January Kickoff Meetings

In January every year my team plans Kickoff meetings to get our distributors excited and ready for all the fun things we are focusing on during the year.  We do one in Los Angeles and one in Orlando, back to back weeks.  Thankfully we are all good friends and enjoy working together, otherwise things could get ugly after that much travel.  This was my first time experiencing Kickoffs and I thought it was a lot of fun to have events of a different scale in different places.  We incorporated a lot of fun stuff to promote our new product Vitality, like a jumping photo shoot and a Kinect station.  Who wouldn't love to play Kinect at work?  In LA our event was at the Los Angeles Convention Center, our loading dock was against the player entrance to the Staples Center where both the Clippers and Lakers played during our event.  We also got to stay at the amazing JW Marriott downtown, which is very beautiful, modern, and has amazing food.  LA Live is a brilliant complex with a million places to eat and hang out downtown.  It was nice to be so close to all of that stuff that was open late when we were done working.  The most disappointing thing about LA was finding out that if we had gone to Beverly Hills to get Sprinkles cupcakes the night before we left, we would have seen the whole set up for the Golden Globes!  I couldn't believe I flew out of LA on an award show day, but I guess I'll just have to keep dreaming of the day I get to plan one of those!

I was home less than 36 hours when we left for Orlando, just enough time for some laundry and Kneader's french toast.  Orlando was fun because the event was in the Walt Disney World Hilton, Downtown Disney was right across the street!  Orlando turned out to be much colder than LA, which was disappointing.  I spent the majority of my time at both events working the Run for Malawi Challenge table.  We are encouraging everyone (distributors, friends, employees) to join our challenge on Nike.com and help us accrue miles towards our goal of 50,000 by the end of June.  For ever 1000 miles our group runs, Nu Skin is donating 1 secondary education scholarship for a child in Malawi through our non-profit Force for Good Foundation.  I worked on fund raising for Malawi last fall and feel like I have a pretty good understanding of the great needs our foundation is fulfilling.  I think this project is really cool, education is so important yet unobtainable for a lot of people. 

Our mantra right now is Go Double, so naturally we had to have the National Champion double dutch team perform.  This is my friend Kyle jumping in during their practice.  He was a natural.

One important lesson I learned on these two trips was that I am incapable of jumping and not making a stupid face.  You cannot imagine how many of these pictures I took that are so much more embarrassing than the two I posted.  All in all, it was a crazy month but a ton of fun.  The three days we stayed in Orland after the event were a well deserved break from two weeks of hard work.  Our hours are long and demanding, but we get to have a lot of deliriously funny nights eating at Denny's, walking around a new place, or just sitting around the pool telling good stories.  10 months in and I still love this job.

Here are a few videos from our events.  The first is the Palindrome Kyle did an amazing job writing.  He just thought of it one day and did it, which is incredible to me.  The second is an amazing video we made of all the staff who work directly with our distributors. They are the people we work with the most on our trips and events, so I think you'll see why we have so much fun at work (start watching around 1:13). The last one is just a highlight with some clips of the speakers and things from LA.  Our keynote speaker has a great clip at the end of the video that is very Hitch.