We were lucky to catch up with Lacey L. Bakker recently and have shared our conversation below.

Lacey L. , appreciate you joining us today. Was there an experience or lesson you learned at a previous job that’s benefited your career afterwards?

As soon as I was old enough to work, and for many years after, I worked in retail. My first job was as a clothing salesperson at a women’s retail chain. From there, I’ve sold everything from photography services to shoes and accessories and pretty much everything in between. When I became a publisher, I had no idea how my background in sales would be so essential! Customer service, marketing, sales, order processing, organization, and merchandising have all played significant parts in my career. The most important lesson I’ve learned from working in retail is that the customer experience is everything! Every customer touchpoint matters, and if you’re not properly taking care of your customers, someone else will!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I went to school for marketing and advertising, then publishing, then consumer neuroscience and consumer neuromarketing and have continued my education through publisher events, seminars, classes, courses and workshops. I do approximately 400 hours of continuing education per year in order to keep up with what’s happening in the industry and so that I can continue to develop my skills.

Pandamonium Publishing House was created in 2015 with a very simple goal in mind-to bring authentic and unique stories to the world. The name comes from my real-life cat named Panda who is mischievous, fun, lovable, and larger than life! I wanted to pay tribute to him for starting my journey as an author and publisher. Although Panda causes pandemonium, his heart is pure and his message is clear; things may not always go as planned in life and sometimes things can be upside down, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is love, literacy, loyalty, and leadership. When all is stripped away, the messes are cleaned up, and order is restored, we find out what is important to us. At Pandamonium Publishing House, our motto is Publishing Made Simple. We take a complex, chaotic, confusing publishing process and make it easy so that you can get back to what really matters, sharing your stories with friends, family, and the world. We publish books of all genres by authors from all over the globe. Thank you for trusting us with your work and your stories and our deepest hope is to ignite a lifelong love of literacy through authentic storytelling.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Oh boy! This is a lesson I learned the hard way! There’s a massive difference between being busy and being productive. When I started in the publishing industry, I thought the more I did, and the faster I did it, the better. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Initially, I took on clients and books that weren’t a great fit. I would work with anyone and everyone because that’s what I thought I needed to do to build success. I quickly learned that slowing down, being more selective, and not equating busyness with productivity was vital. You can easily waste an eight-hour work day with busy work and feel run off your feet, but by being selective about who you work with and what you work on, productivity skyrockets, and you move closer to your goals.

Choose your most important tasks for the day and work on the top three. Focus on them and ignore everything else until they’re complete!

Have you ever had to pivot?

My background is in marketing, so pivoting is what we do! If something isn’t working, we change the approach but never the goal. I think that’s important to remember because things change, and some situations are out of our control, but we never lose sight of the goal. If you keep the end in mind, you’ll find solutions to all kinds of things! Sometimes pivoting is the best thing you can do and leads to even greater results.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.pandamoniumpublishing.com/shop
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pandamonium_publishing_house8/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pandamoniumpublishing/
• Twitter: @laceybakker1
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSDZPT6iRLxIdTmdm8CMtPg