BE A HERO

What would it take for you to be a hero to your clients?  What would it cost you?  What could you gain? I'm not just talking about taking care of your clients.  Taking care of your clients is easy - all you have to do is do what you said you'd do.

But what about when something goes wrong.  What about when something terrible happens.  What if everything that could go wrong - does, all at the same time.

This website is hosted on Squarespace, a web development and hosting platform.  I have a total of 4 websites hosted with Squarespace, including my personal blog, my photography business website, and a design consulting firm I co-founded.  That firm has dozens and dozens more sites all designed and built on Squarespace.  It's safe to say I'm a fan.

One of the reasons I've been a huge fan is their absolute commitment to customer service.  In fact, I would rate their customer service as the best I've ever experienced - from any company... ever.  They are just that good.  Not only do they build incredible tools for web development, but they take care of their customers.

Squarespace is based in lower Manhattan, which means they were hit hard by Hurricane Sandy.  The building they were in was one of hundreds that lost power - which for most people means that the milk in the fridge is going to go bad.  For a web hosting company, it's a little worse.  For a company that is based entirely on servers connected to the internet, power is kind of important.  Knowing this, The company released the following statement early this week.

As frustrating as it would have been had they lost power, and taken down all of my personal sites, as well as the sites we manage, hardly anyone could have blamed them.  This wasn't even their fault.  They had backup plans, and backup plans for the backup plans.  Unfortunately, Sandy took out all of them.  For many of us, this would be it.   For most of us, we'd admit we were beat, and try to come up with some way to make it up to our customers later.  These guys, against all odds, took a different approach:

Did you catch that?  They carried buckets of fuel up 17 flights of stairs, all night long.  Why? Because they're heros - that's why.  Because that's just who they are.  They take care of their customers, even when it's NOT easy.

By the way, not one of our sites went down - not even for a moment.  What if, instead of explaining to your customers why you can't do something, or why the terrible thing that happened isn't your fault - you simply got it done?  What if instead of having to make it up to your clients later, you were a hero instead.  What if, instead of saying "there's just no way," you were willing to carry buckets of fuel up 17 flights of stairs to keep the thing going?  

Note: the link above to Squarespace is an affiliate link.  If you click on it, normally I'd make a commission, however for the next 10 days, anyone who clicks on, and signs up for Squarespace, I'll donate that commission to The Red Cross. That said, neither Squarespace, the Red Cross, or anyone else has asked me to write this post, and I was not paid to write it.