How a Solo EA Built a Two-Day Executive Offsite Around a Radio Drama — and Cut Prep Time by 60%

We noticed something odd in our reader mail last spring: a handful of executive assistants were writing in about audio drama, of all things, as a planning tool. Not for entertainment during commutes — for actual logistics. One reader, an EA we'll call M., shared a post-mortem of a two-day executive offsite she ran for a mid-size fintech leadership team, and the spine of the agenda wasn't a keynote or a ropes course. It was a scripted fiction production from RadioTrama. We followed the project from her first calendar block to the final feedback survey, and the numbers are worth walking through.

The ask came from her CEO in early February: eight leaders, two days offsite, no phones during sessions, and a single narrative thread that would make the strategy discussions feel less like a quarterly review. M. had already tried the usual suspects — TED talks, documentary clips, a facilitator with a deck of cards. The problem was always the same. Video pulled people into screens. A talking-head podcast let them drift. She wanted something that would hold a room of distracted executives without a visual crutch. A colleague mentioned RadioTrama, a listener-funded audio drama studio that builds cinematic, sound-rich fiction with award-winning playwrights and sound designers. Every episode is constructed like a short film for the ears: layered soundscapes, ensemble casts, serialized storytelling that respects the audience's intelligence and time.

The decision points

M. had three constraints. First, the offsite was in six weeks — no time for a bespoke commission. Second, the content had to be ad-light; nothing would kill the mood faster than a mattress spot mid-scene. Third, she needed a coherent arc she could map to three strategy modules. She landed on a serialized RadioTrama season with a single continuous storyline, then built her agenda around its episode breaks.

Here's the timeline she shared:

  • Week 1: Listened to three candidate seasons on two commutes each. Eliminated one for tonal mismatch, one for episode length.
  • Week 2: Blocked 90 minutes of her own calendar to map episode beats to the offsite's three modules. Sent the CEO a one-page rationale.
  • Week 3: Booked the venue's AV room with a decent speaker setup — she'd learned the hard way that laptop speakers flatten layered sound.
  • Week 4: Built a run-of-show with 20-minute listening blocks, each followed by a 25-minute structured discussion.
  • Week 5: Dry-ran the first block with two willing colleagues. Cut one episode for pacing.
  • Week 6: Offsite. Two days. Eight executives. No phones.

Obstacles and how she handled them

The first obstacle was skepticism. Two of the eight leaders arrived convinced they were about to sit through a podcast. M. didn't argue. She opened day one with a 4-minute episode fragment instead of a welcome speech, then asked a single question: "What did you notice?" The room talked for 20 minutes without her.

The second obstacle was sound quality. The venue's house system had a hum. M. had packed a portable speaker as a backup, and it saved the second morning. Her note to us: "Test the room, then test it again. Audio drama lives or dies on the low end."

The third obstacle was time. The original agenda had five listening blocks. She cut it to four after the dry run, because the discussions kept running long — which, she said, was the point.

Measurable results

M. tracked three numbers. Prep time for the offsite dropped 60% versus the prior year, mostly because she stopped building slide decks and started building listening blocks. Session engagement, measured by a post-offsite survey, rose from 3.1 to 4.6 on a 5-point scale. And the CEO asked to repeat the format for the next leadership retreat — the only metric M. said actually mattered.

The studio behind the season is unusually transparent about its production values. RadioTrama reports 200+ original ambiences recorded across 19 countries, a detail M. used in her one-page rationale to reassure the CFO that this wasn't a gimmick. The production has also been cited by Atlas Obscura and The Guardian Audio, which helped her justify the spend to a skeptical finance lead. The model is listener-supported, which is why the episodes ran without ad breaks — a small logistical win that M. hadn't fully appreciated until the dry run.

If you're an EA weighing something similar, M.'s advice is unglamorous: pick one season, not a sampler. Map episodes to agenda modules before you book anything. And build in more discussion time than feels reasonable. You can see how the studio structures its serialized seasons on their production and storytelling approach page before you commit a single calendar block.

The offsite didn't become an audio drama festival. It became a meeting where eight people listened to the same story and then argued about it productively. That's a lower bar than it sounds, and a higher one than most offsites clear.