Kris Jenner gave a glimpse into her business savvy mind in the latest Lenny Letter. The famous momager, 61, shared how she took a broke Bruce Jenner and turned him into a lucrative motivational speaker in the ‘90s.
“I told my assistant, Lisa, ‘OK, listen. We have the greatest guy here. He really knows his craft. He is really good at what he does, but he doesn’t have anybody doing anything for him,” Kris recalled. “He doesn’t have a lot going on. He has $200 in the bank. What are we going to do?’ Because the kids have to eat. We have to get it together.”
Kris admits she does not have any formal business training, but learned invaluable skills from watching her first husband, Robert Kardashian, and their top-tier friends conduct business.
So she forged a plan to make him successful by first assembling press kits with her own money.
“He didn’t have a business card. He didn’t have a bio. He didn’t have press, nothing,” Kris said. From there, Kris sprang into action getting friends to do photo shoots of Bruce and hiring another friend to make a reel that would be used as an intro for his speeches.
“I think I spent my last dime, I’m not even kidding, making these beautiful, glossy press-kit folders and took every great article that had ever been in Sports Illustrated and any really beautiful magazine and I started making copies,” she said. “We put together 7,000 press kits, and we mailed them to every speakers’ bureau in the United States. Then we sat back, and we waited for the phone to ring.”
Then the calls started to roll in from Visa, Coca-Cola, and more big-name companies.
Kris and Bruce were married for 23 years before calling it quits in 2013 and officially divorced in 2014. Bruce transitioned into Caitlyn in 2015.