Colorado Facilitator
Facilitated planning, leadership and team sessions for organizations across the Front Range and the mountains.
We create sessions that are greater than the sum of their parts, guided by award-winning facilitators.
- 110,000+people facilitated globally
- Award-winningfacilitators
- Mile high and higherin person, virtual or hybrid
We design sessions that leave teams with shared clarity, specific commitments, and the momentum to follow through.
Trusted by teams across the public, private and non-profit sectors
Colorado
Facilitation for Colorado teams, on the Front Range and above it
Positive Impact facilitates strategic planning, leadership development, team retreats, and change management for organizations across Colorado. This is one of the few markets where the physical setting genuinely changes how a session should be built, because a good share of the work here happens well above the elevation your visiting participants live at.
If your session is specifically for a team in the Denver metro, our Denver page goes into more detail on that market. This page covers the state, including the mountain towns where a great many corporate retreats actually happen. We are a Canadian firm, a 1% for the Planet member, and pursuing B Corp certification rather than holding it.
What we do
The areas we're called in for most
Every engagement starts with your context. If your challenge isn't listed here, ask us anyway.
Strategic Planning
Colorado organizations plan against fast growth and a workforce that moved here for the place as much as the job. We facilitate the process that turns that into a short list with owners and dates, rather than a set of ambitions everyone endorses and nobody schedules.
Learn moreCommunication Training & COMS
Our own communication styles framework, giving teams a common language for how they each work. Useful on teams assembled quickly from people who arrived from somewhere else and brought that place's working habits with them.
Learn moreTeam Development & Team Building
Retreats, offsites and tailored sessions that build the trust and psychological safety strong teams depend on. Colorado is one of the great offsite destinations in North America, and it needs a little more design thought than most, for reasons set out below.
Culture & Engagement
From vision and values work to culture shifts, we help turn stated values into observable commitments, including in organizations that grew faster than their culture had time to settle.
Leadership Development & Executive Coaching
Hands-on coaching and development for managers and executives, often people promoted quickly in a growing organization who are now leading colleagues who were peers last year.
Corporate Training
Participant-led training designed around your people, with tools that stay useful long after the session ends. Delivered on the Front Range, in the mountains, or virtually when a full day is more than the question needs.
Every engagement we run is shaped around your team. Share what you're working on and we'll build the right session around it.
Share what you're working onHow We Facilitate
Sessions that turn conversation into a plan your team can actually run with
There's no prepared script. We guide the process, your team brings the expertise, and together we build toward a plan your people helped shape and will actually use.
Here that often means designing around what the room can actually do on the day it is in, rather than what an agenda looks like on paper at sea level. Facilitator-guided, participant-led, and paced for the altitude the session is happening at.
Get in Touch
Why work with us
Three ways teams here engage a facilitator
Every engagement is customizable, but most start in one of these shapes.
Quarterly or monthly
Ongoing Partnership
A facilitator who gets to know your team over time, so trust deepens and development compounds instead of starting fresh each session. Mostly virtual, anchored by one or two in-person days a year.
Best for: making development a habit rather than a one-off.
Ask about a partnershipMulti-day, immersive
Multi-Day Offsite
Extended session for strategic planning, leadership development or a culture shift. When we're flying east anyway, two days costs far less per day than one.
Best for: bigger decisions that need room to breathe.
Talk about an offsiteHalf-day to full-day
Single Workshop
A focused session built around one goal, whether that's a decision, a kickoff, or a skill like communications or building trust and psychological safety.
Best for: teams that know exactly what they need to work through.
Ask about a workshop
How we facilitate
A clear path from first call to follow-through
Each engagement follows a similar path, and includes the same care, from your first call to the work that carries on after we fly home.
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Discovery
A call to understand your context, your goals, where the session will be held, and where your people are flying in from.
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Design
Customized session design, built around your team, not a template.
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Facilitation
An experienced facilitator in the room or online, and in the room the day before.
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Materials
Materials and tools your team can keep using afterward.
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Follow-up
A summary with commitments and clear next steps.
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Support
Optional support to help momentum carry past the session.
Why facilitation?
