Eureka: Fresh thinking starts in the Bavarian Alps

0:14You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Great businesses are built on strong teams and a corporate getaway is often seen as the ideal way to bring people together to foster relationships and shape a company's future. But while well-meaning, these events can be pretty far from fun. Airless, windowless, often soulless hotel meeting rooms on the outskirts of a town are certainly not conducive to creative thinking. But what if your business brain and body were refreshed by alpine pastures and mountain air?

0:55Well, Monocle's Emma Nelson has been to Bavaria to meet the couple behind Vondel, a family business where healthy entrepreneurship is definitely on the menu.

1:11It's the first morning of your company's away day. But you're not in a crummy hotel on a roundabout. your bedroom did not look out onto a car park, the windows opened fully, and a moment ago you might just have walked past the cow that supplied the milk for your coffee.

1:31Because you're following a gravel road up through an alpine pasture, and at the top of the hill, this is waiting for you.

1:48Just two hours after you pull up at Vandal, a conference centre above the Bavarian town of Ruh Polding, apparently you don't just feel brighter and more relaxed. The owner says visitors actually look different. The town is called Ruh Polding, which means Ruh is getting quiet, Pol is the centre and Ding is the thing. So this is the getting quiet thing here and that's exactly what happens. People come here and within two or three hours they come down, they relieve, they enjoy all the anger, all the pressure, all of that is a relief. I'm Monica Harlinghausen-Smith and I live at Wonderful Wandel, which is also a boutique seminar hotel, a farm and so much more.

2:33And I'm Kurt Simon Harlinghausen. I live also with my wonderful wife and I do everything with digital and I'm too curious not to try out from farming over prototyping and have a lot of workshops here with cool people. Simon is a former managing director of Miele X, the digital arm of the white goods giant. When Nottaway working as a corporate consultant, you're more likely to see him here.

3:05That's Simon on his tractor. His wife, Monica, is a business author and corporate leadership coach. Between them, they have decades of experiences of bad conferences. Usually, if you go on a retreat with your company, you end up in some kind of a hotel, which is a bigger institution where you have a lot of different people that you don't know. You have a very common room where you have to stay, the conference room. The lighting isn't perfect. The air is usually not good. and you have just so many different impressions that hinder you in focusing on your real topic. Soulless is the typical conference environment.

3:43It's a big chain, bad food, bad seats, bad technology. So all of that, we said, no, no, no, it's not going to happen here. So the couple decided on a few founding principles for a new kind of corporate retreat. We have the best sound, we have the best video, we have the best nature, best air. amazing local food. And what is the add-on is this is a family business. So you get the spirit, the engagement, people love what they bring to the table and people join us here. Just describe what we have here. Well, here we have a farmhouse which is completely modernized, which basically hosts a family plus a group of 8 to 24 people who can come here and exchange their ideas views, visions and learn from each other.

4:34As we found this house being from 1717, there was nothing there. So we thought, wow, that's an opportunity.

4:46Justus Pfeiffer is the mayor of Ruopolding. He isn't what you might expect when you meet him. There's not a grey hair on his head, for starters. He's 35 years old and before he officiated weddings and revamped the town's parking system, Justus was a NATO fighter pilot. I'd been in office for two months, maybe. And then Simon, he approached me in my office and said, well, Mr. Pfeiffer, we have an idea. We bought this old historic farm and farmhouse, and now we want to develop it into something new. I was really sceptical because often we have investors who want to do something new and they have huge ideas.

5:27And Simon was different. He was brought up as a child here in Ruppelding, so he knew how the people, how the different sporting clubs, how the tradition works here in Ruppelding, or how community works, and so he knew how he had to deal with the locals. So Wandel, a play on the German word for change, was built. The transformation was tough, with tradition dictating every step of the process. The 300-year-old wooden pillars and beams that had held the building together could not be moved one inch, so they had to be restored on site. Within an old place, they reinvented remote working. We see it as a European hub.

6:12Salzburg is an airport, Munich is close by, but we have all the peas from the countryside. In the first they say, wow, because it's very weird. You come, you drive through a valley, then it's a narrow road, and then at the end you end up at a house, and you enter and then there's this kind of bar and conference room and so much wood and just a nice smell. And this is the first impression. It's like, wow, what is this? Every room is different, as every human is, every perspective is, every situation is. And so with that, there's nothing standard, but that's life.

6:51When the presentation and performance expert Marcus Brown was looking for a location for a summit for senior leaders to perfect their public speaking skills, he chose Vandal. Well, I think the problem that most of these conventional conference centres have is that they're generic spaces that have been created to house large-scale generic events. The halls are full of hundreds or thousands of people, the lighting's terrible, the air's even worse, grabbing a coffee or going to the toilet can prove to be quite challenging. And if you bundle all of that together, you have something which is a very, very stressful experience, low quality and not special or spectacular or intimate at all.

7:33The result was the speakery summit, with a meeting room that looked over rolling pastures, a backdrop of dramatic alpine peaks, and with bedrooms that had their own sauna. The lanyards, the curse of the conference, were handmade from the local pine forest. There was even a performance by children from the local Tracht Association.

7:57And like so many hotels where supplies are brought in from miles away in a lorry, the community is very much what drives what's on offer here. From the local brewery, the videographer and even the umpar band. Calling upon local resources is just part of the whole scheme and it benefits the town too. On the morning of our visit, Justus Pfeiffer was holding a meeting of the town's gemeinder, the municipal authority in the main room. Down in the village there are people who the phone is ringing and somebody comes up in the city hall into my office and says, oh, I have a problem with this fence and there's something and can you help me?

8:35Here we are, we're not in the village town, but we are for us. We are for us and we have a clear mind and can go into the topics very deep and in detail.

8:49Creating such a harmonious place takes hard work. The building is still being adapted to fit the rules governing the local landscape. But more astute leaders could allow Monika and Simon's peaceful yet ambitious nature to rub off on them a little. At Vandal, Monika and Simon have conquered the summit. For Monocle, in RuPaul, in Bavaria, I'm Emma Nelson.

9:29Thanks, Emma. And you can find out more by heading to Vandal.com. And that's all for this episode of Eureka. We'll be back at the same time next week. The programme's produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. Listen again and find out more at the website, monocle.com. and if you'd like to get in touch, email Laura on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye and thanks for listening to Eureka.