Speaker 1: You would probably know better than anyone on this PR crisis. What? That's not a thing.

Speaker 2: What are you talking about?

Speaker 1: Yeah. When a company, something happens and maybe it's out of their control or maybe you find out that it was well within their control and it was a misstep. I am always curious to know what is the best way to own it, apologize only for what you know, or basically recoup from that. You see companies do it so poorly and then you see companies do it so well.

Speaker 2: I've learned a long time ago that you cannot control everything. When it comes down to it, where I'm at now, I can't control everything that I want to content-wise. I just can't. But you have to do it with my viewpoint on everything. What I tell people is, if things go well, it's because of my team. If things go wrong, it's because of me, because I didn't set them up for success. In the organization, when there's stuff that's out of our control, then what you have to do is gather all the information. You listen to the people that are telling you this information and wherever they sit on the hierarchy of things, and you give them what you think would be the best and most successful thing for how to deliver that information. And then you understand your place and you let those decision makers handle it. Now you can try to steer them in a certain direction. But at the end of the day, if somebody that is above you tells you this is what we're going to do, then you do it and you just deal with it. And you just say, OK, well, this is going to be your responses. This is going to be what happens. And then you collect that data and then you present it to them later. You say, hey, this is successful or this wasn't successful. We had a person in our club who is still very much beloved leave the club. And we learned a lot from that. I could say that we didn't handle it very well from a PR or social perspective. There's a lot to the story. But at the same time, like the next time that that comes up, they're like we've already dealt with it beforehand where somebody popular was going to leave again. And the reception was exponentially less. The noise was exponentially less of dissatisfaction. And so you have to learn, hey, this is how we celebrate somebody. This is how we have to be above board. And fans have an emotional connection. They don't remember the bad times. They only remember the good times because that person provided them so many happy moments, kind of like the rose colored glasses of a relationship. Yeah. You know, like it hurts in the moment. But when you think back like, oh, yeah, that was pretty good. Oh, that was pretty awesome. Like you only remember the good times or you don't remember the things that led you to make that decision. So you just have to make sure that when the opportunity comes up or presents itself again, that you're prepared and that you do your research. You look over and pour over your notes that you made, and then you present the best laid plan and you stick to the plans. When you make a decision, stick with it. When people make mistakes or PR companies make mistakes, it's because they waffle. Nobody wants to like if you make a decision, you made it. Go with it like and learn from it. And then, you know, don't be, quote unquote, dumb enough to stick with a bad decision. But like this is the best laid plan. Here's the actions that we're going to take. Stay the course and go from there.

Speaker 1: That's a really good point, because even if you make a mistake initially, but you were like you own that position later, you can say, you're right, that was wrong now. And that's not that's different than a waffle, right? Where you're just like, oh, well, what I meant was. Yeah, people see right through that.

Speaker 2: So what I try to do is you have I have a lot of very talented. I call him Team Awesome. It's like I call him Team Awesome meetings. Like literally, we're getting to we're getting together. It's the creative staff. And what I always try to remember is we're so closely tied and invested in the project that sometimes we lose the grand scope of things. So I always after we kind of go back and forth, I always try to ask people that don't have as much tied to things before we make a big decision. Can I get your thoughts now? I don't put too much into it, but maybe it's something obvious that we just missed. Like, I don't ever want to be the McDonald's where you put out a national campaign and then somebody says it out loud and they go, how did that get through so many people? And you're like, oh, my God, did I not see it? And once you know, it's kind of like it's kind of like your friend. And I'm going to use you as it is as an example that snorts when they laugh.

Speaker 1: And when me, yes.

Speaker 2: And so once you actually hear it and you notice it, you can't unnotice it. Right. So just make sure that before you make any really big decision that you kind of put it out there to I call them Uncle Joe's and Aunt Mona's, the regular folk that like, like, oh, yeah, like your aunt and uncle that don't know too much about for us soccer. Hey, if I said this, what would you think? And then, oh, it's not something ridiculously obvious that we missed. OK, then we're all right. We can go from there. But they're all with your is viral as you can get. You know, like where things are popular and grand, you're always going to get worse publicity for doing or making an obvious mistake that's much harder to come back from than doing a million things right in a row. So make sure that you don't have that one big obvious mistake. No pressure. Yeah.

Speaker 1: But, you know, that that layer of just running things by people, I think that's that's brilliant and something we're all in a rush because, you know, we were talking to Alex from Purple Mattress and he's we were saying how, OK, you've had all these successes. But the crazy part is you never get to rest. Like this one is successful. Mattress company. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Oh, the puns.

Speaker 1: That you I didn't even realize I made that one. You you already have to have game plan for the next thing coming. Well, while this is still like in the middle of the pipeline. And so I think that's the misconception that you can ride the wave.

Speaker 2: Sometimes you have to ride the wave. Like for speaking for us personally, like we had an idea of the strain the royals would put on us. Now we live lived it. We've learned a lot like you can have theories. But then you execute it and then you realize, oh, this worked. Oh, this didn't work. How did this not work? Oh, OK. We'll examine it. Huh. Learn from it. What did work that we didn't think would work? Why did this work? Oh, it might be because of this. And then you dig into that. So there's a lot of layers to it. And you have to trust the people around you to give you honest answers. Like not everything can be good. Just can't be. And so if you have people that are qualified or that you trust, then you have to accept when they disagree with you and you can't be dense enough to just disregard their opinion because they're at the table or in that meeting for a particular reason. So take what they say seriously and and take it for what it is. And then if it needs to be fixed, fix it. I don't like the best idea should always win. And sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you're handcuffed. And I get that, you know, sometimes you have to make things that you don't want to, but you have to. So make it the best you can. And then when you get an opportunity to have creative freedom and you have an idea, but hey, it turns out this person had a better idea. OK, make that better idea as good as it can be.

Speaker 1: And from a leadership role, I mean, you're overseeing the team. Like that example is probably going to be what trickles down to the rest of the team.