My sister, who’s a Leadership Coach once said on a podcast ‘often our talents come so naturally to us that we disregard them’.
It really stuck with me as I notice that I often focus on what I can’t do so well, rather than what I’m nailing.
I have a Website Clinic. Others refer to their version of this service as a focus hour or power hour. For me it’s the Website Clinic. I like the idea of it being there to diagnose and fix peoples’ problems. Plus, for a few years I had a cartoon, mini-me of me with a white doctor’s coat and a stethoscope. Living the dream!
It was a short lived dream. You see, it doesn’t matter how many people go through the clinic or how many years I’ve been doing them for, I always come away thinking we could have achieved more. The customers always give the clinic rave reviews and are happy with the service but I get a weird imposter syndrome about it and worry that they’ll think the time spent together was rubbish.
Five years of the clinic and I’ve worked with people at all stages of their website life. From those who have built their own website and want to do a specific task, to people who need help planning the processes behind new offers or products, and those who have had their website professionally built but there’s been very little support following handover.
Recently I had a clinic call with a person whose website had been built by a pro but she was pretty afraid of the developer, referring to him as moody, precious about the site and unhelpful. She wanted to be able to update the website herself so booked into the clinic and I met her only to find…. She could barely operate a computer.
To say the session was painful would be an understatement. We crawled through the session with her eventually giving me a login to her website so I could make the changes and show her how they were done. In the end we ran out of tasks before the hour was over and I was asked ‘can you just show me some stuff, any stuff, I just want to use up the hour’.
After the call I spent weeks having her contact me by email telling me I’d broken her website (I hadn’t, she was experiencing cacheing due to having an appalling server) I had to repeatedly talk her through clearing her browser history and eventually she got it. This went on for a couple of weeks, alongside emails asking for recommendations of website support for people who’d come to her house (in Canada) and eventually things settled.
That one website clinic, which was priced at £129 probably worked out to be around £30 per hour what with all the follow up support. Not gonna lie, I almost jacked in the whole website clinic thing after that.
But, it’s been a while, I’ve recovered and I kinda like the weird and random situations I get through the clinic.
Do you offer power hours? Have you had any weird and wonderful experiences with them? Let me know in the comments if you have – sharing is caring and all that!
