Episode 13- Empowering Women to Embrace Their Sexuality with Thien-Kim Lam

“I thought there are grown women like me who read these and get aroused and we take a break for a little playtime or some one-handed reading, so why not include all those components that you need when you’re reading this book?” – Thien-Kim Lam, Founder, Bawdy Bookworms

Episode Summary:

Today we are joined by Thien-Kim Lam who is on a mission to empower women’s sexuality, both on the page and in the bedroom. Thien-Kim is the author of Happy Endings, an #ownvoices second-chance romance between a sex toy saleswoman and a soul-food restauranteur. She is also the founder of Bawdy Bookworms, where she curates subscription boxes to help women embrace their sexual pleasure by pairing romance books with erotic toys. 

We discuss how sex plays into Asian culture and how some of us had to resort to books for our sexual education. Thien-Kim explains how Asian people are typically represented in books and the media and how the lack of seeing people like herself in romance novels led her to become an author. 

Tune in to discover how she grew her Bawdy Bookworms business by building a community, why she chose a subscription box model for her business, and how she balances this with a writing career. From time-blocking to one-handed reading, business tools to sex toys, and hiring to self-pleasure, we cover it all! Join us for a fun and inspirational chat about being Asian, succeeding in business, and sexual pleasure!

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• [01:34] Discover author Thien-Kim Lam and her passion for sex toys and pleasure.
• [01:45] The inspiration for her book Happy Endings. 
• [02:44] Information on her Bawdy Bookworms subscription boxes and their contents.
• [03:29] How she overcame the struggles she faced when she first launched her business
• [05:00] Thien-Kim’s purpose to help people discover things that make them feel good
• [05:49] Why being an author is a business
• [06:17] How the lack of seeing people like herself in romances led her to become an author
• [07:57] How she started the Bawdy Quickie Box to include diverse romances
• [08:37] Learn about sex in Asian culture and Veronica and Thien-Kim’s sexual educations
• [11:02] How Thien-Kim manages her time between writing and curating boxes
• [11:43] Thien-Kim’s use of time-blocking
• [13:02] Why she likes to use Notion for planning
• [16:24] What an average day looks like for Thien-Kim
• [17:25] Why she chose a subscription box model for her business
• [21:44] How Thien-Kim is continuing to grow Bawdy Bookworms
• [24:53] How she is making her business more orgasmic by hiring out specific tasks
• [27:21] Information about the Bawdy Bookworms Facebook community and why you should join it 

Connect with Us: 

• On our website I Business Laid Bare
• On Instagram I @businesslaidbare and @veronicayanhs
• Connect with Veronica on LinkedIn

Connect with Thien-Kim Lam:

• Check out Thien-Kim’s website at thienkimlam.com
• On Twitter I @msthienkim
• On Instagram I @bawdybookworms

Resources Mentioned:

• Read Happy Endings
• Visit the website for Bawdy Bookworms 
• Join the Facebook group for Bawdy Bookworms Insiders
• Learn more about Notion

“I think that that is super important to me, that giving people the opportunity to read books outside of their personal experiences can help them learn more about other people and cultures and help create empathy.” – Thien-Kim Lam, Founder, Bawdy Bookworms

Thien-Kim Lam is on a mission to empower women’s sexuality, both on the page and in the bedroom. She is the founder of Bawdy Bookworms, where she curates subscription boxes to help women embrace their sexual pleasure through romance books and erotic toys. Bawdy Bookworms has been featured on Buzzfeed, Cosmo, and Oprah Daily. She’s also the author of Happy Endings, an #ownvoices second-chance romance between a sex toy saleswoman and a soul-food restauranteur.

EPISODE 13

[0:00:01.5] Veronica Yanhs: Hey, I’m Veronica Yanhs and I’m obsessed with back-ends. Specifically, your business back-end, your operations. I’m the CEO and founder of Business Laid Bare, we’re a digital operations agency that builds well-lubricated, and Orgasmic Operations ™  so that your business is pleasurable, productive, and ultimately profitable because when you feel good, everything else feels good too, like your team, your customers, and your bank account. I mean, who doesn’t want to consent to that? This podcast gives you the tips, interviews, and mindset shifts on how to run your business and its operations so that it’s immensely pleasurable, productive, and profitable. Ready to whip your business into shape with me? Let’s get it on.

