I Owe You All An Apology
The Amplified Impact Podcast
May 11th, 2023
So, today, I wanted to take a moment to apologize for the tech problems we’ve been having. You all know we’re committed to putting out an episode every day, but man…it’s been a struggle!
I wanted to give you a peek behind the curtain and explain what’s been going on behind the scenes.
I’ve got some big goals for this podcast, and getting it out there every day is just one of them. But let me tell you, coordinating a team to make that happen is no joke.
And unfortunately, we had some serious miscommunications with one of our editors, which led to some major hiccups in our systems and processes.
Turns out the damage was worse than we thought – we ended up repeating some old episodes by accident!
I go into all the details on the episode, but the bottom line is this: we’re working super hard to fix things and get back on track.
We’re totally committed to bringing you the best possible content, and we’re not gonna let these technical difficulties get in the way.
So stay tuned, and thanks for sticking with us!
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
”
In business you have to trust people to do things and you can’t micromanage it.” – Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. As always, super jazzed to have you here today. I owe you an apology and an explanation and perhaps even a story. This one. Okay, so rewind a couple months. We launched this podcast, the Amplified Impact Podcast, in January of 2023. And the goal that I had set for myself, well, there was a number of goals, but one of them was I set for myself. The challenge I wanted to see, could I release an episode every single day for 2023? So, 365 episodes.
Anthony Vicino [00:00:34]:
A couple of things around that challenge that found that I found compelling. One was personally, how am I going to find that many topics to talk about? Will I be able to talk deeply, entertainingly, interestingly, or like an idiot on those topics? Could I do that for 365 days straight? So that was challenge number one. I just wanted to see if I could do that. Two was like the technical challenge of like, okay, how would we coordinate the team to be able to put together the thumbnails, the show notes, the transcripts, get it posted to YouTube, to the podcast directory, to the website, all these things there’s all these little pieces that go into it. And I thought this would be a really cool challenge for myself, for the team, to see if we could do this. And then also I wanted to create something that for myself, at least something that I would be really jazzed to listen to, which was five to ten minute episodes, quick hitting around, business, investing, personal development, things that could quickly consume, get an idea to chew on for the day and then take it into my day. Because I think it’s really cool to have a concept to unpack throughout the day. So this is one of the mainstays of my journaling when I sit down to do that in the morning is like, just pick a topic and then just start writing on it, see what I think.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:51]:
And so, in a way, this podcast can be a way of prompting you to maybe think more deeply on a topic that otherwise wouldn’t occur to you. Anyways, those were the goals for the podcast. And if you’ve been paying attention, we hit some hiccups in the last month with the episodes being released now, we technically didn’t miss a day. We’ve released a podcast every single day since we started. Though we got off to a rough start. We set the goal of starting January 1. The first episodes didn’t go out until January 3. That was a miscommunication between myself, I guess, and the team.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:27]:
But here’s what happened in the last couple of weeks. We had an employee that we’ve since let go who was working for us remotely, and we had given them a whole lot of trust and given the keys to say, you are the one that’s in charge of editing the podcast posting, doing the transcripts, transcribing, all of that stuff. You are owning this. This is your sole responsibility. And we were noticing that there were recurring little issues, like missed deadlines, little things with this person. And it started getting to the point where we weren’t getting replies to our emails. This person was working remotely for us. In the Philippines, we had used a headhunting service called Support Shepherd, which is all about finding a VA overseas.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:20]:
And it was not something I would recommend. My experience so far with Support Shepherd as a company was not great. It’s been very slow finding people. The people that they gave us were kind of okay. They weren’t great. I think you could probably do better just by going directly to a job board and hiring a VA directly, which is what we’ve done in the past. But all that’s to say, we hired this person in December to kind of run the podcast, do all these things with it. And we’re getting all these issues with the time zone difference of them working at nighttime, us being there in the daytime.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:56]:
We were missing each other on all these little things. And the cadence of communication was getting slower and slower. I wasn’t getting replies to my emails, and it was getting really weird with this person. So I was like, listen, things got to change. If they don’t change here pretty quickly, we’re going to have to make a Pivot. Well, we made that pivot in February. So at the time that I’m recording this, this is end of March. So we made that decision at the end of February to let that person go because it was a nonstop hullabaloo.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:31]:
Well, we thought we were out of the woods. We thought we were out of the woods with this. But it turns out this person, the damage that they did to our systems and our processes, and to this podcast in particular, were a lot deeper than we even realized at the time. When we let them go, at the time, we thought they were just lazy and weren’t really doing the work. And now we’ve recently discovered the depths of the treachery. The treachery was a little bit more than we anticipated. So in the last couple of weeks, you might have noticed a couple of episodes are repeats from previous episodes, and they had different titles that had nothing to do with the podcast itself. Very confusing.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:13]:
And I’ll explain kind of what happened. So what we like to do is we like to front load the content, right? So I’m recording this end of March right now. By the time you listen to it, it’s probably going to be maybe end of April, maybe even beginning of May. So we like to have a whole month of episodes in the can. This gives me the leeway if I want to take a vacation, go traveling, that I can rest assured knowing that we have episodes that will continue to go out without me having to do anything. Okay, so we like to have a month in the can and I like to have it all queued up in the system so that we could theoretically launch them all tomorrow and they’d be good to go. Well, the person who was in charge of this, they were really struggling to get the episodes a full month actually uploaded and scheduled. They constantly were like waiting until the day before to get episodes posted, which was giving me a ton of anxiety because I was like, if you get hit by a bus or you get sick and you can’t do the work, then the work itself is going to fall through the cracks.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:12]:
And so I like to have buffers in my businesses. I like to have long lead times and make sure that we have redundancy so that things are good to go. We don’t miss. One of my biggest pet peeves is missing deadlines that we set for ourselves, not through Acts of God, but just through basic execution of the fundamentals. So all that to say is, right before we let this person go, we said, hey, one of the things that you need to have a full month, if we don’t have a full month of episodes in the can by next week, we’re letting you go. We ended up having to let them go the next week anyway for completely different reasons, which was they completely went off the map and didn’t show up for any of the meetings. So that was crazy. But they did get episodes queued up and we’re like, Sweet.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:58]:
They took the feedback, they’re good to go. We’re rocking and rolling. We got 30 days of episodes in there we didn’t realize is the reason that they didn’t have 30 days of episodes in there was because they were moonlighting. They were working for another company and they were also working full time for us, but they weren’t giving us full time hours. And so we expected them to have 30 days of episodes edited and ready to go. They didn’t, though. They were telling us they did so in this mad scramble when they realized, oh crap, they’re going to let me go next week if I don’t get these in the can. They just went and found old episodes and reposted them with different thumbnails, hoping that we wouldn’t notice or maybe hoping to buy themselves more time to go and fix it later.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:40]:
Then we let them go. All the issues came to light and it has been a freaking headache to unwind because we’ve released an episode a day that’s almost 100 episodes over the last three months already, plus more than that in the can. So it was a lot to unwind. So our Badass Reed, who is the head of marketing for Invictus Capital and he oversees the podcast here as well, has been fixing that and unwinding it. And all that to say is. I apologize if you’ve been like, what the hell’s happening here? I thought I already listened to this episode. I had nothing to do with that title. I’m so sorry, guys.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:18]:
I think everything is good to go on YouTube. It’s been on the podcast, Spotify, itunes, those ones where there’s been these snafus. But I think we have it all fixed now. Moving forward, we should be back into our rhythm. No more repeat episodes. It deeply embarrasses me and frustrates me that I allowed this to happen, but I promise we’re going to do better and I share this all with you guys. The takeaway here is that in business you have to trust people to do things and you can’t micromanage it. I could have done a whole lot better job of micromanaging, but truthfully, I’m the type of leader who moves fast and breaks things and this is an unfortunate consequence that occasionally happens as things get broken like this because I move so quickly.
Anthony Vicino [00:09:03]:
In the grand scheme of things, I do believe it works out as a net positive just to keep moving really quickly, keep breaking things and just keep going rather than being overly detail oriented. I’m a big fan of failing our way to success and this is definitely a failure that’s going to influence our systems and processes into the future. But it’s all to say my method is very different than other people’s. I think a lot of people, they would never move forward with a podcast like this until they have everything lined up and perfectly squared away. And my thesis is always imperfectly done is better than perfectly none, which means one is better than none, even if that one is not necessarily the prettiest thing in the world. So I appreciate you guys and your forgiveness, your understanding and being here. I hope we can get off on a good foot moving forward and absolutely crush it. But as always, guys, I just wanted to share that story with you guys here, apologize to you because your time and your energy and like you being here means a lot to me and I don’t take that for granted at all, even when we’re moving fast and breaking things.
Anthony Vicino [00:10:06]:
So hopefully you got a little bit of value out of this. You get to learn something from my failures, my mistakes, which I’m doing in public in the moment right here for you. So that’s how much I love you. So guys, as always, I appreciate you being here. I’ll see you back here tomorrow. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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