EPISODE 015 | APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY

A huge welcome, in today’s episode, I’m going to share a recent challenge we faced – a mishap that occurred just a few days ago. We learned some valuable lessons about the importance of resilience and agility in content creation. Whether like us you create weekly content, you are a business owner, or just someone who appreciates a look behind the scenes, I hope you’ll find this story hugely valuable.

I actually don’t know if this episode will make it out, but I’m recording it as I think and hope it will be a hugely relatable and helpful.

WHAT HAPPENED …

To paint the picture, last Thursday, I woke up early, at about 5.30. I was the first up and it was still very dark outside. I sat in the kitchen, and I updated the website to add the links to our latest weekly podcast episode. I do this every Thursday morning, with a direct link from the homepage, often I add a banner to the top of the website, and I update the Podcast page, to include the image and a brief overview to the week’s episode. It felt good to have that done early, before our newsletter went out, which is always scheduled for Thursdays at about 6.30am. Often I don’t have a chance to update the website until later in the day, so I was feeling particularly organised.

Just after 8am, I received a WhatsApp message from a friend, which read “Listening to your podcast. Might you have uploaded a draft?”, I asked what she meant and then I listened to the morning’s podcast episode … and remember this is a globally listened to podcast of thousands each week … and it was clear, the original, unedited version had acidently been uploaded …

The unedited versions are often full of mistakes, restarts, questions about the way a sentence flows, checking if I have pronounced a word correctly, plenty of behind-the-scenes chatter, definitely not full versions that are intended to be shared … I felt pretty sick.

I immediately called Kate, one of my colleagues, she was already on it as she had received a number of emails from listeners.

By about 8.30am she had uploaded the correct version, but it then takes several minutes for this to feed through to Apple Podcasts and Spotify, during this time we could see the numbers going up as people were still accessing and listening.

Every part of me wants to ensure you receive a seamless experience from us, whether that’s through our paid guides and workshops, or our free weekly podcasts and newsletters, I want everything to be streamlined, easy for you to access and with actionable steps that you can hugely benefit from. And I felt we had really let everyone down.

I then opened Instagram and I honestly have never had so many DMs. Whilst my colleague was focussed on the upload, I then replied to everyone who took the time to let us know about the unedited podcast episode, recording and sending voice messages, to thank everyone for taking the time.

We then decided to write and send an email to those on our newsletter list who had linked to the podcast episode that morning, to say sorry and with the new link.

And then finally the correct version fed through to the platforms.

We decided that it was sensible to add a post on social media, as I feel it’s always important to own these kind of things.

YOUR GUIDE & ACTIONABLE STEPS

1. Act Quickly: Time is of the essence. The sooner you can address the mistake, the less impact it will have.

2. Communicate with Your Team: Make sure everyone involved is aware of the situation and what they need to do to help correct it.

3. Correct the Error: Replace the incorrect content with the right version as soon as possible.

4. Notify Your Audience: Transparency is key. Let your audience know what happened and what you’re doing to fix it.

5. Apologize Sincerely: A genuine apology can go a long way in maintaining trust with your audience.

6. Review and Reflect: Take some time to understand why the mistake happened and how you can prevent it in the future.

7. Update Your Processes: Implement new checks and systems to avoid similar issues.

8. Learn from Feedback: Pay attention to what your audience has to say about the incident. Their insights could be invaluable.

9. Stay Positive: Keep a positive attitude. Mistakes happen, but they don’t define you or your brand.

10. Move Forward: Don’t dwell on the error. I honestly felt so sick for those first few hours, but I moved on pretty quickly. Learn from it, improve, and continue to produce great content.

By following these steps, you can absolutely turn a mistake into a testament to your brand’s resilience, to show that you really care and your dedication to excellence. I also think it really shows a brand’s true colours when you see how they react to mistakes. Often I find these the most compelling testimonials when I am looking to trust and invest in a brand.

Our company is more than just me, it’s very much my vision and ideas, and I am supported by an incredible team behind me … and sometimes we make mistakes, and in those circumstances I do feel very exposed and it’s definitely a tricky position to be in. I am a relatively private person, so it’s tricky to put myself out there like that, but I also equally love what I do, and I love supporting people with their businesses, so it’s definitely worth it.

