Recovering From a Major Launch Mishap 🤦🏼‍♀️

What really happens when your webinar launch breaks midair?  You panic, then pivot. In this episode, I walk you through the behind-the-scenes of my recent live event.

I’ll share what happened, what I felt, how I froze (literally), and how my team and I chose to not spiral—and instead, turn a big mistake into a bigger opportunity for growth and sales.

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If you’re in online business, navigating live program/course launches, or just trying to figure out how to bounce back when things don’t go as planned… this episode gives you the mental recovery strategy you need, plus examples of the action steps I took.

We’re talking:

• real launch flops and what to do about them
• mindset reframes that aren’t toxic positivity
• freezing under pressure and why it doesn’t make you a failure
• how to recover from marketing mistakes with grace and strategy

Whether you're knee-deep in entrepreneurship, building your brand on Instagram, or just here for the behind-the-scenes of running a business—this one’s going to stick with you.

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https://www.magicmarketingmachine.com

Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

Jenna Harding: ⁓ I sabotage my launch. Oops, let's talk about it. Let's talk about launching, launching new products, live launching if you're in online business, messing up your launch and recovering from it. Here's the scoop. Podcast listeners, you know that for the last three or four episodes, I've been like, come to my live event, come to my live event. The live event shows up. We have over 1,100 people registered for it. I jump on the call, I've got my hair washed, I've got my pretty blouse on, I'm ready to rock and roll. And I see that there's only like 300 people in the call. And I thought to myself, huh, that's weird because so many people signed up, but it is very normal to have ⁓ people sign up and then not show up, right? You get busy, you just want the replay, maybe you're gonna come late, whatever. so I start and I'm all action, I'm all energy, I'm delivering the material. This is material that I have been working on all year. I've actually done a bunch of micro launches and presentations and I've been funnessing this webinar, adding things to it, adding lessons to it, adding a live Reels review where people pop their best performing reel in the chat and I tell you why it did well so that you can do that again. we've been, we have. We've got a raffle at the end like we've got so much going on that has taken me so long to put together I've edited these 400,000 times to make sure that there's lots of goodies right up at the beginning. Like I've worked so hard on this and I noticed that one of my colleagues, Jenna, I think I've told you this. My name is Jenna, my business ops person. Her name is Jenna as well. So Jenna disappears and her screen goes dark and I'm immediately like, uh-oh, is Jenna okay? I hope she's, I hope she's all right. that's really unusual that she just disappeared from this call because I've got like team and volunteers in the chat. chat is popping hard to even keep up with Anyway, she disappears. Eventually she comes back. I keep going. I do the training. People are signing up to work with me. People are one person commented, like, there's so much value, 15 minutes in, this is already worth it, yada, yada, yada. Things are going well, aside from there being 700 people missing. I finished the call. I'm so excited. I open up my DMs and I get a message from someone that says, Jenna, I saved my seat for this training 10 days ago and I'm being told the room is at capacity. My heart first I gaslit her. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry if that was you. At first I was like, that cannot be. We increased our zoom capacity to a thousand. no way somebody got locked out. and we checked the settings and it said, your capacity is a thousand. I know she, so at first I gaslighted her, I'm so sorry. And then ⁓ I messaged my team and like, as I'm messaging them in Slack, I can see that they're typing and they're telling me, Jenna, something went wrong. Our capacity wasn't reflected in Zoom and people were locked out. And that's why Jenna ended up disappearing is because she was trying to fix it and we couldn't fix it in time. I paused, I took a breath, I basically froze. a fight, flight, freeze. I hate it, but I'm a freeze. Lately I've been a freeze. I'm really good in a long-term crisis. If your relative is in the hospital and they're in there for two weeks and it's like, you've gotta contact the family and you've gotta make sure they're comfortable, I hate that I just brought this up, but I'm really good at that. But in a short term crisis, like a deer runs out in front of the car. Not good. That's when my husband shines. And that's why we're a good team. Jordan is really good at a short term crisis. I'm good at a long term crisis, but like one time, oh my gosh, I am so on a tangent right now. But one time when Josie was a puppy, we heard her yep. We heard just like, and we were like, where