Crisis Response: What Differentiates A Good Leader From A Great Leader With Bill Colleti

The ultimate test for any business and any leader is how they handle their worst cases. Crisis response is key to establishing a stable, successful business. That’s what today’s guest will be sharing in this episode with your hosts Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch. Bill Coletti is the CEO of Kith.co, a crisis communication and reputation management firm where he helps businesses respond and handle their worst days. Bill explains why a good crisis management plan is important and what it means for your business. He also gives you actionable business advice on how to show up as a leader when a crisis arrives and how to manage business-related risks with your team. Stay tuned and get tips that will help propel your business!

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Crisis Response: What Differentiates A Good Leader From A Great Leader With Bill Coletti

Josh and I were talking about mindsets and behaviors that are required that separates you as a leader whenever you’re going through a crisis. I’m super excited to talk about this topic. Josh, what about you?

I am also excited. I’m sure we say that for most episodes. I’m excited because the kids went back to school, which is great in my house. Things are going to be much quieter during the day but as far as this episode goes, if you’re in business long enough, you’re going to run into some crisis. For our industry, maybe some driver gets hit or someone’s trying to ruin your reputation online, something like that. This is a good topic for you to tune in and understand what mindset and maybe some decision-making practices you need to make to be ready for this type of event when it does come.

It’s not a matter if it’s a wind thing. I’m super excited to talk to Bill Coletti with Kith.co. I had some technical difficulties so I didn’t even get to do a pre-rapport call with Bill. That was all you, Josh. With that being said, I’d like to welcome Bill to the show.

I’m glad to be here.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and everything you have going on.

I’m the Founder of Kith. We are a crisis communications and reputation management firm. More than that, we help people when they are having some of their worst days at a corporate level. I grew up in Florida, ran political campaigns for the first half of my career, took five years in Eastern Europe, ran campaigns over in Bulgaria and other countries and then came home. I’ve been doing this at a large global PR firm for ten years and then with my own firm as an entrepreneur. Fundamentally, all we do is crisis communications and reputation management and helping people survive some of the worst days in their businesses.

If you can handle political campaigns, this is probably easy.

The crucible of crisis doesn’t develop your skillset, it reveals it. Click To Tweet

In the current scheme of things, you’ve had a little bit of experience over in that direction, like the Middle East’s direction and the political aspect of things. How would you handle a PR aspect going on? What’s your thought on that?

The point is I view that the entire world breaks down into risk and we are all in the business of managing risk. Then we have to take advantage of that to create opportunities. When we talk about Afghanistan and what’s going on over there, it’s an interesting case study of something that’s going to happen. I view risk as three things. You have strategic risk. Things you meant to do for some economic benefit. Preventable risks, things you should have zero tolerance for. If the three of us made hamburger patties, there should not be metal shavings in the hamburger patties. That’s preventable.

Lastly, our external, things outside of our control. That’s a weather event. Perhaps you could argue an active shooter, someone who comes into your workplace. Those are outside of your control. Those are three fundamental risks. Strategic, I meant to do it. Preventable, never should happen. External, outside of my control. What we’re watching in Afghanistan is an interesting microcosm to apply to business, large and small.

This was a decision that needed to be made somewhere over the past years. It was going to be bad. If we are a business owner and we are going to pick the topic, shut down our factory number four and lay off a bunch of people, I can do a lot of planning and a lot of preparation. I can think about that. That’s a strategic risk. I know I need to do it. I’m doing it for some economic reason but people are going to be pissed.

Let’s extrapolate that out to Afghanistan. By no means, I want to equate shutting the factory with the tragedy of thirteen people dying and hundreds of thousands of other people impacted by it. It is an interesting example. We need to make decisions as business leaders in crisis and out of crisis that isn’t going to go over well with everybody. We’re never going to be a hero to everybody. That is a bad trait of leaders.

When we try to please all the people, we’ve got to make difficult decisions for our employees, customers and future. It’s an interesting way. We can quibble over the way it happened or they should have done it in the winter, this or that. The fact remains. What the president needed to be done could have been done a little bit better but he’s got public opinion on his side, quite frankly. We got to go through this bad patch just like as if we were going to close factory number four. A lot of people are going to be pissed but they’ll move on.

The storm always comes. That’s like the worst day. Those are the days that everyone dreads because that’s when you’re getting messages, emails and phone calls. How do you prepare to navigate something like that? Let’s say something happened back to the service industry. Your technician did something bad, made the local news channel and it became a bigger story than needed. How would you prepare yourself to handle the onslaught that comes with that?

