Public Sector Facilitation and Scaling a Retreat Business

[00:00:00]  Dan Berger: Welcome to the Assemble podcast. I’m Don Berger, founder of Assemble Hospitality Group. We build purpose design spaces for small team offsites and retreats because the biggest things happen in the smallest rooms. This show is about retreats in all forms, corporate lifestyle, wellness, and even family reunions, and the culture shifts that happen when people step away from the everyday.

[00:00:24] You’ll hear lessons from operators, facilitators, and leaders who know how to design experiences that move the needle. My goal give you the playbook for building clarity, trust, and belonging on your team or in your community.

[00:00:40] Jacob Green is a nationally recognized leadership and organizational development expert with nearly two decades of executive experience in both local government and the private sector. He is a master facilitator and as president and CEO of Jacob Green and Associates, he leads a team of 30 nationwide.

[00:00:57] He is a bestselling author and award-winning speaker. He partners with Fortune 500 companies, public sector agencies, and global brands like Mattel, FedEx, and Hyundai. I know that your book has nothing to do with facilitation, so let’s start there and, uh, perhaps you can make the link of how you have connected the two.

[00:01:17] I found your book to be fascinating. Please share what the hell is your book about and why is it related to what we’re talking about today?

[00:01:26] Jacob Green: Yeah. Sounds good. Well, thanks again, Dan, for having me. I appreciate it. I’m a big fan of yours and your book and you know your whole approach and so it’s fun to be able to talk to you about this kind of stuff and see where it goes today.

[00:01:36] The book is called See Change Clearly, and it essentially is my story of getting into the world of facilitation and working with various teams and environments. I was a 18-year-old at University of California Berkeley. I got smashed in the head in a robbery and sustained a brain injury. Had to drop outta college, go through about two and a half years of rehabilitation.

[00:01:59] And there’s lots of obviously sub stories there, but one of them is that I always hoped during that two and a half years of full-time rehabilitation that there was gonna be some way, at some point in my life I could use. The lessons that I was learning in brain injury School and apply them or others could hopefully apply them in some way.

[00:02:20] So it wasn’t just like I was wasting so much of my life. I felt like rehab was just a big waste of my time. It was a derailment, turns out to be one of the most valuable things in my life, and the time that I learned so much about people and teams and groups and organizations. So I wrote a book that came out in 2019 that ultimately tried to answer the question.

[00:02:41] What stories from brain injury and brain injury rehabilitation can apply to your teams and your organization and leadership success?

[00:02:49]  Dan Berger: Apart from the fact you think some of your teammates are some maybe brain dead,

[00:02:53] Jacob Green: maybe on some days after some trips and some groups. Yes. That, that occasionally is the case, myself included.

[00:03:00] But yeah, there’s the tie, there is, you know, we talk a lot about, in the book, a lot about environment. A lot about the impact of an environment on teams, on organizations, on groups. A lot about the ways that different people and different teams approach challenges and issues. And it sort of all ties together to the work that we do today working in facilitation and working with teams across the country.

[00:03:20]  Dan Berger: So how do you lead? 30 facilitators are obviously very opinionated. And I wanna talk about your clients in a second because it’s a very specific type of clientele and arranges both private and public sector. But I wanna talk about leading a team because unlike most of the folks I have on the pod, there’s many of you.

[00:03:36] So tell me a little bit about the team you lead and how, how organizationally are you structured?

[00:03:41] Jacob Green: Yeah, so I had been professionally keynoting for about 10 years, mostly about the experience of brain injury and how that applies to leadership and teams and, and organizational success. Then I wrote the book.

[00:03:54] Then after 18 years, I left the public sector, went to the private sector, and you know, first it was just me and then, but I knew that I wanted to build a company. I am most successful when I’m with a team. I don’t particularly enjoy,

[00:04:07]  Dan Berger: I know exactly what you’re talking about. Yeah.

[00:04:09] Jacob Green: Being a solopreneur is not where I wanted to be, and so very slowly we started building a team.

[00:04:14] Our team today consists of. Some of the most amazing leaders, some of which I worked with in my career, and now got grab into the company, some of which I never met until they came into the company. We have project managers, we have master facilitators, we have team building experts, we have strategic planning experts.

[00:04:32] We have lots of different experts, all of which are focused on helping teams be successful and work together. Hence why we’re so interested in your work and came across your work and and believe so strongly in what you’re doing.

[00:04:44]  Dan Berger: So you were a city administrator. For 15 years.

