Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: So if you'll follow these two steps on social media, you'll save yourselves most of the time. And that is you share with care and post with purpose.
Don't reveal too much information about where you are. Don't take a picture in front of your kid's school. That's what I'm talking about when I say sharing with care, because then it goes. You lose control over that image. It goes all over the world, and then people can track you down. They know where your kids go to school. If you're posting, you know, picture on the beach in Belize. Hey, we just got to Belize. It's so gorgeous here. The water is fantastic. We're eating lobster tonight. Well, that also lets people know no one's at your house, so your house is there if people want to break in and steal what they want or they want to do other things. So share with care. And when I say post with purpose, what I'm encouraging people to do on social media is think about the unintended consequences of how someone may read into a post.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: Cancel culture only affects the rich and famous. Well, this conversation with Nevan Neheman, CEO and founder of Red Bayern, blows this myth out of the water. You won't believe the real life example that happened to a small business owner only hours before we recorded this conversation.
The cancel culture mob can pile onto anyone. Evan shares his expertise in crisis communication, how to take a proactive approach, along with invaluable advice on maintaining authenticity while navigating the turbulent waters of cancel culture. You won't want to miss this conversation, so stay tuned.
So, Evan, thanks for coming onto our show, mate. I would love you just to share with our audience a little bit about your background. Really, what's brought you to where you are today, talking to us?
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Well, I'm really excited to get into the discussion today, so thank you for having me. I'm a big fan of the podcast, so this is pleasure, Mike.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: I've been dealing with issues involving reputation and revenue for the better part of my career over the past 25 years. And people ask me all the time, how did you wind up being someone who wrote a book about cancel culture, a book about crisis communications and being a. A quote unquote fixer, crisis manager? How does someone stumble into that as a career? And for me, it's really simple. I started in Washington, DC, working around politics and policy, and we've got no shortage of crisis situations here at the center of american government and worked in Washington for seven and a half years left to go work actually for a crisis communications firm where we were representing foreign governments, we were representing high profile CEO's that were having reputational issues. Some very famous celebrities who got embroiled in some scandals did that for a couple of years and then went back in house as a communications for a startup that was growing very aggressively and getting a lot of media. And then eventually I decided the path that I needed to go was to start my own business. I wanted to create a firm that would help good people and great organizations facing tough circumstances and guide them through that. I'm a big believer that people do make mistakes. We're human, but I think people should have the opportunity to redeem themselves. And so the better part of my career has been spent working with businesses, nonprofits, corporations, industry agnostic, and lots of private individuals and small and medium businesses, helping them communicate more effectively accomplish their goals utilizing communications. Sometimes that means proactive, positive pr and strategic comms, and sometimes that means jumping in to defend them in cases involving cancel culture crisis situations. So at Red Banyan, which is the company that I founded, we're split in half. Half of our work is dedicated to long term clients who are trying to use communications to accomplish their goals. The other half really want us to get them out of a sticky situation, navigate it, and put them back on the road to redemption as quickly as possible.
[00:04:24] Speaker B: In the hybrid working world, I've seen too many business owners and their businesses suffer because of poor performing employees, leading to below average results.
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It honestly does sound like such a fascinating industry mate. And of the of the half, which half do you like to spend your time in? If you had a choice, you already.
[00:05:18] Speaker A: Knew the answer before you asked it.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: I'm sure I've got others don't.
[00:05:25] Speaker A: There's no doubt. For me, the the passion that I bring definitely relates to the crisis work. And part of the reason is I get a high degree of personal satisfaction from stepping in, seeing a path, charting a course for how to help the organization or the individual, and then to be that that resource for them in a time of need and to help them get through what for many business owners is the worst time in their life and keep them from growing despondent or giving up, but staying in the fight and living to fight another day and ultimately turning, flipping the script and turning the page and finding a way forward. Now, that being said, I also, you know, I'm hedging a little bit because I also love when we've got really complex, interesting industry leading clients on the proactive, positive side. And there's something really rewarding about being with them along an extended journey and seeing how they grow in terms of their stature and their revenue and their prominence. So they're both very gratifying. Although, if I'm being perfectly honest, I get a charge and an adrenaline jolt and a dopamine hit when the crisis calls come in. I enter that state of flow pretty quickly where I'm fielding the call, I'm with my team, and in the battle, and literally hours can go past and I'll realize, oh, I haven't gotten up from the chair. I haven't gotten up to run to the restroom or even get a drink of water. So I definitely lose myself when I'm in that crisis mode.
[00:07:17] Speaker B: There's something about us humans, isn't there? That we just something in our DNA? We love to sort of. A lot of us love to face a challenge, and especially as a group of people, we love to face a challenge and push ourselves to try and get through that. And when we get on the other side, there's just this euphoria, level of satisfaction attached to that. And it's not only about individually, but it's doing it together in that community, I think so.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: And for me, what's been most gratifying about my own personal journey as an entrepreneur and a founder is I'm 13 years into this experiment, which was to create the agency that I was looking for but could never find out there. So ultimately, I had to start it myself. And for me to have brought along a whole team of people who now they're the ones that I've taught, they've learned right there with me beside me, and they're handling the most complex, high stakes situations, and they don't even need me most of the time. Every once in a while, they'll call on me. If they're really unsure, they want me to weigh in. But the level of trust that our clients place in them and that I have in my team, that for me, is one of also the most rewarding aspects is that I have found a way. And it's taken me a long time, frankly, to get there. But I have found a way to impart a lot of my knowledge and my expertise to just a dynamic team and be able to empower them, which magnifies our impact and lets us serve many more clients than we ever could. If it was just me.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: Yeah. Well done, mate. And we all know that growing any sort of business in any industry is a tough gig. It takes a lot of work. So using this theme of crisis and crisis management, what's the biggest crisis that red banion faced in their growth?
[00:09:16] Speaker A: Oh, man.
