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Key Takeaways
- Senada Greca traded motivation for self-discipline, and self-discipline is what carried her from disaster to Kim Kardashian’s coach.
- Greca turned the hardest chapter of her life — depression, an eating disorder, raising her household at 14 — into the precise experience her business is constructed on.
Many of the best entrepreneurs flip their greatest weaknesses into their biggest strengths. Celebrity coach and wellness entrepreneur Senada Greca is a excellent instance. After struggling with depression, anxiety and eating problems early in life, Greca went on to become one of the world’s main voices in wellness, coaching megastars like Kim Kardashian, building a following of more than 10 million across platforms, and founding a number of wellness firms, including Aonic and WeRise.
All it took was a mindset shift.
Turning struggles into power
Greca grew up under a communist regime in Albania, where her household confronted hardships including food shortage. She moved to the U.S. at 14, where she skilled a large tradition shock.
“I was stepping into womanhood during that time, so I went from scarcity in a communist country to now plentitude of different things, and responsibilities changed,” she shares. “Now I was the only one in the family that spoke English and had to kind of carry the family at 14. And that started eating disorders, depression, anxiety.”
Rather than succumb to those damaging ideas, Greca discovered an outlet in fitness and finally realized the energy of healthy eating and power coaching.
She shifted her mindset from making an attempt to be as skinny as doable to turning into as robust as doable, and changed motivation with self-discipline.
“Motivation is a feeling,” Greca explains. “It’s transient. We feel like working out today. We might not feel like working out tomorrow. But when you build that discipline day in and day out, that’s what carries you through when motivation is lacking.”
Eventually, she utilized that same philosophy to her profession.
“I very much liken building a strong body to building a strong business, but on a much bigger scale,” she says. “It’s pushing through those tough days, making those tough decisions, showing up when you absolutely don’t want to.”
Greca’s fitness journey began as a pursuit of personal enchancment. But once she realized how much higher her new way of life made her really feel, she felt compelled to share it with others, posting exercises and fitness suggestions on social media. At the time, fitness was still a pastime, not a profession. Greca holds an MBA and had beforehand labored in finance and gross sales, filming exercises for Instagram in her spare time. As her following grew, she saw an alternative.
“I’ve always wondered, would my training methods work for somebody else?” Greca shares. With her newfound success on social media, the reply appeared to be yes. She determined to take it a step further and based her first company, WeRise.
“WeRise was taking that philosophy that I built for myself,” Greca shares. “Helping women step into the strongest version of themselves, and not just physically, but mindset as well. Overcoming traumas, overcoming imposter syndrome, overcoming career development problems that they had.”
It began as a commonplace fitness app, but has since developed into what Greca describes as “your partner in transformation,” combining power coaching, personal teaching from Greca, nutrition suggestions, and a built-in group designed to keep customers accountable. In many methods, it’s like having a digital gymnasium in your pocket.
The idea took off, and alongside Greca’s quickly growing social media presence, it caught the consideration of one of the world’s greatest celebrities: Kim Kardashian.
The Kardashian connection
Kardashian found Greca through social media and was impressed by the years of work showcased in her online portfolio. The two linked, and Kardashian finally employed Greca as her personal coach, one of the most high-profile behind-the-scenes jobs in Hollywood.
“She appreciated my discipline, my story, and what I’d accomplished, so that’s how she found me,” Greca remembers. “I like to say that you can’t control who discovers you or your work, but you can control what they find when they do. So when that opportunity came, I was ready for it. I didn’t chase it, but it happened, and I’m glad it did because it introduced me to so many opportunities that I’m incredibly grateful for.”
Greca provides that she’s coaching Kardashian with the same strategies she makes use of on the We Rise app, which Kardashian lately shared on social media during Greca’s September exercise problem.
Working with Kardashian gave Greca an even larger platform and added credibility with an viewers keen to study about the movie star’s exercise and nutrition habits. That expertise partially impressed Greca’s next enterprise, Aonic.
Wanting to show people the actuality behind her own routine, Greca based Aonic as a science-driven complement company centered on educating shoppers about wellness.
Greca has never straight requested Kardashian to promote her companies, but natural alternatives have arisen nonetheless. “Kim has shown this before on social media, she loves Aonic,” Greca says. “She loves creatine, Aonic build, and the Aonic fuel, especially the cans.”
Ending the markup
Kardashian’s enthusiasm displays a broader cultural pattern.
“I kept seeing people who wanted to take care of themselves in a much better way through supplementation, but without the confusion and stress,” Greca shares. “There’s so much confusion when it comes to health and wellness, especially with healthcare optimization. I think sometimes that confusion is created so people can sell you something. With Aonic, we wanted to simplify that.”
That philosophy is summed up in Aonic’s motto: “end the markup.” Greca believes the wellness industry has become saturated with premium merchandise and costs, usually including prices that have little to do with the high quality of what’s inside. Aonic goals to take a completely different strategy.
“We’ve changed the economics of the category itself because it’s gotten so packed with premium brands,” Greca explains. “They’re adding different ingredients so they can justify the premium prices. We didn’t want to become another brand like that. We wanted to end that premium pricing, which incorporates all of the marketing, advertising, logistics, and warehousing.”
Instead, people can be a part of the Aonic Club, pay an annual membership, and get merchandise at value. “This way the quality stays, and the markups get ditched,” Greca proclaims.
AI powers half of Aonic’s effort to scale back costs, which Greca believes should decrease prices for shoppers, not just increase income for firms.
“I don’t know that I love AI, to be honest with you, or where some things could potentially be heading,” she says. “But if we utilize it smartly, I think we can use it with Aonic to cut costs across sourcing, operations, manufacturing, finance, and branding, and bring those savings to the consumer. AI is being used in Silicon Valley to make companies loads of money, but nobody is really thinking about how it can reduce costs for consumers. I think we’re leading that effort, especially when it comes to supplement brands.”
Building beyond herself
Unlike many influencers who construct manufacturers around their personal identities, Greca doesn’t need herself to be the most important focus of her firms.
“I want the brands, whether it’s WeRise or Aonic, to grow beyond my relevance,” Greca shares. “I want them to encompass everything wellness while staying true to the standards of quality we’ve established in these early stages. I want to keep those standards as we grow, keep the products affordable and accessible, and continue using innovation, AI, and technology not to enrich our own pockets, but to pass those savings on to the consumer and help people take better care of themselves.”
Greca grew to become emotional as she mirrored on the larger mission behind her firms.
“It’s not, ‘How can I make as much money as possible?’ It’s, ‘How can I help as many people as possible in the best way possible, in the most accessible way possible?’” she says. “Because, again, like I’ve said before, if you try to capitalize on the trust of people with every single thing that gets thrown at you, you’re eventually going to deplete that trust fund, as I call it.”