A Hard Lesson Learned ....

 by: Diane Hughes

Are you like me? I like to handle things on my own so I don't even THINK about incorporating help with anything I am working on ... especially my business as a whole.

Well, I learned something new recently. It was a HORRIBLE experience that actually turned out for the better. Let me tell you my story:

I have a team of about 2000 associates. Since all my sites are hosted at Host4Profit except for the site that their websites are hosted on, I decided to transfer everything over. Well, I have transferred many sites before so I knew how it worked. I knew I would get access to Host4Profit before transferring with my registrar and that all I had to do was upload everything over to the new host while my old host was still active. This would make a seamless transfer. No one would ever know anything happened ...

To make a long story short, it didn't turn out to be as seamless as I hoped and things were a little messed up for about a day. Needless to say, I received TONS of emails!

"What happened?!"

"Where did you go?!"

"Give me my money back!"

"Hello? Are you there?"

Well, I couldn't ANSWER these emails because I was busy getting the transfer problem fixed. This caused most of them to email me a SECOND time, therefore doubling the amount of emails sitting in my email box! Stress was building as I worked to get the problem fixed ....

After the problem was finally resolved, I sent an update letting everyone know what happened. I got back to any emails that I felt needed answering ... this whole thing took almost 18 hours of my time and NO SLEEP for me!

The stress and the fact that I had no sleep took it's toll on me. When I got some really rude emails from some angry customers and associates, I didn't take my own advice and let it sit until I calmed down. You know what I did instead? I gave refunds to all of them! I didn't even want to deal with it ... as a result, I refunded over $1000 in sales.

I know, I know ... you're asking yourself, "How could that be a good thing?" Well, it made me get out of my bull stubborn "I'll handle it all" attitude and incorporate some much needed help. Now I have someone to answer those emails, someone to answer those calls, and various other things. What a RELIEF! Why didn't I do it sooner?! :)

If you answered "Yes" to my first question above, heed my advice. Take off those bull horns and find a couple of people that you trust to help with some of your dauntless duties. And if your business is not big enough yet to incorporate help and you're handling it just fine ... don't forget this advice when it grows right before your very eyes ----

Copyright 2004 Diane Hughes