with chaos.  Our third-party warehouse had moved premises the week before our offsite. The move hadn’t gone smoothly and by Friday we had a lot of deeply unhappy customers.  We spent several hours tackling these issues before finally stepping back again to debate our future.  These discussions then carried us through to dinner and our final night on the island.

Our offsite finished the following day with an uneventful afternoon flight back to Sydney.  We returned with pages and pages of actions and strategic decisions – plus a pool of data analysis on more aspects of our business than ever before.  We also came home refreshed and ready to tackle whatever the future holds for us.  If history is anything to go by, the business will, once again, prove unrecognizable four years from now.  We also promised ourselves that we’d return to Lord Howe Island – but next time for a real holiday where work and business were set aside.

Kim's Lookout panorama