Will Your Body of Work Benefit From Licensing or Certification with Pamela Slim

You’ve built a successful consulting practice using methods, tools and frameworks you’ve developed and road-tested with clients—is it time to ratchet up your impact and revenue? Award-winning author, speaker and certification expert Pamela Slim walks through the practical and strategic considerations of scaling your IP.

Pam shares her from-the-front wisdom:

The benefits of deliberately codifying your intellectual property: your approach, method, tools and frameworks.

Why B2B programs are often an easier sell (and far more lucrative) than B2C programs.

How to tell if your business is a good candidate for developing licensing or certification programs.

One wildly successful real-life example of practitioner certification.

The value of building your marketing engine (spoiler alert: it doesn’t have to be big to be mighty).

LINKS

Pamela Slim Website | The Widest Net | Books | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Pamela Slim is an award-winning author, speaker and agency owner who has spent three decades helping business owners scale their businesses and IP.

Pam’s agency specializes in the design and development of certification and licensing programs. She is the author of Escape from Cubicle Nation (Penguin Portfolio, 2009), Body of Work (Penguin Portfolio, 2014) and The Widest Net (McGraw Hill, November, 2021, winner of Best Sales and Marketing Book of 2021 from Porchlight Books).

Pam and her husband Darryl co-founded the K’é Community Lab in Mesa, Arizona, where they host scores of BIPOC entrepreneurs and contribute to the local social, health and economic development of their community.

BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLE

RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTS

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00 - 00:17

Pamela Slim: Ideas are out there everywhere. The challenge, the hard thing, is taking that idea, putting it through a specific process where you can actually end up translating it into concrete behaviors that people besides you can be doing at scale out there in the world.

00:23 - 01:07

Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist Women, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton. And today I'm here with Pamela Slim, award-winning author of 3 books, speaker and agency owner who spent 3 decades helping business owners scale their businesses and their IP. Her agency specializes in the design and development of certification and licensing programs. Plus, she and her husband, Daryl, co-founded the CAH Community Lab in Mesa, Arizona, where they host scores of BIPOC entrepreneurs and contribute to the local social, health, and economic development of their community. Pam, welcome. Thanks so much

01:07 - 01:27

Rochelle Moulton: for having me. I'm delighted to be here. Well, I'm delighted to have you on the show for many reasons. But the initial spark was when I read your second book, Body of Work, just last year, and I put you on my ideal guest list. And then when you showed up in my inbox via Alastair McDermott, I figured I'd better ask you right then. So I'm really glad you're here.

01:28 - 01:49

Pamela Slim: It's so fun. We were just saying pre-show what a serendipity it is. It's amazing given the alignment of our work that we haven't met before, but I love that it took a wonderful thought leader in Ireland that actually brought us together. We could probably throw a stone from my desert dwelling to you in Palm Springs and we could hit each other. So isn't that beautiful?

01:50 - 02:15

Rochelle Moulton: Exactly, small world, sometimes big world. Well, as I was preparing to talk with you, I clicked to your website and the first thing I saw was your headline. You have the power to shape the world through your work. And I love how with that statement, you set up this idea that everything we do in our businesses not only matters, but that we can deeply connect it to the change we want to make in our world.

02:16 - 02:52

Pamela Slim: Yeah, I so appreciate you picking up on that. This is probably the thought. Usually I go in waves and cycles for months, sometimes years, of really deeply exploring a core element of the way that I'm looking at business or the way that I'm doing work with clients. And at this stage, I've been experimenting. I'm getting ready to be doing some keynotes this year, which will be really fun to be on the road. And those of you who do that know it's probably the best way to make sure you are clear in your thinking and what your

02:52 - 03:23

Pamela Slim: big ideas are, because you think about being up on stage with other people. But part of really what's been hitting me about that and around my work is 1 of the things that I observe a lot as an author and a long time business coach and somebody who works with thought leaders, especially interfacing with more mainstream publishing and the way that we tend to celebrate thought leaders, is there's a lot of focus on just the idea, whatever that idea is, you know, AI, habits, you know, amazing great things that I think a lot of us can

03:23 - 03:59

Pamela Slim: be driven by that thought of, oh, if I could just think of the thing, that big great idea, I could get the book deal, I could be distinguishing myself between other competitors, and we think about it sometimes in that singular way. Part of what has me really work it through based on 1 of my strong through lines in my own body of work is being a training and development, organizational development person, which is ideas are out there everywhere. The challenge, the hard thing, is taking that idea, putting it through a specific process where you can actually

