How I Built My Small Business

Jenny Sauer-Klein - ACROYOGA’s Global Success: Lessons You Can’t Miss

• Jenny Sauer-Klein • Season 1 • Episode 34

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Jenny Sauer-Klein's journey as a serial entrepreneur has seen her start four influential ventures, including AcroYoga, Scaling Intimacy School of Experience Design, Play on Purpose and The Culture Conference.

Jenny co-founded AcroYoga, a global phenomenon blending acrobatics and yoga, which has captivated millions worldwide, including Hollywood celebrities, professional athletes and Silicon Valley innovators. Professional athletes and Silicon Valley innovators.

Her other ventures focus on creating transformational experiences and deep connection. Throughout her career, Jenny has been a sought-after speaker and consultant for top organizations including Google, airbnb, dropbox and UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Her insights and work have been featured in major media outlets such as the New York Times, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc Magazine and Tim Ferriss' book Tools of Titans.

This episode is sponsored by Pareto Labs, an online business education platform.

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Anne McGinty:

Before the episode, I want to share a quick word about our sponsor, pareto Labs. Pareto Labs is an online education platform that makes learning practical business skills easy and enjoyable. Whether you're a small business owner or an ambitious employee, you can level up your skills and knowledge. I recently took their two-hour course on how to read financial statements, which was broken up into 12 bite-sized videos. The format allowed me to learn at my own pace, fitting the course into my busy schedule perfectly. I just wish I'd had the opportunity to take these courses, and in this learning format, years ago. Best of all, you can sign up for a two-week free trial, so there's no risk in giving it a try. Head over to ParetoLabscom that's P-A-R-E-T-O-Labs. com and sign up for the free trial to see what you think. There's nothing to lose and only gain.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

Every time I would go home and visit my mom in New York she'd be like you're on the computer all the time. I felt for a time I would say like my computer is my best friend, it's like the thing I spend the most time with, and I just think that's really not the way I want to live my life.

Anne McGinty:

Welcome to H ow I Built my Small Business. I'm Anne McGinty, your host, and today I'm thrilled to have Jenny Sauer-Klein with us. Jenny's journey as a serial entrepreneur has seen her start four influential ventures, including AcroYoga. Scaling Intimacy School of Experience Design, including Acr o Yoga. Scaling Intimacy School of Experience Design, play on Purpose and the Culture Conference. Jenny co-founded Acra Yoga, a global phenomenon blending acrobatics and yoga, which has captivated millions worldwide, including Hollywood celebrities, professional athletes and Silicon Valley innovators. Professional athletes and Silicon Valley innovators. Her other ventures focus on creating transformational experiences and deep connection. Throughout her career, jenny has been a sought-after speaker and consultant for top organizations including Google, airbnb, dropbox and UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Her insights and work have been featured in major media outlets such as the New York Times, F orbes, F ast Company, inc Magazine and Tim Ferriss' book Tool of Titans. You can find a link through to her business in the episode's description. Thank you to our listeners for being here today. Jenny, thanks for coming on the show.

Anne McGinty:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here and have this conversation.

Anne McGinty:

How did you originally get involved in the wellness and mindfulness space?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

I was in college and I was studying musical theater, and that can be a very competitive industry and practice. You spend a lot of time looking in the mirror and trying to achieve a perfect form, and I really started craving a way to connect with my body that wasn't performative and didn't involve a mirror. It wasn't external, but it was internal, and I'd heard about yoga. This is in the late 1990s. I ended up choosing an Ashtanga class, which is a fairly vigorous form of yoga, and I remember at the end of the class in Shavasana, just like laying down on the floor and just feeling all this tingling in my body and like this peace and calm, and I was like, oh, this is it.