[00:04:50] Jacob Green: Yeah. I was in local government for 18 years.

[00:04:52] I was in various different executive positions. I was a fire department command staff member as a civilian, so I was over emergency management, disaster management, public information. Then I went to the police department as a command staff member over there overseeing all, most all of the civilian divisions, dispatchers and records, and all the kind of civilian folks in the police department.

[00:05:14] Large agency and then I was a director and economic development agency. And then where I really started working with private companies, that’s really where my experience there came from. And then my last six years as an assistant city manager in cities. So that’s kinda like the number two position, the COO position, it’s the private sector equivalent.

[00:05:32] Before I actually left local government and went to the private sector.

[00:05:35]  Dan Berger: Did you have any experience with facilitation in government and were you a part of facilitated meetings? Because it’s not very common to have facilitation in government.

[00:05:44] Jacob Green: Yeah, that’s a great question. My exposure to facilitation actually started when I was 14 and it’s kind of worth, I think, exploring a little bit.

[00:05:55] There was a group of, I actually have rarely shared this, uh, background to many folks, but when I was a high school freshman, there was a group of skinheads that had come onto the campus and they were committing a variety of different hate crimes on campus. This was in public high school. And a group of students, we all got together to try to figure out what we could do about the situation.

[00:06:17] And there was an outside group that had created a retreat system for high school students to go on a retreat and learn essentially about each other, about each other’s different backgrounds and challenges and issues. And the hope was that these retreats. Would ultimately create an environment on the campus where students could get along better and these hate crimes would essentially be pushed out.

[00:06:43] It was a really novel thing. Back when I was a freshman, I went on a retreat. It totally changed my life. I came back to the campus, helped form a club that is still in existence to this day. I’m 46 years old right now. That was when I was 14 years old. And in that club I learned how to be a facilitator of those offsite retreats.

[00:07:04] So every month I would spend eight hours off site facilitating a retreat for high school students. We would bring in neo-Nazis, we would bring in folks that didn’t, didn’t get along with each other. We brought in all kinds of different people together, students to talk about these different issues. And then that program spread nationally, and I was a part of building and training facilitators all over the country.

[00:07:28] To help with retreats on high school campuses for the purpose of creating environments in which everyone, regardless of your race, religion, background, whatever could exist and be safe on a high school campus.

[00:07:41]  Dan Berger: I’ve had a similar experience at something called the Group Relations Conference where people come in and you talk about the here and now and basically just somebody gets up and says, I’m racist, and then people start attacking them and, and then they start talking and then people, it’s an incredible experiment of.

[00:07:56] What happens when people just say what’s on their mind, knowing that they’ll never see these other people again. So what did you do to facilitate that successfully? Like what was your approach to that at a young age, working from your, most of your intuition.

[00:08:09] Jacob Green: Yeah. First of all, I learned from some incredible mentors.

[00:08:12] Right? Okay. You know, there were some incredible mentors that came in to teach us. I didn’t know what a, I was 14. I didn’t know what facilitation was or what that meant, but what I learned when I was 14 years old that has carried with me today is facilitators ask really good questions. Mm. Facilitators listen.

[00:08:29] A lot of facilitators. They’re sort of, you know, war storytellers, and it becomes about the facilitator and about the person. What we really feel as a company, and again, I learned this from when I was 14, is curiosity. You bring curiosity as a facilitator to hear people’s stories, listen to their backgrounds, listen to their interests, listen to their values, listen to what motivates them, and try to figure out, as a facilitator to ask really good questions to get folks to listen to each other and work together more effectively.

[00:09:00] And so I had great mentors to watch and learn from, and it was four years of facilitating and traveling the country and helping train other student facilitators. That really became a fundamental part of who I was, and over the years, got to facilitate in lots of different environments. When I was in local government, because I always wanted to be in local government, I, I really wanted to be a public servant.

[00:09:26] I really wanted to serve my communities and I’m really proud of being able to do that in my career. I was regularly sent in to different departments to help teams level up their performance. To help systems improve, to help groups work better together. It’s just something naturally that I love and something that I was very fortunate that bosses would leverage and help me do with other organizations and other teams.

[00:09:53] So it’s just a very natural part. Never in a million years thought I would build a business facilitating and helping others, but it’s really where I love to be and where I landed.

[00:10:02]  Dan Berger: So you got a team of 30. How do you teach them to be curious? That’s

[00:10:06] Jacob Green: a great

[00:10:06]  Dan Berger: question.

