Learning from a costly mistake

I was recently interviewed and asked about the top three mistakes I’d made in my business.  Only three I thought, that should be easy.

But one came to mind immediately.  It was in the early days of Company of Women, and we’d decided in our infinite wisdom to run a May Play Day on a Saturday for women in the community.  We booked a hotel, lined up presenters, vendors and designed a neat passport, etc… It all looked pretty.. and fun.

We also decided to advertise in the local paper, and that was the big mistake.  We shelled out $6,000 to be on the back page of the paper – yes, the entire page.  It looked beautiful but we neglected to find out if the women we wanted to attract to the event, ever had time to sit down and read that paper.  Clearly they didn’t, because the turnout was low.

Those that came had a wonderful time, but the end result was disappointing.  We learned several important lessons from this mistake –

1.              Stick to what you do and know best.  We did a relatively good job of reaching women business owners, but with members of the community – we had a ways to go.

2.              Do your homework before making a big advertising spend. Check whether your target audience read or get the advertising format you are using. Now today it would be easier with social media, but not back them.

3.              Women don’t always want to play on Saturdays. Women business owners tend to be protective of their weekends. They want to spend them with their families, and Saturdays are usually the day for chores, not coming out to play.

4.              Don’t run before you can walk.   We leapt from evening dinners once a month to this all day, Saturday event.  No one really knew us. We had no history of putting on this type of event. No track record.

5.              It’s a lot of work.  The actual event itself was labour intensive.  We were exhausted at the end of the day, and when we barely covered our costs, we learned the hard way, that it wasn’t worth all the effort.

6.              The first time is always the hardest.  That’s how you learn and certainly with other events we have put on, the second year was way better.  But we were burned, and didn’t go there again.

The key with mistakes is to learn from them and move on.

Another Four-Letter Word to Ban

Soon. As a child that seemed like a vague term given just to pacify you and make you believe that whatever you wanted would be happening…. well, soon. As an adult, it’s a cop-out. 

And in the six years since we bought the farm, that is what we’ve heard about high speed Internet. How does the ad go… Coming soon to a neighbourhood near you. Well high speed may have come to numerous neighbourhoods near us, but it ain’t here yet. 

Some of you may be wondering what the big deal is? Remember dial up? How s..l..o..w it was? After a couple of years of tying up the phone line and still not getting great service, we gave in and went to satellite. Now this is not an inexpensive option and while faster than dial-up, high-speed it is not. It is also very fickle – and very sensitive to the weather – so if we have had a storm, it has rained, or a bit of snow… forget it. 

Lately there has been a rumour that we are getting high-speed …soon. But I am somewhat cynical and it can’t come quick enough for me. 

Word of advice to advertisers – forget the word soon – be specific – you might get more buy-in then.