Bizly Team Offsite — The Sequel

A hip hotel, a huge screen, a table full of laptops: This was the scene at Bizly’s second team offsite.

We’d experienced excellent results when we held our first-ever meeting outside our office. But one-and-done is not our way at Bizly. We are iterators at heart, and that’s true of our meetings, too. So we got out of the office again in a place that inspired us.

The mission was critical: to get everyone in sync about our big web app launch. It was three hours well spent, perhaps the best meeting we’ve ever had.

We convened at the Refinery Hotel, just a few blocks from our NYC Midtown office. The hotel is hip, fashionable and historic. (In a former life, the building housed a millinery factory. Thus the meeting room’s whimsical name: Hatbox.) At Bizly we’re big believers that the physical room and environment lend an important intangible to a meeting’s success. It was certainly true here.

Most of us arrived independently and checked in for the meeting with the hotel concierge. Everyone reported receiving a VIP welcome. At a venue where many evenings a black rope cordons off the sidewalk for partiers vying to get to the Refinery Rooftop bar scene, VIP has a particularly pleasing edge. This brought a great energy to the meeting start: We all felt important!

A few AV and tech tools were upgrades since our last meeting, all of which worked well.

— A deck provided a loose structure to the meeting. The first slides were inspirational, and the remainder just guided our conversation. We wanted (and needed) some lane markers, but didn’t want to squash enthusiasm and creativity.

— One team member dialed in via Skype, and we made use of the projector and huge screen in the room. The connection failed once (not bad for a three-hour meeting), but it was quickly reestablished and we didn’t lose a beat.

— One of us tapped into Meeteor, a web app for leveraging meeting productivity, and used its note-taking tool. That’s an experiment we’ll conduct again and expand upon.

We headed out the door from the Hatbox room with total clarity about our launch and a shared sense of purpose. It was time to put heads down again and do the work. But we’re all curious about what the next offsite will bring.

Bizly is a platform for instantly booking private meeting rooms at leading hotels. Browse and book online here. Download the app here. (Android coming soon.) At Bizly we’re all about amazing meetings that move business forward.