Jared Kleinert is the Founder/CEO of Offsite. Jared is also a TED speaker, 3x award-winning author, and USA Today’s “Most Connected Millennial” who has helped organize hundreds of events for over 30,000 attendees.
In this episode of The Leader Assistant Podcast, Jared Kleinert shares tips on offsite planning, networking, and remote work.
LEADERSHIP QUOTE
To give anything less than your best, is to sacrifice the gift.
– Steve Prefontaine
CONNECT WITH JARED
- Jared on LinkedIn
- Offsite – Save 10% when you mention Leader Assistant to the Offsite team!
- @offsite on X
- Jared’s book, NETWORKING: How to Meet Influential People, Deepen Relationships, and Become a Super-Connector
ABOUT JARED
Jared Kleinert is the Founder/CEO of Offsite. If you’re planning a team retreat, Offsite can save you time, money, and stress. Jared is also a TED speaker, 3x award-winning author (his most recent book is NETWORKING: How To Meet Influential People, Deepen Relationships, and Become A Super-Connector), and USA Today’s “Most Connected Millennial” who has helped organize hundreds of events for over 30,000 attendees.
As a teenager, Jared was one of the first ten employees at an enterprise SaaS company called 15Five, the market leader for software powering continuous employee feedback, high-performing cultures, objectives (OKR) tracking, etc.
Later, Jared would become a delegate to President Obama’s 2013 Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Malaysia, write multiple books including the “#1 Entrepreneurship Book of 2015”, 2 Billion Under 20: How Millennials are Breaking Down Age Barriers and Changing The World (2015), and “Networking: How To Meet Influential People, Deepen Relationships, and Become A Super-Connector” (2022), and speak at TED@IBM the day before he turned 20.
His insights on entrepreneurship, networking, remote work, and offsites have been featured in major media such as Forbes, TIME, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, NPR, Entrepreneur, Mashable, Fox Business, The Hustle, Bloomberg, and more.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Jared Kleinert [0:00 – 0:25]: Hi, I’m Jared Kleinert, founder and CEO of Offsite.com today’s leadership quote comes from Steve Prefontaine, which is to give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift. The Leader Assistant podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident. Game changing Leader Assistants.
Jeremy Burrows [0:32 – 1:24]: Are you tasked with ordering food for your office? Let me tell you about EasyCater. With over 100,000 restaurants to choose from nationwide and 247 customer support, EZCator helps assistants like you and me succeed at work and makes our lives easier. Visit EasyCater.com Leader Assistant to find out more. Hey, friends, welcome to the Leader Assistant podcast. It’s your host, Jeremy Burroughs, and it’s episode 246. Today I’m speaking with Jared Kleiner. Jared is the founder and CEO of Offsite. Offsite is a service and site that saves you time, money and stress. And we’ll hear more about that in just a second. But Jared, first of all, what part of the world are you joining us today from?
Jared Kleinert [1:24 – 1:27]: Upper west side, Manhattan.
Jeremy Burrows [1:27 – 1:29]: Manhattan, Nice. And are you from that area?
Jared Kleinert [1:30 – 1:47]: I’m from the Sixth Borough, which is South Florida, so if you’re Jewish, you would know. Boca Raton, Florida is where I’m from. If you’re not Jewish, it’s an hour north of Miami, South Florida. Born and raised. My whole family’s New Yorkers though, so as soon as I turned 18, I moved up here.
Jeremy Burrows [1:47 – 1:53]: Nice. And what’s do you have kids, pets? Hobbies?
Jared Kleinert [1:55 – 2:39]: I have hobbies. Yeah, yeah, no kids. Single by tax status and. Yeah, hobbies. One of the cool things about living on the Upper west side is I’m a five minute walk away from a jiu jitsu gym. And so I’m about a year into doing jiu jitsu. That’s become a really cool hobby. Um, and then I also run ultra marathons once or twice a year. Um, but I run the shortest ultramarathons possible, so I’m only a little crazy. Not a lot like I do 50k or 31 miles, but there’s people that are doing 50 miles or doing a hundred k. A hundred miles. I. I stop at 50k for now and just completed a race in Nashville like two weekends ago. So.
