recovery is possible

I've made some pretty expensive mistakes at work.

Not necessarily expensive in the financial sense. More in the stress, anxiety, and oh my gosh, the CEO is in my DMs sense.

Marketing can be a particularly scary place to make mistakes because so much of what you do is visible.

I've had a few experiences that I'd rather not repeat, but they've taught me something important: recovery is possible.

The 300,000 email mistake

Early in my career, I was responsible for migrating our marketing automation platform from Pardot to Marketing Cloud.

At the time, I was not a particularly technical marketer. I'd been working in CRM land for about a year when this landed on my plate.

If you've ever used Marketing Cloud, you know it's not exactly the most approachable piece of software. There are a lot of moving parts, and I was still figuring out how everything worked.

To make things more interesting, our entire CRM team left the company right after we'd made the decision to buy the new platform. So that was fun.

We hired a contractor to help us build everything out. We worked together for months. She built the system, we tested it, and I trusted her. She trusted me.

Then, one Monday night at 7pm, my Slack started blowing up.

Our CEO was furious because people on Twitter were freaking out about receiving emails saying they'd been accepted into our program (a program they hadn't even applied to).

All roads led to me.

The CEO then hit my DMs. People were upset. I was embarrassed, and honestly, I was a little defensive. I hadn't turned on the switch. The contractor had, and I didn't know she was going to.

But, that didn't actually matter at that moment. We had a problem.

So I ran to my computer and started figuring out what was going on. More than 300,000 people had received this email so far. The email was firing at our entire database. No criteria. No filtering. Just everyone.

I quickly turned it off and sent an email saying, "Sorry, you received an email you shouldn't have."

(Every time I get an email like that from another company now, my heart hurts for them. I know how this feels.)

Turning it off was the easy part. I still had to understand what went wrong. And at that point, I still didn't really understand Marketing Cloud. I'd been relying heavily on the contractor, so I had to knuckle down and learn the system myself.

I also had to have some really hard conversations with the contractor. They did not go well.

Then, I had to work through the technical issues and fix things without her.

Meanwhile, I was trying not to completely spiral over the fact that I'd made a very public mistake.

The CEO never sent me a, "It's okay, Sam. People make mistakes" message. But the COO did. She sent me a really kind message acknowledging what had happened and telling me I'd done a good job jumping into action.

That message meant a lot. It was the kind of thing that made me feel like I could actually recover from the whole mess.

Eventually, I got everything sorted out. I learned how to use Marketing Cloud, how to troubleshoot the system, how to put safeguards in place, and how to build things without relying on someone else to tell me they were working.

I also learned that trusting someone else's work doesn't mean you can/should skip understanding what's happening under the hood.

I still trust people. But now, when I'm building automations, I have a checklist. I know what to check, where things can go wrong, and which areas need extra attention. If something feels iffy, I poke holes in it until I'm comfortable. It's not worth the risk.

Seven people showed up

Fast-forward a few years, and I made another mistake. This time, I was organizing an event for Laravel with the senior leadership team.

It was my first time doing an event like this, and I was excited. We sent out invitations and got 80 RSVPs pretty quickly.

Perfect, I thought. This will be a great evening.

Seven people showed up.

SEVEN.

This was also my first time meeting the full leadership team, so that was an excellent introduction. I eventually figured out what happened. I hadn't verified that the people who rsvp'd actually lived in the state where we were holding the event.

People all over the world really love our CEO and will sign up for pretty much anything he's attending. Turns out, an rsvp from someone on the other side of the world doesn't do much for in-person attendance numbers. (smh)

I should have known better. I hadn't done enough work upfront to validate who was actually going to show up, and I learned my lesson. Now, I put a lot more effort into the pre-work.

But the leadership team didn't get mad at me. They were kind, and I think they trusted that I was capable of learning from the experience and doing better next time.

(Later that same year, I put on a massive event and 1,100 people showed up. :))

You can recover

I've had to learn to stop defending myself long enough to actually fix things.

Making mistakes is not fun. Don't recommend. But when they happen, they can be an opportunity to learn something and get a real sense of the people you're working for and with.

Things can be fixed. We can learn. We can get better.

And eventually, those moments can just become a story for a blog to prove that we're all human.