January 21, 2026 – Apps that Get Used Ghazenfer Mansoor and Crisis Communications Michele Ehrhart

​​0:04 Intro 1: Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award-winning School for Startups Radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now, here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion, Jim Beach.

0:26 Jim Beach: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting School for Startups Radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there riding the roller coaster life of entrepreneurship, making a million dollars and then helping others do the same. Boy, we have got a great show for you today, two great stories from great entrepreneurs. First up, we have Ghazenfer Mansoor. He is going to talk to us about building apps. He has an app-building company and amazing technology. They have been doing this for, I think, 10 years. Started in 2015, I think. Forty employees. It is a great story. You are going to love it. And then Michele Ehrhart is with us to talk about crisis communication and what you do if your company screws up, what to do beforehand, what to do during, what to do after. And she has got a little bit of knowledge. She used to be the head of screw-ups at edX, and I mean that in the good way. She was Vice President of Communications globally, and so she was there in front of the microphone whenever there was a disaster. And we talked about that famous FedEx commercial that we all love from the Super Bowl. I think it was one of the top five commercials of all time. Oh, and today we have a Quick 10, so we are going to play the Quick 10 as well. Today, we will see if we can finally get a winner. Great show. We are going to get started.

1:58 Jim Beach: Welcome back to the show. Again, thank you so much for being with us. Very excited to welcome my first guest today. He is going to help us understand some of the things going on in this crazy tech world. Please welcome Ghazenfer Mansour. He is the CEO of Technology Rivers. It is a software development firm specializing in AI-powered solutions. They also do SaaS product development and healthcare technology. He loves to help startups and service-based businesses streamline their operations, automate processes, and scale. He is the author of a new book called Beyond the Download: How to Build Mobile Apps That People Love, Use, and Share Every Day. He has also been just award-winning and a very demanded speaker. When you look at his LinkedIn, you really get a sense of someone who is at the cornerstone of this industry.

2:59 Jim Beach: Ghazenfer, welcome. How are you doing today? 

3:03 Ghazenfer Mansour: Thank you for having me, Jim. 

3:05 Jim Beach: It is my pleasure. Am I getting the name right? Still Ghazenfer? Absolutely. That is perfect. Great. What part of India is that from? Or is it India or somewhere else?

3:17 Ghazenfer Mansour: I am originally from Pakistan, but that name is common in that region, India, Pakistan, okay, I think some part of the Middle East as well.

3:26 Jim Beach: Well, certainly Mansour is. I have heard that many times, but your first name is a new one for me. The book, why don’t we start there? Tell us about it. Yeah, thank you.

5:31 Brian Carruthers: Yeah, I will not be a statistic, I promise.

3:40 Ghazenfer Mansour: So I am involved in mobile for a long time. In 2000, when I joined a company in Reston, Virginia, they got a project from a European telecom to build wireless communities at that time. Those were smaller Nokia phones, flip phones, probably you remember those. So building a community on that phone was unique. So that is how I got into mobile. And then I built a wireless home controller proof of concept for Palm. So that was 2000. That is how I got into mobile. Based on that experience, we spun off that startup which was building a mobile platform that was pre-iPhone and Android, and later on, iPhone came, obviously the whole game changed. But because of the prior experience, I have always been involved in mobile. So based on all those experiences of 25 years, I wrote this book called Beyond the Download: How to Build Mobile Apps That People Love, Use, and Share Every Day. Because if you look at your phone, you will probably have so many apps that you cannot even count, and that is a challenge if today you are downloading the apps, because every other application, every other business, has those apps. But the bigger challenge is not the download, but how do you retain the users on those apps? How do you keep them going back to your apps again and again? So there are some strategies that you need to implement that would help you get your users to be involved, to retain those users, to come back again and again. And the more you are using, obviously, your SEO, your visibility, or everything will increase. Apple will feature you. Google will feature you.

5:34 Jim Beach: If, what, what, how, I felt like there was an “if what” coming. How do I get Apple to feature me? Just do the “people use” the whole strategy, you mean?

5:44 Ghazenfer Mansour: So, so you won’t be able to. So let’s say, if you have an app, the reason people are coming back to it, using it every day, that means it has something on it, right? So it is not beyond just solving one problem. It is solving some problem for multiple people. Apple, Google, they have all the data. They pick up all of those things. Obviously, it is just one of the criteria. They have a big list of things that you follow to get featured on their list, to be one of the top. The quality of the app does make a difference. You have to have a remarkable app. You have to have an amazing user experience and design, along with many other things. So you have to follow certain processes and steps in order to get featured by Apple and Google.

6:36 Jim Beach: Okay, well, we want to talk about that, but we want to get there in a minute. Let’s go back a little bit more. So when we build apps that are sticky like this and get used, and you are so right, my phone has six or seven pages of apps, and I use seven of them, you know. Is that about average?

7:01 Ghazenfer Mansour: I would say yes, that sounds right.

