Brown Alumni
Brown Univeristy Alumni Magazine - The Corporate Magician
Brad Montgomery '88: When a hearty laugh is good for the bottom line.
By Carrie Printz
When Brad Montgomery graduated with a political science degree in 1988, he had the same plan as many fellow classmates: take a year off before heading to law school. But sixteen years later, that day still hasn't come. Instead, Montgomery has taken a childhood hobby–magic–and turned it into a successful career as a corporate speaker and entertainer.
Growing up in Denver, Montgomery did magic tricks in high school and during summers off from college. His venues ranged from children's birthday parties to street performances to the Colorado Renaissance Festival, where he performed as a jester. “Looking back now, I was pretty bad,” he says with a characteristic laugh.
During that fateful year off after college, Montgomery entered a contest and won a booking at the renowned Magic Castle in Los Angeles. It was on the drive back to Colorado that he realized he wasn't going to law school. He was having too much fun. Instead, Montgomery eventually entertained students at about 250 colleges across the country. He also performed on cruise ships and at nightclubs. As a magician and comedian, though, his act did not revolve around traditional sawing-a-box-in-half tricks; instead he performed less glitzy magic and incorporated humor. “My goal was never to be the best magician in the world,” he says, “but to use magic in funny situations and focus on audience participation.”
Ultimately, though, college clients and nightclubs didn't provide the longevity or stability that Montgomery, a married father of three, wanted for his family. So he branched out into entertaining at corporate meetings. Billing himself as a “hilarious motivational speaker and corporate entertainer,” Montgomery has developed a successful niche by performing at conferences and other corporate events across the country. His clients have ranged from such large companies as Allstate Insurance and General Mills to such smaller groups as the Colorado Egg Producers Association. He tailors his programs for specific audiences, researching his clients and incorporating inside jokes into his act. One of his presentations is aptly titled “Stack Your Deck for Success: A Magician Reveals the Secrets to Getting What You Want Out of Life.” Another is “Presto-Change-O: A Magician's Guide to Laughing at Change.”
Getting a laugh is not always easy: often his audiences don't want to be there. They may have just sat through a boring presentation or been given bad news about layoffs. Montgomery considers it his job to help them see the lighter side of things and not take work so seriously. “Mostly, I'm telling people variations on the theme that life is fun,” he says, noting that he still uses magic and audience participation in his speeches. “If you can make people who work together laugh as a group, that's huge.”
He adds that Brown prepared him well for his unusual career path. “The whole concept of learning how to learn, which you do at Brown, applies to being self-employed in a nontraditional job,” Montgomery says, noting that he had to teach himself to be his own Webmaster, marketing director, and salesman. “Brown helps you have confidence in your ability to go out and learn what you need to do to be successful.”
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