"Handle it Like Plutonium"
A story of learning from big mistakes and teaching with a powerful metaphor
Welcome to the latest entry in The Workaround. You’re in good company with thousands of fellow entrepreneurs and innovators who have subscribed!
I’m your host, Bob, and my mission here is to share personal, behind-the-scenes stories of ups and downs from my career leading tech startups and corporate innovation.
I write to make you think, smile, and discover a shortcut to success or a trap to avoid.
Here we go…
One of the burdens of being a business leader is that bad news bubbles up to you…eventually. It’s funny how it always seems to arrive at 5:35 pm on Friday—when someone on your team decides it’s time to dump a bombshell that will ruin your sleep that night and crush your weekend recovery plans.
The client fired us. We lost the pitch. The key employee quit. The software release went sideways. The sales projections are wrong—in the wrong way.
You know the drill.
A test of your leadership skills is how you react in these inevitable situations. I’ve failed the test several times, with gray hair and wrinkles under my eyes to prove it.
But a few years ago, I figured out how to turn a negative into a positive. Maybe this story can get you to a better place earlier than I did…
“Hey, Bob, I’ve got some bad news…”
It’s early 2016, back at our last startup. As I’ve written in greater detail previously, I had somewhat recently become CEO after my co-founder left the company, and our team is pivoting from Pinterest marketing software to an Influencer marketing platform.
We got the “last check” from our investors, and I had to cover payroll a couple of times personally. Pennies were being pinched. After a painful layoff, we rallied the remaining team in a joint project to find a new path forward. Thankfully, our first influencer marketing campaigns are working—giving us precious hope.
Our biggest innovation in what had already become a crowded market was to promote influencers’ posts with paid social media. We initially did this out of desperation. We lacked a giant network of influencers then, so it was harder to patch together enough of them to hit impression goals. Paid media allowed us to hit our clients’ objectives with fewer influencers.
This paid approach quickly went from a tactic of desperation to a differentiation strategy. It allowed us to provide our clients with highly targeted and measurable media at a time when brands were increasingly aware of the issue of fake followers. (We later helped fan those flames).
Things are working until that winter day in 2016 when Ryan, our CFO, asks me to follow him into a huddle room. Uh, oh…
Ryan had joined us just a few months earlier, and we are still getting to know each other. Today, he would tell me straight up when something was wrong. Back then, he hedged a bit:
“Hey, Bob, I’ve got some bad news…It’s for a paid campaign that Nate has been running. I just found out that he made a mistake in setting it up, and we spent $25,000 more on Facebook ads than we meant to.”
It feels like a punch to the gut. My worries start to accelerate. I think of more of our precious money gone—and wonder what other time bombs of paid media mistakes might be going off at that moment.
But I take a deep breath, and we proceed to take steps that I still use today:
1. Get over it
We spend a few minutes brainstorming how to get out of this situation. Ryan wonders if we could take this back to the client and ask them to cover the overage—after all, this was value that they received.
But we both kill this idea immediately. They didn’t budget for this, and we’ll look like complete idiots asking them to pay for our mistake.
So, we let it go. We stop gnashing our teeth and accept that it happened. Ryan adjusts our financial model. We’ll still make payroll this month, but our “life date”—when our company must be profitable or will die—just got meaningfully shorter. Oh, well: Next Play.
2. How can we adjust the system?
While we’ve gotten over the emotion of that problem, we shift to worry about how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Ryan and I both come from businesses that were built on systems thinking. In summary, systems thinking means you treat your company like a complex machine. Your job as a leader is to step back, watch how the company works, investigate where improvement is needed, and make changes.
One view would be to look at Nate, the employee who made the mistake, as a “bad part” that needs to be replaced. Some leaders might yell at, warn, or fire him on the spot. Some might make an example of him to serve as a warning to others. Nate certainly feels very bad about the situation and won’t stop apologizing.
Punishing Nate doesn’t enter our minds. He has worked well for us for some time, but he is just now learning to buy paid media—we all are! Ryan and I recognize that we have built a system that allows an otherwise smart and responsible employee to make a costly mistake. This is our fault.
