What if the worst day in your business didn’t have to be chaotic? In this episode of the Leading Visionaries, host Anjel B. Hartwell sits down with Mike Swenson, founder of Barkley Public Relations and creator of the Crisis Track framework. Drawing on decades in broadcast journalism, politics, and leadership, Mike shares how visionary founders can use strategy, simplicity, and clear messaging to shape powerful stories in good times and in moments of crisis.

What You Will Learn:

Every communication should be tied to a clear strategy so no message becomes a lost opportunity.

Founders must define what each communication is supposed to achieve.

Organizations communicate more effectively when everyone aligns around a single voice and simple message.

Successful product launches focus on highlighting one or two primary benefits rather than overwhelming with every feature.

Establishing a crisis team gives clarity on who leads decisions when urgency is high.

Visual mapping of potential risks helps leaders understand how many issues could escalate into crises.

Investors are impressed when founders demonstrate crisis preparation as part of the business plan.

Companies that handle crises poorly often face long-term damage or closure, while prepared organizations limit harm.

Crisis communication is not just about operations but also how messages are shaped and delivered under pressure.

Establishing clear spokespeople for each risk ensures fast, unified responses during crises.

Long-term vision for crisis frameworks is to help organizations minimize negative impacts and recover faster when challenges arise.

Resource:

Mike Swenson LinkedIn

Crisis Trak

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LVP 109 Mike Swenson

Now here's your host, Anjel b Hartwell.

Anjel: Welcome to another episode of the Leading Visionaries Podcast, where we celebrate the ingenious, insightful, innovative, and inspired leading visionaries of our time. And provide our listeners with world class examples of the kind of courage, clarity, and confidence it takes to bring visions into reality.

He also served as global president of itpr, a collaboration of more than a hundred independent public relations firms. Mike began his career in broadcast journalism, working in both radio and television. Following that, he spent five years as press secretary to Kansas Governor John Carlin. Mike has donated his time to many charitable organizations in Kansas City and guest lectures at the University of Kansas and the University of Central Missouri.

Mike: Well, thank [00:02:00] you Anjel for the opportunity to speak with you and your listeners.

Anjel: I'm excited, Mike, because clearly you are a visionary and our listeners are, you know, often founders and have vision themselves.

And so I'd like to start our conversation by asking were you always visionary and what has been your experience of vision and having vision in your life?

Mike: That's a great question. I think I know this, I've always been a very visual person, so I think that has always played into everything I've done.

I learned better when I can see something and not just hear something. I guess you could say in a sense I did have an early vision. In eighth grade, our social studies teacher had us write a paper, a, on what we wanted to do when we grew up. And I said I wanted to get into broadcasting sports at the time, sports broadcasting.

So in that sense, I had a early vision that I saw through and thought that was what I would be doing the rest of my life. However, things changed, crossroads came and I had to make a couple decisions.

Anjel: Hmm. Well, and that leads us right into leadership and often leadership is self-leadership to begin with.

So talk about your leadership journey and maybe a little bit about self-leadership as part of that journey, especially when we have to make interesting decisions.

Mike: Right. I you know, even, even in, before, you know, I told you before I graduated, I actually started working in both radio, TV and the radio was more reporting and the stuff that I really wanted to do.

I've got somebody running an audio, I've got a engineer down in master control. I've got somebody in videotape, I've got the new staff, and I'm the guys. And so I had to learn early on and it taught me a lot about teamwork that I carried through. I mean, because there I am a very, very tender age and learning to ha you know, learning to guide a group of people through what is.

Pretty treacherous stuff. Live television. I mean, it's and we had, I got a couple of great stories. We won't go through those today, but I mean, things happen during live television and you've gotta be the person sitting in that director's chair. You gotta be the person that makes the decisions quickly on how we're gonna fix it and fix it fast.

Anjel: Mm. The magic behind the scenes there. Yeah.

Mike: There's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes when you're watching live television shows.

Anjel: Yeah. Beautiful. Well, so what inspired you to start your own public relations company? Like what was the vision there and the inspiration there?

Mike: Well, I, I had one stop in between that I think is important. That led me to and basically it was, I had the opportunity, I had a decision to make. Of going to work for a governor the governor of Kansas at the time as his assistant press secretary. And so that meant I had to, I came to a big fork in the road.

Am I gonna quit doing what I've always wanted to do? I wanted to retire from broadcasting someday. But my family had always been involved in politics and so I had that, you know, neuron firing away. And I made the decision. I jumped. And so what that did for me, and then I went through and was part of his reelection campaign, became his press secretary for the entire second term.

So my first stop out of politics was at a PR firm in Kansas City called the Boberg Company. I spent one year there. But there, I learned after 11 years, and I called my graduate school. The report, you know, the broadcasting and the breast sector was my 11 years of graduate school.

Tell stories that matter mm-hmm. And get people interested. And so that year taught me a lot. And then I went to, to Barton Evergreen to help start the PR firm there. And then ultimately got it started and ran it for 32 years. So I think it was the combination of understanding media from being in the media.

