Meet Jon Kohrs

Today, we’d like to introduce you to Jon Kohrs. Jon was introduced to us by the brilliant and talented Lauren Dickinson.

Jon , can you walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I think what most people say I do is design employee experiences. And those people would say these experiences are workshops, retreats and experiential curriculum. I offer things like a 3-month leadership institute, where leaders get to explore how to rethink the future of their business. I also facilitate 2-week design sprints for teams to develop radically new products. It’s really an experience to learn by doing, ultimately getting leaders and teams to work in a whole new way.
I think underneath that, what I do well is create experiences where people feel seen and feel known. The Enneagram is the foundation of that, and it’s a map that allows people to have a language to talk to each other about who they really are and who they aren’t. I think that’s really different from the vast parade of personality assessments littering the corporate cultosphere. It’s not like, hey, because you’re this, then you should keep doing these things, which is what most companies I find do. Most of those things they tell people to do are actually things that people don’t want to do. That’s part of their suffering. So the Enneagram can weave in as a way to design out the suffering in an employee’s experience.

Please tell us more about your brand, Fresh Eggs
In my mid-20s, I was getting my Masters in marketing, and I had this professor I liked who was a great storyteller. She shared a story in one class that really left an impression on me. It was about a man walking down a dirt road in Iowa somewhere. It was bright outside and sunny, and he started thinking, I want some eggs for breakfast. Gosh, that would taste good, he thought. He sees this sign on the left, and it’s this perfectly pristine, white sign with perfectly stenciled lettering, “Fresh Eggs.” It was perfectly straight on this metal post, just very crisp and clean. The man thinks, hmm, those seem like decent fresh eggs. He decides to keep walking. He stumbles upon another sign on the right, made of old barn wood, nailed on a wood post all crooked and jaggedy. Written on it again is “Fresh Eggs”, the paint still wet and dripping a little. The man thinks, hmm, those could be really good eggs as well. At the end of the story the professor asked, which eggs did he buy? It’s not really about marketing. It’s about the birds, the sun, the dirt road, and all the little things that create an experience for someone to be immersed in. And it’s about him and his psyche. And I thought, Fresh Eggs, what a brilliant, perfect name for a company. A few years later, I was at SXSW and something came out of nowhere and hit me. I literally dropped to my knees and started crying. I ran back to my hotel room and bought the domain name, fresheg.gs. The domain was a devotion to an un dot com way to run a company. So that was the origin of Fresh Eggs. It’s evolved from building websites to developing content strategy to running usability tests to conducting customer ethnography to designing products to teaching teams design thinking to developing leadership training. At the heart, it’s always been an experience firm. And then I began to understand it more and the deeper tug to help people change how they work and how they create experiences for others. Fresh Eggs has been this internal incubator ever since that really helps people do their inner work and design higher states of awareness into the products they create for the rest of the world. And that’s what Fresh Eggs does.

Lauren Dickinson and Orion Retreats have been great to us and I know you’ve got a great relationship with them as well. Maybe you can tell our audience a bit about Lauren Dickinson and Orion Retreats and your experience with them.
Lauren and I met at a retreat a couple years ago in Mount Shasta, and we immediately clicked and knew we were going to work together somehow. When I found out about her company, Orion Retreats, it was an easy decision to create the Enneagram Immersion Retreats. We’ve since collaborated on other spiritual adventure retreats around the world, and because I live in Kansas City, having a regular series of unique retreats here for personal transformation really fit the bill for the type of retreat experiences we both wanted to create. In regard to using the Enneagram as a framework for a retreat, I think we’re really moving the needle of what it means to use the Enneagram more as an experiential model, and what the overall concept of a retreat offers to guests who want to really step away from and break the status quo. I think the Enneagram Retreats are different in that they’re not just teaching you how to work differently, but experiencing in yourself a whole new way of being. I think teams doing the retreats will hatch a whole new way of being together. If you’re an individual, you’ll hatch a whole new way to be with yourself. If you’re a couple, you’ll hatch a whole new way of being in relationship. I also think what’s different is that these retreats are intentionally designed around an out-of-the-normal experience and in a way to explore your inner world. For instance, if there were more body types that came, the experience would be shifted to one of relaxation and space for the body to move. We don’t often get to do that in a corporate setting where we are stuck on zoom calls and in office chairs. So, the entire experience is designed around who people are and to facilitate their head opening, heart opening, or body opening. It’s always unique and customized, so I think that’s also different.

Website: https://www.fresheg.gs/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fresheggs/

Image Credits
I took the photos.