Our day jobs involve quickly fixing some of the toughest technical (and political) challenges that have stymied companies for months.  We’re under very high pressure to produce amazing results quickly, and we pride ourselves on knocking it out of the park every time.

And forget the client gigs – keeping any small business running is stressful.  Jeremiah, Kendra, and I are constantly juggling balls in the air to deal with contracts, lawyers, accountants, marketing, payroll, and of course, sales.  There’s so many months where I look back and go, “What the hell just happened?”

There’s even stress being an employee of a small company.  Jes Schultz Borland took a gamble on us when she signed on as Employee #1.  Small companies fail all the time with financial, political, and business problems. She took a risk, and we want to reward that risk.  We start with a killer benefits package that includes six weeks paid vacation, two paid conferences, MVP Summit paid travel & time off, and much more.

We get to go to a lot of conferences, but… conferences aren’t vacations for us at all.  We can’t imagine going to conferences without volunteering to present and give back, which means that we’re stressing out over our presentations and demos.  Plus, we end up spending all our after-hours time attending cool community events and catching up with our buddies – and we never get to catch up with each other.  That’s where our retreat comes in.

The Brent Ozar Unlimited® Company Retreat

Last year we had a great time touring Alaska on SQLCruise, but this year we’re flying the other direction.

We’re spending ten days in Mexico at Casa Panga, a beach house about 45 minutes away from Cabo’s spring break crowds.  Just us, our loved ones, Ernie, and … the house’s live-in staff to bring us meals and margaritas.

We’ll talk about what we’ve learned in the past year, what we want to do next, how we can improve the business, and how we can grow the company so we can hire more friends – and bring them along to the next retreat.  We’re not playing around when we say we wish you were here with us.