Speaker
Nine starts, frightened every time. Did it anyway!
Founder and CEO, Saint Kay Media. Speaker on reinvention.
Book Kenda
Kenda Hansen is the founder and CEO of Saint Kay Media, co-host of Kylen and Kenda, and a speaker on starting over. She has built companies, exited two, and closed others. She was accepted into the Pepperdine MBA program without a bachelor's degree. She founded one of the first USDA-certified organic baby skincare brands as a single mom working out of her mother's basement, and got it into Whole Foods. She started over at 48.
Signature talk
Three choices, twenty years apart, that each looked wrong to everyone watching, and the single move underneath all of them. Kenda walks through the year everything broke at once (a new baby, a divorce, a company collapsing, a basement, and back surgery), the decision that followed, and why starting again is a skill you practice, not a personality you're born with.
Audiences leave with
For: entrepreneurship conferences, leadership and women's business events, midlife and second-act audiences, TEDx.
for founders and business audiences
Early in her MBA, a professor told Kenda she should quit. The thing he wanted her to fix, leading on instinct instead of the framework, is the thing that carried her through every company, boardroom, and reinvention since. A talk about telling the difference between a weakness to work on and a strength nobody has recognized yet, and how to adapt it to whatever room you’re standing in.
for parents, educators, school communities, and mentorship programs
Opens on Kenda's grandfather, orphaned as a teenager in a rural West Virginia coal-mining town and taken in by a neighbor family that already had seven or eight kids. Decades later, with her oldest sons grown and out of the house, Kenda took in a 33-year-old who needed somebody, or he wouldn't make it. He's now her co-host. What community used to do for young people, what the feed does instead, and why mentorship is the “one more” that's still available to all of us.
Also speaks on
I met Kenda when she was pitching her organic baby skincare company to me with no business school and no safety net. She eventually landed a distribution deal with our company. 20 years and a few companies later, she's the same person: she holds a room, she doesn't cut corners, and she means every word. I've worked with a lot of founders, and I'd put her on any stage I was responsible for.
I was in Kenda's Pepperdine MBA cohort. She was the one founder in a room full of corporate executives; she'd built her company while raising two small kids and exited it during the program, and she was still the person everyone went to for advice on pitching investors. When she led our marketing team, the presentations were the ones people remembered.
Kenda can take something genuinely complicated, the research behind a product line, the details nobody else wants to explain, and make a room understand it without ever making anyone feel slow. I’ve rarely seen that much expertise sit that comfortably next to that much patience.
Kenda reserves a number of dates each year for schools, youth programs, and community nonprofits in Northern California.
Prefer email? Write to speaker@saintkaymedia.com, or find Kenda on LinkedIn.
