Learn the Process
Posted On: 2014-10-15
... and create your own outcomes.
Well here I am, a few days late with this column but still with my head in the right place ... at least I hope it's still on my shoulders.
My partner and I got back last night from another 1500km (almost a thousand miles) four-day road trip to see clients in the next state. While we were away ... in fact while we were sitting outside a typical Australian pub having a break ... I got a reminder of just how important it is that you take time to learn the process of whatever business you're in if you want to achieve any form of success.
For some time now we've been working with an old/new client ... who left us and then came back ... to try and resurrect their website's great rankings. They had them while they were with us and then they lost them when they took their business away and had their website moved to another web host.
While they were away they had someone else do some SEO work for them and basically whoever did that work did everything you shouldn't do if you want to improve your rankings. So when they came back to us there was a lot of work to be done to clean out the rubbish left by the other guy.
There was so much work to be done that we didn't dare move the website back to one of our servers till we were sure that the changes we were making were having some impact. So the website was still sitting on the previous web host's servers and suddenly the site owners began to have problems downloading emails ... and emails are vital to their business.
They spoke to us early last week about it and I explained that it was totally out of my control and they would have to call the host on the host's 1300 number. I also told them how they could access their email via webmail and I heard no more until they called us while we were sitting outside that pub.
It wasn't a very nice call ... in fact they began abusing us for doing nothing to fix their email problem. It seemed that they hadn't followed my advice about contacting the host and working with webmail until their problem was solved.
Instead they had done nothing and now their business was in a total mess because they still couldn't get their email ... and that was all our fault. I don't know how many times I tried to explain that we had no control over their email because their site was still with the previous host but they wouldn't listen.
They were sure that it was our fault and it was up to us to correct the situation and there was no way I could get it through to them that they needed to do something to fix the problem themselves because their host would not talk to me.
In the end I gave up and ended the phone call and later today I'll terminating our business agreement too. It is impossible to work with people who aren't prepared to take the time to gain an understanding of the fundamentals involved in working with emails and aren't prepared to listen.
These people aren't prepared to understand the process and so they will never be able to achieve the outcomes they want and it's the same with any business online ... or offline.
It's the same with baking bread or selling porn ... if you don't take time to learn the process involved in making money in a bakery or here in adult web land you will never make the money you need to make just to survive.
You will never develop the skills to achieve the outcomes you want if you don't want to take the time to learn how things work.
Those people on the other end of the phone call the other day wanted an outcome ... an outcome that they were never going to achieve because they weren't prepared to take the time to understand how the system works.
I'm sure that they had an idea fixed in their minds that the processes involved in getting their emails worked in a certain way ... a way that made sense to them ... but a way that was totally at odds with reality. That idea was so fixed in their minds that they weren't prepared to listen when someone tried to help them understand how the process really worked.
That idea was so fixed in their minds that they weren't even prepared to try any other way to get their problem solved. They were sure that they knew what needed to be done and they weren't prepared to see any other solution when something went wrong.
So do you really understand the processes that you need to apply in this industry if you want to succeed?
Are you sure that you are using those processes to achieve the outcomes you want or are you trying to achieve outcomes that you will never achieve because you don't really understand the processes?