Business Retreat

This year I closed shop for a week and went off to the North Georgia Mountains for my company's Business retreat.

I engaged the help of my good friend Christina Steiner, who graciously took off the whole week and came up with me.

It was a really nice time, at a gorgeous cabin in Blue Ridge.







We worked very hard all day, going over business plans, budgets, marketing calendar, revenue projections…




Then we made dinner (with baby Steiner in Chris's belly ;)


and sat down to relax, watch TV and play Scrabble in front of the warm fireplace.


Christina and I have been friends for 12 years and have been meaning to do a girlfriend's trip together to celebrate the 10 years of friendship. Since we never got around to that, we decided that we would use our evenings to hang out and celebrate the friendship, which added a whole other layer of niceness to the trip :)

And best of all, Christina is a marketing expert, who owns her own marketing consulting company... I really could not have done this without her!

We also had a really nice surprise visit halfway into the retreat.

My friend Carla came up for the day and worked on the marketing calendar all day with us! Carla does marketing and international business for the State of Georgia, and she was also great help. I am honestly a very lucky woman, having not only great friends, but marketing-savvy great friends that are willing to take time off their busy schedules to help me out with my business.

The weather was pretty cold that whole week and it was nice to stay warm inside the cabin with the fireplace going all day.


I only ventured out to grab a couple of frames of sunset



And sunrise (I can’t even believe I was up for this!).

On the last day, we bundled up



and spend a couple of hours in downtown Blue Ridge


although not everything was open

we had a really nice time.

Thanks a lot, ladies. It was not only fun, but also extremely helpful for my business and I look forward to sharing 2009 successes with you!

A.-