How a team works together shapes everything it creates.
$100 Million
is the yearly cost for big companies for staff being in pointless meetings.
65%
of senior managers say that meetings keep them from completing their own work.
58%
of Americans would rather go to a doctor's appointment than attend a work meeting.
75%
of decision-makers feel that collaboration needs to be improved in their companies.
Forrester Research, 2021
Outcomes
What your team walks away with
Better decisions, made together
Decisions the whole room actually gets behind, instead of quiet disagreement that surfaces later in the parking lot.
Real buy-in
Because people helped shape the outcome, they leave genuinely invested in it, not just told what was decided.
Stronger team connection
The kind of trust and psychological safety that lets a fast-growing team say out loud which parts of how it works are no longer working.
Action that sticks
Clear commitments and ownership that carry into Monday morning, not just good intentions on the day.
Fresh thinking and better ideas
Space for your team's best thinking to surface, including ideas that might never have come up otherwise.
A record everyone can point at
A written summary of what was decided, who owns it, and by when. Useful when half the group has to brief a site that wasn't in the room.
Client stories
Real teams, real outcomes
Most of our work is Canadian, and we won't pretend otherwise. The craft travels; these are the kinds of sessions we run. They're the kinds of sessions we run and the outcomes teams point to afterward.
What our clients say
It was a pleasure to work with Will and Positive Impact. I was both inspired and empowered to co-deliver a meaningful offsite. Their positive incite into leadership performance and emotional resilience gave me clear direction and tactical tools I could apply to my workplace right away. I thoroughly look forward to working with Will again.
- Haley Daniels
Olympian and Motivational Speaker
Thanks for your incredible support, kindness, professionalism, and realness.
It was my sincere pleasure and privilege to work with you on our event.
You are a unique and special human, and I’m grateful that our paths crossed on this project, and look forward to the next time.
- Shauna Grinke, MBA, CPHR
Vice President - People and CultureThe workshop was an incredibly valuable experience for our team — the facilitator created an open, engaging environment that encouraged honest discussion and collaboration. The content was thoughtfully tailored to our team’s specific goals, making the session both relevant and actionable. We’re excited to continue partnering with Positive Impact to build on the great momentum sparked in this session.
- Shannon Charbonneau
Account Director
Treetop Marketing and Promotion Inc.
I’m leaving our session with a sense of optimism that I haven’t had in a while. It was time extremely well spent! I am sure that we all feel much closer and more connected.
- Participant
MDA Geointelligence Engineering Leadership SummitThe environment that was created made me feel comfortable to participate and collaborate with my colleagues. It was very well organized. I liked the outcome of the brainstorm sessions and warmup activities.
- ParticipantThe level of engagement and pace of the training was excellent. Like the fact that this workshop was trainer-guided, but participants lead!
- ParticipantFantastic facilitating most importantly Will understood when to let us talk and when to corral us back on track. Excellent value this afternoon.
- Engagement Workshop Participant
100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
We stand behind the quality of our work with complete confidence. If you're not fully satisfied with the results, we'll make it right.
Your trust matters more to us, and our guarantee acknowledges our belief that you deserve to feel confident in every investment you make with us. That's a standard we hold ourselves to, every time.
Ready to talk about your team?
Get in TouchAround the region
Where sessions happen, and what usually fits
Colorado sessions divide into two kinds: those on the Front Range, which behave like sessions anywhere, and those in the mountains, which do not.
