Time We Discuss: Creating a Company Mandatory Fun Trivia (Gordon Southard)

Transcription

(Music)

Gordon Southard: Gallup looked at 2 million employees, over 100,000 work units. They said, "How does engagement impact work And they found engagement, high engagement

Dan: Today on Time We Discuss, I wanna welcome Gordon Southard. And it's time we discuss what it's like running Mandatory Fun Trivia. Gordon, thanks for joining me today.

Gordon Southard: Awesome to be here. Thank you so much.

Dan: Absolutely. For starters, I love the name Mandatory Fun Trivia. Your website, it talks about, you know, you work in corporate, like corporate events, kind of, doing the team building, exercises, and all that stuff. Absolutely love it. So let's start for you. Typical day, what is it like preparing for these events? And then once the actual event is going on, what's that like?

Gordon Southard: Value I think in what we do is the preparation. When we're preparing for an event like we're doing right now today, what we do is we look at who is the client, what are the demographics of that client? Where is this gonna be held? What's the space look like? What kind of technology are we gonna have access to? And then what's going on in the world? And so we take all of that, and we start to think about what questions could we ask that's gonna make sure that everyone is engaged at some point. Because what we realize is, is that people didn't ask to come to this. This was assigned to them by an event planner for the company. The company decided we need to do something for an engagement exercise. They stressed out about it, and then they've fallen on trivia. So we know that the 10, 20, 30, in the case of next week, the 150 plus participants did not ask to come to this. So we are working overtime to make sure that the questions that we ask, everyone's gonna feel like they participated. They've given something they've won in a way by being able to contribute. And it's not easy to do. So a lot of our time is to really think through the types of questions that we're gonna ask. The other thing is, it is not boilerplate. We do have a catalog of questions, but we really do wanna think about what's most appropriate. For instance, at the time that we're talking, a new Taylor Swift album is coming out. So that might be something that we wanna ask about. So we're just being aware of what's going on in the world. But then we also think about, okay, where is the trivia being held? So is it gonna be held in a conference room? Is it gonna be held, did they rent out a restaurant or a bar? Are we going to a conference center? What's the space look like? So then we need to think about, can we do any physical activities? Can we do any physical challenges? Think about like minute to win it style games. Do we have the space for that? And if we do, what's appropriate for us to try? And then we think about, okay, how are we gonna interact with the guests? So it's not just me standing up, asking some questions. It's we are trying to pull out information from our guests so that they leave with a little bit more knowledge about one of their colleagues. So for instance, we think about how do we introduce, we bring some up to the front and we have them do an extra credit round. So we say, okay, what's your name? What was the first concert you went to and where are you from? Now that person has introduced themselves. The rest of the audience may know that person a little bit differently. Oh, that's Gordon from Richmond who went to see Chicago and the Beach Boys. Now that's something that maybe I can connect with that person about that I wasn't able to before. So these are all things that we spend a lot of time thinking through and working on leading up to an event. And that's leading up to an event, of course, other days is marketing, it's reaching out to potential clients, but that would be a typical day leading up to an event.

Dan: When you start to book these events, how far in advance they typically happen? Is it like a six months out or one year out do you get recurring clients on the yearly basis or something like that? What is that like?

Gordon Southard: We do have reoccurring clients, which is great, but it's also much more difficult for us because then we really can't use any of the same questions, none of the same games, we try to keep it fresh, but we do have reoccurring clients. We have situations where event planners in the city will reach out to us and say, "Hey, we have a client that's looking to do something." That might be three, four months in advance. But in the situation, for instance, next week, we were alerted two days ago. And so this is 150 plus event and we have about a week to get this thing ready. So it really does vary. I would say most of our events are at least three, four months in advance that we know about it.

Dan: What made you go down this road for creating your company Mandatory Fun Trivia?

Gordon Southard: Experience of awful events. Look, what we know from our work in the corporate world, and even Gallup did a study about this. So Gallup looked at 2 million employees, over 100,000 work units. They said, "How does engagement impact work?" And they found engagement, high engagement in the workplace is gonna, productivity is gonna go up. You're gonna have profits going up. You're going to have absenteeism go down and turnover go down. So companies know that engagement is important, but what companies do not know is how to engage their staff. And so I've been a part of potlucks, happy hours, karaoke, nights, these are all awkward. I thought they were forced. It was uncomfortable. I thought that it didn't do a very good job of allowing me to get to know people in a different way. And so we started to think, what would be fun? What can we actually do in this company that would be fun? Now I've been hosting trivia at a bar for many, many years. And I thought, what if we brought that ability to have people come together in teams, work together in a much different way, answering silly, fun, interesting questions, and getting to know each other that way. That to me is way better than karaoke night or a potluck where we're sitting around a table having forced conversation. So having that experience, understanding the importance of engagement, we really thought that companies could use a new way to engage their staff. And that's really what the genesis of this was. Now, I will say that this is, I really think this is an engagement company, an engagement improvement company that's masquerading as a trivia company. So the first thing that we wanna do is help companies engage staff, engage with each other. And then we are just masquerading again as a trivia group.

