Hindsight versus foresight

When people ask me ‘have I got any regrets’, or ‘what would you do differently?’ I answer philosophically – we made a few mistakes – some very expensive ones, but we still had to try them – they were all part of the learning to discover what next.

Without failures, of course we would not know success.

There is one thing that I wish I’d got right. I wish I’d backed myself more… or just had a bit more cash to throw at the problem. That is the URL I chose right at the beginning in 2001.

The business was always called RedBalloon, but we called the product RedBalloon days (the product was a gift of a ‘day’ – ie. something to DO rather than a physical gift).

We did find that the redballoon.com.au URL was already registered to another business… so we settled for redballoondays.com.au.

Now with hindsight I can see that I lacked foresight. I should have approached the business who owned the URL to see if they would ‘sell’ it way back then.

A few things happened over the years.

4. We began to provide experiences in a box and other experiences that were not necessarily a ‘day’ (eg. an astrology reading or olive oil tasting).

So the approach was made and about four years ago we purchased the URL www.redballoon.com.au.

My regret is not just for the waiting five years to purchase it – more the regret that it has taken another four years to truly get the brand return on this.

It was fear that stopped me from making the tough decision.

We had been working so hard for so long on our search engine position with Google we didn’t want to change anything. So we used the www.redballoon.com.au in all communications but then redirected traffic to the main original URL.

But given that we had formally updated our branding to drop the ‘days’ it was completely out of alignment with our brand voice.

So for the past two months or so we have had very many, very clever minds working on the switch. That is to migrate our primary URL to being www.redballoon.com.au and referring all the unique ‘days’ URL through.

I shared the delight with our developer team as they learned, discovered and executed a program to migrate the URL… So last Saturday as we all crossed our fingers and toes the switch took place. Now four days after the migration we have not seen a dip in traffic, or a reduction in Google rankings. However they tell me that we won’t know for sure for a few more months. (Fingers and toes still crossed).

Sorry team that it was such a big job – when really it is something that could have been done nine years ago. A massive thank you to the team for cleaning up my lack of foresight.

LESSON LEARNED: If you want to create something big – play a big game, make the investment needed. Big dreams take big decisions, and resources.

Naomi Simson is considered one of Australia’s ‘Best Bosses’. She is an employee engagement advocate and practices what she preaches in her own business. RedBalloon has been named as one of only six Hewitt Best Employers in Australia and New Zealand for 2009 and awarded an engagement scorecard of over 90% two years in a row – the average in Australian businesses is 55%. RedBalloon has also been nominated by BRW as being in the top 10 Best Places to Work in Australia behind the likes of Google. One of Australia’s outstanding female entrepreneurs, Naomi regularly entertains as a passionate speaker inspiring people on employer branding, engagement and reward and recognition. Naomi writes a blogand is a published author – and has received many accolades and awards for the business she founded – RedBalloon.com.au.