[00:10:07] Jacob Green: Because our group of 30 are primarily very accomplished executives.

[00:10:12] You know, we have really accomplished amazing CEOs and city managers and executives, top executives that work for us. The tendency is to facilitate by telling war stories, to facilitate, by sharing experiences, and that’s not actually what teams pay for. It’s not what teams wanna invest in. The focus needs to be entirely on the client, and you do that by being curious.

[00:10:35] You do that by becoming really good at asking important questions. How questions, what needs to change questions, not yes or no questions. You do that by caring a lot about language. For example, in our training classes where we train our facilitators and our instructors, if you’re doing a breakout activity with a team, you don’t say, okay, what I need you to do now is blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:10:59] I need you to do this. I need you to do that. We take the word need completely out of our vocabulary. What I need you to do, it’s totally irrelevant. Our instructors, our facilitators, are not allowed to say, okay, I need you to now tell me. That makes it all about the facilitator. We’re focused on asking them really good questions and helping them think differently about the dynamics between them, the challenges, the barriers by completely and totally focusing on the clients and what we hear from them after our experience is, wow, the facilitator really knew us.

[00:11:32] The facilitator used our language, the facilitators focused on us, became a catalyst for improvement in the team, not the focus of the experience. We try to stick with successful, not famous. We’re not there to, to be the star of the show. We’re there to help the team, the group that we’re serving, be successful.

[00:11:52]  Dan Berger: So is it safe to say that the less you talk, the more successful you are?

[00:11:56] Jacob Green: Yeah. And I think the more we listen,

[00:11:58]  Dan Berger: hmm,

[00:11:58] Jacob Green: less we talk. The more we listen, the more successful a retreat.

[00:12:01]  Dan Berger: So this is obviously a podcast about, for retreat leaders, by retreat leaders. If you’re a retreat leader, how do you navigate the public sector?

[00:12:12] How do you get the Navy like you have to be a customer. It’s obviously almost an untapped market, I feel. So I want to first of all talk about how to land those as clients and then talk about the difference between the private and the public sector. ’cause I imagine for public sector it’s a little more foreign, so.

[00:12:30] How do you land those clients first?

[00:12:32] Jacob Green: Yeah, great question. So a vast majority of the retreats that we facilitate are public sector clients, cities, counties, special districts. Certainly we’ve done military, we’ve done state, et cetera. And our private sector friends find out about our retreats from our public sector friends.

[00:12:51] And so we’ve sort of unintentionally also gone in the private sector and done quite a lot of private sector work. Oh, interesting. So in the public sector, I think it’s public sector teams and organizations and environments are just like private sector teams. There are some differences, yes. But they wanna achieve, they wanna work together.

[00:13:12] They want to overcome hurdles, they wanna build alignment. They want to be successful. They have challenges. They have issues ’cause they’re humans. They just happen to work in a city hall or in a fire department or a police department instead of working in a corporate headquarters. Or whatever kind of private sector environment is, but they’re people on a team.

[00:13:31] And so in the public sector, it’s a matter of a few things. Number one, sometimes the procurement side of the house, the finance part of the house, the budget side of the house works a little bit differently. Sometimes there are rules about how a facilitator can be found and a contract can be executed and there’s processes to go through, and it can be, it can be more competitive.

[00:13:54] Depending on the public sector environment. In the private sector, it might just be, you know, one person that you’re dealing with before you get the retreat booked and solidified in the contract, done in the public sector, it can go through a bunch of different systems and processes, but our approach remains the same with any client, which is do a discovery call, figure out what the outcomes they’re trying to achieve are.

[00:14:20] And then we, we do our magic by creating a customized approach mm-hmm. To the retreat.

[00:14:24]  Dan Berger: But how do you do the biz dev? If I’m the retreat plan, I, I wanna get, who do I call? Do I call the city administrator? Do I call Jacob Green back in the day? I mean, how do I even build a case that this is needed?

[00:14:36] Jacob Green: Yeah. So if you are a facilitator and you’re looking to break into the public sector, I’d say there’s a few things you can do.

[00:14:42] Number one is speak at conferences. So speak at public sector conferences. Try to find a niche in the public sector. For example, let’s say for whatever reason you have a background as a paramedic and maybe you don’t work in the public sector at all. They have nothing to do with it, but you just know something about that audience.

[00:15:04] Pick EMS and fire department public sector conferences submit to speak at those conferences at a breakout session on building cohesive paramedic teams. Or creating an incredible team building retreat. Conferences are an amazing place in the public sector to establish your credibility, meet your potential clients, and get that business.

