Carr Hagerman

Carr Hagerman has spent nearly his entire life as a working, walkabout street performer.  He began when he was 14 years old working at a renaissance festival near his home town of Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was there that he worked with performers such as Penn and Teller (Rio!), Avner the Eccentric, and the Flying Karamozov Brothers, and was inspired to create his own act; a walkabout street character called the Rat Catcher.

As the Rat Catcher, Carr worked with audiences entirely without scripts or props. Instead, he learned to improvise with whatever the audience carried, or whatever the environment offered. In 35 years of working at festival around the country, and eventually traveling globally, Carr studied the form and art of street performing, improvising, eventually taking those ideas into the corporate world.

Carr saw the relationship between the audience, the performer, and the environment as a powerful metaphor of our professional lives, of service and gratitude, and of making a lasting impression. He learned about the remarkable power of Natural Energy, the energy that is released when two or more people fully engage one another, where control is limited and freedom is maximized. When this happens, real creativity will flourish.

In Carr's book Top Performer: A Bold Approach To Sales and Service (available at the 2011 Catersource Conference), Carr describes a world where energy is more important than accuracy, choice is more critical than conformity, and intersection more useful than a destination. His work has taken him inside companies such as Apple, Johnson and Johnson, Hilton Hotels, Proctor and Gamble, American Express…and many more.

www.carrhagerman.com