Asking Virtual Assistants …. What’s Your “Big Mistake”
Virtual Assistants, what is your biggest mistake?
Tina and I were talking the other day about our ‘big mistakes’. You know when you do something wrong, realize what happened and get that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach.
Every VA has had a big mistake, it almost seems like a rite of passage!
So we thought it would be fun to make a big old list of our ‘big mistakes’. Partially to get a chuckle out of it, and also so that we all know that everyone does make mistakes (and thankfully most mistakes are easily fixed in the online world, phew!)
I’ll go first… I’ve made my fair share of mistakes over the last few years. The one that comes first to mind is when I scheduled a teleclass bridge line for one of my clients. Unfortunately for me, I seem to have a natural talent at mixing up numbers. So I reserved the bridge line and then proceeded to set up a thank you page and autoresponder - which all included the bridge line of course. While I thought I was being super efficient, it turned out that I reversed some of the numbers and so both the autoresponder and thank you page included the incorrect number. To top it off, the teleclass summary I sent to my client with all the details for the call, also included the incorrect number.
On the day of the teleclass - disaster struck. My client called me in a panic and another VA on the team was also calling as the teleclass registrants were calling her about the problem. Luckily I was in the office and able to get the correct numbers quickly so all parties could connect and start the teleclass.
It was a very stressful few minutes but I learned my lesson (even though I still feel a bit of panic every time I set up a teleclass!).
I’d love to hear from you … What’s your “Big Mistake”?
February 5th, 2009 at February 5, 2009 - 11:55 pm
My first (yes, there are more than one) ‘big mistake’ was when I had just started working for Thomas Leonard at CoachVille back in ‘02. One of my first big projects was working on a beautiful site that Thomas had created with photos of coaches that he had taken during his Millenium RV Tour. (I can’t remember the name of site, but it is no longer active anyhow).
Lo and behold, I was pretty new at updating websites - and I accidentally wrote over the homepage of the site. And I didn’t have a copy of the original as a backup. GAK! I was horrified… turned out that it was OK, no one was upset… but I felt really bad. My revised version of the homepage was no where near as nice.
And that reminds me of another big mistake while at CoachVille. I was doing events management and did a poor job of a venue negotiation for an event in Salt Lake City. Part of the agreement was that we would sell a certain number of hotel rooms along with the event - which was something we didn’t agree to as a standard. Well I missed it on this contract, which just so happened to be the one event that didn’t have many attendees. So we (CoachVille) was stuck having to pay a couple extra thousand dollars for unsold rooms. Ouch! That one still smarts.
February 6th, 2009 at February 6, 2009 - 10:18 am
Hi all,
The best apart about them - you learn from them and will never let them happen again!
I can recall a few mistakes
For me, I was recording a conference call for a client of mine who couldn’t be on the call because she was on an airplane. She asked me to call in and use audio acrobat to record the conference meeting so she could catch up when she arrived home.
So I used three-way conferencing and had audio acrobat recording the call. WELL, I thought I had the call on mute so that the church leader directors on the conference call couldn’t hear me and I would continue working. My other phone line rang and it was a friend/client. We started laughing and gabbing and chatted for about 30 minutes.
After my client’s conference call was over, I went into audio acrobat to get the link for her to listen to and I thought I would listen myself. Low and behold I had never muted my phone line. Worst part, right when they were going to say a prayer, you hear my loud voice as I answered the phone “Hey, how the heck are ya?”. You could hear me talking in the background for most of the call…the church leaders were great as they didn’t seem to let it bother them and they continued with their call…
I always make sure I’m muted now!
February 6th, 2009 at February 6, 2009 - 10:51 am
I want to jump in on this partially because of the fact that I laid my head on my desk and cried for about an hour and partially because Tina was the one who helped me deal :).
I uploaded 900+ emails from one list to another in which over 400+ had already unsubscribed… and there was no way to fix! Just talking about it I remember the pit in my stomach when I realized what I had done…
Thankfully Tina being brilliant, as she is and being so understanding helped me to move past this HORRIBLE mistake and survive another day..month..year of this virtual vortex we call business!
Thanks Tina as always YOU ROCK!
February 6th, 2009 at February 6, 2009 - 5:46 pm
I have this horrible memory for faces and that is one good thing about being in this industry. You rarely meet your clients. But one time I had a client here where I live in Atlanta who I had met a couple of times for at least an hour each.
While meeting a friend for lunch I saw a small group of businessmen and I happened to know one of the men in this group. I went over there, said hi to the guy I knew and then introduced myself to my client as if I had never met him before in my life. It was extremely embarrassing as he reminded me that we’d been working togethr for several months now. I looked like a total flake who can’t remember a person from one minute to the next. Now I try to memorize something on everyone’s face that will clue me in to who they are if we just “happen” to run into each other out of context.
February 6th, 2009 at February 6, 2009 - 8:12 pm
Oh man this is a fabulous post about mistakes because just when you think you have things under control, here comes a reality check to say “slow down Lucinda”.
I remember a time that I had to write out the delegation steps for client projects and I began writing an email to my project manager about the new clients we have on board, well in the email I was describing the frequent temper tantrums of a particular client and what to watch out for since the client had a habit of losing her mind every Monday morning. Well as I am placing the names and emails in the body of the message, what I did not do is erase the email address out of the sent box above, so the email went not only to the project manager but the irate client as well.
Recovery from that was heart breaking and i felt like putting my head in the toilet. I still feel bad about that and now use a separate email for my team.