Retreats around the world with the CEO of Surf Office

0:03 

Chase Warrington   

Hey, what’s going on everyone, welcome to another episode about abroad where it’s my job to introduce you to people who have built amazing lives for themselves in various foreign corners of the globe. We’re talking with expats and thought leaders about moving abroad, remote work, visas, and all the fun and practical knowledge that you need to know to follow in their footsteps. If you’ve ever dreamed of making a life for yourself overseas, maybe working remotely or embracing long-term travel, retiring or studying abroad, or even just taking a peek inside life beyond your borders, you’ve landed in the right place.

This episode is brought to you in partnership with Wonders of Wealth, one of the greatest challenges, and also one of the greatest opportunities for digital nomads, expats who are building businesses abroad in the world of international taxes. It’s not the most fun subject to talk about. But it’s one of the most important and confusing that I hear about all the time from those of you in the audience. So I had Kathy on the show before she was the CEO of wonders wealth, and afterward, I became a customer of hers because her global tax strategy design course is incredible. It walks you through all the steps that you need to take to take advantage of the international tax system that is set up to help those of us that are living this international lifestyle so highly recommended, you can find the link in the show notes for her global tax strategy design course check it out, and let me know what you think. My guest today is Peter  Fabor. He is the founder and CEO of surf office, which is one of the worldwide leaders in retreat planning companies around the world. So they take and lead other companies on their retreats, which is becoming a super popular thing in the future of work discussion. So also something that I’m passionate about and love focusing on. So it was cool to sit down with one of the true leaders in this space. They lead teams all around the world and Peter himself is a seasoned digital nomad and expat that has moved to a variety of countries in different places around the world. So it was a lot of fun to talk with him I learned a lot and enjoyed getting to know more about the origins of surf office a company that I’ve been following for a long time so thank you to Peter for joining us and sharing so much of his story with us I hope you enjoy please help me in welcoming Peter to about abroad

So you’re currently where you’re on vacation right you’re taking some time away?

2:36  

Peter Fabor  

Yes staying in later Eastern Europe cancel Moldova because that’s where my wife is from and we are visiting the family here and I’m working from the countryside using the mobile Moldavian data  

2:49

Chase Warrington    

So you’re tethered to your mobile device for this call then huh?

2:54

Peter Fabor    

Yeah, I just bought it extremely cheap by the way here if anyone is considering visiting Moldova and working from here I just bought 60 gigs of data for four years at the airport and it’s super fast we have this interview using Zoom we are recording the podcast and it works without any problems so I from my experience is the fastest and cheapest mobile data I or let’s say the value for money are they raised in Europe working remotely? 

3:22

Chase Warrington   

That’s insane. I always get people asking me if I occasionally work from my campervan. And generally getting out into kind of the off-the-beaten-track, I guess you’d say into some like pretty rural areas and can work and I’ve even actually recorded a couple of podcast episodes tethered to a mobile device doing exactly that. And it kind of blows my mind how fast it is. And then I’m able to do it from pretty much anywhere and I won’t say in the world because I haven’t traveled all around the world but at least anywhere in Europe, I haven’t had too many challenges. It’s pretty, like pretty crazy how accessible remote work is now as 

3:57  

Peter Fabor 

For how much I’m curious because it’s something I would like to try, like working remotely from a campervan. I always use can prevent us from traveling and going to surf with friends but for how many days you can like to stay there and work and be productive or is it for just a temporary word like for five days or a few days or you can work from a campervan for one or two months comfortably. But what’s your experience or opinion? 

4:22

Chase Warrington   

Yeah, I have a lot of respect for the people that can do like the full-time camp preventing especially I think I think a big difference here is big like factor is if you’re doing it alone or with a partner, you know, multiple people it’s for me it’s quite challenging having a partner and we also have a big dog in a small space and trying to be productive for a long period. So like a week or two weeks or something is no problem at all we did for some reason I can’t remember if it was eight weeks or 10 weeks last year and that was way too much. I took a good bit of vacation in the middle of that so I wasn’t working the whole time. But yeah, it’s great for me for a reset like a change of pace. I get invigorated by being in a new place and the new scenery and it really sparks creativity but there is a diminishing return that sets in. So I would say like two weeks is kind of the top max for me. 

5:12

Peter Fabor   

I can’t imagine that you had to fight with your partner about who is going to have a call inside of the campervan and who has to go outside right 

5:20

Chase Warrington    

That’s the thing you find yourself you have to make those trade-offs on every single decision like you know, it’s not just like who’s gonna take a shower and then who’s not and who’s gonna like have coffee and who’s not who’s gonna take the call who’s going to you know, go walk the dog and get every single decision you find yourself discussing every single decision it gets a little heavy, nobody’s gonna feel sorry for you but it is a bit to juggle. Do you have a campervan as well Peter? 