[0:00:49.3] Veronica Yanhs: Okay, so welcome back everybody, listeners new and not new alike, to another episode of The Business Whip. I am your host, if you don’t know who I am, I’m Veronica and I am so excited to bring on Thien-Kim today for an interview because what she is doing is so exciting and this is actually the first time that we’re actually getting to chat in person. What better way to do it than recorded and for people to hear like all the amazingness that goes on in your life? Thien-Kim, welcome to the episode and, yeah, who are you, what do you do?

[0:01:26.0] Thien-Kim Lam: I’m really excited to be here and it’s actually fun to hear you actually, to say my name Thien-Kim in Vietnamese, instead of the version I give everyone else. I’m Thien-Kim Lam and I like to talk about sex toys and pleasure.

[0:01:42.1] Veronica Yanhs: You are a perfect guest.

[0:01:45.0] Thien-Kim Lam: I can’t imagine not doing what I do. The tangible stuff that I do is I am a debut author, I just released a book on Happy Endings where the heroine’s a bit – it was American and she sells sex toys so I might have drawn on some personal experience about that.

I also run a subscription box called Bawdy Bookworms, which is the perfect pairing of my love of romance books and toys. Basically, I curate these fun boxes that are themed and I pick a very, very spicy romance and then pair a toy with it’s kind of like wine pairings but a lot more exciting.

[0:02:22.7] Veronica Yanhs: My gosh, I love this because I don’t drink wine, it’s like, I would rather read and have orgasms, and what better way than to stimulate my body and my mind? That’s what you’re doing with Bawdy Bookworms.

[0:02:34.0] Thien-Kim Lam: Yeah, right? I mean, I’ve been reading romances since I was a teenager and that’s how I learned about sex in the beginning and some of them got me really aroused and back then, I didn’t know what I was doing. I thought, there are grown women like me who read these and get aroused and we take a break for a little play time or some one-handed reading, why not include all those components that you need when you’re reading this book?

[0:02:58.5] Veronica Yanhs: I have perfected the one handedness. I love this. I guess in this episode, where we’re heading with all this is we’re going to focus a lot on pleasure. Pleasure for ourselves and creating pleasure for our audience and that ultimately leads to a business right now that feels orgasmic. Because your face just – at least, I get the pleasure of seeing it is completely lit up, right? I can only imagine that this is amazing. Was it always this good from the beginning or did you have to do some tweaks?

[0:03:29.8] Thien-Kim Lam: Of course not. I had no idea what I was doing in the beginning, when I started. Bawdy Bookworms turns six years in August, so very soon. When I first started, I cannot have any experience with online businesses and my first launch, I sold one box. It was awful because I was thinking, “Wow, this business is such a great idea, no one done anything like this. Why wouldn’t people want it?”

I forgot that when you’re selling toys, you’re not really selling the toys, you’re selling this idea of taking pleasure in your own hands literally, right? People are worried, they don’t know what to do or maybe they’re holding this device, “What is this, is this going to…” They have so many worries and fears and I didn’t think about that when I was launching. I actually – after I cried and had a little pity party because you have to acknowledge those feelings, I got back to work and I focus on building a community.

I started a Facebook group where I could really talk to – most of my customers are women and I talk to women about sex and pleasure and how toys can really help them whether they’re playing solo or with a partner. I do try to emphasize that you don’t need a partner for toys. I think that’s a huge misconception, a partner or more can make it a lot more fun but it’s not a requirement, right? We can have pleasure on our own, we don’t even need a toy for pleasure in general, right? I think that toys really enhance that experience. 

