People Processes

People Processes


People Process Interviews: Bill Coletti Kith

March 27, 2020

Today, we are interviewing Bill Coletti. We are so excited to have him on. He is a reputation management, crisis communications and professional development expert. He's been the Wall Street Journal risk and compliance panelist. He's a best selling author of "Critical Moments: The New Mindset of Reputation Management," and he has been on the senior counsel in crisis management, corporate communications and reputation defense to a ton of clients such as ATt&T, Target, American Airlines, Home Depot, Xerox, Nuclear Energy Institute, Cargill and major universities. And I can't wait to get his insight and plans into how we can react to this. Just crazy time. Before we go too deep though, I want to ask you to please subscribe to our podcast. You can find us on iTunes, Google podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, any pod catcher of your choice. You can also subscribe at peopleprocesses.com which will give you exclusive subscriber only content.

Now, Bill, thank you for coming on the show. I'm so excited to have you.

Rhamy, I am looking forward to a good conversation and providing some help to folks as they try to navigate through this unprecedented time we're in.

Yeah, and it's going to be a free flowing conversation for you long time listeners. We're going to skip things like your worst moment in your business career. And we're just going to deal with what value Bill can give us for our listeners. So, Bill, give a quick rundown of how you got to where you're kind of a point man on crisis management.

Started my career doing political campaigns. I did politics for ever since I graduated in college and beyond, did that for the first half of my career then went to a large public affairs, issues management agency. And then we were acquired by a large global public relations firm. And I ran their global crisis practice. And then about five years ago, went out on my own and started our firm "Kith". About what they said five and a half years ago.

Outstanding so for the last five and a half years, you've been working under your own shingle, working with people to try and manage these sorts of public relations issues.

Exactly. Just really trying to do it in the word "Kith", is meaningful to us. If you're not familiar with it, there's a phrase from literature called "I'm Going Home to Visit My Kith and My Kin", you can or your family and your Kith, we subscribe to be kind of your original friends that taught you sophisticated habits so your family teaches you things about making you who you are. your friends, your high school friends, your college buddies. Those are the folks that really teach you a different set of skills, but more sophisticated life skills. And so we try to be the kids to our client, in providing those sophisticated insights and perspectives.

That's outstanding. We're learning something already. What a great name. The name of my company for 10 years was Popular Financial, and it was called "Pop" because we started on Poplar Avenue. And when I started my company, it was still pretty new after 911 and Rhamy Alejeal, the insurance agency just didn't seem like it would fit very well down here in the deep south. So, but yes, we recently changed the People Processes to say what it is we do, which works perfectly. Yeah. Well. So, Bill, right now we have a business. We have it. We have a health crisis. We have a family crisis. But beyond that, we actually also have a relations crisis, right? How do we talk to our clients, our employees, it's a lot about not just figuring out operationally how to survive, but our communication strategy. And that's something where you kind of step into, right?

Yeah, exactly. That's there. So for the past, I've lost track of three or four weeks, we've been working with clients with their initial responses, and most everybody's past their initial response here in the United States. And we're now in this sort of really mushy middle section. And we really spend a lot of time...