It's super-easy to tell stories of success and how everything went from good to great. But what about the events when you had to eat humble pie? Or the times when you were scared out of your mind? Here are three stories which by some coincidence involve presentations. Nonetheless, there's a solid lesson behind each story and it's well learning from. ------------------------------------------ Imagine your website has just gone live and the next thing you know, you’re on a radio show. That’s exactly what happened to me one week in June 2001. After weeks of hard work and lots of back and forth, my website had gone live. By today’s standards it wasn’t a very flashy website. It had tiny fonts and was extremely spartan, but finally it was up and running. That very afternoon, I was at a store when I ran into the presenters of a popular radio show. They asked me a few questions and then asked me what I did. At the end of the question set they announced my website on air. I was excited beyond belief I called my webmaster, Chris Parkinson, and told him to expect loads of traffic. You know what happened next, right? Yes, nothing. No one showed up to the site despite the popularity of the show. My excitement turned to disappointment as the hours ticked by. But what was I expecting? I’ll tell you what I was expecting. I was expecting a “miracle moment”. And I learned that events don’t always roll out the way you’ve planned. Which is why this series is about the startup stories we’ve experienced at Psychotactics. They’re a series that give you an understanding of how we went about our early days. How we didn’t just sit behind our computer and hope that clients would sign up. It wasn’t just about starting a blog or putting a website. There are stories that I haven’t quite told before. These are three of the stories: Three startup stories from the early days at Psychotactics. Story No.1: The One Person “Australian” Workshop In 2004, we did something quite bold. We’d been in business for just a year and eight months when we decided to have a workshop in Los Angeles. That workshop, priced at $1500 per person sold out. Which prompted us to have our second workshop closer to home. When a client suggested we have a workshop in Australia, we jumped at the opportunity and the deal for this workshop seemed almost too good to be true. This client wasn’t asking us to do all the promotion. Instead he was going to get over 60 people to attend our two-day event and all we needed to do was show up. Workshops are notoriously hard to fill at any point in time When you start marketing a workshop you get a few early sign-ups and then it gets deathly quiet for a long time. Finally, as the final date approaches, you get another spurt of sign-up activity which usually fills the remaining seats. For this particular workshop, we hadn’t got any early sign-ups, and even though that was a worry, we weren’t terribly concerned. After all, the client was going to get those 60 people to attend. Even if just half of them showed up, we’d still have a sizeable number of attendees. Even so a uneasy calm set in The e-mails from the client weren’t encouraging. He kept bringing up stories of local disasters. There was a drought in the area, a big fire in the city—things that seemingly had no bearing on the workshop. When we didn’t react to the doom and gloom, he sent us more e-mails. The numbers receded from 60 to 30, then from 30 to 10. It was too late for us to change our minds We’d already committed to the workshop and we decided to go ahead anyway. When the client knew we were determined to go ahead, he decided to book a venue and some accommodation nearby. And here’s the interesting bit: We just knew the workshop was in Victoria somewhere and assumed it would be in a big city like Melbourne. Imagine our horror when we were driven over 116 km to a little town called Hepburn Springs We must have been naïve at the time anyway, because it never occurred to use to ask where t