208. Don't Let A Bad Decision Burn You Twice

And we put, you know, full faith in them and we paid them, I think it's probably like a thousand dollars a month retainer at the time.

And we had, you know, maybe a thousand dollars or fifteen hundred in ad spend or something like that per month.

And what transpired in the, you know, three months after engaging was a complete waste of money, a complete waste of time.

We since found out that this person was quite new to the exercise.

They were sort of learning on the fly.

We were kind of like their test case and we were getting no real results.

And at the time, we were obviously really upset and frustrated.

And, you know, we went down the channels of wanting to get our money back and all this sort of stuff.

And it was a bit of an uncomfortable situation for both parties.

But when it came to truth time, Sam and I had to really look back and say, well, whose fault is this? And it was ours.

We had to take full responsibility for offloading something and expecting someone to get results, which is of course what you pay someone for.

But that person wasn't necessarily to blame for everything.

It was actually us as people putting faith in someone that was trying to learn the job.

So obviously we hadn't done our due diligence.

We didn't check their references or we didn't check their performance of other brands and things like that.

and so that was our responsibility of course they didn't perform they didn't do a great job but at the end of the day we lost out not them really and therefore we have to take full responsibility so at that point in time we took everything back in-house we started running ads ourselves we started learning the process of running ads ourselves and that was in and of itself an education process so the thought process that we had was this is our responsibility we'll take it back and we'll use that money to learn things ourselves it's an education versus trying to offload it and really fulfill someone else's education who was learning on the job in this particular circumstance and once we had that mindset shift of like okay cool we're putting money in to start learning some stuff we experienced a really steep learning curve we learned so much in such a short period of time and we've since said that you know in the first few years of business that it was like doing an mba you know in the first 12 months a master's of business actually being in the weeds and starting a business it was an incredible education for us for our knowledge base and so what we started to do was figure out what facebook ads were and how to run them and all the metrics that we're looking at And then we started to get some performance, which was fantastic.