It's hard to pick just one. I mean, there's been.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: Fairly regularly in small business, don't they?
[00:09:26] Speaker A: Look, here's the problem with the stories that people tell on podcasts, on tv is people tell the story that they think the public wants to hear. And I actually think it can be very demoralizing to founders who are in the thick of just trying to survive finding a product market fit. And when you've got everybody crowing about how great they are and their business is on the upswing and it's up and to the right. Hockey stick growth, they're being disruptive. They throw around these phrases. They tell a fairy tale about how great things are and how wonderful they are. And behind the curtain, when you peek back there many times, the emperor has no clothes. And it's not exactly all that it's cracked up to be. And I know that in my earliest days, it was really hard because I was, you know, fighting day in, day out. I've got this new business. I'm trying to hold on to the clients that I have and do a great job for them. I'm trying to rustle up new business simultaneously. Meanwhile, I have a two year old and an infant. I need to be able to pay my bills. I got to take care of my family.
I would say two incidents stick out most boldly in my mind on my journey over the past 13 years. One was in the very early days where I was working off a card table in our guest bedroom, and I had two clients, no employees, two clients. And one of my clients was a very big automotive client, and they accounted for about 65% of my revenue, maybe slightly more. And I got a two line email after working for them for the better part of a year and a half. It said, our budget did not get approved. Please stop all work immediately.
And in two sentences, 65% of my revenue evaporated. And I literally didn't know how I was gonna pay my bills in the next month.
Taught me a very valuable lesson about having all your eggs in one basket and being too reliant on any one central client.
And it was a tough lesson, but. But I learned it and I've never repeated that. And then the second real, the only real time besides that email where we faced an existential crisis as a firm was Covid. Frankly, because I had done a lot of. I practice what I preach and I tell business owners all the time, a big part of being. Being prepared to defend yourself against cancel culture against a crisis is to have a plan in advance.
If you can prevent the crisis, that is way better than having to call red Banyan or a firm like ours in to help you when you're in the thick of it. So having a plan in advance and being disciplined about it is super helpful. In my case, I had a plan. I had cash reserves, and I had mapped out every sort of strat or every scenario that I thought was most likely to occur. Now, I never in my wildest dreams mapped a scenario where 100% of our clients stopped paying their bills for two months straight.
And we have literally zero revenue coming in and payroll due every two weeks. That was a shock to the system. And what it forced us to do is we had to shed staff, which was very painful and I hated it and it was miserable. And I was sick to my stomach for weeks in advance. But it was the right move to preserve the firm long term. The other thing was we had to pivot immediately. And at the time, the crisis communications was only about 5% of our revenue. And what I realized when Covid hit was these long term contracts. There was so much uncertainty, no one knew what was going to happen in the world. But there was a lot of crisis to go around. So we completely flipped our entire website to talk about our crisis communications capability. And we started just taking crisis work and short term pay upfront and we turned ourselves into a crisis specific agency. And we went from having 95% recurring revenue to an only 5% crisis to being 100% crisis communications. And then since that time, I've been working very hard with my team to come back to 50%, 50% strategic comms, 50% crisis, which I think for us is the right mix in terms of knowing where our revenue is coming from, how to staff, how to staff projects, how to plan for the future, and then be also able to flex up and down as we need to when a crisis hits.
[00:14:19] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for sharing, mate. How has that happened? So I get the journey and sort of then go into 100% crisis and then, yeah, you can be very easily sort of pigeoned into a corner and said, oh, you know, red Banion's a crisis management company. You know, we need to go to somebody else for proactive stuff. So how have you started to turn the tide, so to speak, and get back to a better balance?
[00:14:40] Speaker A: Yeah, well, look, I'm the first to admit I make mistakes every day. If you're looking for the founder or the CEO who's going to tell you how great they are, that's not going to be me. I'm going to tell you how great my team is and how amazing our clients are. But I'm going to tell you that every day I'm trying to become a better version of who I am as a leader. And I have a long way to go and I make tons of mistakes every day. And I'll tell you frankly, I've not done the best job at now getting us back to communicating that we do not just crisis, but strategic. And a big part of that was we're actually preparing to relaunch our website and to turn the website back to a more balanced look. Because right now, if you go on redbamian.com, comma, it looks like all we do is crisis. And so sometimes we're not given a look or an opportunity because people don't realize we do the proactive, positive, strategic comms as well. So stay tuned. And if you check out our website in the next 60 to 90 days, you're going to see a much more accurate view, view of who we are and what we're about.
[00:15:45] Speaker B: Sounds fair, mate. We'll keep you accountable to that. Maybe it's going back to the sort of when you're very, not that you haven't been honest, but very honest at the start about the passion of crisis. Maybe it's just that you're just hanging onto that crisis side of things because you love it so much.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: I love it so much. And it's a, I've heard people say there are riches in niches and if you get specific about an area, you can really own a market or own a, a certain product line or a service area. And for us, a lot of firms claim to do crisis work, but they haven't done it at a real serious level. They haven't represented foreign governments like we have. They haven't represented major Fortune 500 companies like we have a list celebrities. So we do have a unique track record of success and expertise in that area. So I think it's always, I'm always playing with that balance of I want to be known as the crisis communications firm in the states and globally. It's important to hang on to that, and we need to also make sure that people know that they can work with us and get value from us, not just during a time of crisis or putting together a plan to prevent a crisis.
