The best laid plans . . .

I spent the last six months preparing for the Webinar I was supposed to give yesterday.

Then I didn’t give it.

Here’s how it went down.

Between April and yesterday, several colleagues, sponsors, and I slaved over a report about the ROI of business books. Once the report was complete, I did a private Zoom with the principals at the four sponsors of the report, Amplify Publishing, Gotham Ghostwriters, Smith Publicity and Thought Leadership Leverage to show off the data.

It wasn’t clear to me exactly how we’d be presenting all that information, but at the end of the private Zoom, they all just sort of assumed I’d be presenting the full version at the Webinar. Since I’d already prepared 90% of the slides and was intimately familiar with the data, it wasn’t very hard to prepare. But there was a hitch.

The only reasonable time everyone could participate in the Webinar was 1pm Eastern Time on October 24. That was my birthday, but hey, we all work on our birthdays. More of a problem was that I had arranged a hard-to-schedule service appointment for my Tesla on the same morning in Peabody, Massachusetts. (In case you’re wondering, I bought it long before Elon Musk started behaving like a psychopath.)

In contrast to gas-powered cars, Teslas rarely need service. But this one had a charging problem, and that was annoying. When I moved to Portland, Maine, I recognized that the lack of a Tesla service center in the state might be an occasional problem. So I needed to get the car to Peabody, 90 minutes away.

They’d promised me a loaner while they worked on the car, but Tesla is famous for dropping the ball on service promises and handles all service requests through text messages in the app. And there was no way I was going to attempt to put off this service appointment.

So I made a plan. I sent all the slides, with detailed speaker notes, to Bill Sherman, a collaborator on the report who could certainly speak to the content, and warned him that there was a small chance I wouldn’t be back in time to present the Webinar if Tesla failed to live up to its promises, and that he might have to step in.

An unexpected stumble

Here’s how my day went.

Starting early in the morning, I drove the affected car from Maine to Massachusetts.

I checked in with the Tesla app, which had instantly recognized that I’d pulled into the service center.

The app offered me the loaner, just as promised. And the very helpful service center staff gave me the card-key for the loaner.

I popped myself in the loaner and drive back to my house. I arrived back home at 10:30 — in plenty of time to give the Webinar.

I emailed Bill and told him I’d be fine to present.

And then the power went out.

Central Maine Power is the second-worst rated electric utility in the country, behind only the Texas utility that failed in the midst of snowstorms. More than once, CMP had failed us in the middle of snowstorms. But this time, the weather was pleasant. There was no reason to expect a power failure.

No power means no router and no internet. My laptop could run on battery, but my phone’s hotspot was delivering about 1 megabit per second. Not nearly enough to run a Webinar.

CMP said the power would return at 1:35, halfway through the Webinar. There was no way I was going to count on that.

So I emailed Bill from my phone and said, “Hey, remember when I said we didn’t need the fallback plan? Well, we actually need it.”

Bill presented the content expertly and I watched. The power did indeed come back halfway through, but I wasn’t going to stop him in the middle.

A few reflections

First, I had decided a few weeks ago that it was time to get a backup generator, and the generator guys are coming to set up the details next week. Better late than never . . .

Second, it’s a bit weird to see somebody else deliver your content, but the important thing was that after the hard work of creating, it was getting put in front of the right people.

Third, anyone who saw the webinar, and even those who didn’t, can see the full report here: AuthorROI.com

Fourth, if your podcast or blog serves authors, I’m happy to appear on it. After all, I already have the slides all ready to go.

And finally, it pays to be paranoid and put backup plans in place. Even if the reasons you need them aren’t what you expected.

And hey, I still got pie for my birthday.