A few months ago, I met with a business leader I admire a lot. My motivation was to connect and let him know I was looking for a new role. I knew his business was in a tough spot, I tried to comfort him with tales of woe of a now, very successful business. I thought my past misery might cheer him up.
After my war stories he said “you should tell that story in an interview”. I laughed, it wasn’t a story I thought would put me in a good light with potential employers. Now that I have started my own business, I want to write a series of failure, this story will be my first installment in that series.
I had been asked to run a product, and the request also came with an ask to move to London for its delivery. At the time, my husband was in grad school and moving for him was not an option. I decided instead of moving, I would spend the majority of 4 months going back and forth. My schedule was 2 weeks in London, 1 week at home. It was exhausting, but I had a lot of time to dedicate to work with no kids and a husband who worked and went to school.
My product was going well, it was a simple data product designed for low volume clients, simple input and outputs. We had a bigger business problem with volume of clients who decided about a month before a compliance date to onboard to us. (a good problem to have in the long run, certainly not the short term) We had an onboarding backlog we knew we couldn’t meet by go live. Clients were flooding our ops lines and emails, and we had just hired a new head of Operations (poor guy). So, what was the solve? Well, frankly at the time, there wasn’t. The higher ups demanded action, but the reality was, even with our best efforts, we wouldn’t onboard everyone in time. The process was highly manual, and only so much that could be done.
I started running working group calls with clients, the objective was to talk message submission for my product, but it soon just became a status call for their onboarding. I had no access to these systems, so I couldn’t tell them, I just did my best to try and get clients answers. The only success I had at the time, was giving clients my email address, so they could feel like something more was being done (sometimes I could get answers faster for them but most times I was in the same line waiting)
Go live came and went, and we still had more people to onboard. We eventually got through the back log when a new issue presented itself. We couldn’t extract data from the system. We had been overloaded by the submission volumes. So now, I not only had the non-onboarded clients yelling at me, but also the onboarded ones.
So, there I was again, sitting in front of clients with little to no information. Shockingly, it built some good relationships and trust with my clients. They knew I wouldn’t hide from them, and they knew I’d still show up, even when I had nothing to say and I was clearly there to keep them in a holding pattern until we could get a plan together. (and to be honest, a lot of times, just take a flogging from them).
There. That’s the story! Eventually we got a plan together that we communicated to clients and executed, but it wouldn’t be the last issue we encountered in a short time span. After this, the business became much better at communication in order to handle crisis, so much so, we actually started to avoid them.
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