Heidi and Tori Ganahl
EPISODE 13
Hear how this Mother/Daughter dynamic team created a platform to help empower and inspire young women... as well as how they generated OVER 1 MILLION media impressions in a year!
Guests: Heidi and Tori Ganahl
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The mother-daughter, founders of Shefactor, an online platform for young women looking to create a life they love.
Heidi Ganahl is a serial entrepreneur. She gave up a successful, but slightly unfulfilling career in pharmaceutical sales while turning a personal tragedy of being widowed, super young in life into an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of people and their pets. As the founder of camp bow wow, the largest pet care franchise in the US which grossed over $100 million. She sold that company and is living the dream.
Tori Ganahl. Her daughter was raised by this amazing human being and benefited from having such a bad-ass mom. Tori while in college demonstrated her leadership and people skills by becoming a sophomore president of the largest sorority on campus at the University of Oregon. When she graduated, she realized she was stuck in a corporate job that just wasn't fulfilling in the real world.
Tori and her mom tackled this issue head-on and ended up creating the Shefactor platform to help other young women navigate the journey of becoming confident, successful leaders of their lives and creating the life that they loved. They've reached over 1 million women in one year, and boy, they are just getting started.
Key Takeaways:
Business is like a baby. You got to get it there.
If you can really align what you're doing with your career, with your life, with what you're passionate about, what you care about, it just makes all the difference in your success, in how your attitude and the people that you're around with. It's just so much more fun.
When you have partners, there's that extra dynamic because you both have different points of view.
Start with figuring out what you're good at and your strengths, and then relying on other people to do the things that you might not be as good at, but they are. And that's also a leadership moment. Cause if you're not giving them that freedom to do what they are great at, then you're depriving them of that too.
You have to build relationships with your customers, and our customers need fun, lighthearted, little bits of inspiration every day.
We're slowly building this community of growth-oriented young women who really get how important it is to take a second out of the day to read a little bit of inspiration, laugh, smile, or just take a tidbit of advice and move on with your day.
When it comes to content, it's about just speaking directly to the customer and in me creating this content. And more recently we've completely boiled it down to just me doing it all because the thing is, people, connect with a person and that's how they connect with the brand.
You have to create memorable moments and things happening in your company and your brand that they want to hear about and they want to report about.
Always look for opportunities to do things a little bit different or edgy to grab their attention so that they would want to have a relationship with us and report about what we were doing.
One of the core things we built Shefactor on was this statistic that young women only stay at their jobs right now for an average of 18 months. Now, how do you build women into the C-suite and women onto the board of directors if they won't stay at the company, when they're 25 years old for longer than 18 months, it just doesn't work?
You can't just walk in with the same old, same old, you need to know your audience, you need to know your data and you need to give them something that's really intriguing and interesting.
I feel like we ask for this because we need affirmation that what we're doing is good and what we're doing was great. And you know, we're in the right spot, but you have to be your own cheerleader. Like you have to tell yourself that those things were great. So it starts with how you talk to yourself and then the more you've got, you're like, yeah, I can own that.
You have to be selfish to resonate with what that vision is for you.
You have to be in alignment with who you bring into your business, your employees, your partners, your speakers, whatever that is. And if you're not in alignment, it's a huge red flag.
What kind of challenges did you encounter, how did you navigate through them and what steps did you take to overcome them?
Tori: I think our biggest challenge initially, especially within 2020 was this pivot that we had to make our whole plan for 2020 was to do live in-person events. And then on top of that, you know, figuring out how to monetize this space is definitely a huge challenge.
Tori: We also had some family stuff going on, where my mom had to get brain surgery in August. And I had to completely transition over into running the company and taking care of her and doing those things.
Tori: All of 2020 was pivot, pivot, pivot, and see what works, see what there's something in the wall, see what sticks.
Heidi: We have such a small, nimble team. We had a great coach to step in. She was one of our speakers, Stephanie Pong. She does manifestation and hypnosis and teaching positive thinking.
