42:4 Ghosts of holidays past

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to episode number four of the holiday season. My name is Lee and you are listening to Trailblazer FM. In this episode, we comfort our agencies as they share ghosts from Christmas and holidays past. Sometimes it’s great for us to be able to hear those horror stories that others have been through in order to help protect ourselves from similar situations. We kick off with Ali Green, from GreenMellon Agency, who shares how giving gifts went terribly wrong.

Ali Green:
Most of my stories of Christmas past are failed Christmas gifts and deliveries. But I will start with just to commiserate with my fellow agency owners, that there is always the client that has a deadline of end of year, or they submit a request the week of Christmas and they want it by the end of the week. And you just wonder, “Are you the antichrist?” This is terrible. What is this?

Ali Green:
But luckily, we’ve been in business for 12 years and we have learned to stand up for ourselves and prune out those naysayers and those bah-humbuggers. But, that ultimately does come in. So now our team … we’re pretty resilient and we know how to say no. So, that’s a nice skill to have learned. But, oh my gosh, Lee, we have attempted so many … early on, so many creative attempts at Christmas gifts. I remember we have … So we’re on a cute little downtown square in Marietta, Georgia. We have a lot of local businesses here and we obviously love to support them. There is one down the street where they have … so this might be a very Southern American term, a Mason jar, which is a glass-

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Is that a big jar for like … they call canning-

Ali Green:
Canning, right. Canning and not all of them are quite as … Some of them are very straight with just a twist top. And this lady made cakes in Mason jars and they were darling. They were so cute and they were delicious. So we decided to send everybody two Mason jars of these little cakes. I packaged them myself, put bubble wrap and tissue paper, and probably the majority of my thank yous were, “My cake arrived shattered.”

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, no.

Ali Green:
Oh. And I put so much work into making those little packages, just so darling and presentable. So that likes to come back and haunt me in my sleep. Go with the easy … Submit your spreadsheet and let somebody else handle it that has done this before.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Listen to last week’s episode to find out more. [crosstalk 00:03:02]

Ali Green:
Yes. There’s so many stories. But I’ve ordered cakes with a four month old in the pouring down rain, trying to get in with my list of clients. And now I realise that I don’t have to actually go to a location to do it. That was a terrible memory of trying to do this last minute Christmas ordering when I was still on a maternity leave. Oh, this year Lee … I mentioned on a previous episode that this year we decided to do Thanksgiving cakes instead of Christmas cakes, because we’re thankful for our clients.

Ali Green:
But Lee, I have to tell you that our point of contact at the Piece Of Cake location, she dropped the ball a little bit, and they didn’t go out until the week after Thanksgiving, which we got them in. We’re still think that the message was still relevant, but it was just a little delayed. So, things happen and that’s okay.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Continuing the theme, Nicole [Osborne 00:03:54] from [Wunderstars 00:03:55] shares how overthinking can really create a lot of stress.

Nicole Osborne:
One thing which immediately springs to mind, I was working with this agency and lovely team, lovely owner, but complete bottleneck in terms of decision making. And they wanted to come up with something so highly innovative and so highly unusual for their clients, and they just couldn’t make up their mind. So it really became very stressful and at a time when your team was meant to be winding down for Christmas, of having the good spirit. We were all really stressed about what present we would actually choose for our clients. And everyone had to fill out these really long spreadsheets with all the contact details, and it became quite a negative experience.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, no.

Nicole Osborne:
So when thinking about horror stories of Christmas, it was just really stressful. Something which was meant to be pleasurable and joyful, turned just into stress. So my advice here is just to not overthink it and really empower your team to come up with some ideas. And just go with it, because unless it’s something completely inappropriate, you can’t really go wrong with finding a good present.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Actually, I think of Mark now at [Designbox 00:05:05] and he’s the perfect person to choose a Christmas gift for me, because him and I get on really well. So instead of Tom … For example, if Tom was going to do that and try and come up with everything, that’s a lot of stress, isn’t it? And Tom’s actually going to be on all of these shows, which is phenomenal. So be sure to check out their website and they did our new brand, which I’m sure you are all enjoying. But taking the stress away from Tom, Tom would be able to say, “Hey Mark, what do you think Lee would like?” And I think Mark works closely with you as well, doesn’t he? So he’d be able to say, “What do you think Nicole would like?” And basically the reason why I say this is, I’m hoping that Tom is now going to send me a Christmas present.

