In today’s episode, I get to talk with Pamela Slim, an expert for experts, who helps business owners leverage their IP to scale. Of course, you know that a book lives in that scale strategy, so we’ll be talking about how your book can be a tool to package ideas, build awareness, and generate demand.
We talk about the specific point of view that you, as an expert, have and the process you go through in your business—questions you ask, models you share. We discuss about how to get really clear about your methods and how to codify them and scale your ideas.
Pamela Slim is an award-winning author, speaker, and agency owner who has spent three decades helping business owners scale their businesses and IP. The Pamela Slim Agency (PSA) specializes in productizing service businesses and the design and development of certification and licensing programs. Pam is the author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, Body of Work, and The Widest Net, which won the Best Sales and Marketing Book of 2021 from Porchlight Books.
If you’re a service-based entrepreneur or business owner, or maybe you’re a 9-to-5, and you really desire to someday run your own business (a beyond better life you imagine for yourself), this conversation is for you!
Get to know Pamela:
Book recommendation:
- If You Want to Write: A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit, by Brenda Ueland
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ow to leverage your IP to scale, with Pamela Slim | Episode 259 Transcript
These transcripts were generated by robots, not writers.
Stacy: Welcome, welcome wherever this week finds you. I am pretty sure that it’s going to get better after this conversation because today we are going to talk with an expert for experts. So this is somebody who helps business owners leverage their IP to scale. And of course you know that a book lives in that scale strategy, so we’ll be talking about that too. As somebody who has been in business for 17 years now, which feels crazy to me, I still feel like a kid, I’m not even an adult yet in my mind with many different iterations.
Stacy: Hourly freelancer, project based freelancer, value based solopreneur, and now an entrepreneur with a small team, I am endlessly curious about how to get my work to more people and that’s why I write books, I host this podcast and I create content on my blog and social media platforms is really to scale and get this information out to more people. So I know that we’re going to learn a lot from this week’s guest. If you’re a service based entrepreneur or service based business owner, or maybe you’re in corporate or you’re in a 9 to 5 and you really desire to someday run your own business, that’s part of your Beyond Better life that you imagine for yourself. This conversation is for you. So so let me introduce you to this week’s guest.
Stacy: Pamela Slim is an award winning author, speaker and agency owner who has spent three decades helping business owners scale their businesses and ip. The Pamela Slim Agency PSA specializes in productizing service businesses and the design and development of certification and licensing programs. Pam is the author of Escape from Cubicle, Body of Work and the Widest Net. Welcome Pam. I’m so excited to have you here.
Pamela: I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Stacy: I feel like this has been a long time coming because we met a couple of years ago through one of our mutual clients, Amy Lafko. Shout out to Amy for connecting us and I have really just loved getting to know you and your work and seeing the way that you help business owners. One of the things I said to you before we started recording is that the work that you do really helps People realize their dreams through scaling their work. So I’d love to hear a little bit about how you got into this work and how your own body of work, which is the title of one of your books, has evolved over the past three decades.
Pamela: Yeah, so my early roots, my degree in school was community development, international development. So that’s where I spent a lot of time abroad in Mexico and Colombia and Brazil. And I’ve always been really excited by grassroots economic change, as one’s career goes. I decided not to be an expatriate aid worker. I just didn’t really think that was a good fit. And then I found my way into training and development, which was a big stage of work that I actually really loved. And systems thinking is kind of systems thinking. And so I loved transformation and change and really looking at how it is that you could be building education programs or leading training and development. My last real job at Barclays Global Investors in 1996 was a director of training and development.
Pamela: But I spent about 10 years working with big companies, often as an outsourced provider to build their training programs. So I loved that work. It was really interesting. And then in 2005, I started my blog, Escape from Cubicle Nation, after I moved to Arizona for love, an initiative, and wanted to be a mom where I got pregnant with my son. And that started a whole journey where I wanted to be off the road and doing some different work. And it was really, I found so many people in corporate would pull me aside sometimes the person who hired me to come in to help retain their employees, and they would say, how did you do it? How did you quit your corporate job to start a business?
Pamela: So that just became 20 years of starting in real early stage startup work where I did lots and lots of work with people early in the stage of leaving corporate to start a business. As you said, that was my first book with Penguin Random House. And then as time went on, I became more interested in just getting a little bit down the maturity line of businesses. So for folks who had been a business for a longer time and really looking at what is that quality that is so important in a successful service business? My jam has always been service. You know, the business of ideas and methods and models. So my second book, Body of Work, was really about like, what is that work that you’re building?