Tori: I think the biggest thing that I learned as well from that experience is taking every challenge as an opportunity. Like you can turn every challenge that you face into an opportunity to grow and to change and to be more passionate and fill your life with more purpose.
If you each had to pick one thing that you still struggle with, what is it and how do you work on pulling yourself forward or through that struggle?
Heidi: My word for this year is grace and giving myself grace, giving the people around me, grace, and it's a struggle like you have to be kind to yourself and I can say that but who's your harshest critic. Usually, that's what we do as women. And that's kind of how society rolls, but at the end of the day, especially with everything going on with COVID and mom's trying to juggle so much, it's almost an impossible task.
Heidi: We have to give each other grace, we have to just find ways to connect in small ways and support each other as much as we can and recognize this is not normal. It's not a normal time. Anything that is, I think, really important.
Tori: I still struggle so much with perfectionism and I think that's something that a lot of women struggle with as well as this theory that we have to be perfect.
Tori: Taking care of people, that's my strength, but it can also be my weakness, I can focus way too much on helping other people and not enough on myself and what I need.
Tori: So it's about finding that balance. It has to make one little impact and let go of the need to be perfect and be everything for everyone. Especially as an entrepreneur and leading a team and leading a community like you want to be perfect.
When you've had those moments of imposter syndrome, what have you done to pull yourself out of that?
Heidi: It’s really hard for women to brag about ourselves and to own our successes. And at the end, I found myself being self-deprecating and kind of making some funny remarks and I'm like, knock it off Heidi. Like, don't do that. Just stop before it comes out of your mouth. And I think that we do that often, it's a practice we've got to practice not doing that or catch ourselves when we do it. And with grace say doing better next time. And then really standing up for ourselves and speaking out and owning our successes is really important as well.
Tori: I have a lot of thoughts on imposter syndrome and mostly because I think it's the number one thing that our community has voiced that they struggle with and it's happening so much across young women right now.
Tori: I think a big part of that is social media. I think you constantly are comparing yourself to other people and what they're doing and how big they are and how many followers they have, how many people like this.
Tori: Something that I've been trying to implement is a routine of the mirror, really talking to myself in the mirror every morning saying, I am creative, I am worthy. I am successful. Saying those things to yourself is important.
Keys to your success:
Tori: Following your gut and following your vision and being so strong in that and not letting that go and not letting anyone get you. So I think that's one of the keys to success for me is just being so aware and willing to do the work that it takes to make that intuition louder and more clear and more visible and staying so strong to your vision and what you think is right for you.
Heidi: Surrounding myself with great people. I just learned that early on that I couldn't do it all. And instead of being arrogant or thinking that I had the answer to everything or having to pretend that I did, I realized that the keys to the kingdom were in getting people around me that were smarter than me, or as smart as me that could figure out problems that I couldn't, and then they multiply your effect.
What is something most people don't know about you?
Tori: I think that innately I'm a very self-conscious person and I always have been, and that leads back to that perfectionism, but I also love performing. I love theater. My dream was to be the host of eNews and here I am with a podcast and leading all these events and I'm doing it.
Heidi: The first thing that came to mind is that I'm a huge college football fan. One of my hobbies is traveling around and going to different stadiums and experiencing the different games. I'm not just a huge dog lover... I actually have two kitty cats right now and very passionate about cats too.
What is the best piece of advice you've ever received?
Tori: The biggest, best piece of advice that I've ever received is to be more selfish. You have to be selfish with your time and your energy and not give that to people that don't deserve it.
Heidi: "Be impeccable with your word." It's really important to be thoughtful and careful about what you say, but also be authentic and speak your truth.
Find out more:
Guests: Heidi and Tori Ganahl
Company: SheFactor
You can find Heidi and Tori Ganahl on:
Website: www.theshefactor.com
Facebook Page: @TheSheFactor
Instagram:
LinkedIn: SheFactor
Youtube: SheFactor TV
Twitter: @shefactor
Pinterest: SheFactor
Listen and Subscribe on: Spotify | iTunes | Stitcher | Google Play
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