Bandwidth & the BCG

As has been mentioned before, I am no longer a n=1 business.  One of my proudest achievements of the last 12-18 months is the emergence of a team of focused, committed, high-performing associates who deliver my stuff at least as well as me.  Not only do my colleagues treat the work as seriously as I ever did, their fresh eyes see innovations and opportunities that have been passing pass me by.

I deliberately hand over interesting projects and not only when I can’t be in two places at once.  In the medium term this should expand our active client base but for the moment I am embracing personal financial pain in order to radically change my working life.

I am freeing up bandwidth to chase opportunities in an entirely new domain; by this time next year I plan to describe myself as the CMO of a tech start-up.  I will still own and operate a pharma consulting company but it will no longer be the first line of my LinkedIn profile.  In BCG matrix terms I am relegating my old business to ‘cash cow’ status in order to make room for a ‘star’.

I’m excited at the prospect of solving brand new problems in an unfamiliar commercial space.  I’m looking forward to being ‘inexperienced’.

I’m reminded of advice given to me by an improviser in 1991, the year I quit working for other people...

Enjoy not knowing

Babies. Making idiots of us all since, well, forever

We have a baby.  Our daughter born six months ago is a happy, smiley constant source of joy to my wife and me. The story of her provenance is a long and tortuous one but no matter, this is not that tale.  She is here now and is exactly as she should be. 

Today's thought is a follow-on from last week's idea that one of the roles played by my smarter self is to remain vigilant in the face of the dumber version.  There are recognisable patterns: fatigue levels differ on Tuesday morning as against Thursday night and I try to allocate tasks appropriately.

One definition of 'experience' might be to identify, and to operate within, the rhythms of one's working life.

But babies are arrhythmic.  The edicts of Gina Ford notwithstanding, they only know what they want when they want it.  We do our best to anticipate and shape our daughter's rotating need for food, clean clothes, attention, distraction and sleep.  'Shaping' being a euphemism for ignoring her demands for food and attention for at least a little while.  

Thus my carefully calibrated plans to get the tough work done whilst the house is quiet are more often stymied than realised.  My daughter doesn't care whether she's being fed by the smarter or dumber version of her father.  She just wants the food.  

(cue: hollow laughter from my wife whose entire life is presently subsumed by the feeding-changing-cleaning-bathing-washing-feeding cycle)

One partial solution will be the creation of a discrete workspace, either on our property or elsewhere.  This is a work in progress.  Another is to (further) improve my smart-me:dumb-me ratio by staying fit, rested and out of the pub.  A third has been to hire someone to help out with the myriad tasks that are usually entrusted to my dumber self.  The beginning of the end of Headcount: 1?

But mostly my response must be attitudinal.  Our daughter was so longed for for so long and I am blessed with a career that lets me stay close to home for more of the time than most breadwinners.  So I count that blessing.

A final thought: I have nothing but respect for single parents.  The sense of grinding isolation must be close to overwhelming almost all the time, especially if the child is too young to be anything other than demanding.

Protection against my dumber future self

I'm at the end of an absolutely brutal week of travel.  In the office all day Monday.  Night flight to the US to make a pitch presentation on Tuesday.  It went well enough. Night flight back for a full day of work on Wednesday.  Day trip to Switzerland yesterday.  Be careful what you wish for and all that.

No complaints.  As I've said in these pages many times, 'If I'm not on planes I'm probably not getting paid'.  The real challenge is how to keep functioning in amongst these waves of fatigue.  A partial answer may be this: -

Be aware that sometimes you are smarter than usual and sometimes you are dumber.  The job of your smarter self is to protect you against your dumber self for the foreseeable future.

My dumber self forgets things.  He fires off emails with spelling and grammatical errors or worse.  He packs badly and eats poorly. He mis-prioritises and has overly emotional reactions to simple setbacks.  Whether because he's tired, jetlagged or just hungover he is an idiot.

He is an idiot and my smarter, I'd like to say 'normal', self has to mitigate against him.  We all know this.  We've all stood in the middle of a supermarket feeling like an idiot for not writing up a shopping list.  We curse our would-be smarter selves for not thinking this one through.

My smarter self writes lists and sets alarms.  He allocates tasks commensurate with my fluctuating IQ to various times of the day and week.  Aren't we all that much are smarter on Monday morning than on Friday afternoon?  My smarter self is mindful of my tendency to react emotionally when fatigued and plans accordingly.  My smarter self works hard so that the dumber me can lean against a wall in the sunshine with a pint of beer in hand.

