On June 5th, we got on a boat.
Our senior team left the office, boarded a yacht at the Manila Yacht Club, and spent the evening on Manila Bay celebrating the people who have stuck around for five or more years. In an industry where most people change jobs every couple of years, that kind of tenure isn’t normal anymore. We wanted it to feel like the big deal it actually is.
Here’s the thing about working at The Ortus Club: we obsess over the goal of an event before we obsess over anything else, and that habit doesn’t switch off just because the guest list is internal. So, before our celebration became a boat day, it went through the same questions every event we host goes through: What is this actually for? Who needs to feel something by the end of it? What’s the one thing people will remember after the event?
What the Brief Would Have Said
If we received a brief for this event, it would have read something like: mark significant tenure milestones in a way that doesn’t feel like a corporate obligation. Make it personal enough that people actually want to be there. And do it in a way that reflects what we do for a living, because if we can’t make our own team feel celebrated, what are we actually doing?
The timing helped a lot. Cannes Lions, the festival of creativity that the entire marketing world watches every June, was right around the corner. The industry was already in the mood for glamour, big gestures, and yes, apparently boats. Cannes Lions has leaned unusually hard into yacht culture this year, with brands chartering vessels along the Croisette specifically for the access and exclusivity they offer. We didn’t plan our boat day around that, but it didn’t hurt that the rest of the industry was about to spend a week proving our instincts right.
Five Years Isn’t Nothing
A lot of the people we celebrated with joined The Ortus Club when the company looked nothing like it does today. They were the first hires on a project, learning the job by doing it, long before there were playbooks or processes to follow. Some of them are training the next generation of managers now.
We didn’t want to gloss over that with a quick toast and move on. Staying somewhere for years, especially right now, is a choice people make on purpose, and we think that deserves more than a short announcement in a town hall meeting.
Marketing Doesn’t Stop at the Office Door
We talk constantly about building communities people actually want to be part of. It would be a little strange if we didn’t try to build that same thing for ourselves. Our boat day wasn’t just a thank-you; it was us applying the same instinct internally that we apply externally every single day: if an experience is worth creating for executives we’ve just met, it’s worth creating for the people who have spent years building the company that makes those executive events possible in the first place.
That’s also honestly part of why we’re writing this. We want people outside The Ortus Club to see what staying here actually looks like, not just hear us say “great culture” in a job posting.
If You’re Reading This Because You’re Job Hunting
This is, in part, an HR post. We’re not going to pretend otherwise. If a team that produces events for a living puts this much thought into celebrating its own people, that should tell you something about what it’s like to actually work here long term. We’re not promising a boat day every year. We are promising that tenure here means something, and that we notice when people put years into this place.
If that sounds like somewhere you’d want to be in five years, we’re hiring!