Pamela: And then as the world turns and sometimes comes back, I realize once people know exactly what they’re building, they want to know how to bring it out in scale. And so that’s where A lot of my early community building systems thinking came from a way to think about really sharing your work in an integrated partnership way. I look at us as one example, right? We’re in different parts of the world, but we often work with the same clients just in highly complementary and non competitive ways. And so with that, you know, I just realized as people were really wanting to bring work out and scale all the work that I had done before about building programs that you can be selling to big companies and knowing about the structure of things like certifications began to come together.
Pamela: And so it is, I feel like I have the greatest job in the world. Probably like you feel like going from a twinkle in the eye if somebody has an idea for a book or where somebody has an aspiration to be sharing their idea and being able to actually walk through a process of codifying it. I think my favorite part is really like bringing great ideas into the world. You know, things that heal, things that make positive change, things that reduce harm. And so yeah, that’s kind of where the journey has taken me. And it just continues to evolve and grow. Now that my kids are out of the house and in college, I just want to do more things in different parts of the world that goes through the quality of life.
Stacy: That’s such a cool background and it makes me think a little bit about my own background. I was a teacher early in my career and I didn’t teach for too long, but the amount of time that I taught gave me such, I think it gave me such a unique skill set coming into entrepreneurship because I learned how to develop curriculum, I learned how to keep like 15 year olds engaged, which if you can do that, you’re like good in pretty much any circumstance. And so I know you know what you do and with your background that’s such a skill that if you don’t have the opportunity to develop that professionally or you know, through your education, having somebody like you is so important.
Stacy: I think the other thing that you have a really unique lens on that is really, really hard for solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, service based business owners to see is how their person to person work. Like I’m working one to one with a client or even one to many, like I’m running a program with humans in it that I’m talking to regularly. How do I then turn that into something I can bring to companies? And I’d be curious to know when you’re approaching working with somebody, you know that is like established, they’ve been in business for a long Time somebody like me would be a good example. I’ve been in business for 17 years. Pretty much all of my work is direct to authors. How. How do you work with people like me or in an aligned space?
Stacy: Maybe there’s a story you could share with us to help them develop something, this whole new way of thinking actually, because it is quite hard to step out of your. This is my expertise, this is how I work, this is my service. And start thinking that B2B business to business.
Pamela: Yeah. So it is a choice I always like to open in the space that sometimes in the world of entrepreneurship, there is this idea that you’re only a true entrepreneur if you have this highly scaled business or if you’re totally outside of the work. And so to me, in the bigger Picture still, after 30 years, I still love and adore to do very hands on work with clients. And there’s nothing wrong with that. So I just always like to start the frame that way because there can be a lot of thoughts about that. You have to go this direction if you choose to look at your business and you get excited over time to think about it as what we call a productized service. So that it really is codifying your methods.
Pamela: The way that you work with clients, there’s probably a specific point of view that you have, there’s a process you might go through. In your case, is that true? Like if somebody comes, you know, to you with a book idea, there’s probably, you know, a number of phases that you go through. There’s questions you ask, there’s models that you share. And so usually when you’ve been in business for a while that you have that there’s a deliberate step that you can take then to be taking the time to really document and codify. And so that the process of codification works in tandem. Like when you think of some of the like overarching things that can make an ideal an idea, scale is where you might see that there’s something that you have that would be really helpful to sell one to many.
Pamela: Because in service businesses we can have a whole bunch of different things that we do. And not every method that we use, not every model, not everything we do necessarily has the opportunity to scale. You really have to see, you might say, oh, I could see that every university could use this with their, you know, with their students, or every company in their leadership program could use this approach. Like the, you want to be pulling out and really starting with an idea to codify that you see has some potential to scale and that’s usually, you know, involving in conversations, maybe sort of. Sometimes you might work with somebody who asks you. They’re like, oh, this is so great. I love the work that we’re doing together. Could you bring it to my company? So sometimes it kind of shows up at your doorstep.
Pamela: Other times you look and find ways in which you can make a choice. But you want to be choosing something that you see has some potential to scale. And then there is a method for going through and codifying where you are really getting clear about what the method is. You’re trying to have as few steps as possible in as clear a possible way, coming up with a sticky model, usually some kind of a visual, some kind of a name that really makes sense. And then usually then you’re still delivering that in your service business, but you’re much more clear. I call it in book terms. It’s like before, you might be the main character where people get excited to work with you, the person. And you start to really make your method the main character. So you start to talk more about your approach.
Pamela: Because by definition, when you have an idea that scales, you want people other than you to be taking it and running with it. So it’s either people that really learn the method they can do on your, on their own, or it would be maybe people who you certify in that method to be using it in different organizations and institutions. So it’s a. It’s a whole process that you start to go through and reflect on. Do you have something that you see one to many would be something that people would need. You go through process of codification. And then there is a lot of marketing and awareness building. That’s a really critical part of this. The process where you do get yourself in front of many people in order to get them excited about that method or model.
