Post All-Team and Pre-CES Check In

Last week, the stars aligned and we slid a short but high-impact all-team meeting into just one day. From California to Florida, we all made our way to our new Caster HQ at Innovate Newport. For a brief time, we closed our laptops (gasp), took notes on paper (double gasp), and got to work on strategy and planning for 2023. Here are some of the highlights: 

We ♥️ Our Clients 

Every year we ask our clients: Will you be ours again? This year over 80% of our clients plan to stay with us through the New Year. The world has seen a lot of churning in the past few years, with everything from The Great Resignation to supply chain issues indirectly impacting agencies like ours. That vote of confidence in the midst of a turbulent tech economy is both gratifying and humbling. We appreciate a return client more than anything else. Working with happy clients keeps us happy too! As a bonus, we have a few exciting new companies joining us for 2023. 

Cross-team Communication 

With a team that’s 50% remote and the move to Innovate Newport, we’ve been a little more dispersed than a team of high-volume communicators (a.k.a Chatty Cathys) prefers. When you’re often communicating via Slack, it’s easy to fall into the habit of collaborating with a few select team members. If we’re not collaborating on the same clients it requires a little more effort to reach out. So what are we doing about it and why? Well, we’re reconfiguring our internal project spread to facilitate every team member chatting with every other team member. Why would we do that? Communication opens doors and broadens horizons. It’s literally sharing information. We have a wide array of talents, and you never know when someone can lend a hand with a new idea. Ultimately, increasing mindshare using our internal projects will allow us to bring more fresh ideas to our clients.

Tick Tock 

We have and always will be vested in our clients. One of the questions posed during all-team was, “Do you have enough time?” Specifically, do we have enough time for “deep” hours where we can dive into the details of a client and their industry. Our ability to feel like an extension of a client’s core team is what sets Caster apart, and the dedicated time is what makes this possible. During this discussion, we tossed around a few options to ensure every team member has the time they need to research, write and deliver stunning results. We’re examining rebalancing some teams to give us each a shorter list of clients with a deeper well of hours, enabling even fuller immersion.

CES Prep 

A tech PR meeting in December is incomplete if someone doesn’t at least mention CES. We have several team members with a decade or more of CES experience, so we know the drill. Our media list is divvied up, and we have plans set for each client. Interested to see what we have planned? Click here!

Eat, Drink and Be Merry 

Planning and strategy are fun, but we can’t get together without having a party. Lucky for us, this all-team meeting coincided with our 24th Holiday Party. Good food and good conversation are what keep our wheels turning. It’s the perfect pick me up before we polish off the year!  

Those are just a few of the important topics we covered in our quick eight hours together! We’re already planning our next opportunity (after CES that is).