What the offsite cost

Saturday note. Somewhere in the weeks before the last quarter, the regional team gets on planes.

Two days in one city. A room with the year on the wall, a dinner on the first night, an alignment session in which people mostly say out loud what they had already emailed. Everyone flies home and the plan is roughly the plan it was on Monday, with better relationships around it.

Add up what that is. The flights, the rooms, the dinners, the airport cars, and then the part nobody adds up, which is a dozen senior people spending two working days on each other instead of on a customer. In more marketing budgets than anyone would admit, that is the largest single discretionary purchase of the half year. Larger than the year's photography. Larger than a month of paid media in a small market.

I am not against it. Two days in a room is sometimes the only thing that makes a team spread across three time zones behave like one team, and I have watched a year of quiet blockage clear over a dinner.

What I object to is where it sits. It goes in as travel, or as team development, or inside a line whose wording implies the customer is somehow the beneficiary. Nobody writes a brief for it. Nobody names the audience, or says what should be different by October because it happened.

It has an audience, and the audience is the team. That is a real purchase doing a real job, and it survives being argued for on those terms.

It is the pretending that does not.