This is a YouTube video titled "Ivan Misner's Biggest Mistake in Business" featuring Ivan Meisner, founder of BNI Websites, sharing a personal story about a major technology project failure and how he managed service recovery by engaging his team to identify and prioritize issues, ultimately turning the failure into a success. The content is a monologue reflecting on professional challenges and lessons learned, recorded in February 2014.
Hi, I'm Ivan Meisner with BNI. I'm the founder of BNI Websites, bni.com business network international. Bni.com so, DC, your question to me was, what. What big mistake have I made professionally and how did I address it? I think one of the biggest challenges that I've ever had in my life was a technology project and the rollout of a technology project. Huge, massive project, really expensive. And I made some commitments as to what it would look like when it came out. And it did not look like it was supposed to look like or act like it was supposed to act like when it came out. And I think, listen, we. We all have things like that happen in our life at one point or another. And you can't define yourself by your failures. You have to define yourself by your successes in life, not your failures. This one was at first a failure, but then what you have to do is some service recovery. And what I tried to do was service recovery. And I did that by sitting down with my directors of my organization and saying to them, this was not what I had promised. This isn't what I had hoped it would be. So what I want you to do, and this was part of the service recovery, is I want you to tell me every single thing that you don't like about what was given out. And I spent two hours getting body blows with everything that was wrong. And I wrote it all down on a sheet of paper, one at a time. I had page after page after page of all the things they hated about this program. And I kept saying when they. When there was a little lull, I said, anything else, and it'd be quiet. And somebody else would say, yeah, I got something else. Let's write it down. We did that for two hours. At the end of two hours, they were pretty exhausted, you know, throwing all these issues at me. And I had a plan at that point, which then I was able to roll out, which is, look, I get it. I hear you. I agree with most of these. Here's my plan. Let's all. Let's put together a committee of you people to go through these issues and let's triage the problem. Let's take all of these issues and say which one is the highest priority, and we will fix this. And I made that commitment to them. We will fix this. Took two years, but the product we have now is what I hoped it would be. It took too long, but we got it to where we got it. And look, in business, we all make mistakes. We all have some failures. It's about service recovery. It's about keeping your integrity and doing your best to make it right. And I think what could have been one of my biggest failures professionally in many ways, is one of my biggest triumphs because we were able to turn it around and it is now headed in the right direction. And that's my story for you. Ivan Meisner, bni. Com.
