Putting up a brand is a struggle but keeping its name afloat is far more difficult. In this episode, Elliot Begoun is joined by Jeff Hahn, crisis communication specialist, and owner of Hahn Public, to share his expertise in this field. For his clients, Jeff is the guy to call for brand crafting, message development and crisis communications. How important is crisis communication to a brand’s reputation? Listen in as Jeff shares how a tornado turned his life around and how he managed to overcome crises in business and his own life.

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Confidence In Crisis Communication With Jeff Hahn

Before I start and introduce my guest, Jeff Hahn, I am going to do a founder shout out. As always, I’m excited about this one because I get to announce that the team at The Good Crisp Company has successfully closed their Series A. The reason I want to concentrate on that is a reminder. It’s a daunting task to get out there and build a business. It’s even more so to get to the point where you are a large enough concern to win the institutional money. Matt Perry, Steve Winkler, Alex Hanifin, Annie and the team, Bobby, have been in the trenches working hard day in and day out for numerous years.

It’s fantastic to see that success being recognized. It’s fantastic for them now to have the growth capital that they need to take the next big step in what has already been a fantastic journey and brand. I use this shout-out both as a congratulatory one and as a motivator to all of you who are still hearing your rejections and wondering if you’re ever going to get your yeses. With that, I’m going to ask my guest, Jeff, to introduce himself. This conversation is going to be a productive one. Jeff, please share with us a little bit about yourself.

It’s good to be with you. Everyone, I’m Jeff Hahn. I’m an agency owner in Austin, Texas. My agency, the Hahn Public, and I have a food component of it called Apron. We concentrate on two sectors, food and beverage and also the energy sector. My unique role between those two sectors is as a crisis communications guy. I grew up in Corporate America, Locky, then Motorola for many years, but my origins are on the farm. I grew up on a farm in Iowa.

You might say my introduction to the crisis came at an early age when I was about eleven years old. Our farm got destroyed by a tornado. Our thoughts in days are with all those people in Tennessee and Kentucky affected by that horrible weather. I’ve been there and I understand what they’re going through. That event was a defining moment in my life and it put me on a path towards understanding the whole psychology of crisis and the way that we communicate about that.

That’s been the orienting of my career as I’ve grown up as a communications guy, a PR guy. Now we serve lots of different clients in those two spaces by promoting their brands and I’m the guy on the other side of it that is in the protection business. I’m very happy to be with you here, especially as we talk to brands that are up and coming. They have new and different challenges when you close Series A, all of a sudden, you’re a bigger deal. It’s a fun conversation and a fun reason to be here with you as well.

I’m glad we’re having this conversation because I think being able to understand how to manage crisis communication and being, being confident in the ability to do so is paramount. We’ve got supply chain challenges. We have a lot of pressure around social justice and climate issues. Even in social media, there’s a lot of trolling. It’s a tough time to be an entrepreneur and be a brand.

There are going to be moments in your journey, whether that a product withdrawal or a recall, whether that’s some bad press, an ingredient, Prop 65 issue in California, all of those things, and then the internal stuff. Maybe to start there, where do you see crisis communication, both externally and internally, sometimes overlooked or not recognized by entrepreneurs or leaders of smaller companies as they grow.

The general answer is I see it everywhere, nearly every brand I interact with, whether that’s casually or in a client relationship, has substantial exposure. That is unrecognized because the brands are designed and oriented towards growth to promote, to talk about the good things they’re doing and to create products. All of those good things come with the shadow side. The shadow side, as you suggested, includes challenges that come from outside and inside.

When I think about the whole category of crisis communication, it is founded on the notion of risk as you grow your brand, as you develop into something interesting that people begin to have an affinity for, you also grow your opportunity to be a target externally. Interestingly enough, we’ve seen a substantial increase over the past years with the advent of social media, easy to post in cameras and phone, and internal risk as well from your employees.

Let’s go a little deeper into the internal risk with employees. Give us some examples if you would.

Especially as you’re coming up in your business as a founder growing and maturing in your business, it’s important to remember that you’re not the person who you used to be, hanging out with a team, having a beer on Fridays. Those kinds of conversations have to give way to you being CEO. Now you have to create distance between yourself and your team because if you don’t, there are going to be social interactions that get used against you.