Jeremy Burrows [2:39 – 2:39]: Wow.
Jared Kleinert [2:39 – 2:42]: Pretty about that. Like 10 days ago actually at time of recording.
Jeremy Burrows [2:43 – 2:50]: Well, one thing, one thing is it’s one thing to run a marathon, it’s another thing to run an ultra marathon. But I like how you had to.
Jared Kleinert [2:50 – 2:53]: Give that five miles. Yeah, right, right.
Jeremy Burrows [2:54 – 3:15]: Cool. Well, tell us a little bit about your career journey like you. You said when you’re 18 you moved to New York. What, what was maybe your first real job and, and what have you been up to over the last several years and how did you. And then we’ll, we’ll get into how you started or why you started off site, but I’d love to hear a little career.
Jared Kleinert [3:16 – 6:44]: Yeah, first job, family catering business from like 11 to 16 years old. First real job. I cold emailed someone I read about in Forbes who is called the most connected man you don’t know in Silicon Valley. It’s about this guy, David Hassell. He has a company called 15Five which is now one of the leaders in employee engagement and performance management software. I think Lattice won the category so far. 15:5 sort of second and then you have Culture amp and a few other players like that. But I emailed David when I read this article about him. The company was still in stealth at the time, but basically just liked the profile on him and how much of a connector he was. Like he was hosting these dinner parties and Tim Ferriss would show up and all these athletes would show up. Founders also just liked his hobbies. It was like kite surfing and just seemed like a really down to earth guy with a lot of previous success and so reached out to him, offered to work unpaid in exchange for his mentorship. Ended up spending two years at 15 5. I was employee 7 by the time I got on payroll and yeah was sort of in the right place at the right time. They were also one of the pioneering remote first companies back in the day, like over a decade ago. And so I got to attend before it was cool, yeah, maybe like you know, 5% of companies were remote or hybrid. So I got to attend off sites with them as an employee and got to see sort of the beginning days of what’s now not quite a billion dollar company, but very close. They have award winning culture and really built a type of company that I would want to build in terms of not only size but the way they run their operations, how much of a positive ripple effect that they have on their users. And so you would think the natural progression would be to start my own company, but I did, just not in tech. I took a seven year speaker, author, consultant turn in my career, wrote some books similar to yourself that led to speaking. I was fortunate to do like both a TED and a couple TEDx events and then that led to a lot of corporate keynotes. So speaking at off sites, that led to facilitating executive team retreats, that led to running my own Summits for entrepreneurs. And so like a decade later, you know, going into the pandemic, I was running summits for like 20 to 40 people at a time. And then during the pandemic that all went virtual. I was sort of betting after a decade of random experiences related to off sites and seeing the trends of like single digit percent of companies being remote or hybrid going to maybe 15, 20% of companies being remote or hybrid pre pandemic, I was betting that would go 10 years into the future with the pandemic. We’d all be remote or hybrid. We’d all then plan off sites. And planning off sites sucks, as you know and for many of your users are familiar with, because it’s always the executive assistants, the people, leaders, chiefs of staff that get stuck with planning off sites. And it’s, you know, more important than ever to get it right. But we haven’t quite figured out if that should be a role internally, just to plan off sites at a certain size company. Who exactly should plan that? It’s not quite like a office event, like an office manager might have done in the past. Like no one knows what’s going on. And so we tried to solve some of those problems.
Jeremy Burrows [6:45 – 6:55]: Nice. So when you started it, did you. Well, actually, let me take a step back. So how many books did you write during that journey of author, speaker and all that?
Jared Kleinert [6:55 – 8:22]: Wrote two books a while back, I think. 2015, 2017 or 2013. 2015, something like that. Both profiling top performing millennials from all different walks of life. And so interviewed like the founders of WordPress and Duolingo, interviewed social media influencers like Jake Paul and interviewed nonprofit founders, scientists, actors. And yeah, both books, one was called 2 billion under 20, the other was called 3 billion under 30. They, they were both profiling like young people doing cool stuff in the world. I think they were amazing books. And when one was even traditionally published with Macmillan and St. Martin’s which is a subsidiary. But I think the titles were terrible. Could have sold a lot more copies if I titled them better. Which I guess is a lesson I’ve learned with offsite. In a way, let’s just get a better name going. I did write a third book recently. It was sort of a pandemic project that I put on the side as offsite was growing. And then I was just like, I need to finish this. That book’s called Networking and it’s on professional networking and relationship building. So I did get the title better on that one. So I have three books by name. Maybe I’ll Have a hobby in the future of writing more. But books are hard, as you know, it takes a small part of your soul, like a Horcrux from Harry Potter.