5:43 

Peter Fabor   

No, I had that as my first car. I never had a real car you know, like for people the first car I had was a camper van and I bought it together with a friend of mine to just go to travel to mainly spend time in the South of France, north of Portugal. In Spain and surfing we’re sleeping in the campervan downtown with friends and I have amazing memories. We did a trip from Bratislava to Slovakia, the longest one was we went to the south of Spain well and then from there by ferry to Canary Island, so we left it there and the plan was that it never happened. We had the plan that let’s continue back to Africa, Senegal with some ferry and make it to Cape Town like the south and that was like a dream. We’re still at the university and we plan to do it one summer but it ended up that we just used that campervan in canneries, we’re traveling to Ghana reserve and every time we came we just use the campervan and we had it parked there and then we just decided one day that okay, it causes more problems than it brings benefits so we decided to sell it so that’s my experience with the campervan but I never worked from there and I think it was also at the time when it was not the thing that it was like in 2000 between 2011 until 2013 

7:07 

Chase Warrington 

You were doing it early before it was cool 

7:10  

Peter Fabor  

And it also not it didn’t look so cool. It was just like an old Volkswagen but not those really old ones that look cool. It was from 94 so it looked relatively modern but it was still a 20-year-old van and it yeah since then I have also had some Blocker with having a car I don’t want to have a car because I had so many headaches with this game provided like there was always something not working so I’m kind of against the cars that are maybe why I live in Amsterdam that I go everywhere by bike or by walk and I’m using the car sharing so I don’t need to own a car. 

7:46  

Chase Warrington  

You know what I have a desire to not own a car as well. One of the things that I love about living in Europe is that I don’t need a car like I have a campervan now and that a toy is an extra thing that helps me travel but that’s something I think coming from America and like like you just grew up needing a car and I love not having a car and I find it funny that I have this camper van now because my first camp prevents experience sounds like it was very similar to yours. It was also a Volkswagen and it had tons of problems. I think I’ve told the story on this podcast before but like essentially just ended up on tons of tow trucks and fell apart ended up getting to Ireland and selling it there so I sold it on another island after deciding it wasn’t worth it anymore. And anyway, I mean, it was just a disaster, a bit of a disaster but I also had dreams of doing these long cross-continent campervan trips, and that one driving to the southern tip of Africa would be completely epic. Do you know anybody that’s done that? 

8:45

Peter Fabor    

Not really, maybe some people like doing it as an adventure expedition. But then the way we traveled was what I loved about traveling with a campervan that we didn’t have a plan for. Maybe we had the plan that we knew what the end destination was, but we didn’t know exactly how to get there. And we didn’t have a plan. Okay, we need to stay three days here and five days in Sebastiaan, and three days in Bilbao. No, we were just like, oh, we like it here we like br is let’s stay here for four more days. You know, and this is how you travel. And I think when you go to Cape Town, you have to plan it better. Also because of the security and so, we were probably not the best type of people at the time to plan such a trip. So maybe it’s for good that we didn’t decide to go 

9:33 

Chase Warrington   

Probably so yeah, probably in the end one of those spirits is that’s nice to dream about. And who knows how it would have turned out. It’s cool that that took you to the Canary Islands and it sounds like I mean, I know about your business, which we’re going to get into here with the Surf office and I’m super excited to learn a lot more about it because it’s something that I think is such a cool experience. And the origin story is something that I know a little bit about, but I don’t know all the details of so I want to ask about that, but is that sort of how you found it, like chasing surf? Sort of how you found the Canary Islands? Or were you already kind of were you already aware of the Canary Islands spending time there and then discovered a passion for surfing because it sounds like that’s been a core part of your journey and story  

10:15 

Peter Fabor   

No, my passion for surfing started earlier when I lived in Barcelona for humans. I was doing their internship and a friend of mine it’s the guy with who I later a couple of years bought the campervan he just came to visit me for a week but he stayed for one month and he told me that he tried surfing in France in BRS and we should go together and because it’s amazing and we just bought the tickets for a bus from Barcelona to stone Sebastiaan and then, for instance, the best yeah and we just and finally we get to be irate and we just bought in decathlon we bought some equipment for camping rented the surfboards and that’s how I started the surf. And since then I’ve been obsessed with or I love the combination of traveling and doing some sports activities so every summer or every other opportunity I had to travel and go surf since then Canary Islands because they are the places where you can go to serve during the winter and the weather is very nice and that’s exactly the place where you want to be during the winter if you if you’d like surfing in Europe or you can go somewhere else to Mexico or Bali or Morocco but in Europe that that’s the place to be during the winter

11:33 

Chase Warrington   

 yeah, I’ve fallen in love with kind of spinning my spinning at least like a part of my winter in in the Canary Islands it’s just an awesome place I’m fascinated by the different terrain as you can be on these tiny islands that you can drive across in like an hour and see like volcanoes and like volcanic mountains that are like look like Mordor and like green lush hills and cliffs and then beautiful water and waves and beaches and it’s like I don’t know it’s just their crazy set of islands with so much to offer.

12:05

Peter Fabor    

I agree which one is your favorite? 