[00:17:04] Speaker B: Out of interest. Mate, do people invest differently? If they're coming to you from a crisis management perspective, that is, are they prepared to invest more around that versus the. What we'd all like to take is that proactive approach and not get to the crisis.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: It's a different business model. It's a different business model, it's a different pricing model, and it has to do with urgency and the value that's delivered in a short, condensed timeframe. And so on the crisis side, it tends to be a very short sales cycle, and clients decide very quickly, do we trust these guys to solve our problem? And can they start right away? And if the answer to both of those questions is yes, then we move forward aggressively. The sales cycle on the proactive positive side is much longer, and it's much more nuanced, and there's a wide swath of services that someone could be looking for in the communications realm. So finding the perfect fit of what it is, we're identifying what we're going to be able to do for the client, where the value lies. It's much more complicated and there's less urgency when you're on the positive strategic comm side of things. So that's why I view them as interconnected, but very different in terms of how they're operationalized, etcetera. But one of the things I love about the crisis side, not just because we're helping people in their time of need, is when you save someone's business, or you turn their life around, or you have them send you an email to tell you they were contemplating suicide before they worked with you, and now they feel like there's a reason to carry on, that motivates you and that gets you out of bed. And you also earn their trust and their respect in a way that then leads to a very strong bond. And so a lot of the clients who come to us in a time of need, we go through hell together, and we're right there next to them and guiding them through and fighting hard for them. And so many of them end up becoming clients on the strategic comm side. They want to continue working with us, but in a different capacity. Or if they're not able to do that, or it's not appropriate, they become great advocates for us. And they refer people and they tell people what the experience was like, and they tell their friends and their family, and we get a lot of referral work from past clients who were happy with the outcome.
[00:19:35] Speaker B: Yeah, it certainly sounds like a natural cycle to take, isn't it? You've helped people through a crisis, and then the advocacy comes in, or the advocacy combined with the more positive and proactive approach to comms and strategic comms. I know from obviously, how you came across our desk to come onto the show, there was a little bit of a. A focus on some of the. Or my eyes went to some of the cancel culture stuff that you've had, and you've written a book and everything like that. You can unpack that during the show. But how do you, given that you've lived and breathed this and you've supported some fairly high level people around it, how do you define this fascinating thing called cancel culture?
[00:20:14] Speaker A: Yeah, well, look, cancel culture is the use of intimidation by a group to isolate and disproportionately punished someone that a mob of people have decided is unforgivable. That's really what cancel culture is about. And cancel culture is this phenomenon that we've seen a lot of in recent years, where it's a pile on. It's an Internet lynch mob. It's mobilization and cross pollination between online communities at many times exacerbated and accelerated by the mainstream press to take a situation, either something that someone has said, or someone has said that they said it, or they've done something, or they've been caught on video, and a story has been told, and this person has been demonized, and all of a sudden, you've got a group of people who take interest in the story, and for whatever reason, they want to get involved, and they want to be social justice warriors, they want to be activists, and they set about targeting and harming other individuals, and it's wrong. I wrote a whole book about it called the cancel culture curse. So just the title alone lets you know where I stand on it. I think it's fundamentally negative. I think it's categorically un american, and I think it flies in the face of not just american values, but also any western civilization, any progressive liberal values. And when I say liberal, I don't mean the political definition of liberal versus conservative. I mean we live in a world where people should have the opportunity to express themselves without fear of being drawn and quartered or being publicly humiliated and publicly punished. And people should have the ability to express ideas freely and openly and to debate ideas without fear, that if you say something that someone else takes offense to, whether it's what you meant or not, all of a sudden you're on the defensive. And you can either be fighting to protect and preserve your company or your career. And in many cases, what people don't realize is people end up risking their lives from cancel culture, and it can not just kill a business. It can literally kill a person. And so we've represented people in the past who for years have continued to receive death threats based on videos that went viral, based on misinformation that was spread through the press. And even gangs of people armed with weapons have come to their homes seeking to do them harm. And I'm thinking of one client of ours who is known globally. She literally had to flee her home and leave the country because people were hunting her down and trying to end her life. That's not right.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: It's unbelievable. And we do hear, we don't see hear all of the details, but as a normal citizen, let's say an average citizen, we hear all sorts of stories that come up in the media, and not that you need to believe everything in the media, but you hear various aspects of what's happening, but it's always these people who are very, very well known. So I guess what I really want to understand, too, is I don't know if I've got, you know, JK Rowling and some of these people listening to this podcast, maybe if they are, hey, JK, nice to. Thanks very much for your patronage.
[00:23:47] Speaker A: But yeah, nice job on that Harry Potter book. You've done well. Congratulations.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: Very well. Very well. It's in the movies as well, to back it up. So, done very well. But it's. How does something like this, because I know that and I have seen it. Maybe I'll get a chance to send an example of something locally that happened, but I have seen it in small to medium business, wherever, you know, business owners have made a decision, maybe that they believed in, but then it's gone against the narrative. So how does this relate to that small medium business owner or that leader leading a team in a big organization and they sort of maybe feel a bit far removed from ever being canceled.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: You've raised a really good point. And there's a misperception and a fallacy that the people who get canceled, are you famous people, powerful people. And there's this glorification of cancel culture where people say, oh, it's a way to take these powerful, patriarchal people who don't want to share the power, and they want to behave badly, and we get to hold them accountable and we get to take them down a peg. But where people get it wrong is it's not the rich and famous that are the biggest targets of cancel culture.
At biggest risk are individuals and small and medium businesses. Let me explain why. First of all, if you reach a certain level of celebrity, you've got a built in ecosystem around you that is going to help protect you. If you're a celeb, you've got lawyers, you've got agents, you've got publicists, maybe you have a crisis communications firm that you've hired on retainer. You've got advisors, you've got people who are helping you manage your finances. And you have legions of fans who like you and have already decided they're with you. They're a community. You've got followers on social media, and you also tend to have very famous, influential, powerful friends who can be surrogates and supporters of you.
There's, it's very rare that a cancellation of a celebrity succeeds completely and they're really taken down forever. It does happen sometimes, usually when it happens, though. And some of the cases that people like to point to of cancel culture, the cases they point to are not actually cancel culture. They're cases where the matter goes through due process. And a person is convicted in a courtroom and found guilty, that's completely different. That's due process. And that's what happens in progressive societies who respect the rule of law. Problem with cancel culture is there is no due process. It is trial by fire.