I’ll give you a very good example. Stan Richards, the 87-year-old, Founder of The Richards Group, one of the country’s largest ad agencies, was in an internal meeting with a young team of people. Someone on that team happened to be recording the session and Stan said something in that meeting that wasn’t exactly PC. Rather than his employee having a conversation with him about how he needs to be aware of that, they posted it on the internet.

You see that same thing happening in other spaces. Urban Meyer, the Jacksonville Jaguars football coach who got fired and deservedly so, performed inappropriately in a few venues and a few ways. Those issues aren’t elevated these days discreetly. They’re posted online. Oftentimes, as we’re growing our companies, we have to be very aware that risks aren’t just outside, but they’re in our own management practices, and preparing for crisis takes both of those external and internal ideas into account.

I’m big on making these episodes actionable. The objective I have is that not just using my tones of voice to help people fall asleep but also, give them some stuff that they can take to their businesses and do. How do founders and entrepreneurs prepare? How do they ready their organizations and themselves for this type of reality? Unless you disagree, it’s not a matter of if.

It’s just a matter of when. You’re going to have an internal and external crisis. It’s the reality of today’s world, but how you navigate through them is often the difference between long-term success and an existential threat to the business. If you’re coaching young entrepreneurs and encouraging them to prepare for this, give us some of the must-dos.

I’ll talk about two of them at the stage of the entrepreneurs that are so interested in your work ought to pay attention to. The first is, you can segregate crisis-type situations into 2 or 3 categories. That’s the first tangible step an entrepreneur can take. Think about the crises that you might face in three categories. The first is reputational. Some of the examples I just gave, like Stan Richards, that’s a reputation crisis.

If you’re in The Good Crisp folks, you now have a production facility. You have risks associated with safety. If you’ve got a facility, you may have risks associated with emergencies, explosions, severe weather that somehow or another disrupt your supply chain and those emergency supply chain disruption among them that we’re all feeling have severe financial consequences.

Step one, then is to inventory your vulnerabilities. Step two is to develop or create a rapid response team. If I were to paint a broad brush, this is the number one thing that brands get wrong the most. They don’t have a defined rapid response team that in case you have a reputation, safety or an emergency issue, is able and ready to deploy.

You won’t believe this, but the number one reason that brands fail in this step two is that people don’t know what phone number to call into. They don’t know what conference room to go to or what zoom channel to log into. It’s the simplest thing, but it creates an enormous amount of chaos at the front end of a crisis. That chaos is happening while the clock is ticking. You only have these days about two hours and my accounting to control the narrative of your brand.

If you waste an hour and a half trying to get together, somebody, some social media person, troll or even a broadcast media van is going to drive by and start reporting on your crisis while you’re still trying to find the conference room. A rapid response plan often sounds like an onerous thing, but let me assure your audience, it doesn’t have to be anything more than the size of a business card. On one side, it says, “Rapid response team, here are the people on it.” On the other side, it says, “Here are the places that we gather when necessary.” One of those people has activation responsibility, and that’s it. There’s a plan.

I want to dive into some of the things in your book. The premise, as I understand it is around what you call your reputation dissonance model. The thing that I love about it is you’re saying that any brand can navigate bad news if they follow in sequence five action steps. What are those five action steps and why does that help them or give you the confidence in saying that a brand will be able to navigate any brand, bad news break that they have to get out there?

The five steps start with assembling the rapid response team. We’re going to walk down through the rollercoaster of crisis. Your first action is to issue a holding statement to your stakeholders, internal and external. That holding statement gives people an understanding that you’re on the scene. You understand there’s an issue. You are in charge.

Give an example of what a holding statement might be.

It’s a fewer than 100 words written statement that you issue via email. In that statement, you’ll say things like, “We are aware that X is happening. This is frustrating and upsetting for all of us.” The good news might be that you have taken measures to reduce or make safe particular people or products, and you’ll be communicating with your stakeholders in a very short time with more information. Less than 100 words, it says who’s in control. Put that on your social channels, in your email channels and get that out to the stakeholders that need to know so that they understand you’re on the scene and you’re in control.

You got a rapid response plan and holding statement release. What’s next?

