Stand-up comedians, magicians, virtual-reality games—those are some of the typical “fun” activities at company events. John Cosgrove’s new business, the Cosgrove Trivia Challenge was created to offer an entertainment option that encourages more interaction between employees—and between the entertainer and employees.
Cosgrove started hosting pub quizzes seven years ago at Kieran’s Irish Pub in downtown Minneapolis, where he was a manager. These quizzes are popular in his native Ireland, and he and the pub’s owner, Kieran Folliard, also Irish born, thought it would be a good way to increase the pub’s revenue.
It worked, and within a year, people were asking Cosgrove to host quizzes at private events, such as groom’s dinners. “It’s the perfect icebreaker,” he says. “You have two families that don’t want to mix, and you put them together and make them do trivia about the couple.”
Cosgrove decided to expand the concept into the corporate realm. Before starting his business last October, he interviewed 23 entrepreneurs, business leaders, and marketing and media people to find out what kind of events companies typically had, what worked and what didn’t—essentially, to determine whether his concept could fill a hole in the business-event marketplace. The response was positive. Cosgrove coined the term “interactive team entertainment,” took $10,000 from his personal savings, and the Cosgrove Trivia Challenge was born.
Whether the client is a company or not, Cosgrove’s quizzes follow the same basic structure: four rounds of 10 questions—broken into categories such as music and news—with each question worth two points. For each one- to two-hour event, Cosgrove pulls from a database of about 454,000 questions and 70 trivia books, and also devises questions from newspapers, magazines, and company materials such as annual reports. (He’s proud to say he’s never used a Trivial Pursuit question.) His fees start at $1,000 per event.
Cosgrove’s question lists are customizable to accommodate a company’s theme. St. Louis Park–based Moneygram, for instance, based one of its events on the theme “change and growth.” Cosgrove’s questions included identifying snippets of popular tunes, including David Bowie’s “Changes” and Tony Bennett’s “The Best Is Yet to Come.” Starting in mid-December, Cosgrove began offering handheld keypad devices for his quizzes, making it possible for groups of up to 5,000 people to take part.
The quiz business is a perfect fit for Cosgrove, who overflows with innumerable data bits. (For instance, he’ll tell you that his surname comes from the Gaelic word oscrach, meaning champion or victorious.) Though his company is still young, Cosgrove’s clients have included the likes of Best Buy, Guidant, and Target; Moneygram just booked its second year with the Trivia Challenge. Cosgrove hopes other companies will make his contests an annual event.