03:59 - 04:36

Pamela Slim: end up Translating it into concrete behaviors that people besides you can be doing at scale out there in the world and that middle section involves sometimes Instructional design and change management and psychology and philosophy all of these kinds of things of what it actually takes for taking a big idea. Like, hey, we should focus on habits. James Clear's great book, Atomic Habits, such a powerful idea, it's so interesting. We think about really what it takes in order to be implementing that into our life, to really change the way that we are, that to me is this

04:36 - 05:07

Pamela Slim: interesting intersection between often the market fit of ways that we're communicating and telling our story and driving interest for ideas, the method, the way that we actually develop something that consistently over time can make change, and then the model, which is the way that we can be describing things in a way in which it's sticky so that people remember it And again, they begin to develop these habits in their everyday life where they really do things differently because we've architected it that way.

05:08 - 05:38

Rochelle Moulton: It's interesting, Pam, because I was going to ask you some questions about your business, but I will come back to that because I want to explore this a little bit more. It's a really great setup for what we're going to talk about today. But let me ask you about you, because 1 of the great things about looking at the entrepreneurial part of your career is that it's long, right? You've been doing this for a while. You've written 3 books that, again, from the reader perspective, they're quite different, and yet they're connected. So will you talk just

05:38 - 05:50

Rochelle Moulton: for a moment about how you see your body of work and the threads that connect some of the really interesting things that you've done in those in those chunks of years because I can I can kind of see where your brain was going?

05:50 - 06:28

Pamela Slim: Absolutely. So I think in the biggest arc, the early days of my work, my degree in college actually was international development. So I have a very long winded major, which was the focus was non-formal education as a tool for social and economic change in Latin America. So I studied in Mexico and Colombia. A lot of the systems that you study in economic development are extremely similar to the kinds of models that you might see in organizational development, in change management. And so I was always driven early on and just excited. I was an exchange student multiple

06:28 - 07:00

Pamela Slim: times and studied abroad and was just really interested in transformational change, especially things like really eradicating harmful systems and creating more equity in the world. So those were like my earliest roots. And I worked through more of the nonprofit model for a while, and then I kind of fell into the world of training and development, which I actually ended up being so excited by because it had some of these elements that I was really excited by that I saw in the international work. I just knew that it wasn't a fit based on my philosophy of being

07:00 - 07:29

Pamela Slim: this fresh-faced 20-something white girl from Marin County, California originally, like living in Columbia doing economic development. I was like, I've met people from there that are so much better at making that change. And I don't really believe in that like external person parachuting out from a theory of change perspective. So it allowed me to really then dig into a whole number of years while I was working inside corporate, which I actually loved, which surprises some people, knowing that the first book I wrote was Escape from Cubicle Naked.

07:29 - 07:30

Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, it's Not intuitive.

07:31 - 08:04

Pamela Slim: That's right. But it really is this lifelong enthusiasm for how can we make transformational change? How can we make communities, organizations more healthy, and really embracing training and development as a tool in order to do that. So I worked, my last real job was 28 years ago at Barclays Global Investors as the Director of Training and Development. I think they're BlackRock now. They went through a whole series of acquisitions, but I left there and then spent the first 10 years of my career as a management consultant in Silicon Valley. And that was so fun and interesting.

08:05 - 08:34

Pamela Slim: Got to just do all kinds of different projects, really for growing and scaling a lot of tech companies. And then around 2005, I met my husband, wanted to move to Arizona and be off the road so much. And that's when I launched my blog, Escape from Cubicle Nation, that really dove me into this exciting exploration of helping people who were in corporate who wanted to leave and start a business, which were many of the clients that I had actually interfaced with when I was a consultant. And so I spent about 10 years in a deep dive

08:34 - 09:04

Pamela Slim: there, which led to my first book deal, and then really doing a lot of work and developing my own body of work around tools to help people do that early stage transition. Then I just started to slide more in the body of work years, the way that you begin to understand body of work, many ways that was a reaction to noticing how a lot of people in the startup space were saying, you can only be creative and free if you work for yourself. It felt so limited, untrue, privileged, frankly, right? Not everybody can do it. It's

09:04 - 09:35

Pamela Slim: hard. Work is hard in general, but I think the main focus and the tools I wanted to bring forth in that next stage was to help people be more deliberate about just what is that body of work they wanted to move forward. Having a metaphor much like artists or writers do of saying you don't always have to be doing the same thing over time and you can have experiment with different work modes as you're building your body of work at different stages of your life depending on what's going on. You can choose to work deliberately in