12:07  

Chase Warrington  

Ah, I mean, I’ve visited so far I’ve visited three: Tenerife, Gran Canaria, and La Palma. And I mean, the crazy thing is that they’re all relatively similar and relatively distinct in certain ways. And I like them all for different things. So I mean, it’s super I’m sure it’s for you as the same kind of hard to say. I had a great experience and La Palma was like the lies of La Bonita just like really laid back and chill. I was coming from Valencia and liked the hectic city and just it was a very laid-back experience. But I mean, I could make a hard case for loving any of them. Honestly 

12:41 

Peter Fabor   

This is the answer all Canarians want to hear so doesn’t don’t change it. But you’re right. When I moved to Gran Canaria, I planned to visit all the islands, so they’re officially seven, but you can count eight because they’re responsible for Ireland north of Lanzarote. So if you count eight, I visited seven of them. So the one that is missing is De La Gomera. And exactly what you say is that each island is different, and they’re all beautiful. So there is no best island. There is the best island for a specific thing if you want to surf, or if you want to hype it. Each island is different. But from those three that you mentioned, like I love three of them, all three of them. But La La Palma is somehow magical. I remember I only went once and we did a lot of hiking and it was amazing. 

13:27

Chase Warrington   

How long did you live in the Canary Islands? I don’t know how you define life. But I mean, how 

How many years were you spending there?

13:34

Peter Fabor    

I spent two years there in total when I lived there. But besides that, I spent, let’s say, a total of three years or three and a half with the existing ones, but like, full time I lived there for two years, but the time like it’s very slow. I have a feeling that Yeah, it’s like four years, somewhere else. 

13:54  

Chase Warrington  

There’s like a Canary Island time where it does slow down. I think it’s great when you are older and you have a family with kids. I think it’s an amazing place to live and spend more time but I moved there when I was 2827 28 and it was a bit slow for me.

Yeah, it’s a chill mindset. You have to go there with the right idea about what you want. So what I find interesting, if I understand it correctly, and I’ll probably just ask you to just tell the story, but it sounds like you were there in Gran Canaria, I believe, and wanted to have someplace to work and serve and thus serve in the office. Is that more or less correct? 

14:35 

Peter Fabor   

Yeah, more or less, more or less? You are right. 

14:38  

Chase Warrington

Tell the story better than me. I shouldn’t have even tried to paraphrase. 

14:41 

Peter Fabor   

You said it correctly. It’s a short version for sure. I work on moving to Gran Canaria. I visited a couple of times, because of this campervan trip they told you about and I worked at the time before moving to Gran Canaria. I worked in the Czech Republic in Prague for one tech company as a user experience designer and I just realized that I worked there for two years. I went to the office, which was not a remote job, there were not very many remote jobs at the time. And I just realized that I can do this remotely, I don’t need to go to the office. Because I interacted mainly with developers, they didn’t want to have meetings with me, they appreciated the communication by acting by email or by chat, whatever. And they replied to me, whenever they have time, now what is becoming kind of the norm, but at the time was like, okay, so I don’t need to meet them. If I don’t need to meet them. I don’t need to be in Prague if I don’t need to be in Prague. Why, where could I be? And I thought, like, oh, I would like to be in the Canary Islands. And it sounded like a crazy idea to go to the Canary Islands. And I talked to my boss about this. And he was very skeptical about my productivity. And so I told him, Look, if it’s not going to work, well, you can call me anytime. And I will buy the flight the next day, and I will come back to Prague, and he couldn’t say no, and it worked well, and my I had this idea before that I would like to move to canneries and start this as the kind of side project hobby project to create something like co-working co-living space even I didn’t call it at the time working co-living space. Other people told me that I should call it this way because that’s what it’s called. 

16:19 

Chase Warrington  

I have this concept where people like to work from the same place and like maybe they live there. I don’t know, crazy idea. 

16:25 

Peter Fabor   

I just didn’t want to work from there alone. You know, like though, it was very small. I just rented one apartment and another apartment and the litter in the workspace was basically like a garage converted into the workspace. And yeah, people started to come and I called the office. So there was this idea that oh, people go to serve and to work and yeah, it was, it was fun. I have so many good memories of those two years in Gran Canaria. And I met so many, so many good friends that I’m still in contact with. Until now, it was definitely like, I would recommend it to anyone who is not starting a business. But with the intention. It was also my intention to make lots of friends, lots of international friends, like in two years, you may just, I don’t know, 10,000 people. And of course, you’re not friends with all of them. But if you made it’s about the quantity, if you made 1000 people, you probably are going to have 100 friends. And yeah, that was the idea. And it worked out, we opened another one in Lisbon. That location, I moved to Lisbon. So then I moved to Lisbon for two years. And then we slowly went. I can continue with the story until now that we started to get more and more companies and remote companies contacting us, like, hey, we need to organize this off-site retreat for our teams. And we had teams from the automatic and top towel. And you know, like this first evangelist of remote work, and I thought, like, Oh, this is interesting, like, why don’t we just do this. This is the future. I just saw it as like, this is the future, you know, and I was so engaged in the conversations with these people that I remember that we had this press group from our automatic WordPress guys that they were telling me about the slack, how they are what they’re using for communication, and it nobody was using Slack it was a completely new thing. And I was like, Oh, why are you using it? How does it work? And yeah, I was like, Okay, we are going to use like, as well as 

18:25  

Chase Warrington  

When was this Peter? Like roughly 

18:27  

Peter Fabor  

the 2000 dislike I think was in 2015. 