7:04 Jim Beach: Right, about right, yeah, because, I mean, I can’t use more than, I don’t know, very rarely do I use more than seven or eight of them. I think I will go and count as soon as we get off of this, because I will be interested. So what is different about those? Are those all things that are necessities in my life, or I think are necessities? What stands out in that group? Can we make a big comparison of the group to the group that I never use, but I thought it was important enough to download at one point?

7:33 Ghazenfer Mansour: Yeah, so you download it because you learned about the app for one reason or another. Could be your business, could be your personal. Somebody shared this, x reason, but your needs define what, why you should be using. Like, why are you going back to Facebook every day? Why are you going on TikTok every day? LinkedIn. So all these different apps, not everything is productivity. In fact, none of those are productivity. So why do we keep going back to those apps? They are solving some problems. It is not just about an amazing app that has a beautiful user experience. Yes, that does make a difference, but it is solving a specific problem. Why are we going on Facebook or a dating app or whatever the apps are using? Why are we going there again and again? I think, once you have an answer to that one, that is when you will create the stickiness in the app. You want to provide reasons for your users to come back again and again. And if they forget, you want, that is where the marketing part comes in. Like, if they forget, how do you keep reminding them? How do you create opportunities for them? Sometimes, it could be rewards. Sometimes it could be just notifying them. Sometimes it is about sharing something that your circle is doing, your friend circle, your family circle.

9:07 Jim Beach: Right? Your policy desig Or get a new client. What are the first steps that you do before you even start programming?

9:18 Ghazenfer Mansour: In our process, it is like a house. You are building a house. You don’t just start building the house. You create a blueprint of the house. And it is very similar in our business. Building a blueprint even before design is important. It is more important what you build and how you build, rather than the specifics on the technical part. So the very first thing is creating that blueprint of the application. And blueprint meaning you know exactly. There is a process of going deeper discovery, figuring out the specific requirement, why you want to build it, who is it for, what is your target audience. If you are building something, let’s say for senior citizens, it has a totally different approach than if you are building something for kids under 10. Again, it is a different approach. So the blueprint process goes through all of those things. You create those sketches and flows, and once that flow is done, then you create a design of it. And again, that is where you make sure you create based on the specific audience, what those audiences are, what type of stuff they like. And then once you build the design, then you get to the development of the app.

10:35 Jim Beach: How long does the design take versus development?

10:46 Ghazenfer Mansour: Well, there is no easy answer. It really depends on how deep you go into that. Sometimes it could take months, and sometimes you could get it done in a week timeframe. So every application is different. So there are a lot of templates as well you could use as a starting point versus something you really build custom, and that custom experience has its own benefits, but it has its own challenges as well. So again, the house example, building a purely custom house versus picking one of the 50 models that a builder has and says, I want this one. So you can move quickly if you pick one of the existing ones. If you are being purely custom, then everything needs to be reviewed. There are iterations, and once you go through those iterations, those are the ones that take time.

11:43 Jim Beach: Okay, that makes sense.

11:45 Jim Beach: And then when we actually get to design and build an app that we want, what are the critical things that we use during the design process? Are you using Agile or one of these other pedagogies or paradigms? What are your thoughts on all of these tools? And then at the end of that, talk to me about, in specific, AI and how that affects your programming phase.

12:19 Ghazenfer Mansour: Yeah, so design is an interactive process. You need constant feedback. You have to have all the stakeholders involved, because different people have different input, different taste. So you build things, you get feedback, and then iterate. How is it, how it relates to your overall brand? So yeah, design is an ongoing, interactive process. It takes some time because there are a lot of people involved in that. Now AI does play a huge role now, because there are a lot of tools that could be designed quickly. Now, with AI, we can create comps, give specific instructions, and you can get the app ready in a really short time by creating the mockups. And a lot of those AI-specific tools, even existing tools like Figma, Adobe, they all have AI components where you just give instructions and it can give you the design. So coming back to the design part, there are times when, depending on the time and budget, many times you just quickly want to have a proof of concept. So do you really need all that fancy design, or can you just simulate it, create that proof of concept quickly using AI? So using AI, you can give instructions and create a design that still matches your brand. You can create amazing design still, but now you are creating using AI. It has its own, again, challenges, but you can get things done quickly.

13:59 Jim Beach: All right. Are you excited about the quality yet, or do we still need human intervention?

14:09 Ghazenfer Mansour: Human intervention is definitely needed still. It is necessary because AI has still a lot of hallucination, and depending on the input, let’s say how many times you give instruction to AI, you don’t want that kind of thing. Or if you are uploading, let’s say, 10 different documents, that is your requirement, it may only read the last few documents or so. You are not always getting. So you have to refine it. It has this limited context. So you will likely have hallucination in the AI responses, so you have to tweak it. So human involvement is critical, and the whole process, somebody needs to review before making sure the output that we generated is the one that we want. So, but AI will expedite the process. So the things that were taking weeks and months before, now they are taking hours and days.