Jeremy Burrows [8:23 – 8:49]: They are definitely hard. So that’s awesome. So tell us about networking then. We’ll use that as a good segue. Your book on networking, the subtitle, I’m looking it up right now. To meet influential people, deepen relationships, and become a super connector. First, before we get into practical tips on networking, why did you want to write a book on networking?
Jared Kleinert [8:50 – 10:04]: Yeah, again, it was sort of not planned. It was basically a decade of personal experiences related to going from having no professional network to cold emailing people like David from 15.5 to turning that one connect or one relationship with a super connector into many relationships with super connectors, both joining communities and building my own communities. And then I got asked to speak on the subject. I write about different networking tactics, tried courses, and random stuff like that. And so then I was like, oh, it would be easy to put this all together in a book. It was not easy. I was like, yeah, I could send this to my assistant, have it all transcribed, then it would be perfect. But we didn’t have chat GPT at the time to take all the transcriptions and turn it into usable writing. So actually I had to go back and format it in a way that would make sense in a book and then add some examples and that became much more of a project. But yeah, I guess it was like, how do I get this all in one place and share it? And if it helps some folks with networking and relationship building, that’s great.
Jeremy Burrows [10:05 – 10:14]: Nice. So what’s your, what’s your number one tip then? I know we’ll link to the book in the show notes, but what’s your number one tip for networking?
Jared Kleinert [10:15 – 11:18]: I had to, you know, take one tip. I mean, you know, we have a. We have like a, you know, little process in there, but I guess it’s. It’s sort of doing 80, 20 on the time you spend with your network and really focus on building relationships with super connectors. Like, one of those type of connections can allow you to access more people in a community or in a geographic region. You’re a great example. Like, we got introduced because I was looking to talk to more executive assistants and be in front of more people who are leader leaders and assistants and whatnot. And so someone put us in touch and you are a super connector that can connect with hundreds of those type of people. And so you want to be a good person and provide Value to everyone up front. You can’t forget to be a good person when you focus on talking to super connectors as much as possible. But like, if you had an ideal network, it would be full of super connectors rather than just narrowly connected individuals or isolated individuals.
Jeremy Burrows [11:19 – 11:48]: Love it. I love that phrase, super connector. And yeah, you know, part of my job is to help grow my CEOs network, you know, and to help him reach out to people on LinkedIn that, to offer help or to just build, build the network. And so it’s, it’s interesting. He’s one of those super connector type people as well and he’s connected to a lot of super connected people.
Jared Kleinert [11:48 – 13:18]: So I think, yeah, I think that’s a unique thing that a founder or CEO can provide to a company merely by title alone, if not by their charisma or passion for whatever they’re doing. But I, I, this guy Tim Francis who runs like an outsourced VA company, sort of gave me this framework. But he said, you know, your job as a CEO is high level skill, high level access and high level decision making. And I thought that was pretty interesting. So high level access, like, you know, I can open doors for my company. I’m like the best sales development rep for offsite because I can email peers, I can email VCs. Like I can, I can do a lot of stuff like that. Well, fundraising like, you know, no VC is going to talk to anyone but the CEO at a company. And same with like high level strategy and decision making. Like the buck stops with me. For better or for worse, I need to be the ones to make those decisions. Even if I try and empower my team as much as possible, then high level skill, like hopefully I bring something to the table. Although I try and work myself out of jobs, marketing is the thing that I’m still doing like the founder led marketing right now I work for like 11 people full time and a few contractors. But that’s sort of the one thing that I’m still owning and don’t have any support on. But sales. We got other people doing engineering we got going there. We have Allstate planners now who are fantastic. I’m just focusing on marketing.
