No Solution? Don’t Believe It.

You’re in the middle of a crisis you weren’t anticipating. The first solution you tried didn’t work. The next step isn’t obvious.

What do you do?

You keep trying until you find a solution that works.

My wife and I were invited to a huge music festival in Colorado years ago filled to the brim with Texas music fans and industry folks. 

We were in the beginning stages of launching our own Texas music magazine, and the timing was ideal for us to attend the festival and promote our new effort.

So, we agreed to sponsor a venue at the festival with our new magazine’s name and proceeded to box up and ship 2,500 copies ahead of our arrival. 

We arrived at the venue, but the boxes never did. 

The whole point of attending this event and sponsoring the venue was to get these magazines into the hands of the consumers. The very consumers the magazine was targeted at. These same people would be pouring into the venue over the week-long course of the festival. 

Now what?

Find The Boxes

After a day spent calling around and tracking, we learned that the truck had gotten stuck in a snowbank! The truck was along a road that would soon be closed due to weather.

I asked my colleague what she did to try to solve the problem. She responded that she had left a voicemail with UPS to see how we could get the boxes to the event. We were waiting to hear back. However, when we eventually did, they told us there was nothing they could do.

All the time and money spent on this trip was worthless without those boxes. 

Find A Solution

After calling around, we found someone with a 4×4 truck—with tire chains and all. We rented the truck and paid the owner to drive out to where the UPS truck was stuck. We also confirmed with UPS that their driver was still with his truck. So, our team immediately hit the road to beat the impending road closure, loaded up all of those heavy boxes, and delivered them safely to the venue. 

And, we ended up having a remarkably successful magazine launch. 

Marfa, Texas, is 1,000 miles away from the Hollywood Walk of Fame in California. If your goal is to find your favorite star’s spot on the sidewalk and have your picture taken with it, you have to take that final step. Never taking the final step will deliver the same result as having never taken the first one you began with. You might as well take a picture of your shoes standing in the Marfa dirt. 

Like with our magazine launch, if we had accepted that there was nothing we could do, we would never have had a successful launch.

So, the next time you are faced with a crisis that someone says can’t be solved, don’t believe them. The job isn’t done until you get the boxes.