Then you got the three M’s, message, messenger and method of delivery. Your message is a more extensive creation. It could be a long statement about the situation and it could include orienting ideas about corrective action to be taken. Sometimes your message might need to contain an apology, but in Breaking Bad News, identify sixteen possible messages. The apology is number sixteen on the list. Don’t go there too quick.

In messenger, who’s going to deliver the message? We don’t want to assume that the CEO is the natural messenger. That’s probably the worst assumption because CEOs should be paying attention to the total scene, the big picture. You might want to train a messenger to be ready to communicate with stakeholders that are different from the CEO.

In smaller companies, especially startups, that’s a challenge, but with forethought, that can certainly be a duty that’s assigned and the person can be trained. Finally, your method of delivery can range from a written press release to a press conference. There’s a bunch of options in between. In fact, there are twelve total options. None of them are right. None of them are wrong. They sit on a 2 by 2 scale that says, “If you want more control and be more authentic, choose these few.”

The worst thing is to assume, “We should call a press conference and put the CEO up in front of it to explain what’s going on.” It was probably the worst damn idea ever because it’s not thought through. That could be way overkill and it could put the brand at greater risk because CEO is not well prepared for that role. A press conference is a terrible idea.

Why would you put someone who’s unprepared in front of a group of reporters who simply are trained to find conflict and fault? Those are the kinds of assumptions that persistent side of crisis communication because people don’t know they have other options. Those are the five steps, rapid response team assembles, holding statement, message, messenger and method of delivery.

For young brands, maybe to illustrate, can you give a couple of examples of a company that managed it well and accompany that in your opinion did not. If you need to whitewash to protect the innocent, feel free to.

It’s more fun to talk about those that did not. There’s a company I talk about extensively in the book and it’s a food truck. Pretty young in their development. This food truck happened to be serving food out in front of a local prison. There were activists who saw the food truck serving prison guards. Those activists posted information and video online on their social channels accusing the company of harming immigrants because those prison guards were employees at a prison where there were immigration violators.

That created a little bit of a social media firestorm against the prison and food truck. The food truck issues an immediate and extensive apology almost goes overboard expressing their support for immigrants and the activists, etc. They included, “We have decided that we will not serve food in this area again.” Guess what happened? Backlash. Those that are advocates for police, immigration law, supporters of the prison employees themselves, they then blow up social media. The food truck issues a second apology apologizing to them or to that crowd and saying, “We’ll serve them, but we want it to be well-known that we’re pro-immigrant.”

In all of that process, what did they do? They made one side mad, another side mad and destroyed their business in the process. What do they have to do next? They got to start their food truck and go someplace else. It was a great example of not being prepared for a social media firestorm and moving towards number sixteen of your message options way too fast. There were several ways that they could have resolved that online without jumping into the reflex of issue, apology and it would go away.

That’s almost never true. I detail some of the aftermaths in the book. There’s a good example of a small business that bungled their opportunity to do something good inside of a crisis. It happens to the biggest brands too. I go down through several case studies like Chipotle, Blue Bell ice cream, McDonald’s. None of them are immune. They all make missteps. When you peel back the onion, you learn that there are some common things that if they pay attention, they just make deliberate decisions rather than knee-jerk reactions that they can move through any difficult situation with a little bit more elegance.

I appreciate the example of a food truck because it’s a great example of that you don’t have to be a huge corporation to have significant backlash in crisis communication poorly managed, especially nowadays when so much of that is happening on social media, so much of the response is instant and so much of it becomes almost trivial. It starts and then follows.

Some of the founders are going to read this and go, “I’m now scared to death because they don’t want to make any mistakes and so forth.” You mentioned taking inventory of where they’re vulnerable, but many may not understand how to do that or where to look for those vulnerabilities. Let’s spend a little bit more time digging into what some of those vulnerabilities may be.

There’s a couple of places to start when you’re performing a risk assessment. The first is probability. If you look at your operation and ask yourself, “What’s the probability that bad things going to happen from a reputation, safety and emergency standpoint?” You can even rate and rank these five perhaps it’s highly probable. One is, who knows? You work your way down a list of options or possibilities and turn them into probabilities. You might then look at your list afterward and say, “We have a few 5, but mostly 1s and 2s.”