You're convicted, you're sentenced to death, you're destroyed before you even have a chance to adequately defend yourself. And so part of the reason that small businesses and individuals are at so much risk is they don't have the following. And the legions of fans and committed supporters that a list celebrities have, they don't have the millions or tens of millions of loyal customers that large corporations have. So it becomes much more dangerous for them to operate in a cancel culture world. They don't have the resources and the team at the ready, usually to defend them. And so that's why cancel culture's biggest.
The threat of cancel culture is actually biggest to small businesses and to individuals because it can take them out so quickly and they're simply not equipped to weather the storm. The other thing is celebrities know how to utilize the media. They know how to deliver a message using their own platforms, etcetera. For average citizens, maybe they're not so active on social media maybe they don't really spend a lot of time putting themselves out there using pr and other marketing tactics. That's part of why it's so important as a precursor to ever being canceled. It's worth it to invest in building a narrative and a brand, your personal brand and your story about your organization, so that there's something online. If there's nothing and you're keeping your head below, you're trying to keep off the radar and just focus on your business. But you're not investing in telling your story and putting out information online and through press releases and getting earned media coverage, etcetera. If you're not doing that, you're not inoculating yourself against a time where you could become a target. In which case, when someone goes to Google you, all they see is negative and they don't see an accurate picture of you. And so for all those reasons, small and medium business owners and individuals need to be prepared. They need to understand what cancel culture is. Part of the reason I wrote the book was to expose the practice and to say my piece about why, in my view, it shouldn't be happening and we should move it past, move past this time and relegate it to the dustbin of history, but also to give a playbook to businesses so they know how to navigate if they are embroiled in a cancel culture scenario.
And hopefully also give them some ideas about how to avoid getting canceled in the first place.
[00:29:17] Speaker B: It's certainly one of these. The term I use, it's really bullying on a massive load of steroids, isn't it? You know, that pile on that happens to. Can you give an example to really hone in on this so business owners can really relate? I get what you're saying. There's that lack of ecosystem and support base around the average sort of small to medium business owner. What could an example look like in your experience around a business, a leader in a business being canceled?
[00:29:45] Speaker A: Yeah. So at the end of my book, I actually have a whole series of case studies where I delve in depth into what happened to private individuals, what happened to some small businesses. And so what I'm not going to do is give you one from there, because if you want to read those.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: And we can read that, you can.
[00:30:06] Speaker A: Listen to the book on audible. I narrate it. It's a lot of fun. You can go to bed at night with me in your ear. How wonderful does that sound?
[00:30:13] Speaker B: Give us hot, even newer content. Evan, I'm going to give you something.
[00:30:17] Speaker A: So hot that it's hours old, and the person isn't even a client yet.
[00:30:24] Speaker B: I love it, mate.
[00:30:25] Speaker A: This is how prevalent this problem is. And so I'm going to actually draw on an example. I'm going to obscure a few.
[00:30:30] Speaker B: We need to become a news show.
[00:30:32] Speaker A: I'm sorry?
[00:30:33] Speaker B: We need to become a news show.
[00:30:35] Speaker A: All right, well, we're going to break some news right now. I'm going to tell you a story today about a call that I had 7 hours ago with an individual. And I'm going to change a few details just so that I don't pour gasoline on the fire. And you can't readily identify who they are. But an individual goes to a conference, and this is. I think this is important for me to tell this story because this is how quickly it can happen, and this is how savage the people who cancel others can be. Someone goes to a conference, buys a ticket to attend the conference. There are no assigned seats at the conference. It's first come, first serve. So during the first half of the day, they sit in the back because they got there late or something, and people are sitting in the other seats. Conference goes on for a number of hours, and they break for lunch.
They come back for part two of the conference.
The person I was talking to on the phone today with his friend wanted to get a better seat for the second half of the day. So they walked up toward the front of the room, and many people left bags, backpacks, briefcases, or jackets on the chairs to claim their spots. Other people didn't. And it was, by the way, it was open seating. It was first come, first serve. They found a couple of seats. They sat down. It was closer to the front. They were going to be closer to the engaging speakers.
An individual comes in, approaches them, and demands that they get up, that's my seat. You're sitting in my seat.
They have exactly the exchange that you would think, well, there are actually no assigned seats here. There's nothing on the chair, so there's open seating.
You know, I should be able to sit here. The individual puts up a little bit of a fight. There's an exchange. They're arguing over it. And ultimately, the person who was demanding that they vacate so he could have the seat that he wanted to sit in ends up sitting three or four seats over where there were empty seats.
Now, unbeknownst to the person right behind him is someone with their cell phone out recording the whole thing. And this person is an influencer. And the person goes and sees an opportunity and says, you know, what's going to go viral is I'm going to out this person and I'm going to show them being so entitled. They stole a seat from someone at a conference and refused. Can you believe it? They refused to get up. What a terrible person. And so they posted this thing on social media. They excoriated, attacked, slandered, defamed the person who had done absolutely nothing wrong. Meanwhile, the individual who wanted his seat back was literally in the frame of the video, sitting a couple seats over. Talk about much ado about nothing. The video goes viral, and the person who ended up stealing the seat has had their business attacked. People are booking jobs with this small business so that their calendar gets completely filled and they think that they're providing professional services, but they're all fake. And so real customers can't get an appointment for service because their calendar's all booked. And then they go to provide the service and the person's not there. It's a fake. Their Google reviews and other website reviews have plummeted from five star reviews where they're getting bombed with one star reviews from people who were never, their customers, lying about them, making up stories, trying to be social justice activists. The problem here, there are many problems, is the people saw a version of events that was divorced from reality. They didn't have the whole story, and then they mobilized to attack someone based on this nonsense. And the problem is now the person who moved up to get a better seat at a conference is concerned that they're going to lose their small business, because not just them, they've been doxxed. They've put their address out. Their phone number is out. The community of people online identified this person, and then the businesses that are associated with them have also been doxxed. So they're getting one star reviews, they're being harassed, they're getting text messages and phone calls saying, you better disassociate from this chair, that this chair thief, or we're gonna take you down, too. That's how messed up this cancel culture world is. And that's what's going on every single day.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: Wow. That is unbelievable. How do, I mean, it's a million dollar question, isn't it? But given you've written a book about it, you spent a lot of time in the trenches around it. How did we even get to this level where that sort of situation happens and it just blows up in the money that you explained to?
