Ten boats,
no presentation
An amateur sailing regatta we ran with our clients and partners for several years — the one weekend in the calendar where nobody was selling anything.
It was made together with the people who sailed in it, which is the only reason it worked.
It began as a way to spend two days with the people we work with outside a meeting room. Over the years it turned into something none of us had planned: a place where business, sport and community converged without anyone arranging it.
Each edition put ten Bavaria 42 yachts on the water, with client teams racing for the Mildberry Cup. Most crews had never sailed together. Some had never sailed at all.
The half of the weekend with no results table mattered as much as the other one.
The first day was briefings and training sails — teams meeting their boats, their skippers and the manoeuvres they would need in the morning. The second was the race itself, then a guest programme ashore and the awards in the evening.
A marketing director and a production manager on the same winch learn more about each other in an hour than in a year of quarterly reviews. That was the whole mechanism, and it never needed explaining to anyone who came once.
As soon as one regatta ended, people were already planning the next one.
More a source of energy than a competition, and of partnerships that started on the water.
New relationships came out of it and existing ones got stronger. A shared experience accumulated of a kind no business environment produces on its own.
People who had met on a boat went on working together long after the weekend was over, and the conversations that began there were rarely about the regatta.
The regatta is not on the calendar at the moment.
It ran for several years and it left a mark on a lot of people, ours included. Whether it comes back is an open question, and the honest answer is that it depends on who wants it: this was always built together with the companies who sailed in it, never a programme we ran at anyone.
If reading this put your own team on one of those boats, that is usually how these things restart.
Interested? Write