is the dog? And we start looking through the house and we're inside the house. I can't even express enough how safe we're inside the house. But we hear this yet and we go, where is she? We can't find her and we start searching the house. We can't, we're calling her name. We can't find her anywhere. I froze and I didn't tell Jordan this, but at the time I was like, well, the dog's gone. Like there's no, of course she's not. We know she's here. We just can't find her, but she yipped. we heard her. So we know she's here and she's in the house, which is a safe place. So I fully gave up and I froze in the hallway and I just thought, well, the dog's gone. Now what next? You know, what does life look like? and then. ⁓ We found her in the linen closet because we had opened the linen closet and she had walked in because it's, you know, a deep closet and the bottom was empty. And so she'd walked in and then closed the linen closet, not knowing she was in there and she was just hanging out in the dark in the linen closet, not saying anything when we called her name. So those are some examples of how I am a freeze, unfortunately. So I kind of I went into myself. I froze. I was disappointed. I learned from my mindset coach that you're allowed to be disappointed. That might sound stupid, but I think a lot of people, especially women need to hear that. You're allowed to be disappointed. You don't need to immediately fix the disappointment. You can just witness the disappointment. You're allowed to be disappointed. went, this is disappointing, but it's not the end of the world. And I've been in business long enough to know that we can make lemonade here. I might not see it right now. I might not know how we're going to do it, but we can fix this and it can. end up being a good thing. First, I'm gonna be disappointed for a half a second. I'm gonna walk away from my husband because his eyes are getting glassy and I think that he is more upset about this than I am because he was so excited for this presentation. He took the morning off work. He took the morning off work. He cleaned the office. Like he's just like vacuuming the office where I'm gonna do the presentation. I saw him, guys, I saw him carrying plants upstairs and he decorated the office. Not just what my guests could see on screen. but what I was looking at in the rest of the office he decorated. He was number one biggest fan, supportive husband for this presentation. So he immediately is really disappointed. And I think that he gets nervous too, because he's introverted, right? So the fact that I'm about to show up in front of potentially a thousand people, I think made him a bit nervous. Jenna Warriner (06:15) this is Jenna from the editing room. I'm just playing this back and it sounds like I said that Jordan was angry. He wasn't angry, he was about to cry. I just wanna be clear that my husband doesn't have an angry bone in his body. just to be clear, okay, back to the story. Jenna Warriner (06:29) upset. about this snafu, I tried to stay calm. I called my friend Alicia Wood, who is a very intuitive person. She's an intuition coach, she's a mindset coach, and she's my good friend. Luckily for me, I win. So I phoned her, she didn't answer. No, she didn't answer. I'm like, no, don't leave me to sort this out on my own. So then I called Jenna. said, I hope it's okay that I'm phoning you, because I don't normally phone her. And she was like, yep. And she stayed very calm and measured. She's a much more measured person than I am. She told me what had happened. And I was actually like, you know what? It doesn't matter how it happened. What are we going to do now? Like, let's just focus on how we're going to resolve this or what our next steps are because. Everything had gone so smoothly with the launch that I was actually like, this is weird. I'm not used to things going so smoothly, but I have such a good team right now. Like they're so fantastic. Everyone in the organization is so good and cares so much that everything was done ahead of time. We were super organized. We were happy. We're having a good time. So it was like, all right, well, it's normal for something to go wrong. This is just our thing that we get that goes wrong. So we were like, do I jump on zoom and do it again right now? Do I change our content co-working public event next Tuesday to the webinar? What do I do? Here's what we landed on. We're going to redo the whole thing October 9th. So we're going to do it again, open it up to the public. I won't be quite as loud about it. We won't be trying to get another thousand people, but the goal is people who weren't initially available that day or didn't hear about it or who registered and got locked out. now have the opportunity to come. Same prizes, same raffles, same energy, same presentation that we're gonna do it all over again. And I think that's actually really exciting because what about the people who were unavailable last Friday and, they're free on a Thursday, like, okay, let's do it. Like this is great, it's more opportunity, or people who came and loved it, they get to come again. Like this is ultimately a good