Jeremy Burrows [13:18 – 14:07]: Nice. Right, well, what is your experience then? Working with assistance? So whether it’s, you know, as you started offsite and you realize, oh, assistants are often the people that get tasked with planning off sites or if it was your prior role at 15, five or elsewhere, or maybe even when you were doing the whole writing and speaking circuit, having your own assistant virtual assistant or full time or whatever. What’s been your experience working with assistants and how have you. Maybe there’s an example or a story of how assistants have changed the game for you and your businesses.
Jared Kleinert [14:09 – 17:03]: Well, likely you’re an assistant if you’re listening to this or you have been an EA or a VA or you’re some sort of people leader like an EA that became a chief staff. So I just want to apologize on behalf of all founders and CEOs everywhere, especially in the tech world because again like back to what I said earlier, this idea of planning off sites and team retreats is relatively new. There are some companies like Automattic, Buffer, Zapier, GitLab that have been doing it for a decade plus even a company like 155 and some of the high level strategy for those may come from a chief people officer, may come from the CEO, different team leaders, but it has been left to assistants to figure out all the logistics and you’re already dealing with 17 other jobs while balancing this 18th job that is now really really important and there is no playbook to do it. So yeah, it’s just a tough position to be in but and then sort of makes matters worse. I would say about 50% of the time you have either a CEO or a principal, you know, C suite exec who is late to the game in giving you the requirements to plan an offsite. Like they don’t tell you the budget very clearly, they don’t tell you the locations they’re interested in, the business objectives for planning an off site. Those are all wonky. And then even if you get those in time like you might have them be changed three weeks out. And so yeah, it’s just a really difficult position. So I don’t have much more to offer other than empathy and like hopefully a solution with with off site. But yeah, I mean I’ve as far as working with assistants, I don’t currently have an assistant. I am in the market for a virtual assistant and realize that’s going to be a huge use of leverage on my time. Very excited to add that back in. And I’ve had EAs, I’ve had VAs, I’ve had a chief of staff in the past and have all been positive experiences. But yeah, it’s definitely an ever evolving role that kind of is a catch all super stressful and off sites are like one of those things that have been added in when probably should be with a, you know, head of people or a chief people officer or should really be thought of as strategically as your commercial real estate was previously or as your hiring strategy is like, off sites are the best way to increase employee engagement retention alignment for remote first or hybrid teams. But the actual planning of off sites is not teed up as strategically as what it should be, in my opinion. Yeah, obviously very biased, but.
Jeremy Burrows [17:03 – 17:22]: Right, right. Well, what was your. So you mentioned you’re in the process or soon to be adding a virtual assistant to your team. What’s the. What was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back, if you will, on getting back to, hey, you know, I do need a virtual assistant to leverage my time.
Jared Kleinert [17:22 – 19:02]: Yeah. I mean, I’d say 80% of what I’m hiring for now is specific to taking that like high level skill of figuring out new marketing channels, for example, and just to make it super simplistic and scaling some of those efforts. So high level strategy is we want to appear on certain types of podcasts, we have unique content to provide, and I have some high level access to some people, but I could hire someone to help me research other opportunities and then I can give them an email template to email out on my behalf. Like the high level skills, writing the email, being a person who others would be interested in interviewing, potentially, whether by title or by company or whatever. Um, and then actually getting on the, on the camera and doing the interview. Uh, so, you know, but a, a VA could, you know, scale that. Or like I’m testing out some new SEO stuff and I’m tinkering with content types and like how to set up templates and like even how to prompt ChatGPT to like, help me fill in the blanks. But once I figure out a couple of those templates, I could give it to a VA to make a hundred of those. And so it’s a few of those sort of things. It’s probably like 80% of what I’m hiring for today. But I’m super excited to also get 20% of like the personal stuff in there, which then helps the business see if I’m able to take tasks that I’ve been letting slip through the cracks or even some admin stuff. So I’m sure it’ll very quickly, you know, go into a lot of different directions, but it was from a very specific set of needs to start.
Jeremy Burrows [19:02 – 19:07]: You could say, yeah, yeah, makes sense. Awesome. Well, before we jump into the ops.