Take on the fives and answer this question, “If that happened, what would you say?” I call it in the book the Dave Matthews Band question. Do you remember that song Dave Matthews Band What Would You Say? That’s the exercise. Rank the risks from a reputation, safety and emergency, then ask yourself, what would you say if you’re stuck and it keeps you up at night, you know that you have one there that you need to pay attention to?

The challenge with that, speaking candidly and we laugh about this to some degree, but entrepreneurs are pathologically optimistic. Gary Hirshberg is the one who coined that. It’s so true. It’s very hard to think about shit hitting the fan. I worry that the entrepreneurs that try to take on this exercise miss vulnerabilities because they’re blinded by their optimism. What do they do to make sure that they go find their neighborhood curmudgeon or cynic and sit down with him or her and ask them? What would you, what would you suggest?

You’ve pointed out how difficult it is to read the label when you’re inside the pickle jar. The challenge that we have is that all of our wirings as entrepreneurs are designed to move up and to the right. I would suggest a couple of things. One is, go visit your bank and assess the degree to which you can expand your line of credit within 24 hours. That is a sobering conversation when you’re told not by much and not very quickly because it is your line of credit that’s going to be the elastic tool that keeps you in business when your revenue is dropped to zero. That’s one conversation to have that’ll help you start to familiarize yourself with risk.

A second could be and should be with an attorney that you might be acquainted with. Attorneys are trained to avoid and reduce risk. That’s why they’re very familiar with the conversation. They’re also quite combative if not properly aligned to these discussions. They’ll simply say, “No comment.” Attorneys are not typically brand-oriented people. You have to be a little bit careful, take your risk assessment with you, and don’t let them simply push you into a no comment corner, but you do need some outside help here and even use your fellow entrepreneurs.

I have found that around the table, we can see each other’s vulnerabilities much better than we can see our own. It could be that you’re in a YPO group or Vistage. Take your risk assessments with you and have someone else help you to see the possibilities and turn those into probabilities. I sometimes say, “It’s just not a good idea to cut your own hair.” Try to get some outside of an objective perspective.

I talk to fellow founders who have been there, but also keep an eye out and watch brands that are navigating through crisis and then go back and ask yourself, “What if it was us?” The universe presents your training drills ad nauseam. There are plenty of opportunities to look at other brands that are responding to challenges. Take that challenge and apply it to you because they’re all real. I’m a believer that one of the fundamental axioms in this business is that you’re going to fail at something. You’re going to let a customer, shopper down or employee down. It’s the reality.

You can’t possibly control everything and not every outcome is the one you want. What defines the brands that succeed long-term are the brands that use that failure to build a stronger relationship. I want to talk about this. We’re fearful of crisis or worrisome. I have found in my career. I’ve been doing this for many years that sometimes those things are what develop that deep connection between you and your constituency. At the broader constituency, I mean your shoppers, customers, employees, investors or friends.

When something tough happens, how you navigate, own that, step up to that, communicate with the authenticity that you show, that can do far more to propel a relationship forward that if it never happened or if you didn’t have that challenge. It’s also an opportunity to think of your crisis communication as a potential competitive advantage or a brand-building activity, your thoughts on my comments there.

I couldn’t agree more once you weather a crisis and hopefully, they come in small doses, so they’re not complete game-changers or storms that wipe you out. They’re opportunities to strengthen your orientation towards your North Star and strengthen your relationship with those stakeholders that are most important to you. Certainly, as brands grow, not everybody is going to love you. A quick crisis will be a great way to see, “We’ve got to be true to ourselves and care about who we care about because not all will follow. We’re not going to be universally loved.” Crises expose and aluminate that vulnerability.

The other thing that I hear in conversation with founders and I’m going to use a moment in time. When George Floyd was murdered, a lot of brands were trying to figure out how to show up at that moment. Some were choosing to be bold. Others were trying to make supportive but relatively innocuous positions. Others were fearful that by doing that, it could look like they were just jumping on the bandwagon, so they decided to remain silent, but they were fearful that remaining silent looked complicit towards the other.

