Episode 83. Pamela Slim – Shape the World Through Your Work

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Pamela Slim is an author, business coach and the co-founder with her husband Darryl of the Main Street Learning Lab in Mesa, Arizona.

A former corporate director of training and development at Barclays Global Investors, Pam focused her first decade in business as a management consultant, working with large companies such as HP, Charles Schwab, 3Com, Chevron and Cisco Systems.

Since 2005, Pam has advised thousands of entrepreneurs as well as companies serving the small business market such as Keap, Progressive Insurance, Constant Contact and Prezi. Pam partnered with author Susan Cain to build and launch the Quiet Revolution.

Pam has written three books: Escape from Cubicle Nation (named Best Small Business and Entrepreneur book of 2009 from Porchlight Books), Body of Work (2014 with Penguin Portfolio) and her latest, The Widest Net (2021 with McGraw Hill, named Best Marketing & Sales Book of 2021 by Porchlight Books).

In 2016, Pam launched the Main Street Learning Lab in Mesa, Arizona, a grassroots, community-based think tank for small business economic acceleration. http://pamelaslim.com/ke

In The Widest Net, she explains how to build strong diverse relationships, identify and connect with new partners, expand markets, generate leads, and find new customers in places you may never have considered. With this book as a guide, you’ll learn how to connect with potential clients and customers using the true breadth of the marketplace, which she calls an ecosystem of living connections.

The Widest Net shows how to:

Search outside your own lens/bias/routine/history to target ideal customers.
Attract the interest and attention of new leads by learning more about them authentically.
Develop products and services suited to these customers.
Sell through a trusted reciprocity framework where your customers become part of your ecosystem and you each help the other grow.
Build and sustain loyalty and trust with new customers.
Nurture a diverse and resilient customer base by identifying and adjusting to the ideal customer target over time.

Pam is frequently quoted as a business expert in press such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Information Week, Money Magazine and Psychology Today.

Favorite Quote:

“We all need each other.”

Quote from interview:

“You have to really know how to tell the story about how your experience has really crafted for this work that you want to do. I call Body of Work the love letter to creation. It really centers what it is that you’re building and being very deliberate about what you want to bring to life. And then everything else is secondary.”

R.O.G. Takeaway Tips:

Questions to contemplate:

What are your values? The core beliefs you have about what matters most.
What are your ingredients? Skills, experiences, perspectives, hidden talents?
How can you leverage them?
What makes you uniquely positioned in your organization and in the market?
What are you creating? What are you investing in that will last long beyond your tenure. How can you center on what you are creating?
What do you need? To make the creation work. To get exposure for it. To improve it.
What’s the work you want to do?
Where are your customers? What ecosystem (AKA watering holes) do you want to join?
What impact did you want to make?
Looking back – What impact have you already made?
What matters most are the ways we purposefully bring our full self: values, ingredients, creations, desires, all of it into the work for a mission greater than ourselves.