Good Life Project - Pam Slim On The Power of Community

Episode Date: September 23, 2015

Pam Slim is one of those people.You know, the ones who see the best in everyone. In everything. In every seeming barrier, she sees the lesson. The good. The opportunity to learn. To grow. To create. To collaborate.The one whose lens I aspire to embrace, but still find myself failing more often succeeding (someday, lol).She's also just an amazing human, dear friend and award-winning author who is in the midst of very cool 21-city Indispensable Community Tour.And, it just happened that one of the stops on that tour was NYC a/k/a my little town. So before she swept out to the next city, I asked her to jump in and share a special GLP "Guest" Riff about the power of community, especially as it relates to makers and entrepreneurs.In her short and sweet Guest Riff, she asks a big question:What if we thought more about serving a community as a community?Now, of course, the realist in me always kicks in when I hear things like that. Sounds good in theory, I snicker, but can it really happen in the real world?According to Pam, yes. Sure, we still all need to build our own things. We still need to put food on the table, honor our paths and build what we're here to build. But in the end, she argues, all ships rise when we start thinking about community not just as a target market, but as a collective solution. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonathan here with this week's Good Life Project short and sweet riff. So we've got a little bit of a special riff for you today. I have a dear friend of mine who has been in town doing these really cool gatherings. In fact, she's touring the whole country bringing people together. And her name is Pam Slim. You may have heard of her before or read her many fantastic books or blog or heard her speak. And I kind of snookered her and grabbed her and said, Hey, before you leave, you want to record a quick riff so that we can share what you're up to with my

community because I think they would really dig it. And she said, Yes. So without further ado, I'm going to turn this week's riff over to my dear friend, Pam Slim, who by the way, you can find at PamelaSlim.com. Over to you, Pam. Awesome. Thank you, Jonathan. Well, in 2009, I remember wandering the hallways at South by Southwest. And in fact, I think that was the first time that I spent significant time with Jonathan. My first book had just come out, Escape from Cubicle Nation. And on one of the days in one of the hallways, I ran into Sunir Shah, who at that time was working for Fresh Books. And he introduced me to a few friends, one, I think, from MailChimp and from Batch Books.

And they were in this heated, excited conversation about how they had known about each other for a really long time. And they were attending some sessions at South by Southwest and they started talking and they said, you know what, we all seem to serve a very similar client. We love the small business market. We love small business owners.

And through our conversation, we can see that we have a really similar approach to customer service and what we believe about how we want to structure our organization. What would happen if we just did something together? If we could maybe do some cross promotion or host an event? And I remember having a conversation with them in the hallway where they were so excited about that possibility. And that moment was actually the birth of what is now the Small Business Web. That is the official trade association for companies that serve the small business market. And it's grown to over 300 companies. And that philosophy has really stuck with me for such a long time that why is it, especially

as business owners and entrepreneurs, we can spend so much time worrying about how we uniquely are going to be serving the customers who we love so much. And we stay up at night wondering how we can answer all their questions. And we wonder if our level of service is going to be what they need. And what I begin to really work on is figuring out how about if we flipped that concept as business owners of just thinking about ourselves and our businesses that serve our customers, and instead viewed ourselves as part of a broader community of other people who are like-minded, who also care about the community that we care about, each person who has unique

skills and strengths, and where together we can really support a lot more needs in our community and we can feel more supported ourselves and we can do our best work. I know in my relationship with Jonathan, we have often served a very similar market. We've written books at the same time that focus on similar topics. But what I've learned is the more that I do me and Jonathan does him, that we actually bring better service to our communities. So this whole idea is one that I'm excited about exploring and sparking. It doesn't leave out our individual passion for building our businesses, for serving our people. What it means is we're not alone. We realize we all need each other and we can begin to look for ecosystems of people who share similar values,

who have similar passion about serving people that we care about. I think it ends up creating more pie for everybody, and I think everybody benefits. That was a fantastic short and sweet guest riff from my dear friend, old friend, Pam Slim. Not that she's old, but just we've known each other for a number of years. Definitely go check out her work, her books, PamelaSlim.com, her books Escape from Cubicle Nation, Body of Work, and she's going to have some really cool stuff coming out some point down the road. So keep an eye out for it. I hope you had a fantastic week ahead. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.