Can a crisis be good for your business?

Crisis is defined as a time of great disagreement, confusion or suffering. For farm business owners, it’s often an incident or event that interrupts the normal flow of operations and puts the stability of the company at risk. It might be a chemical spill, a food-quality compromise, or an outbreak. But in the Chinese translation, crisis also means a turning point.

Jeff Chatterton, crisis communication consultant and president of Checkmate Public Affairs in Kitchener, Ont., takes this to mean that in every crisis, there is opportunity. It stems from the fact that people actively watch and listen when a business is experiencing challenging times. In other words, there’s an engaged audience.

“If you handle it well, a crisis can do far more for your image, reputation and credibility than any amount of vanilla leadership training, sponsorship or advertising,” he says.

Chatterton works with business leaders across many industries, instructing them how to prepare for and react to crises. It’s not usually a case of if something bad happens, but when.

“Most of the crises we end up dealing with are not the ones everyone thinks of,” he explains. “Where business owners can get into trouble is on something completely out of the blue that they had not previously thought about. If they had, they could have fixed it in advance.”