“My advice would be to dig into your “why?” Ask yourself why you want to start your business and take the time to sit down and analyse your answers to get them as clear as possible. It’s important to always remember that you are doing this for a reason.” – Silja Thor

Founder@ Interview

Interview with Silja Thor

“My advice would be to dig into your “why?” Ask yourself why you want to start your business and take the time to sit down and analyse your answers to get them as clear as possible. It’s important to always remember that you are doing this for a reason. ” – Silja Thor

Today we feature Silja Thor, the founder at Silja Thor. We hear their story in their own words, their successes, their challenges and their insights.

Let’s start by getting to know you. Can you please tell us a little bit about you and what you do?
Originally a serial entrepreneur from Iceland, I’m currently a business mentor living in the Netherlands.

My work right now is centered on the belief that growing a business should be seamless and that, to make that happen, you have to do something that you love that can also make you super profitable.

That’s a lesson I learned the hard way during my first 16 years of entrepreneurship, during which time I allowed my businesses to control me and not the other way around. In fact, if I hadn’t had my daughter and gone through a divorce, I would have kept on working unsustainable hours and piling more on my plate for all the wrong reasons.

Taking everything I learned during this time, I now help my clients to achieve amazing growth by aligning every piece of their business to their zone of genius.

In doing so, they can have beautiful months and hit unbelievable goals that might have seemed completely unattainable before they started with me.

A great introduction and start to this interview. Can you please tell us, how did you start, from what age, and what made you decide to change direction and start?

I used to work as cabin crew until I was 21, flying mostly between Italy, Spain, and the UK. While I was finalizing my last contract to fly over to Newcastle, I came across an opportunity to get involved in starting up a business, and I thought to myself: “hey, why not?”

That was all it took for me to take the plunge. I very quickly immersed myself in this brand new telemarketing business, running the sales side of things as the company began its move over to Edinburgh.

Looking back now, I can see that I was very naïve at the time, as you often are with your first business! While I didn’t understand all of the ins and outs, I jumped right in at the deep end and ended up staying on for quite a few years. I found that I just really loved the freedom of it and the way my team and I could create something so tangible from nothing, turning ideas into realities. And, if I’m honest, I think I loved the fact that I could take charge a bit, too!

From there, I moved onto my second business in Iceland in 2006/2007, which was basically a platform for construction workers. As with my first business, I was a founder and, in fact, I always have been a founder. However, this business was less of a success story, and I lost everything when the Icelandic economy crashed.

This brought about a really tough time in my life. So, I had to make some decisions. I have always been really passionate about global politics and international developments, so I decided to move to the Netherlands and do a university course on those exact topics. At this point, I thought I might end up changing my career field, with working for the UN being one of my long-term goals.

But, it wasn’t long before I realised that it just wasn’t who I am – I’m definitely a founder at heart! So, I started up a new project focused on nutrition and female empowerment, which became the starting point for yet another business of mine.

It became very clear to me that business is at my core. So is innovation, which I came to realise after being involved in so many technology start-ups. Innovation is still a big part of what I do because so much of my work is focused on helping my clients be more innovative. I think this is so important, because it allows them to make a much bigger impact.

Thank you for that insight. So can you tell us…What does your business do and where is your company based?

My business is in mentorship, and my main offer is a six-month-long mentorship program in which I help my clients to align every part of their business with their zone of genius. This helps them to become crazy profitable doing what they love to do and without sacrificing what matters in their lives.

Together, we get to work on some key foundational pieces where I help them figure out how to position themselves and their offers. The goal even in these early stages is to come up with something that my clients are really excited about and that, in turn, is irresistible to their clients. And, crucially, it has to fit into my client’s lifestyle and desires.

What I do in my program is help my clients to create beautiful offers that can give the people they serve the things they truly desire. It all starts with creating a solid client attraction strategy and developing a rinse-and-repeat system that they can rely on at all stages of their sales funnel. Once my clients have that, they can ditch the rest.

In my experience, keeping it simple and profitable is really what it’s all about in business. As such, I assess my clients’ successes on just two key benchmarks. The first is hitting five figures, and the second is getting them to multiple high-five-figure years. If they can do that while staying true to themselves and not compromising other parts of their lives, I know I’ve done my job.

