Episode 35: Owning Up To Your Own Mistakes in Business and Creating Your Own Fool Me Twice Checklist
We’ve all made mistakes in our business but how do you handle it when a client or a customer confronts you about it? Are you someone who quickly owns up to faults? Are you someone who avoids confrontation at all costs? Do you kind of ignore the person and or ignore their emails or ignore the text messages with the person you've argued with until enough time has passed that your mistake is completely forgotten?
In this tip episode, Fiona discusses the importance of owning up to your mistakes and shares how you can avoid doing them again by preparing your own ‘Fool Me Twice’ checklist.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
How do you deal with arguments and mistakes?
Fiona’s experience on handling a mistake she made
Fool Me Twice checklist
On making mistakes
On owning up to them
Conclusion
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to Episode 35 of My Daily Business Coach podcast.
Today you're listening to a tip episode, which, you know, as it sounds, is a quick episode with a tip, tool or tactic that can help you in your small business. If you're new to this podcast, welcome, welcome, welcome. Thank you for tuning in.
In this podcast, you might not know that I offer three different types of episodes. So once a week I give you a quick tip episode like this one. It's usually five minutes or less. And then every Thursday, Australian time, I offer either a longer coaching episode where I walk through an element of business in sort of more detail, or I do a longer interview with an amazing small business owner from around the world.
Go back and have a look at some of the past episodes after you've listened to this one, of course, and you'll find a whole lot of really great interviews with amazing people. You'll find a whole lot of coaching episodes and like this one, so many tip episodes. So thank you, thank you, thank you.
Whether you're just tuning in today for the first time or you're tuning in for the 35th time and you’re like a loyal listener, thank you. All right.
So today I'm going to be asking you in this tip episode to think about something that could be perceived as negative. And, hey, I know we have a lot of negativity happening in the world right now. And you might be like, really? Do we need more, Fiona? But hopefully it won't be too tough. And what's more, you know, considering this thing that could be perceived as negative may just help you immensely when it comes to your business. So ready. All right. Let's get stuck in and find out what I'm even talking about.
Take a minute, if you can, and really think about the last time that you argued with somebody about a mistake or an error that you'd made. So it could have been a personal argument at home. I mean, hello, anyone who has been in lockdown like I am in Melbourne for six and a half months with your significant other and kids and everything else, there's definitely going to be some arguments and there's going to be mistakes that are made or things that were miscommunicated also.
You know, in a professional setting particularly, a lot of people are working from home and we're having to navigate sometimes people and navigating things that they've never had to use before, like Zoom or Slack or different sort of platforms. And so, of course, mistakes are going to be made. Any time that you're doing something new, there will be mistakes and errors. I mean, that's how we learn. So think about that time that you've had that last argument and think, what role did you play?
You know, what sort of person were you in that argument? What kind of type, I guess, would you have when you respond to an argument? What do you like when you argue with someone?
I know it's a bit of a confronting question, but really take a minute to consider it.
Are you someone who quickly owns up to faults and who’s like, “Oh, hands up. That was me. Totally. You know, I'm here. I'm transparent.” Are you someone who might, you know, avoid confrontation at all costs? You hate confrontation and you prefer to walk away rather than sit down and hash things out. Do you kind of ignore the person and or ignore their emails or ignore the text messages with the person you've argued with until enough time has passed that your mistake is completely forgotten, you know? What are you like when you argue with someone?
Now, there's no right or wrong answer to these questions, but be aware of how we deal with mistakes is really important.
If you're looking to grow your business, particularly if you're gonna bring on staff, even if they're remote, you know, how do you own up to mistakes? Are you going to be just throwing everything, you know, throwing them under the bus, or are you going to be like, no, I completely see how that was my fault.
So an example in my own business. I mean, there's been plenty of examples. Let me tell you. A big example for me was about 14 months ago, maybe a little over that I launched my first online course, which was Marketing for Your Small Business. And that is still available if you're interested in doing a marketing course, you know, self-paced online with everything that you need to know to create a really great marketing plan. Not just now, but, you know, in the future and be able to replicate that again and again and understand what marketing actually is. You can check that out at marketing for your small business dot com, or you can find it on mydailybusinesscoach.com/shop.
So anyway, I launched that course. Yet, like I said, 14, 15 months ago and now when I was offering that I was launching it for the first time, I made a big mistake, a big mistake in one of the course offer emails that I sent out so I could have blamed it at the time, you know, on a lack of sleep. I think I had a four month old baby or that it was launch week or the fact I was, you know, trying madly at the time to meet the manuscript deadline for that my publisher had set for my book. My first book, Passion, Purpose, Profit.
So I could have easily said, oh, you know, I could have just thrown all of these excuses. But they were just that they were simply excuses because this mistake was something I completely could have avoided if I had taken a little extra time to check things, if I wasn't rush rush rushing, and if I had just sat down and literally gone through things. Or better yet, if I'd asked a friend or somebody I trust or, you know, my VA or somebody else to walk through the whole process and to check those emails, perhaps their mistake would have been caught.
