The Water Trough- We can't make you drink, but we will make you think!

From SaaS to LaaS: The Power of Laughter in Business with Kevin Hubschmann

• Ed Drozda

Share episode

Just had an enlightening chat with Kevin Hubschmann, founder of Laugh.Events, on The Water Trough! From SaaS to LaaS, we're diving into how humor can transform business strategy and connection. Don't miss this one! #SmallBusiness #LaughterAsAService #Podcast 

Welcome to The Water Trough where we can't make you drink, but we will make you think. My name is Ed Drozda The Small Business Doctor, and I'm really excited you chose to join me here as we discuss topics that are important for small business folks just like you. If you're looking for ideas, inspiration, and possibility, you've come to the right place. Join us as we take steps to help you create the healthy business that you've all. Always wanted.

Ed Drozda:

Good afternoon folks. This is Ed Drozda The Small Business Doctor, and I wanna welcome you back to The Water Trough where today I'm joined by Kevin Hubschmann. Kevin is the founder of Laugh.Events. He started his career selling SaaS, S-A-A-S to Fortune 500 companies, and now his work focuses on selling LaaS, L-A-A-S, laughter as a service to the same audience. Leveraging humor and the skills he has honed as a standup and improv comedian has helped him to grow and retain a multimillion dollar book of business. Now he helps teams and leaders unlock their professional potential with those same skills. Kevin, welcome.

Kevin Hubschmann:

Hey Ed, how's it going? Happy to be here.

Ed Drozda:

I'm excited to have you here. I've not been in this close proximity to a comedian in my life, and I always avoid the front row, so let's face it...

Kevin Hubschmann:

You're in good hands. No roasting here.

Ed Drozda:

Oh, goodie. Well, I'm really excited about this opportunity. I want you to know, Kevin, I believe strongly in the power of laughter as well. I think it goes a long way to boosting civility, encouraging comradery, and building legitimate and strong foundations. I wanna start out by taking you back to an earlier time in your life. During the SaaS days your boss made this statement to you: stop being so salesman and start being more Hubschmann. Tell us about that moment.

Kevin Hubschmann:

Yeah, that was a real defining moment in my career. Growing up, into high school, into college, I always led with being a bit silly, and I think that mentality caused people to maybe not take me as seriously. So, once I got into the corporate world so to speak, my first job outta college, I made the decision, hey now's the time to tighten this tie, get a little bit more serious. If you want people to take you seriously you gotta take yourself seriously. That was the mentality that I told myself, and that's how I approached work. I went into work with this nine to five personality as I would later call it. People who would see me at work were very surprised to see what I would be like outside of work. A little bit levity in my life a little bit more during my five to nine and I was really just all business when it came down to it. That was something that I really didn't realize that I was doing after a certain point. At first it was conscious and then it became unconscious, but ultimately I'm on a sales call, new manager, and he's monitoring things. He's met me and I'm very casual with him, very loose with him, making him laugh, we're having a good time. Then I get on this call and he sees that I've sort of shifted. I'm really all business and I'm looking to ask the right questions and get the right answers. It was very regimented and pretty stiff, and when he got off the call he said it was a good call, but I need to tell you something. You need to stop being so salesman and you need to start being more Hubschmann. That was an eye-opening moment for me'cause it was someone taking a mirror up to my face and showing me how tight my tie was and basically being like, you know, that's not how you win business. And that's not how you influence people. And that's not how you make connections. It's not being really professional, so to speak. I need you to show more of your personality. I need you to be a little bit more loose and be a little bit more fun and be the guy that I see every day in this role. And that was the moment where I said, yeah, I need to improve that part of me. Simultaneously I started to take improv classes in New York City. New York City capital of comedy in my opinion, and I started to do these private classes with my brother and my best friend. I would then see that was really helping me loosen up and it was allowing me to really be authentic. The next day I would come in and I felt like I had a leg up on everybody, because I was not trying to get my point across. Suddenly I was really open to everyone's opinions more than I was before. My ears were wide open and I was also stopping myself from interrupting people. I stopped saying, hey, it's my turn to talk. I started to use that yes and mentality. I started to improve my communication. I started to build off of people's ideas, interject mine when they made sense, but lift the people around me up. Then when it was my turn to speak I was able to think of the context of the room and what was said. Suddenly the words that I was saying had a lot more power because they were a collective thought in a way,'cause I was taking all the other things people were saying and then interjecting my own opinions and building off things. So it was that moment where it was like, hey, you don't have to be this invention of a person that you've made up. You can really be yourself. You can be that five to nine personality during your nine to five.