Dan: When your event first starts, invariably though, people are gonna be a little standoffish. You wouldn't know it, but I'm actually very much an introvert. So these types of events, like, I don't like them at all. They don't terrify me, but like in that vein. So how do you get those types of people where you can already probably sense that they're a little standoffish, like not really wanting to, how do you get them engaged? How do you draw them in successfully?

Gordon Southard: Yeah, and that's again, something that we spend a lot of time thinking about. So you are protected as an introvert a little bit because you're on a team. So we always make sure that there's a team environment and we have activities at the table that the teams can work on. So if you are not interested in trivia, maybe what you would be wanting to do is focus on the Sudoku that's left on your table. Then the first team that fills that out gets extra bonus points. I'd be all over that. Yeah, or maybe you wanna focus on the magic eye that we've left on your table, the first team that can identify what the magic eye is. So we wanna make sure that maybe you're not wanting to engage with everybody, but there's something at the table that you could be working on that allows you to contribute to the team. We spend a lot of time walking around, talking before the event, asking where people are from, what kind of categories are they typically interested in? And we always can pivot in the moment on whether the types of questions we prepared, but if we've gone around in the pre-event, realize that nobody wants to talk about sports, then we're gonna pivot in the moment and change it up. So we're very good at that. And we're very good at trying to ease the tension of, we understand this is awkward, we understand that you're forced to be here, but we're gonna make this as lighthearted and as fun as possible.

Dan: Okay, all right, cool. Okay, let's talk about getting that first client, because invariably when you start your own business, getting that first client is always the hardest. How did that work for you?

Gordon Southard: I was kind of fortunate in the way that I do host Trivia Weekly at a restaurant. At a bar in downtown. So I already had a lot of people that enjoyed coming to Trivia that were weekly regulars for years, for years regulars. And so when we started talking about how, hey, not only do we do this weekly bar trivia, but we take this pub trivia concept and we take it into the companies, just announcing that every week at our regular events really started to drum up business. And so people started asking like, "Hey, actually we have a holiday party coming up, or we do have an in-person event in a couple of weeks. Could you do that?" And we didn't say no to anything. We were taking every opportunity that we could. And while we did start to earn some money, we also asked, "Could you please, this is a family owned business, could you please pass the word along?" In a large way, this is a word of mouth operation. So it started because we did have a dedicated following. People knew that we were good at what we did, but the corporate side is a much, much different animal, but people trusted us because they knew what we were capable of.

Dan: Awesome, okay. So Gordon, one of the things I like to do on Time We Discuss, I like to help people identify different careers that they might not even know exist, things that might resonate with them. It's like, I like that. I think I could do that. How do I do that? So this brings us to the next part, okay? You talked about entering through a hosting trivia at a local pub, okay? So someone could easily replicate that. How does someone then become, like do what you were doing at the pub level? Is that a volunteer position? Is that, you know, there's an opening for it, you have to apply for it. How can someone follow you in that exact same path, but at a different geographic location?

Gordon Southard: Yeah, it's not hard to do because bars and restaurants want activities. They want something on those Tuesday, Wednesday nights where typically, you know, it's not their busiest, especially in, you know, Monday nights, maybe for football, but in the off season, like you might have two or three days that a bar is actively looking for an activity. So there's a couple of ways. There are trivia companies out there in the world that do run operations that have contracts with multiple bars, and so that you can work with one of those companies as a host, and then they would pay you a nominal fee, and you would arrive at the bar. They would mail you the questions, and then you just show up and read what's been sent to you. Now, there's also the opportunity where if you're a little more of a go-getter, then you can go to a bar and set up your own contract with that bar, but that's gonna require you to develop the questions each week, you to make sure that if you're not able to be there, who's gonna be there in your place, because the bar is expecting every Wednesday night that there's going to be trivia, and so it does take a little bit more work, but someone is absolutely able to go and negotiate with the bar, and what I would recommend in that situation is say to the bar, "Give me one month of Tuesdays to do trivia, "and I won't charge you a dime." But if we can move the needle on how many people, how many butts in seats, how many beers, how many french fries are being purchased, how many wings are being purchased, if we can show that this is gonna have a positive impact for your establishment, then the contract would look like this, but give me a month, and so I think that that is, it is a good way to do it if you're a go-getter, if you're willing to write the questions, if you're willing to set up a kind of a group of people that will cover for you if you're not able to be there.

