ABOUT KAREN KLEINWORT
I'm a translator.
When a client comes to me carrying a business that's quietly costing her herself — her health, her time, her sense of who she actually is — I can usually see the thing she can't yet name. It's not a strategy problem. It's not a mindset problem. It's an alignment problem.
That's where I work. At the intersection of what you're building and who you're becoming while you build it.
Karen Kleinwort — coach, operator, translator.
I came to this work the long way around.
Fifty years of businesses, bodies, boardrooms, nonprofits, schools, and twenty years of building an integration model that the rest of the industry is still catching up to. By the time coaching became a mainstream profession, I had already been doing it — fully integrated, mind, body, and spirit and strategy in the same session — for nearly a decade.
The coaching was the synthesis. Not the start.
CHAPTER ONE
The kid at the cash register.
I've been running businesses since I was four years old. Not in a metaphorical way. In a "help Mrs. Smith find the coffee before you eat your cereal" way — serving customers at my family's general store before most kids had finished breakfast.
By 12, my sister Krista and I had built Krista & Karen's Soft Ice Cream from the ground up. We ran it from age 12 to 20, paid for both our college educations, and learned everything the business books would later try to teach us — pricing, operations, customer relationships, what it costs to run something that depends on you showing up every single day.
At 14, I was running a marina general store and teaching my 30-year-old manager how to calculate markup. He took it well, all things considered.
Business has never been something I learned. It's the water I swim in. It always has been.
CHAPTER TWO
Bodies, retention, and what it actually takes to make people stay.
Through my twenties I spent seven years at the premier private health club in London, Ontario — personal training while directing the member retention program. I knew 3,500 members by name. I knew their families, their goals, their patterns, and I could usually tell which ones were about to leave before they did.
We cut attrition in half.
What I learned there wasn't a retention strategy. It was a relational truth: people don't stay because they're sold to. They stay because they feel seen. That understanding has shaped every client relationship I've had since — and it's the reason I work the way I work now.
CHAPTER THREE
The boardroom, the engineers, and the SEC filings.
In my thirties I served as corporate administrative officer for a publicly traded company. I led our half of a $5M joint-development program with Garrett Turbochargers — a Honeywell company — directing more than a dozen male engineers, coordinating SEC filings across three countries.
My company sponsored my H1B and relocated me from Vancouver to Los Angeles — the kind of investment companies don't make in people they could replace. For most of those years, I was the only woman in the boardroom. Twenty years ago, that meant something different than it does today.
I learned what it means to operate at real stakes. I also learned what it costs — personally, physically, relationally — to sustain that level of output without any structural support for the human running it. That lesson is one I bring to every client who's running hard on an engine that's quietly burning out.
THE PATTERN THAT RUNS THROUGH ALL OF IT
While I was at Turbodyne — and through the years I spent running operations at a private school in California afterward — I was simultaneously building a nonprofit. Sponsor a Teacher Program was a federally certified 501(c)(3) I founded, ran for nearly seven years, and voluntarily closed when Donors Choose launched a structurally superior model for the same mission. I completed the IRS paperwork myself. I held a 90% to the classroom and 10% to the overhead structure, and didn't bend on it. I ran directly into institutional resistance — principals and boards blocking the program because it removed their control over funding. Teachers loved it. Administrators shut it down at every school I approached. When a better solution existed, I stepped aside.
At the school, I went from enrollment counselor to effectively running the operation. I cut a four-month enrollment process to under two weeks. I discovered financial misconduct twice. The second time, while the owners were traveling, I coordinated the team, secured an internal loan, ensured every teacher was paid, didn't take my own paycheck during that period, and reported the balance when they returned. They came home furious. I resigned.
I've entered organizations, become the operational center, found what was broken, and acted on it — repeatedly, at personal cost. I've never once regretted the call.
That is the operating history behind the work I do now. When I tell a client I can see what's actually happening in their business — I mean it in a specific way.
CHAPTER FOUR
At some point I stopped editing.
For years, I had been doing both kinds of work — the strategic operator work and the energy work — but never in the same room at the same time. Depending on who I was with and what they needed, I would show up as either the businessperson or the healer. I kept them separate because I thought I had to. Because I thought the people who hired me for one wouldn't trust me for the other.
I was wrong about that.
In 2006, I built a coaching practice around something nobody else was doing at the time — a fully integrated session that held business strategy, energy work, and somatic healing in the same container. The structure was specific: 20 minutes of talk and diagnostic work, 45 minutes of combined Cranial Sacral Therapy and Reiki, 25 minutes of integration. One session. All three layers. Every time.
The integration wasn't a pivot. I didn't leave corporate to "follow my calling." I became a Reiki Master Teacher, a Certified Professional Coach, a practitioner of Cranial Sacral Therapy — and I wove those into everything I'd already built, because they were already part of who I was. What changed wasn't the skills. What changed was that I stopped pretending they were separate.
"People sometimes describe me as having a corporate side and a holistic side. They have always been the same side. I'm just letting both of them show up at the same time, finally."
THE OPERATOR AND THE ENERGY WORKER.
ALWAYS THE SAME PERSON.
CHAPTER FIVE
Twenty years of pioneer practice.
I've been doing this work — fully integrated, mind, body, and spirit and strategy in the same session — since 2006. When I started, almost no one else was.
For most of my first decade, I spent 95% of my time educating clients on what Reiki and Cranial Sacral Therapy even were before I could practice them. The market didn't have the vocabulary yet. I spent years building it.
I'm one of the few coaches who built this model before there was a market for it. I've spent twenty years refining it while the rest of the industry slowly arrived at what I'd already been doing.
The market caught up. The practice didn't change.
CHAPTER SIX
Now
Today, I run a private coaching practice in Midland, Michigan — working with women and men who are building something real and ready to stop running a version of their business that's costing them themselves.
I coach private clients through the 4-Week Alignment Accelerator and the 6-Month Alignment Ascension. I lead the Women's Business Resource Community — a private membership for women entrepreneurs who want strategic support without the hustle-culture noise. I run weekly programming, open office hours, and group coaching. I build things the same way I always have: one real relationship at a time.
I have two teenagers in high school who keep me honest about what actually matters. I have a garden I tend imperfectly. I walk outside when I remember to.
Fifty years of operating experience. Twenty years of integrated practice. Every layer still present. All of it available to my clients — every time.
Every layer still present. All of it available.
The best next step is a real conversation.
If something on this page stopped you — if you recognized yourself in the person I described at the beginning, or in the way I described the work — the best next step is a Discovery Call. Fifteen minutes. Complimentary. No pitch. Just a real conversation to find out if working together makes sense. Most people leave with something useful whether we work together or not.
BOOK A DISCOVERY CALL FIRSTBachelor of Science
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