Anne McGinty:

How did that lead you to your journey, to becoming the co-founder of Acra Yoga, which then became this huge global movement?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

Yeah, so kind of, of course, a funny circuitous path. Always. I graduated, I ended up doing a lot of traveling in Central America. While I was traveling in Central America, I ended up learning how to spin poi, and so I was doing this fire spinning throughout my travels and came back and got really interested in circus and circus arts. I ended up moving back to New York, where I'm from. For a period of time I got introduced to this man, kevin O'Keefe, who had a company called Circus Minimus, and I ended up teaching circus arts classes and afterschool programs in New York City.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

While I was doing that, I was like I'm gonna train to become a yoga teacher. I did not see it as my long-term career or as something I was gonna focus on, but I was like you know, this is something I enjoy, I'm gonna put some energy here and, worst case scenario, at least it will keep me true to my practice. So I took a few different trainings. One of them was a contact yoga training, which was a partner form of yoga. It had the flying practice. It had a Thai massage-esque practice called yoga sage. I was also training in a practice they called circus yoga, so it combined elements of circus and acrobatics with yoga. So all these pieces were starting to come together and I was like, you know, I really want to pursue this circus thing and I was 24. I was like, if I'm going to do it, this is the time. And the best circus training center in the country, in the United States, is in San Francisco at the circus center.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

Long story short, I moved to the West Coast in the fall of 2003. I basically arrived on the West Coast and went straight to Burning man, met a bunch of people and one of them was like, oh, you should meet my roommate. He's an acrobat and a yoga teacher, blah, blah. And I was like, yeah, totally, we should meet. Took a couple of months we finally met and literally the night we met we were like, oh, let me show you this, let me show you this. And we started exchanging tools and techniques, because my circus and acrobatics background was fairly rudimentary and kind of basic, foundational for kids and youth, and his was this super high level, competitive, elite gymnastic thing. So we had these very different backgrounds but we could speak the same language.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

The vision started coming right away and basically the next month we started teaching together at the circus center a partner doubles acrobatics class and then taught our first Valentine's day workshop, which was at a yoga studio in San Francisco which was sold out and a complete mess. But we were just experimenting wildly and it just took off like crazy. It was a right place, right time. Circus arts was the fastest growing sport in the United States. At the time Yoga was exploding. We were also both very excited. We were very focused, very dedicated and we had our shit together and we're very prompt on email and like had all of our bios and our pictures and our workshop descriptions. We had a website. We were very responsive and we started to shift into high gear very, very quickly.

Anne McGinty:

Yeah, very high gear, because correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean this really went around the world very quickly.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

Yeah, so Jason at the time was studying with someone named Dharma Mitra, new York, who's an older gentleman from Brazil, and he went to Europe with Dharmamitra and then was at all these conferences and he was showing people you know what we were doing and doing some workshops here and there, and they started inviting us to come to Europe and do these conferences and I was like, no, that's not really happening, because I was just in San Francisco. And then the invitations really started coming in. And then it was the German yoga conference and the Asia yoga conference in Hong Kong. It just started proliferating and fast forward two years later, on our first six month world tour through China and Japan and India and all over Europe, and yeah, it got real crazy, real fast.

Anne McGinty:

That is incredible. So what are some of the lessons that you learned, both the good and the bad, from this experience?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

Yeah, for better or for worse, this was a double edged sword. We really prioritize the practice and the community and the business kind of came second or third or fourth to support the community and the practice. No-transcript started doing teacher trainings and at a certain point I think we had done five teacher trainings in two years and we were like whoa, this is growing too fast. We need time to pause and to really connect to especially the community of teachers. We wanted them to be really tight with each other and we also realized that over those first few years they were teacher trainings but ultimately we were just teaching people the practice. At that point we were like, okay, we need to slow down and pivot and really get more prerequisites in place so that people come to the teacher training already knowing the practice and we can focus on teaching them how to teach.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

So we paused and our accountants at the time said you guys are crazy, this is like your biggest income driver. You can't stop doing these teacher trainings. And we said, well, yes, we can and we will, because that's what we feel is important for the practice. And it was a good decision, it was the right decision we ended up developing these five-day immersion programs and to take the teacher training you had to take two out of three immersion programs. So very soon our business model shifted and then the majority of our income was coming from the immersion programs, and then the teacher trainings happened on top of that. So that was a really good lesson in what is the ultimate priority, and that was the community and the practice, and then allowing the business to serve those needs and finding a way for the business to still be profitable and for it to still make money, but at the same time being like okay, this is the North Star, and then we shift the business model to suit that.