Dan: That is awesome advice. Okay, so let's shift and talk about education. How has your education helped you with this endeavor or hindered, had no effect? What has your education done to further this?

Gordon Southard: My bachelor's degree was probably the most impactful, to be honest with you, is in radio and television, in media studies, and I would say that because my focus was on radio, and in radio, you were having to learn to communicate without any visual cues, without any feedback visually, and so you have to get good at being confident at public speaking, you have to get good at being able to just, you know, not have that visual feedback. So I would say radio in undergrad was very beneficial, just, and that was more of learning to communicate. Now, my master's degree was in higher education, and I would say that helped with understanding adult learning, really, really keying in on how adults learn, the gamification of learning, so that was very helpful, but also the master's degree provided a lot of opportunities to present, to present at conferences, to present in front of your professors and in your classes, and so any chance that I could get to present in front of groups I took, because that practice and that skillset is perhaps the most important aspect of delivering trivia. It seems easy, and I will admit, anyone thinks that, yeah, you can get up and read questions, but anyone listening or watching, I would ask, how many times have you been to a trivia where like this person is not that good, and you're not interested in going back? And so the focus is how to deliver, how to communicate, understanding how adults learn, what they might wanna hear, and how they may wanna receive this information, super important, so yeah, radio and television, media studies in undergrad, and then my master's in education did absolutely,

Dan: okay, so that leads me to this next part. Let's talk about the business side of things. So invariably, I like to say people usually start a business, from my experience, people usually start a business because it's something they're passionate about, and they think I can make money doing this. They don't necessarily go into business for the business part of it, that they like accounting or something like that. So how did you bridge the knowledge gap when it came to the business side of things?

Gordon Southard: It was awful, that was a very difficult part, but luckily, where I am, we do have small business counselors that you can meet with for free, the county provides. And I think that that, I'm guessing a little bit, but I'm thinking that that is available in a lot of locales around the country. So having someone that I could meet with and understand what the steps were to actually become a legal company, and whether to go sole proprietor, go LLC, and you know, asking those and learning those answers to those questions is very, very helpful. But also understanding the upfront cost. I assumed, oh, this is trivia, there are no costs, quickly found out that there are a lot of costs associated. And so yeah, that first year was a steep learning curve of like, hey, I'm doing this on the fly, which may not be the smartest thing. Like if I could have taken a year and done no trivia, but just literally focused on the business side, that would have been smarter. But instead, I was building the plane as we were flying, and that led to probably spending more money than I needed to, things taking a little bit longer than it should have. But without the help of our small business counselor here in the county, I would have been in big trouble.

Dan: You talked about basically hidden costs. Elaborate on that a little bit, what were some of those hidden costs that you really did not expect that came knocking on your door?

Gordon Southard: This was very naive of me, but when I show up to the bar, I just show up and start asking questions. But for a corporate event, they're gonna wanna see a website. They're gonna wanna see social media. They're gonna wanna see the website name, not just be something crazy, they want your company, because they wanna refer, they wanna go back when you are trying to get business, they're gonna go to your website, that costs money. Didn't think about how buying a name and the landing page, all that costs money. They're gonna wanna see branded shirts. They're gonna wanna see you show up in something branded. They're gonna wanna see some gifts given to the winning teams or to the participants that are branded. They're gonna wanna see that you are prepared with all the materials, the printed materials. Now, we wanna make sure that we're not doing anything on the phone. I think that one of the unique or one of the positive aspects of our trivia is that no one's on their device. You are a paper and pencil, paper and pen, but you're not just handing somebody a piece of paper. Now you have to design the look and feel of what those answer sheets are gonna look like. What do your picture rounds look like? How is it branded? What does your brand even look like? You gotta spend time and money on that. And the logo design. But so we have perforated sheets. We don't print perforated sheets on just a regular eight and a half by 11 looseleaf paper. It needs to be a thicker paper. So all of this costs money that I had not originally thought about and have quickly learned. And we've gotten a lot better about it.