thing. Another thing I was thinking about during this moment of not crying, let the record show, I did not cry. I'm actually so proud of how this all went. I took a lesson out of Amy Porterfield's book because she on her podcast spoke about earlier this year how her mindset coach tells her, I can't remember exactly how she says it, but it's basically, how can we make this a good thing? Like, why is this a good thing? This bad thing that just happened? Wow, the way she says it is way cuter. I cannot remember the affirmation, but it's basically like, take the thing that just happened that sucks. How can we make it into a good thing? there's an opportunity hidden here. If you ever send out an email and you mess it up, so say you send out an email and it's still your blank template, or you send out an email. and the subject line is still put subject line here or some sort of mistake like that. And then you follow it up with a oops, oops, and you make the subject line like, oops, let's try that again. Often that oopsie email will get better open rates than the initial email that you messed up, right? So you're up there panicking and I'm guilty of this too because you sent out the wrong email and you messed up or whatever. But then your oopsie email gets in front of more people than the original one, so it becomes a good thing. I know that there's a slippery slope here between what I'm saying and toxic positivity, but I'm not suggesting toxic positivity. Let things be disappointing for a minute, you know? learn from them, but also find those hidden opportunities. This launch is not your last launch. This your last chance to grow your business, right? They're all learning opportunities. They're all opportunities. They're all increasing your audience and helping you hone your messaging and seeing what gets results and what is still a little bit sticky. and if you start solely focusing on the thing that goes wrong, you're risking not focusing on the thing that went right, like the 300 people who did show up and I did get to teach and who did learn from the presentation, right? So I want to focus on them. So for the following weekend, one of the reasons I think internally that I decided not to just immediately redo the presentation was because I wanted to focus on talking to people who had come, right? So I had a lot of DMS with people who did come. We were getting emails from people who did come. People who did come were signing up to work with me and we want to, we want to nurture the heck out of them and make sure that they have everything that they need and that they're happy and that they're excited and that they know where to go. Right? So we needed to focus on that for the following weekend. And I also didn't want to make any rush decisions. and I should say when you update your zoom, when you update your zoom capacity, you need to wait 24 hours for it to apply typically, which we did. But then there's a button. There's a button we didn't know you need to press. You have to like, we have a business account. So there's like multiple, there's like the business zoom, there's Jenna's zoom, and they're all kind of living under the same zoom house. And you have to go to the account that you want the capacity on and you have to click apply. It was one. Silly little button. None of us had ever done it before. It looked like it was fine. There was no way it could be avoided. No one is in trouble. Everybody did their best. It was just a crappy situation. It was just a mistake. another time I launched, I launched on my period. I'll say it. And in the launch debrief, after the big event and the big launch, I literally wrote in the launch debrief, don't do that again, because I lost an entire morning because I was bedridden with really bad cramps. So I couldn't sell, I couldn't DM with people. It was like, I couldn't make content. Like I was like. Bed when I was bedridden, you know, it really stunk and then my energy was really low and that's not kind of the vibe you want to have in a big event like that. So, you know, we live and learn and we make these mistakes and then the next time you do better and you're in business for the long haul, right? We're going to keep going. We're going to keep learning. We're going to keep getting better. We're going to keep honing. We're going to keep making mistakes, letting some of those mistakes be disappointing and turning some of them on their head and turning them into opportunities. That's the name of the game, my friend. All right. Let me know what you want episodes about. I have a few in the bank. I have a really cool guest coming who used to work at Google and one of her episodes on this show was like one of our most popular episodes. So we brought her back. It's recorded. I just need to get it out, edited and up and out to you. And. I want to make some really actionable episodes coming up so they work almost like a workshop. But if you have ideas, comment in the comment section or DM me on Instagram. Let me know what you want to learn about on these shows and I can get those to you as we go into this winter season. Meantime, I'll see you in the next one.