RESPONSIBILITY AND BEING TOUGH
Being a boss and owner of a company is a huge responsibility, one which requires being tough and making difficult decisions regularly. To this day, employing 75+ people is major pressure.
Today I received a call from a major crisis client, one who pays us a major fee solely to keep his company out of the media. He urged me (to put it mildly) to tell a reporter in no uncertain terms to screw off. This reporter was poking around endlessly, telling people half truths and straight-out lies about our client in an attempt to get sources quoted for a story. A previous story by this same reporter had no named sources and many allegations. I understood why this client was very upset. So, of course, I harshly approached this reporter, instantly turning into “the bad guy.” He was poking around in a kind way, and once we got tough, we were the “bad guys.”
Whether it’s (soon to be) President Obama banning reporters who didn’t endorse him from his plane, or the Fox News PR machine being harsh on critics, often times tough PR people are portrayed as not knowing how to deal with the media. But in fact, these “tough guys” are perhaps the most effective PR people when it comes to difficult issues.
Same goes with owning a business and running a company: being tough isn’t easy. But it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a modicum of fairness. Being fair is vital to being tough, both as a business owner, and particularly when it comes to issues and crisis PR.
I complain sometimes to my closest outside business advisor about how difficult it is to run a business. He reminds me, “If it was easy, everyone would do it, and everyone would be successful.”
Ronn Torossian
5W PR
