The CEO called me in a panic. ‘We might have to recall $8 million worth of meat in the next 48 hours.’
His company supplied a major food brand. Something had gone wrong in production. The brand was already nervous and asking hard questions. One wrong answer and they’d pull the trigger on a recall that would gut his business. He had about an hour before the next call with their team.
‘They’re freaking out,’ he said. ‘What do I tell them?’
Here’s the thing about moments like this: the instinct is to stall. Buy time. Wait until you have all the facts before you say anything. But the brand doesn’t need all the facts. They need to know you’re not hiding from the problem.
I told him to walk into that call with four things only: what you know, what you don’t know yet, what you’re doing right now to find out, and when you’ll update them next. That’s it. No spin. No deflection. No attempt to minimize the situation before you understand it. Just clarity and forward motion.
He made the call. The brand didn’t initiate the recall.
Not because the problem disappeared — the investigation was still ongoing. But because they trusted he was on top of it. They trusted he wasn’t managing them. They trusted that the information he had, he was sharing, and that when he had more, he would share that too.
Trust is the thing that prevents a business problem from becoming a reputational catastrophe. And trust in a crisis is built in exactly the same way it’s built everywhere else: by being honest with people, including when honesty means saying ‘I don’t know yet.’