Ed Drozda:

Do you suppose your boss was excited or perhaps surprised by the person that he unleashed?

Kevin Hubschmann:

You know what, I don't think he knew the guy before so much. He really just got a taste of it, and I think that's what makes a really great manager. He saw where he could make an impact right away. I think that really was something I'm very grateful to him, and that's the difference between a manager that's on your case about hitting quota and a manager that's about unleashing your potential. I think he wasn't surprised because he didn't let that other piece of me linger too much,'cause he said I already know the version I like and I know the version that everyone else likes, and it's about time you start to like that version too.

Ed Drozda:

Powerful words coming from a manager to literally let their own ego go, to allow a subordinate in this case, to thrive.

Kevin Hubschmann:

Yeah, I think that's a manager's job, to feel out the best way that they can support the individual, with the ultimate goal of reaching quota as a team. Especially when it comes to sales. Sales is a world of individual contributors that are working together on a team. It's like the Ryder Cup; everyone's playing for team USA, so to speak. All these individuals, and they're individual golfers used to playing independently now have to come together, band together, and they have to include teamwork. I think that's a really difficult thing for a manager. How do you balance getting the most out of your individual contributor while also having a culture that you're setting as a manager for your whole group? How do you make sure that you're working on that small thing with the big thing in mind? Like you said, it takes a lot for a manager to take his ego down, and take the money out of it for a minute, and say how do I unleash this person,'cause that's ultimately gonna get me to my goal, which is reaching sales goals and revenue targets and reaching our team's full potential.

Ed Drozda:

And a manager such as this also realizes that he or she may be unleashing new possibilities that will no longer keep you in the fold.

Kevin Hubschmann:

Absolutely. For better or for worse that allowed me to stop having such tunnel vision on the person that I was trying to become, which was maybe a manager of sales or a VP of sales, or just staying in the sales world. I think it unlocked a curiosity in me that I've always had; it allowed me to say well that's who I am. That's the Hubschmann that I am, this person that is boundlessly curious. So let me be curious and that really helped me too because in sales, that allowed me to be more consultative in my approach. I started to be very curious about, hey, what are your problems? Instead of pitching my solutions I was listening so much harder and so much more consciously and saying, I'm not gonna give my pitch until I know it's relevant to you. And then I'm either going to say I actually think something else is better for you or this is the thing that you care about. I'm gonna skip slides one through six and let's just focus on seven because this is what you talked about,'cause I listened the whole time, and I'm not gonna distract you with the out of the box presentation. I'm making this all about you. That got me interested in the details outside of just closing the sale. Like, how is this impacting your organization? What's your infrastructure like at your business and how does that work and how does marketing work and how do systems integrations work? Suddenly, I didn't just care about closing the deal. I cared about making a really great holistic solution and taking that from that let's close the deal to let's figure out something that's gonna be best for you so you have more trust in me. Ultimately that actually led to more money. It led to them saying, well, we were thinking about one seat, but the way you just said it, maybe we need five, maybe we need 10. Maybe we need a global license. What does that look like? I think that's really what that did. I think it really opened up my third eye of curiosity and said let's start diving deeper into the real problems here.

Ed Drozda:

Curiosity is certainly the pathway to possibility, there's no question about that. I think it's pretty obvious that for yourself, you were satisfied with this newfound awareness. What was your take on your client's level of satisfaction with the person that you were, they may not have seen the change, but what was their impression about this person?

