What keeps your CFO up at night is not what keeps your CTO up at night

Several times a year my phone rings with a version of the same call.

Something has gone wrong, or is about to, and it will not stay quiet. The person on the other end is senior, competent and completely without a plan. They need to know what to do in the next four hours.

I take those calls. This isn’t rare, our agency has walked companies through the worst week of their corporate lives and helped them come out the other side with the brand intact. But every one of them would have been in better shape if we had met a year earlier, on an ordinary Tuesday, with nothing on fire.

The response you try to assemble while the story is breaking is always going to be the weaker response; it also costs considerably more to build, and the damage rarely stays inside the crisis. I have watched a badly handled situation impact a company's plans to acquire another business, and that is not a cost anyone thinks to model when they decide the crisis plan can wait one more quarter. For some companies, it becomes the thing they do not come back from.

Here is a partial list of the crisis scenarios that have crossed my desk in the past 36 months:

● A union organizing effort, with protests planned outside the building and employees inside campaigning to bring their colleagues along.

● A data breach that became a hostile grab for client records.

● A management change that went badly enough that employees started questioning where the company was headed.

● A flawed product launched, then rolled back after it had already shipped.

● Tier-1 outlets knocking at the door with heavy-hitting questions on funding, price advantage and company resiliency.

● A large layoff with the suggestion hanging over it that AI would be doing the work instead.

● A natural disaster that cut customers off from energy and medication at the same time.

● An executive who broke their contract and decided to talk about political topics explicitly off-limits for their organization, causing financial damage as donors reacted.

Not one of those appeared out of nowhere. Ask any executive team what could take the company down and they can tell you. They know. What they have not done is say it out loud to each other and write down what happens next.

When I raise this with a leadership team, the answer I hear most often is some version of the same thing. We deal with them as they come. You cannot plan for a crisis.

The second half is where the reasoning breaks. It assumes a crisis arrives fully formed and unforeseeable, and almost none of them do. What arrives is a threat. A reporter's email asking about something you thought was internal. A pattern in the exit interviews. A review site that has turned in one direction over six months. A customer complaint that has started to travel. A threat to your reputation is already a crisis in the works, and whether it grows into one depends on who you put on it in the first 24 hours and what they do with that time. You cannot schedule the event. You can decide in advance how you meet it, and that decision is worth more than any statement you will write later.

The avoidance underneath the objection is human. No leadership team wants to spend an afternoon cataloging the ways their company could come apart, and there is always something more urgent on the calendar. Our process at Red Fan insists on that afternoon anyway, and the reason is the part of crisis planning most people miss.

The plan matters, but what surfaces while you build it matters more.

We start by interviewing the C-suite one at a time, asking the same question to each of them: What keeps you up at night? The answers are never the same. The chief financial officer is worried about a covenant nobody outside finance has thought about. The chief technology officer is thinking about a dependency that has been flagged and deferred twice. The chief people officer knows about a manager whose team has turned over three times in two years. Each of them has been carrying that weight alone, like an albatross around their own neck, assuming it belongs to them and is not worth raising until it becomes something.

Put those fears in a room together and an executive team learns more about its own risk in ninety minutes than it has in the previous two years.

From there we build the plan. Who gets the call when something happens, by name and by role. Which outside counsel gets the call. Who speaks for the company and who stands by for messaging. What the first hour looks like, then the first day, then the first week.

But the plan can’t just live as an idea. We then run the team through three or four of the most likely scenarios together, out loud, in the same room. Not a memo they skim between meetings. A walkthrough. They find out how they behave when the information is incomplete and the clock is running, which is the only condition that ever matters. Those mental muscles have to be exercised before you need them.

I have come to think of this as one of the most useful insurance policies an executive team can buy, and the coverage extends further than the crisis itself.

You get a leadership team that has already discovered it can function together under pressure. That is not a small thing to know about each other in advance. They know who’s responsible for what, and who needs to be pulled under the tent immediately.

You get the right names on speed dial. This one surprises people. In the middle of more than one crisis I have found that the company's lawyer was the wrong lawyer. Good attorney, wrong

specialty. A real estate attorney is not going to carry you through an employment matter that is about to go public, and learning that on day one costs you the day. We have had to find the right counsel mid-crisis for clients who did not know they needed a different one. Under a plan, that name is already in the document with a cell number beside it.

You get a budget that has already been approved. Nobody should be reviewing an engagement letter and questioning an hourly rate while a reporter is holding a story for comment. Decide what this costs when you are calm and the money is theoretical.

We put our own pricing behind that. Clients who have built a plan with us pay our standard crisis rate when something happens. A company calling cold and already in a panic with nothing in place pays double. That is not a penalty for bad luck, it’s what the work costs when we are learning the business, embedding with the team, finding the right attorney and writing the holding statement in the same afternoon. We would rather have done the first two of those a year earlier, and we price it so you would rather have too.

You get a document that stays alive. We update quarterly, and after any event we run a post-mortem: what worked, what surprised us, who has joined the team since the last version and how to reach them at eleven at night.

And you get a pressure-tested method. The next time something happens, and there will be a next time, the company is not inventing its response from nothing while the stakes climb by the hour.

Every leadership team I have watched handle a crisis well had a plan that had been rehearsed. They were not calmer by temperament or luckier in their timing. They had done this before, in a conference room, on a day with low stakes.

If your team has never had that conversation, it is the conversation I would like to have with you.

Schedule 30 minutes with me here. On October 7, we're hosting our next webinar focused on pre-transaction stakeholder analyses. The same muscles you work in a crisis exercise apply here. Where is your brand exposed today and how might it affect your next deal's success? Join us to learn what you can do now to preserve announcement impact before the deal is even signed.

Until next time,

Kathleen Lucente CEO and Founder, Red Fan Communications

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---P.S. Ask your general counsel one question this week. If we had to make a public statement about an employment matter by five o'clock tomorrow, who writes it and who signs it? If the answer takes longer than a minute, you have found your next agenda item.