Jared Kleinert [19:07 – 19:13]: Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s the right hiring strategy or not. You would know better. Am I thinking about it anyway or.
Jeremy Burrows [19:13 – 19:51]: No? I mean, you have it sounds like you have a very specific idea of, hey, this is what I really want to offload and scale and it’s a great place to start. And I think that’s a. If you didn’t have that, then yeah, it’d be a little bit of a. Not very clear expectations. But if you’re like, hey, I want to reach out to these types of people, I want this type of messaging, I want to use these mediums and you know, I want to do 100 a week or 100amonth or whatever the, the, the KPI is like that’s, that’s a great time to hire an assistant. So I think you’re on the right track.
Jared Kleinert [19:51 – 19:53]: All right, I might email you.
Jeremy Burrows [19:53 – 20:07]: There you go. There you go. Awesome. Well, let’s do this. Before we get into off site planning, I want to hear your remote work tips. Is your team currently I’m assuming is remote.
Jared Kleinert [20:08 – 20:08]: Okay.
Jeremy Burrows [20:08 – 20:20]: And then you worked at 15 5, which is remote first. So like what’s your number one Work from home but stay productive and engaged with your team tip?
Jared Kleinert [20:21 – 22:13]: Yeah, I mean I’ve never worked in an office, so that’s kind of a weird thing or maybe increasingly common. But I’m 28 and so yeah, just my career has never dictated me being in an office. I think what I have learned over time is to figure out what works best for me. And I think everyone is going to have their own unique set of habits, rituals around remote or hybrid work. So probably connect with yourself first and figure out what that’s going to be. I used to need to go somewhere and for many years went to a wework every single day. Rest in peace. We work soon to be rest in peace. But right, right, but that was like I needed to go somewhere and get work done. And then that probably persisted until the pandemic. Not that I couldn’t work from home or a coffee shop or whatnot, but I was probably most productive somewhere else other than where I lived. And then I got used to working at home during the pandemic and then came to really like it because I had access to a kitchen and could like go to the gym downstairs and like all the commute times and change times were reduced. Like even getting cough or water before we started. It’s like 30 seconds I just walked over to my kitchen, got water, got back or like going to the gym this morning to do Jiu Jitsu. Five minutes there, did a class, came back, 30 minutes later, I was ready to work. And so I love that I can set up my Life to get a lot done in a short amount of time. And I have, like, a standing desk where I do meetings. I’ll just sit on the couch. But I have, like, certain routines, like, start the day, you know, different coffee shops to go to if I need a break. But yeah, just figure it out for yourself. And then plan off sites quarterly.
Jeremy Burrows [22:14 – 25:07]: Nice. Yeah, it helps to. For me, it helps to have a little bit of a routine and, yeah, have those moments where it’s like. Like for lunch, I don’t eat my lunch in my office. I eat my lunch in the sunroom. You know what I mean? Like, just simple things like that that can help you mix things up and stay focused throughout the day, for sure. Awesome. Okay, so off site. So I. Thankfully, now that our company’s grown, we have an experience manager and we have another office manager slash assistant. And they are much more gifted in the party planning, off site planning. You know, skills versus my temperament, if you will. But I did have to do this when we were younger, you know, a smaller company. I was like, I did everything. And I used to just dread, like, I’ll put it this way. I am a capable and I think good event planner, event manager, event planner. I just do not enjoy it. Like, I am not the kind of person that’s like, oh, we should put. We should decorate over here so that people feel this feeling when they walk in the room and all this stuff. I’m more like, all right, well, we got to have food. We got to have a roof over our head. We got to have good wi fi and make sure everybody knows where to park and let’s go. You know, So I get tasked with an off site or had in the past, assistance. I know I talk to assistants all the time and. And they get thrown. Hey, and I see this in our community. You know, we have a online community. Leaderassistant.com community, over 4800 assistants, I think, from all over the world. And probably every couple weeks, somebody says, hey, I just need to plan an off site in New York or I need to plan a leadership team meeting in San Francisco. Does anybody have any venues or any recommendations on restaurants that we should go to? And yada, yada, yada. Well, what? So. So if somebody is listening now and their executive, they just got out of a meeting with their executive, and their executive said, hey, Susie. Hey, Tim. Hey, you know, Roger, Whatever. I need you to plan an off site for 40 people in December, somewhere warm, and, you know, have fun. What? You know, where do they go? Where do they Go from here. Guide us, Guide us. Obi Wan.