[00:15:27] It’s every week I’m speaking somewhere and the audience is constantly calling and saying, Hey, heard you speak. We’d love to have you come do that strategic plan for us, that retreat or that team building retreat or whatever. So first advice I would give is get on that conference circuit and submit to be a speaker in a niche.

[00:15:45] Part of your environment. Second is the decision makers in local government are very, very busy. Your approach needs to be extremely simple website, very simple, one sheet, very simple, and do some outreach and test the market. See if you can get a response. The public sector is all about relationships and trust, so you really want to try to target.

[00:16:11] Big blasts on big, you know, email spam stuff doesn’t even get through the IT department.

[00:16:16]  Dan Berger: And they’ll likely actually respond too, because they probably don’t get a lot of solicitations most of the time.

[00:16:21] Jacob Green: That’s right. It can be a real advantage going through that in the public sector. And then third on the discovery calls, make sure you really do your homework and use the right language.

[00:16:31] You know, if you are working with a government client and you’re on a discovery call, trying to figure out if they wanna pick you as a retreat facilitator. Talking about profit is probably not gonna show your understanding of the public sector. Using the word sales is not gonna work in the public sector.

[00:16:47] You wanna use language that resonates for them. Talk about service impact, mission. Mission. Talk about values, talk about what happens in City Hall. Really get to know your client in the public sector because what the public sector does not want to do. Is bring in a private sector retreat facilitator that has no experience working in the public sector because the public sector’s afraid that it’s gonna be too driven on increasing profits and outside of mission and service.

[00:17:19] So if you’re trying to get into the public sector market, you really wanna make sure you understand how the public sector decision makers are driven and what they care about and how you’re representing yourself as a facilitator.

[00:17:30]  Dan Berger: A quick pause to thank our sponsor, facilitator directory.com. Facilitator directory.com is the number one resource for finding a facilitator.

[00:17:39] Whether you’re looking for someone to lead your executive offsite, facilitate a forum or guide a wellness retreat, facilitator directory.com is the place to find top rated facilitators, guides, and team coaches. And now back to the show. So I’m just super curious, what’s a public sector retreat like? Are they doing like fire drills and super regulatory?

[00:17:58] Like what? You know, we have this concept, you know, I worked for the member of Congress, I worked at fema, so I have some biases. What do these retreats look like?

[00:18:07] Jacob Green: Yeah, our public risk sector retreats and our private sector retreats all start with the fundamental question of the client. Why’d you reach out and what are you hoping to achieve?

[00:18:15] Right? And as you know, 99% of the time. It’s, we’re having some interpersonal challenges. We wanna build alignment better on our team. We wanna get to know each other better and understand each other better. We want to work together more effectively. We’re a remote environment right now, and we want to figure out to get some face time, be in a special place together and figure out how we can level up as a team.

[00:18:39] It’s really not all that different right now, for whatever reason. We’re doing a ton of engineering firms. Team buildings and strategic planning for engineering firms. ’cause one got our name from some public sector client that served some city hall and now the word has spread through all these engineering firms.

[00:18:54] They’re the same issues. They’re people issues, they’re communication issues. So we’re working through various exercises in a day or two. Typically a government retreat is gonna be one day or two day, and we’re working through. Human communication challenges, interpersonal challenges. We’re using some of our tools that we’re certified in to use as a way of looking at data and information differently.

[00:19:17] Sometimes in the public sector, they’ll ask us to get into strategic planning concepts like, you know, work planning and some visioning and goals and priorities. So we’ll, you know, incorporate that and it’s just a lot of human communication and bonding and, and getting people aligned around whatever that mission and vision is.

[00:19:36]  Dan Berger: So what tools do you bring to these retreats? You know, again, fascinating. I’m convinced this is completely different. They’re sitting in a classroom, you know, there’s a chalkboard, but I get it. It’s different. You make just as much money, probably more, but what you know, what tools are you bringing to government?

[00:19:53] Because at the end of the day, this has real downstream impact, arguably more impact than private sector retreats.

[00:19:59] Jacob Green: Yeah. I’ll bring you one of our tools that actually comes from brain injury stuff. Almost everything that I do, as you know from the book. Everything is tied back to brain Injury school.

[00:20:07] Everything. I, you know, Irma Bombeck wrote that book about everything I ever needed to know. I learned in kindergarten or probably botched the title, but for me, it’s everything I needed to learn. I learned in Brain Injury school, it applies to my life. So we use a tool called the A EM Cube Assessment.

