The Week My Internet Died, And My Phone Hit The Driveway

It happened on the same weekend, an amazing stroke of bad luck. 

The internet went out last Friday as construction crews tore up our road. Then at my open house the next day, while doing video content, my phone fell from the tripod onto the sidewalk and was smashed. Not a crack, the entire front screen flew off into the yard.

So there I was. No internet, no phone, and a full week of work in front of me.

I would love to tell you I handled it well, but in another way...I didn't. I stood in the driveway for a solid two minutes doing nothing, because every single thing I was planning to do that day lived inside one of those two things. In fact, the map to get back home, the emails I was to follow up with, the schedule for the day, and more were gone.

And then when I finally found my way home, I sat down at the kitchen table with a legal pad, and I asked myself a question I hadn't asked in probably five years.

What can I still do without my technology?

Not what did I lose. What is still available to me right now, today, with nothing but my car and a pen.

Turns out the answer was almost everything that actually matters.

Here's the thing I need you to understand before Wednesday, and it's the whole reason I'm telling you this story. This is not a post about how technology is bad, I am back up and running a website, this blog post, I have a scheduling link. My whole business would be harder without those tools and I'm not about to pretend otherwise.

But referral marketing was never built on top of those tools, it is building and maintaining relationships in your warm market so business comes to you through people who already trust you, instead of through ads or cold calls. So let me be clear, there is nothing in that sentence that requires a device.

Contractors, insurance agents, real estate agents, we all got sold the same idea at some point, which is that the tools are the marketing. Better CRM, better follow-up, better funnel, better leads, the more automation, more business.

The tools are the record of the relationship, but they are not the relationship.

And when both of my tools went dark on the same weekend, I found out how much of my business had quietly turned into managing the record instead of building the relationship.

This past week ended up being one of the best pipeline weeks I'd had in months.

I'll tell you exactly what I did on Wednesday, move by move, because none of it was clever. It was all the oldest stuff in the book and concepts I continue to hear more and more on my podcast from experts. 

But I want you to sit with the question first, because it's more useful than my answer: If your phone died right now and your internet stayed down all week, what would you actually do to grow your business on Tuesday morning?

Most people can't answer that, not because they're lazy, but because they've never had to. The tools have been there the whole time, so the question never came up.

Mine came up on a Saturday in a driveway.

So tell me in the comments. What's the one thing you'd still be able to do for your business with no phone and no internet? I want to see how many of you land on the same answer I did.

More on how I think about all of this at www.ReferralBlueprint.com