Jared Kleinert [25:07 – 29:45]: Yeah. My hope and what I’m spending like years and years developing and lots of time and money is to build trust with executive assistants, people, leaders, et cetera, so that when that conversation happens, you go to offstate.com, you make a free trial account. And then we are starting to build software. The first software product that we launched publicly a few months back is essentially Airbnb for finding your off site venue. And so we’ve partnered with a few hundred hotels around the world. These are vetted and curated properties where we’ve not only secured like 20% off room blocks, meeting space, activities, things like that, we’ve gotten better contract terms like lower food and beverage minimums, improve attrition rates, things like that. But we also just know that they’re going to be really good on the ground experiences because those hotels have had major companies host off sites there. We’ve had users and clients now go there and give us reviews. And so we’ve really vetted these places for off sites, not for weddings, not for parties, not for conferences. These are off site venues. And so that’s where we started because that is the biggest domino that needs to fall. And it impacts about two thirds of your budget because it’s going to impact your rooming. And that’s, you know, maybe 40% is going to be the hotel, nights, meeting space, things like that. And then travel is going to be dictated on where you decide to go for your venue. And so that’s third of your spend as well. It might even be 80, 90% if you hire locally versus like flying in photographers or videographers, or flying in speakers and facilitators. But that’s, that’s where we started. We are adding speakers and facilitators to our marketplace. Now probably by the time this out, we’ll have that live in the marketplace. And then we’re adding some event production staff you can hire for like day of support or for a few hours here and there. And then over time we’ll add those activity providers, things like that. In the future, probably like 20, 25, we’ll have off site planning software. So things like a budget builder, an agenda builder, pre and post off site feedback forms, basically everything you would need to plan an off site end to end. That’s the vision and we’re hoping to be rippling the Canva, you know, the category defining company of this space. And so you know what, that’s where you can go. There’s no upfront cost to make an account@offsite.com and then we also do end to end planning as a service. So if you really want to take it from like 50 to 100 hours of work to like 10 hours of decision making, then we can do that. We charge a flat fee per person per offsite. It’s typically $250 can be lower than that if we’re doing larger off sites or if we have a cadence of off sites like a lot of companies will. One all hands meetings a year, a sales kickoff or president’s club, quarterly executive team retreats, department level off sites. And we’ve seen with like some of the larger companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, you know, if you’re an employee at those companies, you’re basically at an off site at least once a quarter on average, which is amazing. And so I think the trend will continue that more companies will go remote, they’ll plan off sites and then they’ll adopt similar cadences to Dropbox, to Airbnb, to Automattic, which owns WordPress, to GitLab. And we’re trying to empower that. And so we do offer end to end offsite planning. We also are making a bunch of templates that we’re putting out for free on our blog and just trying to add some thought leadership to the space too, because three years ago, only a select few knew how to do this because they’ve been doing it for decades and even those companies are still figuring it out. Like 15.5 didn’t have any playbook really for running off sites even a decade in. And like Automattics doesn’t really. They have a small playbook and same with GitLab, but they don’t have a real rinse or repeat process for this. And I think there’s an opportunity to offer that and do it in a way that like, software can empower by having algorithms that’ll serve up the perfect agenda for you based on your business objectives and can tell you exactly where to go based on where your team’s located and the cost associated with traveling there. There’s like whole ecosystem of stuff to build, but we started with, with venues because that impacts everything else.
Jeremy Burrows [29:45 – 30:41]: Yeah, makes sense. Awesome. So what’s, what’s maybe a. You know, of course you’ve got the logistics, you get, like you said, you got the venue, you got the city, you’ve got the, the travel, you’ve got the food and all that kind of stuff. But what’s maybe that extra, like, experience? Flare is the only word I can think of that what’s a few examples of that? Because oftentimes the executives come to us as assistants and they’re like, hey, we want to do this event here, but we really want people to have fun. We really want people to have some unique experience that they’ve never had that they talk about for the rest of the year. So what are the, what are a couple of examples of that extra touch that your team has done or that you’ve seen done at off sites?
