Interviewee Name: Runa Magnusdottir, CEO & Founder
Company Name: Connected Women
Website: http://www.Connected-Women.com
Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Runa Magnusdottir: I am an Icelandic woman, I'm an entrepreneur. I've owned companies, bought companies, started up companies, and sold companies throughout my adult life. Today I work doing things that I'm really passionate about and that is to coach business people mainly to help them discover their own passions in life and also help them on the personal branding and marketing side.
Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?
Runa Magnusdottir: A typical day for me is when I get up is to shift my mindset to the day, what it is I want to achieve, what it is I want to give myself today so I reflect on my intentions. A typical day is to contact the people who I am working with at the time. I work with a lot of businesswomen from all over the world, so I am contacting women from various businesses all over the world. At the end of the day I go over in my mind and see what I got out of this day. I have an opportunity to think if I managed to do what I intended to do and quite often the day ends with a smile.
Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?
Runa Magnusdottir: What I have done for the past two years is I've used a method called the passion test. A stay motivated by keeping myself on track with the things that give me the energy and inner strength that I'm looking for ever single day. I go through the passion test in front of me and see what I’m supposed to see. I motivate myself by mentally being where I am supposed to be, and I'm in the moment and finding the things which are motivating right now, not something that one day will happen.
Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Runa Magnusdottir: I’m quite pleases with where I am now. But what I would do differently is be more aware of importance of networks, knowing the importance of where I want to go, having a goal and having a vision. If I had known that at the earlier stage in my life I guess that would've made a difference. Having a vision, having something that I am aiming to get, the network around me, is all about knowing people, communicating with other people, supporting them and them supporting you, if I would have been aware of that I'm sure that things would've been different. Saying that, it is what it is and probably I was just supposed to learn it down the road.
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?
Runa Magnusdottir: It's becoming clearer and clearer to me how important it is to have strong self-esteem, and that has to with your business. Because I work a lot with women business owners, and I'm sure it's the same with the guys as well, I notice the tendency is not to believe in themselves. I think when we really believe that we can do it that's the thing that makes our business work. We have to believe that we can do it. I always knew it that was a thing for us to build, but it's a constant thing to work on your own self-esteem, work on your own self image, but it's something that I've seen that is at the core of everything.
Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?
Runa Magnusdottir: This is quite interesting that you’ve asked me this because I don't look at things as threats. I look at things as challenges, so when I hear the word threat I become blank. I don't see threats I see challenges.
So the biggest challenge is to keep focused. You have to be focused on the number one thing to do. It is to have that vision and keep focused on the vision, and to believe that you can go there. And that's the challenge that you have to constantly be aware of and how I'm handling it is by using my day-to-day methods.
Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?
Runa Magnusdottir: The uniqueness of what I'm doing is to offer a program that is combined with several things that you can normally get at maybe five or six different places. We combine it all into one thing. And what I'm talking about is we go through a program that offers you personal assistance, and time and place to reinvigorate the passion for your work, your vision, your brand and what it is that you stand for, and taking that discovery in the workshop and put it into both text as well as a pitch that you pitch in front of a video camera creating a video that's then published in an online magazine that we distribute in a sustainable way through a network of connected women. I think that is very unique, having all that done in one package.
Avil Beckford: What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?
Runa Magnusdottir: I think in general that businesspeople are not aware how much they can use social media. And I think that businesspeople and business owners are at the surface of the opportunities that are out there. And because of the size of the market, the size of the Internet it's just an abundance of everything. But for instance, if we take Facebook because everyone knows about Facebook, as social media there are 600 million people who are there and one in every 12 person on Earth is on Facebook we have to remember that 11/12 is not on Facebook, and they will get on the Internet so it’s an abundance of opportunities and I think that's something that companies should be looking at and how they can use it to build their businesses.
Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?
Runa Magnusdottir: I cannot think of anything that would be a huge deal here. But challenges overall relate to what I said earlier, and the way I resolve challenges is to work constantly on myself. I believe that everything that I’m doing in my business, I can have a lot to say about it, but when I lose control that’s when things are challenging. When we are aware we can have something to say in everything that we’re doing, and it’s up to us how we react to situations.
Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.
Runa Magnusdottir: I’ve had so many! I’ve been so fortunate to have so many big breaks. There has always been a woman who stood behind me, who helped me. If I go back in time, when I was about 20 years old, the private secretary for the Minister of Culture and Education in Iceland who was a woman, gave me a huge break. She appointed me to help out with computerizing the ministry. That was a huge break. Another huge break was when my mother asked me to join her company which I later bought. And that was definitely a huge break in my life. And I can name so many that have come to me and it has always been women who gave it to me.
Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?
Runa Magnusdottir: I wouldn’t say biggest failures, but I have made a lot of mistakes obviously. If I talk in a business sense I would say that it was when I set up a company with a group of five people and worked my behind off building it up and wanting to see it grow, and at the end I basically got nothing out of it financially, but I got a lot of experience out of it. Therefore I do not consider it to be a failure, I consider it to be a huge lesson, and the lesson that I learned was the network. When you're in a project working with other people, working on a business hat you're building up, you need to find the people around you who are supportive, who are the things you are lacking. So if you're clear on who you want and what it is you can bring to the table, and you know what it is that needs to be accomplished you need to have people around you who will fulfill whatever it is you need because people have different skills. That was my lesson there.
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?
Runa Magnusdottir: I think one of my toughest decisions would probably be going through a divorce.
Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?
Runa Magnusdottir:
- The minister who offered me a very special job at the age of 20 definitely shaped my life in the sense that she gave me insights into things in the political world that I was not aware of obviously because I was young. I understood how the system worked in the political world.
- I was 27 or 28 years old when I started my first company so having my parents there beside me helping me out and supporting me, believing in me definitely shaped my life as well.
- The third one was when I went through a huge training to become a coach shaped my life tremendously.
These three things have made me who I am today.
Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?
Runa Magnusdottir: My children. What mother doesn't say that? Even though I'm only talking about business, when it comes to accomplishments it's definitely my children. They are independent and following their desires and doing the things that they love to do. I'm very proud of that and being able to say that they are independent is a huge thing.
Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?
Runa Magnusdottir: The idea behind mentors in Iceland is a fairly new thing so I had to think outside the box when it came to mentors. I would say overall in my life my biggest mentors were my parents. In my adulthood, and how they did it was feeding me with information, and talking openly about life and that the thing I think mentors in my mind has influenced me is to be open and to listen to other people's view, that has been my biggest learning point from mentors.
Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?
Runa Magnusdottir: So the core message from my mentors was to be open and listen.
Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?
Runa Magnusdottir: If I can give your readers one piece of advice, that would be to take the word impossible and look at it closely to see how you can change it to “I am possible.”
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