Photograph by Mike DeFilippo
Ask any of the hundreds of entrepreneurs, business consultants and even Mary Kay peddlers what they think of Karen Hoffman, and the reaction is overwhelmingly adoring. Small-business owners rave about her ability to motivate their employees. Entrepreneurs cite her innate gift for brainstorming great ideas. Individuals praise her for pushing them to discover and achieve their greatest desires.
And almost anyone who has interacted with Hoffman talks about her vast list of connections and how she uses them to solve other people’s problems. Hoffman has a database of nearly 9,000 business, nonprofit and individual contacts from across the country—and the list grows by about 1,000 a year. However, it’s not the sheer number of people she knows that is notable, but her almost philanthropic desire to connect strangers who can help one another. She’s like a human Facebook or LinkedIn, matching up entrepreneurs through emails that provide her with a karmic, not monetary, reward.
“Everyone I know knows Karen Hoffman,” says Judy Ryan, the president of Expanding Human Potential, a local leadership-development firm. “She is the Kevin Bacon of Missouri and beyond, and one of the most generous, positive and creative people I know. Karen is a go-to person who definitely thinks outside the box.”
Individuals pay Hoffman $80 an hour to reinvent their careers or lives. The cost for companies is about $2,000 a month to guide brainstorming meetings with the CEO and/or employees and then hold them accountable for meeting goals they set.
“Her ability to connect people and to see their potential is terrific,” says Laura Herring, president and CEO of the global career-transition company IMPACT Group, in Town & Country. “She has the ability to sit with a business owner and identify their goals and then work out strategies to achieve them.”
It was Herring who dubbed Hoffman “The Idea Coach” during a career-related conversation they had in 2002. Herring was adamant that Hoffman should be paid for generating ideas for others, rather than doing it pro bono simply because she enjoyed it. “This could be a living,” she told Hoffman. “You make the perfect idea coach.” The CEO became Hoffman’s first client, writing a check on the spot to retain her services. By the time the agreement ended a year later, Herring says that her IMPACT employees were happier and more focused and that the company had grown.
A new business was born—though there were still struggles to come.
Hoffman showed an early interest in entrepreneurship: At age 5, she hand-wrote a newspaper and sold it door-to-door for 2 cents an issue; in fourth grade, she made potholders—and sold them; at age 12, it was Christmas cards and Fuller brushes. “I was the skinny little girl with the big box,” she recalls. “They probably felt sorry for me and had to buy.”
After graduating from McCluer High School in 1971, Hoffman married her high school sweetheart, Rick Hoffman. (Initially, the two had fixed each other up with friends.) She skipped college and, subsequently, as a housewife and mother of three, began new ventures in her spare time, including selling a babysitters’ directory (which she generated), Tupperware and eventually real estate. In 1981 Hoffman took a part-time job with Barter Systems International, immediately falling in love with the barter industry, as it was inherently built on networking between partners. Six years later, she started her own exchange, Trade Resource International (which was eventually bought by the barter behemoth ITEX), and later became executive director of the International Reciprocal Trade Association, the worldwide trade association for barter exchanges. After only a year in the high-flying international job, Hoffman quit. Despite the excitement of dealing with large corporations and traveling internationally, she felt an emptiness. “I wanted easier and simpler,” she says now.
In the early 1990s, Hoffman turned to the world of publishing, starting two magazines: Sports St. Louis and St. Charles Living. Both were break-even businesses, but the work was exciting and the magazines were finding readers; Sports had a print run of 20,000, St. Charles half of that. In 1997, this rush of momentum ceased when Hoffman was diagnosed with stage-three ovarian cancer—an especially difficult cancer to beat. The months that followed were overwhelmingly bleak: a hysterectomy, six rounds of chemotherapy, hernias, fatigue, nausea, weight gain, hair loss.
“Chemo sucks, but it wasn’t a horrible experience,” Hoffman says, before correcting herself. “Chemo was a horrible experience, but having cancer wasn’t a horrible experience. It changed my marriage. My husband and I value each other more, hardly ever fight, and we don’t sweat the small stuff. I also have an appreciation of how hard it is for some of us to lose weight. All my life, I was in the normal weight range; I’m not now.”
Hoffman had closed both magazines while she underwent chemotherapy. After beating the cancer in 2002, she decided to refocus her life only on what brought her joy. With time on her hands, she began volunteering with nonprofit groups, serving on the board of the Pay It Forward Foundation and starting Encouraging, Supporting and Promoting Women (ESPW), which remains one of the area’s most popular women’s groups. As the various organizations and agencies presented their issues and problems, Hoffman helped them make connections and brainstormed ideas to move past their obstacles.
While this community work was enriching for Hoffman, she still struggled to turn her talents into income. The consulting she did for IMPACT, her first client, was successful—with proven results for the company—but that was one client, not a business. “I was fulfilled emotionally, but not financially,” she says. “I was struggling with how to make The Idea Coach work.” All that internal turmoil erupted in what she describes as a life-changing day on April 22, 2004. As she drove home on Interstate 270, preparing to merge onto Interstate 70, she broke down in tears, shouting angrily at God about her worries for the future and her struggle to transform her passions into a career.
Later that evening, an emotionally drained Hoffman was visited at home by Laura Lloyd, a local artist. While Lloyd was there to talk about paintings of hers that Hoffman had seen in a coffeehouse, she also brought a book, The Dream Giver, by Bruce Wilkinson. “I haven’t read this, but I feel like I am supposed to give it to you,” Lloyd told a surprised Hoffman. Hoffman began reading, with curiosity that quickly turned sour. “It was frustrating,” she recalls. “Somebody was telling me about a book that will generate more ideas—like I needed more ideas.” But she kept reading and finally came to a realization: She was what the book called a “dream champion,” and it was her life’s work to help others fulfill their aspirations.