[00:35:41] Speaker A: There's a perfect storm of elements that have led us to this day. And part of it is just the interconnectedness that we all have and how fast news travels online. So you can't have cancel culture without the Internet. That's a critical aspect. Two, you have people who have decided that being famous or being influential online is their main goal in life. And they want clicks, they want likes, they want the dopamine hit of getting views. And so they put up content that they know is going to be salacious and is going to get eyeballs. And many times that's negative content or it's content exposing alleged bad behavior. We've also got hyper partisanship going on, and you see it not just in the US, but in many societies all over the world. We're at a time where it feels like the fabric of society is being tornado, and you've got extremists on the right, extremists on the left, and a lot of people stuck in the middle who don't really feel at home with the loud, angry voices on the two opposite sides. But there's just hyperpolarization. And when you combine all of these elements, there's also, people have been on edge. It's been a tough time economically. The uncertainty of the pandemic, all of these different elements, when you throw them in a cauldron and you stir them up, it's the perfect sort of scenario to produce cancel culture. And you've also got a connection between social media and the mainstream press. And so one of the biggest problems is if something goes viral online, it's bad enough, and it can be like in the story I was just telling you about, the professional services business that's now literally fighting to survive, they try not to go out of business.
If that story then jumps to the mainstream press and they get criticized and attacked by mainstream media, which then takes that story and elevates it to an even bigger audience, it becomes even more dangerous for them. I'll tell you a secret, which is I really want to help this company. And I talked to them today, and I actually want to flip the script now. I think there's an opportunity to go to mainstream press and hold them up as an example of a good business, someone who did nothing wrong, who's being targeted and bullied, to use your words, you're 100% right. That's what cancel culture is. It's bullying in a unique format. It's designed to be vindictive and to create a permanent punishment based on something that an individual has decided they don't like.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I just, again, I'm sitting here thinking, well, you know, as business owners and it's a pretty common thing to attend a conference or, you know, some sort of event and stuff for anyone. So that could happen to anybody. And it makes me think, geez, I better be careful about, you know, in somebody's view, stealing another person's chair at some point. How.
You're the wizard in this, not me. So how do you. You started to move into the proactive approach after the fact, which I'm on board with it. That sounds like a fantastic opportunity to me as well. How does someone even try and mitigate the risk that is, be proactive around, like, that sort of situation that you've shared? I just can't get my head around how you could proactively avoid something like that, given all the scope that you shared about the situation.
[00:39:19] Speaker A: Well, part of it is just knowing that this phenomenon exists and that there are people out there who will bend over backwards to destroy you in order to lift themselves up. And so I would say conduct.
[00:39:32] Speaker B: It's like you've got to be on your guard all the time. It's almost like we're living in fight or flight mode all the time.
[00:39:36] Speaker A: Unfortunately, we have to be, and we need to be cognizant at all times that anything you say or do, there's probably someone in the vicinity who is recording it. Everybody's got these things in our pockets on our desk. We've got cameras. We're reporters. Any individual has access. And that's another reason, by the way, of why cancel. Culture's prevalent now is because everybody can be a reporter. Everybody has access to the same tools. So you don't need to wait for the New York Times to send a reporting team to uncover something and put it in print.
I can decide, I'm going to go after Brendan, and I'm going to write a blog post about you. And I can put it up on x, and next thing you know, it has a huge effect on you. You have to comport yourself as if at any time someone is recording you, and you could be made to look bad. And so I think it requires a certain level of discipline. When you're out in public, you need to be really aware of things that you might do or say in private, in jest with friends or family.
Be a little bit more conservative in public if you've got sort of, you know, you like the occasional. My uncle, he would have been canceled at this point. He's retired. Nobody's gonna do anything to him. He likes a good joke and off color humor, dirty jokes. But if you are telling those jokes, and you're a public figure, or you work at a company and you're at a conference, be careful, because if someone catches you at the cocktail hour telling what you think is a funny joke but someone else finds offensive, you could be fired within days because your organization is shamed and they're going to be encouraged to cut ties with you. So my advice to all the listeners is just really be on your guard. Be extra cautious. Be cognizant that there are eyes and ears everywhere. The other thing is, so much of the time, it's not just what you do in real life. Social media is the biggest sand trap of all. That's where the quicksand exists. So if you'll follow these two steps on social media, you'll save yourselves most of the time. And that is, you share with care and post with purpose.
Don't reveal too much information about where you are. Don't take a picture in front of your kid's school. That's what I'm talking about when I say sharing with care, because then it goes, you lose control over that image. It goes all over the world, and then people can track you down. They know where your kids go to school. If you're posting a picture on the beach in Belize. Hey, we just got to Belize. It's so gorgeous here. The water is fantastic. We're eating lobster tonight. Well, that also lets people know no one is at your house. So your house is there if people want to break in and steal what they want or they want to do other things. So share with care. And when I say post with purpose, what I'm encouraging people to do on social media is think about the unintended consequences of how someone may read into a post. And is what you're sharing on social media, is it something that's going to age well? Is it something that reflects well on either who you are as a person or the business that you work in? And if it doesn't really do that, think twice about posting it. Another sort of rule of thumb is don't write on social media a lot about hot button issues that are really dividing our society. Stay away from religion, stay away from politics, stay away from the culture wars, because if you're going to weigh in on those things, and certainly it's your right, I'm not saying, you know, I'm the biggest advocate out there of free speech. And to my last breath, I will defend the right of anyone to say what they think, even if I disagree with it. That being said, just because you have the right to free speech doesn't mean you should exercise it by putting yourselves out there and painting a target on your back. So just be cognizant of that. And also keep in mind you're a spokesperson for your organization because you have an affiliation with them. If someone can go on LinkedIn and see that you work for Microsoft, well, you then have become a liability to Microsoft. And so many times people don't think of it in that way or they don't think about. They think they've got their personal life online and they can separate that from their business. But especially for small and medium business owners, you are your business. You're the face of the business. And everyone who works for you is also a spokesperson for your business. So it's really important to have the conversation with your employees that they need to be careful also in their own social media because they could potentially post and negatively impact your business and your brand.
