Looking for a corporate event emcee who keeps your event professional, entertaining and on schedule? Greg Schwem is a professional event emcee, corporate event host and business humorist trusted by companies across the U.S. to host conferences, annual meetings, leadership summits, awards ceremonies and corporate events.
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A corporate event emcee is responsible for guiding the audience, introducing speakers, maintaining the event schedule and creating smooth transitions throughout the program. Greg Schwem is a Chicago-based corporate event emcee, professional event host and business humorist who has emceed everything from a one-hour awards ceremony for 200 BAE Systems engineers, to a three-day conference for 6,000 McDonald’s restaurant managers, to a virtual webinar for IBM customers.
Greg combines professional hosting experience with business humor, helping audiences stay engaged without pulling attention away from your event’s objectives. He is also a nationally syndicated Chicago Tribune humor columnist and a 30-year stand-up veteran – which is why the improvising never sounds improvised.
If it has a stage, a schedule and an audience, it’s in scope.
Nobody books an emcee because things are going well. They book one because of what happened last year.
One speaker runs eleven minutes long. The break gets cut. Lunch backs up. By afternoon your closing keynote is speaking to a half-empty ballroom and a room-set crew waiting to flip tables.
✓ Greg buys back time between segments – without anyone feeling rushed.Forty-two recipients. Nineteen surnames the host has never attempted. Each stumble costs the room a little more goodwill – and the winner a moment they only get once.
✓ Greg rehearses every name. Correct pronunciation is part of the job, not a bonus.Post-lunch, post-breakout, post-third-coffee. Heads drop toward laptops. Your best content lands in the deadest slot on the program, and the survey comments say “too long.”
✓ Greg resets the room in ninety seconds, on purpose, on cue, every time.Your VP of Sales is excellent at sales. Reading transitions off a teleprompter for nine hours is not the job you hired her for, and the whole room can tell.
✓ Greg frees your executives to be leaders instead of announcers.An emcee is not an announcer with a nicer suit. The role is closer to air-traffic control, if air-traffic control also had to be funny in front of six thousand people.
Greg opens the day and sets the tone in the first four minutes, because that is the window where a room decides whether it’s going to lean in or lean back.
He hands off to your speakers with introductions that actually build them up, instead of reading a bio the audience just read in the app.
He fills the gap when the video won’t load, the panelist is stuck in traffic, or the CEO’s flight lands late – and he fills it so smoothly that most of the room assumes it was scripted.
He interviews your executives onstage like a broadcast host, pulling out the human answer rather than the rehearsed one. Greg spent his early career as an award-winning television reporter at NBC-owned WPTV, and it shows the moment he puts a microphone in front of someone.
And he closes the event on a line people repeat in the hallway, in the Uber, and on the Monday-morning call.
Greg opens general sessions, introduces keynote and breakout speakers, and keeps multi-day agendas on schedule. He regularly works as a conference emcee in Chicago and travels nationwide for annual meetings and user conferences.
Forty recipients, forty correct names. Greg rehearses every name in advance and paces the segment so each winner gets a full moment without the room losing energy.
For single-day meetings and sales kickoffs, Greg keeps segments moving, manages Q&A, and bridges the gaps between presenters so the room never goes flat.
Multi-day programs need a host who sustains energy from the opening session through the closing keynote, Greg tracks the arc of the whole event, not just the next segment.
Franchise conventions and large-scale gatherings bring multiple stages, breakout tracks and thousands of attendees. Greg has hosted a three-day convention for 6,000 McDonald’s restaurant managers.
Webinars and hybrid programs need a host who carries energy straight down the camera lens with no live audience to feed off. Greg has hosted virtual events for IBM customers from a broadcast-ready home studio.
The skill isn’t filling a big room. It’s reading whichever room you’re standing in.
A one-hour awards ceremony. Tight, technical audience, tighter run-of-show, and every recipient’s name landed correctly.
A three-day conference. Arena-scale general sessions, multiple stages, and the energy held from day one through the closing session.
A webinar hosted straight down the lens. No live laughter to feed off, no dead air either – Greg has been doing camera work since his TV news days.
| Service | Conference emcee, corporate event host, awards-show host, on-camera interviewer, virtual event host |
|---|---|
| Based in | Chicago, Illinois, available nationwide and internationally |
| Event formats | In-person, virtual and hybrid |
| Typical events | Annual conferences, sales kickoffs, awards galas, franchise conventions, leadership retreats, association meetings, user conferences |
| Audience size | From 100-seat ballrooms to 6,000-seat arenas |
| Content style | Clean, customized, corporate-safe. No profanity, no politics. |
| Travel | No travel fees within 50 miles of Chicago |
| Response time | Within 24 hours |
| Book | Booking form · greg@gregschwem.com |
You’re not hiring a bio. You’re hiring whatever happens when the lights come up.
