In this essential episode, Michael Swenson, Founder of CrisisTrak, shares how to build crisis plans that safeguard your enterprise from disasters. If you struggle with blind spots that could erase years of value, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What Crisis Track automates to streamline your recovery
– How to form a crisis team for rapid, organized response
– Why early planning protects customers, employees, and investors
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the start, scale and succeed podcast. It’s the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As a founder, I’m your host, as always, Scott Ritzheimer and I talk with a lot of founders, many of whom have finally built something real. These are very successful founder CEOs. They’ve got an executive team. Their company is running, well, maybe even a little too well, but that’s another episode for another time, but it’s a real enterprise, real value on the table. But one thing that I found is so many of them have a massive blind spot, and that is that they’ve never actually sat down and thought about what happens when a crisis hits. Their plan is basically, hey, we’re smart. We’ll figure it out. We always have. We always will. And this is especially true for those who are in the chief executive stage. But here’s what makes us so dangerous at this level, and at this stage, is that you’ve spent years building this thing. You’ve got customers who now depend on you. You have employees who bet their careers on you. You might have investors who’ve entrusted you the family of all of these folks, there’s a lot of people who count on you, and all of it, every bit of that value can evaporate in a matter of days if the right crisis catches you the wrong way. And so the irony of it is that you finally have the organizational maturity to build a real crisis system, but most founders at this stage don’t do it because nothing bad has happened, at least not yet. They’re protecting everything except the one thing that could take it all away. So we’re not going to handle this alone. Today’s guest has spent 30 years helping organizations prepare for and navigate their toughest storms. Mike began his career in broadcast journalism as an on air reporter as well as a director and producer. Following that, he spent five years as press secretary to Kansas Governor John Carlin. Mike Barkley public relations. Mike founded sorry Barkley public relations in 1987 he built the firm into a national leader in crisis management, influencer relations and cause branding and employee engagement. Mike became nationally recognized as a leader in both crisis management and cause branding, and served as the chair for i, p, r, e x, a global group of independent public relations firms. He believes that the earlier an organization includes crisis planning in their overall business planning process, the better off they’ll be. And he’s here with us today. Mike, welcome to the show. Excited to be here. This is a topic that we’ve all bumped into, but I don’t know that we’ve ever addressed here on the show, so I’m really excited about that, and I want to jump in with this question. So I’ve heard you say somewhere in the research, as I was getting ready for this, that the crisis doesn’t have to be your fault to impact your business. What do you mean by that? And why is it so important?
Michael Swenson
Well, there’s three positions you own in a crisis where you only can own one. You can be the victim. You can be the villain, if you will, or you can be the bystander and and by that, I mean nothing you did caused the crisis. There was a situation where we had three of our clients involved in as three of about three or 400 brands in the country, where a company, a food product company, mishandled, how they they did not handle their food well. They made peanuts. And, of course, peanuts go into everything. This company had a horrible record of food safety. They finally caused some problems. And they were giving, you know, they’re giving their product to, like I said, three to 400 brands. We had three of them, and all of a sudden, now our clients, through no fall of their own, other than they bought their peanuts from this company. Now it’s facing a crisis, because we had to make sure that all of their customers knew, hey, we’ve taken things off the shelf. We checked. We don’t the products we have that use those products, they’re off the shelf. I had to go through all that. And of course, then they got to find new vendors. Vendors, you know, so it causes a business disruption. So that’s what I mean by it. I mean, this is a company, and by the way, six months after this all happened, that company was out of business, and they’d been in business for decades. Wow, that’s what can happen. And they caused, as I said, three to 400 other companies to have to deal with it. So you can be doing everything right and still have a problem.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. It’s fascinating. So knowing that a big part of this may not even be your fault, how do you help your clients start to root out where their most for lack of a better term, critical crises may come the biggest risk. How do you help them assess that?
