Let me tell you about the incident that changed my business forever.
About 7-ish years ago, my mom promised that I wouldn’t need daycare because she was newly retired and available. About 5-months into this promise she started feeling burn out. I get it. “Babies are a lot of work,” is the understatement of a lifetime. However, when she was in the middle of ghosting me, my websites had a plugin that became vulnerable to hackers. Instead of notifying people, the plugin creators decided to keep their issue quiet. Needless to say, I had a situation on my hands. And it escalated VERY quickly!
I was neck-deep into a sticky situation.
- Zero childcare.
- Zero contractors to help me.
- Zero processes to handle this.
The thing that killed me the most is I didn’t offer hosting! I had to go onto individual accounts across multiple platforms – GoDaddy, Bluehost, etc. and perform scrubbing that was easy on some systems, and a monster pain in others.
It took AT LEAST 100-hours to unhack all the websites across all the different platforms. Not only this, but I had to schedule this emergency around having a 5-month-old and no childcare. I spent every waking moment, working late overnights, bottles at my desk, laptop next to the crib, reading emails out loud as stories – I was a freaking mess!
After a ton of frantic work and a week or two of sleepless nights, I finally got all the holes patched, and the websites back to normal.
I got some sleep and did some soul searching on what just happened.
I realized this was MY fault. No one put me in this position but me.
- I saw the signs of my mom’s burnout and ignored it.
- I knew not training anyone as backup would be an issue if I got sick, injured, or overrun with work.
- I knew not offering website hosting was not sustainable for long-term maintenance.
I came to a conclusion. ALL of these things needed to change!
- I enrolled my son in daycare for 2-days a week (Yes, just two days, have you seen tuition rates for babies?!). This released my mom of her babysitting duties because she should really be golfing anyway!
- I hired a virtual assistant and a website contractor.
- A new policy was instated – hosting is required!
I got a lot of heat about that last one! However, if I had required everyone host their websites with me, this hacking situation could have been a 1-hour ordeal. I.E. **gets on tech support chat** “Hey can you roll back my server to 1-week ago? Thanks.” **removes hackable plugin** -=DONE=-
If you’ve been wondering why I require hosting, now you know the story!
If you’re on the fence about getting a website done, consider me for your website design. You know now I’ll work long hours to thwart hackers!
Beautiful websites are great, but if it’s not converting traffic into leads, you’ve got a dud. Our modern commercial real estate website design package is built around one goal – converting traffic into leads. How much time would you get back if your website brought in leads hands-free, and followed up with those leads automatically? Our website design package comes with pre-written ebook of your choice to use as a lead magnet! Websites also come with access to the CRE plug-in so you can show your listings without an expensive IDX.
Modern websites that act like lead generating machines is just another way, I’m taking the “broke” out of commercial real estate brokerage.