Anne McGinty:

When you said that you did five teacher trainings. How many people were in these teacher trainings?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

I think at that time it was probably around 30 or 40. Oh my gosh, per round, wow, something like that. And they were two and a half week long residential onsite retreat center style, so like very, very in-depth, intensive programs. So it's just a wonderful, like loving people. And we figured out also over time that you know Acro Yoga one because it was like a yoga hybrid model. Right, it wasn't just yoga but yoga plus these other elements, and our model was a co-facilitation model, so it was really teaching and partnership. So we really felt like to have it be taught in. Partnership is the ideal scenario because there's so much that gets modeled in the transmission of it that you can talk about, but if you're not showing or demonstrating, it's not the same. We started to see AcroYoga as a graduate training rather than as an entry-level training, because people needed to have training in teaching yoga. They needed to have found their own voice to be able to hold a group, take a group through a cohesive journey together in that hour and a half class or whatever, and after you master that, then you can come together with a co-facilitator and then you can combine styles and voices and co-create a curriculum and guide a group through a practice that combines yoga with other elements.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

One of the things that I continue to be aware of as an entrepreneur period is to just follow what's alive. Every year, when Jason and I would map out where are we going this year, what are we doing Like? What are the teacher trainings? Where are they? We would look at like, where's Acra yoga popping in the world? Because it was spreading through us but beyond us and it was like oh man, it's really popping in Budapest right now, or it's really happening in Australia, new Zealand, because of these people. So then we would go to those communities to try to support the proliferation and give them some foundation. So we were initiating, but then also listening and following and then stepping into support. So at a certain point, like early on, you're pushing the boulder up the mountain, but after a period of time you're chasing that boulder and trying to give it some guardrails, and that can be beautiful, also exhausting, also completely unpredictable. You know you can't create a five-year plan Like you have no idea what's going to happen.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

One of the big lessons I learned in that was we trademarked the term Acra Yoga with the intention of protecting the practice and protecting the teachers who had spent time and money investing in the teacher training and the certification, because there were a lot of spinoff practices that were being born at that time that were using some of that phrasing and the good problem was it started to become a generic term. So when people would see partner yoga anywhere, they would call it Acra yoga, like you call a tissue, a Kleenex. So it started to become very confusing because there were these different brands in different schools and everyone just called it Acra yoga. And so we were trademarking. And trademarking if you haven't done it before is very expensive, it's very time consuming. You have to trademark country by country. Haven't done it before is very expensive, it's very time consuming. You have to trademark country by country. You can trademark in the EU as a whole, which is helpful, but still to go country by country and we were again a very international practice it's just incredibly time consuming and expensive. And then you have to defend that trademark. So you have to have alerts on the web about when people are posting and using the term and then you have to send cease and desist letters if you're going to try to keep the trademark.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

And because Acra Yoga was such a community heart-centered practice, the community really did not like that we had trademarked it. Even the teachers for whom we had done it to try to protect them didn't feel it was in alignment with the ethos of the practice. So we got a lot of resistance from our own community for something we were trying to do in our minds for them. And at a certain point when I was leaving Acra Yoga, we had been talking about what to do with the trademark and I was really like I think we just let it go. It's just too much. We're at the point where Acra Yoga has become a generic term and that, ultimately, is a beautiful thing and shows you that it's gone beyond. When I left, we still had the trademark and I think within a year or two after I left, jason did release the trademark.

Anne McGinty:

So what was it like then, shifting away from Acra Yoga?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

It was a very painful process. It took a lot of time. I think you know Acra Yoga in some way. I say like happened to me because it really felt like it just arrived with like a golden ray of light and was like you will do Acra Yoga now. It really was so organic and so I rode that wave for 10 years and at the time that it was happening, for the most part I was like this is my life's calling, this is what I'm going to be doing forever. I felt that my purpose was being fulfilled.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

And then in the last couple of years of that 10 year block, I started to have some doubts. I started to not feel as fulfilled. I started to feel like there was this yearning to do something else. I started to feel very much like I was caught inside a golden cage. I was getting burnout. I was traveling so much, my body was breaking down. I had chronic back pain. I had been doing, you know, just a lot of very deep backbending and crazy acrobatics and I don't think I listened very well to my body signals and did a lot of pushing through and just a ton of time on the computer more than you would imagine for someone teaching yoga.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

It took a lot of logistics and the bigger the community got, the more bureaucracy there is and the more mitigating relationships.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