Kevin Hubschmann:

I think it resulted in a lot more trust, ultimately. I think they could suddenly see that I was genuinely interested in solving their problems, which ultimately makes them look good and makes them interested in speeding things along, having the right conversations, bringing in the right people. You know, I wasn't just pitching a product, I was trying to make them look awesome at work. That's really what I wanted to do. That was my ultimate goal; how can I ask the right questions, listen to their problems and prescribe a solution that's not just me pitching a product because they know I'm a salesperson. They know I'm gonna get commission off of this, and you can smell that a mile away. So, when I put that air freshener on my sale, it suddenly took a different turn. I'm still friendly with with people that I sold six, seven years ago. We have nothing to sell each other, but that trust was built and that was the foundation of our relationship.

Ed Drozda:

As a business coach trust is absolutely a requirement. I also believe that in sales, the quota can move people to be more mindful of the quantity of the work they perform versus the quality. I don't mean this as a negative towards salespeople. I think that in many cases the compelling force behind their work makes it difficult to focus on things like trust.

Kevin Hubschmann:

Absolutely. You can't minimize the fact that having a quota over your head is scary and oftentimes distracting to your sales pitch. That's why increasing that trust and it'll ultimately increase your deal size and deal volume and also get the crap out of your pipeline like the things that don't fit and that you're chasing. I genuinely believe that when you go forward with these tools, trying to build trust, you do separate yourself amongst your competitors as well. You are being that first line of defense. You're giving that first impression and that could really accelerate a deal. Whereas if you are just giving a pitch, you're no different than a personalized email, or a proposal that just has numbers, cost savings, and things like that. So I think that's also what separates people and makes their pipeline legitimate. It doesn't just make it like, what's gonna close? Well, I sent them the pricing and let's see how it goes, and whatever. I think that also increases your close rate, and I think it can ultimately make that quota a little less intimidating.

Ed Drozda:

I appreciate what you're saying. Now we know you went from SaaS to LaaS. I hope I'm not messing it up by saying SaaS to LaaS but, oh that's it. You nailed it. So you went from SaaS to LaaS. We know how it began, the seeds that were planted by your boss, or added on to stuff that you'd already fertilized before that. So in the current environment, are you working with salespeople largely, or people in industry at large? What is your focus today?

Kevin Hubschmann:

It's certainly a mixed bag. I think different organizations have different goals and different problems. I'll break down our business a bit more. There's our virtual corporate comedy experiences, which are really fun and hilarious. Moments where people are like we've had a rough quarter, we've had a rough month, or we've worked our tails off. We really wanna get in a room with each other, stop thinking about work, and we want to have fun. We just wanna laugh. We take their work lingo, their memes, their culture, and we create comedy shows about it. So that can be a sales team just went through a crazy quarter. That can be an accounting team that just went through an insane busy period. That can be a product team that just launched something, like a celebration moment. We also have in-person experiences that fill that same celebration need. But when it comes to something that has really become a staple of our business it's called laughing and development. These are very much tailored to your business goals. Laughing and development is applied improv, basically skills that you learn doing improv. Skills that you learn doing standup, skills that comedians have honed. That is thinking on your feet, communication, listening, active listening, taking risks, having a supportive environment. There's boundless amounts different things you can get from it. That's when we take an intake form from people and we say, what are you actually interested in getting out of this? And out of like a hundred exercises we can do we're gonna dial it into the eight or 10 that's gonna fit for your group. For salespeople it's perfect because that's where my specialty can come into place. I've been in your shoes. I know what that's about, and it's really effective for salespeople because there's actual data out there that shows that these types of workshops increase sales conversions. When Salesforce implemented applied improv workshops their teams saw a 36% increase in sales conversions. That's a serious number that you can look at and go, okay, for our offsite or our sales kickoff, whatever it might be, this is going to allow us to actually have tools that we can bring back to our clients and bring back to our sales cycle and our process. That's where we've seen it be very successful in the sales world, but applied Improv is an excellent tool for brainstorming too. So it's really good for marketing teams, product teams, and engineering teams. Improv makes you focus on divergent thinking. We live in a world now with AI that is based on convergent thinking, like hey give me this answer to this problem, and that's the answer. Whereas we're human, and we need to work that divergent muscle in our brain and come up with 10 bad ideas so we'll have one good idea. Let the floodgates open up. That's really all these applied improv experiences are doing for boosting creativity and team collaboration. It's basically how do we create a really supportive environment so there's no bad answers, no bad ideas. And people say that all the time. No bad ideas, let's throw it out. But what kind of environment are you actually creating so someone can fall flat on their face and get supported in the same way that if they hit a home run. That is what these exercises are; to create that environment so teams can take that and launch it into their day-to-day lives in the way that they communicate as a team.

