TWO THINGS WE RUN\nFOR COMPANIES

Before you read further

• Corporate offsites. A small group from your company on genuine terrain, guided and coached. It works when your people already want to go.
• FIFO roster matched trips. Departures built against a published roster, so a break that is otherwise unusable becomes a trip. Bought as a retention benefit.

Everything else on this site applies to both of them. We have been running trips for fifteen years and the standards do not change because an employer is paying the invoice. The training, the risk warning and the terrain are the same for a corporate group as for anybody else.

Corporate offsites

This is a trip, not an exercise. Small group, real terrain, guides who coach through the day rather than shepherd people along it. Your team comes home having ridden, driven or skied something they could not have organised themselves, and better at it than when they left.

There is no facilitated session, no values workshop and no debrief about collaboration. Whatever it does for the way your people work together happens on its own, in the truck and over dinner. We are not going to send you a report claiming to have measured it.

• Small groups. Numbers are set by guide ratios and the terrain, not by what we would prefer to sell.
• Guides who coach as the day runs, so people improve instead of just being taken somewhere.
• Terrain we have scouted ourselves before it was ever offered to anyone.
• Two package tiers: one built around comfort, one that puts the money into more days riding.
• The same written training beforehand as every other trip we run.

This suits a company whose people already want this. It does not suit a whole department that has been told to attend. If half the group would rather be somewhere else, the trip is worse for everybody, including the people who wanted to be there. Make it an opt-in list and it works. Make it compulsory and you have bought an expensive version of the problem.

The bookings that work usually start with a handful of people who already ride, drive or ski, and the group forms around them. If nobody in your business is that person, this is probably not the right thing to be looking at, and we will tell you so rather than take the booking.

FIFO roster matched trips

A roster gives people time and takes away the ability to plan. The break is fixed months out by somebody else, it moves when the swing moves, and nearly everything sold to travellers assumes you can choose your own dates. So a lot of people finish a swing with a week off, look at what is available, and spend it at home again.

We build the trip against the roster instead of asking the roster to bend. Send us the patterns your site actually runs and we will come back with which trips fit inside which breaks, travel days included, and which ones need annual leave stacked on the end of a swing. Departures are then set against crew changes, so a crew can travel together on the same off swing without anybody negotiating a shift swap.

Dan works a FIFO roster himself. That is why this product exists, and why the roster patterns are understood rather than guessed at.

• Send the rosters in the form your people use them: 2 and 1, 8 and 6, even time, whatever it is.
• We tell you what fits and what does not, in writing, before anything goes out to your workforce.
• Training is done during the swing, on a phone, at night, because that is the time that genuinely exists.
• Departures repeat against the published roster, so the same crew can be booked a year ahead.
• It can run as a company funded benefit, a partial subsidy, or a negotiated rate your people pay themselves. Tell us which and we will price it that way.

The argument is straightforward. Rosters make ordinary travel hard to plan, so time off is worth less than it should be to the person holding it. A trip that fits the roster is worth more than a better trip that does not, because the better one cannot be taken. You know what a resignation costs your site far better than we do.

A trip does not fix a retention problem caused by the work, the roster or the supervisor. If people are leaving over any of those, this will not hold them, and we would rather say that now than take a booking and watch it fail. It works as one good reason to stay among several, not as a patch over a bad site.

The bar does not move for corporate groups

Every participant completes the same pre-trip training as anybody else on that trip. Same modules, same quizzes, same pass mark, marked before departure. A company booking does not create an exemption and we will not write one, including for the person signing the cheque.

Somebody who has not completed it does not ride. We would rather have that conversation with you three weeks out than at a trailhead with the rest of the group waiting.

These trips carry the same risk as every other trip we run, and that risk is serious. People are killed and permanently injured in these sports every season, including experienced, fit, well equipped ones. The preparation improves the odds and makes a group capable of looking after itself. It does not make anybody safe, and we are not offering to.

Every participant reads the risk warning and makes their own decision, in their own name, in writing. A company cannot make that decision on an employee's behalf. That is a further reason attendance has to be genuinely voluntary and not only voluntary on the invitation.

Everyone on the trip holds their own cover for the activity. Corporate travel policies commonly exclude what we do, so the wording is worth reading before you commit anybody. We do not arrange, advise on or recommend insurance.

Cost and the practical side

Every trip is quoted. A one off offsite for a small group and a repeating roster matched departure for a site are not the same job, so there is no rate card and there is no package list to choose from. Give us the group size, the window and the budget band, and you get a number back along with a straight answer about whether it is achievable.

• We invoice the company. [PLACEHOLDER: deposit amount, payment terms, cancellation windows]
• Quotes are in [PLACEHOLDER: currency and GST treatment] and hold for [PLACEHOLDER: quote validity period].
• Repeat departures can be scheduled a year ahead against a published roster.
• If what you have asked for does not work, we say so rather than selling you the nearest thing that does.

Questions

Not what you were after

These are the other ways people work with us.