And you know, there's just so much, more and more and more to handle as the practice grows, to hundreds of thousands of people, to millions of people who are watching what you're doing and having opinions about it, and there's legal stuff.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

It just became a big bear and I was constantly on the road and creating community for other people and witnessing this beautiful connection that the practice created and feeling on the outside of it, this beautiful connection that the practice created and feeling on the outside of it. And I had my core group of people that I would travel with, that I felt very connected to. But when I would come home to the Bay Area after a three-month tour and I would see my friends, my regular friends, the first thing they would ask me is like oh, when are you leaving again? And I felt like people didn't invite me to things because they didn't remember I was there. And I started to really crave my own sense of community, separate from my work community, so to speak, and I wanted a partner and I wanted a dog and I wanted a home and I wanted a garden, and just none of those things seemed possible with the lifestyle that I was living.

Anne McGinty:

So did you take a year or two to kind of come down from that experience to settle?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

Yeah, it took me a while to be like who am I, what am I doing? What actually matters to me? I mean, literally my entire life was wrapped up in acroyoga, and so part of why I think I put off leaving for as long as I did was because it was like jumping off a cliff and I was terrified because I knew that I was going to hit this major crash and burn. There was no way to avoid like an insane identity crisis. It was. It was literally unavoidable. And so you're like, okay, well, I'm just gonna not deal with that for as long as I can until it was so painful to stay that I was like, okay, well, I'm just going to not deal with that for as long as I can, until it was so painful to stay that I was like, okay, I need now to face this. And it was 100% a huge identity crisis, very painful, a lot of grief. I lost my entire community, so many of my good friends, partially because I'm just not seeing them in the way that I was, I'm not going out into the world and visiting people on a regular basis, but also because, when I dropped out of the Acra yoga world, the thing that was uniting us fell away and so a lot of those friendships just dissolved. It was really painful and I left the yoga world completely and I stopped practicing yoga completely. It was a very cold Turkey moment and thankfully I had just started dating my now husband at the time and thank God for him, because he really held me through that period of time where I was literally crying every day for like a year and a half, just processing so much grief and sadness and confusion.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

But ultimately, coming back to what I care about, which is still, you know, the three values of Acro Yoga were trust, connection and playfulness. And coming back to okay, the form of how I will express those values is going to be different, but those are still very core to me and who I am and what I care about and what I want to bring into the world. And so then I got really interested in how do I take those core values into a corporate environment, into companies, without the yoga, the acrobatics, the Thai massage, without anyone have to walk into a yoga studio or do a handstand or have bare feet or anything? I was curious about how to port it over, and through Acro Yoga I had developed a whole body of work of, like icebreakers and games that helped people develop the trust and rapport that they needed as strangers to then trust each other, to lift one another into the air.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

So part of the transition was me teaching that body of work, which I ended up calling play on purpose, which is all these team building games and icebreaker games that are very accessible and and easy to do but they they start to break down those walls and to help people get to know each other, create vulnerability and things like that. So I started to teach that body of work as its own thing. So I started to kind of do more team building work and that was part of the bridge into the next phase.

Anne McGinty:

How did you bridge from Acra yoga and the yoga space to working with corporations?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

Yeah, it was not not an easy transition necessarily, and there were a couple ways I did it. One was there was some point early on in those experiments where I led a workshop called Acra Yoga for Entrepreneurs. So I was taking the practice that I knew but translating it to a business context and then inviting people that I knew that were entrepreneurs and asking them to invite people who were in a business context and from there in that workshop, I was using the practice as a metaphor for business. I had a couple of prizes that I was giving away in that workshop and one of them was like a team building session and it ended up going to this woman who was a VP at a pharmaceutical company and it ended up going to this woman who was a VP at a pharmaceutical company so random and so I did a team building workshop for free. I think she ended up paying me like $1,500, but I didn't charge that. But she was like, hey, let me give you something for this. But we did the workshop. It went super well. She wrote me this glowing testimonial. You know, it was a lot of like very small stepping stones like that.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

