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:

- How to form a crisis team for rapid, organized response

- Why early planning protects customers, employees, and investors

- What Crisis Track automates to streamline your recovery

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 5 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

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 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/

Mentioned in this episode:

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Founder's Quiz

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?

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.

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?

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,

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?

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.

Right. Some folks might be forgiven for

mistaking this for their strategic planning process. How

is this different from strategic planning?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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 crisis

track.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.

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.