Pamela: Usually it’s like solving something really important that everybody is interested in and you have a unique way of doing it. And so there’s like socializing that idea, marketing that idea to create the demand. And then when you get ready for things like licensing or certification, which we can talk about and define, you know, in a minute, then that’s where you would step into more of the formal things of getting a licensing agreement and packaging things and all of that.
Stacy: I’d love to maybe get an example from you just to kind of put this in like more specificity for our listener. I’m just thinking about, you know, maybe a brand strategist that’s listening to this or a life coach or a Leadership consultant or a DEI consultant, somebody who’s listening to this and they’re like, right now I am. You know, or maybe they’d be maybe more in the coaching space. Cause if you’re a consultant, you’re probably already doing B2B. Like, I’m a leadership coach or. And how do I. How do I now kind of think about this a little bit differently? Do you have a. Maybe a client story you could share with us as somebody that made that transition? And how did they start to look at their own work differently?
Stacy: Because I would imagine when I’ve thought about this for myself, my core work is in the world of books. But then if I drill down into that storytelling, creative problem solving, I would say innovations in there. There’s all of these buckets that kind of fill the nonfiction framework that I do. But sometimes when you’ve been doing this one thing for so long, it’s sometimes hard to even figuring figure out what those little, like not little big buckets are to lean into. So do you have like a story or example you could share with us?
Pamela: Sure. No, I have a. I have a number of them. And just for in case people aren’t familiar, when we talk about B2B, generally it means like, we’re selling to businesses. So. And usually selling to larger businesses. So it would be, you know, me selling or licensing my material to a Google or, you know, an institution, a Harvard or whatever the thing would be. So that when we talk about selling B2B, that’s generally what it means and we Talk about selling B2C is direct business to consumer, where, let’s say as a life coach, that you would have individuals who are taking out their own credit card, you know, to hire you and pay you. And then there can be sometimes, you know, the B to small B, like where you’re selling, maybe the smaller organizations or, you know, associations or things like that.
Pamela: So licensing, certification, scaling can work in all of those environments. So it’s not only when you’re. You’re selling or you’re scaling to large institutions. If we look at a couple examples, there’s one of my clients, Vince Molinaro, who does a lot of work around leadership accountability, leadership contract. And he has, he is somebody who has, you know, deep expertise and books around leadership and specifically how to drive accountability through organizations. And so usually you see in that business where he has a book that is on a specific topic, he has training around that. So he can come in and do, you know, just workshops or training interventions or, you know, executive coaching with senior leaders. And then where people think about, like, licensing or certification is like installing that methodology into their business. That’s where you begin to have certification or licensing.
Pamela: Where an institution might say, we really love this. We love the way that you talk about, you know, driving accountability in an organization. And we want to install this system inside the work that we’re doing. So that is one example where, you know, he already had businesses, you know, who were the. The customer. But you can kind of see where the life cycle is there. You can have other more direct services. One of the. My longtime clients in Hilica, when Perez is a therapist, but she’s developed. She has a new book coming out which is very exciting, which is all about this career identity fusion. There’s this specific kind of characteristic and model that she has seen in her work with clients where they might appear to be burned out. They. They have high anxiety, their mind is always racing. They.
Pamela: But it’s specifically because of this phenomenon which she has really codified and named through her, you know, couple decades of doing this work, which is where their identity is so fused with their career and with work that’s really what the main issue is sort of unraveling that and helping them to see that’s not the only center of what they’re doing. So in her case, as a expert professional that she is, as a psychologist, she, over a number of years has noticed an issue. She’s named it, she’s done research around it, she’s codified it in a book, and then that will be something. She owns a really interesting therapy, brick and mortar therapy business where they also do career coaching in South Carolina. And so she’ll likely be doing certifications where other therapists could use that.
Pamela: Other coaches could be certified in her method because it’s a specific way in which they could understand a dynamic when they have a client who’s coming in and using it. So there are all kinds of ways in which you know, first are really noticing that I have an approach that really is solving a core problem that other people have not begun to solve and then seeing if there is a way in which other people would be using it. I think coaches and consultants are often huge fans of certifications. I know a lot of clients. Oh, yeah, business partner, Darren. My business partner, Darren Padilla. I always tease him because if there is a certification that’s interesting, he’s going to do it. He loves doing certifications and he has a million letters behind his name.