I was also at that time connecting with Adam Rosendahl, who has a practice called Late Night Art. We're still incredibly close friends and collaborators today and I started leading Late Night Art in companies through him and his company and through that it was not my content, it was his content. But he was very open to exploring and being creative, so I was able to bring my ideas to the table and we were constantly experimenting and creating new things together, but within his context. But it allowed me to see what does an intake call look like? How do you design the curriculum to address specific teams, needs and challenges, and then do a debrief and I just saw the whole process and going into those rooms for maybe a year or two through late night art I got to see that these corporate people that I thought were something other than and I didn't really know much about.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

I was like, oh, these are just people like everyone, who want deep meaning, they want deep connection, they want vulnerability, they want to feel seen, heard and acknowledged, just like anyone from the yoga community. But I learned that I had to shift the languaging and shift the framing so it was relevant to their context and their world. So that was a lot of how I started getting a foot in the door and then doing some of those other free or low-cost team building workshops with people that I knew through my extended community, who worked in organizations or were like leading organizations, and people really allowed me to get in there and so it was like I'll do this for you for free in exchange for feedback and a testimonial if it goes well. And thankfully everything went well. And then all of those touch points lead to referrals and all of that, so it kind of started to grow organically.

Anne McGinty:

What kind of tools and techniques do you use, as a speaker or a leader of that group, to keep your audience engaged with what you're doing?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

One of my things I say all the time is that connection is your best engagement strategy. Connection is the thing that keeps people awake, alive, receptive, also accountable, especially if you're in a virtual context and you're just listening to someone talk, like people zone out, they multitask, but you put someone in a breakout and you're saying, hey, you're going to connect with this person, you're going to share with them something important that's happening in your life.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

All of a sudden, wow, you're awake, you're alive, you're going to connect with this person, you're going to share with them something important that's happening in your life. All of a sudden, wow, you're awake, you're alive, you're present, and when you come back to that main room, or if you're in person, like back to the big group, you're going to be that much more alert and receptive to whatever's coming next. So I find that connection is a really wonderful tool for both deepening trust, rapport, psychological safety in a room, but keeping people engaged. So when you notice people start to dip or drop or tune out, put them together with someone or in a small group and ask them to do something that's connective and that really helps. Beyond that, you want to add an element of engagement every five minutes and whatever you're doing. So even if you're lecturing, giving a talk, you can also be like, hey, raise your hand. If you've ever had this experience, can you give me a thumbs up If this is resonating with you? You know, I'd love to hear from a one person you know what they got from that example, or can you give me an example of how this is true in your life?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

It can be very small things. If you know you're online. You could do a poll or a word cloud or a breakout. Or maybe you're going to ask people to take a deep breath or journal for two minutes on this prompt and do some writing, reflect with a partner debrief on this.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

It's small moments, but you have to think about the fact that the average adult attention span there's many studies on this, but the worst ones say that the average adult attention span is eight seconds and the average attention span of a goldfish is nine seconds. So that's really not saying much about us. Your job as the facilitator, the presenter, the speaker, whatever you're doing with your audience, is to proactively engage and bring people's attention back to whatever you're doing, knowing that it is just unfortunately, in the moment in the world, we're in human nature to wander. People are just not good at focusing for long periods of time, especially in our day and age. So you have to, I think, really plan for that ahead of time, and it does take more work to do that, but then it takes way less work in the moment in the room.

Anne McGinty:

How do you turn the concepts that you are teaching them into an experience that actually sticks beyond the time that they're in that room with you?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

Yes, Great question. So we always talk about like experiential learning, right? I think in many ways, experiential learning means not just talking about a concept or an idea, but giving people a visceral experience of what that means. So you could talk about, you know what is it to be a courageous leader and you could have a definition. You could have a whole talk about times you've been courageous and various people in history who have been courageous.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

But if you want people to be transformed in a meaningful way that lasts, you have to give them the opportunity, within the context of your workshop, your talk, your program, to practice being a courageous leader in the moment, right? So you have to find a way to say how are we going to do that together? So is it? You're going to ask them to write a letter to a direct report of theirs who they've had some challenges with and they're going to express, they're going to take ownership for their part of what has been the challenge and ask for that person to meet them halfway. In this way, they're going to deliver that letter, or they're going to get on the phone and say that thing, or they're going to mock through that interaction with someone as if that person is the challenging person that they're trying to address and they're going to actually say the words and do the thing right. So it's in some way making a concept three-dimensional right. So instead of we're talking about it and it's out here, you're actually putting it in the body, putting it in the moment, making the experience real, making it now, making it happen in some way that you're showing people you can do this. And so then they're not trying to carry it forward, being like how do I actually do it? They've actually already done it, so they walk away being able to own. I am a courageous leader and I know what that looks like because I've done it already and now I can continue to do it.

