Crisis Communication & Issues Management

BBS has 30 years’ experience in not only managing crises, but also anticipating them through proactive risk assessment, leadership coaching and crisis communication advance planning.

Our role is to identify those things that people working in the business cannot easily see, and to identify and escalate issues before they become a crisis.

Senior members of the BBS team lead our crisis communication and risk work, liaising closely with senior executives to understand unique operating environments. We seek to forecast risks, assess executive team response capability, review and test internal structures, identify key stakeholders, and ultimately intimately understand the operational and political environment within which the business operates.

Every risk/crisis plan is unique and the individual process for identifying and managing risk must also be bespoke.

Our strategies are always tailored and written in Plain English to ensure staff easily understand protocols when they are needed the most.

During ‘live’ crisis situations, our team works hand-in-hand with company executives and other advisors always with the intent to managing risk and with a firm focus on stakeholders, their needs, potential reactions.

We work ‘on the ground’ coordinating the crisis room, liaising with operational executives and also with emergency services and regulatory personnel to facilitate the effective exchange of information in support of accurate and swift communication.

Ultimately, this paves the way to the successful resolution of the crisis.

Where the situation is critical, such as in the event of a death and/or catastrophic business failure, the external communications advisory team is often the only group which can step in to provide a new perspective.

We test the organisational communications response against community expectations, in other words, we seek to manage reputational risk and potential outrage by putting the communications strategy through ‘the pub test’. We coach executives in what to say, what not to say and why and critically, support organisations to stage communications so that those who need to know first, do.

We are strategic advisors but also the extra pair of (safe) hands which are needed when a crisis response requires more than business-as-usual.