It’s okay to own your mistakes

I feel like often times, when mistakes are made, people are unwilling to take responsibility for them and try to pass on the buck to the next person. I don’t want to be that person. As an over-achiever and perfectionist, it’s hard for me to admit this, but I do make mistakes. I am not a flawless person.

The other day a client asked me to update his Google Maps listing with a different phone number. I logged into my Google business account, changed the phone number, and hit submit. All was well and within a few hours, it was showing properly. Great! Problem solved for my client.

Later that evening, the client sent me email and said he’d gotten a lot of calls for a different business and wondered if I knew anything about it. The business he mentioned IS one of my clients, but I had only changed his phone number. So I logged into my account and saw that not only was his phone number changed, but so was this other business. I’m thinking, “Why would Google change both business phone numbers? They aren’t even in the same part of the country!”

Then I looked further and noticed that not just those two businesses, but every business listing in my account had the phone number changed. Fast forward to me frantically changing all the phone numbers and trying to figure out how this happened. (I did figure it out. There’s a checkbox for “apply to all locations” when you edit business information, and I must have checked it – therefore changing all the business listings in my account.)

Let me tell you, this was pretty embarrassing for me. I had options here. One of them was to tell the client that Google screwed up and changed the other businesses when I only changed his. He wouldn’t have known the difference. But it’s not true. And so I did what anyone should do when they make a mistake. One – I fixed it. Two – I apologized.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as an adult, and that I’m trying to teach my kids, is that it’s okay to make mistakes and the best course of action is to fix it or try to fix it and apologize. That’s all you can do.

When it comes to setting up a new website, or updating an existing one, mistakes can happen.  We work diligently to do our best at all times, but being human gets in the way of perfection. With every mistake comes an opportunity for learning and growth, and I hope that comes across to our clients.

Yes, we sometimes make mistakes. But we learn from them too.