Coping with disaster: are you ready to deal with a 55% drop in your business?

It's been a long, long time (eight years, in fact) since I've personally dealt with a business I owned having taken it in the shorts as FunAdvice did in August. Thus the reason we didn't crow about the quantcast, the compete, etc, updates with our glorious ever growing traffic numbers this month. They didn't grow.

In fact, we hit 6.9 million in July, about 4.2 million in August and our run rate this month is for a meager 3.3 million visitors, if we're lucky. What happened?

1) Aggressive marketing - I'll put my hand up on this one. Lock, stock and barrel. Sometimes when you sit too close to the fire you get burned ya? We did. Lesson learned.

2) Perhaps you don't have a good comparison for what we went through...well, I've consulted with nearly 60 companies on online marketing strategic, tactics and helped them execute. Only two companies grew faster than FunAdvice did for a six month period, in all the companies we have ever worked with. There was a specific reason for both of them growing faster than us. Simply put: we were on fire.

3) The collapse happened and now we're back to the same strategy as before (which I've come around to accepting is the only strategy that builds scale, value and provides disaster proof returns: helping people one person at a time.

Marketing at the relationship level for us has always provided a massive return. "Mass" marketing for us has simply never worked...sure, we hit a random ball out of the park with our second press release (getting the NY Times pick up was sweet)...but really what we need to do is simply grind it out. One person, one relationship and building block at a time.

When (or if, really) disaster strikes, don't:
1) Make rash decisions - I made things worse, delayed recovery for two weeks and cost our site revenue, cost members the excitement of the connections they could have made, etc.

2) Blame the team - if you're running the show, the buck stops there. End of story. I'd personally LOVE it if somebody else stepped up and said it was me...but, they can't, because they'd be lying. I'm not going to encourage that, as business only works when you deal with reality, not somebody's hopeful version of it.

3) Be a jerk. I whined, I'm not too proud to admit it. You know what it got me? Zero. One night, I slept with such pain in my chest I could barely breath...it sucked. Badly. Take a deep breath and realize, remember: if you're still breathing, keep your health and live to fight another day.

4) Skip analysis: point of fact I had enough data in 3-5 days to make the right decisions. Instead, I let my ego cloud my judgement and spent two weeks waiting for nothing to start digging into things. If this happens to you remember to think quickly and smartly but only act once the data is clear. You can't have too much clarity and yes, bounce your ideas off of somebody. Outline your thinking, it may help you from jumping further over the edge.

Bottom line is you have noticed FunAdvice is less busy, well, it is. The good news is we've installed some new software so our site is working on a per visitor basis, better than ever. And, we uncovered (thanks to the drop) a series of bugs that had been plaguing us for a long time. So we'll get back there...it's just a matter of time, and building things with the right foundation.