A trip like this takes a ton of planning. You have to bring enough food, clothes, cooking materials etc. to last for seven days and it all needs to fit on your boat. This is a full pack in pack out trip. There are no bathrooms or fire rings. Let's put this in perspective for you in case you don't get it; you have to pack out everything including human waste and ash from your fire. There, ok, now you probably got it. A long float trip much like a business takes a ton of planning to make it a success.
Things always go wrong, very rarely do they go 100% right so you need to be ready. For example, you may go to bed with four rafts tied to the bank and wake up to only three (yes that happened). So after you yell about it you get your head together and assess the situation. What will we do if we don't find the raft? Will we die? No we won't die, we can make do. As we went through the situation and the plan the owner of the missing raft said "man am I glad my wife isn't here." As a team we stayed pretty positive about it and worked together to fix the problem. Negativity rarely results in anything good when something goes wrong. I stayed positive and told the owner that we would find it. We packed up, went down river and about a mile down river there was his raft, fully in tact no issues. When things go wrong in your business you need to keep your cool. Rarely are things that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. Assess the situation and work with your team to come up with a solution.
Having well-rounded and experienced people on the team is essential. I was lucky enough to go with someone that has 18 years of experience running his own raft company. They were dialed in to say the least. I can row a raft because I fish a lot, but whitewater is a whole other ball game. I wasn't very confident in my rowing skills on this trip in many sections, but I had a good experienced team to help me through. Just being around experienced individuals teaches you a lot about how to be successful. When you look at your business and your team you have all sorts of different levels of experience don't you? You have to start getting experience at some point so you probably have some employees that are less experienced than others. Then you have some heavy hitters on the crew that have more experience. A successful business has a well-rounded team with various levels of experience that work together towards a common goal.
Sometimes an outside perspective on your business like a river trip can do wonders for you and your business. Stepping away from the business and examining it from different perspective can really open your eyes. If you are finding you and your business stuck maybe a fresh outlook on it will put you back on track.