The work I do is global because I run my business online. So, I have clients from Australia, South Africa, the USA, Canada, and all over Europe, although I’m based in the Netherlands and live in The Hague.

What’s the story behind your success? What led to your aha moment? how did you get to where you are now?

I can see now that I used to be stuck on the hamster wheel, which is where so many entrepreneurs find themselves at some time or another.

As a former serial entrepreneur, I’ve also experienced a lot of lows, the worst being when the financial crash hit Iceland. When that happened, I lost everything, even though I had worked so hard for so long. Still, I kept going back to that excessively hard-working mindset, because I always believed that was a prerequisite to success.

But then, when I was going through my divorce and I became a single mum to my daughter India, I started to realise that I was always the first person to drop her off at daycare and the last one to pick her up in the afternoon. It was ironic, really. I was working so hard because I wanted a beautiful life for myself and my daughter, but I was missing out on so much.

When I finally had this “aha!” moment, I started to see that it wasn’t really worth it. That’s when I decided that I wanted to build a business around my life and not the other way around. Ultimately, I wanted to spend time with India and the way I was working was not allowing me to do that.

This forced me to sit down and think about what I could do instead, and that’s when it came to me: I could be a mentor! It was something I had already been doing a lot of during my journey as an entrepreneur and it always came so naturally to me.

It was definitely the right decision and I quickly discovered that I have this amazing ability to spot my clients’ problems straight away and unlock their true potential. So, it really wasn’t long after I started as a mentor that my clients began getting exceptional results.

Thanks to me, they get to experience incredible transformations and have amazing breakthroughs. And, as a result, I hit consistent five-figure months, typically making around 30,000.

Thank you for sharing that. What’s been your life’s biggest lesson so far?

My biggest lesson is to always put yourself first and to have a day where the priority is to make sure that you’re okay. I call this a “CEO day.” You see, to achieve and enjoy success as a CEO, you have to be able to focus on your mental health and wellbeing. For me, personally, most of what I do is built around that as a guiding principle.

Thanks to my CEO day, I have the space to check that I’m not falling into old habits or going back to the hamster wheel. It also gives me time to remind myself of what really matters in my life and business and to analyse those key points. When you do that, it’s far easier to build your business around your life and not the other way around.

What I have come to realise is that, as soon as I step onto the hamster wheel again, getting clients becomes so much more difficult. I get overwhelmed and exhausted, and this inevitably has an effect on my emotions. When I would feel like this, I used to find that one of the first things to go was the CEO day, because I’d be so focused on ticking to-dos off my never-ending list. But that’s a big no. I now know that as soon as I do that, things start to go wrong.

Basically, I’ve found that, if I slow down, I consistently have better, more profitable months, even if the work seems to be stacking up around me. The lesson here, then, is to always take care of yourself. If, for example, you feel tired, take a nap. Or, if you need to refocus, take the time to journal, go for a walk, or speak to your mentor.

If I could start my entrepreneurial journey over again, I would put that principle into action. I probably would have avoided more than a decade’s worth of overworking and underpaying myself if I had.

That your outer world really reflects your inner world! And, by extension, that your worries are simply a result of your internal wishes not being met around you. I’ve found out in recent years that, by staying in that worried state, you can actually cause more of your needs and desires to go unmet.

So, nowadays, I’m very intentional about taking care of my inner world by not burying my head in the sand and instead tackling my worries head-on. Doing so allows me to rewrite my stories and rephrase my wishes so that they reflect my successes and ambitions. As a result, I’m able to attract more of what I want in life, which is remarkable.

This has allowed me to see just how important a role my intuition plays in my business. I have come to realise that my intuition is incredibly strong and that it is never wrong.

If you were to go back in time, what piece of advice would you give to your younger self?

The most important piece of advice I would give to my younger self would be to get a mentor. Knowing what I know now, I realise that I could have skipped probably about 10 years of trial and error if I would have got myself a mentor at the start. So, really, the most expensive thing I did in those early days was not investing in a mentor!

A mentor will always be a few steps ahead of you and will, therefore, have already figured out how to get to where you want to go. In other words, they have already been there themselves and can tell you where to focus.
And, of course, I would tell myself to slow down and stop grinding quite so hard for such little reward. Ironically, that’s the only way you’re going to really speed up.

