A Start-up Journey (Crisis Management)

This is the 15th post in this series, click here to read the first one.

I realize that I wrote a post in this series just this morning, titled “Damn the Know-it-Alls”, but I just got off the phone with Paul Tobey and I thought, OMG, what if he decides to check me out and sees this post I wrote on the same day I spoke with him. Not that Paul has nothing better to do than to poke around my blog, but on the off-chance, I would feel like a total ass if he thought I was talking about him in that post. So I interrupt this series to share with you my call with Paul Tobey (shameless name drop).

Okay, first of all Paul is a true expert, who probably does “know it all”, but he is the polar opposite of the type of people I was talking about in my last post. He almost apologized for pointing out the flaws in our system. Those of you who have been following this series know, I have no problem with criticisms of our platform, I want to hear them. How else will it get better? How many restaurants do you think might still be in business today, if when the owner asked “How is everything?” ,  the customer actually said “Well, it all sucks” instead of “fine” when they didn’t really mean it. On the down side, Paul will probably not be a customer of our service, at least not for his main business, and for good reason.

Paul is a trainer, and he sounds like a damn good one. Paul has a process, that sounds like a damn good one also. Unfortunately for us, Paul’s process involves a lot of attendee interaction and so his training webinars tend to take on a life of their own, which is hard to do when the content has been previously recorded. Now, Paul is a pretty big-time guy and I was thrilled to get almost an hour with him on the phone, even if most of the dialogue was reasons why my platform won’t work for him. Would I have loved Paul to sign up on the spot for our platform? Sure, but what I got was much more valuable, “Insider Insight”, and I got it for Free!

To be fair, our platform is not really designed ideally for training. While we have plans to create a training front-end, when I really stop and think about it, I know that will be a challenge. Particularly for the better trainers like Paul who clearly have more than just a hope that their attendees learn something. If I had to guess, I would say we can currently meet about 50% of Paul’s requirements. Not good enough. Can we ever get to 100%? Probably not. If we can get to 85%, would Paul compromise to meet us there? Not a chance. So for now, I have to resign myself to the fact that not everyone using webinars is a candidate for our platform. I hate conceding to the big boys’ platforms on anything, but for now, I must, on this one thing anyway.

Again, that “Insider Insight” was a rare gift. No, I’m not gonna tell you the good stuff Paul shared, you will have to wait and see when we roll it out. I also got similar valuable insights from Wayne Turmel (shameless name drop #2), who I don’t want thinking I was talking about him in my last post either, should he happen to run across my blog.

So that’s enough “Crisis Management” for one day.

Next Post: Ain’t no hill for a climber

previous post in series: Damn the Know-it-Alls