15:12 Jim Beach: What is the best AI tool for your industry for building an app?

15:24 Ghazenfer Mansour: We, in our company, we use heavily React Native. That is for mobile app development. It is an open-source project by Facebook. It is not AI. It is non-AI, but that is the one that we use for creating mobile apps for iPhone and Android, for tablets. So you write one code and you can mix your native and hybrid code together. So that is a popular framework. AI does support. There are different AI tools that could be used with it to generate the React Native code quickly. And then there are tools that are considered low-code or no-code tools, which you can use to quickly create web and mobile apps, but they are more for non-technical that will help you get to some stage. So the way we look at it, in the past, you were creating, let’s say, mockups or sketches by hand before you start using any tools. Now, you can use these low-code tools to quickly build something, and that is the thing we are seeing more and more. A lot of entrepreneurs are creating different applications using these tools, and then we help them take those, convert it into HIPAA compliant, or make them production-ready, because once you build it, that still gives you a good starting point, but that is still not production-ready.

17:05 Jim Beach: All right, let’s switch the conversation just a little bit. If I were to come to you and say, we need a simple app or something in your wheelhouse, you know, something like a SaaS app or something like that, is a realistic, and it is not a big app, you know, I just need my customers to be able to buy my widgets a little bit. It is not big. What is the low-end cost and what is the high-end cost that we should expect in the marketplace? And if you want to share your price, you can, but what is the realistic price for that? Because I can go on Fiverr, and a guy on Fiverr is willing to do it for 15 bucks.

17:49 Ghazenfer Mansour: And you already mentioned Fiverr. So it really depends on who are the people building it. Is that the company, all US-based, all offshore in India, Pakistan, or any of those regions, or is it a hybrid model? In our business, we have people in seven countries. We have headquarters in US, Reston, Virginia, and then we have developers offshore. We have people in different regions. So our costs are hybrid. We are not like US, and we are not India. We are somewhere in between. Every app has its own specifics. So there is no, I would say it is hard to come up with the pricing without the specific features. But I would say most of the app world, I mean, you can start from $10,000 and you can go up to even a million dollars. And we have done apps in those ranges, because there are apps that could be way bigger. It could have a lot of different backend integrations. It could be a multi-year project, and we went into that higher range as well.

18:59 Jim Beach: All right, that is what we needed. That is a good answer. Ten K is going to be your bottom, and below that, it is just probably people who are not good at it. Can we put it that way? I do not want to say they are a scam or anything. Let’s just say they are not good at it.

19:19 Ghazenfer Mansour: Well, they may just have a free cycle available.

19:25 Jim Beach: Okay, there you go. All right. So when you started Technology Rivers, it sounded like it came sort of out of another organization or another business. But how did you get your first customer? How did that first year go? So talk to us about being a first-year entrepreneur.

19:45 Ghazenfer Mansour: Yeah, so 2015, that is when we started. So our first customer, there was a company in Virginia. That company went public, and this CEO had an idea, and CEO wanted to build different apps. So CEO hired a manager who became the CEO of this new startup, and she found us through some forum where I answered a question on some warm part, hybrid versus native mobile app, and that is how we got our first customer. And we talked about it, then we built one app, then we built a second version of it. So we did three different verticals for that customer. So that was the starting point for us.

20:44 Jim Beach: And what about marketing today? How do you continue to grow the business? What do you do? Is it word of mouth? What are you doing today?

20:53 Ghazenfer Mansour: When we started the business, it was mostly word of mouth, and then secondly, referrals from different customers. But in the last two, three years, our focus has been more on marketing, and we are getting more and more inbound. So if I look at it, in the last two years, we got two projects with referrals. Everything else came through inbound. And out of those, I would say, I do not have exact numbers, but almost, I would say 90% of those come through AI search. So now we ask people, people find us when people search us on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, they search for top mobile, top HIPAA, healthcare app development firm. They find us number one or two, and that is how we are getting most of our leads.

21:47 Jim Beach: All right, excellent. And how big is the company now? Whatever scale you 

want to share with us.

21:59 Ghazenfer Mansour: So we are close to 40 people.

21:59 Jim Beach: Wow. That is very impressive. Thank you. Have you built any apps you are allowed to tell us about by name that you can say, oh, that is our app?

22:08 Ghazenfer Mansour: Yeah, there are a lot of apps that we also listed on our website. I do not know if I am allowed to say any specific names.

22:18 Jim Beach: Well, you are allowed to say whatever you want. Our work, yeah. I mean, I’m on your website looking to see if I can find some to say about you.

22:27 Ghazenfer Mansour: Yeah, so let me talk about one couple of latest ones. So, for example, HealingTrack, it is a healthcare coaching app.

22:41 Jim Beach: Okay, you have golf ball scanning apps, breast cancer apps, on-demand healthcare staffing apps, patient care management apps, kidney donor application apps. This is an incredible body of work. Restaurant and bars, fitness, event planning, and this is impressive. Congratulations. Amazing company. It is great. Great job. I heard you wanted to play our little game, the Quick 10.

23:17 Ghazenfer Mansour: Absolutely.

23:17 Jim Beach: All right. Are you sober currently? I’m required by the state of Virginia to ask if you are currently sober.

23:34 Ghazenfer Mansour: Absolutely, I don’t drink.

23:34 Jim Beach: Okay. Do you want to accept the standard wager? The standard wager?

23:34 Ghazenfer Mansour: What is that? I don’t even know.

23:37 Jim Beach: That is the bet that everyone else made. No, you have to. Okay, yes, play. Say yes. Trust me.

23:37 Ghazenfer Mansour: Absolutely, yes. Yes.

23:37 Jim Beach: Number one, your favorite creativity hack.

23:55 Ghazenfer Mansour: Questions are the answers to the problem.

23:55 Jim Beach: Number two, favorite bootstrapping trick.

23:55 Ghazenfer Mansour: Sell the solution before you build it.

23:55 Jim Beach: Number three, name your top passions.

24:18 Ghazenfer Mansour: Healthcare, innovation, playing badminton, playing puzzles, 

continuous learning, building business.

24:26 Jim Beach: Number five. How do you get your first real customer?

24:35 Ghazenfer Mansour: First real customer, find one simple pain point that someone is willing to pay, rather than building the whole thing. Just find one use case.

24:49 Jim Beach: Number six, what is your dreamiest technology?

24:49 Ghazenfer Mansour: Oh, that is a tricky one.

24:59 Ghazenfer Mansour: AI that removes friction so humans can focus on creativity and relationships.

25:07 Jim Beach: Number seven, best entrepreneurial advice.

25:12 Ghazenfer Mansour: Focus, and secondly, execution beats ideas every single time.

25:19 Jim Beach: Number eight, worst entrepreneurial mistake.

25:23 Ghazenfer Mansour: Building too many features before proving the demand.

25:29 Jim Beach: Number nine, favorite entrepreneur and why.

25:33 Ghazenfer Mansour: Steve Jobs for his focus on one product at a time, creativity, and belief that customers often need to be shown what is possible. And that is my favorite one.

25:45 Jim Beach: And number 10, favorite superhero.

25:45 Ghazenfer Mansour: Nelson Mandela and Muhammad Ali.

25:54 Jim Beach: Great choices. Great choices, especially this week. So very well said. We are calculating your score and to find out the winner of the wager. While we do that, how do we get in touch with Technology Rivers and both you individually?

26:11 Ghazenfer Mansour: Yeah, so Technology Rivers website is technologyrivers.com, R-I-V-E-R-S dot com. My personal website is ghazenfer.com, G-H-A-Z-E-N-F-E-R dot com. On the personal website, you can find more about my podcast, which is Lessons from the Leap. You can also learn about my speaking engagements. You can also find out about the business, even from there as well.

26:38 Jim Beach: Fantastic. How often is your podcast and what is the topic?

26:44 Ghazenfer Mansour: The podcast is Lessons from the Leap. This is where we interview business leaders, entrepreneurs, learning about the different leaps that they have taken in the business.

26:57 Jim Beach: Fantastic. Oh, I’m so sorry for you. I just got your score from the Quick 10. You got a 94. It is an excellent score, but you have to have a 95 to win, and so you owe us a Tesla.

27:12 Ghazenfer Mansour: Oh, okay, that is fine. Now it is much cheaper than that.

27:15 Jim Beach: Absolutely. Excellent. Thank you so much for being with us. A great story. Congratulations. And this is a book that I’m going to read. So thank you so much for that, and we would love to have you back.

27:31 Ghazenfer Mansour: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on the show, Jim.

27:35 Jim Beach: Our pleasure, and we will be right back. We are going to talk about how to deal with crisis management from a FedEx crisis manager. We are going to talk about that famous commercial. We will be right back.

28:01 Intro 2: Well, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a wonderful question, actually. Oh my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim. Wow, that’s a, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question, and I don’t have a great answer. Great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question. And that is actually a really good question. School for Startups Radio.

28:24 Jim Beach: We are back in again. Thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited to introduce another great guest and return to a topic that is so important to the show. Please welcome Michele Ehrhart to the show. She is author of a new book called Crisis Compass: How to Communicate When It Matters Most. She is also the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at the University of Memphis. After having an amazing FedEx career, she ended up there as the Vice President of Global Communications. Very impressive. Michele, welcome to the show. How you doing?

29:15 Michele Ehrhart: I’m great. Thanks for having me.

29:17 Jim Beach: I gotta think that the FedEx finally opening the box after stranded on a desert island with Chris Hank was the top five commercials of all time.

29:15 Michele Ehrhart: Oh, I think so. I think it was really well received. FedEx was very good at some memorable commercials, but that one has got to be one of my favorites. Yes.

29:24 Jim Beach: Well, let’s give UPS some cred, too. Do you remember their series with the long-haired hippie guy who drew on the whiteboard?

29:24 Michele Ehrhart: I do. I do remember that.

29:24 Jim Beach: In the stage show. Did you really?

29:24 Michele Ehrhart: Yes.

29:24 Jim Beach: Wow. Really. It was a stage show of that ad. We did two national tours with either the CFO or the CEO of UPS and Secretary of Commerce Gutierrez from the Bush administration. And we would go into a Ritz-Carlton ballroom and teach UPS-ers to go international because the profits are so much better. There, give out some awards, do a silly little routine, and I would come out with the wig on, with the long-haired hippie guy. And then, of course, I’m mostly bald. And so that was in the second act. So it was funny in the second act, because they already knew I was bald.

30:17 Michele Ehrhart: Well, it’s brilliant marketing.

30:20 Jim Beach: It was good. It was good. That ad spawned thousands of spoofs. So when you’re being spoofed, you know you’ve hit the zeitgeist.

30:29 Michele Ehrhart: Right? Absolutely. All right.

30:33 Jim Beach: Let’s talk about your zeitgeist. Tell us about crisis communication and when we should yell and when we’re not allowed to yell. I like to yell.

30:43 Michele Ehrhart: I imagine you do. Well, I think crisis communications is something that is on the top of everyone’s mind right now. I mean, you can’t listen to the news and not hear something that would register as a crisis to you. But I will say that crisis is in the eye of the beholder, because what you and I might decide is really critical may not be as critical to someone else, and vice versa. So I wrote a book because it was the book I wish I had when I was tapped on the shoulder and asked to take a role at FedEx about halfway through my career there to step into that role. And it was a very quick learning experience in the sense that I was in that role of crisis communications manager for about four months, but it felt like five years, because there was so much that happens in that role, especially at a company as large as FedEx. So I wrote a book after I left FedEx, thinking this is the one I wish I had when I’d gotten that role. And I thought a lot about, because I was coming out of FedEx as a small business owner. I started my own company, and thought about other small businesses, and businesses of every size need to know what to do when the bad day happens. And we may think we know, but if we haven’t really prepared, then it makes it a whole lot harder on those bad days.

32:05 Jim Beach: Let’s compare bad days. Michele, I think that would be, oh boy. Okay, let’s do it. Okay, you throw down, I’ll throw down, and we’ll see who wins. Okay, go, you start. So you throw me a bad situation and how you dealt with it, and then I’ll throw you a bad situation, and we’ll grade each other and stuff.

32:28 Michele Ehrhart: Okay, great. In the midst of the pandemic, we had a workplace shooting that was a former employee, and he killed eight people in one of our facilities in the middle of a shift change.

32:45 Jim Beach: Yes, yes. Fortunately, though, you’re just part of the zeitgeist, though. You know, we have, in America, workplace and school shootings, so unfortunately you’re just, yeah, horribly. So you’re just part of that trend now, and so there’s a little bit of that to fall back on. And I’m sure you had the highest standards and highest, 100 percent, I think that stuff in place.

33:12 Michele Ehrhart: Well, I will tell you it was the worst scenario you could create in your mind. But FedEx was so great, and UPS and all of the companies that fly airplanes 365 and drive big trucks around, they have very robust processes in place. So while it, and we were in the middle of the pandemic, so while it was a terrible situation, it was probably the best-run crisis that we ever had, because we were prepared, and ironically, we had done tabletop exercises not two weeks prior on a workplace-type situation. So there’s a lot of muscle memory there. If you’re going to have a bad day like that, having that muscle memory to fall back on is so critical, so incredibly critical. I cannot overemphasize that you have to plan the work, and when it happens, you have to work the plan.

34:05 Jim Beach: Very true. Yes. Very well said. We’ll tweet that out. That will be our tweet quote for the show. We’re actually, Michele, letting the AI decide the tweet quote for the show now, and it’s interesting. You know, I take notes during the show. I think that’s probably the best line so far. It’ll be so interesting to see if AI matches it. So fascinating. Yes, side note there. All right, so, 24-year-old kid running a summer camp at Stanford, knock, knock, knock in the middle of the night. Thirteen-year-old girl just standing there. Oh no, just standing there. You already figured it out. Oh my. Yes, that’s terrible. What is it? Some type of assault? Nope, worse than that. Well, maybe not worse than that. I take that back. It was her first menstrual cycle.

35:00 Michele Ehrhart: Oh, what a mess.

35:03 Jim Beach: Okay. And thank God it was me, and thank God we had pre-thought to some degree. And all of our camps were computer camps, so we were highly male-skewed, but we always had a female at every location, even if we had to fly someone in from Kansas or something. And so we did have a female. I immediately went and woke her up, and we took, all three of us got in the car and drove to the nearest drug store, and I gave her $50 because I had no idea.

35:41 Michele Ehrhart: There you go. “I have money, but no knowledge.”

35:45 Jim Beach: So there, you know, I’m married now, and I bought supplies lots of times, you know, when you’re married, but, you know, 24, come on, Michele, wow. And so anyway, came the next morning. I called the mother at 7:30, woke her up, told her what had happened. She got in a car and rushed to campus. The girl was happy and laughing. The mother left without talking to the girl at all.

36:07 Michele Ehrhart: Okay, well, actually, that’s probably, having a daughter who’s not much older than that, that was the best actual possible outcome.

36:17 Jim Beach: Yes, I thought so. I was very pleased with the way.

36:19 Michele Ehrhart: Well done. Well done. Okay, mine are catastrophic, though. I mean, I’ve got bad stories. You think about what I did for a living for so long. Yeah, I can’t blow up any airplanes, no, and stories of that and stuff. So, I mean, I have stories of tractor trailers crossing medians, hitting buses full of first-generation college students. I mean, they’re tragic, and not every crisis has to be tragic. But to your point, that was a crisis for you in that moment, and you weren’t necessarily prepared, but you knew what to do. The first thing you did was call in reinforcements.

36:56 Jim Beach: Well, it was a crisis that could have brought the business down.

36:58 Michele Ehrhart: Absolutely. Depending on how you handled it, I mean, and that’s the whole concept, is that brand and reputation are very married. Brand is what you tell people. Reputation is what they think about you. So if we don’t have those together, and if you don’t know what to do and you don’t know who to call, then that’s a super bad day.

37:18 Jim Beach: Well, another thing I learned is you have to be the first one to call. So in addition to having that little problem, we also burned a building at Stanford, you know, not to the ground, but, you know, good.

37:34 Michele Ehrhart: I would assume it was accidental.

37:38 Jim Beach: Yeah, it was an accident. We didn’t, like, well, no, it wasn’t like a student protest or something. So we were lucky. You know, my first thought was, I gotta go tell my people, you know, I gotta tell the people here at school. And that’s another crisis where you have to be the first one there and to talk. I think so, yes, exactly. In your book, do you go through the stages of the crisis and things like that? I do. I start that kind of, so I know what the stages are.

38:05 Michele Ehrhart: Of course we can. I’m going to pull my book out so I don’t get them out of order for you, because I would hate to be wrong on my own book, right? Yes. So in the very beginning of the book, I talk about what you’re going to read about, and the whole idea is to get ahead of it. So some of this is homework, and some of this is what you would do if you’re in the midst of the crisis. So it talks.

38:33 Jim Beach: Business listeners to do both. So give them some homework.

38:36 Michele Ehrhart: Yeah, I mean, so the homework is you need to think about where your vulnerabilities are, what keeps you up at night, what do you worry about? Those are the places that you should start. I’m in higher ed, so I mentioned one student protest. That’s a big thing. That’s a big, hot item out there. There’s a lot of scrutiny on higher ed, so I think a lot about what some of the reduction in grants mean for an R1 institution, which is the type of institution I work at, which, if you don’t have money to do research, it makes it hard to be an R1. So thinking through where are the vulnerabilities in whatever business that you are in, and that depends on not only the industry you’re in, but the size of company that you have. But thinking through it is really the first place to start, because then you’re creating those neural paths. So it’s not the first time you’ve ever thought of it when it happens to you. And of course, you won’t be able to think of everything, but give yourself time to actually think through what could happen and start to think about what you would do. You don’t have to make that an exhaustive list, but once you have that list, pick the top three that you think are most likely, and that gives you a place to begin. And then you have to build your plan. And it goes back to what you just gave us in the example of, hey, this person was standing in front of me, I knew I couldn’t solve everything, so I called in the person I knew that could help me. So know who to call, who needs to be brought into the room. And then you also said, make sure that you have that person who will be the spokesperson for your company, and that person being you and me, we are that person. Make sure you have the people in the room that can either inform you of what to do or approve what it is you have to do. You don’t want to be chasing down approvals at two o’clock in the morning when you need something done. You need to know who to call. You need to have them in the room.

40:34 Jim Beach: Let me interrupt, Michele. We started at one location and grew to 89 locations in five years, and became the largest summer camp company in the United States, with some 25,000 kids a year coming through our system, 365 days a year. We ended up at 365, including Christmas. We had camp on Christmas Day. Wow. It was one of our most popular camps.

41:04 Michele Ehrhart: That’s amazing. I want to talk more about that on a different.

41:07 Jim Beach: Call. We had, I had 22-year-olds who were in charge of each camp, right? So they had to have graduated, and they usually did two years with us, and then graduated, and then did a summer with us, or something like that. And we had a binder for each one that had route to the hospital, route to the campus, our first menstrual cycle policy, our double, you know, basically, it was a list of everything that ever happened, double fall through plate glass window, suicide risks, first, you know, how did we save that kid, and all of that and stuff, and stuff. And so that’s what you’re saying we need to do, right? We need a manual, a book, to show people that we had thought about this, right? Don’t you have to have something to show people afterwards?

41:51 Michele Ehrhart: At some point, it really depends on what your company is built from or  made of. But I say the answer, the short answer, is yes, because you want to leave whatever situation better than when you found it. So if by taking notes and keeping this process somewhere where people can go back and refer to it, then you need to do that. There needs to be some manual like you said, especially with 22-year-olds whose frontal lobes are not fully formed. They need to know where to go and find this information easily. They don’t need to be looking for it and scrambling. So it’s something you have to train people on. You know, football players don’t just show up and win games. They have to practice. Ballet dancers don’t just perform. They’ve been through lifetimes of conditioning before they perform. So the same holds true. You have to know where to go. You have to have some muscle memory, and I talk about that in the book, like how to get that when you’re not living day-to-day crises. It comes with practicing it, pretending you’re in the midst of it, seeing, okay, what do we do next? What happens if this happens?

42:54 Jim Beach: So let’s move to the first communication outside of the company. Okay, give me your thoughts and rules on that. What are best practices with first communication? I know half the story at this point, and I don’t know which half the story I know.

43:10 Michele Ehrhart: Yeah, well, I think you have what we call in the PR world, the golden hour. When you find out about whatever it is you have about an hour to say something, and if it’s nothing more than acknowledging that you know that something’s going on and that you’re addressing it, because the worst part is to look silent when it’s your fault or perceived to be your fault. So just a holding statement of some sort that says, “We’re aware of the situation. We are cooperating with authorities,” if it’s something that involves the police or first responders, “and we’ll get back to you when we have more information.” Because then you said, “Hey, I know what’s happening and I’m on top of it, and when I know more, I’ll be able to tell you more, but I’m not going to tell you something that is foolish and does more harm than good.” So the number one rule is do no harm. You don’t want to make any situation worse.

44:06 Michele Ehrhart: You go ahead.

44:11 Jim Beach: Melissa, Half Pint, I can’t remember her name now. Melissa from Little House 

on the Prairie. Gilbert. Melissa Gilbert, maybe, and her husband, Timothy Busfield, who was accused of bad sex things over the weekend, and he put out a video and then disappeared to drive 2,000 miles to turn himself in. Yeah, that was bad. Walk us through. How would you respond to that situation differently?

44:36 Michele Ehrhart: Well, you know, anytime you’re working with celebrities, they are their brand. So when you think about how you represent your brand, he simply could have stated, “This is what I’m doing. I’m going to turn myself in,” because he said it. And then nobody would have wondered why he was missing in action, or who was covering up for him. I mean, it was just, I’m sure they did what they thought was best for themselves, but it did not play out well in the media.

45:10 Jim Beach: No, and I think it was that video. If he had added one line, “I’m now going to drive cross-country to face the charges,” right?

45:20 Michele Ehrhart: That I’m not running from this. I’m going to go and face these charges. You’re right, simple, but he didn’t. And because he didn’t, and this goes back to, I have a whole portion of the book that talks about strategic silence. There are times when to be quiet because it’s not your story, or by saying something, it just makes the story go on. And there are times when you have to speak. Nine times out of 10, you need to speak. If it’s about your brand, you can’t be silent. It makes it seem as though you’re paying attention. Oh my gosh. There’s several that I use in the book of when you don’t say something fast enough, and then when you do say something, it isn’t good enough. So we can use, was it the airline that pulled the doctor off of their flight physically because they needed him to give up his seat. He was an older doctor, and he had to see patients the next morning, so he refused to get up. So they had called in the police. It was very brutal. It was all captured on film. They didn’t say much, and when they did say something, they blamed it on the passenger, and it made a bad enough story 10 times worse, just by the way they handled it after the fact. So you can make it a whole lot worse by not saying something, and then by saying the wrong thing when you do decide to make a comment.

46:49 Jim Beach: Do you remember the guy whose guitar got messed up by one of the airlines and he made a video about it that went viral? Remember that guy.

47:00 Michele Ehrhart: Vaguely. Give me more.

47:03 Jim Beach: He’s been on the show, that’s how I know the story. But he was sitting in the airline looking out the window and watching them throw his, you know, $20,000 guitar around. And of course, it ended up busted and everything. And, you know, lo and behold, he’s a singer, a songwriter. And what does he do? He writes a song about it, and it went completely viral. What do you do now? You’ve been caught, Michele. Now what do you do?

47:28 Michele Ehrhart: Oh, you fall on your sword as fast as you can and say, “We messed up, and here’s what we’re going to do to try to make this better.” And this is not, I mean, look, when I was at FedEx, we had a package toss at the beginning. Everyone captures things on their Ring cameras, and it went viral. And there was no, you can’t fake video. It was for everyone to see, so you either address it head-on and say, “This is not representative of our brand, and here’s what we’re going to do to make this better,” and you go do that. That’s what you’ve got to do with this guy. You’ve got to apologize. You’ve got to go buy him a new guitar. You’ve got to say you’re never going to let it happen again. People love to watch other people. You have to give people a chance to get better. Now, if they do it again, absolutely, absolutely. And if it’s something that’s egregious, like if they were beating the guitar on purpose because they thought it was funny, then, yeah, you’ve got to fire them. If they were doing their jobs, but they were doing it poorly, you have to take the opportunity to make it better, and if they don’t follow up, then they have to go. But we’re in this instant gratification phase of life, and a lot of people hide behind social media and go, “You should fire them.” And, you know, these are humans. So we always have to have a little bit of grace when it comes to this.

49:09 Jim Beach: But on the other hand, we live in a world where the patient on your operating table may be out, but may have a phone recording everything you say right now. Very true. How many times have we seen that, you know? And that’s always an ugly situation. Oh, you have to remember, we’re always being watched at this point. We have no privacy.

49:30 Jim Beach: That’s a good lesson to learn. It sucks, that lesson, though.

49:35 Michele Ehrhart: It does. Well, I have teenage children, and I say it to them a lot. You know, I didn’t go to college, you and I didn’t go to college when there was social media availability and accessibility 24/7, and frankly, I’m kind of glad because my reputation came through college pretty unscathed. But if everything I said and did was posted on social media, who knows? And that is the world our kids live in.

50:01 Jim Beach: Yes, yes. I was a non-PhD teacher, lecturer at downtown University, Georgia State, and I started to see things changing, and, you know, more and more people getting reported and stuff. And I was out there, you know, I always thought class was good if I was provocative, right? I got one minor thing someone said against me. I was like, there’s my exit door right there. You know, the next one’s going to be major.

50:32 Jim Beach: Because someone told me that I like to yell. Michele Ehrhart, well, you know, I have a definitive story.

50:45 Michele Ehrhart: Say more. I would love to hear it.

50:45 Jim Beach: Horrible. Oh, no, you have to tell it. We came home from lunch one day and we had one person who stayed in the office to answer the phone. And guess who called while we were away but Visa, and they wanted to know when we were charging our customers, then when we were actually fulfilling that service, and all these questions. And finally she said, “I didn’t know what to do anymore, but maybe you should call them back.” Well, I called Visa back, and we lost about $600,000 in the next hour because I yelled and yelled as loud as I could in front of every single person. “Caroline, you are taking the food out of my children’s mouth.” Never saw her again.

51:32 Jim Beach: I do feel bad about it, but.

51:34 Michele Ehrhart: No, well. And to your point, though, I mean, there are moments that are, we’re not at our best, and unfortunately, sometimes those get captured on film.

51:43 Jim Beach: Now, yes, now they do. You know, that would, I had this guy on the show about a year ago who kicked a dog, and I watched the video, and to me it looked like he pushed the dog off of his foot. And I’m a dog lover, but he got, he lost his job. You know, he was the CEO of a tech company and lost his job because he kicked the dog.

52:08 Jim Beach: Oh, I’m a dog lover, but I’ve done that. I’ve moved my dog with my foot, haven’t you? Yeah, I mean, I’ve never kicked a dog.

52:20 Jim Beach: For asking me that question, well, but I mean.

52:24 Michele Ehrhart: Move so you don’t get hit by this thing, or move because you’re in harm’s way. That’s what we do.

52:34 Michele Ehrhart: My children the same way. So, well, I move children that way. You’ve got to snatch them because they’re in harm’s way. We saved them. We saved them.

52:48 Jim Beach: Got divorced once, and my divorce lawyer, she got divorced because her husband took the baby to a bar and hooked him on the wall in his little jumper, and the baby.

53:00 Michele Ehrhart: No, you’re making that up. Nobody does that.

53:03 Jim Beach: That’s true. Emily Bear, B-E-A-R, tells that story.

53:09 Jim Beach: Wow. Michele, you’ve been a lot of fun and a great guest.

53:09 Michele Ehrhart: Oh, thanks for having me.

53:09 Jim Beach: No crisis between us. How do we find out, get a copy of your book and come take a class at Memphis?

53:20 Michele Ehrhart: Well, you can always come to Memphis, memphis.edu, but for my book, you’re going to have to go to micheleehrhart.com. That’s M-I-C-H-E-L-E E-H-R-H-A-R-T dot com.

53:35 Jim Beach: Again, the name is Crisis Compass: How to Communicate When It Matters Most. Michele, great guest. Thank you so much for being with us, and we’d love to have you back.

53:46 Michele Ehrhart: Thanks a lot. Anytime. Thank you.

53:49 Jim Beach: We are out of time for today, but you know what we do? That’s right, we come back tomorrow. Be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars. You.