18:32  

Chase Warrington  

I mean, that doesn’t sound like 2015. It doesn’t sound like that long ago. But in this time warp we’re talking about two-time warps: the Time Warp of Gran Canaria, and the Time Warp of just like remote work and the quick evolution that’s happened overnight. It’s like that seems like decades ago, in some ways. Like I mean, that’s true pioneer work at 2002 1015 i 

18:52

Peter Fabor   

For me, the most impressive thing that this company has is that it was very clear that this is going to be the future. I just didn’t know I expected that it would take at least 1015 years to change the mindset of people. But of course, COVID picked up all of these transitions and now every tech company is remote. So it was a good decision that in 2017 we dropped the concept of co-working and CO living for individuals so we have individual people visiting and we’ve started to focus only on companies and made it more professional started to work with the hotels and expand it to more locations so that that’s what we are doing right now. 

19:35  

Chase Warrington  

Was that pivot strictly a business decision or was there any other element to it that called to you 

19:42  

Peter Fabor

I must say that I was there on-site, you know, for this co-working co-living and it was basically for the more than three years I’ve been doing on-site support managing the property and so and I don’t know people who don’t have experience with such a thing. like managing the bar, like the little guest house the same as me, I didn’t have such experience before. I think that being odd is easy. Like, you can do it like, yeah, you just rent the building and then and you, you create the community, you know, everybody’s talking about community, man, it’s, it’s a lot of work. And I was burnt out, I just didn’t want to do it anymore like to be on-site and do everything by myself. And I was thinking, Okay, I learned a lot about how to do this and started thinking, Okay, how I can do this with other companies, hotels that are operating the property, I didn’t want to operate it. And I also didn’t see it scalable, like, hey, how we can add another building, we need to sign the lease. And it was, yeah, there are a lot of headaches with the, with the landlord with a lot of things can that can happen to property now, like when someone is coming to me like I want to open a call living space, and, and asking me for some ideas or advice, I just dropped some things, what can happen. And if they realize it, you know, like the like, for instance, the internet doesn’t work. And people work remotely, and they need the Internet and the Internet doesn’t work for 15 minutes, if they’re going to kill you, you know, like when you are at home, and the Internet doesn’t work and happen because of the provider, whatever, you go for a walk, you’re going to make a coffee and hope that it will start to work. It’s not such a big deal. You apologize to your colleague, you’d have a meeting or something. But yeah, if you have 20 people in the workspace. So we end with that because of this we also developed lots of ideas, lots of processes that for instance, for the Internet, we just contracted the internet from through to providers and to have like two setups for the internet. And if it doesn’t work, you can connect to another one. And like, nobody’s going to do that in the hall like Portal or co-working space. Why would you pay for another internet connection? But it’s not a big investment? You know, it’s just like one more line? It’s not a lot of money for the value, what do you provide, and we had, like, a lot of these little hacks would be developed over the years. And I thought, yeah, we can use them working with other hospitals and partners and to teach them how to provide better infrastructure for this retreat, whatever it’ll be a useful experience. 

22:16 

Chase Warrington   

I was reading one of your articles you wrote about like, like kind of coaching facilities on how to be retreat Ready, like how to, you know, kind of prep themselves for being able to accept rich, you know, companies that wanted to come to their offsites there because I agree with you like I think you were saying this years ago like this is the future. And I believe that the future has arrived at the off-site, the team retreat. This is kind of like returning to the office. This is a core part of how these distributed teams of all natures are going to build team culture and camaraderie and push big ideas forward. So that future has arrived now. And there are a lot of people, individuals, companies out there and venues included in that, that are wanting a piece of that pie, right and saying, Yeah, we can do that, you know, we do, we cater to this type of company all the time. Sure, we can cater to Team sites and team retreats and things like that. And the truth is, a lot of venues aren’t set up for this. And there’s not a lot of expertise often in running these things. Well, is that fair to say? In your opinion?

23:21  

Peter Fabor   

Absolutely. That’s our biggest struggle to find the right venues. And not only it’s almost impossible to find the venues with the right setup and everything, everything that we expect from the venue to have tight it’s even difficult to find the venues that have open minds to change things, you know like we work with the hotels that we already host there a couple of retreats and they see that okay, we can surface can bring them a lot of business, but we want from them some changes to improve the internet connection or to change if the hotel has three meeting rooms or five meeting rooms to dedicate one to serve our face and design it maybe in a different way. Because traditionally the hotels received the corporate customers for kind of like workshops and presentations, you know, and they are not used to we still experience it that they are shocked that all but these people that were working on the laptops for five days was like yes, that’s exactly what all the groups are office is going to send you are going to do that. Yeah, there is maybe some presentation of the CEO here and there but it’s mainly about just working together and you chase you I’ve been following you around on Twitter and there is this super interesting framework you can wait like how to divide the time during the retreat between the activities that are work-related and not work-related. And we have been seeing a huge shift from companies that came for retreat, just you know, to have some presentations and kind of like workshops and because they realize that they can do it ASAP They can do it on Google Docs or Slack or Zoom. And it’s like, you don’t want to waste that precious time during the retreat. And they are. We see a huge shift that the companies are doing more like team building, but more focused on how to create an environment for employees where they can just like, get together about whatever they end up with, and end up talking about the work and their projects. And it can work so that you need some work set out where you’re just with the laptop, like in the co-working space, but you can interrupt other people and some others join and start to talk about something or yeah, just going for a walk together and chatting. And this is way more important than having some presentation and projector, you know, and this type of the audiovisual setup than what most hotels are focused on like they expect that this is the corporate customer. And this is how it should work? So that’s like a long answer to your question. I saw that you organized a retreat recently in Austria. I like the deal, because I saw that you were posting about this framework, how to divide the time like before, like, did it work for the newest retreat? Or do you now see it differently?