| Region | Organizations based there | Format that usually fits |
|---|---|---|
| Denver metro, 5,280 ft | Energy, aerospace and defense, technology, financial and professional services, health systems, federal and state agencies | In person, and the deepest pool of meeting space in the state. See our Denver facilitator page for more on that market. |
| Boulder and the north Front Range, 5,300 to 5,400 ft | Research institutes and higher education, aerospace, biotechnology, climate and environmental science, technology | In person. Behaves like a normal session, and worth choosing when the group is research-led and would rather not be downtown. |
| Colorado Springs and the south, about 6,000 ft | Defense and space, cybersecurity, health systems, higher education, non-profits and associations | In person. Its own market rather than a Denver suburb, and an hour and a half from the city, so worth its own day. |
| Mountain towns: Vail, Breckenridge, Keystone, Aspen, 7,900 to 9,600 ft | Retreat and conference venues, resort and hospitality operators, municipal and county teams | Multi-day, and the reason the section below exists. This is where an agenda designed at sea level stops working. |
| Western Slope and the mountain communities | Agriculture and ranching, energy, health and education, county and municipal teams, tourism operators | In person for an anchor session, virtual for follow-ups. Distances are real here and we build the travel into the scope rather than burying it. |
A local detail that matters
Nobody plans a mountain retreat around the altitude, and they should
Colorado is one of the best offsite destinations in North America, which is why so many companies fly a leadership team into Vail or Breckenridge for two days. Those towns sit somewhere between roughly 7,900 and 9,600 feet. The Institute for Altitude Medicine reports that between 15 and 40% of visitors sleeping at 8,000 feet or higher in Colorado experience acute mountain sickness, with the highest rates at the highest resorts, and cites a survey at a 9,800 foot resort where 60% of visitors developed a headache.
Set that against how offsites are usually built. Everyone flies in on day one, and the facilitator front-loads the hardest conversation into the first full morning while people are supposedly fresh. In a mountain venue a meaningful share of that room slept badly, has a headache, and is not at their best, and none of them will say so because it sounds like a complaint about a trip everybody else is enjoying. The session then reads that flatness as disengagement or resistance, which it is not.
The design answers are simple once the problem is named. We put the lightest content on the first afternoon and the hardest conversation on the second morning, once people have had a night. Where the schedule allows, we suggest an intermediate night at Denver's elevation before going up, which the same source notes substantially lowers the incidence. Working blocks on day one are shorter than they would be at sea level. And we say out loud at the start that the altitude is a real factor, because naming it lets someone admit they slept badly instead of quietly withdrawing. To be clear, this is session design and not medical advice. Anything about your people's health belongs with your own advisers, and we would say so on the first call.
Featured Workshops
Each of these runs in person, virtually, or as a hybrid, and the multi-day versions are where the altitude planning above matters most.
COMS Communication Styles
COMS is our own communication styles assessment, grounded in research and facilitated by our team. It gives your people a shared way to talk about how they each work, so different styles become an advantage instead of a source of friction.
It's especially useful on teams assembled quickly from people who arrived from elsewhere, since each brought a different set of working habits and nobody has agreed which ones the organization now uses.
Eight questions, one simple grid, and a reference the whole team can point at months later.
Learn more
Strategic Planning
This is where your team gets a real say in shaping and carrying out the organization's direction, landing on initiatives that actually move forward.
Colorado organizations plan against fast growth and a workforce that moved here for the place as much as the job. We facilitate the process that turns that into a short list with owners and dates, rather than a set of ambitions everyone endorses and nobody schedules.
A strategic plan is a living, breathing document. We stay involved as it plays out over the following months and years.
Learn more
5 Dysfunctions of a Team
This session takes a good team and helps make it excellent. We draw on Patrick Lencioni's well-known framework, approached through an appreciative inquiry lens that starts with what's already working.
It lands well as the anchor of a mountain retreat, since trust is built in unstructured time and a two-night offsite is the one format that reliably provides it. The five behaviors, trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results, are all on the table.
Your people walk away with shared language for how they work together, and a plan for moving forward that they built themselves.
Learn more
Our Core Team
Great content is only made better by great facilitators
Will Chambers
Founder & Facilitator
Award-winning facilitator and Founder of Positive Impact, with sessions delivered to tens of thousands of people. Will focuses on strategy, leadership, team dynamics and communication, turning concepts into clear, committed action.
More about Will
Lindsay Davis
Coach & Strategist
Award-winning coach and entrepreneurial guide, with experience spanning rural entrepreneurs in Africa to multimillion-dollar companies. Helps leaders focus on what matters most and build the resilience to anticipate challenges and move through them.
More about LindsayMichael Lorsch
Facilitator & Learning Consultant
Brings facilitation and learning design from theatre stages to executive boardrooms, including in-house work with lululemon. Blends mindfulness, relationship systems and human-centerd design to keep people at the center of every session.
