KALA MAXYM OF FIVE SENSES TASTINGS
“My favorite part about running my business is also the thing that’s the challenge— it is that I make all the decisions.”- Kala Maxym
Kala Maxym is the Founder and Chief Event Composer of Five Senses Tastings, a performance and music-based company that focuses on engaging with the five senses, and the co-founder of the company’s cocktail branch, Song & Tonic. Her varied professional background includes time as a Senior Program Analyst with the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, as a Customer Success Manager at a VC-funded Tech start-up, and as a professional opera singer performing on stages across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. Kala founded Five Senses Tastings in 2012 while working full-time for the VC-funded Tech start-up. After almost five years, she decided to take the leap into full-time entrepreneurship in 2016, quitting her job and moving to Los Angeles in the same week. Kala was born and raised in Germany and has spent time living in the UK, Spain, Chile, and throughout the United States.
Can you talk about your journey up until founding Five Senses Tastings?
Yes, it's very varied. I was raised in Europe and I moved to the States when I was 14. And when I got to college, I really had no idea what I wanted to do and sort of by accident fell in love with politics. My first job out of school was working for the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, and I loved it. It was amazing. I got to travel to all sorts of amazing places like Venezuela, Barbados, and Chile on the U.S. government and it was great. I got to a point about two years in when I thought to myself: am I going to be an FBI agent or a foreign service officer or am I going to do this crazy thing that I've always done and always pretended I didn't really do, which was sing opera? So I decided to go sing opera. I got into a grad program, I went, and then I became an opera singer for a few years. I toured through England, France, and Switzerland and also sang on stages in Latin America and the United States. And then the economy tanked and my voice changed— I was not sure about this whole opera thing. And while I was trying to figure it out, I started working at a tech company. I meant to stay there a year and ended up staying four and a half. It was during that time, right when I started at the tech company, that I founded Five Senses. I was doing both jobs at the same time, but working on Five Senses Tastings at 6 am and 6 pm and in the elevator shaft and working full time in the tech company.
What inspired you to found Five Senses Tastings?
The real answer is it sort of happened by accident. But as I reflect on it, I've been able to figure out how that happened by accident. As an opera singer, you get two kinds of two responses. The first is: “Oh my God you sing without a mic and you sing in all these languages. And you have to remember all this stuff and emote— it's just so cool.” And then the other response is, “I'm sorry, but I hate opera...please don’t hate me.” I got to thinking about how we have these very strong feelings about things like music, spicy food, and Chardonnay— we just have very strong feelings about places. I grew up in what I call a sensory ecosystem that was northern Europe, Germany, cold, rainy, gray, no pineapple. And someone who grew up here in LA had warm, sunny pineapple. And it just made me think about how we are just so comfortable in the things that we're comfortable with and how we really just need to make a conscious effort to break out of that. I thought, “I wonder if this way of tasting wine, where you go and you taste a flight of wine which is four to five different glasses of a type of wine ( a grape, a vintage, a winemaker, etc.), could be done with music?”. I thought “what if you just tasted a bit of opera, a bit of folk, a bit of jazz, a bit of tango, and a bit of rock— what would that be like?”. And so it just sort of happened while I was talking to my mom and then I had a company!
Could you tell us more about what an experience at Five Senses Tastings is like?
Oh, yes, I can try. Because it is a full sensory experience, talking about it only gets at the very cusp of it. But the idea is that all moments in our lives are more joyfully and fully experienced when all of our senses are engaged. Typically, when you're at an event or whether you're celebrating something, music is often related to the background or relegated to the background or to non-specificity. There's a lack of specificity compared to other areas that typically are more specified. For example, the amount of spice in the food that you're going to eat and the cocktail that you're going to drink, and even the choice of flower color.
So as a musician myself, I thought, “gosh, I wonder if I could elevate music to the same level as all the other aspects.” Music is storytelling. Our events are really about storytelling with all of the five senses. So we start with your story, whether it's a product that you're launching or a love story, or a team-building experience. We start with your story and then we compose a music, wine, cheese, and chocolate tasting around it to tell that story, so it's fully customized. All of our music is normally presented live, but we have gone virtual, and we work with small businesses around the country. We work as much as we can with businesses that are local to where our clients are and that really represent values that maybe the client shared with us or are important to their company, their brand, or their family. It's my job really to connect those dots. We all learn differently— we are oral learners, visual learners, or tactile learners. So we all take in different pieces of information and connect with that in a different way. So it's my job to kind of make sure you have all the pathways open so that you can really connect to that story that's in front of you.
What skills are vital to starting a business in the wine/food and performance industry?
In the niche industry, you've got to get really good at explaining and you've got to get really good at not getting annoyed when people say, “yeah, I know what you do.” And you say “that’s actually not what I do.” You have to be really good at saying, “yeah, that's kind of what we do, but it's a little bit more like this.” One of the things about having a business that hasn't ever been done before is that no one has a point of reference. So while that's good because no one can say “I went to one and yours isn't as good or yours is better.” There's also no reference point. If you go to a massage therapist, most people have had some sort of massage— we all have an idea and know what it looks like. A musical wine tasting that tells stories and has five hundred years of music is not done. I made it up, so that's great for me. It’s a blessing, and it's also a curse because people need a lot of explanation and a lot of time to experience it. And there's a hesitation sometimes, I think, for people because they think “I don't know what that is. I don't want it.” But what I love about LA, specifically, is that there is an attitude of “I don't know what that is but I think I want it.”