Anne McGinty:

So how do you prepare to speak on stage? And before the first time you ever did, what did you do and what have you learned since then that you think would help somebody else who is maybe preparing to speak on stage for the first time?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

Yeah, I think the first major time I spoke on stage was at a conference called Wisdom 2.0, which is again in San Francisco. It's a conference where, like technology meets spirituality. It's a very interesting kind of intersection and I was really intrigued by it. I went to it one year and I was like, wow, these are really cool people talking about things I care about, but in a business context, but in a heart-centered way.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

I was very intrigued by it and they had a thing called the people stage and you could apply to present a workshop and at that time I had been distilling what I'd learned from Acra Yoga into these five steps to create a global movement. So I put in a proposal and I won and so I was able to give this talk as part of the conference and I was terrified because I'd never given a talk. I'd given plenty of workshops. I can teach people how to do handstands and like crazy feats of physical daring, but like to give a talk right To be like a thought leader. That was really brand new for me and scary, and I think I had an hour and I was like what am I going to do?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

But the beauty of it was that, because I had so much experience in the experiential learning and all of that, that I think I started people like standing and breathing and doing some kind of movement together and like talking about, you know, giving people a visceral experience of what a global movement might feel like. You know what is that sensation? And then I had a lot of thought, leadership pieces, principles. I went over the five steps but then I gave them opportunities to write about them, to reflect with a partner, to kind of get some coaching and feedback. So it wasn't me talking for an hour and I still believe that, even if you're a speaker and you speak on stage, that the era of 45 or 60 minute one way information sharing lectures is over. I do not think it's effective. I don't think that it serves people to be sitting live in a room of people that they could be connecting with and learning from, to be sitting there passively observing something that they could watch alone at home on YouTube and get just as much benefit from. So what I like to think about is you know, how do you maximize that live group, in-person experience? And the way that you do that is really by making things interactive and engaging and participatory, adding elements of connection, adding those elements of engagement every five minutes for any speaker that's getting on stage Now, I would say you have to really proactively engage your audience and help them learn, not only from you but from other audience members, and that really is a mindset shift from stage on the stage, which is what we're used to right that person in front of the room who has all the answers to guide on the side. You are the person on stage, but you're really the one holding the container for the group to learn and to elevate the wisdom that's in the room. So how do you get people to share with each other, to reflect with each other and also to name for themselves in the moment? What am I taking away from this?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

I just led an event for the Culture Conference, which is another brand that I have for organizational leaders inside companies about their company culture. The tagline is transforming leaders and teams from the inside out. So it's really about owning your contribution to what culture is, and I had a couple of internal case studies from leaders within companies who were sharing things that they were doing in their own organizations in between each talk, and I limited the talks to 15 minutes. So that's one thing is like give people a bite sized chunk of time, and it's harder to do that. It's easier actually to talk for 45 minutes because you can ramble around.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

If you only have 15 or 10 or five, like if you've done a Pecha Kucha or Ignite talks, you have to do 20 seconds a slide for five minutes. Man, I've done one of those and it was so hard, so hard because you have to be so succinct and so on, point and so targeted with your message. So shortening things is an excellent tool to make you really, really, really sharp, because it gets you down to the bare minimum bullet points of what's most important. So that's one piece of advice I would say, like, if you have a 60 minute talk, be like how would I give this same talk in 10 minutes and then use that as your outline to expand on. So between these case studies, you know, as the MC or the host, I said afterwards okay, great, three minutes, turn to a partner, share the one thing that you're taking away from that talk what was most meaningful for you, what's useful, what's something you're going to do with what you heard, because if you don't take the time to do that.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

It glazes over. You know it's in one ear and out the other and they don't have time to integrate it for themselves or assimilate, like what does that mean for me? How might I use that? What's what's valuable in it for me? So I think making your talk interactive, engaging people for me. So I think making your talk interactive, engaging people, giving people time to debrief, giving people opportunities to learn with and from other audience members, is really, really valuable. And then puts you in a totally different category of keynote speaker, like I would always call myself, like an interactive keynote. You know, I'm never going to say like this was just a talk where you sit and listen, but we're going to be doing together. So it sits somewhere between a talk and a workshop where you're still providing contents and data, statistics, stories, context. It's a multi-directional dialogue as opposed to a one directional monologue.

