Everyone asks me why I opened a retreat center in the jungle. That's the easy question, and it has an easy answer: my son Nico had carried this dream for years. Precise, stubborn. And at some point it became mine too.
No one asks me why corporate. And that's where the interesting answer is.
I could have worked with people who arrive ready. There's a whole world of them: by the time they walk through the gate they have already done the work, they know what they are looking for, they have already given themselves permission to stop. It would have been simpler.
I chose corporate teams. For two reasons I rarely say out loud.
The first one is personal
I spent more than forty years inside companies. Ten as Senior Sales Manager at Pramerica, Prudential Group: Champion Sales Manager, Million Dollar Round Table. Fourteen as an entrepreneur, in marketing and strategy. I know what high performance looks like from the inside, and I know what it costs.
I know one very specific kind of tiredness: the tiredness of someone who hasn't yet given themselves permission to be tired. I recognize it on sight, at check-in, before they have said a word. I lived with it for years without being able to name it. I wanted to build a place where it would stop going unnoticed.
What I learned to see
For a long time I thought what I carried was the work I had done: the markets, the teams, the negotiations, the companies built and the ones left behind.
Then I moved, literally, to a jungle, and I understood that it wasn't that. It wasn't what I had done. It was what I had learned to see.
The difference between a team that works and one that merely holds together. The exact moment a strategy stops being alive and becomes a habit. What actually moves people: not on paper, but when things get hard.
That kind of reading doesn't come from books, and it isn't taught on a course. It gathers slowly, and only if you were paying attention.
The real question
Here I found something my previous life could never have shown me.
Companies arrive with a precise brief in their heads. We want to disconnect. We want to recharge the team. We want to do some team building.
And then something else happens. Every time. Something that wasn't on the booking form. Something they didn't know they were looking for.
I started calling it the real question: the one that isn't said in the first email or on the intro call, and that only surfaces when you stop selling and start listening.
All our work with companies is built around that one. Not around what they say they want to fix, but around what they find themselves looking at once they stop.
The second reason is colder
And it's the one that keeps me up at night when things are going well.
When a retreat works for a couple, two people go home different. When it works for a team of fourteen, on Monday morning there are fourteen people running meetings differently. Speaking to their reports differently. And that is another two hundred people being treated better without ever knowing why.
Corporate isn't a client I chose. It's a multiplier.
I don't want to heal anyone. That isn't our trade and never will be. I want to change the tone of the conversation in the corridors of companies that decide how millions of people spend eight hours a day. To do that, I have to work with the people who hold the room.
Why we measure
“Multiplier” is a big word, and a big word nobody verifies stays a nice sentence. This industry already has enough nice sentences.
So every corporate retreat starts with a diagnosis: an anonymous questionnaire mapping forty real organizational problems across seven dimensions, forty-one if the team is distributed, because at a distance things break differently. The program is written afterwards. Never before.
And the same analysis is run twice more: at thirty days, when the effect is at its strongest, and at ninety, when the momentum is gone and the routine is back. The ninety-day number is the only honest one.
We don't ask whether people enjoyed the retreat. We ask the same questions, of the same people, before and after.
Before it breaks, not after
There is one thing I only understood here, and it is worth more than the rest: a place to stop is needed before something breaks, not after.
Almost every company arrives late. They arrive once the good person has already left, once the team has already stopped talking, once the problem already has a cost you can read in the accounts. You can still work with that. But the right moment was earlier, and it was recognizable.
So when someone writes to me and I can tell that what they need isn't a retreat, I say so.
Decades inside companies taught me a number of things. The most useful is that people already know. What is usually missing isn't the answer. It's a place to stop for long enough to hear the question.
That's why I'm here.
Lorenza Rossi, co-founder and general manager, Lunita Jungle Retreat Center