I built that community so I could educate because that’s really why this business is so exciting to me is that I get to have all these people discover new things about their body and discover things that make them feel good and here I am, I’m like the guide. “Here’s a fun thing you can try or here’s a book you should read if you’re interested in exploring this fantasy.” I want to be there to help people just be happier and live better lives.

[0:05:27.7] Veronica Yanhs: Would you say that being an author is considered a business? I don’t want to mess up in terms of how I address this, that’s why I’m like, is being an author first a business and second, why are all these endeavors that you dabble in, not dabble, that’s the wrong word, you’re like all in. Why books?

[0:05:48.0] Thien-Kim Lam: Books for me are so important. You’re right, being an author is a business. People think that publishing books, you can be a writer and not have it be a business but if you want to be a published author and make a career out of it, you really do have to look at it as a business. What you’re writing, does it appeal to the current market? You have to find the intersection of what the story that you want to tell in your creativity and what’s going to sell. I mean, if you don’t want to sell books, that’s totally fine but it’s not a business, right? It’s a hobby. Same thing with any business. 

For me, storytelling is important because I grew up reading a lot of books with people who did not look like me. A lot of white people, especially in romances. I’ve always been drawn to this beautiful love story of finding someone who really gets you and brings out the best in you and then they have great sex together. You got to have all of those things, for me.

As I became older and I wanted to find books that represented who I am and people look like me, I couldn’t find them and I couldn’t find the stories. The stories I would find— I’m in an interracial relationship, the stories I found were a lot about, if I could find – whether the plots were about race, the conflict was about race, somebody didn’t approve or one of the family members, whatever. I thought, that is really an important story and is very valid but I wanted to bring stories that brought joy, right? Asian joy, Vietnamese joy specifically, because that’s my background. People falling in love without the – that struggle of dealing with who they are, like their ethnicity, that’s such an important part. 

Asian people have been in the United States for many, many years and yet we’re still treated like outsiders, right? The story’s that the mainstream seem to tell over and over, “Oh, we have to give up a part of our ethnicity to belong in the United States” to be “American” but I don’t’ want that in my stories. I want these people to all in, they’re American, all their friends accepted them as American and they’re proud of who they are and they would never date someone who wasn’t comfortable with that, right? Comfortable with their ethnicity.

That’s not a big factor in my stories, which does tell to Bawdy Bookworms, we have a monthly box called Bawdy Quickie and my focus on there is spotting diverse romances and that’s – when I say “diverse”, I mean, across many spectrums. Obviously, it’s going to be tough, I’m going to make mistakes and not be able to include everybody but I’m trying my best to include a wide spectrum from ethnicity to sexual orientation, to different types of relationships, we’ve included books about polyamorous couples, Black, Hispanic, Asian, queer romances. I’m trying really to get all the spectrums.

[0:08:34.3] Veronica Yanhs: I love that you are so cognizant of this. This is so appreciated and you touched upon being Asian, because I’m also Asian, I’m Chinese and how do our heritage play into sex? It seems like it’s not – at least for me, I’ll just speak for myself. Sex is not something that we talk about. 

My mom and my dad, we never had the talk about sex. That was like – “You’re going to learn that in school” kind of thing. And like PDA, even saying “I love you” is not something that’s really looked up upon in my family because they would rather me show my love than say it. How does sex play into your Asian culture?

[0:09:13.1] Thien-Kim Lam: It does not. Surprise, surprise. I remember, my only sex talk was, “Don’t get pregnant.” They didn’t say how it was supposed to happen but believe it or not, I got my – I wouldn’t say “sex education”, “reproduction education” at my CCD classes. I was raised catholic so we actually had classes in middle school where they taught about reproductive health. That was my sex education, not my family.

[0:09:43.0] Veronica Yanhs: Mine was, aside from in fifth grade where they make you watch those videos and then we watch the females first and then we had to watch the male reproductive systems, videos. After that, I discovered this book called Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. I read that book, that was my sex education as a kid. I was 10 years old when I read that book because I was like, “Oh, is this like a space book?” No, it’s not.

