Jagler: Brew Your Skill reinvents the corporate workshop
“I don’t have time for this meeting. I’ve got too much to do. Why can’t they just let us do our jobs?”
I can’t count how many times I have heard a version of that complaint by co-workers over the course of my career.
Based on many conversations with people in various industries over the years, I’m certain it’s a common workplace occurrence.
Dan Gramann and Vince Carone have a different concept for the corporate workshop or staff meeting. … It typically involves alcohol, food, comedy and free-wheeling conversation.
Gramann, a Milwaukee native, is co-founder of Chicago-based HFI Consulting Group. He has hired Carone to be vice president of a subsidiary, Brew Your Skill, which is contracted to facilitate fun and productive corporate meetings for other companies.
Brew Your Skill’s taglines include, “Laugh, drink, learn,” and “Create culture with your team with the most unique training in the world by having interactive learning with comedic facilitators.”
Brew Your Skill’s shtick has enabled it to attract corporate clients across the nation, including several in Wisconsin.
In advance of a meeting, Carone, who has been a stand-up comic in the Chicago area for 15 years, interviews the corporate client’s staff and drills down to find their “pain points,” or the aspects of the company that cause the most grief, angst or friction in the workplace.
Carone then uses his comedic skills, often teamed with Gramann’s business background and expertise, to spark lively and constructive conversations that are healthy and productive for staff and management alike.
“The most common thing that I’ve heard is employees want to have healthy conflict,” Carone said. “Conflict — they avoid it and don’t know how to handle it. It’s creating fun and creating engagement. I think it definitely helps.”
“We want to mix it up and have a real good time with our companies, and the employees just love it,” Gramann said.
“We bring in laughter. We bring in some of the best comedians to kick off the event and ensure that you have a great time, and you’re ready to sit back and appreciate the new skill,” Carone said.
In addition to private corporate events for specific clients, Brew Your Skill has been staging “community business development” events, in which leaders from several companies attend and share best practices in a facilitated conversation. The sessions also serve as productive networking opportunities.
Sarah Feldmann, founder of Clever Dog Creative, a West Bend-based digital marketing firm, has found the community events to be useful.
“The skills they focus on teaching are useful, regardless of your industry,” Feldmann said. “So, whether you're business-to-consumer, business-to-business, large or small, these are skills that can be used anywhere. I also found that the presentation method was easily digestible. Sometimes workshops like these can get really dull, and you don't absorb much. But with Brew Your Skill, the blend of professional humor and tips I could put into practice immediately kept my attention and made the event all that much more valuable to me.”
To read a list of ideas by Gramann and Carone for injecting fun into the workplace, see the companion C-Level column in the 2017 Top Workplaces special supplement in Sunday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Dan Gramann
Title: Co-founder, HFI Consulting LLC, Chicago
Expertise: Team of consultants across North America that nurture small business growth through core skills, business systems and accountability processes.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Family: Fiance, Annie Burkhart
Best advice ever received: “Be genuine, be YOU.”
Favorite movie: “Fight Club”
Favorite Musical Act: Wicked
Favorite Wisconsin restaurant: Sanford
Steve Jagler is the business editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. C-Level stands for high-ranking executives, typically those with “chief” in their titles. Send C-Level column ideas to him at steve.jagler@journalsentinel.com.