[00:20:22]  Dan Berger: Ah, yes.

[00:20:23] And you’re certified in that, I believe.

[00:20:25] Jacob Green: Yeah, exactly. And a lot of folks, you know, yes, we do strength finders and a lot of folks use disc and lots of great tools out there. They’re all great. We use something called the A EM Cube Assessment, and it focuses on one single concept, and that’s the cognitive diversity of a team, cognitive diversity of a team.

[00:20:43] So we use this tool tomorrow, I’m getting on a plane in a few hours. I’ll be heading up using this tool with a team tomorrow, and it’s a tool that allows you to look at a leadership team and figure out what elements of cognitive diversity may be missing. And what elements of cognitive diversity might be needing to be leveraged.

[00:21:04] And so lemme take a step back on what that means.

[00:21:06]  Dan Berger: Yeah.

[00:21:06] Jacob Green: There’s some massive research that was done by a group of researchers to figure out what is the one characteristic of a high performing team. So they did about three years of research on lots of different teams all over the world to figure out what was that one characteristic.

[00:21:21] Because if you know that characteristic, then you can build a high performing team, right. And so at the end of this three years of testing all these teams from public and private organizations all throughout the world, they figured out, they concluded that the one characteristic that separated high performing teams from everyone else was the level of cognitive diversity of the team.

[00:21:41] We know what diversity is,

[00:21:43]  Dan Berger: and cognition, basically how different brains work, how different people approach problems. Maybe they’re more creative, maybe they’re more intellectual.

[00:21:51] Jacob Green: Yeah, it’s a team with different experiences, different backgrounds, different ways of learning, different values. If you assemble a team with a high level of cognitive diversity, you have a better chance of solving really complex problems more effectively and faster, and that’s what we need in, in private sector and public sector, is speed of solving complicated problems and doing it more effectively together.

[00:22:13] Again, it all goes back to brain injury and brain injury. We have to figure out what parts of the brain work, what don’t work. How do we leverage those parts, those gifts. Move it forward. And so this assessment gives you a visual way to see the cognitive diversity of your team, what may be lacking, what opportunities might exist, and that’s one of the best tools that we use with our teams.

[00:22:32]  Dan Berger: What do you do if there’s a missing cognitive ability on a team and you can’t bring any more people?

[00:22:37] Jacob Green: Yeah, so number one, we train teams. When you can’t hire more for those gaps in cognitive diversity, how do you do? For example, let’s say you’re doing a project meeting. Okay, you’re doing a project to build a bridge, I don’t know, whatever.

[00:22:50] And you know, your project team has a gap in this particular piece of cognitive diversity, right? You can tell your team, okay, time out for the next 10 minutes. Let’s all take that perspective as we approach this problem. Let’s brainstorm. Let’s think solely from that perspective, since we can’t hire someone to fill that gap for us, right?

[00:23:10] Let’s fill it ourselves and see what happens on the whiteboard as we take that. Position in what’s called the cube. This visual representation of cognitive diversity game changer for teams to really start thinking differently about how they work together, how they solve problems together. And it’s not better or worse than all the other tools that are out there.

[00:23:31] It’s just different. And for me it resonates because it speaks to the importance of leaders leveraging and allowing differences to come to the table and solve problems together.

[00:23:43]  Dan Berger: We have a few minutes left. I wanna touch on managing a big team. Most facilitators are one or maybe two person partnerships.

[00:23:52] What happens at scale for, you know, facilitation firm?

[00:23:57] Jacob Green: Yeah. What happens at scale, at least with our company, is we get better and better and better. And here’s why. Like I thought I was awesome until I saw my colleagues facilitate and present. Mm. It was my responsibility to give them some fundamental.

[00:24:13] Approaches that are important, like we talked about earlier on this call, where we focus on the client, use the right length, all those kinds of things, but watching my colleagues, my teammates facilitate. I sit there and I learn. I go, oh my gosh. I never thought of that. I never thought of that. Oh, so you attend other retreats?

[00:24:29] We all attend each other’s facilitations. Sometimes we go out as a team of two. Sometimes we go out as a team of three. We are learning from each other. We are better because we get to learn from each other’s approaches and the client benefits. ’cause often we’re two facilitators coming in with a team. So the client benefits because they get two different facilitation perspectives and we all get to learn.