Jared Kleinert [30:42 – 33:44]: Yeah, I mean I’m personally not a flare guy. Like I’m, I’m a meat and potatoes kind of guy. Like not flashy. Yes. We’ve had clients get yachts and do crazy parties and like race supercars and travel around the world, like almost 20 countries. What I think is most valuable and what I am most passionate about is really thinking through at the very beginning, what are your business objectives for this off site and who’s coming? If it’s the entire company, why are you doing this? And answers that may arise are increased employee engagement, increase cross department collaboration, build trust and intimacy. So there’s like better communication and slack. It might be to celebrate, might be to do strategic planning. But having that conversation with your CEO or with your team leader at the very beginning I think is the part that gets overlooked the most and is also the most important because why you’re having the off site and what ROI you’re looking for will make it easier to justify with your CFO or with your boss. It’ll be easier to get the right venue that’ll lead to that kind of experience happening. It’ll lead to very strong intentions around the agenda and how you’re starting each day, ending each day, how you’re leaving, you know, flex time in order to allow certain sessions to run over. Like giving people breaks to like call family or like have spontaneous connections happen. And I would get all those like business sessions in first, even if they’re minimal. Like a president’s club is like very celebratory. There’s very little work. But like whatever you want to communicate to your top performing salespeople, like make sure you program that first and then figure out how you’re going to have fun. And you can even be strategic about that. Like you one, one thing people don’t think about is employer marketing. So do you want to get a photographer or videographer there to capture certain elements of the experience and use that on social media? Use it in your marketing. Do you want to ask people before and after off sites for an employer net promoter score so you can hopefully see that go up and then ask them at the peak, which is like right after the off site to leave reviews on Glassdoor and other things like that. Like, that’ll make your life easier in the future. And if you’re budget constrained, you could think about the intention behind an activity and then find ways to accomplish that for much less money. So something like volunteering could be a unique shared experience that can accomplish the objective of bringing people together and maybe reflecting your company values. And it could be free or, you know, small donation to a certain charity relative to getting everyone on a boat and getting them drunk and like, you might have HR issues and it might not accomplish your goals, might lead to some fights. You know, I don’t, I don’t know. Like, so just being really clear about what you’re trying to accomplish so that you can build the right agenda, like set the right framework for it, get approvals faster, everyone’s on the same page. Like, that’ll just make the rest of the offsite planning process much smoother.
Jeremy Burrows [33:45 – 34:38]: So what’s the. If I’m in a, if I’m at a company and I’m like, we really need, we’re a remote company. We haven’t done an off site in a couple years. We really need to get everyone together. But you know, you got certain people, they’re like, eh, it’s too expensive or we don’t really need to do that. What’s. Maybe, yeah, what’s. How do you persuade, you know, people to do it? What’s the business case that you would present to say, hey, this off site will benefit because it’s one, it’s one thing to say, oh, we, yeah, we need to do something. And you mentioned, you know, oh, you got to have your goal. What’s your goal for this? Is it a sales one? Is it for the whole company? Why is it for the whole company? But back to the beginning of like, hey, why should we do an off site? How do you persuade and present a business case of like, we should do an off site for our team?
