The LightSpeed team went on a getaway for 3 days to a holiday house in Onrus, a seaside town just outside of Hermanus in South Africa’s Western Cape. The goal was to get the group together with the specific intention of discussing how this year has gone and to reflect on where we should aim to improve – and to have some fun in the sun in between!

Wednesday  

We met early Wednesday morning at our office in Woodstock and got a bit of work and planning in before we set off for Onrus, which is about an hour and a half outside of Cape Town.

We stopped off for a beer tasting and early lunch at Honingklip Brewery just outside of Hermanus around 11AM. We were treated to a selection of their wide variety of home-brewed beers, as well as an amazing orange and butternut soup with home-grown hops salt, charcuterie boards and cheese platters.

With full bellies we checked into the Onrus house (which the owners dubbed “Onnies”) and unpacked, settled in and got comfortable. We weren’t there long before we were all in the amazing pool and soaking up some vitamin D.

We had a short team meeting and planning session before we went for a walk down to the beach, where we sat and watched the sun go down. Once we headed home, we got to work on the braai, with Ashley taking the reigns as braai master for the first night. We ate well, and spent the night enjoying a few of the beers we’d brought back from Honingklip which made for a great team bonding experience.

Thursday

Thursday morning kicked off with a mini hackathon where we did some bug fixes for our own site and some client sites, before we moved on to team discussions about moving forward into 2016.

We discussed things like our pricing package options, how to better leverage social media channels, how to power through the financial slump in the October to February period and whether we should consider using new services we are looking into like Sketch, Bedrock, Sage and Beans.

A focal talking point was talking about signing up to the WooExperts programme – an affiliate program where WooCommerce refers customers to you who need eCommerce sites built. We’ll be trialling this in the coming months, and are all looking forward to see what it can do for our business.

With some serious discussions out the way, we spent a few hours on a fun project, building a Lego stop motion video, which will be featured on our website soon. Team members Iggi and Anton worked on a soundtrack for the video together using Ableton, drawing inspiration from a certain Star Wars tune…

Before moving onto another great braai and meal together, we took some team photos around the house. The rest of the night was spent enjoying evening swims, another great braai with Iggi at the helm this time ‘round – the highlight was the homemade garlic bread made with amazing selection of cheeses we’d bought back from Honingklip.

We capped the night off with some Famous Grouse and a few sessions of Call of Duty and Virtua Tennis on the PlayStation Ashley brought up.

Friday

We woke up early on Friday, had a short work and planning session, and then packed our stuff and hit the road back to Cape Town due to the 10AM checkout.

On the way we stopped off in Betty’s Bay at the Harold Porter Botanical Gardens. We had a short hike up to the Leopard’s Kloof waterfall and enjoyed some jaffle cakes we’d made in the morning and packed for the hike. Some of us picked up some new plants for our homes from the nursery, and then we set off for Cape Town where we arrived in the late afternoon.

All in all the team getaway was a huge success: we got good work done in amongst a lot of good fun.