Technology Fails and How to Recover from them and Avoid Future Mishaps

After three attempts at making a guest appearance happen, my potential guest ended up CANCELLING our episode and I was left heartbroken. At no fault to the guest and 100 on me, I had to assess my recording set up and figure out how to never let that happen again.

We’ve all been there, having mishaps and technology fails in one way or another. After three attempts at making a guest appearance happen, my potential guest ended up CANCELLING our episode and I was left heartbroken. At no fault to the guest and 100 on me, I had to assess my recording set up and figure out how to never let that happen again. This inspired a conversation with my business partner, Lacy Estelle, and how tech fails have impacted her own business.

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Episode 6 Technology Fails and How to Recover from them and Avoid Future Mishaps

With Special Guest Lacy Curtis from An ADD Woman and The Woven Agency

www.anaddwoman.com

www.thewovenagency.com

Welcome to the No Mercy business coaching podcast with Emily Woodruff. The podcast that walks you through managing your own small business through the highs and the lows, will talk with small business owners from all over the US and share insights on how to help manage your business without the extra fluff and connect with other women just like you. Let’s dive in
Hey, everyone, it’s Emily with the No Mercy business coaching and consulting podcast. Thank you again for being here with me. I’m super excited to have you here. It’s been a really fun journey so far. Today, I have a guest on with me, we’ve heard from her before, this is Lacey from the woven agency and add woman, she is going to speak into a little bit of frustration that I have had in my life lately. Technology fails. So to get started, I want to tell you a fun little story. So as we all know, I’m doing a podcast, I’m interviewing people, I’m connecting with others, I have a few that I am I’m working on right now I have a list of guests who are coming on. My whole summer is booked up. I’m super excited for it. I had an interview recently, with somebody that I was really excited about. And I’m not I’m not gonna dog this person at all, they did nothing wrong. He was 100% my fault. And when I was sharing my frustrations with Lacey, she’s like, You know what other people have been there, let’s talk about it and normalize it a little bit, you know, doesn’t mean that it’s okay. Because as the professional, I should have been able to remedy the issues. But everything that I tried to do had just failed. So let’s go I guess. So I had everything scheduled. I’ve done my due diligence, I sent all my questions my interview prep guide, you know, to my client, and I’m super excited, I have a virtual meeting setup. And I have practiced this because it’s, it’s a new thing for me to have to record virtual meetings. I do it professionally, but we use a different app that I don’t have personally, I do it in their apps all the time. The difference is I am always at a secure location. I’m always somewhere that has a steady internet connection, I’m on a desktop, my location around me isn’t changing. Or if it is I have a Wi Fi hotspot. Everything is basically provided for through my work. And I’ve never had an issue ever. I’m the IT person at my day job. I am the IT person for some groups that I volunteer with. I am in the audiovisual team for my church. I’m very tech savvy. I did not expect myself to have the kind of technology fails week that I did. Because of all the experience that I have with it. I am usually the person you will call if your speaker won’t connect if the sound doesn’t work, if your Bluetooth just isn’t even showing up. Call me. So like I said, I had trialed virtual meeting. And I don’t even want to say the name of the client that I used of the the virtual meeting client that I used, because it’s not their fault. It’s me 100%. Or it was my surroundings. It was it was me 50 50% And my surroundings the other 50%. I’m not claiming this as my my complaint, total error. Yet, asked me in a week again, and I’ll probably I’ll probably offer up that other 50%. But right now I’m still mad about. So so when I trialed this, I tested it out. I made sure I knew how to record I made sure I knew how to, you know, switch things back and forth use all of the different tools that are available. So I thought I was golden. I decided that because of the time that we chose to record, I would just jump outside and do my meeting. At this little picnic table that we have at my day job. I thought it would be fine because I would be on their Wi Fi. I wouldn’t have to worry about the signal. Otherwise I’d have to go to like a McDonald’s or something and jump on theirs.

