By Gillian Arthur, Consultant and Strategic Writer, Mainstay
Last month, Mainstay’s team returned to Phoenix, Arizona for our annual All-Hands meeting. With only a handful of opportunities to see each other in person each year, these meetings are a particularly special (and highly anticipated) time for our crew.
The company that plays together, stays together
When your workforce is fully remote like ours, it can be a challenge to cultivate a strong sense of community. And at Mainstay, with many of us working on different projects, it’s not always possible to get the same amount of “face time” with every colleague. Social opportunities like our All Hands meeting changes this—offering everyone a chance to build deeper connections and collaborate on big picture ideas.
It’s worth noting that at the center of these yearly meetings is something very important to the Mainstay ethos: having fun. That’s why—in addition to business planning—we made a point to focus almost half of our annual retreat time on team-building exercises.
Our first team-building exercise was for charity — spending several hours packing meal boxes at the St. Mary’s Food Bank of Phoenix. These meal boxes are part of St. Mary’s neighborhood food distribution program, feeding less fortunate families within the greater Phoenix area. This was the second time Mainstay has volunteered at St. Mary’s, and it’s an organization we’re eager to continue supporting.
The second team-building exercise was a spirited pickleball tournament. Our team members competed in three doubles matches, switching partners every game so we all got a chance to play with a different colleague. Through this exercise we learned just how well we work together as a team and more importantly, we had fun doing it.
These exercises didn’t just get us out of our offices to have fun; they reinforced valuable lessons of cooperation, communication, and shared responsibility—lessons we’ll always take with us.
Big wins, big opportunities
While this meeting was an important time to re-connect with each other, it was also an important time to get visibility into recent activities across all sides of our business, collaborate on go-forward opportunities, and discuss annual planning as a team.
As part of this effort, we reviewed the previous year’s business wins, including the recent launch of Craig LeGrande and Venky Lakshminarayanan’s book AI-Driven Value Management: How AI can help bridge the gap across the enterprise to achieve customer success. We also looked at strategic business planning for the year ahead, focusing on both new opportunities and strengthening our existing customer relationships. We reviewed new product innovations coming for our Advisor platform. We also spent time discussing how can we expand on our successes and deliver even more of our services across current opportunities and projects to ensure great results for our customers.
Overall, Mainstay’s All-Hands 2025 meeting was a resounding success! Big thanks to our exceptionally talented team for making every moment in Phoenix a memorable one. We can’t wait to meet up again next year to build more memories. In the meantime, Mainstay is ‘all in’ for the current business year 🙂
