This Week In Business: The Mess Up Edition

Those on Facebook know that I went to a talk this week where one of the presenters implied that one person companies were less responsive and legit then larger businesses. I like to think I’m fairly responsive, but the death of my dog last week did slow my capacity greatly, so maybe he was a little right. My company limit is, at this point anyway, how hard I can work, but larger companies are also limited by how hard they can legally make their employees work. I think it all comes out in the wash; there are advantages to both large and small.

So it was back to full capacity at Breaking Even Communications this week, but I know I’ll spend the next few weeks catching up completely. Here’s what’s going on:

When I wasn’t able to turn over work as quickly as normal, I knew I had two choices: 1) Type through the sobbing and give some people a mediocre product. or 2) Tell them I was devastated by the death of a non-verbal 27 pound animal and would just need a little time. I sent the email to my clients and the web developers I work with so that they’d know I wasn’t slacking.

I was waiting for someone to say, as nicely as possible, “It was just a dog” but no one did. Everyone understood, and some people took the time to write some very nice notes back. It just goes to show you that being honest really does get you far. And taking time to deal with things was actually really helpful for me.

One of my clients is starting an email newsletter and I thought this would be a great time to consolidate his three email addresses into one address that was branded with his domain name. This is all easy enough I know, but who didn’t check the box “Leave a copy of the retrieved email on the server” while importing the emails? That would be me. And who wanted their old emails to also live at the old email addresses? That would be my client.

After spending some time looking for an obvious solution, a friend ended up helping me. To be honest, I still don’t think I paid him enough but the good news is he enjoyed the challenge, I wrote him a great LinkedIn recommendation, and my client now has the emails where he wants them. It ended well, and I suppose it’s good that the problems I have are no longer simple fixes because it means I’m getting more technologically knowledgeable. (You know me, looking for that silver lining.)

But please learn from my mistake: deleting anything off a server is a bad idea. Just leave it there; you can always go back and delete it later, and servers have room for that stuff anyway. Lesson learned.

I got the checks my bank ordered me for my business account in the mail a few weeks ago. I was happily writing checks and when I went to send my friend payment via Paypal yesterday, and my business credit card was declined. I called the credit card company which is when I found out that check I wrote them to pay my business credit card bill was to an account that didn’t exist.

I called my bank. The account hasn’t existed since June, and the checks had the complete wrong account number on them. I spent the afternoon on the phone, embarassingly calling or emailing anyone I wrote a check to. Because I don’t buy things I can’t afford, in my personal life or for my business, letting someone know a check I wrote them was going to bounce made my stomach turn.

The bank reordered me the correct checks at their expense and I’ll be waiting to see if they try to charge me for stop payments or bounced checks. If they do, I’m moving banks. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

I made my blog available on Kindle.
One of my friends is a very active Kindle user and he inspired me to finally look into this. It turns out it was about a ten minute process, and while I’m still waiting for approval, having my blog accessible to a few more people (and making a tiny bit of income off of it) was worth the time invested. Here’s how to do it.

Here’s hoping your week is going well!