Life, friendships, work, etc. doesn’t always go exactly as we want it to, and it shouldn’t. In fact, having losses can actually turn into a win depending on how we take it. I want to be fully transparent on my blog, meaning I’m going to put out content that is the truth with nothing to hide.

I took the biggest loss in my short professional career the Thursday night before my first marathon. It was a good week like all others until I press that ‘send’ button.

Here’s How It Happened:

To give you a quick background on the situation- I was setting up a social media/email campaign for a location that was celebrating their one-year anniversary. We went ahead and ran a BOGO (Buy One Get One) gyro, for four days.

After launch on Wednesday, I figured I would go in and make some noise through an email blast. (Step one to my mistake).

As I set the email up, I type out what we all would see in an email, “Come celebrate one year with us”, and I explained the promotion. The email looked good, copy looked good, I set the audience up, or at least I thought I did..

Instead of sending that email to just that location’s email list, it went to every Taziki’s customer. So, instead of 500 people receiving an email for a BOGO on a gyro, 300,000 did. Ouch….

How I Handled It:

I sat back and thought to myself that it’s all over, there goes my four months of trust, here comes a bad situation for all stores because of my mistake. 10 seconds later I realized that this wouldn’t solve anything. I had to man up, admit my mistake, and get in touch with everyone I possibly could to create a plan.

That’s exactly what our team did. No one yelled, no one screamed, no one was upset. Instead of saying “Wow Andy, you messed up”, it was “Relax Andy, let’s get this right.”

At the end of the night, we were able to send out a plan to all stores explaining what happened and how to handle the gyro madness.

How I’ll Move On From This Mistake:

1. Admit it was your mistake- Don’t lie, put blame on others, or try to work around it.
2. Keep things in perspective- It’s only food, right? I can’t think like this though as I was really hard on myself for the following week. It was a challenge to finally get over it and move on before it altered my future work.
3. Apologize BUT also explain how you’ll make it better/won’t have it happen again. Figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.
4. Put more attention to details and don’t try to multi-task.
5. Earn trust back but doing, not saying.

Not a pretty post to write, but a lot of good experience from this. Mistakes happen. Learn from them, move on, keep them in the back of your mind, not the front.