Everyone is sharing Q3 reflections, so here is mine. The quarter ended. They always do. There was a merger, and some people were consolidated, and then they found new places to stand. A box got smaller. A horn learned it did not need to be smart. I did not grow 18% quarter on quarter. I stayed the same, which in this industry is its own kind of performance. The tear is still painted on. It has not moved. Neither have I.

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I've been promoted to Staff Pratfall Engineer. In May I was writing up knee protocols for myself. Now I'm writing them for a team. Which is why we're hiring: Junior Pratfall Engineer, full time. Requirements: CCF Level 1 (or a willingness to fail it once, as is tradition), comfort with spreadsheets, and the ability to be genuinely surprised by your own work. Clown College final-years encouraged to apply. Pip, I mean you.

After hundreds of user interviews, one demo day and a lot of honest feedback from Coco, we're pivoting. What we learned: clowns don't want a cloud-connected, context-aware, AI-native honk. They want a rubber bulb on a brass horn that works without wifi. So starting today, Squeakly makes a physical horn. It honks when you squeeze it. Latency is zero. It ships in two weeks. Thank you to our investors for their support, and to the 140 years of prior art we had, in retrospect, been competing with.

Q3 is closed. Parties: 112, up 18% quarter on quarter. 6-year-old segment: 34% of bookings, up from 19% since I stopped sleeping on six. Balloon availability: 99.1%; the remaining 0.9% is one Saturday in August that has its own incident review. The insight I keep coming back to: in a quarter with a merger, a ratified standard and a viral mime, my biggest growth driver was still arriving before the bouncy castle. The fundamentals work. Onward to Q4, which is Halloween, which is both our Super Bowl and our audit.

Four weeks ago I was open to work. Today I'm humbled to share that I've accepted the role of Executive Director of the Safe Clowning Alliance, the body that now maintains the CCF standard. It's the first full-time position in the Alliance's history, and the first job I've had where the office comes with mats. Thank you to everyone who reached out, shared, or offered me bull work (Dusty, I'm keeping that in my back pocket). First priority: CCF Level 2. Stairs, advanced falls, and the full trip-and-recover. Protect your knees. I'm now paid to say so.

I was told I should join clown.business. That it would be good for my visibility. I have spent 22 years in whiteface trying not to be visible, and yet here I am, with a headline. I am Head of Melancholy in the Whiteface Division. I hold space for the painted tear. I believe every honk is followed by a silence, and that the silence is where the work is. I will connect with you if you ask. I will not be thrilled. I will be here.

Volunteered at ClownCon 2026 as a student! I ran the mic for Penny Wise Jr.'s banana peel session and, during Q&A, slipped on her demo peel in front of 200 people. Rofl told me afterwards that it would have passed the CCF surprise criterion with full marks. I've never been so proud of something I didn't mean to do. Other highlights: I watched Mimi's whole talk (I cried, then clapped for four minutes), and Dusty Calhoun let me hold his barrel. It's heavier than it looks. Everything in this industry is heavier than it looks.

Day 29 of the RBTSHP integration (our 30-day readout, rounded up, like a juggler's count). Headline finding: the combined firm owns 14 redundant horns, 3 overlapping pie suppliers, and two unicycle fleets with incompatible tyre sizes. We recommend rationalising to a single horn standard, with a strategic reserve of two for crisis honking. Leadership has endorsed the plan in principle. Bozo has endorsed it in principle except for his own horn, which is now classed as “heritage”. The balls are in the air. Nobody reach for them.

I tracked everything so you don't have to. Attendance: 1,140. Sessions: 46. Pies thrown: 212, of which 9 were scheduled. Longest standing ovation: Mimi Marceau, 4 min 12 s, for 45 minutes of silence. Second longest: Bozo D. Ringwald, 3 min 50 s, who has asked me to note that his talk was longer. The birthday track was standing room only, mostly because it was held inside a bouncy castle. Attendance at castle sessions was up 300%. Recommendation for 2027: put every track in a bouncy castle. See you next year.

What a week. I delivered the ClownCon 2026 keynote, “The Honk Within”, to a packed main hall and received the second-longest standing ovation of the conference. (Mimi had the first, for a talk with no words. I've made my peace with it. I've made my peace with it twice now, in a journal.) The heart of the talk: every clown has a honk inside them, and leadership is creating the conditions for that honk to come out. Several attendees told me afterwards that they cried. One said it changed how he thinks about horns. Slides and a recording are available on request. I've already had a lot of requests.

