Connections! A Recap of NFP Partners’ First Team Retreat
Spread as far east as Chicago, as far south as Houston, and as far Northwest as Portland, the NFP Partners team works each and every day as virtual accountants for many nonprofit organizations who are spread just as far across the United States.
It was our goal, this year, to bring everyone together in Denver for a two-and-a-half-day long staff retreat. Besides, without the amazing organizations or the rock star staff of NFP Partners, we would not exist. Here’s the story of NFP Partners’ first team retreat as told by Laura Jorstad and Stephanie Underwood. It’s a story of fun, refreshment, and most importantly, connections!
The focus of the retreat was to connect on personal and professional levels, learn some cool ideas about marketing, go through general business policies and procedures, and thank our clients and our team. We accomplished that and much more by coming together and setting aside our typical daily busy schedules of being nose deep in work. What did we do for two-and-a-half days instead? We had a lot of fun!
- Three of us managed to miss the street sweeping sign, which meant three parking tickets!
- We met each other. NFP Partners is a great team of talented accountants, but the team is spread across four states. Some of us had not met face to face and for others, it was just time to work together at the same location. Connections!
- We celebrated our clients and partners at Punch Bowl Social. Thank you to all who celebrated with us. If you couldn’t join us, you missed a stellar game of bowling, lots of great food and drinks, and making connections. Nora Weiser, Executive Director of American Cheese Society – also NFP Partners’ first client – was the winner of the raffle basket! Connections!
- The team also learned how to be marketers of NFP Partners – who knew marketing could be so fun?!
- We volunteered at The Urban Farm at Stapleton. It was great manual labor with the animals and the vegetables (well really the weeds) and a fun way to learn more about each other.
We believe strongly that our success is based directly on relationships, those that we develop with each other, our clients, and our partners. We worked hard and played games (remember, I said we had fun) to help develop our internal relationships and connections.
We explored the ways in which we can continue to improve internally, and in the services we deliver to clients. Every team member walked away understanding that they have an important role in expanding NFP Partners, feeling committed to “impacting on the world, one accounting challenge at a time,” and full of ideas on how our team can share our mission with other nonprofits that could benefit from our services. Connections!