So we work on improvements. Ryan—who would soon be elevated to COO for work like this—puts several new processes in place to double-check our spending. We work with the software company that we use to buy the media to implement hard limits on daily spending. In the months ahead, our engineering team will build ways to monitor our spending better and warn us of risks.
A mistake like this never happens again, even as our influencer marketing business grew massively and we ran millions of dollars through our software, people, and processes.
3. Turn it into a story
It’s tempting to credit all of these checks and balances for our success in scaling. But I think the difference was something else: We told the story.
Days after the issue, we hold our regular Friday all-hands meeting called “Drink 'n Demo.” It’s our traditional way to share good news from the week, check our progress on the path to profitability, and tell lessons learned.
It’s just a few days after the $25,000 mistake, and of course, we share the tale of what happened. In talking with the team, my mind suddenly recalls a story and analogy I learned from my friend, John Stichweh, years ago…If only I recalled John’s story earlier!
At the time, John was a client of mine at a big consumer product company. He led the IT team responsible for brand websites back then. He relayed how a junior employee decided to tweak some copy on a website and made a mistake that took it down for several days. John told the employee that:
“This is one of those things you should treat like plutonium…it’s powerful and dangerous—and you won’t immediately see the results of mistakes. So be extremely careful and ask for help when handling it.”
So I re-tell John’s story and make the comparison to our paid media issue. I see the nods and smiles as the team quickly grasps and integrates the lesson. Storytelling has been the most effective way humans transfer and recall information since the first words were spoken. (It’s also why I tell plenty of stories in this Substack.)
Teaching through stories empowers the team to handle unimagined issues that will arise in the future. You can’t have a process for every situation and can’t anticipate every error. But when we all internalize a lesson like this, even the most junior employee can make better decisions in real time. Leaders won’t even know the countless bombs that never went off because this lesson was learned.
Finally, we make the point that no one is getting fired for this. It’s a moment of truth when employees are alert to what might happen to them. But you can’t run a successful company on fear. Ryan and I take responsibility, and we move forward on our mission together. Some teammates still remember the story today, and most remember the plutonium analogy—I sure repeated it enough! But I don’t think anyone remembers that “Nate” made the mistake.
You’ve got plutonium stored in your company, dear reader. It’s that thing that, if lost, exposed, or handled poorly, could throw your entire business into dire straights. Do you know what it is? Do your employees know how to handle it?
Maybe now is a good time to give it some thought…after all, Friday is just two days away.
How we might work together…
My team and I lead Hearty, a boutique recruiting service that helps tech-forward companies hire proven talent. Our senior team of operators sources and screens, saving you time and money. When you need help, let’s chat.
Need help with a software project? Perhaps a product MVP, a project that requires outside help, or a fractional CTO for key strategic decisions? Our team at Shipwright Studio has worked together to build multiple successful startups, and we love helping leaders turn their dreams into reality. We're the team our clients trust for software built to last.
Looking for Influencer Marketing and Content Creation? The team from our previous company is back by popular demand with A2 Influence. We’re ramping up now and would love to share more.
Feel free to schedule time together during my Open Hours for questions, feedback, networking, or any other topic!
BONUS: Cool Content of the Week
A little something I found meaningful. You might agree…
Break Point on Netflix
My wife started taking tennis lessons over the summer, which led me to pick up a racquet for the first time since college. So, while scrolling Netflix a few weeks ago, we were both excited to click on Break Point, a series on Netflix that follows the pro tennis tour and its rising generation of stars.
Break Point is a highly entertaining peek into the lives of highly talented people in a winner-take-all contest. There’s plenty of drama and players to root for and against. But my biggest recurring takeaway is that the mental game separates the great ones. Tennis is just a single player on the court, going shot-for-shot against another player who is just as talented and determined.
The top players keep their emotions in check, push away the voices of doubt that arise, and move on from a bad shot, game, set, or match. Funny…that’s how you win in life, too.