Nicole Osborne:
Yes. I think you’re absolutely right. A person who knows the client would best should come up with a suggestion.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Absolutely.

Nicole Osborne:
And as an agency owner, be open minded.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And it’s a shame that whenever that was and whoever that was, it got so stressful. It came from the right place, which is phenomenal. But like you said, it got too … there was too much pressure to get it right. And actually, that made it less enjoyable.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And with gift giving nightmares, it appears that Ali and Nicole are not alone. Here’s [Chantal 00:06:19].

Chantal Edouard-Betsy:
I actually do. And it comes from before all of my clients were international, when I had all these local clients. One year I went ahead and I ordered a whole box of power banks and … like adapter, like charger/adapter things. I thought that was quite a cool, techy gift to give to all my local clients. Unfortunately, the place I ordered it from delivered it really, really late. And to this day, I still have not ever delivered these things to my clients. About six years later, I still have three boxes of power banks and charging things for various phones in the bottom of my office cupboard that have never been distributed. So yeah, epic fail that one was.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
However, in about 10 to 15 years time when the new vintage phone scene is making its rounds, you’ll make a killing on eBay selling all of those. Fantastic.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
In our next clip, Michael MacGinty shares how a lack of support contracts and of boundaries, created a holiday nightmare.

Michael MacGinty:
Probably like most agencies, or most people who are getting into this business, I made the mistake … We didn’t have support plans. To be honest, back in the day we didn’t talk about support plans. We just supported people, so we were on call 24/7 fixing any issue that came up. Usually, a site going offline due to a customer not updating their sites, or updating poorly, or maybe they had auto updates or whatever. So we responded to fix things that we didn’t break for years and years for people who weren’t paying to have anything done.

Michael MacGinty:
And Christmas was a huge struggle for quite a few years. It actually caused quite a lot of grief, especially with e-commerce websites. Because when we were trying to wind down for Christmas, they were getting busy and getting ready for sales, or whatever. And it left scars to the extent that we actually don’t do e-commerce websites for retail, we just stopped. It just made it too hard. Even if somebody is on a support plan at Christmas, they just expect … they need someone to be there to support them. And we’re not willing to give up our Christmas anymore for anybody. So, if a customer comes, or a client with us for a support plan, we make it clear that Christmas time we’re shutting down.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And that’s good. Being able to set that expectation is all you can do, rather than trying to provide some sort of skeleton crew. Because if you do that, somebody still has to suffer during Christmas.

Michael MacGinty:
We do do the support thing, but we just don’t do it for people who are likely to need it, if you know what I mean? So, very few solicitors call us on Christmas day.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s true. And if they do, worry.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Continuing the theme of setting boundaries and expectations, Travis shares his story of their ultimate generosity with somebody who wasn’t even a client, but was in desperate need.

Travis Buck:
Yeah, so there was this time … it was where a large local retailer came to me. They’re a big multimillion dollar tech company and they aren’t even really a client. We got a phone call out of the blue about this time of year. They do 90% of their business on the holidays. This was the owner who was a referral of a referral. He has a web team on staff who contacted another web person, who somehow contacted me. And the thing was their website, the products were actually disappearing from their store page.

Travis Buck:
It was about 10,000 product website. Each day more and more products were being removed from their search results on their own site.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, wow.

Travis Buck:
So over the phone, we basically just went through the site. He didn’t even have FTP info, I had no backend access. This was just an owner and he called this an extinction event, and he was just desperate to get inside of what he could tell his web team. And my partner and I, we basically somehow were able to go through the site, run some different scenarios. Ultimately, telling him to what to take back to his web team, which they did fix it. And I got this one random email a couple weeks later from the web team, CCing the owner, explaining it was his mistake. He had fat fingered the .htaccess file, which was spelled wrong.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, wow.

Travis Buck:
It almost took down an entire company.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Holy crap. That is insane. Did you get any compensation for that one, or was that the goodness of your heart?

Travis Buck:
No, just warming my cold, dead heart. They still are not a client, but they’re a major brand out here.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Hey karma, are you listening? Just hello? And we don’t mean negative against the client, we mean bringing something positive to you. Actually, I do believe in paying it forward to be honest, as well. So I’m pretty sure A, you saved that guy from an awful Christmas and B, somehow if it hasn’t already, that’s going to come back and bless you in some way.