[00:24:51] We all rotate around with each other, we all learn from each other, and I get to learn from some of the absolute best in the business. So they’ve leveled my game up and we all help each other lends to a better client experience.

[00:25:02]  Dan Berger: So a bit of a boring kind of technical question. If you are a one man shop, one woman shop, what’s your next step to grow?

[00:25:10] Jacob Green: So for me, I wanted to have a company, an organization, a team. So I had that right from the bat. I knew that day one that I started, hopefully I would be able to sell enough and grow enough that I would be able to afford bringing on others so that I could serve more clients, I could get better as a facilitator, and I’m just better when I’m on a team.

[00:25:30] So I think if you’re a solo facilitator, that’s fantastic. You don’t need a team, you don’t need others. But if you do wanna grow others. And you do wanna expand. I would look at not finding a cookie cutter repeat of yourself as a facilitator. I would look at someone who facilitates differently, but has some shared values.

[00:25:51] I would look at someone who can offer your clients some different skills, some different certifications, some different approaches. Someone that can, you know, offer something different. So your clients benefit from the diversity of now two different kinds of facilitators based on the group. Depending on the group that we have, we’ll match them with a facilitator that we think is gonna be a good match for that particular client needs.

[00:26:15] So I don’t think you necessarily need to grow a whole company, but I knew 100% from day one. My dream was to have a team that I could learn from, that I could grow with, and that we could make impact in a much larger way together.

[00:26:28]  Dan Berger: And many facilitators choose that career path because they wanna do their own thing.

[00:26:32] So it’s not for everyone.

[00:26:34] Jacob Green: No, absolutely.

[00:26:35]  Dan Berger: Jacob, are there any questions I should ask you that I haven’t, anything else you wanna share that maybe we didn’t get a chance to talk about?

[00:26:41] Jacob Green: You know, the one thing that I was thinking about in terms of this discussion is the value and the importance of the environment and space.

[00:26:49] I mean, you’re, you’re the expert. It’s why I’m learning so much from you about environment and space and creating a retreat facility. That means something. We have found in our work, and I’ll give you an example. In the public sector, often when let’s say layoffs are taking place, they’re gonna choose a conference room or a different location or like maybe a real controversial public hearing that takes place offsite.

[00:27:15] And we always say, don’t pick that environment for your retreat. It sounds obvious, but the environment that we select for and working with our clients, the, the environment that you select as a retreat facilitator is so critically important. And coming across your work, this is why I reached out right originally and coming across your work because you understand the role that environment plays with these teams.

[00:27:41] If we don’t take these teams offsite into a new, fresh environment, we cannot make the same kinds of positive impact. If we choose an environment at the city hall that they’re used to, that there was some trauma related to that room 10 years ago. We just have to be in a fresh, inspiring, new place. And so I love the work that you’re doing to give teams that option.

[00:28:04] And I think it’s been amazing how important it is for us to focus on environment as part of building our retreat experience. So I think what you’re doing to really create some magic space for that to occur. Right on. And is a big key to the success for any facilitator out there that’s trying to work with a group, start with really what do they wanna achieve and where are you gonna achieve that?

[00:28:27] You get those two things right? There’s some magic.

[00:28:30]  Dan Berger: Yeah. And I think about the Maslow hierarchy of needs for retreats. And in order to get to the transformational change at the top, you have to start with your. Food, water, shelter, and that’s your environment. And that has to have hospitality. That unlocks safety, that unlocks curiosity, that unlocks engagement, and that unlocks transformation.

[00:28:49] And that’s how I think about the benefits of a really good vessel.

[00:28:53] Jacob Green: Yeah, I mean, your space is amazing for retreat facilitators that are working with a client that doesn’t know where they want to meet. I would encourage your retreat facilitators to take some ownership. Of recommending one of your spaces or recommending a space that works for their group, they often don’t.

[00:29:12] Yeah. When you leave it to the client, the client will often pick a space that is not really conducive. Right. To a really meaningful experience. And so. Retreat. Facilitators should play an active role and responsibility in helping make the decision as to where the retreat will take place,

[00:29:28]  Dan Berger: and the right partner can help you find the right activities and at least give you the options to make those choices.

[00:29:33] Jacob Green: Yes, a hundred percent.

[00:29:34]  Dan Berger: Jacob, this was awesome. Thank you for your time. Congrats on all the success. Have a wonderful thank you trip, and we’ll talk soon.

[00:29:41] Jacob Green: Congrats to you all. See you in Boise.

[00:29:42]  Dan Berger: Thanks.