Dan: That's so fascinating. Cause like I wouldn't have thought of half of those things. You know, I would have thought of a website that makes sense. You know, maybe on some level business card if you're really old school, but like I wouldn't have thought about the perforated pads of paper or something like that or whatever. Okay, so talking about gifts, do you ever partner with other companies where like you can get them to donate things or anything like that? Or is it no, you're putting all that out of pocket?

Gordon Southard: It's both. When I set up a meeting with a potential client or if somebody has actually expressed interest, what I will say to them is that we are happy to provide gag gifts and branded gifts for the winning team. But what we find is our most successful events also include some prizes from you. And so if you X company, if you're having a big conference, here in DC, if you could provide some of your branded items that for either the participants or maybe people that win some of our little gag questions, that is, I think, some goodwill people appreciate maybe getting one of their company's branded mugs or branded t-shirts. So we do suggest that some companies take us up on it, some don't, and that's okay, because we usually, we'll definitely bring gag gifts and we have reusable grocery shopping bags that say Mandatory Fun Trivia champion on it. So you're walking around, people know that you're a trivia champion. We also have koozies that have a trivia question on the back of the koozie. So if you're at a party, you see our logo, but you also have a trivia question on the back of that koozie that you can interact with guests with. So we have some things, we ask the company to provide some things, whether they do that or not, it's completely up to them.

Dan: I'd like to ask this, this is kind of a new question I've thrown into the rotation. What about some unexpected perks of your job, your business? You think when you're a kid and you worked retail or something like that, you got like 10% off if you shop there or something like that. Are there any unexpected perks that you get from your business?

Gordon Southard: I'm a lot better at Trivial Pursuit in Jeopardy now. I'm a lot better at that than I was even five years ago. I would also say that we've gotten to see some incredible spaces around town, around the region, these rooftop conference rooms with just great views of the area, getting to meet some incredibly talented people with some incredible companies. And these companies are always happy to give us maybe a little tour of their facility. And we get to learn so much about these businesses that you definitely know their name, but you don't know much about them. And getting to meet the people, getting to see the infrastructure, getting to see the places has been, to me has been a big perk. Now that's not a monetary perk necessarily, but it's been a lot of fun.

Dan: One of the things I'd like to do is identify different hurdles for people that are starting different careers or trying to pivot into new careers. So what is one thing where it could be a major deal breaker for someone? Like, so maybe if someone, they're not comfortable doing public speaking, this is not for them. Are you able to identify like one of those hurdles that could potentially be a deal breaker for someone that if they don't like doing X, this is not for you?

Gordon Southard: Public speaking would be certainly one of them. Maybe the biggest because they are expecting, in some ways they're expecting a bit of a show pony. You cannot go out there and be dry and dull because it sets a bad tone for the event. So you do have to be energetic. You do have to be, I would believe, an extrovert, and you have to want to be a public speaker. I would also say that you cannot be lazy about the small details. You have to be paying attention to the room. If you're not able to read a room very well, then it becomes more challenging. If you see more and more people are on their phone, what do you do? How do you re-engage people? So people that have a natural inclination of bringing the room together, I think that's for them. If you're not as much into that, it will be harder. I don't think any of these things are absolutely deal breakers. But if you are in front of 200 people and you don't want to be there, you don't want to be speaking, you're in trouble. I would, I also mentioned, and something I haven't talked about yet is the scoring and then how you analyze how the event went. So if you are not interested in really studying up after the event, then this might not be the correct industry for you either because we look at how many questions were answered correctly. If we're seeing, in this round, 20% of the questions were answered correctly. That is, that's bad for us. That is not what we want to have happen. So we go back and look at the data, look at our questions, look at the demographics that we were working with and make sure that we don't make those same mistakes next time. So again, these are not major hurdles, but data analytics, I didn't think was going to be a part of this. It absolutely is a part of it. Public speaking, absolutely a big part of it. And being able to engage with a room that is resistant is very important.

Dan: How does business ebb and flow throughout the year? Do you find that different seasons are more popular than others? I imagine if you're working, if you happen to be working in an education space, maybe summers might be worse or better, depending on the institution. A corporate could be all over the place. What is that like? Is it even throughout or is it kind of all over the map?