Travis Buck:
Yeah. That’s what I’ve always thought too. If I can just work out some miracle for this dude, it’ll come back some way.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
One of the miracles is that you didn’t send coffins to your clients.

Travis Buck:
Oh, my God. That was such a miracle.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Guys, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, listen to episode three or four. It’s one of the ones about giving.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
In my own experience as an agency owner, we’ve had some very stressful Christmases supporting clients, even through Christmas day. Next, I asked Emily how GoWP could help agency owners like me avoid those potential scenarios.

Emily Hunkler:
We are a 24/7, 365 days a year maintenance and content edit service. Apart from the other services we offer developers and copywriters and all of that, we started with maintenance and support. We have some really great case studies of agency owners going through similar situations like you just explained. So haven’t been able to take a vacation since they started their agency, can’t spend time with their family on the holidays. Not being present basically, because they’re monitoring sites and making sure things don’t crash and taking support and answering clients, and all of that sort of stuff. So with GoWP, you can forget about all of that. You work on your schedule, your project management, all of that. You take care of that, but put your sites on maintenance and support with us and it’s our team of developers that handle all those things.

Emily Hunkler:
We have folks on staff 24/7, all year round to field those support requests, the ticket queue, all of that. Get it done fast too. Our SLA is around eight hours, but we’re a lot faster than that. It’s generally three hours where things are getting resolved, I believe. So you’re able to give and offer your clients top notch support year round, all day long. So they know that if their site crashes on Christmas, someone is there and it doesn’t have to be you. Someone is there to take care of that and we are happy to be that team to do that for you. Because we love the stories we hear and the case studies we get to write about agency owners who finally got to spend a Christmas with their family without stressing, or finally get to take a vacation with friends and not worry about all of the websites they’re managing. So that’s why we’re here, that’s what we love to do. We love to help agency owners create those stories.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Next, Tom Amos shares an experience I’m sure many of his have been through at some point, either through Christmas or during some time off. Remember in our upcoming episodes, we’ll be looking at how to avoid these sorts of situations in the future.

Tom Amos:
I actually asked one of the guys about this. He just reminded us of this absolute nightmare we had a couple of years ago. One of our largest client’s website went down Christmas day. And the rule is, don’t look at your emails when you’re off, but I did. And obviously you’re at a family party and suddenly the website’s down. And it’s one of the biggest clients, so financially they’ll lose a lot of money Christmas, or Boxing day or whatever time of the year. But I just remember going to the toilet at my mom’s house and sending out an email to the web hosting company, just to hope that someone would fix it. But, it did get sorted in the end. That wasn’t a great Christmas, that.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That does as well just remind me of all the anxiety I’ve ever felt from checking an email on any sort of break, or even at the weekend. And even if the subject line sounds even remotely kind of curt, I just get overwhelmed with this feeling of dread as I open the email.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I can still feel that anxiety every time I imagine checking an email during the holidays. This is something personally I do, which is to disable all notifications when I am off. In the iPhone, I’m able to disable email syncing. I assume you can do that at as well in Android and on other platforms. We have a rule that none of my team should be contacting me at all via any means whilst I am away. And that does include weekends.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
A lot of this has been born from many experiences where myself, or my business partner, Tim have found ourselves working during holidays. Be that on pitches, be that on support, be that trying to work out massive business issues that really we shouldn’t be touching. We should be taking downtime and relaxing. Like I mentioned earlier, in the upcoming episodes we’re going to be looking at how agencies manage client support during the holidays to ensure that everybody gets some time off.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So if you’re not subscribed to this podcast, can I encourage you? Go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Also, if you have any of your own ghosts of Christmas past, your own horror stories, be sure to head on over to trailblazer.fm to share them. As always, a huge thank you to Cloudways for sponsoring this season. You can find out more about them over on trailblazer.fm/cloudways.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’ve said it in all our previous episodes, I’ll say it again. We trust them with the big stuff. If we cannot afford for it to go wrong or even down over Christmas, we will always trust Cloudways for those mission critical projects. Speed has always been one of those things that blow us away with the service at Cloudways. So why not sign up for a free trial and see how fast your WordPress website could rock and roll using their platform.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Again, trailblazer.fm, head on over to episode number four to share your ghosts from Christmas past. If we don’t see you in those comments then, let’s see you in the next episode.