Pamela: It’s part of why we love Building certifications because it’s just something that he loves. Coaches consultants often love to be adding things to their toolbox. So especially for that could be an example in some ways of like a B to small B, where it’s not necessarily like an individual that just wants some help with their life gets, you know, life coaching advice, but it’s more that you have, you know, somebody who is really interested in using a tool in their professional practice, and maybe it’s more like a solo practice, can benefit from it. So that could be an assessment that you have. It could be a specific tool, it could be an approach, an addendum to help you do your work. There’s. There’s a lot of different ways that you could see that happening.
Stacy: Oh, great example is that’s so helpful to. To hear about these different types of businesses and ways that they have moved into that space. And again, it does seem like it’s a little bit of a different lens that you need to take toward your work. So it’s so helpful to have somebody like you that can come in and go, here’s what I see. Here’s how we can think about this, or here’s the process to get there. You’ve mentioned books many times, which makes my heart so happy, because we both know that writing a book can be, well, not only can it be an amazing journey to uncover, like, name and clarify your framework, but it’s also an incredible marketing tool. And used effectively, it can be an absolutely amazing business asset and strategic tool to accomplish your goals in your business.
Stacy: Now, you’ve written three books, and I’d love to know from you, we just heard about your two clients and how the book plays into their journey. But I’d love to know for you, how have your books intersected with or supported strategic changes in your own work, in your own business?
Pamela: Yeah, for me, it’s very deliberate. Everybody has a different approach that they take as an author. So you could have your Dan Pinks of the world who, like, love to dig into a specific idea and just do a really great job as a journalist exploring that and writing books on it. So he’s written books on time, on regret, on, you know, all kinds of different topics.
Stacy: I blurbed your book, by the way, and I was like, that’s really cool. That’s very cool.
Pamela: Dan has been a good friend for a long time. I feel very lucky to know him. He’s a wonderful friend, an incredible thought leader. But, you know, it’s. It’s fun to see where somebody really Is a journalist by training of digging into a topic that has to have personal interest, but also good market fit based on issues that people are interested in. I consider myself an author practitioner, and so it helps me immensely to be codifying and documenting in the form of a book what it is that I’m seeing and what it is that I’m working on with clients. So that’s exactly the way working backwards in my books have come about. I started my blog, Escape from Cubicle Nation. I actually had this one client who would meet with me here in person. He was here in Arizona, and he was so sweet.
Pamela: He was a software engineer, very organized. He would print out my blog posts. He had like, a binder with a different post. And he was like, could you so. Oh, my gosh, I was just so meaningful. And so he. And he finally was like, could you just please write a book so that I can have, like, the big picture and everything here? Because in, you know, the old days of blogging, that was. That was the way we shared ideas. And so Escape was really codifying that. And my purpose in that book was that people would read it and either they would say, oh, my gosh, like, I see myself doing that. Let me, you know, quit after a side hustle, or they would say, I did not realize that it was so complex and.
Pamela: And risky, and maybe I better, you know, stay with my job. Both of those would be good outcomes to me because I am not one of those people who says anything. Everybody just quit your job. You really want to make sure there’s water in the pool before you jump. So Escape came from that body of work. My second book that came out in 2014, was a response to people saying, in the. In the entrepreneur space, you can only be cool, creative, and free if you work for yourself. And I was like, that feels very limited. And there’s a lot of shame for people if entrepreneurship didn’t work out where they would have. They’d go back to their job and somehow feel ashamed. And I was like, the world of work these days, we can move among, in between work modes.
Pamela: The purpose is to create a body of work that’s really meaningful. And so that became really a response to what I was seeing, and hopefully a way that people could allow themselves to grow and evolve at different stages of work. Little did I know. I don’t know if you’re this way, but, like, little did I know that actually by writing it, I had no idea where it would lead. It’s often, like, I codify it as a response to what’s happening and the messages I’m telling my clients. But then I didn’t know that it would lead to this really specific focus around ip. It really is about, like a love letter to, you know, IP and what you’re building. Once people know what they want to build, then the next question is, how do I bring it out at scale?
Pamela: And that’s where the widest net came out of really codifying this method that I had used as a natural community builder of what’s a way to look at it, not in building an empire, but really by building an ecosystem where we center our clients, we collaborate, we work together like a group of avengers, all set on doing the very best job for our clients. Because I thought, you know, there’s so much like crushing your competitors and just transactional ways of marketing that’s what I wanted to respond to. And then the book I’m working on now, Remember who youo Are, is really like a companion to body of work, where when you’re doing that and things are rolling and then you’re just navigating life and work, how do you really stay grounded in a great quality of life, building a great body of work?