[0:10:09.6] Thien-Kim Lam: Yeah, I mean, that’s why I got into romances at first. I’m like hey, surely, they’re talking about sex here. Back then it was, you know, in the 90s, a lot of the sex was very vague and all heterosexual of course because that’s what I can get my hands on, was the guy knew exactly what to do but they’d never named the body parts the actual names. It was like, “his member” or I don’t know, something totally cheesy.

We’ve come a long way because even in my book, I need terms, I’m not sure if I can say this on your podcast but – 

[0:10:44.2] Veronica Yanhs: Of course, you can.

[0:10:45.5] Thien-Kim Lam: I mean, I write “cock” and “dick” in my book because that’s how everyday people call those body parts, right? I think that’s important to have that language because knowing what to call things is the first step. Being comfortable with using those terms is also really important.

[0:11:02.0] Veronica Yanhs: What systems did you have to create for yourself to be able to write a book on time and also, make sure that you’re curating your boxes. You’re running two businesses then. All these things sound great and all but how are you still staying sane? I want to know that.

[0:11:21.7] Thien-Kim Lam: There were some tough moments. Now, I had already written my book when it was bought, as a debut author, they initially don’t buy your book on proposal for fiction writers anyway. The book of it was written but I had a lot of edits, different rounds of edits. That was during a pandemic, it was, I think challenges that, even if I had systems, they might not have worked for me at the time. I prefer to work in time blocks so I’ll block off days or hours to work on different projects so that my brain doesn’t have to switch back and forth constantly because that just really messes with my productivity.

 As for writing, I and so new at this, I don’t know what systems work best for me and because writing in such a long-term project, right? My boxes, I can go month to month and say, “Hey, that didn’t work in May, I’m going to do this for July.” I can’t say that about my writing because 80 something thousand words. It’s going to take me more than a couple of weeks to go through and figure out my systems. I’m hoping I have some systems for my current book that I’m writing and I hope that that works. 

I think when it comes to something that requires so much creativity, that’s a balance, systems and then acknowledging the creative process. That’s not to say— I don’t know with my writing, but my box I do have systems and the good thing is, it’s more or less the same with curating my boxes, just rinse and repeat. I have a Notion dashboard or what I do keep the steps in, I don’t look at them every month because I kind of know but I know that it’s there for when I am able to bring on a team member, that’s what I’m trying to do is document those processes so they’re there for when I’m ready to expand.

[0:12:59.8] Veronica Yanhs: That gets me hot and bothered.

[0:13:02.7] Thien-Kim Lam: I am so in love with Notion. At first, I think I’ve been using it for a year now and I just love how I could nerd-out over it and I’m sure that I’m not using it to what it’s capable of but it does what I want. I’m a mixture of paper and digital planning.

[0:13:17.3] Veronica Yanhs: I love it. So long as it makes you excited to use this, so long as it prompts you to want to document because like, when we were talking before we hit record, the things that we do repeatedly, they’re called habits but then once you document that, that actually finally becomes a process to me. That’s the difference between habits and process. Somebody asked me that question, so I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s true, we do things every day, we don’t think about them” but the moment we write them down, it’s now living outside of our brains and it makes our lives so much easier.

The fact that you’re prepping your business for the future this much and anchoring it in Notion, because we use Notion as our knowledge base as well, it’s just awesome. Yes, even though we have tasks like ClickUp task templates and Google docs and I even use Miro for my mapping or create Loom videos, it’s like, all of it is scattered about but it’s all anchored and centralized in Notion and we have this area that allows us to see where the documentation origin is. I love that you chose Notion as that home base.

[0:14:21.3] Thien-Kim Lam: Yeah, I like it because it is so open-ended, you know I can do whatever I want though that’s what made it intimidating when I first started. I have to say that I am not great at consistency. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken the Gallup Strength but consistency is number 34 for me. It’s like way at the bottom so I have to be cognizant of that. If I am creating these systems and processes that I know that there is flexibility because I don’t like feeling hemmed in by having to do exactly what this is I’m supposed to do. 

