Earlier this month I signed my own company's board minutes. A simple thing: open the document, sign, done. The screen showed the date filled in, like it always does.
When the signed copy came back, the date line did not have a date on it. It had the word "today."
Not a disaster. I fixed the template that afternoon and re-signed. But I keep thinking about how right it looked on the screen, and how the only place the mistake existed was in the copy that actually mattered.
The same thing, seven weeks long.
That week I was already living with a bigger version of it. For seven weeks over the summer, every voicemail drop we sent showed as sent, and not one was ever delivered. The tool said "queued" to every request, and queued looks like success. I wrote up the whole thing, including the guess I got wrong, on the DealRoute blog this morning.
Three places this hides in an investor's business.
1. Follow-up you automated and stopped watching. Drops, mailers, drip texts. The tool reports what it did. It does not report what the other person received unless you go and find that number.
2. Documents. Contracts, purchase agreements, disclosures. The version you clicked through is not the version that gets signed and recorded. Read the executed copy, every time, before you rely on it.
3. Lists. A list says an owner has a phone number. It does not say the number reaches them. Until someone answers, the number is a guess.
The audit (ten minutes). Pick the one automated thing in your business you trust most. Find the number that proves the other person actually received it: delivered, opened, signed, answered. Not sent. If you cannot find that number, write down how you would know if it had been failing for a month.
The honest part. We only caught the voicemail problem because I sat down to decide whether drops were worth keeping, and went looking for a number that did not exist. Nothing alerted us. Now a check runs every morning and goes red when something is sent and never confirmed. I would rather have built that check before the seven weeks than after.
One question to carry this week. What in your business is reporting success that you have never once checked against what actually happened?
The full story, the four checks we run now, and the mistake in my first guess are here:
Hit reply and tell me the one tool you trust without checking. I read every one.
Talk soon,
Jason