Jared Kleinert [34:39 – 37:27]: Yeah, I think there’s a top down approach and I think there’s a bottom up approach. Top down are probably things like looking at how much it costs to recruit and engage an awesome employee and the cost of letting them walk out the door. So disengagement and having to replace people, that’s like the stat used to be like $25,000 on average per person you have to replace. I don’t know if that’s, that’s probably increased with inflation. But yeah, you think about the cost associated with not doing an off site and then you think about doing an off site where you’re giving people like six months of lead up time to think about that amazing experience. And then you’re doing the necessary pre work to determine what the best business objectives are going to be and how to run the certain sessions. And you get people super engaged. I mean we’ve had countless CEOs, you know, earmark lots of money for all hands meetings, go into it initially skeptical and then at the off site they’re sort of saying this is one of the best investments we’ve made in the entire year because they’re able to see everyone really light up about the company, meet some of their colleagues they’ve never met in person before. And that does translate to every single day as you’re emailing people as you’re on slack, if you’re going through difficulty challenges of the company, you know you have people to reach out to and ways to solve the problem. So there’s lots of like top down approaches to think about, namely around employee engagement, retention, alignment and like other objectives related to that bottom up approach would be sort of asking your team or asking about the company like hey, we’re considering an off site, like what would make it valuable to you? And sort of hearing what they say and they might tell you that they want to get training on a new product. They may want to get some facetime with a certain department that they don’t typically talk to. They may want to learn more about the company strategy. And like I’m sure, I mean if it happens at a 10 to 15 person company where you know, not everyone’s fully aligned on long term strategy, I’m sure it happens at a company like capacity. You know, as hard as you guys try to keep everyone aligned, it’s really important for everyone to know like what direction you’re rowing in and what the, what the end game is here. And so that’s true for a team. You have company, but it’s going to be unique for every team and every organization. So just asking them in a pre offsite feedback form or even before you decide to do an off site, sort of like ask them in a forum like hey, we’re considering this, like what would make it valuable for you and respecting your team’s time because that’s like three, four or five days out of office, traveling away from family. Yeah, if you take that feedback to heart and sort of look for trends like you might end up with A great set of objectives to then turn into programming.
Jeremy Burrows [37:29 – 38:00]: Love it. That’s awesome. Jared. Well, what I would love to do is just have you. Well first, quick question. You know, assistants all over the world are listening. You know, the majority are in the US but a lot are in the UK and elsewhere. Where do you service? Like where, like are you primarily in the States now? Like if somebody in London wants to call for help, like how, who, who can you help?
Jared Kleinert [38:01 – 38:46]: Everyone. I mean we, we work mostly with remote first or hybrid companies. Although we do have some office first clients. 70% of our business is North America. But you know, we’ve, we’ve sent people to almost 20 different countries now. Yeah. So I mean whether, whether you go to offstate.com check out the marketplace that you see the venues we currently have, there is a little feature to like ask for more options like if you can’t find what you’re looking for and then service wise like we’ll basically go anywhere. It’s the right, right fit. But yeah, most, most like high growth startups. High growth companies are a good fit for us, especially if they’re remote or hybrid. Especially if it’s A. E.A. or you know, if you’re listening, you’re probably one of our ideal clients.
Jeremy Burrows [38:47 – 38:49]: Right? Yeah, no, that makes sense.
Jared Kleinert [38:50 – 39:30]: Other, other companies have limited where they’ve gone because of margins for example. And like I do think having strong margins is important as a business owner, but I’m also trying to build a like the most customer friendly business in the industry and like the category defining company. And so with that we’ve raised our minimum contracts the slowest out of competitors to accommodate smaller teams. We’ve serviced the widest range of places possible versus just limiting ourselves to certain locations. And I’ve really gone out of our way to try and make this accessible to as many organizations as possible, including nonprofits and communities and things like that.
Jeremy Burrows [39:31 – 39:44]: Nice. Awesome. Well, where’s the best place for someone listening who’s like, all right, I need help with my off site. What’s the best place for them to reach out and learn more and get in touch with you all?
Jared Kleinert [39:44 – 40:14]: Yeah. Offsite.com make an account if you use the link in the show notes. I think Jeremy’s putting a little tracking link on that. We’ll make sure you get 10% off your first contract with us. Fuse that. Or you can just tell us Jeremy sent you or leader assistant sent you. Pretty small team here, so as long as you tell us, we’re happy to give you a discount. And yeah, you know, happy to help you however you want to be helped. Great.
Jeremy Burrows [40:14 – 40:38]: Well, I’ll definitely put those links in the show notes. Leaderassistant.com246 Leaderassistant.com246 Jared thank you so much for being on the show. Definitely a fascinating journey in your young career and love to stay in touch. And best of luck to you.
Jared Kleinert [40:38 – 40:53]: Thank you. Appreciate it. Please review on Apple Podcasts.
Jeremy Burrows [40:59 – 41:01]: Gobos.Com.
