Team Building Rescue
We are Sandstone Limited of the United Kingdom and Global Team Building is our online brand. But it wasn’t always so. Our first online team building activities were showcased under a different brand. Team Building Rescue. So, we thought we’d use this post to tell you a little bit about how and why Team Building Rescue morphed into Global Team Building.
We started corporate life way back in 1992 and our focus in those days was on training. Probably even then our greatest passion was promoting good teamwork. As the millennium drew to a close we started moving into innovative team building. All our team building activities were delivered in person in those days. Remote teams were up and coming, though, and we started planning so that we could offer virtually delivered options. But we were just too busy to turn our great ideas into reality.
Crash!
Then the 2008 global financial crash happened. And suddenly we weren’t quite as busy. So, we had the time to develop the first of our remote activities. It was a development-focused activity, and we called it Space Rescue. And it is still going strong today! It was (and is!) an automated activity that didn’t need us to facilitate it. Which kept the cost down. And it had a classic team building activity style. A bunch of people were in difficulty and needed a team of people to rescue them. How they went about tackling that challenge was the mechanism that delivered both team fun and team learning.
At that time, we thought that it would have a wider appeal than to only remote teams. The global financial crisis had a big impact on training budgets and the event industry as a whole. We thought that an automated activity that kept the cost low would be of interested to co-located teams as much as remote teams. Budgets may have reduced, but the need for morale-boosting team building was higher than ever at the time. And so it proved. Space Rescue proved to be a big hit. We were running for teams with sizes ranging from 4 people to over 1,200 in no time.
Brand
We needed a brand to market Space Rescue by. And we came up with Team Building Rescue. It seemed appropriate. With the help of our then online marketing partners, Red Evolution (still highly recommended by the way!), we bought the teambuildingrescue.com domain and put Space Rescue front and centre. Our intention was always to develop the site with new activities and that we did as we started to expand our portfolio. MiniTreasure (also still available) came next and we added it to the site. MiniTreasure was swiftly followed by VirtuWall (you guessed it – another still available).
But our newer activities, as they were then, had no element of rescue in them. MiniTreasure is a fun treasure hunt and VirtuWall, even in its infancy compared with the comprehensive activity platform it has since become, needed no one to be rescued. Team Building Rescue was, simply, no longer sufficiently descriptive of what our activities offered. After much soul searching – no one likes killing off a first child! – Global Team Building was born. A then new brand that was not only descriptive of what we offered then but broad enough to be descriptive of what was to come.
It doesn’t matter where a team is based or how spread out it is. Anywhere in the world. We’re very confident that Global Team Building has options that will work for you.
