Meet the Founding father of Silatha

Silatha is an answer to retain ladies within the office by way of meditation & peer2peer help.

Ladies play an important position in a profitable office, however because the pandemic, companies have repeatedly struggled to retain their feminine workers. Ladies leaving the office can have vital monetary prices for a enterprise, and due to this fact corporations have put aside budgets to beat the gender bias.

Silatha is tapping into this want, aiming to supply ladies with the instruments to successfully take care of their private {and professional} challenges, in order that they’re ready carry out higher and keep within the office.

We sat down with the founder Veroniek Vermeulen to search out out extra.

We’d like to learn about your profession earlier than Silatha, the way you got here up with the thought, and what motivated you to begin Silatha?

As a fast overview… I studied engineering (Technical College Delft (NL) and Brunel College London (UK)), after which spent 17+ years in international advertising and marketing (with a $2B duty). Since then I’ve spent 10 years immersed in meditation & teaching (ICF Licensed – lived in monasteries everywhere in the world).

My private journey began in 2012 once I took trip from my profession for a meditation retreat in Nepal. I had the whole lot in life, and but by no means felt fulfilled; I continuously desired extra. I loved the success, however I felt life was main me. I wished to regain management and consciously lead my life.

Within the Himalayas, I had a life-changing realisation. I felt what it meant to be within the current second. Against this, our fashionable existence are busy and preoccupied; we spend half of our time occupied with the previous or future relatively than being within the second.

In our fashionable Western lives, there’s all the time extra to need, which is, by nature, deeply unfulfilling. Meditation affords another, to attach inwards. It permits us to nurture our internal qualities and strengths for long-term pleasure and true fulfilment.

I continued my studying with retreats in monasteries in Vietnam, Japan and Myanmar, and realised how necessary it’s to have an anchor to construct a meditation routine. 

Realizing the company world effectively and seeing many ladies combating their mental-wellbeing because of the excessive strain, it turned obvious how the office will not be designed for girls’s particular psychological well-being wants. This sparked the thought to remodel the traditional knowledge of meditation for contemporary existence and together with peer-to-peer help, webinars and consultants to essentially carry a holistic method that works.

My private life story has been my information to constructing Silatha, and the various tales I heard from different ladies will preserve driving me to alter the world.

I’m a fighter for girls’s equality. Builder of the primary meditation group for girls and on a mission to alter the office to empower ladies with confidence and break by way of age-old taboos. Giving ladies a platform to be themselves and create their desired life.

What does your aggressive panorama appear like and the way does Silatha differentiate itself? 

Apparently sufficient, no different firm is providing what we do. There are meditation apps and generic well-being programmes for corporations, nonetheless, they lack particular help for girls’s wants (like being pregnant, menopause, combining motherhood and profession, and many others.) and peer-to-peer help. Specific apps that look into ladies’s points, solely deal with one in every of these points, and group apps usually don’t have any particular focus and lack the psychological well-being half. So we’re distinctive available in the market, creating change within the office. Tapping into a necessity corporations have and are investing cash in.

May you inform us about a few of your greatest achievements so far?

Amongst others, listed here are a few of our key achievements:

– Silatha obtained the Status Meditation App of the Yr Award

– Talked about by Sifted (from the Monetary Occasions) as start-up to look at within the psychological well being business

– Talked about in 20+ world-renowned magazines like ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, Ladies’s Well being (one in every of 20 greatest Psychological Well being Apps), Grazia, Marie Claire, and plenty of extra

– 4.eight out of 5-star ranking in Apple App retailer worldwide

– We are able to rely KPMG, Nike, GE, and Mondelez as our first shoppers

– Grown to over 70Okay downloads in only a few months

How do you propose to create a scalable and worthwhile enterprise mannequin?

We provide corporations a subscription mannequin the place corporations pay a charge for every lady taking part within the Silatha program. We at the moment cost €500 per lady per 12 months and can enhance this over time to €1200 per lady per 12 months. We workforce up ladies per pillar (a pillar will be Feminine Management, Combining mothership with profession, menopause, and many others) and provides the ladies steerage over the 12 months. There are about 20 to 25 ladies per pillar and we will run as many pillars concurrently they need.

Corporates can even select to buy the app solely (so no consultants, workshops and many others) for a lowered value.

What do you propose to do with the cash you elevate? 

1. We’re additional enhancing our know-how: 

• Enhance the onboarding, group options and personal rooms for the businesses
• We’re additionally including a ladies’s month-to-month cycle meditation collection plus cycle journal
• We’re going to add an AI-generated avatar greatest pal to the app, that helps her in reaching her well-being objectives 
• We are going to make use of a group supervisor to supply the most effective service to our company shoppers.

2. We are going to additional develop the Silatha app with the cash to greatest serve our customers. Integrating new components to help her, including meditation collection and workshops, and including AI to make sure appropriate suggestions and companies.

What do you like to do in your free time? 

I like sports activities and achieve this 5-6 occasions every week to stability the lengthy working days. It varies from lengthy 180km bike rides on weekends to operating, boxing or swimming in the course of the week. I like an excellent e-book (particularly about human behaviour), and today I usually take heed to audiobooks whereas operating. I’ve travelled so much (70 nations and have lived in 6 nations), however today I journey much less and benefit from the quietness of being house. 

What is a few recommendation you want you knew earlier than beginning Silatha?

The whole lot is about people, understanding you’re not your emotion and your ideas, you’re the ocean, not the waves. Additionally, from the start, get sturdy advisors in your workforce that may assist construct the enterprise.

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Silatha is a superb alternative to spend money on supporting corporations in retaining their ladies expertise and create a office the place everybody thrives. Take a look at Silatha’s marketing campaign right here.