By Renee Rouleau, an EO Dallas member and CEO and president of

So, we recently launched a new skin-consulting service called “My Skin Prescription,” which was highlighted in an article featured in the New York Times. Well, my PR agency knew ahead of time that it would be featured first online, and that in the next day it would be in the actual newspaper. I guess that’s how they always do it, release it online first.

So when it was released online, my PR agency emailed me the link for the feature. Of course, I was so incredibly excited to read it that I immediately clicked on the link … and sure enough, there was a big photo of me, an article highlighting our new service and a link to our website. Not only is it amazing to be featured on The New York Times website, but to have a link back to my website was gold!

But wait … were my eyes deceiving me? They spelled the link incorrectly: MySkinPerscription.com (“Per” instead of “Pre”). And when I clicked on the link, it went to a dead page!! Oh no! My worst nightmare! So my PR agency immediately contacted the newspaper, but it was the afternoon of the day before Thanksgiving, and as you can imagine, not many people were in the office. My PR agency was having a hard time reaching anyone. With the holidays and no one responding to their emails, it could possibly take days before the link was fixed … yikes!

So with my entrepreneurial brain trying desperately to find a solution to this oversight, I immediately contacted GoDaddy.com to purchase the incorrectly spelled domain: www.MySkinPerscription.com, so that I could do a re-direct and point all of the traffic to the correct site, meaning I wouldn’t lose out on all the people reading the article and clicking on the link. Normally it can take up to 24-48 hours to activate a new domain server and have it go live, but luckily it was up and running within three hours (with some pleading to the GoDaddy folks).

Thanks to some quick thinking, I was able to remedy a really unfortunate situation. It was a very stressful process, but it all worked out. And come to find out, within four hours, just an hour after we got the new incorrect-spelling site up, The New York Times was able to change it after all. That’s life for you! It just goes to show that adaptability is a necessity when it comes to running a business!