What a Train Wreck (This Could Happen to You)

I’m still Sleepless in St. Louis.

In case you missed last week’s email, the federal government now requires trains to blare the horns at every crossing in my fair city…

…because the city failed to bring the crossings up to safety standards.

The feds sent trainloads of emails to city officials, directing them to act, warning them what would happen if they didn’t act.

But — get this — the emails were sent to the city’s FORMER Director of Operations, Nancy Cross, who left the city in April 2025. And no one in the city government bothered to update their systems so emails sent to Nancy would forward to her successor.

So city officials didn’t get the warnings. The mayor said they didn’t know about it until the day before the horns started blaring. An alderman said this happened because the feds sent the notices to a “defunct” email.

What a train wreck! The government can’t keep its emails straight. And now all of us trying to get a good night’s sleep are funct.

It’s easy to laugh at City Hall. But most businesses I know have a Nancy Cross problem of their own.

You spent weeks, maybe months, building your marketing system. The lead magnet. The landing page. The welcome sequence. The booking calendar. You wired it together, tested it and turned it on.

And it worked.

So you moved on to the next thing.

Meanwhile, the details kept changing. Small ones.

The assistant who got every new-lead notification left. The notifications still go to her inbox.

You raised your prices. The sales page still shows the old ones.

You switched calendar apps. The link in email #3 of your welcome sequence still points to the old one.

Gmail and Yahoo tightened their rules for bulk senders. Your domain settings never caught up, so a chunk of your emails now land in spam.

None of it feels like a big deal on the day it happens. Nothing breaks loudly. Nobody notices.

Then comes the pile-up. Leads go cold because nobody follows up. Prospects can’t book. Sales stall, and you can’t figure out why until you trace it back to one tiny detail that went stale a year ago.

That’s where most marketing systems fail. Not in the build. In the upkeep.

Building the system is hard work, and it’s worth it. But it’s half the job. The other half is keeping it tuned (the links, the inboxes, the handoffs, the settings) so one lost detail doesn’t stop all your momentum.

If you want help with both halves, let’s talk.

Book a Plan to Prosper session. We’ll look at the business-building systems you have and the ones you need. Then we’ll find where the details are most likely to slip and how to keep track of them, so your marketing keeps moving.

Book your Plan to Prosper session here