Pamela: How do you have a unique point of view that’s based on who you are? Because a lot. I find a lot of my clients are always looking around like it was just more like Stacey, if I could just, you know, get it together like her. If I could only be, you know, whatever Adam Grant around work, you know, research, whatever we want to be. And that actually really takes you out of your zone of strength. So that’s because of that kind of codifying as I go, I tend to evolve the work that I do. And then exactly like you said, a book can be. It’s just the most beautiful, efficient way that you can be packaging an idea. You have to have rigor around the idea, especially if you’re trying to sell it to traditional publishing.
Pamela: You have to make sure that it actually meets a need in the market and it passes muster in the way that you’re bringing that idea forward. And then it’s much easier with that codified idea through the book to be developing that path of services to accompany it. Usually the book can get people excited about the big idea, and then the services that follow help them to actually implement that change.
Stacy: It’s interesting to hear about your journey, and there’s an element that I’m hearing of like you’ve developed something, and then it’s really an opportunity to bring that all together as an offering into the world. One of the things I’ve also been thinking about just in this whole conversation is mindset. And it’s one thing to be given a process to really understand your IP or to develop your framework, your offering and your positioning and all of these things that we’ve been talking about. But that is all kind of useless if you don’t have the kind of confidence, mindset, belief in yourself to step into a next stage of your. Your work and your impact. And I know for me, every. Every phase of my entrepreneurial journey has opened me up to more.
Stacy: And I actually just had an experience earlier this week, a conversation I won’t share the details of because it was with a client, But I left that conversation, and I was like, huh, maybe I need to think about this in a different way. It opened me up. And when I was, you know, first starting out, my goal was to make $60,000 a year. I was like, if I could make $6,000 a year, I’m good. You know, like. And then every iteration has, not just from a monetary standpoint, but just from, like, kind of what you believe you can do on this planet and what you strive for.
Stacy: And I’m just curious, in your experience, when people come to you to take this transition from, I’m a service provider doing great work, and I know I’m getting results and I’m ready now, like, when they are actually ready to move into this creator and licenser or whatever, their certification, provider of a training methodology. And then maybe on the other side, who are the people that come to you and they’re like, want to go there, but there’s all these things holding them back. I’d love to hear a little bit about that from a mindset, beliefs, limiting beliefs standpoint.
Pamela: Yeah. So I. I look at it through the. I look at a couple different ways, so I know how important mindset is. Just, you know, what is the way that you’re framing the thinking about what you’re doing that is driving that kind of emotion that you have, you know, to. To react to it. And so there’s really powerful ways in which we need to be conscious about the way. To me, it’s like the way we’re narrating our own life. It has to be true, and we have to be doing it in such a way that we feel good about what it is that we’re doing. It never removes fear or doubt or anxiety from the process, because that is always there for anybody I have ever worked with. And in my own experience, Whether it be in work or in sport.
Pamela: I did martial arts for 18 years. You know, it was like, that’s cool.
Stacy: Side notes? Yeah, side note. I’m a martial artist. Amazing.
Pamela: Well, I know, but there are people listening. You know, where you know, they play tennis forever. Pickleball these days in the US at least is a big phenomenon. Or, you know, you were a runner or something. There, there is a dynamic when you are deciding to go from one stage of development to the next. That is, I think Steven Pressfield calls it that, you know, the going pro where there’s something about stepping up into that next level of development that naturally can raise, you know, fear, doubt, anxiety. And I don’t find it is where you’re trying to get rid of that or if that, if you feel a little bit shaky that there’s anything wrong with you. Part of having a mindset is just recognizing and narrating. I was just sending a voice note to a client this morning and were laughing.
Pamela: We did a, you know, all day session and just talking about, you know, the journey often of entrepreneurship. And one day you can feel on top of the world and the next day you’re like, what am I doing? You know, I have no idea what I’m doing. It’s all crashing around. And I was like, I totally hear you. It’s like it’s a cloud, you know, across the blue sky today, and it’s probably going to be different tomorrow, but there is nothing more normal than that. So that’s the starting place, is that it is normal to have those feelings that what I think allows thinking, strong, clear thinking that makes you feel courageous in order to undertake that journey is where you do have the rigor about what it is that you’re approaching.
Pamela: And there can be, frankly, I don’t know, yucky demeaning ways sometimes, like, let’s say the traditional publishing industry will vet ideas and, you know, you can hear very harsh feedback about your life’s work. I remember for the Widest Net, I was in, you know, in a editorial, you know, conversation in New York with a publisher who I knew, and they were like, yeah, it’s not really a big idea, you know, and it was just like, you know, inside the meeting, I was like trying to smile and make it okay and not have my, you know, tear going down my face.
Stacy: Yeah.