It is Friday and the UK Met Office is predicting 26C and sunny.

Running to stand still

Predictable as ever I've fallen for one of the classic blogging blunders; I decided to live an unjournaled life for a time and fell out of the habit of writing.  Not that I've had much of a choice as a proliferation of projects has had me working at a barely sustainable level for over six months now.  My passport has new stamps from all the usual places plus Lebanon, Hungary, Egypt and next week Japan.

I have to monitor my mental energy levels and devote the hours where my concentration is highest to the least forgiving tasks (and clients).  I live in a near-constant state of paranoia that some day soon I'll turn up in Madrid for a meeting with Client A but my slides will be for a German-speaking subsidiary of Client B.

Diet and exercise are more important than ever but not as important as sleep.  I find myself daydreaming about a holiday where all I do is sleep during the day.  In the mean time I do my best to exercise every day I'm at home and every other day when I'm traveling.  In the fortnight when a head cold kept me away from the gym my weight drifted up a disturbing three or four kilos.  When that happens I move slower and fatigue more easily and lose concentration right when I need it most.

I need my accountant, my lawyer and my travel agent to ask all the smart questions the first time we discuss the job.  I'm on the lookout for a new graphic designer and one guy failed the audition the moment he told me that he wasn't a mindreader.

Over Christmas in Australia I ploughed through the last draft of the book I've writing on and off for years.  At best it'll need more time than I can give it but at least it's off the 2013 'To Do list'.  At worst it was a flawed idea badly executed but, hey, at least it's done.  This year I'll be hard pressed to read a complete book, let alone write or edit one.

I have a new business idea.  Something really cool that might just be a scalable add-on to my (decidedly unscalable) consultancy.  The only problem is that Phase 1 of a six or seven step project requires 30-40 quality hours of my time.  The earliest I reckon I can offer that up is July.  So of course I worry that opportunity's window might be closed by then.  I tell myself that this isn't a case of the urgent crowding out the important but I worry that I'll look back in five years and think that taking on that one extra client in February 2013 was a dumb play, regardless of the cash it put in the bank.  And let's be thankful that at least there's cash in the bank.

So much as I'd like to write on these pages more (and more often) I'm not going to make that promise to myself. I'll check in from time to time, especially as my world seems to be changing faster than ever but I doubt that there'll be a discernable pattern.

Until next time...

This is not a complaint

My working life began in 1989 when I finished my Business degree and became a ‘Trade Marketing Associate’ for Unilever Australia.  I have been self-employed since 1992.  I have been operating on a Headcount: 1 model since 2003.  I have never been as busy as these last four months.  The last time I got to the bottom of my ‘To Do’ list was June.  My working day begins with an new iteration of the urgent doing battle with the important.  Client demands have crowded my every personal project, including, obviously, this blog.

But this is not a complaint.  What very bliss it is to have built a thing, business, and find that it is in demand.  My diary is full and my mind is entirely focused on doing this one next task as well as I can.  The operational part of my business has no choice but to operate under the assumption that the fundamentals are in place.

Even so, I wonder about the longer-term sustainability of it all.  The next round of plane flights need to be booked tonight whether I'm fatigued or not.  I am busy because I have a reputation for high standards.  In such a world there is no such thing as a small mistake: any slip-up costs me with time, money or kudos.  This is self-employment at its least forgiving.

The obvious solution is to take on staff, at least someone to deal with the more bone-headed stuff like collating expenses and organising hotels but to do so would be to shift away from a business model that has served me so well for almost ten years.  I hesitate because I question my ability to forgive.  Of late I've started snapping at my suppliers for (often imagined) inefficiencies.  God knows what I'd be like to share an office with 40 hours a week.  If I'm going to go back to being a boss then I have to improve my communication and get better at setting expectations and rediscovering the knack of cutting a bit of slack.  I'm unconvinced that I'm up to the task.  

Right now I'm approaching this new phase suspicious that if I take on staff then they will let me down.  In the space of 400 words I've gone from not complaining about being busy to actually complaining about imaginary staff.  Even so, I suspect that 2013 will be the year they stop being imaginary.

