Hello, beautiful humans. It’s Sarah here, the admin and guest coordinator at EPM. I’m currently in NYC, where things are surreal and uncertain, but we are grateful to be safe and healthy.
As this global crisis continues, people are scrambling to adapt their lives to fit the situation. A huge adjustment for people has been trying to find a way to work with the obstacles of distance. We chatted about this recently and realized, unless you know us personally or have been a regular in our community, you may not know that much about how things work behind the scenes. Since we are on a bit of a pause now, we thought this would be a great time to share more from behind the scenes. As a small company, we love being able to be transparent about how we operate and make things happen. So we decided we should share a little here—some of it might surprise you!
We are coming up on our 10th year!
Erin started this company all by herself in 2011, with 4 retreats at 3 locations in her first year: Marrakesh, Ischia and Tuscany. She kept it going on her own through 2014, by which point she was up to 12 retreats a year! At that point, I joined as an intern, which grew into a part time position and eventually the full time position I have now. She envisioned this company as travel based mindfulness with a charitable component, and it has kept those core founding principles. In addition to adding to our list of locations, we have already partnered with 9 different non-profits around the world, and the list keeps growing.
Behind the scenes, we are still a very small company.
Did you know the full time staff at EPM is 2 people? Yes. You heard me right. It’s Erin and myself. Erin Lewis, our founder, is still running the show over here—envisioning our future, scouting and planning the retreats, making all major decisions and leading a majority of the retreats on the calendar. I handle all guest communication, social media, blog, outreach and administrative duties. There is a lot of crossover and communication to make all of it (hopefully) appear seamless. Erin’s goal is to run a lean company and keep costs as low as possible for guests, and this is one of the ways to do it.
We have been working remotely all along.
It’s been crazy watching people scramble to move their work to online, since we have been doing it the whole time! You may know that Erin lives in Italy, while I live in NYC (where we met), so we communicate via video conference calls, email and text! We line up our times of communication to take the time difference into account and stay in touch for times we will be “out of office.” We respect a work/life balance, but for both of us, this is more than a job, so we tend to be online a lot more than a normal office worker. So aside from no longer being able to work out of my neighborhood cafe, nothing has changed for us in terms of communication.
We have a network of collaborators all over the world.
Currently, we have collaborators in Canada, the US, Italy, Morocco, and the list is growing! We have an artist, a sommelier, a life coach, a meditation teacher, a tea ceremony expert, an enneagram coach and yoga teachers as co-leaders for our retreats. Erin always wanted this to be more than just asana (the physical practice of yoga), so we expanded over the years to other activities that create mindfulness.
Do you have any questions about our company or how we work? We have time to answer! Let us know in the comments if you have questions for us.