[00:44:36] Speaker B: There's a couple of, I guess, balances I want to explore there, but let's go into the first one. Just when you're talking about I love what you say about share with care and post with purpose, talk to learn around messaging type stuff and you know, it's part of the good messaging. My understanding of that is people learning a bit about your identity, like some connection type content. So I just want to give us some advice about how you let people into your world just to identify with you, because that helps bring bring in the right audience as well. How do you tread that fine line of sharing with care, letting people attach to this identity of who you are and what you're about and all that sort of stuff in a personal or private space, but then not going over the other side of the line. Like you said, sharing too much where all of a sudden you're away somewhere and you come back and you've got nothing left in your house?
[00:45:36] Speaker A: It's a great question. And as I said earlier, that I practice what I preached, and that's particularly true on social media. And so I think about these things not just as someone who's helping organizations and advising them in my capacity at Red Banyan, but I am painfully aware of what can happen to people who stick their neck out and stick your neck out enough times, eventually someone's going to chop your head off. And so on. Social media. What I try to do personally is I agree with you. You want to be authentic and you want people to be able to connect with you by not just posting this innocuous, tepid stuff that doesn't really sound like you, and that has nothing to do with your business. And it's just filler. Lord knows we've got enough content now that we have AI to generate unending amounts of content. We're going to see more and more and more of that in the coming weeks, months and years. But I specifically avoid weighing in on some of these culture war issues. I have opinions about them, and if someone asks me in the right space, in the right environment, I'll have a conversation with them. But I don't make it a priority to.
And I'll pick an issue where you'll never hear me express an opinion one way or another, and that would be on something like abortion and abortion rights. You're not going to find me advocating for the pro life narrative and you're not going to find me advocating for the pro choice narrative. I think they're both personally, I think they both are valid. I think they both have arguments that make sense to me and I can actually understand the mindset, the mentality and the beliefs that could make someone sit firmly in either camp intellectually. I get it. Do I have my own opinion? Sure I do. But guess what?
That's not central to my business. It's not central to who I am, and it's not really important for me. I'm not going to be impacting policy one way or another related to abortion rights. And so I choose not to speak about that very divisive topic.
You just have to pick and choose, but go into, you know, if you feel like there's something you really want to talk about that's in the political realm or more controversial. I'm not telling you that you should feel completely constrained and you shouldn't be true to your own beliefs. I'm just saying be aware that if you do go down that road, there could be consequences and be prepared to either have to defend that position or to push back against people who inevitably will attack you. So just go in with that realization and that understanding. The other thing is, I don't post in real time when I'm traveling, and I travel a lot. And I do that because, for the reasons that I mentioned earlier, I'm actually a very private person. And while I post a lot on social media and I travel and I'm out there, I don't want people to know where I am and what I'm doing at every moment of the day and to geo target my location and know what's going on. I want a level of privacy in my personal life, etcetera so I just think you have to tread carefully and you have to think that there are, unfortunately, people out there with malicious intent and err on the side of caution when it comes to presenting yourself online. Talk about things that you're passionate about, tell your story, be authentic and be real, but don't necessarily go itching for a fight unless that's what you want. And if you do want to fight and you enjoy putting yourself out there and engaging in combat, you know, verbal combat, online, more power to you. But I think most people that I talk to, they'd rather focus on their family life and they'd rather focus on growing their business without endangering the future of their business by being too political or being too controversial.
[00:49:59] Speaker B: I think what you said a lot earlier around that awareness, isn't it? It's really the answer to so many things. If you've got a level of awareness around this stuff, which is hopefully what we're doing today and the knowledge you're sharing, then at least you can be on your guard a little bit, which is a shame that we have to be like that. But try and make some sensible decisions. And do you really need to be doing this? Do you really need to be putting your thoughts forward? You picked a great, I think you picked a great example, actually, around abortion, mate, because I'm very much with you.
I don't know where I sit on these. I can just understand the situation from so many different angles. And again, we talked prerecording about fostering and some of these things, and you come up with all sorts of moral and ethical quandaries that you're just like, where does this sit? It really challenges your own thinking and your curiosity, the other sort of area. And it's following on from what you're just talking about, this fine balance.
There's also, I think, the religion and politics and some of these things you talked about, but there's this line also of these things that I hold true, that they're values to me, they're really important to me.
I'm not saying that we want people to be controversial all the time, but where does that sit as well? Because in a business, small, medium business especially, it's so important that you get people who are aligned with how you think as a business owner, because let's face it, the business owner is the one that drives the culture and the environment in the organization. So again, that's a really tough line to walk nowadays. What advice have you got around that?
