3 Tips to Create Retreats & Experiences Feature with Jen of We Travel
Updated: Nov 11, 2019
Jen Corley is the Director of Development for We Travel, which is a registration and payment platform for retreats.
Not only that, but she is an incredible life Mom within the last year, and today is her son's first Halloween and the costume she's been sharing is amazing.
She is multi-passionate, a wife, a mom, and a Development Director at We Travel since the beginning of the start-up. She graduated from both Harvard University and Stanford, receiving her Bachelor's from Harvard and her Masters from Stanford.
Her incredible experiences range from investment firms to yoga alliances, and now being at we travel for several years. We are talking about three tips on creating retreats and experiences in today's episode. Super excited to share from Jen's episode on the podcast.
Background
Jen's Story Highlights from Early Years Harvard & Stanford Experiences Yoga Teacher Training Private Equity Firm Experience Leaps of Faith to Graduate School Living in Morocco
We Travel Highlights
I found we travel which kind of combined my love of travel of yoga. I think that last count we are 34 people, but it's 17 different nationalities, 14 different languages booked on the team, and we've lived in 31 countries.
So it just really seemed like the right place for me to land professionally that would allow me to sort of combining my background, skills with everything that spoke to me in terms of my passions and interests.
I joined in 2016 when we were really small and things have just exploded since then. It's been like a crazy wild ride but lots of fun."
8:40 time stamp on episode Insights into early influences and childhood "I love travel from when I was young, particular was interested in the Middle East. I had a really good friend growing up, who is her parents emigrated from Iran. I had early exposure to Persian language, and later Arabic.
I always had this like wanderlust and this like, want to explore the unknown, and to learn about other cultures intimately. That all was present from a young age as well. And so I think it just took in adulthood. Think it was really like there was a moment when I was leaving the job at the private equity firm.
"My parents, some of my friends were like, what are you doing? This is crazy. "
Highlights about the Founder and CEO of We Travel.
He started the company he was working for he worked for Doctors Without Borders. He worked actually for the Red Cross in Tajikistan.
He was making sure like prisoner conditions were okay. He had off periods while he was there including organizing trips into Tajikistan and other places in like Central Asia and Silk Road.
He had his own experiences of wanting to start a company that would solve kind of some of the pain points around group travel. The seed of an idea was born that it would be amazing to start a company that solved a lot of these pain points for group travel like logistics to help focus on the experience.
So he founded We Travel, with our other two co-founders, one is from Switzerland, and the other two are from Indonesia and Azerbaijan. So that was, you take that as sort of the foundation of the company.
Jen shares Insights into recent group retreats in Portugal with the team and activities.
15:44 Jen on being Director of Development with We Travel
I focus a lot on education-based marketing, so producing useful content that people can learn from.
This is to position our company as kind of a thought leader in the space and to help people out. Day to day basis, that means that I'm working with retreat hosts that are building businesses.
It celebrates a kind of innovation and the ability to do new things, quarter to quarter.
My job has changed a lot in three years. We are focused on helpful content. And, you know, and helping people build their businesses in that way. "
Three Tips on Creating Retreats
1 Theme of Creating Retreats
We talk about theme types, aligned ideas, and communities.
It's important to meditate on that journal on it, get clear about what it is that's as a retreat leader and organizer, or what you want as a retreat goer. Where could you shift and change but just get keeping your audience in mind?
And similarly for retreat goers, I mean, this is a two-way conversation, right? If you have a teacher or a coach or a mentor in your life that does retreats, and you know, you know them you have a personal relationship with them.
I think that's, that's great to join on that basis, but also really making sure what are your options? What are your expectations, making sure that you, you know, find the retreat experience that's going to speak to you whether that's educational, experiential, really travel-focused, service-focused, whatever it might be just making sure that you're not easy to like Google yoga retreat Costa Rica.