23:21  

Chase Warrington  

Yeah. So I mean, this is something that I just genuinely love doing, I feel so lucky. It’s like a core part of my job now, because I get to think about how to do it at a high level. So I read a lot and follow other people like yourself and the content that you put out there and try to take from everybody, they’re different concepts, because, you know, I guess there’s no like one right way to do a retreat, for instance, but like for in our case, like a duelist, where, you know, like some of the core fundamentals of the company are like we’re super asynchronous, like like very far on one end of the spectrum in terms of asynchronous, so we have very few meetings are completely distributed. And I think every third person is from a different country. So we have like almost nobody, even in the same country, we have no, we have very few virtual meetings. So like everything we do is hyper-optimized for asynchronous and I would argue too much in some cases like we need to pull it back in some ways. And so our retreat for us is maybe different from a lot of other companies and that we’re just like, focused on using this time to connect and provide opportunities for that serendipitous conversation that we don’t get to have in the virtual world, like the downsides of fully distributed work. So exactly, as you said, like we try we like, it’s very tempting to be like, Okay, we’re gonna be in one place for a week, once a year, like, let’s conquer our biggest problem. You know, let’s, let’s do lots of brainstorming. Because that can be better than a virtual environment, or let’s like, figure out let’s do a one-week hackathon. Like we have these ideas, let’s do these workshops. But what we found is that, like we don’t end up getting a ton out of them, like like there’s value there for sure. But there’s also value doing that acing and virtual and then like so weighing those two things out it’s not like overwhelmingly better when we do it together but what is overwhelmingly better is that connection that team building that having fun together that getting to know one of your teammates that you know, you never otherwise would have a chance to talk to because they work on the other side of the world or whatever. So we just like reoptimize everything for that experience and then like sprinkle in some work here and there and I get it that’s not going to work for everybody like a lot of people would say that’s crazy it’s a waste of money you got you you got everybody together like you got to get something out of it and I think we do but yeah, that’s been the way that we have that it’s worked out for us um, we had a blast we went to like a small we rented a small village in the Austrian Alps and just hung out in the Alps and did a bunch of mountain activities hiking and paddleboarding and went all in on like costumes and traditional leader hoes and stuff and just gotta had fun and enjoyed spending some time together.

28:47 

Peter Fabor   

I saw some pictures it looked amazing person I agree with you also likes I see the evolution with our arms, sir of his retreats because we are we’re also a remote team in some way very similar to do is what you describe that every person is from different countries though we are not. We are 17 people and I don’t think there are more than two people from the same nationality. So it’s like really like interesting maybe and maybe it’s coming from me but I believe there are more people in the team as well who don’t like the meetings and push the async communication so we don’t have very many meetings like we have all hands because yeah, we started it it’s good to have all hands but we don’t have it every week we have adjusted every two weeks and we try to avoid like most of the meetings so the meetings I have with the team per week are maybe like two three, but then I like to talk with the customers or with other people and it when we organize retreats before it was more focused on Yeah, we should come with some big ideas then we should brainstorm and we play these games that everyone had to come up with the ideas for if you have a budget the 10,000 euros and if give a budget 1 million, like, what would you change in the company, you know, and this type of exercises and the end of the retreat, we, we came with some OKRs. That was the idea. And everyone was exhausted, there was not so much team building. And there was not so much of that trip entity time we mentioned. And we tried to do it differently. This time, we had the after-COVID. For the first time, we had a retreat last month, like three weeks ago. He said I tried to do it completely differently. And it worked out. Some people were surprised like why we don’t have some presentations or why we don’t we had some brainstorming and discussions. But it was more about the company culture, where we would like to go like, yeah, what’s the direction, how we are committed to what we are doing, and so on. So people shared their own stories, but it was not focused on we were not focused on coming up with some big ideas. And my conclusion about it was also that if you come to the retreat, and you don’t know, what are these big problems you have to solve, then there is a problem, right? Like, it’s not something you should figure out during the retreat. Everyone should know what the biggest problems are. Maybe there are areas in their department that focus on them. And retreat shouldn’t be a place to figure out like, what are these problems? You can discuss them, of course, but it was difficult, like, yeah, you organize a retreat. It’s like everyone flies from different places. It’s a big commitment for everyone. It costs a lot of money, and you have the internal pressure to do some important work that is not so important. Important is the focus on team bonding. Yeah, 

31:42 

Chase Warrington   

yeah, I find it funny. Because it’s like, well, what can happen is, you can start to think of that week, let’s say you even do it more than most companies and you do quarterly offsites retreats, you can start to think of that week as if that’s we get shit done. That’s when we tackle things. And then what does that turn the other 11 weeks in the quarter into, you know, I think it should be inverted. And we should be optimizing the work for those 11 weeks per quarter that you’re getting a lot done. And then that one week where you get to fill in the gaps. And so I’ve seen that happen, you know, where it says, Oh, well, we’ll tackle that at the off-site. And it’s like, well, the off-sites in four weeks, like why don’t we tackle it right now? And that’s one thing that I will push back on with people sometimes when they’re talking about these strategies is like, you know, I do get that you can get stuff done during that time. But I don’t. I just always worry when I start to hear my team say, Oh, well, we’ll tackle that when we get to the retreat. And no, no, no, because we don’t want to show up to the retreat and start figuring stuff out then.