Hoffman says that there was “a lot of peace” in making that discovery. “I embraced my gifts and strengths,” she says. “I really believe I am here to help people realize there are positive possibilities around everything.”
Slowly, Hoffman began to reshape her Idea Coach business. She was well aware of the increasingly lucrative industry of “consulting,” but she viewed those professionals as experts tied to a specific industry or process. She, on the other hand, wanted simply to brainstorm for ideas with professionals—all kinds, in all areas—who wanted to grow their businesses.
Over the past few years, Hoffman has been doing just that—and, finally, doing so for a solid and steady income. She now works with about 30 clients a year (mostly in St. Louis), gives motivational talks and runs workshops on goal-setting and positive possibilities. She works either from her St. Peters home office or in the field, meeting with clients at their businesses or coffeehouses and restaurants. Hoffman’s methods vary, but they almost always have an aspect of play to them. For instance, late last fall Hoffman gave client Karen Conant, owner of two area flower shops, a blank “check” to draw on the bank of the universe. After considering the steps necessary to take her business to the next level, Conant decided on a number: $50,000. Sixty days later, an investor gave her that exact amount. “It was a huge moment for me,” Conant says. “Now I am pretty fearless. What I learned is, if you don’t ask, you’ll never receive it.”
Rex Cusumano, who hired Hoffman to be the idea coach for his brother’s business, Cusumano Vision Center, describes his fee as money well spent, with revenue growing
20 percent after Hoffman began her consulting in mid-2006. “The trend was not going that way before she came on board,” he says. “We can attribute a lot of our success to her keeping the whole staff on track and meeting our goals. It’s hard to keep people motivated, and that’s what Karen does.”
While her fight with cancer has made Hoffman insistently positive, business clients, colleagues and friends have learned to watch their tongues and gird their wrists around Hoffman. When she is facilitating meetings, she will gently point out when someone is speaking negatively about anyone or anything in her presence. In consulting sessions, she often asks participants to slip rubber bands on their wrists; when they say something downbeat, especially about themselves, she requires them to snap the rubber bands on their wrists as a stinging reminder to be positive. Cusumano admits that he’s had to snap a few rubber bands along with the center’s staff.
Hoffman’s clients also point out that her greatest facility is not for unearthing the single brilliant idea everyone has been waiting for, but for more generally guiding the group brainstorm, opening clients’ minds to new ways of thinking. When she was recently asked how a cookie maker with neither money nor a commercial kitchen could start a business, for example, she quickly suggested: Why not barter cookies for kitchen time at a day-care or church? Suddenly the options seemed more numerous.
“I’m more like the queen of possibilities,” Hoffman says. “I help foster dreams and inspire the hope that there is a solution. It’s not the ideas that I have; it’s about the possibilities. People are told they can’t, we don’t have the money or time or whatever. That blocks people. I do think we need the contrarian and the skeptic, but I’m not going to let them dash people’s hope. I don’t have this whole ego thing that it has to be my idea. I coach the ideas in reach of all of us. I love seeing that light bulb going off in other people’s brains.”
While Hoffman is known by hundreds of small-business owners in St. Louis and beyond, she has yet to break into corporate America. Angela Lieb, Hoffman’s friend, confidante and business partner in a new speakers and experts’ bureau called City of Experts, believes she knows why: Hoffman, despite the confidence she generates in others, hasn’t shown enough in herself or her business to crack the ceiling of the business elite. “Our society is attracted to attractive people and to people who have a formal education,” Lieb says. “Karen is extremely bright, and yet she doesn’t feel like she’s worth paying herself a substantial income because she doesn’t have the educational credentials or the body of a size-4 beauty contestant.”
Hoffman concedes that confidence might be in play, but the nature of big companies is also a factor. “I had an experience with a corporation where I had the ear of the CEO and things got done,” she says. “When he left, I had to go through the chain of command. Employees had not just the fear of failure, but the question of ‘How will this be used against me?’ It’s frustrating.”
No matter the reason that Hoffman hasn’t played with the big boys, Lieb is confident that her partner will eventually be invited into corner offices. “A lot of companies are starving for those out-of-the-box ideas. I can guarantee if a big company guy was sitting on an airplane with her, before the end of the plane ride he’d have a notebook full of ideas and he’d want to hire her. She’s the best-kept secret.”
And yet she can’t do it by herself. Lieb notes that because Hoffman is such a dreamer who is constantly moving to a new project before finishing the last, her success is dependent on partnering with doers. “She is a visionary, but not a visionary who knows all the parts and pieces,” Lieb says. “She may not come up with all the solutions, which is why
98 percent of the time she works in teams. She’s the captain of the cheerleading squad. She can’t cheer the team on her own.”
Hoffman readily admits that collaboration is her strong suit. “Nothing happens on this planet with just one person,” she says.
Hoffman and Lieb have spent nearly three years developing City of Experts, which currently has 85 members. While it’s now only breaking even, Hoffman expects it to become profitable this year after she and Lieb launch a magazine to promote it and its members. Hoffman also plans to do more motivational speaking engagements, workshops on setting goals and, maybe, just maybe, break into a big company or two.
As she looks ahead, the cancer survivor says that optimism is central to her life—both in business and personal terms. “I believe positivity saved me,” she says. “The more positive you are, the more things your body creates to help save you. I’m grateful to be here. The grass is greener, the sky is bluer and people are what’s important.”