How do the brands decide the right way to respond to a situation, which may be a crisis external even to their company? It’s a societal crisis, a moment in a time crisis, another school shooting or something like a George Floyd incident or the tornadoes in Kentucky and Tennessee. These kinds of things now in such a polarized society where the best of intent is to say something, but then you have those who see that as some type of endorsement of a belief or an endorsement of behavior. Coach our folks on that. What do they do? How do they assess whether they should tow it or sit on the sidelines?

Particularly with the George Floyd aftermath, I had clients who asked the same exact question and my response to them was universal, “Have you commented on issues like this before? Have you aligned your brand to the core issues that are in play associated with the murder of George Floyd? If the answer is no, why is this the right moment for you to do that?” Typically it’s not. What I always suggest to brands is if you have a sense that you want to align your brand with a social cause, then pick a low-stakes moment to do that. Maybe it’s even a happy moment to do that.

Find low stake opportunities to establish a voice and help people see, “This is the kind of thing we talk about as a company.” You have to put those ideas in play and in public. That’s typically on your website, where you discuss the alignment of what you’re creating, producing with a social cause. By the way, it’s a really smart thing to do in this era.

More and more consumers are identifying themselves as belief-driven buyers. The belief-driven buyers set once to orient themselves to brands that make a difference that make the world better. You have to establish that voice and make it consistent because if you show up in one moment and then go away, then you’re an opportunist. It looks twice as bad.

When a few of our folks came to us and not knowing how to show up, I said, “If you feel like you need to do something, show up just like, ‘I’m not sure how to respond in this moment. We want to hear from you, our community and our customers. We want to listen.’” The relationship we have with brands is not linear or logical. It’s a motive. It’s very similar to the one you would have with a friend, a loved one or something along those lines. There are moments where you want that loved one to talk, and there are other moments where you want that loved one to shut up and listen, absorb and be a shoulder to cry on and so forth.

It’s okay to be that too. I shared an article and the title of it was I Think All Of This Talk About Authenticity Is A Bit Inauthentic. What I mean by that is the moment we try to feign authenticity or that we try intentionally to be authentic or not, when we are actually authentic humans and we show our awards like, “I’m not so sure how to react. We’re interested as a brand in what you would like to see us do at this moment. How can we support this?” If you’re feeling compelled to toe-in and those kinds of moments, then toe-in with honesty and don’t take the position because it’s the position that the majority is or that you think is going to be reflected as the one that your brand should be because those are mistakes that are hard to claw back in my experience.

The technique is beautiful. If you feel like you need to say something, but don’t have a position, then make yourself a listening conduit. Gather people around you and use that as an exercise of community. Don’t try to create a position or take a position that doesn’t have any relevance or connectivity to your past, traditions or rituals. Be careful there because that’s when the authentic BS meter goes way off.

Almost inevitably, it does far more harm than good. A question is coming in. It’s an interesting one. We’re in this period, The Great Resignation. It’s difficult to define people and people are leaving organizations. Unceremoniously, you’ve got people that are calling in because of COVID and so forth. Some tips for communicating internally about those kinds of disruptions while also trying to encourage personal accountability, a sense of pride in your job and in your role in the company.

It is a very big challenge for entrepreneurs who are growing their staff. The place that I have found success and in advising clients on this matter is simply to form up your employee value proposition, continue to talk about it and continue to improve upon it. You don’t have to acknowledge the uncertainty in the universe. You don’t even have to acknowledge that, “People aren’t going to stay. Some are going to leave. This may not be the place for them.”

That’s okay. What you do have a responsibility to do for your brand, however, is create a value proposition that people are drawn to. Keep emphasizing that and you’ll be fine as you mature and add to the value of the proposition. You’re going to have some rough challenges because people will question the value proposition. They’ll even say it’s not good enough.

You have to be true to yourself in creating that and trying to make it better as you go. What I’ve discovered even in my own entrepreneurial journey is that there is a point at which you can’t bend the organization in directions to try to please someone person who may be using, I don’t want to call them legitimate, but at least self-serving conversation with you to try to gain more out of the organization.