[0:14:53.7] Veronica Yanhs: Yeah, I love that. I hate rigidity but I embrace what I call a structured freedom a lot like I am creating boundaries and rail guards but then at the same time, I’m free to bounce around. As long as I know I have this tunnel that I need to go from one end to the other, it doesn’t matter how I bounce as long as it’s contained in that tunnel and then at the end of the day, I make it or wherever, whenever, make it to the end of the tunnel. 

It’s all about just making sure what works and so I love that you focused on time blocking. Did you always know that time blocking was your thing or did it take a few iterations to understand how you worked best? 

[0:15:32.8] Thien-Kim Lam: I’ve always been a multi-passionate person. I’m doing a lot of projects and I learned, I don’t know when this was, because I’ve been time blocking for several years now that I work best when I can focus on one thing at a time. 

[0:15:46.4] Veronica Yanhs: That is so me. 

[0:15:47.1] Thien-Kim Lam: One project. I call them projects because I used to write a blog, do food blogging, freelance, I mean I did everything trying to – because I had small kids so I couldn’t – I was the primary caretaker so I couldn’t work a regular nine-to-five job. I don’t know where it is where you are but childcare in the DC area is ridiculous. It is basically like another – you would work a full-time job to pay for daycare, so I opted to stay home and had to find different freelance stuff. 

I learned if I didn’t block off time to focus on one thing at a time after the kids were in bed or napping that I would never get it done. 

[0:16:22.6] Veronica Yanhs: What does your day-to-day look like? 

[0:16:24.9] Thien-Kim Lam: Well, my kids are older now. They’re pretty self-sufficient, so my day-to-day is – well, my pandemic day-to-day is once I’m up in the morning, I have a small office. We finally add a curtain about six months ago, so I feel like I have my own private space and I check my planner. On Sundays, Sunday night I’d sit down and loosely plan on my weekend and what I want to get done during the week and what days are best for each kind of work. 

I look at my planner and say, “Hey, is this still good for today?” and then I’ll figure out what’s the priority and work on that first and then go down the list and do other things. I try to put like tasks and tomorrow, I kind of have like Q3 goal planning. I’m trying to do those task things like in my business and then on my business. 

[0:17:11.6] Veronica Yanhs: I love it. Did staying at home make it easy for you to just choose a subscription box model as a way to generate income or actually, why did you choose to do a subscription box model? 

[0:17:25.7] Thien-Kim Lam: That’s a very good question. I have experience in sales so I used to be a consultant for an in-home toy company. I did that for 12 or 13 years. I was really good at my job but I wanted to – I didn’t want to leave my home as often. I was going out two or three times a night to do shows, right? I just was tired of that grind and DC traffic and I want to do something where I could do it all from home online and I thought why not the subscription model?

It is like a book club, here is a box you get every month and you could read the book and then we’ll have book club discussions. Because I missed that interaction with people, right? As a mom with small kids at the time, it just wasn’t easy for me to leave the house for a couple of hours to go to a book club. And I’m an introvert, so finding a new book club is so intimidating. It’s funny people will say, “Oh you talk about sex toys all day but you’re afraid to talk to a stranger?” But if I am talking about sex toys to a stranger, I can do that! 

I wanted the subscription model because I wanted that recurring income. I wanted people to feel part of something and not make it purely transactional, not just to buy this thing and run away with it and not come back because I think the experience about buying a new to you toy, when you like, you want to share that with somebody and I wanted to give people a space. Our Facebook group, Bawdy Bookworms Insiders, is open to anybody. You don’t have to be a subscriber to join. You can go in and say, “Hey, I really like this book that was in last month’s box. Can you recommend me more books, queer romances that have a lot of steam in them?” or “Can you recommend books with autistic characters?” things like that because I can’t read everything. I am not the expert. I am the expert at putting books and toys together but I’m not the expert on romances or toys, right? 