I am paid well to remain sanguine as my ideas are diluted

I am deep in the planning and design process for a truly massive conference that will be held in Europe in a few months' time.  600 people will fly in from all over the world for a two day meeting.  When the idea was formed there seemed to be a burning commercial need: our product's market is changing and we need to energise ourselves against complacency in the face of new competition.  Six weeks later the whole thing is bogged down in a morrass of prohibitive deadlines (getting translations done over the European summer), rival agendas (India's needs are unsurprisingly different from Germany's) and sheer exhaustion.

It's hard to avoid the suspicion that the client is wasting a hell of a lot of money and making many people unhappy for little or no commercial return.  The product in question will continue to grow, albeit with a reduced market share but in a rapidly expanding market.

I've been here before.  Part of my role as an external vendor is to be unflappable, responsive and unfailingly upbeat, to play nicely with others and to do just a little bit more than is required because that's what is meant by 'exceeding expectations'.  I go into projects like these with no more than a faint hope that my work will shine because as the deadline gets closer absolutely every good idea and laudable intenton mutates, often twisting until the effect on the conference delegate is the exact opposite of what was planned.  By taking on the role of sage consultant and pointing this out, in the past I've been accused of prima donna-ish behaviour.  This is easy to level at an external supplier with a creative brief, which is not to say such accusations have been entirely unfounded in the past.

If I'm going to keep working on projects like this I have to let go of cleverness and adopt a new but unspoken standard for my work: -

Try not to add to the sum total of unhappiness in the world

I will try to do no more than have the delegates participate in simple yet creative tasks that have an immediately obvious commerical benefit.  No deep analogies that require decoding.  No fun for fun's sake.  And no endless PowerPoint plenaries where the one commands the time and attention of the many.

Be part of the solution not part of the problem and all that...

Death by TC

Sometimes my consulting work has me working with different parts of the same very large organisation.  At the moment I am simultaneously engaged on national, European and global projects for the one company. These projects are not linked but have come about because individual clients in different roles have each seen a need for what I do.

National projects are easy. Client identifies a need.  Client calls.  We meet.  I draft a proposal.  We set a date.  I deliver.  I get paid.  At some later time the client identifies another need and we start again.

European projects are more complicated, not least because of my pathetic Australian monolinguality.  These projects are by definition more ambitious with a greater number of moving parts and thus requiring better political skills.  My client can sit in the European office and identify a need but rarely can he act on it without first persuading the local offices.  For the project to get off the ground a mix of personal entreaties, subtle bribery and naked threats is deployed to manoeuvre the one or two dominant markets to adopt a 'pilot' version of my programme.  Once this is deemed positive the rest of Europe will fall in line.  The short list of these dominant markets always includes Germany and usually Spain but never the UK and rarely France.  Success in Britain is routinely ignored in Europe and the French predeliction for agonisingly long planning processes is a sure fire momentum-killer of wider projects.  So I spend much of my time in Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Stuttgart in the company of my German-speaking facilitator.  The best operators working at a European level do this politicking face-to-face, but once a pilot programme has been agreed the national pattern kicks in: we meet.  I draft a proposal.  We set a date.  I deliver.  I get paid.  Often, at some later time the national client identifies a local need, finds money in her own budget, and we start again.

Genuinely global initiatives inhabit an entirely different world.  There is a huge and varied constituency that must be convinced of the worth of a project and this cannot often be done face-to-face.  Yesterday I spent five hours on a series of teleconferences (TC's) helping a global client sell a programme that is to be deployed on five continents.  Anonomised, often heavily accented voices dialing in from cars, homes and offices spent the day jockeying for the last word in an effort to make a valid critique of our offering, to promote a national cause or just to sound sage.

I'm not used to this way of working and being unable to put faces or even countries to the voices makes it doubly hard.  For me this is just another project, albeit a very important one, but for anyone in a global role this is a way of life.  Even doing the sensible thing by doing as much business face-to-face as possible doesn't solve the problem because the global TC's never stop.  Being at a meeting in Japan just means that you dial in from your hotel room in Tokyo instead of your office in London, stifle a yawn and start by thanking everyone else for taking time out of their busy schedules.  A quality much overlooked in good global marketing people is the patience to chair these endless phone calls.  This requires an ability to distinguish between those unhelpful comments which are born of miscommunication and those which are deliberately aimed at derailing a project.  The second category demands a response of 'taking the discussion off-line', which of course means setting up another TC.

Life changing experience

One Sunday night in late 1989 my girlfriend took me to see Theatresports at Belvoir Street Theatre in Surry Hills, Sydney.  I can point to exactly where I was sitting that night because the show changed my life.

