We try hard to create awesome company-wide contests and events. For example, our June contest, the JobDig Summer Olympics, chronicled here as the Best Sales Contest Ever, was such an event…well-planned, executed, and a ton of fun. It was enormously successful, as measured by almost any metric.

At the other end of the contest spectrum is another ‘event’ we recently had here. It was simply a “Dress Like a State Fair Go-er” Day. (The State Fair is this week here in scenic Minnesota.) Good fun as you can probably tell by this picture of the winners. Maybe the contest was not as ‘impactful,’ but it was still fun. The trip down our own Project Runway was hilarious and a bit brutal. One had to be thick-skinned.

What was the result? No extra sales that day, but I overheard someone answering a question about our company from an outsider. He said, “we are always having these fun contests, too.” That seemed more important to him than our upgraded website, service offerings and new markets. And that is just fine with me.