Some quick examples, “If I don’t get a promotion, I’m going to leave. If I don’t get a raise, I’m going to leave. I’ve been offered a lot more money. If you can’t match it, then I’m going to leave.” What I’ve come to appreciate and understand is that those are moments for celebration, not resignation and my response to those kinds of discussions or ultimatums is, “We’ve enjoyed having you here and we’re going to miss you. Let’s have a graduation ceremony because you’re moving on to something much better.”

They are indicating to you that they’re not aligned with your values or your value proposition. You have to let go and learn to let go very quickly, otherwise, they turn into cancer inside of your organization. That’s the person who’s got the live cell phone recording in every conference room that you’re in or every Zoom that you’re on. You have to be careful that you’re not compromising your own ethics and integrity in order to desperately keep someone who may not be aligned to your purpose.

It is a scary time for an entrepreneur. We see predatory lawsuits and employees flipping it around where they’re looking for ways to be the victim. That’s certainly not everybody I’m not saying that at all, but for entrepreneurs, those are headwinds. The business in the industry is tough enough, but these are new headwinds. These are difficult. Some of them can be self-inflicted just by the casualness and informality that a founder has.

How do you coach founders to bridge that? There’s a benefit from being still the scrappy entrepreneur who can laugh and be approachable and casual, but nowadays, that flippant comment, that little bit of sarcasm, those kinds of things can be completely used, misconstrued and have lousy outcomes, but you don’t want to be robotic, fearful and always be trying to be cognizant of everything that comes out because you’re not going to be yourself. What entrepreneurs need is to manifest the best version of themselves, their passion, drive, hunger, width or scrappiness to succeed. How do you balance that?

The balance that I’ve advised some of my entrepreneur clients is simply this. Imagine yourself as Elliot versions 1, 2 and 3. Elliot version one, you’re the CEO who is creating a culture and a social connectedness to your team. The team is the orienting idea. You never, in my experience, want to start turning yourself into a virtual family. Family sucks and they will absolutely hold you up on that one word. Be careful in version one of your CEO journey to not get trapped inside of that construct. The team is good. Family is not.

There it’s a little bit deeper, the nuance between the two, family and team.

You can’t get rid of your family members. Can you? You’re stuck with them. You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.

Other than the semantics of the difference in terminology, is also, you’re talking about a level of intimacy, keeping a degree of formality or a degree of separation or distance all the way into where there is no barrier and distance.

In a family orientation version, one CEO, “I need to be more transparent because we’re a family.” These are social traps. From a crisis comms standpoint, I talked to entrepreneurs about avoiding. Those can set up conditions where you’re, all of a sudden, giving away your company. The way that you give it away is in these random thoughts like, “Maybe I should give all of my employees’ equity.”

No. You’re the one taking the risk. Equity is yours. Be careful about that construct. In version two of yourself, phase two, you’re going to create even more distance. What’s going to show up in version two are things like policies and procedures. They’re going to be written down. The team thing can still last and that’s good, but transparency is yours to control.

In version three and phase three, you’re a probably 40 plus person company. You’re now the CEO. You have positional power. That positional power is that, “Elliot, you can’t just go drink a beer with the team anymore.” Everything you say can and will be misconstrued. There’s a ladder of inference that gets completely blown to pieces.

When in casual conversation, just trying to be friendly, something comes out, something is implied or inferred by the receiver and all of a sudden, when you meant to say X, it gets taken as A, B, C, 1, 2, 3. It’s an interesting dynamic and sometimes quite painful for entrepreneurs as they grow through this relationship and say, “I started this because I want to have some fun with my buddies.” That’s not going to be the case as you grow and mature. You can’t do that anymore.

The reality is I see so many reluctant leaders. They started as entrepreneurs and then suddenly they are thrust into leadership and frankly, ill-prepared for that because the skills and traits that it takes to be an entrepreneur, a visionary, a change agent are not necessarily the same skills that are needed to be a leader of people, a motivator of people, a leader of the business.

That’s a place where a lot of founders begin to struggle. Some are able to grow into that, some learn those skills and some have to self-recognize and say, “I better understand that I’m an entrepreneur and a visionary. That’s where I should stay. I probably need to bring somebody in here to professionalize the organization.”