[00:51:43] Speaker A: Spend. Spend your energy talking about the secret sauce of your company, talking about the culture that you've developed, talking about. And this is all content on social media that if you're looking, you know, you got to be active, but you don't know what to say. And, you know, now after listening to this great podcast, you're thinking, well, I'm not going to. I was going to go on a rant about abortion rights, but I think I'm going to talk about something else tomorrow. What am I going to talk about? I would say focus on the things that are the DNA of your business. Talk about what differentiates you as a company. Tell stories about what it's like in your office. Talk about exchanges that you have with colleagues that make you see the world in a different way. There are these moments of magic that happen in our lives, around us all day, every day. If we're paying attention, they're there. And it's actually great nuggets and great conversations to bring into discussions. So I think there's an unending amount of opportunity to be true to yourself, to talk about things that do matter to you and that are fundamentally connected to your business, but don't put you in harm's way at all. And so I would encourage business owners to focus a lot in talking about their teams, talking about their clients, their customers, talking about their secret sauce. What's that factor that makes them better than the competition? How do they view their role in terms of providing value? This is all the type of things that you should be talking about. Milestones in your company, anniversaries of employees, great outcomes that you've been able to produce for your clients or your customers. That's what you should talk about. Not the stuff that's going to go viral because it's so controversial and it's on hot button topics.
[00:53:40] Speaker B: I love it, mate. It's got a lot more of a positive feel to the narrative, doesn't it? This is what we do. This is what we're great at. This is what we love doing, love helping people, whatever that is. It's such a nicer feeling than going, you know, flipping the coin the other way and potentially getting yourself into some hot water before we wrap up, mate. What I'd love to do, if this is okay, I have to confess, I'm not fully. I'm nowhere near up to speed as far as the whole Donald Trump scenario and his recent conviction and stuff. I know a little bit through my wife. I'm not necessarily asking for your specific opinion on this, but what I am, am hearing and seeing and some of the things that I'm watching you mentioned about really, the natural justice, you didn't use that term, but the natural course of things happening, they go through a court of law and everything like that makes perfect sense. And then we got these kangaroo courts with cancel culture and the mob piling on. It does seem worrying to me in what I've read, what my wife shared, and she's followed some of this stuff really avidly.
There seems to be very, very big question marks about a court of justice taking certain decisions and approaches and even the jury being influenced certain ways.
How worrying is that, given that we've got kangaroo courts and potentially we've maybe got influence happening the wrong way within the normal judicial system, at least in the states anyway, in lots of other places.
[00:55:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it is worrisome, and I think it fits into a trend overall of calling into question some of the fundamental pillars of democracy in recent years. And so I think questioning whether or not the Department of Justice or the process of justice was hijacked or used for political purposes, it does undermine trust in the system. And I put it in the same category of election denial and saying, oh, it was a fraudulent election. The person who Trump actually won, people conspired to throw the election, I'm willing to say, because there were loads of court cases and there was no evidence of rampant fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election. It's just the reality that the election was held and the person who won ended up serving as the president.
It's a very dangerous thing when we call into question the validity of fundamental pillars of democracy, whether that's elections or the judicial process, etcetera.
It's one where I can understand the narrative of people who feel like he's been unjustly targeted, that people have done much worse and they haven't faced it, that he couldn't really get a fair hearing in that jurisdiction. I hear that and I understand it. I think what's most fascinating to me about Donald Trump is, and I write a lot about Donald Trump in my book. And by the way, a lot of people wanted to cancel me for writing this book because they assumed even before they read my book, that I'm this virulent right winger, Major Trump supporter, arch conservative. I'm actually not. I'm an independent. I'm middle of the road. I agree with the Republicans on some issues, I agree with the Democrats on some issues. I'm literally registered as an independent, so I don't vote in the primaries for either.
But I wrote about. And if you read my book, you'll see I critique and I criticize and I lambast the right and the left for employing cancel culture. But one of the more controversial thoughts was a lot of media outlets wouldn't allow me to come on and talk about the book because they didn't want to give me a platform, because they either wanted to deny that cancel culture really happens and is a thing, or they actually like cancel culture and they think it's good and it's when it serves their team's purposes. So it was very interesting phenomenon for me to see the politics play out in my own book. But back to Trump. I talk a lot about him in my book. And what I say about Trump is I believe that Donald Trump is the least cancelable person on the planet. I think that he has proven over decades in the public eye, with countless numbers of scandals of epic proportion, the kinds of things that would destroy ordinary mortals.
He was right. When he was running, he was at one of his campaign rallies, and he said I could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I would become more popular. And he was right.
He was right. And I do believe that now that he's been convicted, the battle lines were already drawn. The people who hate Trump are going to continue to hate Trump, and they're going to point to the conviction as proof that, of their view that he is getting what he deserves and he's a bad guy. The people who love Trump are going to point to his conviction and it's going to solidify their view that he is maligned and he's treated unfairly and he's victimized, and that the system is against him. But make no mistake about it, if you're small or medium, business or an entrepreneur, do not use the Donald Trump playbook for communications. Don't go out there and say the loudest, craziest, wildest, most explosive things. He knows how to dominate a news cycle. He is a genius at communicating. He knows what he's doing. This is not by accident. He knows how to put himself at the center of the universe better than any other person. And I believe there really is. And this is not a, this is not a love letter to Donald Trump, nor is it a hate mail to Donald Trump. But the guy is one of a kind. And don't try to replicate his playbook. Others have tried and they failed miserably. I just think that he's a unique individual and I think he's.
It just boggles the mind. But Trump was right. Nothing that he does is going to diminish him in the eyes of his followers. So, but if you're listening to this and you're thinking, oh, well, it served Donald Trump well. He had all this business success and he went on to become president of the United States. I think I'm going to go with the Trump playbook. I would encourage you not to do that or you may end up as one of my clients.
[01:00:44] Speaker B: Well, you realize what you've done now, too. I think you've become too comfortable in our show because I'm pretty sure I heard a little snippet there that said, Trump is a genius. So I'm going to have to snip that out and just share it with all your followers.
Cancel culture, mate.
[01:01:02] Speaker A: You can tweet. And that's, that's true.
[01:01:04] Speaker B: And that's as easy as it happens, isn't it? Hey, you go on your, go on. As your independent tick.
[01:01:13] Speaker A: I stand by everything that I've just said. I believe it. I mean what I say. And whether you love him or loathe him, you cannot deny that he is a genius at putting himself into every conversation. And even in the four years that he will have been out of office, he's, it's like he never left. He's right there in the thick of it, isn't it? It's amazing. He is amazing in that regard. And that's not a value judgment, plus or minus. I'm not embracing Trump, nor am I throwing cold water on him. I'm just saying these are the facts and he's one of a kind.
