Meet Pat Treuer

Today we’d like to introduce you to Pat Treuer.

Hi Pat, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Growing up, I wanted to be a standup comedian and didn’t have the courage to do it until I was 23 when I did my first open mic at Comedy Works. I had two great sets at Comedy Works and then I bombed and took a 12 years hiatus from Comedy, choosing to go into the Corporate World as an International Sales Manager.

After 12 years of working for other people and growing increasingly depressed, I moved to Chicago and left my successful career to pursue standup comedy full-time. I went from flying business class to foreign countries to meet with international military leaders to riding the L Train in the freezing cold to go to open mics at bars, I would never go to as a patron. After a couple of years in Chicago, I started an open mic and a standup comedy show in the back room of a Denver Broncos bar in Wrigley to raise money for local charities.

At the time, most comedy shows in Chicago only had 3 or 4 performers and maybe one of them was a female. Also, it was the same cast of comedians rotating through the shows. Meanwhile, there were so many hard-working, talented, up-and-coming comedians who were overlooked by others so I started offering show spots to these overlooked comedians. It became clear to me the best way to entertain the most amount of people is to have a diverse lineup of performers from all walks of life, so our shows featured 7-8 diverse performers in an hour. This formula worked and brought in a lot of repeat audience members.

After seeing the same faces in the audience for a few sold-out shows, I realized I had something of value. I could combine my corporate sales skillset with my comedy show productions to bring Corporate Clients clean, diverse comedy shows. Treuer Laughs® was born!

For nearly two years, I tried to sell our services. “Comedy is too risky for corporate groups” was the rejection message I constantly faced. In January of 2020, we booked our first corporate show and things were looking up – until the world shut down a month later.

I didn’t give up when it looked like my startup was a casualty of COVID. Instead of giving up, I decided to release daily clips of comedians from the charity shows and sent out about 2000 emails advising people we were sharing free funny content to bring laughter in those initial dark days. From those 2000 emails, 2 people asked me if I could “bring some comedians to our boring zoom meetings.” The opportunity began to show itself.

I didn’t know what zoom was and not many comedians were keen on performing comedy on zoom. I quickly learned how to use zoom, talked comedians into giving it a shot and we produced our first zoom standup comedy show! After the show, we received a request for another show from one of the attendees and this became a theme. People at home with partners would watch our shows and their partners would say “I want this at our next event,” and we would get another client! This word-of-mouth business grew much faster than I could have imagined and allowed me to move back home to Colorado!

Our competition was booking one performer to do an hour or more on zoom, and other performers were not performing clean material. One comedian on zoom for more than 8 minutes is boring and there’s not one entertainer who can entertain everyone. Treuer Laughs® shows feature 6-7 diverse performers with corporate-friendly material and custom content in a 45-minute show.

Soon our clients started sharing their experiences and/or proposals they had from our competition and we knew we were ahead of the game. We started receiving thank you emails on a regular basis to the tune of, “We just love your focus on diversity, the fast movement of the shows, and how easy it is to work with you.” Client referrals continued to pour in.

When did you finally determine this was a successful decision (what sales/revenue measurable told you this)?

As of today we have produced over 350 shows for over 60,000 people across the world and are an active part of companies’ diversity programs. Now with the world back open, we have an established client base and are in the process of creating a clean, diverse standup comedy web series!

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It has not been a smooth road! As a comedian, self-doubt is highly prevalent on a daily basis so that is an ever-long challenge for me as an individual.

On the business side, the first obstacle was getting people to trust comedy was safe for their corporate events. Then COVID hit as mentioned and we shifted to Zoom which was a brand new way of producing a comedy show.

Our success became a challenge in the fact that we needed to find professional, clean comedians across the US and Canada. Thankfully one of our foundations of business is treating talented comedians with respect and compensating them at a high level for their unique skillset. During the pandemic, we were one of the only providers of high-paying work for comedians which was attractive to other performers referred to us.

We have a screening process which was a result of working with some comedians early in the game who turned out to not be a great fit for our model. The initial challenges resulting from the people who didn’t fit our model was emotionally exhausting, however we were able to learn quickly how to identify comedians who enhance our offering which turned out to be a fantastic win for us!

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am a standup comedian and business owner. This is a challenging balance because I have to sacrifice creative freedoms/endeavors from time to time in order to develop the business. This is a daily struggle for me because the business of providing comedy to corporate groups continues to present other creative opportunities which excite me, yet at the same time, the day-to-day business operations can be exhausting and detract from my own creation of new material and performing unfiltered.

The thing I am most proud of is that I have finally realized the secret is to just provide opportunities for others and to take action and not give up. It took me until my late 30s to realize this (I am a bit embarrassed by that fact).

As a result of this realization, I continue to explore new territory with my standup and creative projects. The current project is a standup comedy series I am producing featuring all of the performers I have been working with. I never thought I would be producing a professional standup series until I actually took the time to figure how to do it and then took action on it!

How do you think about luck?
Great question!

“The harder you work, the luckier you get.”

That is one of my favorite quotes because it is true. My favorite role luck (both good and bad) has played in my life and my business is ridiculously stupid. When the pandemic and lockdown hit, I wanted to continue some sort of endeavor related to comedy so I started an Instagram Live series called Comedians in Quarantine Having Cocktails. Each night I would interview a comedian I knew about comedy while enjoying beverages. After doing about 15 interviews with people I knew, my wife suggested I reach out to comedians I didn’t know.

This is where the luck (good and/or bad depending on how you look at it) came in. Because of the pandemic, comedians were not working and had nothing going on. I began reaching out to bigger name comedians over Instagram asking if I could interview them and most of them said yes – because they had nothing else to do. I ended up doing over 40 interviews with career comedians across North America who would introduce me to their comedian friends.

Around this same time, we were receiving more requests from potential clients to produce higher-level shows to entertain their clients. Through the Instagram Live Series, I had established relationships with high-level comedians who were out of work and were willing to try working with me. Essentially I established professional and personal relationships with a bunch of people on the internet who I had never met and that ended up being a major source of our talent pool! Lucky me!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.treuerlaughs.com

Image Credits
Forrest La Fave (for the B&W)