Small business owners, medium-sized business owners often overlook that because they feel like, “I’m nimble. I’m agile. That’s what makes me good. I’ll fix it when it happens.” Very few people think about these things. I disagree with that approach. A phrase I like is, “The crucible of crisis doesn’t develop your skillset. It reveals it.”

When you are in that moment, a true crisis moment that is the worst day of your professional career or entrepreneurial career, I don’t believe there’s on-the-job training. This is stuff you need to think about. You need to prepare for it because there’s very rarely as there a perfect playbook and I never ever will suggest Mr. and Mrs. Leader do ABC and you’ll be fine. It doesn’t work that way. We’re talking about humans and emotions.

To that end, the simplest thing from a preparation standpoint, which is at the root of your question is pull out the newspaper, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, your local paper, whatever you want to read and say, “What if that had happened to us? What would we do?” Do that at your staff meeting weekly, monthly, quarterly, whatever you do with your leadership team, I don’t think you need to do it with everybody but with the folks that matter most to you on your team, the people that you’re going to talk to these issues and say, “What if it had happened to us?”

That begins to build a little bit of muscle memory and thinking as a leader of, “Jimmy gives me horrible advice. I am not going to call on Jimmy in this situation, so I’m practicing in that situation. I didn’t expect my partner, husband or wife, so many amazing female entrepreneurs, to be so shrill or thoughtful in this situation and calming me down.” Those are things why you need to practice it.

There are so many things in our life we should be practicing, health, fitness and all kinds of different things. It’s just one more thing but it’s important because it is these moments that define companies and shape reputations over the long-term if they get big and significant enough. Josh, you might be valuable.

One of your texts does something devastating. You can put that as a sexual assault of one of their customers. It does something electrically that causes them a major fire next to a daycare and it’s your guy that did it. Let’s put some context about what we’re talking about here. I’m not talking about a bad review that I was 30 minutes late or there’s a part that’s on backorder, things like that. Put it into frame.

One of the things I didn’t even think about before we started this interview is a coaching organization that Josh and I have been part of. They turned me on to this and I never thought about it. It’s our integrity policy and integrity card that all of our technicians have. They have it in their wallet. It says, “Service emperor will always provide factual information to the news media and will respond to the media inquiries with respect to the reporter’s deadline. Only designated spokespersons will speak to the media and on the backside of it. It gets my information as the person to contact for this.”

“Any time that one of our technicians is on-site, if something ever happens and a reporter shows up, then they’re instructed to immediately hand this card to that reporter and they reach out to me not to that technician. With the technician, there’s no telling what they might say and what might come out of their mouth because that’s not what they’re trained to do.” That’s one of the things. I never thought about this. One of the things that I think of is if you remember back, someone did the thing where they would pull one wire off of a furnace and hire 5 or 6 companies to come in and inspect the system.

That happened to the first company that I managed. We were on the news because of that. Now it was a good thing. We did the right thing.

Share the experience.

You have to be prepared for that stuff. Granted, back then, I was very green. This was my first foray into management with HVC but we always coach technicians to do the right thing and be honest. There’s that as well. I’m not going to mention any names but, Tersh, you know the story in Florida years ago. It was a very big public story for our industry. Some business practices made national news in our industry and all the local news channels in Florida.

It was a massive crisis. They had the FBI show up and start raiding the whole place. They had 170 employees and stuff like that. It can happen to anyone, especially the whole service industry. A lot of these businesses are growing rapidly because everyone is home and their stuff’s breaking more. You want to be more comfortable. There had been a lot of acquisitions in our market. The quality and some of that stuff can get away from people as these businesses get bigger. You have to be prepared for the worst.

I love that card. We can spend a lot of time there because there’s something I want to share about this equation of crisis success. My question back to you, is the card awesome? You give that to your texts. That’s amazing. When was the last time you tested it and the last time you tested your team on that bullet point?

We go over during onboarding once a year whenever we do our all-company state of the union. It’s something that we talked about. I’d like to check them to see if they have it in their wallet on them. It’s not something that we test. Thankfully, we haven’t had to deal with anything pertaining to this. Years ago, we had a service technician that was onsite at a job. They heard gunshots. They walked out to the road but didn’t see anything. They went back to work.

We’re in the South. People shoot in their backyard. That’s what they assumed it was. All of a sudden, police and reporters showed up. They’re like, “Did you see anything?” This was before we had this policy in place or anything. He was like, “I didn’t see anything.” They let him be but that could have gotten crazy.

