Laugh if you want, but corporations are learning business tips from a Fort Worth comedy troupe

February 17,2017

By Dalton LaFerney

Welcome to the company retreat. This year, the bosses decided to take the staff to Hawaii, then to Mexico, Australia and finally to Dubai. All expenses covered. Journey, the Rolling Stones and Lil Wayne will headline.

While the idea is outlandish, that was the point. It came from an improv exercise for about 40 managers of Mansfield-based AngMar Companies, which hired the comedy troupe Four Day Weekend to conduct a workshop on how to foster positive communication in the workplace.

The employees met in Fort Worth in late January for a company conference, which included a team-building session led by improv comedian Frank Ford, a founder of Four Day Weekend.

"Every person here improvises," Ford told his audience. "Everybody here is an expert in an area you're not."

Comedy may seem only fruitful for creatives, but Four Day Weekend and some experts say improv can be effective in strengthening trust and active listening skills among co-workers across all departments or industries.

Companies like Southwest Airlines, Bell Helicopter and Japan-based Canon all have hired Four Day to help reinvigorate their flow of ideas.

The program is designed to break down comfort zones and get people thinking as a unit, building on each other's ideas.

That queasy feeling many employees get before speaking up at a meeting? Ford says it points to an issue plaguing the business world: If workers feel their ideas are unwelcome, they don't even try to share them. Four Day Weekend wants to change that.

Not just for laughs

Nine cast members run the workshops, and companies can choose "off-the-shelf" services -- like emceeing for events -- or more customized sessions they can include within their own conferences.

Emily Zawisza, Four Day Weekend director of sales, said potential customers can audit workshops before they book. Four Day sends questionnaires to the companies in order to drill down into whichever issues need improvement. Price, Zawisza said, varies with audience size and and other specifications.

Clients may use the group's theatre in Sundance Square in downtown Fort Worth, where it also hosts live shows on the weekend, or cast members will travel to workshop venues booked by the companies.

AngMar has a portfolio including auto shops, the Southern Oaks Golf Club in Burleson, and gun stores across North Texas. Its managers who attended the workshop are spread out and rarely work alongside one another.

"I wanted them to understand they're a part of a bigger family," said AngMar vice president of retail operations John Geyerman, who discovered Four Day Weekend in August, when he and his wife caught a live show one weekend.

Ford, dressed in his usual black suit and tie, said some of the most common areas businesses seek to improve are general communication, adapting to innovations, leadership and presentation skills. His improv exercises pushed the managers to be indiscriminately approving of the ideas popping around the 220-seat theatre.

"It was a lot of fun, and people really let their guard down," AngMar manager Alisa Brown said of her company's session. "It really opened the mind in a different kind of way."

Finding the right message

Four Day Weekend, the brand, has a journey of its own that can be used as a case study in entrepreneurship.

From the sidewalk, clients enter the theater doors and find a ticket booth. Up the stairs, a purple-painted staircase is decorated with photos of the comedians, newspaper spreads and columns. The show has been the subject of dozens of reviews and profiles; it was even featured on CNBC's "Squawk Box." The second floor houses Four Day Weekend's theater, bar and banquet room.

Sitting backstage before the AngMar gig, Ford replayed Four Day's nearly two decades in business.

The U.S. recession of 2008 was a hurdle for so many businesses across the nation, and Four Day Weekend was no exception. As corporate budgets for entertainment shrank, Ford recalled asking, how can a comedy troupe keep companies' interested?

The solution was to improvise, to reposition Four Day's mission to align more with corporate needs: continual education, motivational speakers and employee workshops.

The outcomes

In 2016, Four Day Weekend was named an entrepreneur-in-residence at TCU's Neeley School of Business. That's unique, dean Homer Erekson said, because the resident is usually one person, not an entire company.

At business schools like Texas Christian University's, abstract thought is integrated into every corner of the curriculum.

In the eyes of some academics, improv challenges the conventional business thinking. Rather than a superior-to-subordinate channel, improv favors more abstract thinking and interaction.

Erekson said some faculty are working to quantify the Four Day workshop message by following up with companies the troupe has served, to gauge how employees utilize the training from Four Day.

Brad Hancock, director of the Neeley Entrepreneurial Center, said studying entrepreneurialism is not confined to the business school. He said students in other disciplines need to acquire skills needed to network, earn capital and market themselves in the real world. So creative, abstract thought melds logically with business objectives, he said.

Location Mentioned: Four Day Weekend