Anne McGinty:

When you can do that, I think everyone just gets so much more out of it so between being a keynote speaker and play On Purpose, and now you mentioned the culture conference. So Scaling Intimacy is what? The umbrella that holds all of these Good question, trying to figure that out.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

And we're actually talking about shifting the brand name of Scaling Intimacy. For various reasons, it just continues to go. Play On Purpose was a team building entity and now I have it as a virtual library where I filmed over 80 of those games and activities and now you can go and learn those games and activities through this video library. So that has morphed over time.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

Culture Conference is this annual conference event as a way of reinventing the conference paradigm, because that also very broken and outdated and sit and listen lecture-based people are sitting in the back of the room checking their email and who cares?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

So I was like this is such a low bar, like let's innovate.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

That was also my way of kind of tiptoeing more into the corporate world by creating a conference that would bring my ideal audience together, which was another huge hockey stick moment for my career. But in that new context, I feel like the impact that I want to make is really teaching people how to create events like that, not necessarily just doing that event which touches two to 300 people, which of course, ripples through those people, but I was like what if I could train thousands of people in the art and science of designing interactive, engaging events like the culture conference. So that's how Scaling Intimacy was born as the school of experience design and now we teach experience design and facilitation. So I took the dramatic arc from theater and storytelling and applied it to an events context. So I have this dramatic arc event template that you can use basically for any event, that's any topic, whether it's an hour or two days or a year, and it works. It's kind of expandable, collapsible and creates this sense of transformation and community building. So it's been a wild ride.

Anne McGinty:

What would you say then is your ultimate goal with all of these endeavors?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

I mean, in many ways my goal has been to like revolutionize the events industry and be like no one should ever sit through another boring event ever again. Part of why I did the culture conference was being on the conference circuit and I literally would like get enraged inside because I was like, oh, there's just like so much missed opportunity here for people to be meeting each other, making meaningful connections, finding new collaborators, mentors, friends, like business partners or whatever I was like. It just made me so angry and I was like there is a better way to do this. And I think a lot of people just don't plan very well, don't really take time to understand their audience. It's like they want to share what they want to share, but they're not really connecting to what does my audience need and want at this time? And how do I meet them where they are and take them where they want to go? And how do I do that?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

If you don't take the time to learn those skills, you end up defaulting to the models we know, which is speaker, speaker, fireside chat, maybe a kind of a workshop or a Q&A. These are the models that people know and unfortunately, I think they're just very outdated. So I think ultimately, in many ways, my goal is to give anyone who's leading an event, a training, a meeting, a conference, anyone who's leading an event, a training, a meeting, a conference, a program, a workshop, the skills and tools to be able to do so with care and respect for their audience in a psychologically safe way that actually transforms the people that they're trying to reach and delivers on their promise. A lot of people are scared to do it differently, because then you're actually taking a risk, so I'm hoping to equip people with some tools and frameworks to be able to do that more confidently, so that we can deliver on our promise and really serve people.

Anne McGinty:

What do you do about unlocking connections and engagement with particularly closed off?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

groups, connecting early, connecting often, so having touch points of connections. So some companies will do one offsite once a year and then they cram it full of team building and then the rest of the year is all transactional meetings and it's like it's just not going to carry forward. If you only do that once a year, it has to be what I call medicinal doses of connection throughout. And then the third one, which I think really speaks to what you're asking, is to gradually increase vulnerability. So often what happens is when people are like we need to create connection, we need people to open up, they go too far, too fast and that backfires. And so what you get is people close up even more.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

So if you say like, oh, what's the scariest thing that's ever happened to you, you know that's, that's a big question.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

But if you're like, oh, what's one thing that you're excited for in the next year, what's one thing you're really proud of that you've done in the past year? Right, so not making it the superlative, the best, the worst, the most I'll often do an exercise called story swap, and one of the questions I love to ask there is, like, what's a pivotal moment in your life where everything changed and that could be a birth, a death, a marriage, a divorce, an illness, travel, you know something where it took a right turn. It was like, and your life went on a new trajectory because of that event or because of that decision, and someone might talk about oh I decided to go to this college instead of that college, or when I left home. You're giving people the opportunity, through their whole life experience, to choose a meaningful moment for them that they're willing to share with a partner, and so it's thinking about that kind of like there's a significance, but there's layers of opt-in and people get to choose how they want to participate.

