t's 2 AM. Your phone lights up. "My site is down!!! Customers are calling!!!" Every agency group has this fight about once a month, and the comments always split into two camps. Camp one: "You answer. Every time. That's what separates a real agency from a freelancer." Camp two: "Never. Boundaries. They can wait till 9." Both camps are wrong. They're arguing about what you do after the text lands. That's the wrong fight. By the time your client is texting you at 2 AM, the emergency plan already failed. All that's left is damage control. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝟮 𝗔𝗠 𝘁𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂 "You found out from the client." That's not bad luck. That's missing monitoring. A site that's down at 2 AM went down at 1:40. Something should have told you first. If your client is your alarm system, you don't have one. "They had your cell number." That's not a pushy client. That's a missing escalation path. Nobody wrote down what counts as an emergency, who gets contacted, or how fast. So the client picked the fastest channel they had. You. In bed. "You don't know how long the fix will take." That's not a hard problem. That's an untested backup. Most agency owners find out if their backup actually restores on the night they need it. Worst possible night to find out. "You're the only one who can fix it." That's not great service. That's a single point of failure. If the whole plan is "wake up Dorn," the plan is a person, and people get sick, go on vacation, and sleep. An emergency plan isn't how fast you respond. It's how rarely you have to. Now, some of you are thinking: "So I just let my client's site sit dead until morning?" No. That's not the point. If the site's down, it gets fixed. The difference is who knew first and whether the steps were already written down. Here's the same outage, told two ways. Version one: the client texts you in a panic, you scramble to figure out what broke, and everybody loses sleep. Version two: the client wakes up to "Your site went down at 1:42 AM. We were alerted and it was back up at 2:15. Here's what caused it and what we changed."

We all have something that can derail the day. Maybe it’s social media. Maybe it’s email, notifications, constantly checking your phone, jumping between tasks, or spending way too much time “researching” something that really didn’t need 45 minutes of research. Maybe it is online poker. For agency owners, distractions can be especially expensive. One small interruption turns into another task, which turns into checking something else, and suddenly the thing you actually needed to accomplish today is still sitting there waiting. So let’s talk about it. What’s your biggest daily distraction? And more importantly, do you have a system for dealing with it, or are you just hoping tomorrow you’ll somehow have more discipline? Drop yours in the comments. No judgment. We’re probably all guilty of something.

Using the 5x email strategy for my AGM. different subject for each email 1 until they open it. Bueller? Bueller? has been the most productive at getting opens of any subject lines for a long time. Thought i'd share. Happy hunting

Thank you for all you do for this community. You’re a rare bird that gives unconditionally. You are greatly appreciated. Have a great day brotha!