I wanted to give people that community and they can experience this box together and of course, recurring income is always nice. It doesn’t hurt. You know I constantly have to find new customers whenever you are launching a new product, right? I think that having a monthly item gives me a good promotion calendar like I know what I’m going to be talking about next month. I can hype it up, I can do the same things like reveal the theme of the box, reveal the book. We’re working on adding author interviews so that I can create these systems of how am I going to promote this box? So that I don’t really have to think about something unless it is not working for us, right? So that I can kind of slap that in. 

[0:20:08.0] Veronica Yanhs: I love how you anchored the subscription box model to be in alignment with how you wanted to live. Going out two to three times you said a night or a week?

[0:20:20.3] Thien-Kim Lam: A week. 

[0:20:21.2] Veronica Yanhs: With small kids, that doesn’t sound sustainable at all. I would be so stressed out, so I love that you chose a business model and a way of working that honors how you want to thrive and I think that’s something that’s not celebrated enough because people think “I should do this” or “So and so said I have to run my business this way.” Thank you so much for bringing that up and for just standing strong and how you want to live your life in a way that brings you so much pleasure and joy and for your family too so that they see you.

[0:20:54.3] Thien-Kim Lam: Yeah. Well, I want to acknowledge that I couldn’t have done any of this without my partner because he’s the one working the nine-to-five job with the health insurance and when you have kids, you need health insurance or, I mean, you don’t need it but it is very, very, very helpful. He was the one that was – he supported me. Anytime I said, “Hey, I want to start a subscription box” and he says, “Do it” or I said, “Hey, I think I want to write a romance book.” “Go for it” you know? 

He’s my hype person, he’s my best cheerleader and he is in the back doing all of those things to support me while I am here blabbing about toys. So he doesn’t complain about helping me try out new products. 

[0:21:35.9] Veronica Yanhs: I love that, so what’s next for you? You seem to have so many things on the horizon, what’s next?

[0:21:44.6] Thien-Kim Lam: Well, I would really love to grow Bawdy Bookworms even more so that I can bring on team members and really focus on growing our community and really focus on the education part, right? Educating people about pleasure and different toys and helping them find diverse romances. I think that that is super important to me is that giving people the opportunity to read books outside of their personal experiences can help them learn more about other people and cultures and help create empathy, right? 

We understand people and what they’re going through and romance is great about that. You are going on an emotional journey with these characters and you can understand where people are coming from, so that you can see that love is love, and here are people falling in love, and they are flawed like everyone, but they are beautiful. I mean, that’s what I want with Bawdy Bookworms. 

As for my writing career, I want to write more books with Vietnamese characters doing things that people don’t expect us to be doing to get us out of that bubble of whatever the stereotypes that the media has put our culture in. 

[0:22:56.0] Veronica Yanhs: For me, we have to be good girls. We’re touted as we have to be really obedient and we are kind of like that seen and not heard except I am like, “Okay, I’m wearing yellow today” so it’s just like you see me and you hear me. I love that you are writing books that are challenging the paradigm of the expectations or what society expects from us, right? Being someone who is Chinese, I’m really applauding what you’re doing. 

This is not something that we get to talk about enough and so I’m really excited for you to spearhead this conversation and doing it with your style and flavor. Make it steamy, make it romantic, make them kinky!

[0:23:43.7] Thien-Kim Lam: Well, I would think maybe in the future we’ll see. These set of books, we’re going to keep it, for us, it will be vanilla but I think for I had a lot of people say that Happy Endings was very steamy, very sexy for them and they were blushing as they read it. I think we’re going to have to warm people up to the kink. 

[0:24:04.7] Veronica Yanhs: I volunteer as tribute if you need what goes on in the kinky world especially from someone who is Chinese, so that’s a different topic for a different day as to how to navigate the kink and BDSM scene while being Chinese and like we are already a walking fetish as it is, so it’s like how do you make sure that boundaries are set so you’re protected and safe? That’s a conversation for another time. 

[0:24:24.8] Thien-Kim Lam: That would be a really, really good conversation, right. 