Josh’s example of Florida and the company he managed in Dateline would be a wonderful service to make that hybrid and amalgamation of all that. Make that a little mini case for folks that learn from you guys and say, “Ask your team. Let’s put ourselves in this space. Let’s do a little simulation. How would we respond? What would you do?” Back to the fundamental question of how you prepare, that’s the best way to prepare. In these ten minutes, I’ve looked at you. You’re like, “That’s interesting. That’s a mindset. We’ve changed mindset back to what we’re going to talk about.” That then yields improved behavior. That makes you better.

The crisis isn’t going to wait for your calendar to flip over. Click To Tweet

As Scott said, we all skip on the testing side of things. Scott, you’re not alone. I don’t test it. That’s going to go on my chalkboard of things to top priorities to do for sure.

Do you have any recommendations on how to test something? In a crisis situation, everyone’s like, “It’s one in a million. It’s never going to happen to me.” That’s why this stuff gets lost and people don’t think about it. What would you recommend as far as running simulations or a test, maybe a frequency of how often you would recommend or coach somebody to do this?

Annually is the layup answer. We all do. All of our systems test annually for some reason. What I like to do is make it very episodic and back to that point. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Josh, I’ll put you on the spot. Let’s say you see something in a trade publication that’s close to what you were talking about in Florida. Do it next week and next week’s staff meeting and say, “I read about this in the trade publication. I remember a time when XYZ, how would we respond to that?”

Don’t make it complicated, difficult, have the stand down for safety and everybody gets all excited. Don’t do that. It needs to be a bullet point. That is the mindset of a leader that’s ready for a crisis. It’s not put your head in the sand and hope it’s never going to happen. This stuff does happen. You have proved my point. Without even thinking about it, you pulled out two anecdotes immediately of it does happen. You can do a big standup and we can do a simulation. That’s what we do a lot for our clients.

I honestly think to grab a publication. It could be the New York Times, or your trade rag. Add it with an anecdote or two from your experience because you’re the leader with the experience and say, “What would we do if this happened to us?” Take 10 minutes, 15 minutes on it. You’ll learn a bunch of questions.

I don’t want to prescribe that every twelve months, you need to do that in February. You should do it the next time you see the article because the crisis isn’t going to wait for your calendar to flip over and you’ll forget about it. See it, make it simple and clear. The audience and you have such great industry insight. Don’t make it complicated. Test yourself. Then change your mindset from, “This could never happen to me.” In the course of ten minutes, we talked about two pretty significant HVAC companies that got impacted by this long-term that no longer exist.

It’s something that can come and go. When it came previously and hit our industry real hard, it’s one of those things that shook us all. We were all like, “Was that true? Did that happen?” We don’t leave it to be the case. The media is going to try and blow things out of proportion, so you don’t know what to believe or what not to believe. If you’re a large enough company where everybody doesn’t come to the office every single day, there’s a chance that they may hear something on social media before they ever hear it from you personally. Role-play in that scenario also.

Scott, what we might forget about is the fact that we would need to be training again. I know he’s smart but Scott is my buddy. He’s up there by Josh. This is one of those things that are not top of mind. Most of the time, even when we’re thinking PR, we’re thinking, “We saved this cat from a tree.” How do we spin this to make it positive versus, “Let’s think about crisis management?” I love the fact that we’re talking about this mindset and these behaviors. What other types of behaviors should a good leader that’s prepared and ready for a crisis? What should they be showing? What type of behaviors and mindsets would you say?

There are two things that we should talk about. One, I’ll talk about this equation but also what’s at stake. What are the consequences? This is so rare. It’s never going to happen. I’ll fumble my way through it and everything will be okay. That’s a bad mindset.

It sounds like you were a fly on my wall over here.

You’re just a very typical successful entrepreneur that’s doing a lot of things. No, it’s not that rare. Let’s talk about this equation, mindset and behavior. I believe the key differentiator between good and great crisis response is speed. Speed to the market, your employee and those that matter most to you. The fundamental thing is speed.

Mission and Values + Chain of Command = Speed Click To Tweet

The way you get fast is this equation. It’s mission and values plus a chain of command equals speed. Tersh, that’s why I love that card that you live with. It is this equation of your mission and values. Let’s say something bad happens to a company. I find most people are slow for those two reasons. They’re slow because they don’t know where they stand and what they stand for. They’re fumbling around trying to figure out who matters and who doesn’t matter.