Pamela: But, you know, at that point, it, at the point in which I was presenting the idea and the level of development, I left that meeting at first, you know, I was Mainly just mad with myself. I’m like, man, I did not do that idea enough. And so then I went to, you know, a next level of development with a proposal, ended up selling it to another publisher and it won best sales and marketing book of 2021 right from porch. So and like there’s a little bit where I was like, see that?
Stacy: But you send the publisher a copy.
Pamela: Like actually the head of the company was in the award ceremony because that it’s a. All the publishing companies come. So they saw it, but that’s not the headline. That was me just being petty. It’s okay for us to be. But really what the main message was, they did the job that they should do. They showed me that like I showed up to the test ill prepared and that there is a part of needing to have rigor around the development of an idea in a very competitive environment. When you’re selling to big companies or you’re, you know, having people’s livelihood where they’re investing their money in services. The same is true just for direct services, right? Like I take it seriously. Anybody who invests you, you really want to make sure they get a return.
Pamela: But when you do allow yourself to, which is mindset too, it’s more like it’s growth mindset, where you allow yourself to be okay with receiving sometimes harsh feedback or like where, you know, you think that you have the best thing in the world, you need to be have a vetted idea in order to really bring it to market. And when you do that and you do the work to make sure it can stand on its own and you know why you’re doing it and why it’s important. So sometimes you get a bunch of no’s because the people who are making the decisions don’t have an understanding about your level of awareness or your life experience or the experience of a group that you or a community that you come from.
Pamela: And so they can be wrong very often and why it is that they’re not choosing you. But when you know why you’re bringing the idea forward and why it’s important for people to hear it, that is the thing that can give you more of that. It’s like a bit of righteous indignation in a good way, right? Where you’re like, like I felt that really like humiliating moment for me when I heard that ended up being a source of real courage as I worked the idea. And then I was like, no, wait a minute, like this is actually working in real life. I used the principles to create A community center for eight years where we did community engagement using every single tool of the book. And I deliberately did it. Like, I’m going to use everything that I talk about to test it.
Pamela: And it worked. And so those are the things when you start to see that it’s putting yourself in that zone where the idea and the impact and especially the people who you’re really writing it for become more important than you just holding back. You know, it’s really like being afraid to feel uncomfortable is what a lot of it is. There can be other issues going on, which is when I often refer people to a therapist, I feel like. I don’t know if you feel this sometimes, but I’m like, oh, let’s talk to Lisa. You know, like, I’ll talk to a client. And like, after a while, when you work with them, like, you get to know their therapist name. And then you can both say, you’re like, ooh, this is actually touching on something that probably is not to do with business.
Pamela: This is something that’s probably best to be touching, you know, with therapist. Because there can be certain things that are really just, you know, our own unhealed wounds that we have around a number of different things. So that’s why we need many people working together in order to support. But I think about mindset is like, yes, we want to be thoughtful how we’re thinking about it, but when we know that we’ve done the work and we’re prepared for the journey of, like, if you’re thinking of scaling an idea, if you want to be bringing a book into the world, there’s a rigor. Much like if you’re competitive in running a marathon and you actually want to be placing in the race, like, there’s stuff you need to do if you want to be competing at that level.
Stacy: Yeah, I love that you brought in the athletics analogy. Cause I do feel like athletics are great comparison. It’s why we’ve, like, pushed our kids so much to at least figure what they like, figure out what they like. They don’t have to be competitive athletes like my husband and I were when were younger, but they do need to be out kind of learning that skill of getting. Dusting yourself off and getting back on it. And it just made me think about when I was in high school, my senior year, I was already varsity, but I didn’t make the varsity team my senior year, which is, like, the worst, because all my teammates were there, you know, made it.
Stacy: And it was actually because of my attitude, which is really kind of funny looking back, but I, like, fought it, you know, I was like, I deserve to be on that team. And they put me on the team, and I played an amazing season because I was like, I want to show you I’m going to be the best player out there. You know, And I think, like, that is something that, to your point, not everybody is destined to be an entrepreneur, and that doesn’t. Is not a value statement. I think to be a great entrepreneur, you have to. You have to have wisdom to listen to other wisdom and take that in. Like, in your case, you were able to take that and go, okay, so they said this.
Stacy: Let me evaluate this and decide what I agree with and see where I need to shift and tweak and better. But I also think you have to kind of be like, have a. I don’t know, like, kind of chip off. You have, like, a chip on your shoulder. Sometimes you’re like, I’m just. I’m gonna prove myself. I’m gonna go do it. Because if you let people’s words get you down or make you think you’re not worthy or kill an idea before you even test it, like, that’s. That’s problematic. So I love that you brought that up. I was also thinking, you know, just in relation to the whole point of this podcast, of course we talk about books and publishing. That’s the world that I live in. So it’s been so fun talking about that today.