In terms of general advice for starting a business. Plan for it, if you can. I didn't leave my job until I felt I was ready to go out on my own and even then I was totally not ready. Save up a little because you're going to not make money, probably for a while and you'll be lonely. It's very, very hard but it's also very wonderful. So plan, if you possibly can plan. Everyone will tell you to write a business plan but I don't have one. I think that there are different ways to do it. If you're looking for funding, obviously there's no other option. But if you're a service-based provider like I am or maybe a coach, my probably very unpopular opinion is that it's not necessarily completely necessary to write a business plan.
What is your favorite part about running your own business; what do you find most rewarding?
My favorite part about running my business is also the thing that’s the challenge— it is that I make all the decisions. It's not in a controlling way. For example, if I decide that I'm not going to work from this day to this day, that's a decision. But then that decision also means I'm not making money during that time or looking for money.
The most rewarding thing is when people have very strong reactions to something that I've hit upon and share that with me. There's something about what I do, especially in the virtual world, where you can't necessarily tell what's landing with people sometimes. It does feel really wonderful when someone says, “I had a really profound experience at one of your events. It made me think of this or I learned so much about that.” I can feel great about something that I did really well but it matters if somebody has a response to what I do. The honest truth is you don't know what's going on until somebody tells you, so I think validation and feedback are rewarding.
I’m super interested in your opera career and I was wondering how that has influenced the work you are doing with Five Senses Tastings, as I know it merges your passions for music and wine?
When I was born, I had the voice of an opera singer— I didn’t try. Still to this day, that's what I sound like when I open my mouth. I am just a classical singer and that's what I sound like. Part of me really wishes that I was more versatile— that I could belt, that I could be a jazz singer, that I could be a rock singer, and that I knew how to growl. I was never taught that. And I think that what I try to do in my events is take that idea and show people the huge, wide variety of what is out there in music, wine, cheese, and chocolate. Now, I can only get to so much in an hour or two. But being an opera singer, I grew up in a very classical household, so I didn't even listen to the Beatles until I was 10 or 12. And then I had to find out that there was all this other music out there in the world. And I’m worldly— we traveled all over!
So how it influenced my business is that I was in a business that very few people really, in terms of numbers, give a crap about. People just don't think about opera, especially in this country. In Europe they do, but not here. And so being part of this niche art form makes you really aware of how much people don't know about this thing that you do. And people are so over these niches like wine and opera— you know that everything has its own little niche. And so trying to make more of those niche things completely palatable, including opera, is part of what I do.
I would say being a performer that I feel very strongly about supporting the arts and supporting artists: paying them a living wage and explaining to people what our life is like. Everybody knows freelancers and everybody knows artists, but people don't know that you're not employed and that you don't have health insurance. There is just all this stuff they don’t know about. So that is part of what I try to do, especially when we have live events. I let people know that these are humans. These are artists. They have as much education as you do as a doctor. Art is worth something. Culture is worth something.
I know that you graduated from Barnard and I was wondering if you had any advice for current Barnard and more generally Columbia students on how to make the most out of their degrees and their time in the city?
Work in New York. Live in New York. Get off-campus. It was a while ago. So my advice would be that you've got a unique opportunity to live an adult life before you're really an adult. Go do it. Forget about the frat parties. Go get a job in New York City and live in New York. Try to join things that are off-campus like choirs, sports groups, or theater troupes. That would be my number one suggestion.
And then the other one is to have a minor— do two things! I mean unless you literally know exactly what you want to be for the rest of your life and everything that you need to do, if you want to be a gastroenterologist, for example. But still, you should probably sing in a choir or join a lacrosse team or something. Doing something else besides your major would be my other recommendation. And work really, really hard and make connections. I came in as a transfer, so I have very, very few friends from Barnard. My experience is quite different from anyone who came in as a freshman. And use the career office (Beyond Barnard), because it's awesome!
How has your experience at Barnard impacted the work you do?
In many ways. I am a huge fan of Barnard. I'm in love with it as an institution. To kind of draw a straight line would be hard for me. But I would say the memory of that many insanely ambitious, incredible, amazing, and intelligent women— all of those people out there doing things that presumably are making this world a better place. To say I’m one of those people and in my own little tiny way that maybe I'm doing that is amazing.
I've never worked harder than I did at Barnard, other than working as a business owner. It challenged me to the end of my abilities and I am grateful for that because I went way farther than I thought I ever could have in my work there. Every time I meet a Barnard woman, I say “Oh yeah, of course you are because you seem like a Barnard woman.” I would say the same with seven sisters. To be honest, I can't say that we are way cooler than everybody else. I think that anything's possible and that's certainly true even when you go through times in your life where things are really, really challenging. I actually reflect on my time at Barnard, because if I got through Barnard, I can actually do this because that was the hardest thing I ever did before.
Quick Take One: Name one act of self-care you practice each day.
Exercise, move.
Quick Take Two: Who is a woman you look up to?
Malala.
Quick Take Three: Recommend a few books, podcasts, newsletters or blogs that you've enjoyed and would recommend to the website readers.
Well, funny you should ask. It's by a fellow Barnard alum called The Turning by Jessica Alpert ‘03. I would also say Throughline for podcasts. For books, I like the Motivation Manifesto. Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed is also really beautiful. I also love The New Yorker and The Economist for day-to-day subway read options.