32:36 

Peter Fabor   

Yeah. But on the other hand, I see this working like if you want to focus on some problems and brainstorm. This is great. For smaller retreats, like Team retreats of departments or functional areas of the company, then it’s great, you decide that you want to join the marketing team, and they want to decide like, okay, what are our customer acquisition channels? And what do we want to optimize and what channels do we want to add? And, this type of brainstorming is great to do during the retreat. But when you are meeting the whole company, it can be a waste of time to do this type of work. 

33:11

Chase Warrington    

We’ll be right back to the show after a quick break. For a note from our sponsor. This season is brought to you by my good friends over at insured nomads. They’re the absolute best in the business when it comes to providing health travel and medical insurance for nomads, expats, and just all forms of world travelers. I know insurance is often something that’s overlooked when we’re fantasizing about traveling the world. But it’s an absolute necessity that we address this because often the policy you have in your home country isn’t going to cover you while you’re abroad. And it’s also a requirement as a lot of people may not realize to buy private travel or expat insurance as it’s called sometimes to obtain a visa or even enter certain countries. So, fortunately, there are companies like insured nomads to help us with this. Not only do they have excellent coverage and great prices, but they’re also providing a first-class experience with additional perks and best-in-class technology via their app. It’s an amazing experience, I can’t recommend it enough. Now, this is a company that was built by world travelers for world travelers so they know what it’s like to find yourself in a difficult medical situation abroad. And they want to keep you from having that same bad experience. So the next time you’re planning a trip abroad, whether it’s for a week or a lifetime, check out ensured nomads via the link in the show notes. If you’ve made it this far into the episode and you’re still enjoying yourself, then I would love to ask a quick favor, open up the app that you’re using to listen to this podcast and leave a quick review. You can do this in Spotify, Apple podcasts, and just about any platform that allows podcast listening now if you can’t find that in the interface of the app, then scroll down in the show notes and find the rate this podcast.com/about abroad and you should be able to leave it from there. Thanks so much, guys. We appreciate it and hope you enjoy the rest of the show. I think that would be an interesting segue. I would love to illustrate this for somebody listening who’s you know, now got a general idea of what you guys do and

They agree with us that you and I know that retreats are awesome. And they should be a core part of how any kind of remote distributed team is functioning but how my surf office inserts themselves into this if you know I’m Company X and I Okay, great. I want to start doing sites and retreats to the surf office, what do I do? How do you, how do they engage with you, what does that process look like? And what value are you adding?

35:34 

Peter Fabor   

apartment inside of the company that is going to take care of the event. Is it your core activity, core business doesn’t make much sense to do it. So let’s work with someone like Sir’s office that focuses only on this one thing. And how many locations are you guys in now as I understand it, you have like an inventory of different types of venues like not just, I mean, we could start at this country and city level, maybe there but then kind of dispersed down to like the types of locations because I think that’s also something that sets you apart from, you know, anybody could go to Marriott or Hilton or something and just, you know, book a 30, room block at W and whatever place around the world, but you’re looking at unique locations, I think and the in the location of those where they are in the world, but also in the venue itself, correct? Yeah, that’s correct. Right now, we have offices on the website, I think 26 locations, but we have maybe another 30 locations that we are offering to our existing customers if they are interested so there’s a constant testing of the new locations because we just add them based on the demand. And of course, there is a parity law that in some locations, they work more, and in some locations, they work less for instance, I always thought oh Madera is such a cool place. I’ve been there many times. This is an amazing location for company retreats. And I think we organized just one small team retreat there until now since we added like, it was one of the first locations when we started to focus on retreats in 2017. So for five years, because it is just so difficult to get there, you know, yeah. And maybe that was not clear to us at that time. But now like, Okay, we focus on how to get there. But even with this because when we organize retreats for larger groups we started with Team retreats of 810-12 people, but now we also organize a lot of events for like, 300-400 people. And yeah, you have to, you have to go to this to this bigger hotels because you cannot find like some cool alternative venue for 400 people, even a lot of companies, they think that you can, you know, like we have a lot of requests, like, oh, we are 300 people, can you find me something like glamping, but not far from the airport, we can do a full buyout, but only for two nights, you know, like a lot of requirements. They described something that doesn’t exist. So you need to compromise a bit. And working with bigger hotels is good, it’s a good thing. But I don’t know, what’s your experience? But I was very surprised that it’s also difficult to find these big hotels like it’s not that you can go to any big hotel and an organized off-site there No, like we work with also bigger chains, and they may they can have a portfolio of 500 hotels, but only let’s say 10 or 15 are good for our company retreat because of the distance from the airport, the setup of the meeting spaces some hotels, for instance, they don’t have an on-site restaurant and okay, they don’t offer catering. So what are we going to do with I don’t know 100 People are you going to order with UberEats now there is no Uber in that location? So you need to have a certain setup. So even with larger hotels, it is difficult and we work very closely with them and we research all their hotels, we visited their hotels every night to what are these, like these few hotels that are a good fit for off-site, so you can figure it out by yourself, but it will take you it will take a lot of time and you probably have some other things at your job 