Michael Swenson
Well, we create created a process in the early 90s. We had a client to hire us. They were a fast food company. They were in 15 states at the time. Now they are they are national, but their head of PR approached me and we started talking. She said, I’m really worried. So we’re growing so fast. I don’t know. If we’re going to be ready to handle a problem. So first of all, there’s somebody in the organization looking out for the future, which hopefully everybody listening to this has if they’re if you’re not doing yourself as the head of the organization, hopefully got somebody thinking about it. We put our teams in a room. We came up with a simple process, and step two of that process after you form your team. And so that’s the most important thing. Is that as a CEO, you need to pick the team of people that represent a cross section of your company’s functions, and you need to select someone to run that team. And now you need to instill in them the fact that this is not part of your job. It’s just as important a part as what I hired you originally to do. But now you’re now you’re part of this team. Then we take that team and to your question, we put them in a room, and we ask them to come with a little bit of homework, come in with a list of things that you think can go wrong. So usually six to eight people, it’s a nice size. Depending on the size your organization, it can be fewer. I wouldn’t have more than eight, but all of a sudden, if you and I are part of that team, Scott, you’re going to bring in your list. I’m going to bring in my list, and six other people bring in their list, and some of our crises will overlap, but I’m going to have stuff you didn’t have. You’re going to have stuff I didn’t have. And all of a sudden, we would always ring the room old school with the poster notes not on the screen on a computer. I want that room filled. Because now everybody’s looking around the room going, oh, boy, okay, I get it. Now, there’s 103 things that can go wrong. So that’s, that’s where you begin the process of just simply identifying what can go wrong. And if you’ve done that step, you’re now halfway home, because you’re now on the board, you can start thinking about, wait a minute, are there things we can be doing to prevent some of these from ever happening, or at least mitigate them from from being worse than they could be. So now you’re doing what we call real crisis management, because now you’re you’re looking at your organization saying, wait a minute, if we change this policy or change that approach, we might mitigate that from ever happening and and we can maybe take it off the list of things and go wrong. So now, before you even have a crisis, you’re beginning to think about, what can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again? So that’s that was why that was such an important part of the process, was just getting people to simply identify what can go wrong,
Scott Ritzheimer
Right, right? So important, when you’re putting together a team like this, I would imagine most folks listening don’t have a team in place, and one of the things they might be thinking is, who would lead something like that? So how do you go about picking a leader, most importantly, and then helping them staff the right people from around the organization?
Michael Swenson
Well, you know, you look at your organization and let’s say you’ve got six divisions or six departments, let’s say, well, you’d want a representative from every key function of the company. Let’s use the word function. Every key function should have one person representing and then out of that, I think, then the CEO, that’s one of the things you’re getting paid for, is to, you know, who can, who can be the person who can corral this group? And keep in mind, all these people have day jobs. This is now, we’re just adding this to their list, and because, because we know that they will be in a time of crisis, the people that that can help us get through it. So you just pick the best person. I think you’re looking for somebody, obviously, with leadership skills, good communication skills, able to manage up and down. They’re able to take tell the CEO, wait a minute. That’s not a good idea. When the CEO comes up, maybe we should do this. You’d have somebody who can manage up and say, No, that’s not, that’s not a good reason, a good thing to do and and so that’s what you’re looking for, is a good leader who can do that. And sometimes that is maybe your Head of Communications. You know, they’ll be part of the team, and that may be the person, just because of the role they play already.
Scott Ritzheimer
Right. Some folks might be forgiven for mistaking this for their strategic planning process. How is this different from strategic planning?
Michael Swenson
Well, it’s it’s it, I would consider it a subset of strategic planning. So anytime you’re going into a strategic plan, there should be a line item of crisis planning. And if you’ve, if you’ve put our process into place, called, we call it crisis track, if that’s in place, then then your part of your strategic planning is just to go back and make sure that everything’s up to date. Are there new risks that can occur that we haven’t thought of before? Are there again reviewing? Are the things we could be doing to help mitigate any of these things from happening. So to me, that’s part of your strategic plan. Should just be a review every year or every X, however long however you do it, but usually every year, a review of your crisis planning process. It’s just part of your strategic plan because they think about it, all the positive stuff you’re doing, all of the investment you’re making in promoting your company, promoting your products, your services, everything you’re doing takes a hit if a crisis happens and you’re not ready. So to me, if it’s not part of your strategic plan as a core element, I think you’re you’re missing it.