This is an industrial accident, a data breach or something around sexual harassment, things like that. Companies don’t know where they stand and what they stand for. That’s mission and values. Crystal clear, having it on a card with your team is a perfect solution for that. The second way that a company slowdown is that notion of a chain of command. It’s speed equals mission and values plus a chain of command. By a chain of command, you run businesses. I run a business. I don’t do it by myself. I ask people around me what they think.

I might ask my attorney. Maybe I have a general counsel. Some sides of different organizations don’t have that but I would like to have thought in advance. This is my behavior. Who matters to me? We were picking on Jimmy a little bit that Jimmy is bad in this situation and I’m not going to ask him. That all needs to be built into the chain of command. What do my investors think? What do my business partners think? What does my spouse think?

When these things happen as an entrepreneur, I need to think about who’s got to be in the decision loop in order to do that. First and most important thing, you get fast by knowing what you believe in, what you stand for and who’s the voices that I’m going to listen to. That’s one behavior that is critically important for organizations to think about.

If you’re a service business owner and you’re reading this, if you’re a manager or a technician and you’re thinking about becoming a business owner, don’t feel bad if you fall into this category or this description of how your business is run. A lot of times, it is a technician who’s good at being a technician. They’re like, “I’m going to being a technician. I can run a service business.” They don’t realize that there are lots of other things that come into this.

They don’t understand like, “We need an org chart with a chain of command.” Sometimes it’s like, “We’ll wait until we’re at $5 million or $10 million a year in revenue before we get an org chart.” A lot of people are very guilty of having a group chat like, “This happened.” It got thrown into the group chat and then whoever’s in the office takes care of the issue or the ball gets dropped. It’s like, “Did you take care of such and such?” “I thought you took care of this.” If there are three people in the business, you need that org chart so that you know whom to go to and who’s going to be responsible for what within the business.

Let me add. There’s formal, which is what you’re describing but there’s also informal. Outside counsel, investors, if that happened to you, you might call Josh because you trust him as an advisor and you might have other people in your network. Accountability, formal org charts, I love that but think about these truly big events. You know your team very well and you may be the first to recognize, “I probably need to get some outside help.” Who’s that going to be? That’s the informal part. I see it all the time where organizations get influenced by all types of external voices that don’t live anywhere on an org chart. Nor should they but they’re pretty darn important to their organization.

This is where as a business owner in this home service industry that if you hire a coach to help with your business, these are some things that most of these people, coaches like Bill and his coaching service allow you to reach out to them in a crisis situation. It’s one of those things you may want to ask somebody if you’re deciding whether you want to join with this coaching organization or that. “Will you help me if crap hits the fan?” It’s important to know because you have to know who has your back if your business’ back is against the wall.

I would go deeper with that. You got to know what you stand for. You cannot go as an empty vessel and say, “Josh, tell me what to do.” As the owner, you have to at least think about, “What are the thresholds? What are the commission and values? What do I stand for?” Otherwise, you’ll come up with someone else’s problem and it’s not going to meet your needs in that moment for your customers and for those that matter most to you.

You’re saying that even if you’re seeking outside advice or counsel from someone else, make sure that person aligns with your thoughts and values?

Let me illustrate that very clearly. We have this event, whatever this thing we’re talking about, that this crisis in the industry affects a particular company. Calling an attorney would be a typical behavior. That would be some things that people would do. That attorney might say, “You can’t apologize for this because you’re going to get sued and in depositions, you’re going to have to defend that apology.” Tersh, you’ve got a card that articulates a value statement that we’re going to own it, tell the truth and if we screwed up, I’m going to say, “We screwed up.” That is a total disconnect between mission and values.

If you’ve built a history of being the guy in the community that shoots straight, does this thing, get scared, listened to the attorney and all of a sudden, clam up, then take the attorney’s advice, which is not a bad advice but that’s all you do because you’re an empty vessel, that’s bad for your reputation. “That’s not the guy I knew. The guy I knew stood up, forthright, gave credits, rebates and mitigation.” That’s why knowing what you stand for matters because you’re going to get opinions from your insurance company, perhaps from your next-door neighbor, a former business partner, God knows who but if you don’t know that what you stand for, that’s when companies screw this stuff up.

You could totally have those things misaligned, then you have a problem because what you’re saying in public isn’t matching what you’re saying in time of need. Crisis reveals the type of leadership that you have versus some of those other things.

I’m going to develop and make it up as I go.

