| 1995 |
One day in March, when nothing much was on TV, former corporate lawyer Andrew Klein and ex-High School teacher Darren Isenberg form impact entertrainers, aiming to rid the world of dull conferences and events.
Their first job was for a Price Waterhouse conference. Their brief ? Make accountants have fun. Managing to get a room-full of 200 accountants all doing the Time Warp gave the guys the confidence that they could get almost any conference delegate to do anything...AND build team-work at the same time.
Darren grows a strange-looking goatee which remains in place for several years, long past its use-by date. Andrew shaves his head to hide premature baldness.
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| 1996 |
Having survived their first year, the business starts to grow, attaining clients like Telstra, Acer Computers and Phillips Fox.
A highlight of the year is travelling around Australia during the Atlanta Olympics, hosting a Coke promotion. Their Mums are excited to see them on television every night for two weeks.
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| 1997 |
The company outgrows Darren's second bedroom and move to new offices in Edgecliff, three doors up from a brothel, which seems to attract more passing trade than they do.
New clients include NRMA, MMI, AMP, 3M and others with lots of letters in their names.
Highlights of the year include designing a team-building activity for Macquarie Bank that required the bankers carrying a gold-fish in a bowl through the Blue Mtns.
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| 1998 |
Jobs take impact to every state in Australia. On one occasion, to wake delegates up "the morning after" a big Gala Dinner, they travel to a UTAG Travel conference in Tasmania to conduct a 3 minute Energiser. They then fly home. Darren counts his frequent flyer points.
SOCOG use them for the first of many jobs. Members of Andersen Consulting are seen searching Hyde Park for Andersen's garden gnomes as part of a team-building hunt throughout the CBD. A few years later Andersen is no more !!!
We are called on more and more to MC conferences.
Darren uses up his frequent flyer points and travels to the south of France to get away from Andrew.
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| 1999 |
Andrew becomes a Dad. Darren plans another trip to France. Andrew plans to get more sleep.
We MC and team-build conferences for Boral, 3Com, Minter Ellison and ABN AMRO amongst others.
Compaq use us for a series of marketing blitzes to create product awareness.
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| 2000 |
We travel all over the country working for the Who's Who of the corporate world (Optus, IBM, Deloittes, Andrew's Mother-in-law's bridge club) and become one of SOCOG's preferred MC's, hosting functions throughout the
Olympics. We are written up in US papers !!!
We do lots of work with banks, law firms, I.T companies and drug companies who refuse to pay us with free samples.
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| 2001 |
We do lots of great jobs that make lots of serious people enjoy their serious events and end up learning more as a result.
Companies like Freehills, Eli Lilly, The Institute of Chartered Accountants, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, AMP and IBM continue coming back to book us for more work. We decide to start charging for our services (that last bit is a joke…although we do work for the love of it as well and our costs are very reasonable)
Andrew has another son and learns that he can function efficiently on less sleep than he already was not getting.
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| 2002 |
An enormous amount of travelling takes place. We work on our biggest Roadshow yet, compering a 5 week road-trip to each Australian capital city with client LG Electronics. We discover that "Life's Good", if a little tiring.
After years of our clients saying to us "you are great presenters…you should teach presentation skills", we finally design and run fun, entertaining and interactive Presentation Skills courses.
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| 2003 |
| Our Presentation Skills courses take off. We hit the road to compere many Roadshows. Between our MC work, our team-building and our training, we notch up enough frequent flyers to take us to the planet of our choice. We fall in love with our lap-tops (and we mean that in a nice way!) |
| 2004 |
| Its almost 10 years since we began, and we enjoy our work more than ever. Our families are yet to be convinced that we have real jobs. Your company books us and the rest is history |