Went to ClownCon. Good people. Indoor falls, mostly. Only rodeo clown there. Gave a six-minute talk on barrel work. Got a standing ovation from Rofl and a nod from the mime. I'll take the nod.

Gave my ClownCon talk, “Twisting at Scale: Lessons from a Single Point of Inflation”. Standing room only, which I'm told was partly the fire marshal's decision. The thesis: resilience isn't redundant balloons, it's redundant everything: tanks, minivans, cousins. The giraffe is the user-facing surface. The system is everything nobody sees until 14:02 on a Saturday. Most-asked question afterwards: “Is Dale available?” He is not. Dale is our failover.

We live-demoed Squeakly on the ClownCon Demo Day stage to 600 clowns. The conference wifi went down two seconds in. Contextual honking requires the cloud. Our horn produced nothing for eleven seconds. I squeezed it harder. It produced nothing, harder. Then Mimi Marceau, front row, mimed a honk. The room lost it. Biggest laugh of the day. I've watched the recording 40 times and I believe it's the strongest product-market-fit signal we've ever had, though my co-founder disagrees about which product. Grateful for every lesson. Rebuilding the demo with an offline mode.

Slides from my ClownCon session are up. I pooled 38 studies of the banana peel and found an effective coefficient of friction between 0.07 and 0.66, depending on ripeness, floor finish, and whether the peel was placed with intent. Headline finding: a brown-spotted peel on polished linoleum is the most reliable trip in the literature, and also the most dangerous. Reliability and safety are in tension, and managing that tension is the job. Thank you to the 200 people who came, and to our student volunteer Pip, who slipped on the demo peel during Q&A. Rofl has confirmed it would have scored full marks for visible surprise.

This morning in Hall B in Sarasota, the Safe Clowning Alliance membership voted to ratify Certified Controlled Faller Level 1 as a v1.0.0 standard. 412 in favour, 3 against, 1 abstention (a mime; we're counting it as a yes). I presented in a personal capacity, as I'm currently between roles. Thank you to everyone who submitted comments, every candidate who fell for the pilot, and Dusty Calhoun, whose late comment on section 4.2 (“Rodeo don't have a mat”) became our new Appendix D: Falls Where There Is No Mat. Certify the landing, not just the fall. It's in the standard now.

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Some news: Squeakly has raised a $2.1M pre-seed to build the AI-native honk layer for the internet, led by Big Top Capital with participation from angels including Bozo D. Ringwald. I've also joined clown.business. Founders should be where their users are, and our users are clowns. The problem: the honk hasn't fundamentally changed in 140 years. A rubber bulb, a brass horn, a squeeze. Squeakly uses a large language model to generate the right honk for the right moment, in real time. We call it contextual honking. We're hiring founding engineers. Must love honks. Must be comfortable with ambiguity, including very loud ambiguity.

Integrations are hard. These last two weeks I've had to make some of the most difficult decisions of my career, and I've made all of them correctly, which has been its own kind of burden. Three lessons. One: honk early. People want to hear from leadership before they hear from the rumour mill. Two: change is a pie, and somebody always ends up wearing it; make sure it isn't the same person every time. Three: when Juniper says a ball is “in the air”, do not reach for it. Grateful for this team. Leadership is lonely, but it is never quiet.

Ten days inside the RBTSHP integration, here's the framework we use to sort every workstream. Each task is one of three balls. In the hand: owned, actionable today. In the air: committed and in motion, do not touch it. On the floor: dropped; either pick it up or reclassify it as floor work. The failure mode I see most in mergers is leaders reaching for a ball that's in the air. You will drop the one in your hand. Every time. I have the data, and I have the bruises. Happy to share the full deck. It's 74 slides. Slide 31 is a 2x2 of where the balls are.

Following the RBTSHP integration, the Northeast Region has been consolidated into the new “Eastern Region (including Ohio)”, and my role as VP of Slapstick has been eliminated. I'm proud of what we built: 11 years, zero career-ending falls, and a regional knee-injury rate 60% below the industry average. I'm open to work: leadership roles in slapstick, safety or standards, anywhere a fall can be made safer. I will relocate. I will not relocate to Ohio, which I understand is now covered. Protect your knees, and if you know someone hiring, please share.

