The test of a crisis management consultant is judgment: can this person read the situation accurately and tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear?
The difference matters. An adviser with judgment can build your reputation through a crisis. An adviser without it might give you a short-term fix, but at the cost of a longer recovery.
Roy Morgan has been tracking brand trust and distrust in Australia for more than seven years. Their research shows that 24 months after a crisis, 75 per cent of brands have not recovered. Once distrust takes hold, it does not fade because the news cycle moves on. It lingers for months or years.
That is the cost of getting this choice wrong. Reputation is slow to build and fast to lose.
The qualities that matter in a crisis consultant are not visible in a pitch deck. They are visible in how that person thinks under pressure, and whether they have done it before in circumstances that resemble yours.
Start with the End in Mind: What Reputation Do You Want in Three Years?
Every crisis communications plan should start with that one question.
How you manage a crisis is determined by the outcome you want. A quick fix or a long-term solution. The organisation that treats a crisis as something to survive will make different decisions from the one that treats it as a turning point.
Peter Wilkinson, Wilkinson Group
KPMG Australia: a case in point.
A whistleblower alleged, in May 2024, that partners had misused confidential client information to pitch for audit work at other major companies. KPMG conducted a sham internal investigation.
It was later forced to concede the attempted cover-up was not conducted with the necessary rigour. By then, the story had stopped being containable. No amount of crisis management planning survives a cover-up.
CEO Andrew Yates resigned on 29 May 2026. Chairman Martin Sheppard followed in June. By August, KPMG had cut 27 partners and roughly 360 staff, about five per cent of its Australian workforce, after losing government contracts and seeing consulting revenue fall 17 per cent.
The pattern looks like an organisation whose strategy was to do the minimum. Contain it quietly. Investigate it internally. Hope it resolved itself.
Hope is not a strategy
The alternative was to start with the end in mind. What reputation does KPMG want in three years? An organisation that answered that question honestly, early, would have made different decisions about truth and transparency, about the whistleblower, and about the speed and substance of reform.
KPMG offered none of the evidence. The verdict went accordingly.
That is the difference between crisis management as survival and crisis communications as a reputation-building strategy.
The first costs less in the first week and more in the years after. The second costs more in the first week and pays for itself for years.
The Plan Still Has to Exist, Even With the Right Adviser
A crisis has a structure. So does the thinking that precedes it. These questions will tell you whether an adviser understands that structure or is making it up as they go.
- Does the adviser think in terms of a crisis management team? A crisis is not a communications problem. It is an organisational response. The first step is activating a team with authority.
- Do they insist on fact-checking before responding? Act fast, but not without the facts. A statement built on incomplete information creates a second crisis. The second crisis endures.
- Can they define how to resolve the crisis? A short-term crisis exacerbated by media may call for a reactive strategy. A long-term crisis may require proactively getting ahead of the narrative.
- Do they think in terms of stakeholders? Not media outlets, not channels. The specific groups whose trust you cannot afford to lose.
- Will they assess the commitment of the leadership and be realistic about the support for the spokesperson? An adviser who has not prepared a spokesperson is sending them into the room, doomed. That is not advice, but negligence.
- Do they understand that empathy is not an option? Lead with process and omit empathy, and you lose the audience.
Four Tests That Matter
Four qualities separate a useful crisis consultant from a credential on a website.
A cool head when the heat is on. If your consultant can keep their cool when all around them are losing theirs, that might be your person.
Commitment, not headcount. The same senior adviser stays engaged from the first phone call through to resolution. Not replaced by an account manager.
Category-specific experience. Crises do follow a drumbeat, with exceptions. A data breach draws on a different playbook from a sex abuse allegation, a fire, or a bus rollover with injuries. Each requires deep experience. Generic “years in crisis PR” is not a proxy.
Fluency alongside legal counsel. Legal wants precision and delay. Media wants speed and clarity. Both have to move in the same direction. An adviser who cannot explain how to sequence a public statement against a lawyer’s timeline has not done this often enough.
Never Waste a Crisis
There is a saying: never waste a crisis. It is a truism, and like most truisms it is incomplete.
A crisis is an opportunity only if the organisation earns it. Say what happened. Say it openly. Make every decision traceable to a principle.
Trust is the verdict. Truth, transparency, and traceability are the evidence. The right adviser helps you earn the verdict.