09:35 - 10:06

Pamela Slim: different models. So it's perfectly okay if you work for yourself for a while and that works, then you decide to go back and work for an organization, awesome. Then you might work for a smaller firm, You might start a nonprofit. It's more about that context that you create and really being deliberate about driving satisfaction based on what work that you're creating. How are you using your gifts and skills to bring great work into the world? So that body of work, body of work came out in around 2014. And I just spent a lot more time easing

10:06 - 10:38

Pamela Slim: in some ways a little bit more toward people who are doing work at scale, kind of like the earlier work that I had done, you know, as a management consultant. And I'm an author practitioner, I often say. So I write books based on what I'm seeing and hearing and experiencing with clients. When clients were getting more deliberate about the work they wanted to bring forth, usually the main question was, where are my customers? How can I consistently and not in a not overwhelming way generate all kinds of leads and referrals and visibility? So that's really where

10:38 - 11:13

Pamela Slim: the widest net came around full circle, where actually a lot of the ecosystem building principles that grassroots development models absolutely fit into work that I was doing and in the way that I would talk about business development with my clients. And then as you said in the intro, about 7 and a half years ago, my husband and I also opened up this community lab here in Mesa really utilizing all the principles in that widest net method. Widest net was my latest book that came out in 2021. And so looking backwards that's often where we see that

11:13 - 11:32

Pamela Slim: through line, right? Widest net was helping people get their body of work out. Body of work was a reaction saying, hey, if it doesn't work as an entrepreneur, that's not the only way to think about it. But I didn't necessarily have that perspective from the beginning, right? I was more reacting to work that happened and issues that came forward.

11:33 - 11:58

Rochelle Moulton: Well, yeah, I was really impressed with this idea that you created a physical space that manifests the change you want to see, right? Because that's the hardest thing sometimes is to do physically what we're talking about virtually. So I think you get extra bonus points for that. Well, it's a real joy that 1 part just for brevity I left out when I was in San Francisco for about 11 years.

11:58 - 12:31

Pamela Slim: I was the volunteer executive director of an Afro-Brazilian martial art group, Capoeira, which I was a passionate practitioner and eventual teacher working with an artistic director. So I'd actually done lots and lots of work on a local level in San Francisco doing community building and engagement. So it was kind of a coming home for me, but here in Arizona of doing the local engagement work and I'm not bearing the lead. It's now been publicly communicated, but we're actually will come up on 8 years in June Which is when our lease will be up and we have

12:31 - 13:05

Pamela Slim: come full circle to be closing that project. So my husband and I, it's always been something that we knew was not by definition supposed to be something that was long-term the way that we built it. It was specific space that we opened up for. My husband is Navajo, So he's a Navajo traditional healer. So it really was a specific space that we provided at no fee to BIPOC entrepreneurs in our community to really experiment, have events, you know, sort of get support in an informal way that now where we are in the process of economic development

13:05 - 13:18

Pamela Slim: here, we'll be moving forward in a different way, like with partners moving forward. So it just another chapter and you notice it tends to be around 7 to 10 year cycles in which projects happen.

13:18 - 13:26

Rochelle Moulton: And it also explains something that I saw, I think, in social that said there's going to be some big changes this year, so now I know what

13:26 - 13:26

Pamela Slim: that meant.

13:26 - 13:51

Rochelle Moulton: That's right. Well, congratulations, though, because I like how you're looking at this as it's a process and it needed to be a physical space until it didn't. And you know, I think a lot of times we tell ourselves a story about what we did that is bad versus because it works differently than what other people might define as success. Closing the center is progress.

13:52 - 14:27

Pamela Slim: 100%. Yeah. And it really is. It's tied to, I'm a big proponent of theories of change and really having an analysis about how and why that you're doing things. And if we had 13 hours, I would go on a long diatribe about some of the critique about approaches that we can have, for example, to community projects or nonprofits. Just tangentially, 1 of the things that I noticed over and over and over is that most of the ways in which people specifically want to be engaging with BIPOC, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian entrepreneurs is by immediately coming to

14:27 - 15:03

Pamela Slim: a space, designing a program, usually without any input from the community, and just trying to put tons of focus and energy into launching it and trying to sell and pull people into the space. And my husband and I have a very, very different approach of that's actually not