Ed Drozda:

I think it's really important to make the distinction between applied improv and comedy. And although they do tend to get conflated, right? The way that you're describing applied improv is very much akin to a process called design thinking that we use in business school. I think it's fascinating the way that you've taken that concept and applied it like this. I've never looked at it from this angle before, but I can assure you it will inform me the next time I'm engaged in the design thinking process.

Kevin Hubschmann:

I think there is this common misconception. That's why we actually changed it to laughing and development instead of calling it improv. We didn't invent this process. This has been going on for years. We just decided that the word was maybe a bit too harsh, but also maybe a bit too conflated with comedy. And when people think about improv they think about Whose Line Is It Anyways, these absolute comedic geniuses that are making us laugh. Every time I'm like, hey let's do improv they're like, well I'm not very funny. And that's the last thing we want you to do. Improv comedy is not about coming up with the best one-liner. It's not about coming up with the funniest joke. It's about listening to your partner, building off of that idea, making your partner look great. And if you make your partner look great, it makes the scene look great. It makes the show fantastic. Laughter is the outcome that happens when you follow these rules. Just like in a business setting, sales can be an outcome, idea generation, innovation can be an outcome. When you follow these rules of support and having each other's backs, collaboration, and enhancing that communication, that's what applied improv is all about. It's way different than being performative; it's not performative really in any way.

Ed Drozda:

So when you are talking to a prospective client, when you're in that discussion phase, what sorts of questions are being posed to you?

Kevin Hubschmann:

I'll focus on laughing and development, applied improv side of things, because usually on the virtual comedy side the biggest question they ask is, is this gonna be clean and appropriate? That's like their biggest concern, and obviously that is what our business does.

Ed Drozda:

But the other side is more, I don't wanna say theoretical, it's more creative.

Kevin Hubschmann:

Yeah, on that side of things the biggest question that we get is hey, what happens if no one's into this? What happens if we have some people that are really introverted and really shy? Do you think that they're gonna be good? It's not a matter of if they're going to be good, it's how we've set up these workshops. It's not like we're bringing five people on stage and action. We're dipping your toes in by doing a lot of warmup exercises that are going to get you comfortable with everyone around you creating that supportive environment. And we're slowly titrating them up on the dose of improv and that dose of creativity, innovation, and team collaboration, and making you feel comfortable to be your true, authentic self. My favorite moment that I've had doing these was an event with the Rutgers Business School alumni. And you know, same question came up. There's gonna be people that aren't interested in doing it. That happened; there were people that sat down and that eventually got up. They were waiting to see what it would be like, but someone came up to us at the end of the event and said I really want to thank you for doing this event. I was very nervous. It was a networking event, an alumni networking event. I don't even like alumni networking. It stresses me out, and I'm sort of an extroverted person. It's very unnatural to me. She was saying to me I was in the bathroom, panicking, really concerned. I don't know what to do in this setting, having drinks and talking to people or networking. What do you do for work? What is all this stuff? That was her fear. But when we started to do improv she got so into it. Arguably the most introverted person in the room that was so concerned about the normal socialization that happens at networking event, and then we did one of these applied improv sessions, these laughing and development sessions, and it allowed her to feel supportive in the group and allowed her to say I can be my true, authentic self. She said it was the first time she felt able to connect with people in over two years and it was right out of the pandemic. It's stuff like that, that really pushes me to continue to spread this offering around. Even the most introverted people, they love it because you're giving them the opportunity to slowly dip your toes, and they realize that they just need a supportive environment to become extroverted. That's the layer that's missing. It was an awesome experience and everyone got a ton out of it, and she said she came away with five or six business cards that she ultimately wouldn't have. I related so much to that. People say hey, you're a comedian. You go on stage all the time. How could you relate to that? It's because networking can be so unnatural and it can be like I hope what I have to give you is what you're looking for, and that this exchange of goods is gonna be equitable. But with improv and implied improv, titles don't exist. What you do doesn't exist. You're doing a super silly thing and asking the person in front of you to do the same silly thing. And if they don't, they're actually throwing it all off, so there is this exchange of vulnerability and silliness, and it allows people to make this all full circle. I don't need to be this stiff nine to five person. I can bring my five to nine personality out. I don't have to be so salesman and I can be a bit more Hubschmann, or whatever your last name is.