The thing about it is when you asked. When you’re talking about this, I’m thinking about the Facebook groups that we’re all a part of like HVAC, plumbing, electrical and all these service business-focused Facebook groups. There’s a ton of great advice in there. If that advice doesn’t line up with the value that you’ve built in the community, it could tank your business and reputation as far as like, “Why’d you all of a sudden clam up? You must be guilty then,” if you’re not saying anything and you’ve always been the type that you were super vocal. Here’s my question in response to that. What do you say to that lawyer whenever they don’t align with your mission and values?

First of all, find a team of consultants and supporters that are aligned with you. It’s the same thing. “This happened. How would we respond?” If the typical response for a small business is, “I’ve got my lawyer and my insurance agent,” those are probably the first two lines of defense. As a part of that training, we were talking about with your team, just say, “I’ve been thinking about this. How would you respond if this had happened to us? My friend Josh has given me this example down in Florida. What if that had happened to us? What would be your counsel to me?” That is a great test and a value extraction from those that provide service to you as the business owner. That’s the first thing that you do.

There’s a very specific point about the apology. We can go on a long riff about this but I’ll do it in a short way. That is an old legal saw that we should never apologize because Josh, I don’t want you to have to go through that deposition where someone asks you to defend the apology. I’ve gone all around on this with both the plaintiff’s bar and the defense bar, the people that sue and defend us. Both sides would much rather have in a deposition of CEO that said, “Yes, I dealt with this at the moment. Yes, we made a mistake but it’s not worth $50 million. We dealt with it here,” if you play out that litigation.

The lawyer’s concern is that, “I don’t want you to have to be confronted with this. What did you mean you apologized? Why did you apologize? That means you did something terribly wrong.” That used to be the case but it’s not the case anymore. The public expects more from the business and from leaders like you guys. Those are great things to test with your legal team in advance as well or a legal person and say, “This went down. Do you and I agree on this?” Those are some simple ways to work on that but it all goes back to readiness and that little mini-simulation that we were talking about.

Being prepared and pulling out your newspaper or trade paper. I got one right here. We get them every month.

I’m sure in the first two pages, you could find something that you would be curious about how you’d respond to it.

Instead of making this a paperweight on your desk, open it up and check things out. This one’s the ACHR News. You get it every month, read it and role-play that. That’s an awesome thing to do. Not only does it prepare your team but also it changes up your meetings. We all know the technicians come in like, “Here’s another meeting on how to sell capacitors.” “No. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to do a different role-play. What is the scenario?” You can always do the what ifs. I’m almost an anti-what if type of person but this is the perfect time to do that in my opinion.

It’s real. Without even thinking about it, you popped off two perfect examples. If you put a little bit more thought into it, it’s not this blank sheet of paper what if. It’s, “This happened in Miami. What would happen if it happens in us in Georgia?” That to me is prudent planning.

Having a reputation maintains your license to operate. Click To Tweet

Bill, we got a question. Would you and if so, how bring in a social media education policy to protect the business?

Much of this plays out in social. That’s probably more relevant on that. Social media education policy and that is what you’re talking about is here are our rules of engagement. Here’s what we do or don’t and here’s who does and doesn’t engage on social media. At scale, maybe a small business of 20 to 10 people, you might be able to have a clampdown defense that says, “Don’t talk about us on social.” With a lot of the clients that we work with, I frown on that because I want my employees to hopefully defend us on social.

I feed them information so that they will then share their side or our side of the story or, “That’s not the company I’ve worked for and what you’re reading is not accurate.” It’s something that needs to be thoughtfully played out. It goes back to mission and values. It helps that Tersh has that card that says, “Nobody’s going to talk to the media. It’d be really easy to add a sub-bullet. Please don’t engage on social media either.” You could add that but it isn’t whether that’s consistent with your values.

I am not a huge fan of overly draconian social media policies for companies. You could probably get away with it with a smaller company but when you get larger and more removed from the core, they get very difficult. It looks bad when someone says, “I can’t talk about that because I have a social media policy.”

What if the social media policy itself was the exact opposite or maybe clearly defined what’s engageable and what’s not engageable?

That’s an approach. Social media is so dynamic, being able to articulate all the what if’s, all the scenarios, all of this and the that’s. You could put some parameters around it. I’m not opposed to it for companies that team small-ish. When you get at scale, I’m not a fan of them. To me, when you get to hundreds and thousands and big enterprise, employees are another audience. They should be ambassadors. I don’t treat ambassadors with guardrails. I treat ambassadors with empowerment.

