An avid believer in doing something you truly love, Dave Blum '85 builds treasure hunts.
"You should find your work really fun or really meaningful," he said over a plate of Vietnamese food in San Francisco's Chinatown. Blum, creator and founder of Dr. Clue Treasure Hunts, shared his clues for happiness while conducting a brief tour of his hometown, San Francisco--one restaurant, countless trinket shops, one coffee bar, and a circuitous route through the city's popular tourist arena.
An English major while a student, Blum found Pomona to be a solid training ground for his career objectives. He honed his leadership skills while a resident assistant in Mudd-Blaisdell, and using Pomona's liberal arts curriculum, he built a grounding in literature that would eventually become helpful in devising clues for treasure hunts. "Pomona taught me self-discipline. It taught me to be focused and persistent, and I needed that as an entrepreneur," he said.
After graduating from Pomona, Blum traveled and worked jobs that he admits he wasn't happy with. He wanted to start a business using both his passions and his skills. "After a lot of introspection, I discovered the three T's important to me--Teaching, Tourism, Travel and word play. Okay, that's wrong--maybe it's three T's and a W," he said, laughing.
Over the next two hours meandering through Chinatown, Blum recalled his struggle to find his ideal occupation. "What I found was that what I wanted to do didn't exist--I had to bring it into the world. So, I created the treasure-hunt model." In 1995, with a few clients and a lot of ideas, Dr. Clue's Treasure Hunts was born.
Now, on most days, Blum can be found walking the streets of San Francisco's North Beach-Chinatown area cataloguing the hard-to-find landmarks, weathered plaques, bizarre window displays and neighborhood eccentricities that make up his treasure hunt clues.
The treasure-hunt model comes from Blum's interest in working with groups and teaching people to use team-building skills. "Treasure hunts work like this," he explained. "I gather the teams at the beginning of the hunt, talk to them about teamwork, and have them sign a 'team' contract empowering them to devise their strategy." Then, with clues in hand, teams are released into a San Francisco neighborhood to interpret each clue. Each hunt takes two to three hours to complete, and teams are encouraged to find the clues in any order they choose. Blum has created hunts for the North Beach-Chinatown area, Fisherman's Wharf, Golden Gate Park and the San Jose Tech Museum, and welcomes the opportunity to create hunts in new areas.
While we skipped through various Chinatown tourist shops en route to a hip North Beach coffee bar, Blum described his clues. "Each clue has the same structure. The first part gets the team to the general area with references to street names or landmarks, then the second part points out a specific sign, plaque, inscription, or even a shop window display, sometimes even a 'living' clue." This second pointer ultimately assists the team in finding the keyword to complete a phrase, determine a date, or find a name. They record this keyword on their clue sheet and hand it in at the end of the hunt.
On the sidewalk in front of a noisy café, Blum stopped and pointed to a small, almost hidden plaque at the foot of a small tree commemorating the life of a San Francisco native. "That would make a great clue!"
Naturally, Blum admitted, some clues work better than others. "I had this street performer who does impressions of stars at Fisherman's Wharf help me out with one hunt," he explained. The clue brought the participants to the Wharf, then instructed the teams to call out the name of a celebrity. The "living clue" was supposed to insert a particular word into his impression act for the teams to write down to complete the clue. Unfortunately, as often happens with living clues, said Blum, the performer forgot the word and ruined the clue. "I finally had to drop that clue from that hunt, but I still use him once in a whileI just check with him first and make sure he knows the keyword."
Surrounded by mocha and cappuccino drinkers at the coffee bar, Blum reminisced about his time at Pomona over his plain cup of coffee. "I like to drop myself into situations where the learning curve necessary is quite steep," he said. "Pomona afforded me that kind of situation, both academically and socially." A lover of books and literature, Blum spends as much time today reading and studying, both for fun and for his clues, as he did when assigned readings at Pomona. "I like to learn, and somewhere along the way, I learned that it was a big world out there."
An hour and four coffees later, Blum led the way back to Chinatown. On the way, he joked about the world of entrepreneurship. He explained that after a couple of years nurturing the burgeoning Dr. Clue business, he found that relying on word of mouth wasn't enough to grow his client list. So, he engaged the skills of a friend, and debuted the Dr. Clue Web site. "The Web site has been valuable--in fact, today 50 percent of my business comes from corporate clients doing Web searches." This, he said, illustrates the recent trend for companies to look for ways to train employees to work better as teams. "It's part of the current job climate: retaining employees is difficult. Companies need to create fun and exciting work environments."
His client list includes Hewlett-Packard, Quantum Corporation and Andersen Consulting. "Think about it," Blum pointed out. "In this current information age, employees work alone in front of a computer monitor, creating a feeling and environment of isolationism." So it's no wonder that lot of his business comes from high-tech companies that want to retrain--"or train," Blum added--their employees to use team skills.
"Treasure hunts get employees out of the office, out of their normal environment," said Blum. "Though I've never had a hunt bomb, per se, there are always participants who don't want to play along or take part. They see it as a game, so they don't understand the value of it. But, inevitably, by the end of the hunt, they are really into it."
Team members tend to lose a lot of inhibitions when they're doing a treasure hunt, Blum explained. "It's really about teambuilding, so often the best lessons come out of the mistakes that the teams make and the interactions they have with each other and even with strangers on the street."
Headed back to North Beach for a jazz show, Blum remembered his earlier comment about finding the ideal work environment. "I guess the best scenario is to find work that's both fun and meaningful. You shouldn't settle for less."
Good clue for the rest of us.
To find out more information about Dr. Clue Treasure Hunts, you may follow the clues at www.drclue.com.