Every segment transitions cleanly, so the agenda stays on track without feeling like a stopwatch. Greg absorbs the overruns your speakers create and hands the room back to you on time.
Witty storytelling, live interviews and interactive moments turn passive attendees into participants. People laugh with the room, not at their phones.
Charisma with judgment. Greg is funny where funny helps and completely straight where it doesn’t – safety messages, memorials, hard numbers. He knows the difference.
Attendees leave quoting lines at the office and on Zoom calls weeks later. That’s the difference between an event that happened and an event people remember.
“King of the hill in the growing world of corporate comedy.”— Chicago Tribune
Most emcee shortlists come down to four choices, including asking an internal employee to run the room. Here is the honest difference, including the parts other pages leave out.
| What you actually need | Greg Schwem | Club stand-up comedian | Local radio / TV personality | Internal Employee / Executive |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Understands a corporate run-of-show | ✓ 30 years of them | ✗ Built for a 45-minute set | Partial – broadcast timing, not ballroom timing | ✗ First time, live |
| Guaranteed clean, no politics | ✓ Never been part of the act | Risk – depends on the night | Usually | ✓ |
| Material customized to your business | ✓ Researches your site, decks and message boards | Rare – generic set with your logo on it | ✗ Reads your copy back to you | ✓ But not funny |
| Can improvise when AV fails | ✓ The dead air is the job | ✓ | Partial | ✗ |
| Interviews your CEO onstage, on camera | ✓ Former NBC-affiliate news reporter | ✗ | ✓ | Partial |
| Can also deliver the keynote | ✓ One booking, two roles | Set, not keynote | ✗ | Sometimes |
| You talk to the talent, not a middleman | ✓ Direct: call, text or email Greg | Usually an agent | Usually a station rep | ✓ |
| Frees your leaders to lead | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ Costs you your best asset all day |
The same process every time, whether the room holds 200 people or 6,000.
Greg gets on the phone with your team to lock the run-of-show, tone and any off-limits topics.
He reviews your website, decks and internal message boards so the material lands as specific, not generic.
Greg works with your speakers and AV team ahead of time so handoffs and cues are clean on the day.
Every speaker gets an introduction that actually builds them up — and every award recipient’s name is rehearsed in advance.
Greg opens the program, manages transitions, absorbs the unexpected, and keeps the agenda on schedule start to finish.
He closes on a line people repeat afterward — and follows up with your team the same week.
Greg regularly works as a conference emcee in Chicago and travels nationwide to host corporate meetings, conventions, leadership conferences and annual events. He lives in the Chicago suburbs, which is useful for two reasons. If your event is in the city, McCormick Place, Rosemont, Schaumburg, Naperville or Oak Brook, there are no travel fees within 50 miles of Chicago — and no risk of a snowed-in connection from somewhere else.
If your event is anywhere else in the country, he is a short ride from two major airports and books national and international dates year-round.
The Chicago roots are more than logistics. Greg honed his act in Chicago comedy clubs, writes a nationally syndicated humor column for the Chicago Tribune, and graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism — which is why the interviews sound like a broadcast and the jokes sound like a Midwesterner, not a red carpet.
Tell Greg the date, the city and the room size. He’ll tell you straight if he’s the right fit.
You need to feel comfortable knowing you’ve made a great decision to include humor — and that you’ve hired the right host in Greg Schwem.
A corporate event emcee guides the audience, introduces speakers, maintains the schedule and creates smooth transitions throughout the program.
An in-house host can read the agenda. What they usually cannot do is recover twelve lost minutes, land a joke after a technical failure, or interview the CEO without either flattering or freezing. That is a performance skill built over thousands of stages.
Greg absorbs the chaos so your team doesn’t have to. Your executives get to show up as leaders instead of announcers — and your meeting planner gets to breathe.
A professional corporate event emcee has done the job hundreds of times; an employee is usually doing it for the first time, live, in front of their own colleagues.
Handing the mic to an internal employee means your best talent spends the day reading transitions instead of doing their actual job — and if the schedule slips or the AV fails, they have no playbook for recovering it. Greg has built that playbook over 30 years onstage.