Gordon Southard: The type of events do change throughout the year. So in the summertime, especially at the end of the summer, where we just kind of came out of, law firms who are sending their interns home, this is kind of the end of the year celebration for law firms, very successful in those events. So they're doing like a, they've rented out a restaurant or a bar and they have all their interns coming together for one last hurrah. They're super competitive. Here comes trivia. So we do a lot of those events towards the end of the summer. Towards the end of the summer, schools will bring us in and we'll do these engagement events for the teachers before the students come back. So for the teachers to get to know each other prior to the students returning, we do those events and that would be towards the end of the summer. Then we started getting into the fall and now we're getting into the seasonal events where, okay, a company is thinking about a holiday party to bring everybody together. What are they gonna do? And so we start things, maybe at the end of summer in the very first part of the fall, maybe a little slower that we do have conferences to come through. Then we get in the holiday season and companies are having all these holiday parties, boom, we're back in business. And then January, February, we look towards conferences to come to town and we hope to grab onto those. And then the spring, we start getting into those private events again. So if I were to say what the slowest season would be is probably January, February, this is maybe the slowest for us, but otherwise it's pretty steady just with different things. And I will mention, we've been talking a lot about companies, but we will do a birthday party, an alumni event. We will do a family gathering. This trivia translates wherever, it doesn't have to be a company. So we've had backyard trivia for families that have extended family coming into town and just want something fun to do on a Saturday night.

Dan: That leads me to this question. I was talking with Joe Holiday, he was a magician. I spoke to him, oh geez, probably about 18 months ago at this point. But I asked him, when you're at the family parties, are you invariably being asked to pull a quarter out of someone's ear or something like that? When it comes to family gatherings, are you like, hey, Gordon, we want you to come over, we want to do trivia at this party. How often are you getting pulled into those family and friend events where you're forced, I use that in air quotes, forced to provide some entertainment?

Gordon Southard: It happens a lot and I love it. And I love it. Family events, we've had some family graduation parties. It's been a lot of fun to incorporate trivia there because now I can pull from some of our questions that we've used, but also stuff about the person, stuff about the family member that we know intimately, that's just fun to incorporate. I've been asked, actually, we did a rehearsal dinner for a wedding. And so that trivia was all about the things that the couple enjoys and about the couple. And so we've been led in directions that we didn't even think were possibilities. For instance, the rehearsal dinners for a wedding. Never even thought about trivia in that environment. But because of these personal connections, like, oh, hey, I know Gordon does trivia. Will you come and ask some questions about the bride and groom? Absolutely, absolutely we'll do that. And so I never turned down the opportunity. Now, some people may get annoyed with me asking questions. I love asking trivia questions when I'm hanging out with friends. I could see that getting annoying to some people, but I love it.

Dan: That is awesome. It sounds like there are a lot of really, really great opportunities. It sounds like it's pretty low barrier to entry. There's a path to that. Once you're doing this, there's a lot of opportunities with alumni and weddings and corporate and conference, all kinds of really, really great opportunities. Really, really great thing for anyone trying to get into a field such as this. Now, Gordon, I am running short on time, but one thing I like to do, whenever I'm speaking with someone, I like to give them the opportunity to talk about a project they're working on, a cause they believe in, more about their business. So if there's something specific you'd like to talk about, the floor is yours.

Gordon Southard: Well, I appreciate that. We really do take it seriously about staff engagement. And we really do think that there's a place for that with companies. Companies, again, know it's important, but they don't know how to handle it. Some companies will have somebody on staff that's supposed to be, they're learning an engagement person, but oftentimes they don't. So I would just say to anybody listening that is working in a company, no matter what size, that you need to be thinking about the health of your staff, how the staff is interacting, not just with their boss or the company, but with each other. And if you are not proactively addressing engagement, then it is actually actively working against you. And it is something that I've seen, something that my business partner has seen in our private worlds. And so we just really want people to think about that and where they work, what are they doing? What are they actively doing to prevent burnout, to prevent poor staff engagement? And while that sounds, it may sound silly, it actually can be a big, big problem down the road, if not addressed. And it's not always, oh, you had to bring trivia, and there's a million things that you could do, but it's something important to think about.

Dan: Gordon, what you're saying that is so, so true. And if anyone wants to find out more information about Mandatory Fun Trivia, I'll make sure I'll put the links on the website in the show notes, they'll be all over the place. And when people are trying to find you and your company, they can easily do that. Gordon, it's been absolutely awesome having you on Time We Discuss and we learned what it's like running Mandatory Fun Trivia.

Gordon Southard: Thank you so much.