Scott Ritzheimer
So on the other side of this, I think an interest. Challenge once you start to get into it is you get those sticky notes all over the room. It can be a little overwhelming, right? There’s a lot of things that can go wrong. There’s a lot more things that can go wrong than go right, to some extent, right? It’s probably an infinite number of both. So I don’t know that that’s mathematically correct, but I can see it, especially over time, getting easy to to get a little disillusioned by all the things that can go wrong, or to get a little worried about all the things that can go wrong. How do you help folks to strike was it Collins talked about productive paranoia. How do you keep this to being a productive part of the planning process?
Michael Swenson
Well, it gets into, then into the once you’ve established what can go wrong that the next step that that we would encourage those teams to take is to now identify a recent situation, you had crisis. And, you know, sidebar here, crisis, everybody think, here’s the word crisis. You think something big, it doesn’t have to be, it can be something that’s just kind of a small, more silent crisis, but it still can, can snowball so but, but a recent situation, and walk through it from the time the crisis began till the time you solved it and it was ended. And what were the steps that you took all the way through? Whatever inevitably happens when we take go through that part of the that process is we learned that there are steps that were two three people were doing the same thing. Two or three things didn’t get accomplished as soon as they should have, and it all caught. It all resulted in maybe the crisis going on longer than it needed to. So so we set that aside as and then we say, Okay, now let’s map out how we want to handle crises going forward, and let’s pick out the steps. Every crisis will be different, but there are a certain number of things that you’re going to do regardless, and let’s get a list of those things we absolutely have to do. A lot of those revolve around early communication with key audiences. A lot of those will revolve around making sure that you know the team is activated, making sure you have a backup team that’s taken over the roles of the crisis team in their regular job so your business doesn’t suffer while the crisis is going on. You got to keep the keep the trains moving. And so those are all steps we put in place. And now we’ve got a map of, okay, these are 10 things we’re going to do when the crisis hits. The next step is we create a message. Go back to our risk. Create three or three to five key messages for every risk. So now to getting back to your question is we’re getting off of defense and on to offense. So now, yes, we’ve realized there’s a lot of things that go wrong, but now we’re putting things steps in place of what we’re going to do. We have messages ready to go so that we don’t have to sit in the room for two hours thinking of what we’re going to say. We got we can get a message out the door like that to all of our key audiences. And now we’re on offense and and once you’re on offense in a crisis, and you stay on offense, it’s going to end faster, I guarantee you, and it’s going to end better than it might have if you weren’t prepared. And that’s what gets back to me, being part of your overall strategic plan is just this. You need to have this in place all the time.
Scott Ritzheimer
I may get this quote wrong. I think it was Dwight Eisenhower who said, plans are meaningless, but planning is everything and and so I think there’s a certain benefit of this, at least in my experience, of just the process of walking through thinking about what the crisis might be. I’m not hearing you say you need to know what every crisis is and have a plan for every single potential crises. No right but, but I correct me if I’m wrong. But I think a big part of the value of doing this planning is just getting the reps on thinking through how would we respond to a crisis that came up? Would you agree?
Michael Swenson
Totally agree, and to hammer home, your point is, it’s not about a plan for each crisis. It’s about a plan to manage any crisis. Because again, you know, again, it comes back to not thinking about one thing that can go wrong is going to take us south, but it’s about any of these can happen, but as long as we now know the our first 10 steps, we know what we’re going to say, we’ve got a team in place that’s managing it now, every step of the way, the CEO is engaged with the team. And now you got, you know, and then it becomes part of your ongoing operations. That’s what I love. I want see founders and CEOs to think about. You know, it’s just like your marketing plan. It’s just like your your communications plan. It’s like your sales plan. You have plans in place, and people running those. This is the crisis team, and they’re running the crisis when it happens, and you need to be engaged from the standpoint of making sure you’re hearing what everything that’s going on. But you let them manage it, and they bring you the solutions. Okay, we’ve here’s the next step we need to take and get the CEO to sign off, and so it becomes just like you would with any other team within the organization, just treat it, treat it normally. And that gets back to your point of it’s not about worrying about it. It’s about staying on offense and. And understanding that we’re now way ahead of the game and and here’s what everybody has to understand, is everybody’s looking on. I mean, if this is something that’s out in the media now, everybody’s looking on. Your employees are looking on, how you know, people are involved directly, but they’re looking on, how are we handling it? They go home at night and their neighbors saying, what the hell’s going on over at your place, you know? We want them to be prepared. We have we give them the key messages. Yeah, here’s what we’re doing, your key customers, all of your customers, but certainly your key customers may get the special treatment of the phone call or the, let’s take a cup of coffee over, and I’m going to tell you what’s going on. You’ve got prospects you’ve been calling on. They’re looking on, you know, and if they see an organization managing their way through a difficult situation, they’re going to be that much more inclined to continue doing business or want to do business with you.