43:31  

Chase Warrington 

As you and I can attest, these things take a ton of time, resources, and energy. And I think the key the one thing that maybe gets mentioned or failed to mention in that list sometimes creativity like if this is going to be a core part of these companies’ DNA you know if you want to do these at a high level, you can’t just go to the Hampton Inn off of I 40 And you know, the local steak house and like expect people to walk away feeling invigorated, this is like maybe your once a year or twice a year three times a year opportunity to bring people to a cool place to enjoy themselves to make it easy and convenient. So that they don’t leave feeling exhausted and, you know, tired from all the travel, you want people to be pumped about going to these and also leave feeling more connected to their teammates, to the company, to the mission, all this stuff. And so to do that, I think it takes a professional like it takes someone who loves it and also who has the vision and the connections for creating an awesome event. And it’s not just like I heard somebody say “Don’t leave your off-site to Bob and accounting Bob in accounting didn’t sign up to be an off-site leader and to create an awesome event Bob and accounting signed up to be awesome at accounting. So let him do that. And then find someone that can do this well for you. I’ve also found that it can, you know, make sense financially as well. Like you have connections, you know where to go, you’re going to cut out a lot of those extra costs that people are going to the mistakes that they’re going to make along the way and so I find that usually pays for itself, you know, by hiring a professional like you guys 

45:04  

Peter Fabor  

Yeah, that’s what we also found. We like our niche is also somewhere more like I would call it an affordable retreat because there are a lot of agencies that focus on very customized premium lecture retreats, we are not really in the segment. So we focus on being functional, and affordable, but the like fit very good standards and experience. But we don’t do like I don’t know like you want to have a logo of your company on the wall of the hotel, I saw some companies doing this type of thing like that, we don’t do that, you know, so because and also these things are extremely expensive, you know, so the retreat and their customers, there are companies that have the budget for it, that’s fine. But we found out that most of the companies want to do something just yeah, good functional meetings, people have great food at the great venue, and ideally not spend so much money on it. Like they have some budget, but they don’t want to like, Okay, we don’t want to go crazy. Like there are very few customers, they say like, oh, we want to go crazy, we have you. And these are funny stories but usually are the opposite. And yeah, and I believe that it sort of is if you want to organize this type of retreat, I believe that Seraph is, is not more expensive or not much more expensive than if you organize it by yourself because we organized by yourself, you’re never going to get a very good rate from the hotel, you run also to a lot of risks. I heard stories that, for instance, hotels can cancel your reservation, like one week before the retreat, because they will probably not do it for a group of 100 people. But if you are a group of like 20 people and you have off-site, and they get a better booking, because you booked it like eight months in advance, and you get like better, right, because they didn’t know how many bookings they’re going to have. And now at the last minute, they get an amazing booking for your date. It’s very unprofessional, but some hotels are going to cancel your reservation. And because they know that you didn’t book through booking.com or some platform, you cannot live them a review, you can write about it on Twitter, but nobody cares, you know, and yet, they will just make more money, and through offices until something like this happens to you like you don’t realize the value of service because these things are not happening to us. After all, we have the contract, we have the partnership with the hotels and they are not going to do that. And if they would do we would find you some other venue at the same location. And it will not even maybe not so yeah, these are like a lot of things like hidden that can be very costly, though the retreat then can be very, very expensive. But if you organize a budget retreat, like a lot of companies it’s a way for us to stay and we rented some Airbnb in Prague for the first surface for our retreat. And yeah, you can make it very cheap and cool once you scale and you have more than let’s say 1520 People at the event you cannot do this like crazy budget things that people cook for themselves and it gets a little chaotic and gets voided. 

48:12 

Chase Warrington   

And also like I think it could start to like detract from the experience of the whole entity when when you’re not like optimizing it for the group I we do two different types of retreats that do us we do what we call mini retreats which are like the individual team ones, those are pretty budget friendly or like they’re pretty they’re the budgets pretty tight for those so they sound more like like that and I think that’s cool you have that element where you’re like cooking dinner together or sharing an Airbnb, it’s pretty intimate and then we have like our company retreat which is the whole company and that one’s obviously structured very different but I think I’ve I’ve really enjoyed something and it sounds like you know we share this like that dichotomy between those different types like there again there is no like one way to do this it’s there’s a lot of different methods you can place depending on your budget and what you’re trying to accomplish and the distribution of your team and there’s just there’s so many different avenues you can go that can all work in their own individual way I guess 

48:50

Peter Fabor  

Say that we never tried to convince anyone like you should organize a retreat with us you know we just placed like these are the benefits and if you understand the value you can do it with us but when I, for instance, a dog with it happens very often that you talk with the customer and they’re like ah but I can do this by myself and my reaction is always like do it by yourself. And you are I’m sure that it’s going to be good you know like it’s going to be grand and you will if something goes wrong, you will improvise and you will create like bad experience for your team I’m pretty sure about it but depends like how much stress is going to be for you and how much improvisation you need to do and maybe next time we will consider surface but if someone wants to do like a different type of retreat or budget one or super custom one like yeah, you can do it by yourself and we are happy to provide them as I say like a lot of content what we build exactly for this, people want to do it by themselves. And maybe one day they will decide to do it with us because there are hundreds of ways to organize retreat activities. Yeah, yeah. And there’s, there’s tons of great content on your website blog, you also have a podcast, which is worth checking out. So I’m realizing where we’re running short on time. 

