the $500k tropical retreat that went completely off the rails

Happy Friday! ✌️

The Wall Street Journal just ran a wild story about a tech company called Plex...

And their 2017 "Survivor"-themed corporate retreat in Honduras.

Here’s the gist:

The company spent $500,000 to fly 120 employees out for a whole week of carefully planned team-building activities on a tropical island.

What could go wrong?

A lot, as it turns out.

For starters:

The CEO got E coli from a salad the moment everyone arrived and spent the week in his hotel room hooked up to an IV drip.

(He was warned not to eat the vegetables, which he ignored lol)

They hired a former Navy SEAL to run team building drills...

And proceeded to have a group of out-of-shape tech workers crawling through the sand in 100-degree heat until people started passing out.

Yikes.

One woman landed on a fire ant hill and got hives all over her legs…

But the resort's medical bay was out of oral antihistamine...

So they had to inject it into her butt cheek instead.

Another software engineer woke up one morning, shuffled into his bathroom...

Only to find a Mexican hairy dwarf porcupine sitting in his shower stall.

(Apparently it climbed a tree and fell through the ceiling overnight.)

Not to mention two planes full of employees got stranded on a tiny island after dark because the runway had no lights.

In other words:

Mistakes were made.

The retreat was pretty much total chaos from the moment it began.

And yet...

Every single person interviewed said it was one of the most memorable experiences of their lives.

They're still close because of it.

Even though the expensive, elaborate, "perfectly engineered" plan fell apart completely...

The chaos that replaced it delivered exactly what $500k was supposed to buy.

Funny how that works.

Anyway:

I think about this a lot when it comes to email marketing.

Because a lot of business owners are running their own version of the Honduras retreat...

Spending serious time, money, and effort on the elaborate and high-maintenance approach…

Designing fancy email templates…

Building out complicated automations…

And obsessing over send times.

Meanwhile…

They ignore the simpler and scrappier approach:

Sending a simple plain-text email built around an entertaining story each day.

If you’ve got a list of people who already know, like, and trust you…

Don’t let the elaborate and high-maintenance approach seduce you.

Because for the people I work with…

The simple and scrappy approach of Email Storyselling quietly outperforms everything else in their marketing stack.

That's essentially what EmailStoryselling.ai is built to help you do...

Write emails that connect, entertain, and sell, without spending hours staring at a blank page.

So if you want to make more sales from your email list…

Without adding more complexity to your already full plate…

Then tap below to learn more:

→ Build and monetize your list with EmailStoryselling.ai

Jim Hamilton

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