For companies · four cities · One thing a month
Eleven of your people live four miles apart and have never met.
One booked thing a month, in person, for every six of your people in the same city. We build the tables, book the venue, chase the calendar and tell you who came.
Free to set up. $99 a month per person in a cluster we run. 6 seats minimum, 3 months minimum.
Seats are recalculated for the next invoice, never mid-month. Only people in a city with 6 or more colleagues, somewhere we run, are billed.
Six of the 12 activities
Stock photographs, not pictures of Offsite sessions.
- Bouldering
- Escape room
- Pottery
- Darts
- Museum late
- Bowling
Photographs: Romain Gal, Nathan Cima, Silas Köhler, Sebastian Monroy, Clem Onojeghuo, redcharlie, Krišjānis Kazaks, Jessica Gavineaux — Unsplash.
A company of 36 · one dot each
Why it is called Offsite
A company offsite is the day the team stops working and does something together. You do one a year, it costs a fortune, and everyone flies home and opens Slack.
This is the other eleven months. Connection is a cadence, and somebody has to own the booking.
- A pairing bot that books nothing
- A happy hour somebody has to organise
- Two weeks of an ops manager's quarter, once a year
How it runs
You send a list of people and where they live — ten minutes, or a CSV. After that, the only thing anyone at your company does is turn up.
- 01Tell us where your people are
- 02We find the clusters
- 03You approve and pay
- 04We build the tables
- 05One thing a month, booked
- 06You get the report
M and R report to each other — the matcher refuses this table
one of them moves to the other table before anything is booked
M · a manager / R · somebody who reports to them
- A manager and their own report are a block in the matcher, not a preference.
- No two tables in one city ever do the same thing in the same month. The rotation holds 11 venues — 66 people in one city.
the same 6 at every session
re-cut · every table is new
You get three sessions with the same table, then everyone in the city is re-cut and the next six are different people. It takes eight in one city for that to mean anything: below that there is one table, and re-cutting one table deals you the same people back.
The rule at the table
No status updates. No roadmap. No work.
Six colleagues in a room is a meeting unless somebody says out loud that it isn't. Nobody from Offsite sits at the table. They do a thing badly, and then they eat.
It is why attendance is never reported per person. An hour somebody can be managed on is a meeting.
What you get back
One email a quarter: who came, and how many pairs from different teams met. It counts connections rather than sentiment, because “engagement is up 12%” is unfalsifiable and every tool in this category says it.
Plus one anonymous question — did you learn something about someone you don’t work with? — withheld below five responses, because in a group this size a percentage is a person.
- Who missed a session
- How any individual answered
- A morale or engagement score
- Anything a manager could act on
33 of them for the first time
92% came to at least one
32 of 42 seats we booked and paid for
The quarter, over the people who had never sat together
Dinner, booked and paid. The one where nothing is happening except the six of you.
Booked and paid for. Saying no costs nothing and nobody at your company is told.
your company sees a number for the whole company and never this column.
What it costs
$99 per person per month, or $85 committed for a year. 6 seats minimum, 3 months minimum. The venue is inside the price. Billed per person in a cluster we can run, never per headcount.
A month, month to month. Venue, booking and chasing inside it.
Billed once for twelve. 14% under the monthly rate.
People in one city. Below that there is no table.
Months, then month to month. 3 sessions is where a six stops being strangers.
A company of 60
25 billed, in four cities
2 tables of 6, 5 · 11 billed
2 tables of 4, 4 · 8 billed
1 table of 6 · 6 billed
not a city we run yet · 5 people · billed nothing
no colleague in their city · billed nothing
Anyone not in a cluster of 6 is not billed. They wait until there are 6 of them, and the dashboard says how many more that is.
The $2,475 in the card above is $41.25 a month across all 60 employees — against an annual offsite that costs multiples of it and happens once.
The first month is a pilot. If it isn't working, say so before the second session: we stop, and we refund it. You keep the report either way. After the first quarter it is month to month, cancelled in the dashboard.
Free to set up. You see your clusters and your price before anything is owed.
The address is booked after you buy the date, so a room that falls through is a different address rather than a cancelled evening. A first month you can stop, refunded, and you keep the report. And one inbox, answered by the person doing the work.
Where we run
Four cities: New York, Seattle, Chicago and Washington. What you buy is the activity, the city and the date — bouldering in Seattle on the 14th — and we do the booking. That is deliberate: when somewhere cannot take us, you get the evening you were promised at a different address rather than a cancellation, because the address was never the promise. If your biggest cluster is somewhere we do not run, we will tell you to wait rather than bill you for it.
What this isn’t
- Team-building
- No exercises, no facilitator, nothing to debrief. Nobody from Offsite is at the table.
- A perks platform
- Not a catalogue to browse. One booked thing, monthly.
- An offsite replacement
- Keep the annual one. This is the other eleven months.
- A morale metric
- It counts connections. It scores nobody.
- Mandatory
- Attendance that is compelled produces a meeting with drinks. Invite, don't require, and expect about two thirds.
- Everywhere
- New York, Seattle, Chicago and Washington today. We name the cities we cannot run before you pay.
A fixed table that meets monthly for a quarter, built across teams and booked by someone whose job it is — the three things a pairing bot, a happy hour and an annual offsite each fail at separately.
Ask me anything — [email protected]
Where are your people?
It is the only question that decides whether this works for you, and usually a two-minute answer.
Nothing is charged, and nothing is owed until you approve a cluster.
Over 25 seats we send an order form and an invoice, not a card.