50:20 

Chase Warrington  

And I would love to keep asking you a ton of questions, I want to get to plugging all those places real quick, where people can learn more before just before we get to that I would love to know if you guys have do you have these 26 locations that you advertise across the on the website, and then these 30 others and you know, theoretically, you could do a retreat anywhere in the world? So I’m just curious, what do you feel makes a really good location for all these people out here who are going to give this a shot on their own, you know, they’re planning, I talked to these people every single almost every single day now, and I know you do as well that are going Yeah, suddenly, my team has gone remote. And I’m supposed to plan an off-site. And I don’t know what I’m doing. So starting at just the very highest level, because I think that’s what we have time for here. And when we give somebody some a jumping in a launching pad to get them started, what do you think makes for a good location retreat

51:11  

Peter Fabor  

Considering where your team is located, and how easy is to get there, I would say this is the number one thing we have a tool on the website when you go and the top navigation, you’ll find resources, there is a tool called location finder, where you can add where your team is located, where your employees are located, how many of them are located in which location, and it will calculate you the most optimal location for your trade or there are more options you will you will get. And it’s exactly designed for remote teams, we connect it to the API of kiva.com, like the search engine for the flights. And we use their survey and use their engine to calculate this. So this is a good tool to start with to see if you have some overview of the locations that are good for your team. And then I would focus in general especially now like traveling is crazy. You don’t want to have layovers when you’re going for a retreat, because a lot of flights are canceled and delayed, and you will lose your next flight. So you want to focus on what are the locations where most people can get directly by plane? That’s number one. And these are usually like there are not many of them. For instance, in Europe, if you want to go to sunnier locations you have Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, and Rome. And if you want to go more to the north, do you have Amsterdam or Paris? Yeah, there are more locations. But there may be, I don’t because Berlin I don’t consider them. So interesting. You know, I like Munich, for instance. But I don’t think I would organize a company like that, you know. So that’s about like, the general location. And then the second important aspect is the location of the venue you want to be close to the airport. And even you consider it like, oh, we can somehow manage it. Imagine some people are traveling for 1220 24 hours, they arrive at the airport, they’re completely exhausted, they have jet lag and now they want to travel with them by bus for two or three hours, somewhere to the venue. Now you want to be a maximum of one hour from the airport, and my advice is to even Yeah like you will create a better experience if you can do it even less than one hour. Like if you for instance in Lisbon, it’s a very popular location for us because the airport is small and is directly in the city. So you fly to Lisbon and in 10 minutes you can be by Uber in the city center of Lisbon. Barcelona is also great, but Amsterdam is also great with the airport. But then you have Yeah if you organize Richard in London, you fly to London and you’ll need three hours to get to the city. So I would recommend not focusing on location like that. That’s maybe the last piece I would recommend not to focus on or I would like to go here now to be more open-minded and pragmatic about where you want to go

54:11

Chase Warrington    

Love it. Super practical. And as obvious as it might seem to the seasoned veteran, probably something that can be easily overlooked. So thank you for sharing, I can highly recommend people to check out your website. They’re interested in learning more. You have tons of free tools like the one you just mentioned, and lots of great content, for anybody that is just getting started in this area and looking to take a team abroad to another country. It’s a great place to just get started, get your feet wet, and learn more, and then if you feel you need some extra help there. The surf office team is there to lend a hand so Peter, thank you so much. This was awesome. I wish that we had endless more time to keep needing out on company retreats. We’ll have to save it for another time. Where can people go to learn more about the website and any other links that you think people should go to? And we’ll also add these to the show notes. 

54:59  

Peter Fabor  

Yeah, the website is office.com I’m quite active on Twitter and LinkedIn. So you can find me just by Googling My name Peter Faber. Yeah, I also started a blog that is focused more on hospitality. And there is for instance, in the article you mentioned how to build a venue that is ideal for hosting retreats, but I’m also writing about glamping and CO living and, and all these other experiences I have been in, in hospitality. So yeah, check it out. Awesome. It’s good stuff I can attest. So thank you for building and public and sharing all that you’ve learned on this journey. You’ve come quite a ways from a garage and Gran Canaria to organizing hundreds of retreats across the world and dozens and dozens of cities. And it’s pretty awesome to watch from the outside looking in. So thanks for sharing with us here about abroad. I hope to catch up with you somewhere in the world before too long. Thank you for inviting me

55:57 

Chase Warrington   

Thanks for tuning in today from wherever you are in the world. Once again, I’m Chase and this has been another episode about abroad. For those of you wondering how you can best support the show, I have made it super simple for you. Just go over to the show notes of the episode that you’ve just finished listening to and click on one of the two following links about abroad.com/newsletter to get our monthly newsletter, no spam guaranteed, or rate this podcast.com/about abroad where you can quickly and easily leave a review for the show. It’s not just important to me it also helps more wonders just like you find us. Finally don’t forget to subscribe on your podcast platform of choice. And we will see you again next week. Thanks again. Hasta Luego Amigos!