I was 22 years old and working as a Trade Marketing Associate for Unilever.  It was my first ‘real’ job after graduating with a Bachelor of Business (BBus) and my life consisted of a week working for people I neither liked nor respected and weekends getting drunk with a gang of friends who had also gone to expensive Sydney private schools.  My girlfriend wasn’t part of that gang.  She didn’t really like any of my friends and she hated the drinking.  I'm still hazy as to why she liked me at all.

I’d resisted seeing the show for months.  Not out of any objection to the theatre but becauseSunday night was when The Eddies played the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel.  They were a terrifically fun cover band with a tight horn section that was doing happy, danceable versions of Blues staples years before The Commitments repopularised that style of music.  When you’re 22 and hate your day job a massive drunken Sunday night party full of people as desperate as you are to squeeze the last drops of fun from the weekend is an irresistible offer.  Monday morning consequences be damned.

One Sunday she prevailed.  She booked (and presumably paid for both) tickets to see a heat of the Cranston Cup,which remains Australia’s pre-eminent improv comedy competition.  Her friend Julia Zemiro was in the Sydney University team that night with Daniel Cordeaux.  Also on stage that night were Marko Mustac, Ewan Campbell and Andrew Denton.  It was intoxicating.  The audience cheered the teams and booed the judges just as Keith Johnston intended.  It was funny, witty, unashamedly Australian, raw and generous.  It was a million miles from The Eddies’ contrived white boy renditions of 1960’s black American music.  By the time we stood to reprise the deliberately cheesy Theatresports National Anthem I was high.  We hung out in the bar afterwards with Julia and Daniel and it dawned on me: -

These people are my age.  If they can do this wonderful thing then why not me?

I had never before questioned my role as an uncomplicated  consumer of cultural production.  Straight away I enrolled in workshops that started in January. I performed on the Belvoir Street stage for the first time in February.  In March I founded Instant Theatre,the theatre company that strangely morphed into the consulting business I run today.  I left full-time employment in June 1991.  In the following years Instant Theatre performed for the general public in stinking student union bars, grotty pubs and tired little theatres and for corporate types at shining resorts across the world.  I told myself that we only took the corporate gigs to fund the general public shows.  I dreamed of a career in television and wrote some bad scripts for otherpeople’s shows and pitched worse ideas for shows of my own.  After a few years the corporate theatre briefs got more specific and I drew more and more on my BBus.  By 1995 I was calling myself a sales/marketing consultant and I date my current business, Dramatic Change, from then.

Ever since I've fought a persistent drift away from producing content and back towards simply consuming it. I’m in my mid-40’s and ‘why not me?’ is no longer enough reason to monopolise a stage, column inches or even bandwidth. Last year I quit stand-up comedy and the improv that I love may well follow.  I've decided that having the capacity, and even the ability to command an audience’s attention is a necessary but not sufficient reason to produce stuff if I have nothing that to say that needs saying.

A contributor to the Economist’s online blog known as W.W. wrote apiece in early November that argued against the need for more American students to study engineering and the ‘hard sciences’ as market forces have determined that America has enough of these for now. Rather W.W. argues in favour of the humanities: -

I spent last evening reading a fine Pulitzer prize-winning novel by a graduate of a state-university creative-writing program. I appreciate everything math majors do for us. I really do. But, as far as I know, a math major has never made me cry.

The argument that we need producers of Art as much as we need builders of bridges and factories and inventors of machines to mitigate the effects of climate change is an old one and always well stated.  As my second degree is in English and Australian Literature I’m hardly unsympathetic to studying the humanities.  One of the few defensible rationales for studying Literature at university is that it makes for a more discerning and perhaps better consumer of Art provided sufficient intellectual rigour is required to pass the course.  Art is the key word here. Anyone can bash out a sentence on a keyboard (viz. this blog).  The only cost of entry to getting on stage ata stand-up comedy open mic night in London is proximity to London.  But it is unlikely it will be Art.  At best it is someone learning a craft and finding a voice and we can only really guess at that person’s motivations.  The early stages of an artist’s career involve remaining interesting to enough of the right people for a long enough time to get the skills to properly articulate an idea in a manner that is both compelling and intellectually rigorous.

