I have spent my career in rooms most people walk out of and forget. I decided to build the ones they talk about for years.
I am Jeremy Brooks. I co-founded Strayboots, where I serve as Co-Founder & Chief Experience Officer, and I personally create, manage and host corporate events. Across affiliated businesses, the company-reported reach is 37 countries, 700+ cities and 1,000,000+ participants – company-reported figures across affiliated businesses; not solely Jeremy’s personal delivery record.
Those numbers are the short version. The long version is better.
How this started
Nobody grows up wanting to run team events. I backed into it the honest way – by being in the room when one went flat.
You have been in that room. A company spends real money to get its people together. There is a stage, a screen, a speaker who flew in that morning. Everyone is polite. Everyone checks their phone under the table. By the following Tuesday, nothing about how those people work together has changed at all, and everybody quietly agrees not to mention the budget.
What bothered me was not the money. It was the waste of something rarer: a whole team, in one place, at the same time, actually available to each other. That almost never happens in modern working life. Squandering it on a slideshow felt like a crime against arithmetic.
So I started building the opposite kind of room.
What I learned in the first hundred rooms
The lesson arrived fast, and it has never changed since: people do not bond by listening together. They bond by doing something together that is just hard enough to matter.
Give a team a task inside its comfort zone and you get a pleasant afternoon. Give them something a little outside it – competitive, fun, slightly uncertain, winnable only if they actually talk to each other – and watch what happens. The quiet analyst starts directing traffic. The new hire saves the round. Two departments that email each other like rival nations are suddenly finishing each other’s sentences over a puzzle neither could crack alone.
That stretch is not a trick. It is the mechanism. Communication, collaboration and trust are not lecture topics; they are what a team produces when it has no other way to win. Everything I have built since – every format, every hunt, every challenge – is engineered around that single idea.
The work grew up
Strayboots grew from those early rooms into a company corporate planners and management teams around the world rate at the very top of this industry. The events got bigger – hundreds of people, then thousands. The map got wider across affiliated businesses: 37 countries, 700+ cities, more than a million participants and counting (company-reported figures across affiliated businesses; not solely Jeremy’s personal delivery record). The formats multiplied – city hunts across real streets, indoor challenges built for ballrooms and boardrooms, outdoor adventures, creative builds, and give-back events where a team’s day changes somebody else’s life too.
The give-back work deserves its own sentence, because it changed me. I have watched a room of executives go quiet – genuinely quiet – as a wheelchair they built with their own hands was presented to a child who needed it. I have seen teams hand over bikes to kids coming out of cancer treatment, families who could never have simply bought one. Whatever else an event can do, it can do that. I never schedule those days lightly.
Why I still host it myself
Here is the part people find strange. With a company this size, I could hand the microphone to someone else and go run the business from an office.
I do host, still, personally – because the host is the product. A great host reads a room the way a pilot reads weather. He knows when the energy dips before the room does. He knows which team needs a harder round and which one needs a win. He takes a hundred strangers at 9 a.m. and hands back a team at noon. That is not a script you can hand over; it is a craft you build across thousands of rooms, and it is the thing I am best at in the world.
So when a client books the big one – the kickoff that has to land, the leadership group that has to leave aligned, the conference that has to actually connect people – there is a good chance the person at the front of the room is me.
The short version, for the record
- Co-Founder & Chief Experience Officer, Strayboots
- Founder, Corazon Azul – my venture building premium hosted experiences and retreats
- Personally creates, manages and hosts corporate events; affiliated businesses report a reach of 37 countries and 700+ cities (company-reported figures across affiliated businesses; not solely Jeremy’s personal delivery record)
- More than 1,000,000 participants across affiliated businesses (company-reported figures across affiliated businesses; not solely Jeremy’s personal delivery record)
- Keynote speaker and emcee on the comfort-zone principle: strong teams are built by solving something together
Talk to Jeremy
Planning something your team will still be talking about next year? Start the conversation the simple way:
Jeremy Brooks, WhatsApp: +1 754.301.9206
Or send a message via the Contact page – it comes straight to me, and I read every one.