We’re nearly halfway through our interview so it’s a great time to ask how does your business run. What three tools make your business run better?

I absolutely love Active Campaign, which is the platform I use to send out my emails. It allows you to effectively categorise and segment both your clients and your potential clients, so I would really recommend it. Another tool I just love is Asana which is what I use for project management.

I don’t think I could run my business without it! And then, the third one would have to be Zoom, which my team and I utilise for all of our calls and meetings.

Thanks to these tools, I can really focus on what matters, which is my clients. With Asana and Active Campaign in particular, it is so much easier to nurture my clients and potential clients because they all get individual experience. And then, with Zoom, I’m able to touch base with my team as and when we need to catch up.

As much as I love these tools, I honestly don’t remember how I found out about them! I’m really innovative and an early adopter, so I’ve been using them for a while. I have been trying out other software, too, but I’m sure that these are the best and most beautiful my business could be using right now.

I honestly don’t know how I would cope if I no longer had these tools because my business is so dependent on them! It often makes me question how people used to run their businesses back in the day when they didn’t have internet.

I guess I wouldn’t have the beautiful overview that I have today without them, and I certainly wouldn’t have the intimacy that I have with my clients. Now, moving forwards, I’m exploring a new tool that I hope can help me to achieve the same, called Paperbell.

It’s a single platform where I can do my invoices, lead generation, and everything else at the same time, all on one platform. So, it’s helping me to streamline my systems and free up more time for the important things.

What do you know now that you wished you had known before?

That your outer world really reflects your inner world! And, by extension, that your worries are simply a result of your internal wishes not being met around you.

I’ve found out in recent years that, by staying in that worried state, you can actually cause more of your needs and desires to go unmet.

So, nowadays, I’m very intentional about taking care of my inner world by not burying my head in the sand and instead tackling my worries head-on. Doing so allows me to rewrite my stories and rephrase my wishes so that they reflect my successes and ambitions.

As a result, I’m able to attract more of what I want in life, which is remarkable.

This has allowed me to see just how important a role my intuition plays in my business. I have come to realise that my intuition is incredibly strong and that it is never wrong.

What has been your greatest or proudest achievement or moment?

It might sound cliché, but in my personal life, I would definitely have to say my daughter. I’m just so proud of how happy, bubbly, and wonderful she is! And then, in my professional life, it’s the incredible breakthroughs that my clients achieve thanks to my mentorship.

One of my clients had been struggling financially when she first joined me and she wanted to hit 5,000 a month. Now, though, since we’ve been working together, she can see that even 25,000 just isn’t enough for the value that she offers people.

She has realised that money isn’t something that should be so stigmatised and, as a result, she has accepted abundance. This is something that allows her to make more investments, spend more on donations, and have more of an impact on the people she helps, and that makes me feel so proud.
She’s not the only person I’ve helped in this way.

I’ve actually helped countless entrepreneurs go from a scarcity mindset to living a life of abundance, which in turn allows them to better help their clients.

What future life goals do you want to achieve and why?

At the moment, I have two major goals. First of all, I want to invest in 100 women, which is something I am super passionate about. My hope is that I can help these women start up their dream businesses through my business.

The second thing is that I really want to impact and change the narrative around money. I want to see entrepreneurs do what they love and do so as profitably as possible.

That’s why my program is so geared towards helping my clients hit these beautiful, high-figure months, because I truly believe that every entrepreneur should hit at least five figures.

Outside of that, though, a personal goal of mine is to have a cabin in Ardennes in Belgium, where I would love to work half of the time.

To finish our inspire questions…”We believe that sharing inspiring words can inspire others.” If there was one positive thing you would say to someone to inspire and empower them what would it be and why?

My advice would be to dig into your “why?”

Ask yourself why you want to start your business and take the time to sit down and analyse your answers to get them as clear as possible. What impact is it that you want to create? What lifestyle do you want for yourself as an entrepreneur? What would you want people to say about your personal and professional achievements at your funeral?

These are big questions, but they’re necessary if you want to move forward with your business with your goals in perfect alignment. It’s important to always remember that you are doing this for a reason. The more you move with that in mind, the more smoothly things will go.

“Thank you it has been great learning more about your founder story and Silja Thor”

To learn more about Silja Thor Visit http://siljathor.com/

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