Mm-hmm. Understanding how to work with media in a different vantage point. And that kind of all came to fruition and, and all of a sudden now I'd had no business sense whatsoever. But I had a, the founder of our company, Barklay Evergreen, it was called at the time, did something very smart when he said, he said, we need to start a PR firm.

I've seen you bring in a little bit of business the other guy wasn't working out. I wanna put you in charge of it. Need to do two things. I want you to get your own. I want you to make money, make profit, and I want you to go get half of your revenue on your own every year. Mm-hmm. So don't just provide service.

And so that was a very easy way for me to kind of get into how, okay, what's about. How do you run a business, not just doing the pr, but how do you make it understand how to run a business? And so that, that's how that started.

Anjel: Well, and it sounds like you got your PhD in sales

Mike: Yeah. Along the way.

Absolutely.

And so. Many of our listeners maybe have ideas for starting their own business. There may be founders, they may be, you know, CEOs, they may be visionaries who have an idea for creating some kind of big change in the world. Can you share with our listeners you know, from your perspective, the important things they need to have in consideration when, when thinking about shaping the story that gets told?

Every time you communicate something, don't just think about it as I'm saying these words. What is this communication? What am I trying to achieve with this set of communications? Am I trying to, am, is it just education? Am I just trying to educate people? Maybe I'm starting a business where there some people may not understand what it is, so I need to educate part of my perspective list out there.

Or is it about, you know, a specific service or product? And so I need to think about how I wanna shape that story. But, but think about the every communication. Trying to have some type of reaction. You're, you're, you, you know, the action is you telling a story. What do you want that reaction to be? Is it to learn more?

And that's not, doesn't mean we're a bunch of robots. It just means that we are in agreement on what our communications are going to be and, and that in whatever job we're in within the organization, we're gonna use those, that communication and whether it be in sales or marketing or legal or HR or whatever.

So it's internal and externally. How we're gonna, you know, we're gonna speak with one voice and we've gotta keep it simple. And that became more and more important as technology began to drive how we were communicating and the plethora of information that's out there now. And so you've gotta really keep it simple.

They're proud of it as they should be. You know, they think they're onto something that's gonna, you know, be a, be a real winner in the marketplace. But talk about one, maybe two. Get him in the door, then he can tell him about the other 12. But, so we would have to go have that conversation many times and let's focus in, because that gets back to making sure every communication has a strategy.

It's like, instead of just turn the fire hose on, here's what this does. It's more about, okay, we're have this new product and it's going to do this one marvelous thing for you. And then you get 'em in the door and say, oh, by the way, it's gonna do several other marvelous things for you anyway. Mm-hmm. But that's, that's how that applies.

Mike: analogy.

Anjel: Yeah. We're gonna take a quick break that just popped in. So we're gonna take a quick break. When we came back, we're gonna talk more about crisis track, which is something that you have going on that we haven't talked about yet. And let listeners know where they can find out more about you and about that.

Be sure with your own spirals of influence and with the people who you think might benefit from our content. I wanna say a big thank you to all of our listeners who are downloading, rating and reviewing. We're celebrating that we just won our seventh award in the Davey Awards. So thank you for your support around that.

And I do want to, say a big thank you to all of our listeners who are downloading, rating and reviewing. We're welcoming thousands of downloads from all over the world. Shout out this week to our new listeners in Antigua and Barbuda and the Ukraine, as well as our listeners in the Kansas area where Mike is, and we will be right back with Mike Sw.

Your word is your wand. And as the leader, your ability to articulate and communicate your vision is essential to its materialization and monetization. Please enjoy with our compliments, a free copy of the book, be Heard By Millions, and Live Your Destiny, which was a number one new release in three categories.

Anjel: And we are back with Mike Swensen. You can find out more about Mike by going to his LinkedIn. We will have that for you in the show notes. His LinkedIn is Mike s Swenson one 'cause there are several Mike Swenson's over there, but we're gonna have the link for you in the show notes. And so, Mike, before we went to the break, I mentioned that you have a new initiative.

Mike: One of the things that I think in that 11 years of graduate school, of being in broadcasting and, and then being press secretary to a governor taught me that there's stuff happens every day, and as a reporter you are covering thing bad things that were happening to people and, and talking about 'em.

But we got hired in the early nineties by a fast growing fast food chain that was in about 15 states at the time. Now they're nationwide, but this is the early nineties. And their head of pr who became a great client of ours and a great friend, you know, she came to me and she said, you know, I'm really worried that, you know, we're growing so fast and I'm just worried that, you know, we're not really ready to handle, you know, a crisis if it happens.

So we got her team and our team in the room together for a couple days. And we hammered out what became Crisis Track. And, and the whole premise of it was we wanted to keep it simple. What are, what are the fewest steps we need to take to make sure that we're ready when a crisis happens, we're not scrambling around after the crisis trying to figure out, which is how most people deal with crises is, you know, it happens and now we're dealing with who's gonna handle it.