Neither Theatresports nor The Eddies pass this test.  Both shows were hugely compelling but as there was no intellectual rigour, no message whatsoever, both were entirely disposable.  With improv comedy, the one form where I have at least a modicum of talent, meaning will always be absent.  For all the skill it takes to do it well, the engagement with an audience, the quick-witted cultural referencing and very occasional moments of sincerity, I doubt that improv will ever change a single opinion.  How can it? It is calibrated to automatically give an audience what it wants already.  As Keith says: -

Don’t be original be obvious.

Could there be a more blatant directive away from Art?  It is as fatuous and limiting a statement as, “The customer is always right.” Yet it is the driving principal behind the thing that drugged me in 1991and has me waking up on the far side of the world twenty years later wondering what I've done with my life.  The writers’ block that chased me out of stand-up comedy pursues me still.  I've hated the last few improv shows I've done.  It’s no longer enough for someone to marvel at my ability to extemporise a film noir opening to a made-up faerie tale.  If I have nothing to say then why am I demanding an audience’s attention?

I will continue to write and perform whenever I have something to say.  The rest of the time I will stop apologising for being a consumer of Art rather than a producer of tat.

Dreading the week ahead

My 'To Do List' program, Things for Mac, crashed on Saturday morning. At first it was a simple failure to synch between desktop and iPhone but the usual solutions as suggested by the user forums not only failed to fix the fault but made things much, much worse. In trying to copy my database to back it up I managed to delete it altogether.

I've been ambushed by my beloved technology and I approach the week with a woefully imprecise idea of what needs doing.

Being present. In Manila

It's 5am in Manila.

This is the time I usually wake up but jetlag has had me in its throes for about 90 minutes already.  I've doing the calculations: two hours until breakfast with the client, three and a half hours until we start the session and at least 12 hours until we wrap up Day One of this two-dayer.

'Twas always going to be thus.  I got to the Philippines at midnight Saturday and spent all Sunday sleeping and searching out the least sweetened food the hotel had to offer.   I went to the gym and I reviewed the programme.  I gave the project my complete attention.  I was the epitome of professionalism.

This is what business travel is: an exercise in discipline.  And the rules are as obvious as they are simple: don't go crazy at the starch'n'sugar-laden buffet breakfast, say no to (at least some of) the free alcohol, decline those Sunday night drinks with ex-pat pals, don't kid yourself that you can get away with being a tourist for a day.  And never complain about the horrors of the flight or its attendant jetlag.  The job can only really begin once  you've made a connection with your audience.  Why would go out of your way to remind them that you live on the other side of the world?

I have been brought here because I am the best person to communicate certain specific ideas to their people.  If they believe they could achieve the same thing with a local or even Asia-based speaker then I wouldn't be here.  So my goal is simple: minimise all the factors competing for my attention and concentrate all available energy on being present.

Harder than it sounds.  I'll let you know how I get on.

Don't pack drunk

Summer is done and I'm traveling again: Madrid, Edinburgh, Manila, Seoul and Zurich to begin with. No complaints: if I'm not on planes I'm not getting paid.

Travel means packing and packing always makes me feel stupid. Specifically, packing is an exercise in imagining my future self and experience has taught me that that guy is an idiot. Indeed most travel planning could be described as 'negating your inner idiot'.

These oh-so-unimpressive alternative selves exist inside each of us. Stress brings them out. As does fatigue, distraction brought on by overwork and alcohol.

I've learnt to mitigate these minor demons with low-level paranoia. Printing out and filing the limo pick-up instructions for Ninoy Aquino airport now means one less thing for the idiot-me to forget to do later.

In pre-travel mode I become a parent to myself. Lists are made and checked off. I run semi-conscious wargaming exercises like, 'If the programme was pulled forward to tomorrow would you be ready?' I update the weather app on my iPhone to flag destination cities (Manila, 30C, thunderstorms, if you're wondering).

And don't pack drunk. Turning up in Toronto in January equipped for summertime Sydney taught me that. Not unless you want fur-hatted Canadians pointing you out in the street.

Buying time, expecting attention

In the early 90's I once worked on a project to establish a sales/marketing culture for a mid-tier pharma company establishing it's own Australian operation for the first time. Their products were important, if a little mundane and somewhat limited in scope. The company had identified that as the size of the business meant that there was almost no scope for career advancement it was going to struggle to recruit effective salespeople.

Their solution was to staff the sales force with experienced women looking to reenter the industry after having children. Prima facie it was a good fit. The company needed solid experienced performers but who weren't interested in promotion and the women wanted to rejoin the workforce but on more sympathetic, less careerist terms. With the right HR attitude to flexible working hours it looked like a 'win-win'.