[01:01:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Look, personally, I find the whole us politics situation fascinating over the last four years and before that, leading up to the previous election, but also worrying at the same time. So let's, let's see how we go in the future, mate. Let's, let's end this. There's been a lot of positive approach through this conversation, which we wanted to make sure we've done that, and, but also ripping out some of the off the band aids and some of these examples you're sharing, which is fascinating, mate. So thank you very much. What would you like to leave as some advice? Maybe a top three tips or something like that for business owners, leaders in the future so that they can maybe avoid themselves getting into the situation that, particularly this chair stealing incident, the one you shared, which is an absolute classic.
[01:02:37] Speaker A: Yeah, talk about a tempest and a teapot, as they say.
So one, have a plan in place. Invest the time and the resources to get a crisis plan, get some help doing it. And have a plan in place because you don't want to be coming up with your strategy when you're in the midst of a crisis. Two, invest in telling your story, giving your narrative, thinking about communicating publicly and with your employees and your customers. It can't be an afterthought. It needs to be fundamental to your business. Just like you focus on strategy and execution and finance and people. You think you need to be thinking about communication as a core element in all of those things as well. And third, if you find yourself in a situation where you are being attacked and the cancel vultures, as I call them, because they like to swoop down, pick you apartheid, feast on you, rip your guts out and then fly off to their next victim, you have to fight.
Do not wait, do not hope. It'll pass. You have to defend yourself. And it's going to be very hard because you're going to feel terrible and you're going to feel demoralized and this weird combination of anger and despair and frustration and fear. But you have to fight for yourself. You have to fight for your company. You have to fight for the livelihoods of the people who rely on you.
Your partner, your kids, your employees. You can't let the canceled vultures win and you have to really defend yourself. So if I were going to zero in on three takeaways that I hope folks will start to implement, two of them you can implement right now. The third, hopefully you're not going to have to implement fighting back against canceled getting canceled. But if you do, the psychological certainty that you're going to refuse to be canceled is what will work and it will carry you through.
[01:04:45] Speaker B: Great points, I guess, on, .3 though hopefully people aren't subjected to it personally. But if they're seeing others there, then going into fight and just putting some context out there and providing the support around these things can be very helpful. Because as you alluded to, or not alluded to, as you said pretty clearly earlier in the show, that it can be a pretty lonely place and people get pretty lonely, then they can make some pretty disastrous decisions to end their life and those sorts of things. Can they?
[01:05:11] Speaker A: Yeah, it's hard. But you gotta be willing to fight to preserve your business and your reputation. And it takes a lifetime to build a reputation, only moments to lose it. And if someone's gonna force you to lose your reputation, especially over something that was not your intention, something that you did not do or you did not say, don't give them that power.
Fight for your reputation and fight for your people.
[01:05:41] Speaker B: Well said, mate. What's always our final question? What's one thing that's helped build a culture of leadership in your business?
[01:05:50] Speaker A: Intentionality and core values. Every single person in my company knows what our core values are, from the person who's been with me for ten years to the person who's been with me ten minutes. You ask them what our core values are, they'll tell you, oh, our core values seeker strategy, integrity, commitment, can do accountability, results.
We reinforce those core values. And I think, having clearly identified what are the core values in your company, don't put them on a poster on the wall. That's not enough. Don't do it one day as a workshop and then never refer to them again. Instead, we make in our daily huddle. We give each other shoutouts and they all have to be pegged to our core values. I can't tell. Hey, I'd like to give a shout out for Monica, who did good work today. No Monica. Great work. Results and real commitment can do. A client call came in at 10:00 at night. She responded to the call of duty. You have to really make sure that you're hiring, evaluating and sometimes departing with clients who don't meet your core values. And to me, that is fundamental. And it's been a critical part of the success of Red Banyan is making sure that we live those core values every day.
[01:07:12] Speaker B: Love it, mate. More great advice. Has anyone ever said to you, you should start a communication company because you do it pretty well.
[01:07:19] Speaker A: Everybody except my ex wife.
[01:07:23] Speaker B: Communication can be dangerous. Hey, on that note, mate, I just want to thank you very much for being a fantastic guest on culture of leadership today.
[01:07:30] Speaker A: Thanks for having me. This was fun.
[01:07:33] Speaker B: These were my three key takeaways from my conversation with Evan. My first key takeaway, confident leaders share with care.
They recognise the importance of cautious online sharing. They understand that every post can have significant implications, so they avoid broadcasting sensitive or personal information that could compromise their privacy or safety. By sharing with care, they maintain a professional image and protect their personal boundaries.
This careful approach ensures that their online presence remains an asset rather than a liability.
My second key takeaway. Confident leaders post with purpose.
They know that every post they make should serve a specific purpose and align with their goals. They're deliberate about the content they share, ensuring it adds value, supports their brand and engages their audience positively. By posting with purpose, they create a consistent and intentional online narrative that reinforces their leadership qualities and professional image. This strategic approach ensures that their digital footprint advances their objectives rather than detracting from them.
My third key takeaway confident leaders are proactive communicators.
They take a proactive stance in communication, anticipating potential challenges and addressing them before they escalate. They engage with their audience regularly, providing clear, transparent, and timely updates that build trust and credibility. By being proactive, they control the narrative, mitigate misunderstandings, and foster a culture of openness and trust within their teams and communities.
This forward thinking approach helps them navigate crises smoothly and maintain strong relationships with stakeholders.
So, in summary, my three key takeaways were confident leaders share with care, confident leaders post with purpose, and confident leaders are proactive communicators.
Let me know your key takeaway on YouTube or@theculturalleadership.com thanks for joining me. And remember, the best outcome is on the other side of a genuine conversation.