So, when things like this happen, I feel it quite deeply, BUT, I am also naturally a positive person. It me took me a little longer than normal to find the positives. One of the positives that came from Thursday morning, was in the messages we received, so many people said they loved hearing behind the scenes, particularly to understand what went into the recording stage, so I thought it might be interesting if I shared the full podcast process …

behind the scenes: the making of one podcast episode

Our weekly episodes are currently somewhere between 15 and 25 mins long. I keep a word document saved in a folder on our shared company Dropbox filed with topic ideas – my ideas come from experiences, something I read, aspects from our guides and courses, something I have listened to and from speaking to other business owners and friends, ideas come up from everywhere; they are mostly though directly from personal experience. I add new ideas to this file most weeks. I then usually batch research six of these concepts, to create new episodes over a period of one week. I will write my own thoughts and sometimes I will add industry insights, statistics and I double check all that what I’m sharing is current and factual.

It currently takes me just under a day to write the full notes for one episode.

I then collect all the notes together and I tend to batch record, so one episode after the other. I find this system to be the most efficient. Each episode takes up to an hour to record. I still find I’m a little nervous when I have the microphone in front of me, so it can often take me a few recordings to make sure what I’m saying is succinct. I want it to be succinct and helpful, and as neat as possible so I can make the absolute most of the time you spend listening. We are currently just under 20 episodes in, so I know I will become much quicker and I will find it easier as we progress and I have more experience.

My hope is that as I relax more, I will be able to record each episode in one take. But I can’t do that until I actually start and gain experience. It’s not quite perfect in my mind yet, but I know the content is strong, relatable and valuable, and I’m excited about becoming more efficient.

I then hand the recorded file over to be edited, which takes a few hours, and then it is checked by a third person. Once that has been approved, it then goes over to an audio specialist, our amazing freelancer Laura who casts her magic, adds the intro, outro and music, and she sends it back for a final check, before it’s uploaded. I then write the show notes and the newsletter, those are both double checked and then it’s scheduled. We do this every week, without fail and you know that every week, there will be a new podcast episode, along with our Thursday morning newsletters. We are consistent and this is so important to us, because we hope to build trust and a sense of a community.

For this episode, a mistake was made, which definitely won’t happen again, the original unedited and the final version were named very similarly, and the wrong file was uploaded … which brings us to this very episode you are now listening to!

So, that’s a deep dive into all that goes on behind the scenes for our podcast and it will become a little more complex in the future as we look to grow and expand, but at the same time I know there will be elements that we can also make more efficient, as we learn and improve and become experienced. It’s a lengthy process, but it is our belief that our podcasts will become a significant part of our business, and we are willing to put in the necessary work and time.

onto the positives:

1.     Internally, the team have improved our processes and systems for uploading our weekly podcast episodes; we now save the file versions into different folders, ensuring they are clearly named to differentiate between old and final versions, and we have also added an additional check, once the final version has been uploaded. These are robust processes, to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

2.     I had the opportunity to speak directly with so many people I haven’t spoken with before, many new followers who have discovered us from our podcast. I love receiving messages, as I know it is such a valuable way to understand how we can help and support more, and it feels good to form those direct connections.

3.     And … this is a huge positive … with all the incredible messages we have received, we have learnt yet again the importance of simply being real, and not being overly polished and produced. What I mean by that, the tone from most of the messages and emails we received, was that you enjoyed hearing the making and behind the scenes, and realising that each episode doesn’t magically happen, and that we are absolutely human!

Now this doesn’t mean we are going to make our episodes lengthy and unedited, I still feel a final, polished version is important, as I want every part of each episode to be valuable, and although we might increase the length of future episodes, at the moment, these mini length and refined workshop style episodes I know are helpful.

What I can do though is to be more naturally myself in other places, for example on Instagram, I am looking forward to recording more videos without always necessarily worrying ahead of time of having my hair perfect and applying makeup, because I have feeling that is hugely more relatable than always being polished. A polished finish at times will always be important, but I think a natural mix is better.