More about Michael
Jason Maraschiello
Coach & Facilitator
Certified life and corporate coach, mindfulness and meditation teacher. Uses mindfulness and effective communication to help people set manageable goals, find work-life balance and build the support to follow through.
More about Jason
For work in Colorado we assign one lead facilitator who travels for the session and stays with you through the follow-up, rather than handing you to a different person each time. Beyond the core team, we draw on a wider network of facilitators and subject-matter experts, matched to the goals, sector, and people of each engagement.
Before you book
Worth reading first
Six pieces that answer the questions most teams have before a first session.
- Market page Facilitation in Denver Read the guide
- Offsites How a facilitator benefits your next offsite Read the guide
- Getting ready How to prepare your team for a facilitated session Read the guide
- Strategic planning Why organize a strategic planning session Read the guide
- Afterwards Keeping momentum after the session ends Read the guide
- Honest advice When not to hire a facilitator, and what to do instead Read the guide
Frequently Asked Questions
Facilitation in Colorado
We're planning a retreat in the mountains. Does the altitude actually matter?
Yes, and it is the most common thing we see left out of an offsite plan. Vail, Breckenridge, Keystone and Aspen sit roughly between 7,900 and 9,600 feet. The Institute for Altitude Medicine reports that 15 to 40% of visitors sleeping at 8,000 feet or higher in Colorado experience acute mountain sickness, highest at the highest resorts. That is a design input, not a reason to avoid the mountains. To be clear, this is session design rather than medical advice, and anything about your people's health belongs with your own advisers.
So how should we schedule the days?
Lightest content on the first afternoon, hardest conversation on the second morning once people have had a night. The instinct is the opposite, front-loading the difficult work while everyone is supposedly fresh, and in a mountain venue that puts your most important hour in front of a room that slept badly. Where the schedule allows, a night at Denver's elevation before going up substantially lowers the incidence, according to the same source.
Won't people just say if they're struggling?
Usually not, and that is the part worth planning for. Admitting you feel rough sounds like complaining about a trip everyone else is enjoying, so people go quiet instead. A facilitator who does not know to expect that reads the flatness as disengagement or resistance, which it is not. We name the altitude out loud at the start, because naming it gives someone permission to say they slept badly rather than quietly withdrawing.
Should I be on this page or the Denver one?
If your team sits in the Denver metro and the session will be there, go to the Denver page, which covers that market in more detail. This page covers the state, including Boulder, Colorado Springs, the Western Slope, and the mountain towns where a great many corporate retreats actually happen.
Are your facilitators based in Colorado?
No. Our facilitators travel to Colorado for in-person work, and we'd rather say that plainly than imply a local office we don't have. It also means we arrive with no history with anyone in the room and no stake in which side wins, which in a senior group is often the more useful half of being an outsider.
You're a Canadian firm. Does that complicate the contracting?
Less than people expect. We invoice in the currency you prefer, and for a US client the exchange rate has generally worked in your favor. Your finance team will likely ask us for a W-8BEN-E, which is routine and which we complete. We won't give you tax or legal advice about any of it, because that's your finance team's call rather than ours. We are also a 1% for the Planet member and pursuing B Corp certification rather than holding it.
What kinds of organizations do you work with here?
Leadership teams, boards, and departments across private, public, and non-profit organizations. Across Colorado that tends to mean energy, aerospace and defense, technology, health systems, research institutes and higher education, financial and professional services, federal and state agencies, county and municipal teams, and resort and hospitality operators in the mountains. Group size ranges from an executive team of eight to a leadership summit of sixty.
How far ahead should we book?
Six to eight weeks for a Front Range session. Considerably longer for a mountain retreat, because the venue drives the timeline rather than our calendar. Resort conference space books up well in advance for peak periods, and if you want specific dates it is worth starting six months out. Building in an acclimatization night also means you are booking one more night than you might have planned.
Let's talk about your team
Tell us what you're working through, where you're thinking of holding it, and where your people are flying in from, and we'll tell you honestly whether facilitation is the right tool and what the session should look like.
Get in Touch