[0:24:29.4] Veronica Yanhs: But we will leave everybody – 

[0:24:31.0] Thien-Kim Lam: Wanting more.

[0:24:32.4] Veronica Yanhs: Yeah, wanting more. Okay, so before we close up this episode, I would love for you to tell our listeners like what are you going to do to make your business even more orgasmic than it already is? It can always be better, right? What are you going to be doing like in the next three months or so to have more business orgasms? 

[0:24:53.5] Thien-Kim Lam: Yeah, I am looking onto hire out tasks that I don’t enjoy doing that are not orgasmic. I actually just brought in my first part-time assistant and we’re working on onboarding and making sure our working styles mesh well together but I would love to bring on more people to take away all those pesky little things so that I can read books and attend meetings about new vibrators.

[0:25:16.5] Veronica Yanhs: I love it, so what are some of those things that you do not enjoy doing so that people kind of are like, “Oh, okay. I have some ideas too.” 

[0:25:23.4] Thien-Kim Lam: Funny enough, even though I used to do it for clients is that social media because there are so many little bits and pieces that go together like it just becomes a slog and because I don’t like having to figure out the algorithm every time it changes, I would love to have someone take that over. I recently got moderators from our communities so I don’t really have to be in the group anymore so that’s good but that’s what I – bookkeeping that definitely does not bring me pleasure. 

[0:25:55.0] Veronica Yanhs: I always tell my friends, I’m like, “I’m great at counting money but I am terrible at math.” 

[0:25:59.8] Thien-Kim Lam: That’s what spreadsheets are for. I’ve even bought spreadsheets to do it. I’m like, “But I don’t want to enter all the information.” 

[0:26:09.6] Veronica Yanhs: But it’s a part of business and so that’s why we talk about these things like you know, everybody experiences these things. It is not just us or you listener like, “Oh, am I not the only one that doesn’t like bookkeeping because I’m supposed to, right? Because I’m an entrepreneur, I need to -” It’s like no, you stay in your zone of genius, focus on what does well to bring in the money so that somebody else can take care of the books and other things for you. 

[0:26:32.4] Thien-Kim Lam: Right and if you’re like me where I didn’t feel like I was in a position to hire anyone, I had a running list and I think it’s in my Notion, like “tasks to hire out”. Every time I would work on something like, “I don’t want to work on this” I would add it to that list so that the time came that I looked at what’s the priority on this list for me to hire out? 

[0:26:50.0] Veronica Yanhs: This is amazing. I really appreciated that you said yes to coming on my podcast to talk about being Asian, being such a loud and proud proponent of sex positivity and pleasure for everybody like is there anything that you’d like to share before our time here comes to an end and we’ll make sure that your book is linked into the shownotes, your Facebook group, all the ways that we can find you. We’ll make sure that people can find you but yeah, what is something that you can tell us? 

[0:27:21.9] Thien-Kim Lam: If you enjoy reading romances especially very sexy ones and or talking about sex toys, I want you to join our Facebook community. It is free and open to everyone who is cool, right? If you like sex toys and romances, you’re automatically cool. It is called Bawdy Bookworms Insiders and send a request and I’ll see you in there. 

[0:27:44.5] Veronica Yanhs: Well, thank you so much for your time today. I am cheering you on with everything that you’re doing because it is so important, so that’s it. That’s the episode like you are doing the good work that needs to be done and so that we can have the conversations that desperately need to be had. Thank you for making that into your business and having it be pleasurable, productive, and ultimately profitable for you. 

[0:28:08.5] Thien-Kim Lam: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here and chat with you about pleasure. 

[0:28:13.3] Veronica Yanhs: Thanks for listening to The Business Whip, hosted by yours truly, Veronica Yanhs, CEO and Founder of Business Laid Bare. If you enjoyed this episode, spank that subscribe button in whichever podcast app you’re listening in and share this with your friends. Your support means everything, so thank you from the bottom of my butt because, let’s be real, it’s so much bigger than my heart. I’ll see you in the next episode.