For a while it worked well enough. The new team was highly energised and quickly established a healthy, credible presence in the marketplace. Sure, the job-sharing and ongoing maternity leave coverage issues required additional Head Office and sales manager admin but no more than had been anticipated.

About nine months later, after the initial euphoria of launch had died down, the mood changed abruptly. Both management and the individual salespeople were suddenly, totally disenchanted. The company expected the women to still be grateful for the opportunity to rejoin the workforce on such sympathetic terms and that gratitude to manifest itself as greater attention to detail. The women couldn't see what the problem was: they were turning up and doing the job (sick kids who needed early collection from child care notwithstanding) weren't they?

The women were selling time only whereas the company thought that their (complete) attention came as part of the package. Within a year the complexion of the team had shifted back to the usual blend of unambitious old stagers, thrusting careerists and a few women with young children but decent family support to allay the early-pick-up-from-child-care-issue.

No pregnant person can give an employer his or her complete attention. Ditto for anyone with a new baby. It doesn't matter of that baby is real or metaphoric (i.e. a nascent IOS app, a comedy career or a that business you're starting up on the side) and it's no less true if both you and your employer buy into the fiction that selling only your time will be sufficient.

Something you love more than your job is always going to take attention away from that job. Because in part that's what love is.

Blue chin syndrome

Thinking further about this need to earn an audience's attention reminded of a phenomenon that Grainne Maguire, a stand-up comedian friend of mine, calls 'blue chin syndrome': -

The gig isn't going well when out in the darkness you see all these blue chins; audience member's faces uplit by their mobile phones as they text their friends

This is bad enough when the device in question is a Nokia.  If they bring out the iPads it's probably time to vacate the stage.

Earning attention

At his non-rambling best Merlin Mann is one of my favourite contemporary online writer-thinkers.  Lately he's been energetically promoting the idea that what counts in life is not so much where we spend our time or money but rather where we focus our attention.

Every professional performer has endured the experience of a paying audience getting bored and talking through your act: -

Even after they've given you their time and money you still have to earn your audience's attention

The signals that you've yet to earn that attention are pretty blatant if you know what you're looking for.  My first corporate theatre gig, which was also my first paid work after I quit the marketing department of Coca-Cola, was a morning of team building for some long since subsumed Sydney freight company.  The maiden outing of Alternative Corporate Training Services (aka 'ACTS')* was in mid-December 1991 and the job had been a long time coming.  Our show used improv techniques to teach teamwork to corporate types but we'd really just been hired to make the group laugh for an hour whilst they set up for Christmas lunch in the room next door.  I have three distinct memories of that afternoon: -

1. There was no air conditioning so it was stifling.  It was Sydney in December and our hour was the only thing between the group and a fridge full of icy beer
2. We took the 'stage' (read: walked to the space at the front) to the Emerson, Lake & Palmer version of Fanfare to the Common Man.  The idea was the entrance would be epic but as the venue had no sound desk we'd brought along an old boom-box, which I had to clunk on then hold above my head from the back of the room
3. As we started the MD, who hadn't signed off on our appearance, sat at the foremost table took out a massive mobile phone and ostentatiously placed it in front of him

The signal was as clear as day: you have my attention but only for as long as no one (anyone) from the outside world wants it.  The amateurishness of our entrance, our visible lack of self-belief and even our dumb company name meant we hadn't earned the right to ask him to switch off his phone.  Everyone in the room knew it and our gig went downhill from there.

There's a moment with every audience when you have to 'get them'.  If that point in time passes without you earning the room's attention you will struggle thereafter.  The same rule applies with absolutely every kind of audience; a target market of prescribing doctors, an electorate or an online community.

That day in 1991 we stumbled through the hour by dropping the team building message and playing for laughs, which is all they wanted anyway.  They paid us in cash and we went directly to the Chinese restaurant up the road and spent the entire fee on our own boozy Christmas lunch.  Late that afternoon our pager beeped (we shared the one between us) and a booking agent offered us a gig at a January kick-off event.  At that second, boom-boxless, gig we earned the attention of the room and ACTS-CORPRO-Instant Theatre-Dramatic Change went on from there.

* Because we were a theatre group.  Geddit?  No?  Anyone? This was the first of our dumb company names.  After that we went for CORPRO Productions ('Corporate Impro') before getting to Instant Theatre then Dramatic Change