Sunday Scaries: How I turned one of my smallest-biggest mistakes into a Career highlight

Let’s first address what I mean by smallest-biggest mistake.

Something that you’ve done that should have been a small error but might have turned into a bigger one. A typo when entering a client invoice or placing an order.

For example, I once worked in a co-working space where the Office Co-Ordinator placed an order for 10 small boxes of tea bags.

Well at least they thought they did.

What they actually ordered was 10 large boxes where each contained around 40 boxes of tea bags. I then watched them try to find hiding spots for all of these boxes before the Office Manager walked in and asked why the f*** they had so many boxes of tea.

One of mine (one of many, many, many mistakes) that still gives me chills when it enters my brain - which is about once a week just before I’m about to go to sleep - happened about 15 years ago.

I haven’t used Apple mail in a while - maybe because of this incident - so I’m not sure if they’ve fixed this but back in this time, it didn’t have an inbuilt out of office feature.

I was going on my first major holiday since starting in recruitment so I wanted to set up a basic OOO response, please contact X, I’ll be back in 2 weeks. Standard stuff.

As the feature didn’t exist yet, I tried to use the Rules feature in it’s place. “When email received, send this response”.

Turns out how the little people inside the computer understood that was “go back to every email you’ve ever received and send this response”.

I watched in panic as a message popped up counting the thousands of emails being sent, ticking up at a rapid pace. Cancel didn’t work.

I literally had to pull the plug on the computer to get it to stop. I logged back in with the internet off, removed the rule but could see that thousands of emails had still been sent.

Now I was a Junior recruiter at this point so a lot of my emails were (crap) sales ones or rejecting applications, so imagine a recruiter who you’d never spoken to or maybe spoken to once, sending you an email to tell you about their upcoming holiday.

The response that I’ll never forget came from quite a Senior person at a big Ad agency:

Well put Sir.

But how I turned it into a Career Highlight

In a very LinkedIn-esq way, I did manage to turn this failure into learning and then success a few years later.

You know when you’re being interviewed and they ask for your biggest achievement, I always want to tell them this story but I know it’s not what they are actually looking for.

Playing around with Apple rules for a while but never again trying to automate email responses, I got familiar with the “if this than that” structure.

This time it was a colleague who was going on holiday and this man had a (in my eyes very unreasonable and unjust) dislike for Australia’s sweetheart, Delta Goodrem.

So while he was on holiday, I set up a rule on his computer for when he came back to work.

Basically when he received an email from me, this would open Safari and specifically www.deltagoodrem.com.

Youths may not remember these days but a site like that was made to autoplay her latest single.

To sit opposite a man, furious at his computer for such treason and such personal and targeted terrorism was the most satisfying 30 minutes of my life. Eventually he caught on, knew it was me and demanded I fix it.

As my mother always used to say “if only you put that brain to good, instead of the ridiculous”.

Having a new side hustle, the last thing I want to do is create a drag of admin work that turns the fun work into not fun at all.

And I don't have the budget to use the big, expensive tools you might use in your day job.

This is where folk has been a lifesaver.

With all of my coaching clients coming from LinkedIn, being able to add them to a pipeline from LinkedIn and see all my upcoming bookings in one place is a dream.

Plus once I add their email addresses, it syncs future emails two way, straight back into Folk.

And I haven't even shown you the LinkedIn and email message templates and sequences I can build in seconds.

If your side hustle or small business is struggling to keep your customers and leads organised, I recommend giving it a look.