Custom Offsites & Retreats
The most successful team events are experiential, memorable, and relevant
- all at the same time.
Our corporate and institutional clients rely on us to make their offsites, strategy sessions, workshops, and retreats uniquely impactful.
Types of Corporate Meetings
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Offsites, Retreats & Annual Meetings
Larger-scale corporate events designed to advance corporate strategic priorities, engage stakeholders, deepen and enhance corporate culture, and/or boost team & executive performance
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Coaching, Training, & Workshops
Structured, intensive, one-on-one and group development engagements, anchored in a benchmarking assessments and research, with clear near-term and longer-term development objectives as well as tailored follow-up to confirm goal accomplishment
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Corporate Fellowships
These multi-stage programs combine elements of assessment, offsite programs, coaching, & mentorship for high-performing corporate teams (executive teams, high potential cohorts, etc.) to drive both individual and team performance. Can also be done for an open-enrollment group, such as a set of portfolio CEOs or a cohort of CEOs from a common industry
Centerpiece Elements at Ascent-Led Offsites & Programs
Go beyond the stereotypical lectures, panels, and keynote speakers
Experiential Simulations
Refined through delivery at world-class venues and delivered in partnership with world-leading experts and institutions, Ascent’s small- and large-scale simulations enable groups to grapple with complexity in experiential and memorable ways.
Illustratively, Ascent collaborated with Stanford Law School, the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, and several of their corporate sponsors to lead an innovative, experiential CEO selection simulation for 200 corporate directors at the 31st Annual Stanford Directors’ College. This video outlines the simulation for participants and sends them to the custom website for Cardinal Harvest Naturals with their preparatory materials.
Heatmaps & Interactive Labs
Ascent’s immersive heatmaps, interactive labs, and other customized, experimental programs often serve as the centerpiece of corporate offsites and institutional events.
For example, the Investment Heatmap is an interactive Shark Tank/Dragon’s Den-style exercise, pioneered at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, where participants are initially divided into teams to pitch investment & business expansion ideas. In later rounds of the workshop, teams then allocate scarce resources between the various investment and expansion options, culminating in an exploration of strategic priorities and decisions.
Ascent has recently delivered tailored versions of the Heatmap at the Global Philanthropy Forum and global client offsite retreats.
Strategy Workshops
Using a variety of tools, Ascent’s experienced facilitators work with corporate, private equity, and other clients to focus on companies’ key priorities and strategic concerns.
For example, adapted from the McKinsey “portfolio of options” toolkit, three-horizon planning workshops allow senior management and investor teams to articulate investment/strategy options and align on a set of short-, medium-, and long-term priorities.
These workshops are particularly valuable in serving Private Equity firms and their portfolio companies as part of pre- and post-M&A activity, launching new corporate teams, and aligning new senior leadership teams with investment deal priorities.
