sure. I, um, have been performing improvisation for 26 straight years. So a quarter of a century, I'm a Chicago train improviser. The last 21 of those 26 years I've been focusing on extracting the tenants of improvisation that would be used to produce the outcome of comedy and have been redirecting them to business. I'm an adjunct professor at the Duke Future School business and Columbia Business School. So I got to this point is just undergrad. All I have is an undergrad degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago. What I have always said tongue in cheek is that appropriately enough, it's a B s in business. And then I got the rest of my education from the school of hard knocks. So after graduating college, I was fortunate toe win a Bank of America Award around in 1993 or so for creative marketing, guerilla marketing. And in 1994 I began my transition out of business to emerge myself in improv comedy in Chicago. And, uh, yeah, the next five years of that, I did everything in my power never to get back into business, and, uh, every job under the sun that would pay me cash in hand hall in sheet rock and painting houses and as a nanny for one summer and teaching improv coaching improv. And a lot of that was actually W two, however, do whatever I could to avoid doing. This was the night. And then, in the fall of 1999 I had the opportunity to collaborate, to create the first program in any business school in the entire world that focused solely on linking improvisation to business. And that was the court side Man Workshop in managerial improvisation at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business and then cut to 20 one years later, here we are.

The first program that we taught was an MBA program that was to separate the first two terms, the fall terms with green terms. And so it was more orientation. And we were one of seven groups that we're doing something for your orientated. And when it was all done after the 2000 year, they cut the entire program with the exception of us, and they invited us to come back and created accredited program at the university. And that was a learning experience because they one that was a five day intensive and which still runs. We ran our 24th generation of the five day intensive, in which we learn about 33 to 36 hours of experiential learning, all based in business improv in those five days and cut back to 2000. At the end of day one, a couple of students came up to me and said, You know, this format that you're running, which was workshop during the day, three hours in the morning, three hours in the afternoon, and then a I will be brief at night was not necessary and they were getting it, and they didn't need to be essentially spoon fed. So I learned from that instantly and said, Okay, we're not going to do the discussion tomorrow. We'll do it every other day because the discussion is super important. It's a super important that I talk with your classes, talking with other classes as well. And so we adapted on the fly, you know, cut to about a year later, I was doing executive programs, and the very first program that do few executive education was a four day intensive and business. Their problems in the three hours each one of the four days, the tail end of the day Emily. And at the end of the birthday there was a mutiny and I got fired. Me and my collaborator. I got fired from that four day program, which was a gut punch, because neither one of us had ever been wired. Number one and number two we knew we thought we were doing was like on point. It turns out that the students didn't think it was on point and the dean was listening to students. And so the demon came to us the next morning. They too, and so do not working. Tonight you're released from this program. I do not want you to go home. No, I'm gonna pay you for the entire week. And what I want you to do is learn from your mistakes, got the program and put the program back together again in a way that makes sense for this audience going forward. And so, you know, we licked our wounds and slowly, Day one in the day two and three, we put together what would be ultimately most of business. Improv is the company's keep differentiators based in academia, based in the behavioral sciences based on real world outcomes. And we presented it to the dean on the last day of the program there. He came to see us that afternoon and he said, Okay, tell me what you got. And we walked him through what we did from top to bottom. How we're changing our attire, how we're changing our language, how we're changing our set up material. Like I said, all the differentiators that make business improv unique 21 years ago, we're still pretty unique today. Way presented to him, and he said, That's amazing. You showed me exactly what you're gonna do. You broke it down in great detail. I believe in you. And instead of incorporating you back into this program, I'm gonna give you your own exact head program. And so we went from being fired as part of a small piece of the pie of a four day program into having our own three day intensive that we're teaching from eight in the morning to 10 o'clock at night, three days in a row in a boot camp style program. And all of this goes to learning, being adaptable, being humble, understanding that you're gonna take your legs, especially as an entrepreneur, especially for me, is entrepreneur. At that time, corporate improv is virtually non existent, and the ones who were doing it was pretty. You know, there is very flat and we're trying toe raise new ground. So you're gonna stumble, you're gonna fall. And when you get good leadership around you that support you and supports what you're doing, they're going to give you the opportunity to fail, and their gonna give you the opportunity to learn from that failure and give you that opportunity to succeed. And that's the type of leader that I aspire to be. I was 27 at that time. 28 maybe. And, you know, young and full of energy and full of confidence and the kind of have the wind taken out of you abruptly, there is, ah, very humbling experience. And, um, yeah, I learned a lot from that. And I learned a lot from every program that we teach you every step of the way that clients customers. We're gonna teach you. My mentor, my mentor as a man named Martin Maher wasn't Mandy Martin Ahmad. He passed about two decades ago. He created the second city training center, though that was his is doing and what he instilled upon me and what I still upon all my faculty and business improv is your class will always teach you how to teach them. So the outward focused learning every step of the way and growing and adapting every step of the way. And that goes back toe. 20 years ago, in what senior leadership showed me

it ranges. I'm very fortunate in that my vice president of development likes to say that our clients are agnostic, so it's pretty much if you have to talk to people. If you have to communicate, you have to collaborate. We'll work with you. So we work with anything from big business. Big Pharma, bio pharma, um, consultancies, solo preneurs and entrepreneurs, small businesses. It doesn't matter the size. It doesn't matter the function. We work with military on a basic level. We work with military and an elite level. We worked with government in the same way. Uh, it doesn't really matter, because what we focus on, as I said at the top, is all about people. It's people skills. So if you have to talk to people, then we could work with you regardless of what side of the brain you're on. Engineers, accountants, actuaries, doctors or the most creative you know, most gregarious create the advertising, um, at the industry folk, you know, industry meaning entertainment industry folks, we worked with everybody