What do we say? All that stuff. So what Crisis Trek did was, was create five simple steps, establish your team. And whatever size your organization is will dictate, but you shouldn't have more than six to eight people if you're a large organization. If you're a five person, it'll be everybody. But, but you establish the importance of the fact that this is now part of our ongoing operations.

It was like, and we'll bring lunch in and all that good stuff. So, but the next step is the most important Anjel because what we did was we said, okay everybody, your homework assignment before you come to the meeting is you have to come in with your list of risks. What do you think can go wrong with this company?

What are the things you we're, you know, that potentially are gonna turn into crises? Survey brings their list in. If you and I are part of that team. You're gonna bring in your list. I'm gonna bring in my list. There'll be some overlap, but there'll be a lot of things you came up with that I'm going, oh my God, I never thought of that.

Hmm. And so now we got around the room and I, I do it old school with the sheets of paper around the room. I don't do it up on a, on a computer screen 'cause I want the import. 'cause once you have that room filled with a hundred things that can go wrong, you've got 'em. Everybody now gets it. Okay. Any one of these, you get the

Anjel: visual, as you mentioned before.

Exactly. You got the visual.

That always revealed that there was some, you know, two people doing the same thing or no, or somebody not doing one thing. And then we set that aside and we say, okay, now let's talk about what are the first 10 steps we need to take? Regardless of the crisis, there are things we have to do. Every crisis is different.

There'll be different zigs and zags, but there's set, nu set number of steps that we're gonna take every time. Fourth step, we go back to those risks and we create, not in that meeting, but we create key messages for every risk. So now we have three to five key messages for everything that can go wrong.

But this is about the communication of the crisis. So now we have it. Yeah. And I'm driving her to the airport and I'm saying, Hey, Nancy, would you mind if we package this up And we offer it to other clients as well? She said, of course not. I mean, you, you helped us come up with it. You, you've, you've helped me with my problem.

Go forth. And so that's when it started. And I always had in my contract that whenever I left Barclay, I could take it with me. And they still use it too, but I could take it with me. So I didn't retire, of course, for 32 years, but so when I retired and started doing a little consulting on the side, took 'em about a year to get going, but I finally created a set of videos, nine videos that detail what I just gave you, the short version, the Cliff notes version, but in great detail how to go about building your own crisis process.

I gotta believe that if you are talking to the investors and you get up there and you go through your whole business plan and say, and finally. We have a crisis process in place, so when things go wrong, we know what we're gonna do. I gotta believe that would make the investors maybe even write a slightly larger check.

'cause it's like, okay, these guys are really thinking it through. But most people don't think about that. And, and some of the biggest companies in America don't necessarily have a, you know, process in place. Certainly

Anjel: not this simple. Certainly not this point. No. And that's, it's,

Mike: it's, it's a team. And you know what, the first step of just establishing the team is so important because it's like.

That person calls you and says. Yeah, we got this problem. Here's the, we've done these three things already. We've got this message ready to go out to all of our, to our customers, to our prospects. It's not, hadn't hit the media yet, but we're, we're on top of. We're ready to go if it does hit the media, you know, I mean, I doubt the, I doubt the CEO E goes back to sleep, but at least that person knows things are underway.

Right? Right. So you had your exit, right? And now you're back to work again. So tell us a little bit about. Why you chose to, to, you know, take this on and continue to breathe life into it.

Mike: It's the most important pr we did for any client was, was hopefully they've hired us to put this process in place and now they've got it.

And that means they've got us because a member of our team, if they, if they hired us to do crisis track, a member of our team was at their quarterly meetings, which we insisted on of the crisis team. But what, you know what, so that's why it, what inspired me is I just knew it was the most important thing, and that's why I put in my contract a long time ago that I, I, if I left, I wanted to take this with me.

Yeah. It, it's great. I, I loved every second of running that PR firm and everything about it, and I certainly was doing some of the work, but you're, but you're also. More focused on new business. You're focused on the, the budgets and you're making sure the numbers are working. You're, you know, and, and you get to do some of the work.

But most of your work as the, as the founder and this as the CEO is, you know, were there problems. That's the other thing, is that's mm-hmm. You know, when the client's got an issue, guess who's gotta step in and help out because they want to see the boss, you know? So that's just kind of always been ingrained in me, but it, back to what I said first, it's the most important PR we did for our clients.

Anjel: Yeah. And so. Last question. What's your long-term vision for this body of work?

I'm there. You know, I'd get on Zoom like this and help 'em through an issue when they're creating their process. But it is that simple. You can do it yourself. Just, just, it's just again, should be part of your business plan. You're part of your ongoing operations. And, and that's what I hope for, is I just hope for, for, to see some success with people taking it on, because I know that if I've seen it, when you're prepared for a crisis, it's gonna end faster than if you're not.

It's that simple, and it's gonna, it's gonna not only end faster, but it's gonna. Be less of an impact, negative impact on your business. The data's out there. Companies that don't handle crises well, don't end up well. Sometimes they're shut down eventually. Mm-hmm. Um, so let's keep that from happening.

Anjel: I love it.

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