The offsite meeting re‑invented.

Imagine being invited to an offsite meeting with no agenda, no team-building activities and no power-point presentations.

You find yourself spending most of the time outside, doing yoga in an atmospheric sculpture park or walking for miles across breathtakingly beautiful countryside, covered in ancient woodland. You rest, recharge and are nourished with locally grown organic food. You might even spend an afternoon working on a farm, mucking out the pigs or milking the cows. Sounds unreal?

This is what Jonathan Goodwin, Chief Executive of merchant bank Lepe Partners, first devised in May 2016 for the Founders and CEOs of some of the companies he has invested in.

Hosted at Hound Lodge, the 10-bedroom sporting lodge at the heart of Goodwood Estate, and run by coach Samantha Axtell, this is an offsite meeting with a difference. It was so successful, it was repeated in early 2017 with a second planned for later this year. The feedback has been phenomenal.

Goodwin says: “There are lots of opportunities for leaders today to come together, network and talk about business growth but at Lepe we also value supporting our Founders and CEOs in their journey of personal growth. The people who experience the Lepe Retreat at Hound Lodge, Goodwood, get the rare opportunity to focus on themselves for 36-hours. They might learn something or meet someone but they will also have spent time away, in beautiful surroundings being fed delicious food and given the chance to exercise, rest and reconnect.”

Axtell, who trained as Psychological Coach, explains further: “Business leaders are facing an increasingly complex and volatile world. What we have created with the Lepe Retreat at Hound Lodge is the chance for high-performing leaders to stop, re-charge and take stock of what is going on around them.”

Traditional leadership courses tend to focus, by their very nature, on how to better lead people. It is assumed that in order to fuel business growth, chief executives have to convince everyone around them of the company strategy and vision.

Axtell argues the rate of change we face today across all business sectors is so dramatic and overwhelming that a new skillset is needed. The most successful leaders are more “emotionally connected” with who they are. She calls this skill “self-reflection” and believes that if leaders attend to themselves more they will know how to react better in the face of challenge. She says CEOs need to be agile and able to adapt to rapidly changing situations: just think how the internet and social media has revolutionised the way we do business in recent years. Add to that the turbulent geo-political landscape, not to mention Brexit, and it is clear that CEOs are navigating a brave new world.

“Before social media, leaders had the benefit of more time and space to consider their response in times of crisis. Today they can become the focus of a PR disaster within seconds. Look at how the former CEO of BP was lambasted after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill for saying he would ‘like his life back’. We’re living in a complex world and leaders need new skills to flourish in it,” says Axtell.

Hound Lodge is the ideal place for business leaders to engage with this type of thinking. Set within the 12,000 acre Goodwood Estate in Chichester, West Sussex, guests can truly unwind in beautiful surroundings and escape from the frenetic routine of daily life.

They are looked after by a Goodwood butler and a personal chef, who creates a bespoke menu using organic ingredients from the Estate.

Beautifully designed living and dining spaces sit around a central courtyard that leads out onto idyllic ancient woodland. The bedrooms are sumptuous, the beds even more so, the mattresses filled with wool from the sheep that graze on the Goodwood Estate.

People who go on the Hound Lodge business retreat with Lepe Partners are given little information about what they will be doing or who will be there. The idea being that it needs to feel very different to a normal offsite meeting. Axtell argues that in a way the retreat replicates that sense of the unknown, encouraging people adapt to what is thrown at them. Although none of the activities are ever that challenging, Axtell likes to put people ever-so-slightly out of their comfort zone.

A typical day might start with time on Goodwood Home Farm, one of the largest lowland organic farms in Europe, feeding the animals, mending fences or checking on the newly born lambs or calves. After lunch, there might be a yoga session in the Cass Foundation Sculpture Park with Niki Perry, yoga teacher to the stars. At least an hour or two is allocated for recharging, ‘being still and creating some genuine headspace’.

Dinner in the evening at Hound Lodge is a relaxed affair, with plenty of delicious organic food grown or reared on the Estate. The following day, the business leaders are dropped on the edge of the Estate and they spend the entire day walking over the hills and through peaceful woodland back to Hound Lodge. Axtell explains: “The long walk affords people the chance to talk in small groups as well as stop for some moments of reflection and to practice new skills like walking in silence.”

Guests leave feeling refreshed and full of ideas. Time and space are modern luxuries and, at Hound Lodge, there is the chance to really enjoy them. A sense of solitude and peace is found here, away from it all, deep in the Sussex countryside.