You know, and I think it’s so important, and I’m so glad that you’re willing to share this story too. Because people need to know that they’re not stupid. When technology does not agree with them. It happens a lot. And as much as we wish it didn’t happen. It really does especially working in this day and age when you know, primarily you’re going to be doing a lot of stuff from your computer and sometimes Doing stuff from your phone. And sometimes technology just does not agree with us doesn’t want to do what we ask. And it’s good to open up about this kind of stuff. Because I think a lot of times, we get sucked into thinking that it’s only happening to me. And if I was just more of an expert than I would know what to do, but it’s just not always the case. Okay, so I’d say, the worst technology fail, that I’ve had in my business. A couple of things, one of them had little to do with B had to do with my toddler, I made the mistake of leaving my computer out on our dining room table. And my husband called me to tell me that it had looked like my two year old had dumped an entire glass of water all over my computer. Now, granted, this is a technology fail, that doesn’t have to do with like your expertise, right, or your professionalism or anything along those lines. It’s just circumstances. But it definitely derailed me definitely was something I wasn’t anticipating, we ended up having to go buy a second computer, just so that I could get work done over the next month or two sides, like just taking on new clients. And so I did that. And we ended up I ended up being able to get my computer back, thank goodness. But it took about six weeks before I got it back. So that was definitely one of them. I would say as far as like, technology fail in, in the aspect in the realm of like developers. So this actually happened to me recently. And I’d say it’s kind of like a little bit of a scar, right? So I’m a WordPress developer. And I wear that name, strongly and proud that I understand a lot of code. And I understand the backend of WordPress for the most part. But WordPress is made up of a few different coding languages. One of those languages is called SQL, no SQL is all to do with like your database. It’s where if you have a website and you write a blog on it, your blog is stored in your SQL database. And it’s a different code than, than every other language that WordPress is usually made up of. And so I’m not super familiar with it. But this girl hired me and she asked me if I would help her troubleshoot this issue she was having, she had malware on her site, we acknowledged it, we were able to get the malware off. But the malware had created all of these posts that were sitting in draft. In her database, they were sitting in drafts inside the WordPress dashboard. They were all spam. And if any of them managed to get published because of the malware, they obviously could easily take somebody to a site that had a virus. And so that would be really bad idea. So we needed to get them all off. And we were trying to figure out a fast way to be able to delete them from her SQL database instead of from the front part of her WordPress, because that would just take absolutely forever. So we created what was called a call and the call pulled up the, you know, the blog post, the draft blog post that should have been the ones that I was looking for. Right? And so I started deleting on mass. I was deleting, I was deleting, like 250 250 of them at a time. And I got through about Whoa, I got through about 1000 I would say in mind you she had probably well, I’d say got through more like 6000 She had this malware had put like 32,000 pending posts on her site. Okay, so I got through all of these. And she told me, Hey, I need for you to stop whatever you’re doing. And let’s meet up this week, and let’s talk about it. And I want to see what you’re doing for progress. And I said sure. Yeah, great. Mind you. She knew that this was not like this was a little bit out of my expertise, right. But she was willing to like take a chance on me because I said I really wanted to learn it and see if I could handle it. And she was like, Okay. And after we met, we ended up figuring out that I had deleted 6000 posts that were not supposed to be deleted.

You make it sound so easy. You know, no, really, that’s really great advice. So I’m super happy to hear you say things like that. I think that I have one more question for you today. So how do you stay ahead of technology failures in your business? What are things that you do to protect yourself from having a horrible, awful no good, dirty, rotten week like I did.

totally understand that. Well, thank you all so so much. And thank you Lacey for being here. I appreciate everyone’s time and just for your support so far. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to the podcast. Leave us a rating leave us a review. Share it to your friends and family. I would love to grow this little community that we’re starting here. That’s all I’ve got for today. Thanks for hanging out, you know, I hope you have an awesome day. We’ll chat soon. Bye. Thanks for listening to the No Mercy business coaching and consulting podcast with Emily Woodruff. We specialize in branding and design for women, by women

Transcribed by https://otter.ai/referrals/94MUP1Y7

Find Lacy at www.anaddwoman.com or www.thewovenagency.com and on Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok.