By Peter Wilkinson | 3 July 2026
In August 2024, the Sydney Morning Herald published a months-long investigation into Swillhouse Group. The founder-led hospitality business owns several well-known Sydney restaurants.
Former and current staff alleged a pattern of sexual assault, harassment, and on-shift drug use. They also alleged management minimised or mishandled complaints.
The group’s public response arrived a day after the story broke, not before it. They would have known it was coming. The statement apologised for staff feeling unsupported and at risk. That framing was meant to draw a line under the issue.
Instead, it drew scrutiny, because several of the allegations were recent, and the phrase read as minimisation rather than acknowledgment.
That gap between the story and the response is the real lesson here. Gourmet Traveller removed Restaurant Hubert from its guide within a day. Sponsors withdrew from the group’s debut festival, Swillfest, within a week, and the event was shelved. Founder Anton Forte stood down from the board of the Australian Restaurant and Cafe Association.
None of that fallout was contained to the venue where any single incident occurred. It spread across the whole group, because the group had no visible plan for containing it.
The author – Peter Wilkinson
What a Plan Actually Prevents
A crisis management plan exists to close that gap between the story and the response. It is not a folder in a drawer.
Instead, it is a set of decisions made in advance, so judgment does not have to compete with panic once pressure lands.
For a privately owned, founder-led business, that discipline matters as much as it does for a listed company, sometimes more. A business without a dedicated comms function rarely has tested language ready. The words it improvises under pressure become the story’s next headline.
To cover that risk, businesses retain us. It’s an investment, not a cost.
Reading that gap is a habit built over decades in newsrooms, long before it became a career in crisis counsel.
Why Privately Owned Groups Are More Exposed, Not Less
Most owners assume a crisis plan belongs to listed companies with dedicated comms teams. In practice, the opposite is closer to the truth. A large organisation can usually survive a bad week of headlines. It has other activities and other divisions to dilute the story.
A small business often cannot. The owner’s judgment is exactly what gets tested first.
Speed compounds the exposure, too. A single complaint or a filmed incident can reach a wide audience within hours. This is often before an owner has established the full picture. Waiting to respond is never neutral. It reads as evasion, and evasive silence becomes a second story, one that often does more lasting damage than the original event.
The First Hour Sets the Tone
Every genuine crisis begins the same way. Information arrives incomplete. Someone is hurt, often a current or former staff member. There is pressure from a journalist is to speak immediately, and equal pressure to say nothing until facts are confirmed. Both instincts, left unmanaged, are wrong.
The better instinct is to acknowledge quickly and confirm slowly.
A short, honest line, simply confirming the business takes the claims seriously, protects trust better than silence or a defensive framing. Silence reads as indifference. A minimising statement reads as denial.
A calm, direct acknowledgement buys the business the time it needs to get the substance of its response right.
Six Elements of an Effective Plan
Every credible crisis management plan rests on the same six elements, regardless of the size of the business behind it. Skipping any one of them is what turns a serious issue into an existential one.
1. Map the Realistic Scenarios First
Start with the risks specific to the business, not a generic checklist. A hospitality group with many venues should plan for workplace safety failures and harassment complaints well before they reach a journalist. Retailers should plan for a data breach. Tradespeople should plan for a serious injury on site.
This scenario mapping is the foundation of good issues management. Most crises are visible as smaller issues long before they escalate into a public one.
2. Name One Decision-Maker
A crisis run by committee moves too slowly. Businesses should name, in advance, the single person, or small & nimble team, authorised to approve statements, usually the owner or founder. This mirrors a principle senior crisis advisers apply to their own practice. There are no rotating account managers, and no junior staff briefing the person who decides.
Ambiguity over who speaks is most dangerous at the exact moment it is hardest to resolve.
3. Prepare the Three Messages Early
Every credible crisis response contains three distinct messages. Businesses that practice them in advance respond faster than those improvising in the moment. The incident message states the facts and the timeline. Company messaging, meanwhile, states the values and the concrete steps being taken. Finally, the personal message, from the founder directly, states what they genuinely feel and what they will personally see through.
Leaving out that third message is the most common failure among privately owned operators. It is the one that rebuilds trust fastest.
4. Build a Notification Chain
Decide in advance who needs to be told, and in what order. This typically includes staff, board members, clients, suppliers, etc. Getting the sequence wrong is a common and avoidable mistake.
A staff member who learns of a serious allegation online, rather than from their employer, loses confidence quickly. That internal damage often outlasts whatever the public sees.
5. Draft Holding Statements Early
A short, factual holding statement, checked in calm conditions, buys a business time to establish the full picture without appearing evasive. This works alongside basic media training, so whoever fronts a camera is not improvising for the first time under pressure.
This is where we excel.
6. Test the Plan Before You Need It
A plan that has never been rehearsed is only a theory. A short annual simulation, even a simple tabletop exercise, reveals gaps that look fine on paper and fail in practice. Staff who have practised a plan once tend to follow it under pressure. Staff who have only read it tend to default to say nothing at all.
Larger organisations build this same discipline through an ongoing arrangement such as Wilkinson Confidante, where protocols stay tested and current. A smaller business does not need that infrastructure to benefit from the principle. It simply needs to treat the plan as a living document, not a box ticked once and filed away.
Where Monitoring Fits In
Businesses without a dedicated comms function rarely have the resources to watch every review site and social channel manually, and most give up trying. Affordable AI-powered monitoring has genuinely changed what is possible for an operator without that infrastructure. A simple alert on the business name and key venue names can flag an emerging pattern of complaints early.
The tools solve only half the problem, however. They surface volume, not judgment. That’s where we come in.
Why the Plan Gets Skipped
Most owners know they should have a plan. Few build one, and the reasons are consistent. Time is scarce. The cost of an external crisis communications consultant Australia wide can feel like a discretionary expense. A crisis also feels abstract until it isn’t, which is the dangerous part.
Cost is frequently misjudged, too. In practice, a basic plan can be built in a day or two. It does not require a retainer to exist.
A retainer, through an arrangement such as Wilkinson Confidante, instead adds currency. It provides an adviser who already understands the business and is available the moment something goes wrong.
A tested plan costs a modest amount of time each year. An untested crisis can cost the entire business, as it did for Swillhouse across a single fortnight in 2024.
The Founder Is the Plan
In a privately owned business, there is rarely a clean distinction between the company’s reputation and the founder’s own. Customers, staff, and the media are judging the person behind the venues, not a corporate entity several layers removed. CEO reputation management principles therefore apply directly to owner operators, even those who run several venues rather than one.
Trust here still follows the same formula that governs it everywhere else. In short, trust equals truth, plus transparency, plus, increasingly, traceability. A defensive line, once posted, is indexed within minutes and stays searchable indefinitely. Anyone who frames serious conduct as safely in the past, while allegations describe recent events, rarely gets a second chance.
Local presence sharpens the pressure further. A founder in Sydney’s tightly connected hospitality scene faces a faster version of it than most. Word travels through industry networks before a formal statement is ready. A crisis communications consultant Sydney business owner brings in early exists for exactly this. It slows the process down, giving the facts time to catch up with the story. In cases like Swillhouse, the newsroom instinct is straightforward.
The story a business fails to shape becomes the only story told, and other people tell it.
Building the Habit, Not Just the Document
The businesses that handle a crisis well are rarely the ones with the longest document. Instead, they are the ones where the owner has already thought through the scenario. They already know who they will call first, and what they will say before anyone asks.
A reputation management approach built on that discipline pays for itself long before a crisis arrives. A business that plans for its worst day is quietly building a better one every other day too.
Spotting the story before a journalist does, is the same instinct behind every credible crisis response. It starts with a plan written on an ordinary day, not the night the story breaks.
Write the plan while the business is calm. Test it once a year, and update it whenever the business changes. It remains the cheapest insurance an owner-led operator will ever buy. It is also one of the few policies a founder writes for themselves.
Get in touch…
Call us directly
Contact email
Address