The Romance CEO is turning marriage proposals into an engaging team-building experience.

Over the past 11 years, Michael “Mike” Bloomberg ’99 MLA has helped plan and carry out over 150 marriage proposals across the globe. In addition to all yeses — he has a 100 percent acceptance rate — he has collected a wealth of interpersonal relationship gems along the way, which he is sharing with a whole new segment of clients through his Get Engaged! team-building business venture.

“It had been an idea for several years and then came to fruition this summer,” he said. “It’s going well. It’s a new audience. It’s a new target. It’s a new product. It’s like starting all over again. But people want unique and different. There are a million different types of team building, but there’s nothing like this.”

Originally called An Exclusive Engagement, Bloomberg’s marriage proposal consultancy (www.TheRomanceCEO.com) began as a small company just for DFW-area proposals, but it quickly gained national media attention, which led to opportunities to do workshops, work with military couples, write relationship columns, publish The 24-Hour Proposal, speak on entrepreneurship and answer countless media questions on what it’s like to plan a proposal.

“It’s so private and so intimate, but there are so many takeaways. I started learning about all these life lessons,” he said. “I really wanted to share these life lessons, but then I also wanted to give people an insight and let them be participants in that world and see the takeaways that are really possible when you plan a dream proposal.”

Though corporate team building wasn’t his initial target — he was thinking groups like sororities — Bloomberg began researching and found that many hospitals and corporations are rated on engagement — customer, employee, patient, etc.

“It’s what their focus is. It’s about staying engaged,” he said. “No one knows about engagements more than me, but then being able to literally utilize an engagement to benefit them from an engagement point of view, that’s where it came from.”

Get Engaged! clients include teams from education, medical, insurance, banking and event industries — “anybody who has a team they want to bring together or keep together,” Bloomberg said.

The half-day experience focuses on the four C’s — communication, collaboration, creativity and credibility — while evoking emotion and empathy, which he said makes it a more memorable experience.

Bloomberg begins with a foundational keynote address and then divides the team into small groups, giving each a dossier with details about a couple for whom they plan a dream proposal. Team members work together to develop and present their proposal ideas, and Bloomberg concludes with a facilitated session to help apply the takeaways to the team.

“The beauty of the piece is moving forward. We actually take it and we move forward with whatever their mission is, and we tie that in and move forward with it in that facilitated session,” he said. “I’m a trained facilitator so I really wanted to combine that too.”