Scott Ritzheimer
So good. It’s so good. Mike, there’s this question that I ask all my guests. I’m interested to see what you have to say, especially with this background. But what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Michael Swenson
I wish they knew how simple it is to have a crisis planning process in place. It’s just that’s that easy. It’s and and, you know, we you kind of alluded to it earlier. You know, at the very beginning, you’ve never really talked about this on your podcast. That’s not surprising to me. Unfortunately, that’s not surprising because it’s just, it’s always a back burner thing, you know, and because people put it off, put it off, put it off, well, nothing’s happened, and when something does happen, we’ll deal with it. If people knew how easy it is to put this crisis track process in place that we put in place and used on multiple you know, many of our clients over the years that put in place a process for them to to be ready. It’s simple, and then then that 3am phone call is going to be a lot better, because now you get the 3am phone call, it’s from your crisis team leader who says, Yeah, we got a problem. Here’s what we’ve already done. We’ve got our messages ready to go out. And what? Here’s what we need you to do as the founder, CEO, we got a call list for you, and now all of a sudden it’s like, yeah, there’s a problem, but it’s being managed, and I’m going to play my role as the founder of making sure our most important customers and most important prospects know that we are on top of it and and once we’re through with this, we’re ready to go back to business.
Scott Ritzheimer
So good, Mike. There’s some folks realizing this is an absolute essential. It’s not something they have right now. If they’re interested in implementing the crisis track system or just learning more about the work that you all do, where can they find out more?
Michael Swenson
Well, two places to go to my LinkedIn profile. I think I’m MikeSwenson1, but just go on LinkedIn and search Mike Swenson and crisis and my site will come up, and there’s a there’s a ton of content on there that is just there for people to review and read and hopefully gain some insights from regarding crisis preparation and crisis management. And then at crisistrack.com, crisis. And then track is T, R, A, k.com, there is a series of nine videos that you you can purchase, and I go through in great detail how to build the crisis plan out and it you can do it yourself. And if somebody gets involved, you know, they take the time to purchase these videos, and they run into a hurdle, just reach out to me on LinkedIn, and I’ll hop on a zoom with you, and we’ll talk about it. We’re trying to make it as simple as possible. We created this process in the 90s. We used it for 30 years, and I always had in my contract I could take it with me when I retired, which I did about five years ago, and I finally took took it off the back burner myself, and started doing something with it, because it’s something I’m very passionate about. It. Passionate about. It is the most important PR we did for any client is helping them either get ready and prepare for crises in the future or manage one that they’re going through right now. Because if we help them get through a crisis on the other side, everything we did from a positive PR or advertising point of view was saved, was preserved because of the work we did to put them in the best light possible during a crisis.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic, Well, Mike, it was a privilege having you on a real honor, having you here with us today. Thanks so much for joining, and for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Mike Swenson
Mike Swenson began his career in broadcast journalism as an on-air reporter as well as a director and producer. Following that, he spent five years as press secretary to Kansas Gov. John Carlin. Mike founded Barkley Public Relations in 1987. He built the firm into a national leader in crisis management, influencer relations, cause branding, and employee engagement. Mike became a nationally recognized leader in both crisis management and cause branding and served as Chair of IPREX, a global group of independent public relations firms. He believes that the earlier an organization includes crisis planning in their overall business planning, the better off they will be.
Want to learn more about Michael Swenson’s work at CrisisTrak? Check out his website at https://crisistrak.com/
Connect with him through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeswenson1/