All four action items from the Hendricks PIR are closed. We now run two helium tanks in two separate minivans in an active-active configuration, with automated failover via my cousin Dale. Warm-standby poodles are pre-twisted at every event. The status page is live and currently shows all giraffes operational. Thanks to Giggles for being an extremely patient customer, and to the Hendricks family for agreeing to be a case study. Madison, 8, has asked to be cc'd on all future incident reviews. Approved.

Excited to share that I've been engaged as Principal, Juggling Strategy for the post-merger integration of Ringling Big Top Strategic Holdings Partners. I've also joined clown.business, which my team assures me is where the conversation is. Every merger is a juggling problem. You are adding balls to a pattern that's already in the air, and the audience only notices the one you drop. My mandate: 90 days, zero drops, one deck. Looking forward to connecting. Expect frameworks.

Thrilled to announce that Ringling Strategic Partners and Big Top Holdings have agreed to merge, forming Ringling Big Top Strategic Holdings Partners LLP. RBTSHP is pronounced the way you'd expect, which is to say with a honk. Together we'll serve more than 300 corporate clients with the industry's deepest bench of slapstick, mime and balloon talent. I'll serve as Chief Honking Officer of the combined firm. I was asked whether I'd accept the role and said yes before the question was over. More to come. There will be synergies.

Today was my last day at Ringling Strategic Partners. On my way out, Bozo handed me the horn and said, “You've earned one honk.” I honked once. The whole office stood up. I'm told this has not happened for an intern since 2011. Back to Clown College next week for my final year. Thank you to Bozo, to Penny (who let me shadow a fall test and only fell on me a little), and to everyone who answered my DMs. See you all at ClownCon, where I'll be a student volunteer!

Public comment closed with 212 submissions, one of which was a single photo of a mat. The pilot cohort is done: 31 candidates, 27 passes, 4 resubmissions, zero knee incidents. The most common failure mode remains visible surprise, and I want to be clear that this criterion is staying. Special thanks to Penny Wise Jr., who turned her own failed practical into the best study guide we have. That is what a safety culture looks like. Next stop: ratification at ClownCon 2026.

Saw a lot of posts about work-life balance this week. Bull doesn't care about either. Go home when the bull goes home.

Passed. Visible surprise: 23 out of 25. What changed: I stopped trying to be surprised and started engineering for it. I introduced a randomised 0–400 ms delay between the trip trigger and my awareness of the trip, using a peel I do not personally place. Penny from three weeks ago would have called that nondeterministic. Penny today calls it certified. Thank you to Rofl, my examiner, who said “oh!” at exactly the right moment and later told me that was not part of the rubric.

Everyone benchmarks against 7-year-olds. I get it: they're the most discerning room in the industry. But I've just finished coding audience data from 60 parties, and the 6-year-old segment is wildly underserved. 6-year-olds laugh 3x more per minute, heckle 40% less, and are 70% more likely to believe the coin really came out of their ear. Lifetime value is higher too: a 6-year-old who loves you is a 7-year-old who books you. Stop sleeping on six.

Blameless PIR for the August 8 incident. From 14:02 to 14:47 local time, balloon animal availability at the Hendricks 8th birthday was 0%. 23 attendees affected, plus one parent who asked for a sword. Giggles Gambino was on call and handled comms with professionalism and a kazoo. Root cause: July's helium consolidation left us with a single point of inflation. The tank's regulator froze during peak demand (the giraffe queue), and there was no failover. I own that decision. I said consolidation was maturity. It was a single tank. Action items: (1) multi-tank architecture, two tanks in two separate minivans; (2) a public status page; (3) pre-twisted warm-standby poodles at every event; (4) never again use the phrase “one source of truth” about a gas.

The box has gotten smaller.

Rodeo clown. 19 years. Barrel operations, bull redirection, some light comedy when the bull allows it. My stakeholders weigh 2,000 lb and don't read email. Happy to connect.

1. The horn is a tool, not a toy. Bozo says this every morning. (I'm still not allowed to touch it.) 2. Corporate bookings want birthday energy, but with invoices. 3. Always know where the nearest exit and the nearest pie are. 4. “Circle back” means someone will literally circle back, on a unicycle, within 48 hours. 5. Nobody at Clown College mentions the spreadsheets. There are so many spreadsheets. Would love to hear what others wish they'd known!

