When organizations are facing catastrophic crises, they look to people like Melissa Agnes to pull them back from the brink. Her toolkit is stacked with ways to craft proactive responses to whatever unforeseen issues might creep up and toss a wrench in an otherwise calm corporate environment. She knows what it takes to make a brand invincible, and below she’s shared some of how that’s done.

Unfortunately, bad things happen to good companies. Take Crock-Pot for example. They were just minding their business, not burning down people’s homes, and the next thing they knew, they were thrown into a media frenzy, making national headlines, being talked about on morning and late-night talk shows, with longstanding customers threatening to throw out their Crock-Pots and never purchase from the brand again.

Why? Because a fictional television show, This Is Us, decided to innocently use a generic slow cooker as part of the plotline that set the Pearson’s home on fire, killing the family patriarch, Jack.

No one could have ever seen this coming. And yet it came—and it came with the risk of losing customers due to an irrational, yet very real, fear.

What if a similar situation were your reality tomorrow morning? Do you feel confident that your team would know precisely what to do to regain control of the narrative and not lose your customers? Would your team be prepared to respond in real-time with emotional intelligence that results in increasing the trust your customers and the general public have in your brand, rather than depreciating from it?

Being crisis ready is not just about the catastrophic crises, such as cybersecurity breaches, workplace violence, or allegations of sexual misconduct. Brands face issues all the time as a part of their regular course of business. It’s the way you respond to those issues that will make or break your company’s reputation over time. Being crisis ready means that your entire team knows instinctively how to:

• Quickly detect the incident;
• Properly assess its material impact on the organizations; and
• Effectively respond in a way that strengthens the relationships you share with your stakeholders.

When your team is in a position to do this, your brand can weather any type of negative event that may come its way, making your business INVINCIBLE.

In this fast-paced, social-media-frantic world, being crisis ready is being business smart.

Melissa Agnes | May, 2018