Making an occasion of it

Lynette McFadden Business Owner & Mentor, Harcourts gold @lynette_mcfadden

Sometimes I feel as much an events manager as I do a business owner, and our calendar year is laden with activities and social events aimed at promoting fun and laughter, encouraging a high degree of teamwork whilst enabling large sales volumes.

These activities usually start within a couple of weeks of returning back to work – which, to be fair, I encourage by mid-January if possible, as any later than that can cost momentum and create an uphill battle. Over many years, I’ve noticed that getting started again after a break can feel hard, and that’s why every event is aimed at moving purposefully forward.

So, where do I start? Usually, it’s by selecting a theme.

Previous themes have included resilience (guess when we needed that?), ‘your bucket list’, health and wellbeing, and a growth mindset.

This year’s theme is a little special, and we had enormous fun releasing it, but not until we’d completed our own version of The Amazing Race (in teams and costumes), enjoyed a shared lunch, then a formal presentation followed by an incredibly inspirational question and answer session with the phenomenal Dame Sophie Pascoe.

To plan the event is the equivalent of at least 80 hours of work, some of it inevitably happening during the Christmas holidays, but all of it seems worthwhile when you see everyone’s response – and this year was especially heartening.

So, what theme did we select? It was this: winning the moment in front of you.

Its origin was an animated conversation with Gilbert Enoka, our long-term mentor, and it speaks to the practice of building momentum whilst being both present and focused.

So, with event number one tucked away, we’ve got another that we’ve had so much fun with over many years.

Centred around the month of February, we refer to it in-house as ‘Kiwiana month’, and this year we have termed it ‘Kiwiana on steroids’.

Over a condensed period of two weeks (usually it’s four), we will play Kiwi music only at all our office meetings and in-house occasions, serve old Kiwi favourites our mums made when we were growing up, like lamingtons, sausage rolls, and cheerios with tomato sauce for morning teas, and undertake some interesting competitions which have seen baking extravaganzas and people dressing as Sir Edmund Hillary and other Kiwi legends.

Fast and furious, it punctuates the year whilst creating a strong internal culture, and our competition winners get original NZ art pieces.

As the year goes by, so do the events, some tied to financial conclusions like the end of one financial year and the start of another, some seasonal, and some in alignment with what’s going on in our city or the country as a whole. To name a few: there are Māori Language Week, Sign Language Week, and Christchurch Cup Week.

In between all of this is the need for sales, a life outside the business and the requirement to also rest and reflect. But who doesn’t love some fun events and, of course, that chance to win the moment?