Hi Joe,
I am writing you this email to let you know that I am no longer going to be able to work for you. There are unforeseen circumstances that leave me unavailable to provide the time that you need. I hope that you find a replacement who shines and can help to your satisfaction. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors and much success with MM and entities. Thank you for your time.
Always,
Marina
And that was it.
Just the email.
I replied, “I accept your resignation and hope we can still be friends?”
I asked if I could have an exit interview of sorts, so I could improve.
I asked how we might reconcile my prepayment with her hours worked.
I know, I know, Beth wasn’t happy about it either. No more prepayments.
I concluded, “I want to give you a warm and personal thank you for believing in me.”
Over the five days that followed, no response.
- Not to the email.
- Or the message on Slack.
- Or the text.
- Or the calls Beth discreetly made when I wasn’t around.
Marina rescinded my Skype connection with her. And defriended me on Facebook.
And her day-before-my-birthday resignation kind of ruined my weekend.
[Insert inspirational sentiment here, something like, “It’s for the best.”]
Now, hours into changing my passwords, I don’t know what to make of it.
But I guess it’s for the best.
The importance of your support network
I have a client that I absolutely love. We’re doing the best work of my career (more in future Journeys).
I skyped her about my Marina setback and shared the Rainy Days and Mondays video.
Jenn replied, “oh no. (hoping karen is providing some solace)”
Joe: “on repeat. She’s not lifting my spirits but it’s the only song that comes to mind.”
Jenn: “chumbumwamba better, perhaps?”
And, in what is probably the first time in the history of YouTube, someone listening to The Carpenters switched to ChumbaWumba.
I felt better immediately.
Two implications for you:
1. Love. Surround yourself with clients and customers and team members you love. It makes life better, and easier on the rough days.
2. Your relationship with your customers. I’ve chosen to interact with my readers as friends, which makes today’s cathartic email possible. Thought-provoking question for your drive home: What relationship have you chosen to have with your customers?
Related: A very relevant post I wrote about customer loyalty.
Now for the exciting part of the email
With any luck, this will be the last email I send you from AWeber, my email provider for the past six years.
I’m beyond excited about my move to Drip.
You’ll hear a lot about Drip in the coming weeks. I believe it will fundamentally change the way I, my clients, (and you?) do business.
To whet your appetite, with Drip, I’ll be able to:
- Set up conditional campaign flows based on reader engagement
- Automatically send follow-up messages to those who didn’t open the first
- Automatically purge subscribers who never open, never click
- Score each subscriber in my database on metrics I choose
- Add an email “pre-header” (I’ll show you next week) and better formatting
I can’t wait to dive in and located a $1,000 course to become a Drip power user.
It’s just all this darn client work (I’m looking at you, Jenn) that’s keeping me from it.
Now concepts yield new design and momentum
I haven’t introduced you to Shelby yet. He’s doing some very satisfying work for me.
We didn’t get this landing page concept up in time, but I couldn’t wait a week to share the future home of Journey archives and a place for new readers to subscribe.
You like it? It’s only 85% there but I love it so far.
This week’s revelation
My wife found an AMAZING app you need to get. It’s called Unroll.me.
It identifies all the email subscription lists you’re on and lets you:
- Keep them in your inbox
- Unsubscribe
- “Roll them up” for later
When you choose “roll them up,” you get one daily email (at the time of your choosing) with all your subscriptions.
This was how many subscriptions I had for my medicalmarcom address alone!
Cleaning my inbox was as easy as this!
I’ve been using Unroll.me for a week. I love it. You can thank Beth with two clicks!
Miscellaneous notes
- I’m hosting my sixth 10x Medical Device Conference on April 3-5 in New Jersey at the Meadowlands Expo Center. This year, it will have a design, development, and manufacturing focus and an exhibition floor, in concert with MDTX, the Medical Device Technology Exchange. Please share with team members who will benefit and tell them, “Joe promises it will be fun and unlike other shows.”
Thank you for joining me on The Journey.
See you next week – or sooner – if you choose to reply to this email,