I would love to share one of the messages I received last week:

… and I think this is exactly the thing about entrepreneurship, we all think everyone finds things easy. We see a successful brand and people achieving different levels of success and feel that it can often be unattainable, but it’s not, it just takes being brave enough to start, to find ways to learn and grow, to get better, to improve further … and hugely importantly to find solutions when things go wrong … and knowing that you will get better … and most importantly, to be yourself.

There are so many times when I have been hugely nervous about new projects, to have committed to things before I have felt completely ready, but my goodness, I am absolutely prepared to try.

I also think it shows how important it is in all our communication for the need to be more human. Yes, of course, our products and services must be perfect, we must look to excel in what we are doing and provide exceptional customer service, but we must do this from a genuine place of authenticity – both for our own well-being, and also knowing the strength in connecting with people from a place of realism and honesty.

Although I would prefer that we hadn’t uploaded the wrong file last Thursday, I am actually very grateful that it did happen, for all the learning and positives, and I’m also even more grateful that it was a relatively dull version, as again, we are all human, and some of the other edits are a little more colourful in language!

I hope that you can take from this episode the importance of failing fast and pivoting quickly, and if this resonates and you have been in a similar position, please know that you are absolutely not alone, we are all very much here together and I’m absolutely supporting you whole heartedly from the side-lines!

Before I finish today’s episode, I would love to acknowledge my incredible team, firstly, a huge thank you to Kate who acted swiftly to get the correct episode uploaded. Her promptness and efficiency was so important that morning. I’d also like to express my gratitude to Laura, our audio specialist, whose expertise ensures our podcast always sounds its best. Her dedication to the quality is such an important part of our production.

… your feedback not only helped us correct the mistake quickly but also reminded us of the community we have all formed together.

Lastly, I’m grateful for the whole team behind the scenes. Every week, they work hard to ensure that we bring you content that is informative, inspiring, and enjoyable. This incident has only highlighted the strength of our team and the support we have for one another.

key takeaways from our experience

Now, as we close this episode, I’d love to highlight the key takeaways from our experience and I hope the insights will help you when you encounter your own challenges more confidently.

1.     Vigilance and Process: We've learned the importance of vigilance in our processes, and we've strengthened our system to prevent similar issues.

2.     Communication and Transparency: Open and transparent communication with our audience and team is vital in handling unexpected challenges.

3.     Resilience and Learning: Mistakes are opportunities for growth. We've not only fixed the error but also improved our procedures to ensure higher quality and reliability moving forward.

4.     Human Connection: The interactions with our community have reminded us of the value in being genuine and approachable.

We’ve gained so much from these and they have changed a few steps for us internally, and I know we will continue to learn plenty more!

an actionable challenge for you

I would love to leave you with a challenge – one that I'm really excited to see your responses to. Think of a moment when something didn't go quite as planned, a time you faced a setback, and how you turned it around. What lessons did you learn? What unexpected positives emerged? I would love you to share your stories of resilience and growth on Instagram. Tag me in your post @philippacraddock so I can read and comment, celebrate your wins, and possibly learn from your experiences as well. You’ll find a direct link to my profile in the show notes. I can’t wait to see what you share and to connect with you over our shared learning and the positives we have found.

And I hope by now, you know that it is me when I reply to a comment. We do have a very clever automated system integrated into Instagram which allows us to send you direct links to guides and podcasts straightaway, but when you write a comment or send me a direct message, it is very much me replying … and a huge top tip if you use Instagram for your business, you can reply to direct messages using voice messages – I love this as not only is it quick to record, it’s hugely personable and your followers really do know that there is a human there reading and replying.

We talked about the importance of acting quickly in the face of mistakes, the power of transparent communication, and the necessity of updating processes to prevent future errors. We also reflected on the human aspect of our work and how it connects us with our community. These experiences shape us and our brand, teaching us that resilience, learning, and genuine human connection are invaluable.

As we wrap up, a quick reminder about the challenge I mentioned. I would love to hear about the times you've turned a setback into a success. Share your story on Instagram and tag me @philippacraddock. It's through sharing our experiences that we create a community of support and inspiration.

Thanks again for spending this time with me. Until next time, keep growing, keep learning, and keep sharing your journey. It's the challenges we overcome that often lead to our greatest growth. See you on Instagram, and until our next episode, take care.