Flok is a strategy-first corporate retreat planning company for remote and distributed tech teams. We design the retreat around your goal, then run every piece of it: the venue, the structure of the days, the logistics, and the on-site operation. Your team owns the content: the strategy, the sessions, the decisions. You can also bring us in for venue sourcing only.

For a full-service corporate retreat, expect a working range of $2,000 to $5,000 per person all-in. That covers venue, food, activities, travel logistics, and planning fees. Below $2,000 per person, a planning agency rarely makes economic sense. The fee swallows too much of the budget. Below 50 attendees, the math gets tighter still. Flok's Custom tier starts at $300 per attendee in planning fee on top of those direct costs.

The clearest sign is what the last one cost you. If planning it pulled someone off their real job for weeks, or the person who organized it spent the retreat running logistics instead of being in the room, the team has outgrown doing it in-house. It usually tracks with growth. A 30-person offsite one person can run on the side. At 80 or 150, across multiple offices, it becomes a second job nobody planned for.

You can do either. Some teams bring a planner in only to source and negotiate the venue, then run the days themselves. Others hand off the whole retreat, from sourcing through the on-site execution. Venue sourcing on its own makes sense when your team can plan the agenda but wants the hotel contract and rates handled by someone who books them constantly. Full planning makes sense when the whole thing has become more than your team can carry.

A planner who runs the retreat end to end does. The person who planned your retreat is on the ground for it, running the logistics, managing the vendors, and fielding the hundred questions a retreat generates so your team never has to. You are there to lead the retreat, not to run it. Flok keeps the same planner with you from sourcing through the on-site execution, so nothing gets lost in a handoff.

Some do, some don't, and it is worth asking early, because travel is often the messiest part of a distributed retreat. Flok manages flights through a corporate travel partner, with round-the-clock support when a flight gets delayed or cancelled, or it can coordinate all the ground transportation around flights your team books itself. Either way, arrivals and departures get built into the schedule so the retreat starts on time and no one is left stranded at the airport.

Four jobs. We source the venue and negotiate the contract. We design the structure: how the days flow, the opening, the closing, the conditions for the conversations your team needs to have. We run logistics end-to-end: flights, rooming, vendor contracts, dietary, transport. And we staff the event on the ground. Your champion gets to show up as a participant, not a coordinator.

Plan internally when the group is under 50 people, the budget is under $2,000 per person, and someone on your team has the bandwidth to source and run it. Hire an agency when the group is bigger, the budget supports it, the retreat has a business goal beyond morale, or the internal owner no longer has the capacity. Or start splitting the workload and have us find your venue.

We run a full RFP process to hotel properties on your behalf, so we negotiate directly with the property, not a published rate card. Once you've selected your top three venues, we negotiate further across multiple proposals. We also run retreats across many of the same destinations and so we're able to secure rates based on overall volume. Typical venue savings on a full Custom retreat run 10 to 20%. More on the Venue Sourcing tier.

Standard lead time is 6-9 months for a Custom retreat above 50 people. We can certainly move quickly if you can too. The constraints are usually internal sign-off, group size, and the flexibility of the event dates. We've planned full retreats in as little as 6 weeks.

Three things move CFOs and CEOs. One: clear, timely business goals. Two: a budget framed against the cost of not doing it. Three: a proposal that shows what the company gets on Monday morning.

A few situations. If your group is under 50 people, planning internally or a self-managed resort will usually serve you better. If your all-in budget is under $2,000 per person, our planning fee takes too much off the top. If you're already working with another planner or sourcing agency, we don't share engagements.

Probably. Most Flok clients are US tech and SaaS companies between 100 and 1,000 people. Recent retreats include Moloco (800 people from 13 offices), Cleerly Health, and Camp Canary. About three-quarters of clients plan their second event with us within the same year. Most of them bring us with them to their next company. Ask us for a case study close to your situation.