Booking a professional also removes the awkwardness of a colleague having to manage other colleagues’ time onstage. Greg can push back on an overrunning speaker in a way a peer usually can’t.
Annual conferences, sales kickoffs, awards ceremonies and galas, franchise conventions, association meetings, user conferences, leadership retreats, and virtual or hybrid webinars.
The range is deliberately wide. Greg has hosted a one-hour awards ceremony for 200 BAE Systems engineers and a three-day conference for 6,000 McDonald’s restaurant managers. He has also hosted a virtual webinar for IBM customers, straight down the camera lens.
If your program has a stage, a schedule and an audience that would rather not be bored, it’s in scope.
Yes — awards ceremony hosting is one of Greg’s most requested services.
He rehearses every recipient’s name in advance, paces the segment so each winner gets a full moment, and keeps the run-of-show tight even when the list of honorees runs long. He has hosted awards segments for groups as small as 200 attendees and as part of conferences running into the thousands.
Yes. No profanity, no politics, nothing that puts your brand or your HR team at risk.
This is the single biggest fear meeting planners carry into a comedy booking, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a wink. Greg’s entire 30-year career has been built inside corporate parameters — that has never been part of his act anyway.
Just as importantly, he knows when not to be funny. Safety announcements, memorials, restructuring news, disappointing quarterly numbers: Greg plays those completely straight, then earns the laugh back when the room is ready.
Yes — and it is one of the most cost-effective ways to book him.
Many clients have Greg host the full program and deliver a keynote such as Laughing About Work, Humor Is Serious Business, Rock, Roll & Laugh, or Overcoming Gut Punches.
There is a real advantage to combining the roles. By the time Greg delivers the keynote, he has already spent hours building trust with that specific room — so the content lands harder than it would from a speaker parachuting in cold.
Yes. Greg is based in the Chicago suburbs and books national and international dates year-round.
There are no travel fees within 50 miles of Chicago, covering venues like McCormick Place, Rosemont, Schaumburg, Naperville and Oak Brook. Outside that radius, he’s a short ride from two major airports and travels nationwide for conferences, conventions and corporate events.
Yes. Greg hosts virtual and hybrid events from a broadcast-ready home setup.
He has hosted a webinar for IBM customers entirely on camera, with no live audience to feed off and no dead air either. His background as an award-winning television reporter at NBC-owned WPTV means he’s comfortable carrying a program straight down the lens.
Always. Every speaker gets an introduction built from their actual background, not a bio the audience already read in the app.
Before the event, Greg reviews your website, decks and internal message boards, then confirms details on a planning call with your team. For awards segments, every recipient’s name is rehearsed in advance — because getting a name right is not a detail, it’s the whole moment.
Yes. Greg supplies professional A/V requirements to your production team in advance and coordinates cues, mics and timing before the event.
He’s worked general sessions, breakout stages and virtual broadcasts, so he can adapt to whatever production setup your venue or AV vendor already has in place.
As early as your event calendar is set — popular dates, especially in conference season and Q4, fill up first.
There’s no strict minimum lead time, and Greg will tell you honestly whether a tighter timeline is workable. Reach out with your date, city and room size and you’ll get a reply within 24 hours.
Fees depend on the date, the city, the format and how many days you need him — so Greg quotes each event individually rather than posting a number that fits nobody.
What is fixed: there are no travel fees within 50 miles of Chicago, professional A/V requirements are supplied to your production team upfront, and you deal directly with Greg rather than a booking middleman.
To book, use the booking form, or email greg@gregschwem.com. You’ll get a reply within 24 hours — and if Greg isn’t the right fit for your room, he’ll tell you that too.
Most emcees are hired for one role. Greg brings four.
Greg has spent 30 years as a business humorist and stand-up veteran, is a nationally syndicated Chicago Tribune corporate speaker, and trained as a broadcast journalist at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. That combination is what makes him a corporate audience specialist rather than a generalist party host — he reads a room of engineers differently than a room of sales reps, and adjusts accordingly.
As corporate event emcee, as keynote speaker, or as both. Greg delivers a memorable experience guaranteed to have audience members repeating lines at the office and on Zoom calls for weeks.
Contact Greg today to discuss your event and check availability. Send the date, the city and the room size — if it’s a fit, you’ll know within 24 hours. If it isn’t, you’ll know that just as fast.