Even Google did that. By hiring Eric Smith, we need a grownup to help run us. If you’re an entrepreneur and you want to be an entrepreneur, you don’t want to grow up and mature into a CEO role, don’t make yourself do that. Entrepreneurs get to make decisions quickly. You get to say, “Let’s try it this way. Let’s experiment. Let’s think about X, Y and see what happens.”

You have an inherent appetite for risk. When you move up the maturity curve, people who worked for you in entrepreneurial mode don’t like that anymore. They’ve got too much at stake. They have mortgages. They have kids in college. Now, they want certainty. You now, as CEO in phase three, have to look at the corporate calendar and schedule meetings for the entire year, so people have an understanding of how the cadence of the organization is going to work. In entrepreneur mode, that’s the last thing you want to be doing is setting up the corporate calendar, for example.

The forefront of policies and procedures.

For entrepreneurs, a policy manual is a crisis.

Two last questions. What led you to focus on crisis communication and write this book? What were you seeing or not seeing out there that you found this as something that was necessary to be out in the world?

If you were to ask it in a very slightly different way, it would sound like this, “Jeff, what do you think the number one problem in the world is today?” I would say uncertainty. I wrote Breaking Bad News to create certainty and a pathway through the most uncertain situations. In a lot of respects, it’s a do-it-yourself formula for navigating situations that are absolutely disorienting to most people.

That to me was a huge motivating factor because I’ve always prided myself on as a communicator, being able to create trust and confidence. I found over the years now, in crisis, the game changes. The uncertainty that rains and the fog that is created by that exist not just within the stakeholders, it’s inside the war room. That was my motivating factor. I said to myself, “I think I can turn what seems to be a very loosey-goosey craft into a discipline.” That’s what I attempted to do.

My last question is for those who want to learn more, obviously read the book, how do they learn more? Where do they reach you? Where do they find out more about your book and what you do?

The author page and a place where you can get a free copy of Breaking Bad News for your readers is BreakingBadNewsBook.com.

Jeff, thanks for doing this with me. I’m likely to ask you back and we might do some drills and have a little bit of a simulation because these are the kinds of topics that we don’t discuss and we don’t arm founders with until they’re confronted with it. I would like to see them have this arrow in their quiver. I hope you’d be willing to join me again sometime soon.

It’s a great service that you’re providing to your audience. Count me in. I’m very happy to help them, at least for a short amount of time with you, have one of the worst moments of their lives. We’ll get them through it.

Entrepreneurs have a lot of worth moments of their lives and consecutive days. They’re used to it. Giving them the tools to manage through this, it’s the difference-maker off. We’re doing this episode here right before the holidays. I would be remiss if I didn’t wish you a very happy holiday. Thanks so much for joining. Thank you all and have a happy holiday. We’ll see you in the next episode. Take care.

Important Links

• The Good Crisp Company

• Apron

• Breaking Bad News

• I Think All Of This Talk About Authenticity Is A Bit Inauthentic

About Jeff Hahn

Jeff Hahn is the owner and principal of Hahn Public. Jeff focuses on brand crafting, message development and crisis communications for the firm’s clients; he also leads the public health practice area. He has practiced public relations for nearly three decades.

Prior to joining the firm, Jeff was communications director at Freescale Semiconductor and public affairs director at Motorola Semiconductor. For those companies, as well as with Motorola’s corporate office in Schaumburg, Illinois, and Lockheed Space Operations in Titusville, Florida, he served in roles including government relations, media relations, crisis communication, analyst relations, business operations, employee communication, financial communication and executive communication.

Jeff serves on the Board of Advisors for the School of Communication Studies at Texas State University. He serves as a volunteer for the Austin Chamber of Commerce, and is a past Membership Committee Chair; he was also the Austin city campaign co-chair for the United Way campaign in 2010. Jeff has served on a number of nonprofit boards including the E3 Alliance’s Student Success Strike Force (2018 Chair). He was Board Chair for LifeWorks in 2003 and for Keep Austin Beautiful in 1998 and 1999. He is also a 2002 graduate of Leadership Austin.

Jeff grew up on a farm in Iowa and moved to Texas in 1984 by enlisting in the United States Air Force. He served at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio where he completed an associate degree in administration, then graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1990 from The University of Texas at San Antonio. He is formally trained in persuasion communication and holds a master’s degree in communication studies from Texas State University.

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