Planning for your teambuilding event before asking for proposals

Once you are clear about your objectives of your teambuilding session, it is important to determine:

•number of participants
•level of participants
•budget
•time frame
•special dietary requirements including allergies
•physical disabilities and constraints
•if you will require assistance with location scouting
If you are interested in using an external team building consultant, here are some reasonable expectations for a decision making process

•Before you contact prospective consultants, ensure that you can clearly state your objectives, identify a clear decision making process, establish decision making criteria and set a budget
•It is also important to have an idea of other agenda items that your company is planning to include on the agenda eg presentation of sales results, upcoming plans
•Ensure that you have an approved budget and sufficient time on your agenda for team building
•When you contact event consultants you should be prepared to share this information with them and indicate the size of the group, indicate group demographics and state your preferred dates
•You should give event consultants about a week to get back to you with a proposal
•You should be in a position to make a decision no more than 2 weeks after you receive proposals from prospective event consultants.
•Ideally, you should allow 5 - 6 weeks, preferably 2 months for adequate planning of your session.

It is not reasonable or acceptable to:

•Contact event consultants and indicate that your request is urgent unless you know for sure that you will be making a decision quickly
•Contact consultants on Friday afternoon indicating you urgently need information for a Monday meeting and then just disappear
•To ask consultants to spend time preparing proposals, contacting potential venues, etc. before the budget and time have been allocated for team building
•Take more than 2 weeks to make a decision after you get proposals or quotes
•Disappear without contacting suppliers who have taken the time to submit a proposal and let them know your decision

It is just plain unethical to:

•Skim off the best ideas and have the retreat using internal resources without paying a consulting fee
•Use the location that a consultant provided without paying a location scouting fee
•Contact other consultants and ask them to prepare proposals when you KNOW that you have already selected a supplier and you are just trying to meet your company's three quotes minimum requirement. Instead, Google the words team building and use information from company web sites.