Stacy: But beyond Better is really about not just living, like, a better life than your parents or, like, a little bit better than the society you’re raised in, the culture you’re raised in, but really defining your own life for yourself and living a life that is, like, beyond. It’s like you design it, you create it, you live into it. And at the top, we talked. When I introduced you, I said part of what you do is help people live into their dreams through scaling. And I’d love to hear a little bit about that. And if you have any examples that you could share, too, those are really helpful for us to, you know, kind of wrap our heads around how sometimes making shifts in your business can open you up to a life that’s just amazing.
Pamela: Yeah, I. There have been so many different. Different scenarios at different times. So it’s like there. There’s a whole series of things of just deciding to be an entrepreneur. And for a lot of people, maybe they’ve been in corporate for a long time, and they, you know, really are thinking about it, and then when they finally make the move, you know, they can. They can sense how exciting it is. I have somebody who. At the Escape from Cubicle Nation book tour, I did a London stop, and I had a group there. So that was probably in, like, 2009 when the book came out. And so there was somebody who was in my workshop then who. Part of that exercise is we did a. An ideal life exercise. So imagine yourself, you know, walking through, like, your ideal day, and.
Pamela: And, you know, how would you wake up? Where are you? What are you doing? And so we did that visualization that was 2009. What are we in 2026? I just saw her. She came into town and. And we. We’ve been friends for a long time, and I work with her on and off through the years. She’s done a whole number of different things that were iterative. So definitely she’s worked for herself and done different iterative pieces. But now she’s landed in a business that she feels is like the business that she is meant to live. And were having brunch just a couple months ago, and she was like, you know, what I realized the other day is I remembered that ideal day exercise that I did in London at the Escape workshop.
Pamela: And she goes, that actually is the life that I have right now. So that was like a number of years in coming. And it wasn’t like she was miserable all along. In her case, there were very specific reasons why she chose to, you know, work in different business scenarios. Scenarios. So sometimes it takes a really long time. Other times. It’s the one thing about entrepreneurship that I think is so wonderful. And it’s why I always. I want to be normalizing. Not the all or nothing or the like. I want to be an entrepreneur, and therefore, I need to be reaching a million people, you know, or a million dollars. Like, there.
Pamela: There are ways, especially with tools that we have today, where you can choose to work for yourself, utilizing your skills and strengths and make a fantastic living that doesn’t necessarily, you know, have to scale, but that can bring you everything that you want for some people based on what’s important to you and, like, what you’re trying to activate, that itself. Just having the flexibility to be working for yourself, to be caring for your kids is enough. There’s, you know, the.
Pamela: The metaphor that’s quoted in, like, every motivational speaker talk ever about the fishermen in Zihuatanejo. Have you guys. Have you heard that one where it’s like, the busy business person goes to Ziwatanejo in Mexico on the beach. And it sees a fisherman, you know, going out on a boat fishing and coming back early. And it’s his, you know, family gathers and he goes and has lunch. And he’s like, did you know that if you got, you know, a fleet of boats, you could make, you know, so much more money? And then the fisherman’s like, well, tell me more. He’s like, and then, you know, if you, like, got out of actually being on the boats and had somebody else run it in 10 years, you know, you could retire. And he’s like, and what would I do when I retire?
Pamela: And he’s like, oh, you could, you know, go out fishing a little bit, come home at three, you know, meet with your family. Like, there’s a reason everybody uses that metaphor, but, like, it’s really true. It is okay to want to have flexibility and to have a way of taking care of your quality of life at that’s. That there can be other focuses that you have at different points in your life and your body of work where you really do get excited to bring an idea out at scale. I have one of my dear friends and clients, Dr. Romy Mushtaq, who’s a neurologist, and she had a vision. When we had the community lab, we had this huge whiteboard wall that was so fun. I would.
Pamela: I did hundreds of all day strategy sessions where we’d, like, start in one side of the wall and go all the way down in the end. And she had this big vision for what she had been seeing as a neurologist of a specific kind of what she calls a busy brain, where people were coming with these, you know, could be depression, it could be burnout. But she saw clinically that there were things going on that she could actually have a, you know, a good. Develop some kind of a method in order to overcome it. So she wanted to do a research study. She wanted to write a book. She wanted to definitely go with a traditional publisher. She wanted to be a chief wellness officer. She had this huge, big vision. She’s extremely ambitious, and I love that about her.
Pamela: And she has done all of that. She got a deal with Harper Collins. She wrote the Busy Brain. She made the USA bestsellers list. She did research with 17,000 employees. She’s been a chief wellness officer in two places. And she’s worked her ass off 100%. She’s made that happen. She told me, like, she said, literally when I left there, she said, I thought maybe that I was having like a hallucinatory, like something was wrong with me of the fact that I believed that it could be possible. Right. She was like, I thought maybe I’ve just really lost it. And it just is so unlikely at the moment when she was, when she had that vision. But she did it every step of the way. And so it just depends on like, you know, what is that aspiration that you have?
