Comedy Works CEO Wende Curtis talks transparency, luck

GREELEY — Wende Curtis knows her worth: She’s Tide.

When you’re at the store and looking at detergents, the Comedy Works CEO said, there’s the top-shelf brands like Tide, and then there are all the lower-cost brands below it. To know your worth is key in leading a business, Curtis said at her keynote address at the Small Business Development Center’s Northern Colorado Women’s Small Business Conference on Thursday.

Curtis shared her story of how she came to own Comedy Works and open up a second location right at the start of the 2008 recession, while also sharing her thoughts on being a woman in business.

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Curtis started at Comedy Works 32 years ago as a cocktail waitress while she was in school at Colorado State University and the comedy club had a Fort Collins location. She immediately fell in love with the business and started managing the Fort Collins club and doing books for the Downtown Denver location and Fort Collins. She managed its jazz club and then ran the Tampa location. Curtis soon developed a reputation: She was the fixer, being brought on to make clubs profitable after they had been mismanaged for months.

But it wasn’t just the clubs that were mismanaged: the whole organization was.

“It was just one greedy CEO to the next who granted themselves so much stock in one quarter they couldn’t pay payroll taxes,” Curtis said. “I mean, how stupid are you? And when it comes to payroll taxes you don’t mess around. So, Comedy Works came up for sale.”

Curtis said she believes that luck has a lot to do with her success and that luck is when hard work meets opportunity. So when the opportunity came to purchase Comedy Works, she took it.

She quickly learned some lessons along the way. She purchased it with one of the original owners and the chief financial officer, who she didn’t know very well. Curtis worked 70 hours a week, while the two partners checked in once a week for a meeting. They didn’t know the fax number, they couldn’t step in to run the place if need be and 10 months into the partnership Curtis said she was shocked when they asked to make as much money as she did.

“It’s good there was no one else in the restaurant and that I knew the owner because I shouted ‘are you effing kidding me,’ but of course I really said it,” Curtis said with a laugh. Ultimately, the partners got a deal to leave the company and Curtis learned: Don’t partner with people you don’t know well. She still doesn’t have partners now.

After running Comedy Works for a while, another opportunity came up. Some competitors were looking to open a club in the area and wanted Curtis to partner with them.

“But I don’t partner and I don’t partner with stupid straight white men who have no style. Seriously, you should have seen the carpet they were trying to put in,” Curtis joked Wednesday. She had another idea and decided to open her own second location of Comedy Works, which after years of mismanagement before her had been pared back to the Larimer Square location in Denver.

Curtis decided to open the South location, but picked an interesting time to do it: October 2008, just after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.

“They had the biggest bankruptcy in the history of the nation, and they were around for 150 years,” Curtis said. “I was on my own since 2000. Rough times ensued.”

Those rough times included waiting on loans in a time when people weren’t lending, paying a $65,000 a month mortgage on a 21,000 square foot building and going from 55 to 210 employees. She ended up leasing everything inside the building and put all her debt up front. For 18 months she didn’t take a paycheck. She cut back in her personal life — Curtis never married or had children — and went back to working 70 hours a week, coming in at 5:30 in the morning to open the restaurant she now had.

Curtis admitted that up until that point, she had very few business struggles and even was someone who had a golden touch for making struggling businesses profitable. But opening the South location with so much debt in 2008 was a challenge.

Of course, Curtis has had other struggles. She was candid in her keynote, discussing her lifelong eating disorder and getting diagnosed at age 47 with ADHD.

Curtis, who has been giving presentations for several years, first never intended to be public about her personal struggles. When she first slipped with her eating disorder at a talk, she was embarrassed. She was embarrassed to talk about it to friends and families before. But now she does it to help others feel less alone.

“One of the biggest mistakes of my life was I could have been more open to help more people,” she said. “Everyone has stuff and we all struggle with things that have nothing to do with our appearance.”

Curtis also touched on the #MeToo movement, and how every woman has been touched in a way they didn’t want to, including her. She shared how one of the cleaners at the South club, Marta, was harassed by a male cleaner. Marta told him to leave and kept telling him to leave until he did and never came back.

“That’s how we should be raising our children and our daughters and how we should be responding,” Curtis said. “That’s how we’ll overcome. But change is hard and slow.”

Curtis was able to turn the South club profitable and climb out from the mountain of debt she had. But it was hard.

“I had my bookkeepers taking calls from debt collectors, but I said ‘I don’t think it’s your job to take those calls because that’s my debt.’ So I took their calls, and it was really hard. ‘You owe me money; when are you going to pay me?’ They all want dates,” she said with a laugh. “I’ll pay you when I have the money.” She did manage to pay them all.

But going through the experience did make her realize she didn’t want to go through it again. She’s working on her next big project, but she’s not quite sure what it will be yet.

Whatever it is though, she’ll tell you. She’s not embarrassed or keeping secrets anymore.

“I hope that if you’ve learned anything from my story,” Curtis concluded, “it’s to maybe be more honest that I was with your stuff. Let’s be more transparent with each other.”