And so when a beautiful client emailed me late at night asking if I'd meant to include something in one of my course offer emails, I was immediately flushed with embarrassment. I was like, Oh, my God, here I am. I'm their business coach and I'm just really showing my flaws right now. And I remember it. I remember just being mortified and mortified, especially that a client had got in touch with me. I mean, she was being very nice about it.
But the thought of initially, the thought of avoiding her email totally crossed my mind. I could have completely ignored it. I could have been like, you know, I'm busy. I just didn't see it amongst all the other emails. But honestly, what good would that have done? You know, really, what good would it have done? I would have still felt icky about it.
So I owned up to it. I admitted I had completely stuffed up and I apologise to her. And what's more, I took that mistake. And this is where the tip comes in for today's tip episode. I added it straight into her Fool Me Twice checklist. I know you’re like, “What? What are you talking about? Fool me twice.” Yes. So for every area of my business I have a basic Asana board, which includes a fool me twice checklist. You know the old adage fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
So I know it's not perfectly fitting, but it's something that sort of spoke to me. And I totally get that no business can operate perfectly at all, ever. But we try to learn from our mistakes and then we document them. And that is the key thing here. We document them so that we don't make them again.
Think about your own small business and any mistakes that you might have made. So things that come up more than once or that kind of really had an impact either on, you know, your bottom line, your revenue or in your reputation, your brand promise. And are they mistakes that you have yet to truly learn from?
And I know that, you know, I'm not on my own in this, that we sometimes do make mistakes. And it's almost like the universe goes out of its way to show us those mistakes again and again and again, whether in business or in life, until we learn that we're doing something wrong.
So do you have mistakes that you're still doing or that you have yet to learn from? Or maybe, you know, you'll learn from them, but you haven't actually documented them. And when things do go wrong and, hey, they will. They do they go wrong for everybody, no matter how experienced they are, a hush up they appear, you know. Do you learn from those mistakes and do you document them so that next time that mistake is less likely to occur or even if you've never do that thing again, at least you've documented it. So if somebody comes on board and you expand your business, they're aware of. “OK, let's just double check that. We don't do that.”
So if not if you're not doing that. My tip for you is that you start your own Fool Me Twice checklist. Now you can use Asana, you can use Trello. You could use just have like an Excel sheet. You can have a whiteboard, whatever, but you want to have some way of documenting it.
And this can be for basically anything. It could be for onboarding new customers or clients. It could be creating your sales pages. It could be when you launch new product collections. It could be when you do a photo shoot. You know, what was that mistake that we made that kind of cost us money or time? It could be when you pitched the media. It could be like I said, shooting a campaign or doing any kind of big ticket item for your business or small ones, because, you know, sometimes the smaller mistakes are the ones that stress us out the most.
But virtually any other project that's likely to be repeated. Think about what are the mistakes that you've made and then how could you document them so that it's less likely that those mistakes will end up happening again.
So, you know, I love my quotes. And there's a quote that kind of sums this up. And it's by author Neil Gaiman. And he says, I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes because if you're making mistakes, then you are making new things.
You are trying new things, living, learning, pushing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before. And more importantly, you're doing something.
So I guess I wanted to use that quote from my first point, which is don't let mistakes get you down. Every single person makes them. Every single person is. You know, no one is perfect. Every single person in business will at some point be doing something new. And every time you do something new, you're likely to make a mistake. It's through trial and error that we learn best.
And secondly, the point in today's podcast is to own your mistakes, learn from them, and importantly document them so that they become the lesson that they're meant to be.
Finally, to my lovely client. I know that she listens to this podcast who raised this mistake with me more than a year ago now, thank you, thank you, thank you. You know, often we see things and we don't speak up. And I think it takes courage to sort of say to somebody, did you mean to do this?
Because, you know, only then by highlighting it. Were we able to be like, oh, okay. Goodness me. We have made a mistake and we need to make sure we don't do that again. So you've really helped me and the team here at My Daily Business Coach not make that same mistake again and documented.
So that is it for today's tip upside, short and sharp. Look at your Fool Me Twice checklist and you don't have to call it that, but just have some way of documenting your mistakes. Looking at what you learnt and then what you'll do differently.
The show notes for this episode, as always, will be available at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/35 as this is episode 35. Thank you again for every single direct message on Instagram, emails, Facebook messages and other kind of text and everything else about my new book, Passion, Purpose, Profit. I am absolutely floored by the response and I'm so glad it's really helping small business owners scale without the stress. If you want to check that out, you can find it at mydailybusinesscoach.com/my-book that will tell you a little bit more about it and give you links to buy it.
So that is it from me. See you in the next episode. Bye.
