Oh crap !! What to do ?
I am in a strange country, in a town I don’t know – Phoenix, Arizona
I am on my own.
It’s 10pm.
I have lost my mobile phone.
I have no idea where I am.
I have no idea where I am staying either, so can’t get back to where I was staying.
I have no internet access…
This is how it happened…
On Friday night I decided to do a little bit of food shopping at the local supermarket, I called an Uber cab and it drove me to a supermarket.
The cab driver asked if I wanted to charge my mobile phone, I said yes and plugged my mobile phone in to charge, and then forgot about it.
10 minutes later the cab driver dropped me off at the supermarket and drove off.
I walked into the supermarket, and then it dawned on me, no mobile phone!
Now the worst part was, I didn’t actually know the address of where I was staying!
Everything was saved in the cloud and accessed via my mobile phone!
So there I was standing in a small supermarket, 10 o’clock at night, in a foreign country.
I sat down on a bench outside the supermarket and thought to myself,
“Sarah, work the problem…”
The plan I came up with was to purchase a new mobile phone and then log onto my Google account to retrieve the information I needed.
The supermarket didn’t sell mobile phones, so with the last of my US $ change I jumped into a yellow cab and got them to take me to the local Walmart, where I was pretty sure that they would sell mobile phones.
Finally about an hour later I had a brand-new working prepaid mobile phone.
I tried logging onto my Google account, however, Google insisted on two-factor authentication.
That wasn’t going to work, not with my memory!
I must’ve been in the Walmart for an hour and a half, trying to workout what the hell to do.
Eventually I managed to get Skype installed.
Fortunately I managed to remember my username and password.
I went through all of my contacts trying to phone people, but it was the middle of the night in the UK.
Finally, I got through to Kathy from my support desk, and she was able to log onto my Google account for me and retrieve my address!
I finally got back to the house at around 2:30 AM very stressed out!! I contacted Uber and the driver dropped off my phone 20 minutes later !
People you meet when you are in trouble.
I want to say a massive “thank you” to a guy called Richard at the WalMart.
He was the guy that set the phone up and got me a pre-paid account with a service provider.
By the way, Richard is in a wheelchair and suffers from cerebral palsy.
A nicer, more friendly, more helpful, and more knowledgable guy you couldn’t find at midnight in a strange city, in a strange country.
The moral of the story
I’m treating this as one big learning experience, shit happens, and when it does, treat it as a learning experience, that’s what I’ve always done in business.
Always have important information such as hotel address, phone numbers etc written down on a piece of paper, and also available in the cloud/ online but not behind a password protected account.
Next time I will have all my contact information I need on a sheet of paper, and also in a PDF document uploaded to my website…
Phoenix Infusionsoft – icon 2017
Okay, so I was in Phoenix Arizona attending the Infusionsoft annual seminar icon17.
This is a large convention, 3000+ people, for Infusionsoft users. In case you don’t know Infusionsoft is the Customer Relationship Management system I use to send out all my emails and keep customer information.
Icon17 consisted of three main elements for me.
- The workshops / Training
- The exhibitor stands / Marketplace
- Networking
This was probably the first event I’ve ever been to where I had a very clear plan of what I wanted to achieve.
My main goal was to connect with new companies and service providers to provide the infrastructure to support the continued growth of Sarah Staar Business School Inc.
With that in mind I decided to visit every single exhibitor at the show and talk to as many people as possible, this took me three days!!
I made some amazing new connections, and picked up some incredible information along the way, without a doubt this has been the best event I’ve ever attended!
AirBnB
Icon17 took place in a convention center so I decided to use Airbnb for the first time, instead of the usual hotel
I was attending icon17 with Angela (you may know her from the support desk) We managed to rent an entire house for less money than it would have cost to stay in a hotel!
To be absolutely honest I actually preferred staying in a luxury house rather than a hotel.
Thursday afternoon icon17 ended and Angela flew back home. I wasn’t flying back home till Sunday so had a couple of free days. My plan was to spend Friday Chilling out in the house and then spend Saturday visiting the Grand Canyon.
My Grand Canyon trip
My flight back to the UK wasn’t until Sunday, so I decided to use the spare time to “do” the Grand Canyon.
I left the house at 6 AM, for short cab journey to the local airport where I boarded a small plane and actually got to be co-pilot on my way to the Grand Canyon.I then rented a helicopter and flew down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon for a boat trip.
What an amazing trip, some incredible scenery, too many photos to post here but here’s a small taster of what I saw.
The London Meetup – Monday 8th May
Next Monday I am starting the London meet up again, this is a free networking event held in central London.
If you’re around next Monday evening it would be great if you could come along.
Sign up for the London meetup 🙂
This month I decided to centre the entire London meet up around traffic generation, seeing as how traffic generation is the backbone of any Internet marketing business.
Topics covered will be,
- Paid advertising
- Free website traffic
- How to reverse engineer competitors traffic.
I will be showing you the best free traffic techniques as well as some of the best paid traffic techniques & services which I’ve never spoken in public about before.
After the (free) training there will be opportunities to network with each other and also have a chat to some of the panellists, last time I ran these meetups we were usually there until about 11 o’clock at night!
Remember to bring some business cards and a notepad to take some notes.
(Please note this is not a sales event, so no selling or pitching please)
Sign up for the London meetup 🙂
All the best,
Sarah Staar