CORPORATE TEAM BUILDING LAUNCHES IN LAS VEGAS –MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE STYLE

LAS VEGAS — John and Mary Smith (not their real names) unceremoniously ripped open the envelope that had just arrived at their hotel room overlooking the Las Vegas Strip.

Inside they learned where they were to meet the next day for further instruction. At the rendezvous point a car and driver would take them near the railroad tracks where special agents would brief them on the mission at hand — should they choose to accept it.

A top secret mission in Las Vegas? No. It’s the newly founded company, AdVenture Vegas, with a new kind of game in town – corporate team building.
“It’s where The Amazing Race meets Mission: Impossible,” founder and CEO Chad Hardy said.

His unique approach to team building is clarified on his Web site, www.venturevegas.com.

Hardy comes from an extensive background in entertainment and event planning, producing events in Los Angeles, New York and the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.

As the Smiths arrive at the rendezvous point they find other people they know from their corporate office. They are separated into teams and given a crime pack with a cell phone, camera and case file. Then they go out on the town to complete their assignments.
“Their task could include looking for informants (actors) they must interrogate to get information,” Hardy said. “They use their issued cell phones to text message Headquarters on each assignment. Halfway through the game they learn that one of their own is a spy and they have to figure out who it is before it’s too late!”

The next group coming to Las Vegas, Thorsteinssons LLP, is participating in the Operation: Vegas Baby 007 Edition game, he said.

Thorsteinssons is one of Canada's leading firms of tax lawyers with offices in Vancouver and Toronto. There’s is a partners retreat, where they will meet to talk about the firm's future goals and strategies.

“This is their first trip to Vegas as a group, and for many of them, their first ever Vegas experience,” Hardy said.

The group activities Hardy designs, in this example, are to better acquaint those partners who do not get to regularly work together. They have tax litigators who don't usually work with tax planners and with the distance between Toronto and Vancouver they don’t get to see each on a regular basis Kathy Dheensaw of Thorsteinssons LLP said.

“Their event looks like a page out of Amazing Race than the Income Tax Act,” Dheensaw said.

Thorsteinssons was recently featured in a National Post article about "tax law not for the timid."