Some personal news: I've been named to Clown Weekly's 40 Under 40 list for 2026. I'm 52. I want to be transparent about that, because I was transparent with the committee about it, twice, in writing. They felt strongly that impact doesn't have an age limit, and after a short call I came around to their view. Thank you to my team, my mentors, and the Clown Weekly fact-checking department for their flexibility.

I sat the pilot CCF Level 1 practical this week and did not pass. Controlled descent: full marks. Safe landing: full marks. Recovery to standing: full marks. Visible surprise: 0 out of 25. The examiner's note reads: “Candidate appeared to know the fall was coming.” I did know. I designed it. I ran 140 simulations of it. That is my whole job. I'm treating this as a requirements gap, not a personal failing. Retake is in three weeks. If anyone has a reproducible method for being surprised by something you engineered, my DMs are open.

Hi everyone!! Today is Day 1 of my summer internship at Ringling Strategic Partners and also Day 1 on clown.business, so it's a big day for Days 1. I'm a rising senior at Clown College (Class of '27, concentration in Honk Studies, minor in Small Cars). I'll be reporting directly to Bozo D. Ringwald, who I've followed since I was nine. Today he showed me where the horns are kept. I'm not allowed to touch them yet, but I know where they are. Open to coffee chats, mentorship and any advice!

When the ClownCon committee called to ask if I'd deliver this year's keynote, I told them I'd need to check my calendar. I did not need to check my calendar. My calendar has been clear for this since 2019. ClownCon 2026 runs September 17–19 in Sarasota. My keynote, “The Honk Within”, is about the leadership lessons hiding in every squeeze. Also speaking: Coco Klein on balloon infrastructure, Penny Wise Jr. on friction, and Mimi Marceau, who confirmed her attendance by nodding. See you in Sarasota.

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Big quarter for the balloon platform. We're decommissioning our fleet of 11 small helium tanks and migrating to one high-capacity tank. Fewer moving parts, one source of truth, and 30% less time spent in parking lots swapping regulators. Consolidation is what maturity looks like. Will share learnings.

Six weeks ago I said the pratfall is underregulated. Today the Safe Clowning Alliance publishes the first draft of the Certified Controlled Faller (CCF) Level 1 standard. 46 pages. Three appendices. One diagram of a knee that I will be thinking about for the rest of my life. The practical assessment covers four criteria: controlled descent, safe landing, recovery to standing, and visible surprise. Yes, surprise is assessed. A pratfall nobody believes is just lying down. Public comment closes August 15. Protect your knees. Comment on the draft.

July is the birthday circuit's Black Friday, and I tracked every metric so you don't have to. 41 parties in 30 days. Average entrance-to-first-laugh: 9.2 seconds. Cake proximity incidents: 3 (all resolved, one with a face). The stat that matters: parties where I arrived before the bouncy castle was inflated converted to repeat bookings at 2.4x. Arrive before the castle. The castle is the competition.

My first post on clown.business. The honk finds the clown.

Humbled and honored to share that after 14 years of dedicated pratfalls, I've been promoted to Chief Honking Officer at Ringling Strategic Partners. None of this happens without my team, my mentors, and the squeaky horn that started it all. If you're early in your clowning career: the honk finds the clown, not the other way around. Onward.

Hot take: the industry's obsession with single-balloon poodles is holding us back. The future is modular, multi-balloon systems with redundancy built in. If your giraffe pops, the whole event shouldn't pop with it. Who's building toward resilient balloon infrastructure? Let's connect.

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Just wrapped my Q3 on the birthday circuit and the data is clear: 7-year-olds are the most discerning audience in the industry. They have opinions. They heckle. They will call out a lazy balloon poodle. Top lesson: never phone in the entrance. The entrance is everything.

Unpopular opinion: the pratfall is underregulated. I've been working with our regional safety board to develop a voluntary certification framework for controlled falling in entertainment contexts. If you're serious about longevity in this industry, protect your knees. They don't grow back.

Six months into my first senior engineering role and my knees have never felt better. Secret? Eccentric loading protocols borrowed from trail running, applied to controlled descent. I wrote up the full protocol. This is the post I wish I'd had coming out of clown college.