Tammie Hawkins is the President and CEO of Hawkins Events, LLC, a Los Angeles Special Events company. Tammie Hawkins communicates with her clients and just about anyone else through her company’s blog, on which she shares industry insights along with occasional flights of fancy.
“I had a client cancel on me last week,” she wrote in a post not long ago. “It was a big contract, and we had to do some scrambling to shore up our immediate short-term prospects. We succeeded, and all is well.
“But it got me to thinking about my previous employer, Acme Events, founded and still run by my good friend and mentor, Jill Samuelson. A small part of the business at that time was public relations. It has since been phased out, but that’s why Jill hired me in the first place, to work in the PR department.
“I got pretty good at damage control. If that client who cancelled on us last week had talked to me first, I think I could have saved them a lot of trouble (and probably the contract, too!). There are some hard lessons I learned about damage control that would have served him well. So I thought I’d use this post to share them.
- If a crisis hits your company, own it. Immediately publish an explanation of what happened and the steps you are taking to make it right.
- Apologize, and be sincere about it. Make sure the amount of information you share is adequeate.
- Don’t feed the fire. Pressure can bring out the worst in any of us. Don’t succumb to it.
- Get on top of your story before your competitors do. Don’t let them use it to destroy you.
