SPEAKER_01: 3:01

So the show is called Embracing Marketing Mistakes. Do you have a particular mistake that you've made in your career that you you would like to share and and and will release from your um your stress levels forever?

SPEAKER_00: 3:13

This is a weird one for me because most of my mistakes in my um freelance slash marketing career have come from my ADHD, and I only knew I had ADHD last year. So they can all be excluded, they can all be explained brilliantly now. And they're not necessarily marketing mistakes I can learn from, but I can share some stories that make you go, oh, okay. So um I've I've got four words written down heron, suitcase, pasty, and blogs. You can put a word and uh like literally the the pasty one is is just a little very small anecdote, but because I used to do a lot of proofreading in my previous job when I was working for the magazine publisher, we used to have celebrity articles, and we have this article in Iceland the Frozen Food Stores magazine, and um it was with Patsy Palmer, and she was uh B in East Unders. Right! Um it had gone through the the article, had gone through about three people proofreading it, and it still got printed as Pasty Palmer. Oh no, yeah, not really sure. Um, another uh another kind of w one about um that always makes people chuckle is um because I'm very easily distracted and I'm also a massive bird nerd, and uh I I've done a lot of freelance training. So I was doing some freelance training for a group of about 50, 60 marketers. I was on a Zoom call, and um right now I have a a blind in front of me, uh um what's it called? Venetian blind, and it's closed. And it's closed for good reason because I was in the middle of this training and I went, oh look, a heron.

SPEAKER_01: 4:59

Cool. I think that's quite cool. They probably remembered that moment of the training for the rest of their lives. Do you remember that woman that gave that training that just shouted about a heron?

SPEAKER_00: 5:09

Shouted about a bird flying by. Um I was on my way to a um another one is I was on my way to a creative conference that was absolutely brilliant. It never got repeated, unfortunately. It was called Creative North. Shout out for those guys, up in Manchester, and I was really looking forward to having a few days away, enjoying this conference and listening to loads of inspiring speakers. And I got on the train at Gloucester. I thought, right, I'm gonna do it properly. I'm gonna get on the train, take some work with me, sit on the train and do my work. Um, had to get off the train at Birmingham, New Street, and get a connecting train to Manchester. Um, got off the train, got on my new train. Okay, this is great, this this is going well. I've got on the right train, all all good. And um, five minutes into the journey, I realised my suitcase was still on the train to Nottingham.

SPEAKER_01: 5:58

Oh no!

SPEAKER_00: 6:00

So I got to Manchester and I had none of my staff, and I was wearing ripped jeans, a little vest, or just completely unsuitably dressed for a conference the following day. And I did actually manage to get it back, but it was a it was a that sounds stressful. A challenge and a half, yeah. So I'm always super conscious about that. Um the other thing is is so it's so hideously embarrassing. I don't even know whether I can talk about it.

SPEAKER_01: 6:28

Oh, definitely do. Yeah, come on.

SPEAKER_00: 6:31

So I was commissioned by this company that shall remain nameless. I'm not even sure whether to mention the sector, but it was a good few years ago, and I was writing, I think it was 10 blogs a month for them. They were setting up this new website, and it was to be a knowledge base for this particular area of specialism. And they commissioned me to write 10 blogs a month, and it was on a nine-month contract. So the nine-month contract came to an end. The blogs were going great guns, they were getting tons of traffic to their website as a result, and they decided to continue the project. So I carried on working for them. I did another, I think, 10 months worth of work, and they were set up on my Zero My Accounting System for a recurring invoice, obviously, for um like retainer kind of work going out at the start of the month, and everything was being paid by standing order, and everything was hunky-dory. So after the nine months happened, everything was great, and I carried on with 10 remaining months of work, and I forgot to invoice for 10 entire months. And they owed me 20 grand.

SPEAKER_01: 7:44

I mean, how do you broach that? I bet that was a popular email from Berson, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_00: 7:50

Oh, that was the singularly worst moment of my entire career. And and just to to the to this day, you know, I was gonna say I don't know how I how I managed to notice that 20 grand was missing from my account, but yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_01: 8:06

Yeah, yeah, but you you didn't notice that. And in theory, if they've agreed the budget, like a a normal client, if they've agreed the budget, they would probably go, okay, and just I mean it's a bit of an inconvenience to them, but I think that's probably bigger to you because it's your, you know. I I I think a lot of people mind you, if a someone didn't be bill us for night ten months, and then suddenly a bill came with the 20k.

SPEAKER_00: 8:32

They might have noticed that they weren't getting invoices for ten months. I don't know, but it was a hundred percent on me, and I feel like so ashamed telling you my story.

SPEAKER_01: 8:43

So that's not honestly, that's not the worst we've had. We've had quite a few and i I I always find that it's not as bad. What did they say? A problem shared as a problem laugh. That's probably in your bloody book, isn't it? And it's wrong. Um did they pay it? Yeah. Yeah, didn't they pay it? You got paid.

SPEAKER_00: 9:02

And and I never worked for them again, understandably.