Pamela: I find very much as a parent now. You know, my kids are 18 and 21. So now that my daughter’s in school and my son’s in school, there’s a whole different realm now in terms of how I want to work and what it is that I consider to be, you know, quality of life. And so that’s another dimension I think we don’t talk about. You could have a certain stage where you, it’s really important to not be like, you know, working 24, 7 or whatever. But then there can be different stages of your life. I’ll be 60 this year, so my business turns 30, I turn 60. You’re the fire horse, right? I feel like I’m 20 years old inside. Like I am bursting with ideas. I’m not taking care of so many beautiful humans, you know, still connected but in a different way.
Pamela: And so in many ways my aspirations are big right now. Like I’m super excited to execute them and I’m super excited that I made some of the choices earlier to be more around at home when my kids were here. So it’s not like you make the decision once and that, you know that ends up leading the rest of your life or your business.
Stacy: I was thinking about that as you were talking through that there’s also just different stages of your life that require more of you in your everyday. And you know, we had just this morning, my daughter’s braces broke last night so my husband had to take her to get em fixed this morning. So I took my son to my Portuguese class and he met us to go get him. You know, it was like that’s just the stage of life that I’m in right now and that’s okay. And I, I’ve always kind of looked forward to my older years too. I turned 40 this past year and I’ve been looking Forward to my 40s since I was like 20. I just felt like that’s the decade. But now that I’m 40, I’m like, wow, I feel so young, like there’s so much still to do.
Stacy: And I love hearing you talk about where you’re at 60 and I really Believe that, like when you’re doing something that lights you up, it just continues to light you up. It’s not like you want to leave it, you want to keep. You don’t want to leave it, you want to keep in it. So I love that. It was very beautiful, inspiring. Let me ask you the question that I ask all of our guests just to kind of tie a bow on our conversation. And since we’ve been talking about books, it’s a perfect question for you if you could recommend one book. And yes, one book, because everybody wants to tell me like three, but it like forces you to get really specific, one that has profoundly impacted your life. What would it be and why it.
Pamela: Is if you want to write a book about art inspiration and I forget the rest of the subtitle by Brenda Uland. U E L A N D Guy Kawasaki, good buddy from way back, recommended it. It was written, I think in 1937 or something. Oh, it’s a book about art, independence and spirit is the subtitle. So if you want to write. And it is an absolutely spectacular book. She is, was a writing teacher way ahead of her time. And it’s just a beautiful book about writing. So I’m imagining most of your audience, right, are interested in writing as you and I are, but it’s just a very inspiring, beautiful book that will just bring lots of light to your life.
Pamela: So yes, I have many books that I love, but that one, the way that it’s crafted, the way that it reads in the message is is top.
Stacy: I love that. We will be sure to link to that in the show notes. Pamela Slim, thank you so much for joining me today. Where can our listeners find out about you? Follow you if they are listening to this and going, yes, I need her work in my business. How do they get in touch?
Pamela: pamelaslim.com is a spot wherever everything you would ever want to know workwise is there. I tend to hang out more on LinkedIn to talk about work things, so that’s a good place to connect. Just find me at Pamela Slim. And then my Instagram is like the most uncurated, unbranded. It’s like kids, dogs, travels, funny memes and so I, I like to that’s a fun place just to get to know each other a little bit more. I’d love to, you know, that’s more where I share kind of comments back and forth with people. But I’m @pamslim on Instagram, so feel free to jump on over there and send me a message and say hi.
Stacy: Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I really loved our conversation.
Pamela: Thanks for having me.
Stacy: And thank you to you, our viewer, our listener, for being with us. I know that this was useful for you no matter the stage that you’re in. We touched on business. We touched on mindset. And if you know somebody who’s a business owner or thinking about starting a business, share this episode with them because you might be the reason that somebody someday accomplishes their dream life, too. I have to thank, as always, Rita Domingues for her production of this podcast. She is why you’re watching this, why you’re listening to it. She nudges me when I don’t get these done. She edits. She gets everything out in the world. She coordinates with amazing guests like Pam, and I am grateful. And if you are still watching or still listening, you must have loved this episode.
Stacy: So would you just take a moment to either subscribe if you’re on YouTube or follow the show in your podcast platform? It makes a huge difference in not only making sure that you get the latest episodes, but also in helping me reach more people with the message of living a life that’s not just better, but beyond better. And I will be back with you before you know it.
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