The Sandstone Team Building Blog

One of our key team members had a very proud day on Friday.  Lorraine became a mother-in-law for the second time as her daughter Louise married Shaun in Tarporley’s St Helen’s Church.  The bride looked stunning and the weather was kind as early rain turned to glorious sunshine just in time.  Brilliant.  A very nice ceremony was duly followed by a great day, some superb food and excellent service at Willington Hall and dancing into the wee small hours.  Some of the younger members of the party made it into some slightly larger hours…

That’s it.  No smooth intro into a team building parallel.  Just our very best wishes to Louise and Shaun for their married life.

Alan

One of the services that we provide to our clients is that we take photos – and occasionally the odd, small video clip – at their events.  A typical event generates over a hundred such photos and larger events many more than that.  To date, we usually put them onto a CD and send them in the post to our main client contact for each event.  With many hundreds of photos, they are just far too big to email.  We have always tried to do that very quickly and usually manage to get the CD into the post the day after the event itself.  We use first class post so most clients can look at the photos just two days after the event.  Quick, but not as quick as we are going to be from now on…

We have decided to quit sending CDs and send the the photos and any video clips we take electronically.  We still can’t send them by email, of course, as the total size would exceed any mailbox limit.  With the number of events that we run and the size of each collection, uploading them to our web server isn’t a viable option for us either – though we have done that for overseas clients before.  So we have signed up to a service that allows us to upload zipped archives to a secure site that handles very large files and offers easy and fast downloads from a link that we send.  It’ll knock a day off the waiting time at the very least yet still offer full quality, high resolution photos to our clients as a great keepsake from their team building sessions.

Anyone who wants one will have the option of a CD as well, of course.  We are nothing if not responsive to our clients’ preferences!

Barbara

Come the end of an event, one of the most common questions that we are asked is: “So – why Sandstone?”.  The answer is threefold.  Back in 1992 when we were founded, we didn’t feel sufficient megalomaniac tendencies to name it after ourselves.  Secondly, we deliberately wanted to choose something that didn’t include what we did in the name itself as we expected that to evolve over time. What a good decision that turned out to be!  We started life as an out-and-out training company and now, though learning and development is at the core of all of our activities and available for any client who wants it, we are 100% a team building company.

So that explains why, as a family owned and managed firm, we don’t have Hunt in our name and why we don’t have “Team Building” in there either, but not why we do have Sandstone.  With the restrictions of the first two points, we went looking for something that nonetheless had some meaning to it.  Though we now operate from three locations and indeed deliver events all over the UK and all over the world, our first office was in Tarporley, where we still have our head office.  Tarporley is a regular stopping point for people walking the Sandstone Trail, one of the most pleasant and famous long distance walking paths in the UK.  You can find out about it here and here.  As a building material, it is also in much evidence in many local buildings in and around Tarporley.  The name just seemed to us to fit.

Of course, that choice meant that in the early days we were often called up by people looking for building supplies.  These days we don’t often get such calls as people in the UK seem to know who were are and what we do by now, but we do get regular emails from overseas – particularly from China and India – from folk trying to get us to import their sandstone.  They find our contact details from our web site but either don’t take the trouble to read or can’t read any of the details on the site that would tell them very quickly they are wasting their time.  It’s kind of targeted spam, if there is such a thing.

So now you know why we are Sandstone.

Barbara

I’ve decided to take back the reigns on this one from Paul … mainly because he’s had the cheek to go on holiday!  So, rather then deprive you all of our regular event of the month blog, I’ve written it.

The event chosen this month was a clear winner for most of our team.  It was a great Wild West event that we ran early in the month for over 130 people in Stockport.  Now, being July, we were hoping for nice weather so we could take the group outside.  More than that, because indoor space was at a premium, we really needed some good weather!  I can’t claim it was a beautiful summer’s day, but it wasn’t raining and we were happy to settle for that!

With our 12 teams inside all eager to get to grip with the simulation they got stuck in straight away.  After the first set of decisions were out of the way, all the different tasks we make available during a Wild West event were in great demand.  The first group of eager Gunslingers disappeared outside with Steve and then we opened up the Gold Panning with Lorraine – which helped quite a few towns become richer very quickly!  Buffalo Hunt and Sharp Shooter soon followed.  Some needed practice with their aims for both – but, hey, we had all afternoon for them to work on it!

There was a lot of good banter going around the group – maybe not as much cross-team working as we usually see, but lots of good banter as everyone enjoyed their afternoon.  We had some high scoring teams too, but for us the thing that really stood out was the willingness of all 12 teams to try everything we offered them.  A great day all around!

Nikki