Anne McGinty:

I love that question. I actually just wrote it down because I think that's what I might want to keep in my back pocket. So you've started and grown so many businesses. At this point, what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs? I think to aspiring entrepreneurs.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

It's like, whatever your passion is, whatever your dream is, there's an audience for that. You know you don't need millions of people or hundreds of thousands of people, or even tens of thousands of people to make a living. So I think it also depends on, like, what your goals are, right. Do you want to build a unicorn $1 billion company? Like? That's not my vision or dream and it never has been. So it depends on what your dream is. But I always say that, like anyone I work with, you know there's enough to go around for everyone and there's an audience for everyone and there's a living to be made from anything that you want to do. It's just a matter of finding that fit right With your audience or product market fit.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

The beauty of entrepreneurship is that you get to do whatever you want. So you should be doing whatever you want, you know, and doing it in a way that works for you, right? So it's also a lifestyle question. You have all the freedom and all the responsibility. So if you're working you know 12 hour days like that's on you, like you're choosing to do that. If you're feeling burnout, that's on you. And I've gone through it, many of us have gone through it. You know, in major ways I've had to learn my lessons and I'm my own boss, which is both wonderful and difficult, and I have to have the discipline of like giving myself vacation, because no one's giving me vacation, so if I don't do that for myself, it's not going to happen.

Anne McGinty:

And to close up, if you could talk to yourself when you were in your early 20s, what wisdom would you give yourself? Take?

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

care of yourself and work your business around your life. Work will always be there. There's always time to make more money. Prioritize your health and wellbeing and happiness and prioritize your relationships, like spending time with the people that you care about. I think I spend so much time on the computer and every time I would go home and visit my mom in New York, you're on the computer all the time.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

I felt for a time I would say like my computer is my best friend, it's like the thing I spend the most time with and I just think that's really not the way I want to live my life. And it's just. I've been so driven, so career driven my whole life and very ambitious, and there's a beauty to that and I love the creativity of being able to have a vision and bring it to life. And now I have also a family and things that are also important to me, and maybe even now more important to me, where I'm not willing to sacrifice those times and those relationships. I'm not willing to be stressed in the way that I was before and that took going through burnout. It took really going through some hard times to learn that lesson. So, yeah, it would be great to learn that earlier.

Anne McGinty:

Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights with all of us.

Jenny Sauer-Klein:

Thank, you so much for having me.

Anne McGinty:

Today's key takeaways. First, always know your ultimate priorities. These should serve as your North Star guiding every decision you make. Profitability is essential, but be flexible and ready to adapt your business model to ensure your priorities stay intact. If you're looking to provide services or consultancy to corporations, consider hosting a free workshop. Invite everyone who might find value in what you offer and use the opportunity to give away prizes like additional free workshops or training sessions to gather feedback and build testimonials.

Anne McGinty:

When engaging with groups, connection is your best strategy. Keep your audience engaged by incorporating elements of interaction every five minutes. This keeps them awake and receptive. For those who speak in front of groups, ensure your sessions are interactive. Give your audience time to debrief and opportunities to learn from each other. Experiential learning, like practicing courageous leadership in real time, sticks better than just being told what to do.

Anne McGinty:

The era of sage on the stage is over. We need to maximize the live in-person experiences by actively engaging our audience, With adult attention spans averaging around eight seconds. Plan your interactions to be dynamic and frequent. Be a guide on the side rather than a lecturer. There's a vast opportunity to revolutionize the corporate events industry. Think beyond the traditional and make concepts three-dimensional to unlock engagement, especially with more reserved groups. Whatever your passion, there's an audience for it. There's enough to go around for everyone. Lastly, take care of yourself and prioritize your health and well-being, and shape your business around your life, not the other way around. That's it for today. I release episodes once a week, so come back and check it out. Have a great day.

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Anne McGinty

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