Speaker Spotlight
She Has Been Called Too Much, Abrasive and an Acquired Taste. She Built a Forbes Top 200 PR Firm Anyway.
Kim Bode — Founder of 8THIRTYFOUR · Creator of Big Deal Energy™ · PRSA JEDI Communicator of the Year
Kim Bode is direct about the adjectives she has collected over twenty years. Too much. Aggressive. Abrasive. An acquired taste. She notes that these are the words reserved for loud women, and she has stopped trying to earn different ones.
In the same twenty years she built 8THIRTYFOUR into a Forbes Top 200 PR firm, named Michigan Woman-Owned Small Business of the Year and one of Michigan’s 50 Companies to Watch, with more than 100 communication awards behind it.
Both things are true at once, and the tension between them is what her keynote is actually about.
Stop Calling Soft Skills Soft
Her second keynote makes an argument worth putting in front of any leadership team right now. You have Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z in the same room with genuinely different expectations about feedback, communication and what being a professional even means.
That friction is not abstract. It shows up in turnover, in whether teams collaborate, and in whether the people you need stay. Calling the fix a soft skill is how organizations justify never resourcing it.
The other keynote, Big Deal Energy, is personal branding built on a simple premise: your brand is already operating whether you manage it or not. People are deciding whether to work with you and whether to remember you based on how you show up. Her QUIRKS framework turns the traits people have been told to hide into the thing they get referred for.
Where She Lands, and Where to Be Careful
She has taken the stage at the Women in Defense National Conference, the SBA’s ChallengeHER, the American Marketing Association, the HubZone National Conference, the Michigan Defense Expo and the Michigan Manufacturing Association. She serves on the board of the Small Business Association of Michigan and the Women in Defense National Council.
Her writing has appeared in Fast Company, Inc., Entrepreneur and HuffPost, and she hosts the Happy Hour Hustle podcast.
One thing to know before booking: her delivery is deliberately unfiltered, and she swears. For a women’s conference, an entrepreneurship audience or a small-business summit that is precisely the appeal, and it is why reviews use words like force and unforgettable. For a conservative association crowd or a client-facing event you would want to agree the register in advance. Tell us the room and we will have that conversation for you rather than letting it be a surprise on the day.
Book Kim Bode
Available for keynotes and facilitation on personal branding, communication, multigenerational teams and the real cost of soft skills.