I feel the exact same thing. I very much share away. I know that there are some companies out there that are HVAC, plumbing, electrical service business companies where their technicians have a very large YouTube, TikTok or Instagram following. Their company has said, “Share away but don’t put our logo in it. You can do whatever you like but don’t have our logo in your stuff and don’t put our client’s images in there.” If they share something and it’s not something that they would recommend as a company, they could be potentially liable for teaching the wrong practices or something to that effect.

That’s smart and another is a case-by-case situation to that. One of the things to help frame this is what the stakes are. Let’s say we have one of these crisis events. We do something electrical. It burns up a daycare next to us and it’s a big deal or God forbid, one of our technicians is in sexual harassment or sexual assault. Why do we care about this? We care about reputation and reputation matters but reputation without definition is a relatively soft and opaque concept. It’s a little bit like the way we defined pornography in the ’70s. “I know it when I see it.” I know a reputation when I see it and have some definitions.

What’s at stake? I’ve tried to articulate as I’m talking about reputation three things that I think are at stake. The reason you want to respond to these things well and invest in growing your reputation is that you as a business owner want to get the benefit of the doubt. That’s not the company I know. That’s threshold number one. The reason you want to respond to these well and consistently is that you get the benefit of the doubt and someone will say, “That’s not the company I know.”

The second thing is having a strong reputation maintains your license to operate. I’m in the HVAC business but I want to get into the plumbing business. Having a strong reputation, I’ve already got trucks and technicians that are licensed to operate because there’ll be good over here, so that’s why I want a strong reputation because it lets me expand my marketplace and gives me this license to operate.

I’m sure, Tersh, you’re a fan of Chick-fil-A as everybody. Chick-fil-A and that family had some very strong socially conservative values. They’re licensed to operate. Opening a store in Boston, New York or San Francisco was compromised and slowed down based on what they believed. That’s a business decision they made and they understand it. That’s the context of what I’m talking about.

The last one, I fundamentally believe, particularly in B2B, also to a certain extent in business-to-consumer is that companies with a strong reputation that think about this stuff, all things being equal, a strong reputation breaks ties. If it’s company A versus company B, it’s the one with a strong reputation. Price, service delivery, all that other stuff is pretty much equal but the thoughtful folks are the right way to work on this stuff.

It’s human nature we do business with people we know, like and trust. If you have that advantage, it doesn’t become about price, discounts or all these other things that everyone worries about every day. It becomes about who you are. “I want to do business with you because I like you guys,” which is a powerful place to be in the market, especially for these small businesses trying to become larger at least for our audience. Bill, you’ve shared a ton of great information. Can you remind them where to find more information about you, where they can get contact you or ask you any additional questions?

I’m happy to answer your question. I’d love talking about this stuff. It’s a little old-fashion. It’s at our website, Kith.co. Hard to believe that website communication is old-fashion.

That’s not old-fashioned. That’s what I do every day for a living.

Go to our website. There are emails. You can do that. I’m also active on LinkedIn. I share a lot of content. I try to share something weekly on LinkedIn. It’s Bill Coletti on LinkedIn. Also on Twitter, @BColletti. I love a good old-fashioned phone call. If you got a question, shoot me an email. I’m happy to give you some perspective. This is what I’ve done for years, so I enjoy talking about it.

Bill, thank you so much for coming to the show. We appreciate everything that you shared with us.

Thank you for what you do. You share such amazing insight and content. Your industry leadership is much appreciated. I don’t know if you hear that enough but thank you for what you guys do.

It’s our pleasure.

I appreciate that.

Important Links:

• Kith.co
• Bill Coletti – LinkedIn
• @BColletti – Twitter

About Bill Coletti

Bill Coletti is a reputation management, crisis communications, and professional development expert.

Additionally, he is a keynote speaker, Wall Street Journal Risk & Compliance panelist, and best-selling author of Critical Moments, The New Mindset of Reputation Management. He has more than 25 years of global experience managing high-stakes crises, issues management, and media relations challenges for both Fortune 500 companies and winning global political campaigns.

Bill has provided senior counsel in crisis management, corporate communications, and reputation defense to numerous clients including AT&T, Target Corporation, American Airlines, The Home Depot, Xerox, Nuclear Energy Institute, Cargill, as well as major universities and global NGOs.

Previously, Bill served in the Republic of Bulgaria as Senior Advisor to the Prime Minister, Council of Ministers, and the Labor Minister. He was the first Executive Director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Bulgaria.