Leadership Retreats

Making the toughest decisions during complex and unpredictable times.

We support clients in getting their key people together to hammer out strategies, prepare for negotiations, share best practices, or agree crisis response plans.

Location, Venue, Accommodations:

Our summit producers work with client event-planning teams to determine the most appropriate location and venue. Location is typically determined by ease of access for the in-person invitees, the local health/security guidances, travel/visa restrictions, and availability of relevant local experiences.

Once the location is determined, we work with clients to identify a specific venue that ensures confidentiality, a collaborative environment, and safety. This may be an art gallery, warehouse, studio, aircraft hangar, or hotel venue that can provide ease of access, a controlled environment, and confidentiality.

Agenda Design:

We partner with clients’ planning teams to design an agenda covering the ground necessary to make optimal decisions while creating experiences that allow the group to connect as individuals and as a team. We design the program to ensure content balances the opportunity for in-person interactions while ensuring those participating remotely have a full experience - in the weeks leading up to the retreat, the retreat itself, and through the post-event communications.

We encourage clients to shape the agenda to ensure high energy and engagement by blending formats, including:

  • Highly visual keynote presentations.

  • Small group exercises.

  • Video-based updates.

  • Online ideation and real-time polling/voting.

  • Freeform ideation and best practice sharing sessions.

  • Short, specific skill development sessions.

  • Roundtable discussions & executive Q&A.

  • Self-reflection time.

  • Group social activities.

Advance Materials:

We manage the secure distribution of advanced materials and provide digital platforms for the distribution of:

  • Summit documents and materials;

  • Forms and questionnaires;

  • Biographies of attendees and key stakeholders;

  • Secure voting and polling links; and

  • Videos and podcasts as advance briefings on the meeting.

If a custom website for the event is helpful, we build the site and design event-specific logos, brands, and sound signatures.

We’re proponents of tangible media ahead of any event. We design notes, postcards, or simple gifts for clients to mail to participants before the event to set tone and expectations.

Stakeholder Insights:

Ahead of critical meetings, we interview key stakeholders to ensure the retreat host fully understands their issues and perspectives ahead of the meeting and that the agenda directly addresses key concerns and opportunities.

We assist clients in addressing minor issues for stakeholders before the in-person gathering to ensure time at the event is focused on the most critical subjects.

Onsite Production:

Through our embedded media team, we provide the lighting, cameras, and microphones for hybrid broadcasts and filming segments for future distribution to broader audiences. We provide the software for the retreat/summit website, live streaming, remote interviewing, video distribution, polling, and secure voting.

Our facilitators and producers deliver and integrate the in-person and broadcast elements during the meeting.

Facilitation:

Envoy’s team of negotiators, mediators, and facilitators guide participants to allow for the frankest discussions and optimal decision-making. Over the years, we’ve worked through almost every conceivable scenario and personality, ranging from corporate chief executives, supreme court justices, central bank presidents, NGO secretaries-general, and senior military, diplomatic, and intelligence officers. Our role is to keep the event on track, ensure all voices are heard and clear decisions are made.

Localization:

We assist clients in localizing the summit and grounding the event in the host location. That may be serving locally-sourced food and drinks or finding community-based speakers to bring a sense of place to the meeting. And for those remote participants, we ship local products as a way of saying thanks for connecting and participating.

Activities:

We work with clients to design outdoor activities that allow for collaboration and building a sense of team. That could be a hike along a river, biking, kayaking, or outdoor wine tasting by a firepit. We ensure that activities always match the physical capabilities and emotional capacities.

Communications:

Post-event, we create follow-up communications to reflect discussions, agreements, and strategies developed. These can include:

  • Video or podcast interviews with key participants;

  • Edited highlights of the recorded meeting;

  • Written reports of the meeting; and/or

  • Visual representation of the session.

Dollars, Euros, Pounds:

While every summit is different, to help you estimate costs, our fee (including equipment, software, and travel) typically averages around US$17,500 / EUR€16,500 / GBP£14,000 per day with opportunities for reduced fees during non-peak periods of the year.

Last Notes:

Quick Disclaimers: We produce leadership retreats and summits for groups of between 10 and 75 participants. While we provide content for large conferences and events, we’re not an event-planning firm. We’re happy to refer clients to our friends who lead world-class event production firms. We don’t outsource, mark up, or receive commissions or referral fees.

Understanding how and why humans make decisions is what drives our profession. We love this work and appreciate the opportunity to work with you. For more information, drop us a note.