This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host. Earlier this year we started a new segment called Failure Friday. It has been incredibly popular, probably our most popular episode of the week, at least on some weeks.
And the principle of it is we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, if not in fact more. So this is a collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. So you get to hear directly from a side hustler or someone who has gone full time, which is the case today. She actually has a very successful business. But instead of hearing the success story, which is what we usually talk about, you get to hear something that went very wrong.
It often starts with an idea, an assumption, and then that assumption meets reality. And then what do they do? What do they take away from it? What do they learn and so on? But as much as possible, I like people to just kind of focus on the moment of how did it feel in that experience.
So today I've really enjoyed this story. It comes from Tanya Smith from Hamilton, Ontario. We told the successful story of her Boudoir photography studio on episode 1035. Tanya was a corporate banker back in the day. She underwent a big reinvention and then also built a second business helping other Boudoir photographers.
So you'll hear a bit more about that in her story here, as she was beginning to debut this new business, something went very wrong. She'll bring you the story and then I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
My name is Tanya and I am a woman's portrait photographer specializing in Boudoir. And I've been doing that since 2011. I'm also a business coach for Boudoir and portrait photographers and I help them grow their business to six plus figures.
So when I first started teaching photographers online, I partnered with a business that was aligned with my ideal clients. Their audience was my audience and we had a good online relationship for several years. So when I was launching my very first online course, I asked if I could teach their audience with a free webinar and at the end I would tell everyone about my super awesome online course and hopefully get people to sign up. So I had never hosted a webinar before but I researched and I learned and I had all the moving parts in place or so I thought. This other business who so graciously offered to send emails to their audience of over 12,000 with a registration link from my new and informative very first online webinar.
Exciting, right? I was super pumped. And after they sent out the first email, I kept watching in amazement as the registrations kept coming in. In four days, I get over 400 people register for my webinar. So I was nervous but I was super excited and I was looking forward to teaching this to over 400 fellow photographers.
So the day of the webinar came, I did my hair and makeup, I turned on my camera and my ring light, I made sure my mic was on and that I was recording, I turned off all notifications on my phone and my computer, you know, so I wouldn't be disturbed. Well, I overlooked one very important thing. I researched webinar software, I studied and watched tutorials on how to set up a webinar and how to generate a link for people to watch, how to record my webinar, and I bought a monthly plan with them. But I bought the lowest plan and I didn't notice that the plan had a max of 50 people allowed in one room. So here I am, I'm pumped, I'm ready to go.
My camera's ready, my script and my slideshow's ready. I got a margarita in hand for a bit of liquid courage and over 400 people are trying to get into a webinar room that holds only 50. Plus, remember, I turned off all notifications because my business friend was getting hundreds of angry emails and messages saying they're trying to watch the webinar, but getting an error that says the room is full, please try again later, hundreds of people. So she's trying to reach me, she's sending emails, text messages, Facebook, direct messages, everything, but I have everything turned off. So I'm just going along with my presentation, just killing it.
I'm trying not to stress about the fact that I can see that only 50 people showed up when I knew that over 400 registered. But I thought, well, you know, it's my first time, maybe this is what happens. So the 50 people that are in there are loving it, they're commenting all while hundreds of other people are super annoyed. And this person who did me a huge favor and put me in front of her audience is fielding all these angry messages. So after I get off the call, I'm flying high thinking like I killed my first webinar, I did such a great job.
So I turned my phone back on and it's blowing up. Angry messages from people who registered and couldn't get in, frantic messages from my business friend trying to let me know what was happening. So many people could have been on that webinar. I had a chance to get in front of 400 of my perfect clients and now most of them were probably not going to buy from me and they were probably also very angry with me and I was devastated. So let me just say it was a good thing that I had my margarita close by.
So after I reached out to my business friend and I explained what happened, she was amazing about it and she actually let me do another date for all the people who couldn't get in. So obviously this time I paid for a bigger webinar room, everyone was able to get in. I did not have as many people show up for this one, it was just over a hundred. But I explained to them what happened and I had a laugh about it at this point because it was later and people were commenting and sending me messages saying how refreshing it was to hear someone be honest and upfront about a screw up and how it made them relate more to me. So yes, I probably lost out on a bunch of sales because of that first webinar, who knows how much.
But I ended up getting a whole bunch of new followers who really connected with me and that was because of that screw up and me being upfront about it. So that's what I learned from that. If you screw up, own it, be honest, be upfront, don't make excuses, people will be okay with it or they won't. But what I ended up doing for me is making me more relatable and that resulted in deeper connections with my potential clients. [Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
That is the theme of Failure Friday. I think it came through very well in Tanya's story. Tanya, thank you so much for taking time to share that with us. Thank you for being open and vulnerable and transparent about it. Definitely seems like a good takeaway and I'm glad it worked out.
But I can also just imagine that moment of ending the webinar and looking at your phone and getting all those messages. I had a similar experience myself once. I've actually had several webinar disasters. And one thing I have not done is prepared a margarita before my webinars. So I will definitely add that to my pre-presentation checklist.
Listeners, if you would like to see Tanya's work, go to tonyaelsmith.com. This is Tanya with an A, so T-A-N-Y-A, tonyaelsmith.com. Or on Instagram, tonyaelsmith.photography, tonyaelsmith.photography. We will link that up on the notes page as well. I think that is today, let's see, sidehustleschool.com/1707.
Thank you for joining me today. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you take some time to do something for yourself. And I hope you'll come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