Ed Drozda:

So my boss would've said to me I should be more Drozda. Okay. All right. I wish I was in a position to take advantage of one of your programs because I can see where it'd be beneficial. To that point, what do you see as the three chief takeaways that your clients get out of an engaging process.

Kevin Hubschmann:

It depends because improv can go a ton of different ways. I mentioned there's hundreds of exercises that can be tweaked and altered. It starts off with what are you looking to get out of this and we're gonna be able to deliver that. But high level, what people get first is support. A supportive environment goes a really long way. And what are you doing in your work culture to make risk taking normalized, for ideas to be thrown out and accepted? What are you doing to create that very supportive culture? The second thing is active listening. Active listening allows you to suppress your urge. I don't know, I have this urge constantly and I always have to suppress it. Think back to this phrase I heard in improv, which said"F" your good idea. That was something you would be taught. It would say, you have an idea? Well, push it down and listen to everyone else first, because this is a team thing. That has to do with sales environments, clients, and things like that. Are you actually actively listening to them? Are we actively listening to our teammates, to our clients, to our prospects? That's a really huge thing. The third thing is communication and collaboration. The wording that you use is huge. Yes-and, is the most popular thing that people know about improv, but what they might not know is no-but, or no-or, or yes-or. Those are words that stop idea generation and collaboration. The words that you use have a really big impact on how to continue to have ideas moving forward. There's a great exercise that we do that says hey, we're going to a picnic. This is something that your listeners can do. Hey, we're going to a picnic and bringing some things, and now everyone's gonna say what they're bringing and you have to say after they say it like, I'm bringing a blanket. You have to say no-but I'm bringing this and then we'll do it again and you say yes, or I'm bringing this. Then you do it a third time and you say yes-and, and suddenly it's a party. Suddenly people are stoked to go to this picnic. It sounds like the most amazing thing. It doesn't sound like we're having 15 individual picnics. We're having one awesome picnic soup, and this is gonna be a really good time.

Ed Drozda:

Thank you so much. I can envision this thing. Kevin, our time has come to an end. Before we say goodbye, is there anything you'd like to leave us with?

Kevin Hubschmann:

I think what you said in the beginning, never underestimate the power of a laugh. Never underestimate levity, never underestimate the ability to work with people in that environment. I have found over the years of working with comedians that their work ethic and the rules that they live by in terms of how they approach their craft can and should be emulated by everybody in the business world. That can be in the form of curiosity, in the form of deadlines, in the form of working hard to achieve what you're passionate about.

Ed Drozda:

Folks, once again my guest today Kevin Hubschmann is the founder of Laugh Events. He's a comedian, an improv guy, a guy who went from SaaS to LaaS. Kevin helps business people to find an enriching opportunity that's right in front of all of us, but I venture that few of us probably appreciate it. It's a lot more than laughter. It really is important, and I hope you listen carefully to the things that he brought to us today. Kevin, thank you so much for being with us.

Kevin Hubschmann:

Thanks, Ed. It was a lot of fun.

Ed Drozda:

Thank you. Folks this is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor and here at The Water Trough, I wanna wish you both a healthy business and a business full of laughter.