What inspires someone to quit a successful IT sales career in the middle of a recession to become a specialist event caterer providing high-quality paella and tapas? Then, go one stage further and create a team-building day out of it?
PA Life caught up with entrepreneur Nick Blythe, owner of Paella Fella, at the recent PA Life Training Day, where he was exhibiting his team-building day. The objective of the Paella Fella activity is simple ? not only will your team bond together, you will learn how to cook the perfect paella.
?Think of it as The Apprentice meets MasterChef with a liberal dose of The Generation Game. It is the perfect team-building exercise,? explains Nick. When he left his business development career in IT sales to set up Paella Fella, he wanted to create something that allowed him to utilise all his experience in a way that would provide positive benefits to businesses and their staff. ?Paella is a communal dish that is great fun and basically I wanted to share the love.?
The concept for the team-building day came about after he took part in the annual International Paella Competition in Sueca in Valencia, Spain in 2013. Nick takes his food and his paella in particular very seriously, having been to Valencia a couple of times as part of his ?paella pilgrimage?.
Nick explains: ?Sueca is the rice capital of Spain. Each year chefs from all over the world gather together with the singular aim of creating and cooking the best Valencian paella. They all have the same ingredients and equipment and have just two hours to cook the dish from scratch over an open fire of orange bows.?
Having taken part, he realised that it is considerably more challenging than most realise and he had this eureka moment when the idea for the team build came to him.
?Given my professional selling background in business development over the years building teams, it occurred to me that the paella competition could be adapted and made into a really useful vehicle for team building.?
The Paella Fella team-building day essentially draws on similar principals to the competition but goes a stage further. Nick has adapted and changed the context of the paella competition into a fun but business-focused team-building exercise. It challenges and tests people?s abilities in a fun way, that focuses on a set of key business behaviours such as building reliance and trust, testing for initiative and adaptability and building confidence.
The customers love it too. Jenny Carter-Vaughan, MD at Expert Insurance Group, explains: ?We were looking for a different way to reward our team for their hard work and at the same time, give them a challenge that was fun for everyone to take part in. However, I wanted it to be fundamentally beneficial to the business as well. The Paella Fella activity gave us exactly that.?
The Paella Fella team-building day takes people out of their comfort zones, their normal working environment and gets them to do things that they wouldn?t do on their own.
If you would like to see how the Paella Fella team-building day can create a buzz for your team, take a look at the video at paellafella.co.uk/team-building/?PFTB=TAMCGG and give the team a call on 01342 713940, or email them at enquire@paellafella.co.uk.
