Pam Ryan Mejia

Company

Better Together Cubed

Background

Pam Ryan Mejia spent30 years as an educator. The pandemic turned her into an entrepreneur.

“I was on a call with Brené Brown and she said, ‘This is your time to do something that matters to you. Serve the work in a way that you never thought possible,’” Pam explains.

So she did. She created Better Together Cubed, a Wellness/Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) program to help schools improve the health and wellbeing of educators, students, families, and communities. The goal is to foster healthy relationships, regulate emotional health, and lead with compassion and empathy. It uses many of Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead concepts which focus on empathy, resilience, courage, and connection.

“The timing was perfect to get back into the education world after several years away from it,” she says. “It felt like an aligned opportunity to create something the community was desperate for.”

Challenges

Pam had 30 years of education experience, a Dare to Lead certification to implement her learnings, and absolutely no business plan.

“I just did it. It was a passion project and just something I had to do,” she says.

She wrote 320 lessons for her program and needed $58,000 to print the curriculum. She didn’t have it. Secondly, she couldn’t possibly serve every school or district in the country by herself. The model required extensive training and she had no money to hire people to help her.

“I did it because I felt in my core that this is what I should be doing,” she says.

Solutions

The silver lining to her exceptionally slow growth was that it gave her time to make decisions and get ready.

“I learned scalability through the BIG program, how to ask for money, and how to staff up,” she says. “I have a really solid team now.”

Breaking into a well-defined industry with so much competition from well-known brands and finding a way to be relevant was part of the challenge.

“BIG gave me confidence, awareness and a focus on how to show up, how to create collateral, and how to present in a way where even though I’m not in the big league, I look like I’m way more prepared than other companies,” she explains. “I learned how to better define myself and my company, as well as the discipline to stand firm on it.”