Excerpts from
TURNAROUND
by Mitt Romney, Governor of Massachusetts

For Steve Coltrin, media is about relationships of trust.

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I immediately clicked with Steve Coltrin. Steve is an immensely likeable fellow. . . Raised on a farm in Idaho, he built his career in Manhattan, and needs no more than three or four hours of sleep a night. His hardboiled straightforwardness allowed him to be equally at ease among farmhands and Fortune 500 CEOs. Some of his clients had included 3Com, 3M, Palm, Del Monte, British Petroleum, Marriott, BASF, and U.S. Robotics.

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Steve Coltrin was the strategist. He looked long term, set the course, helped craft the message, and coordinated the work of the overall media team. Steve flew into Salt Lake every few weeks and for major media event. I cannot possibly describe all of Steve’s principles of public and media relations—he had built up his strategy over an entire career—but there were some pointers that stood out, even to an amateur.

First, the media were not all the same. Of course, there was a big difference between broadcast media and print, but there was also a divide between the local folks and the national. And with the national, there were journalists that followed the Games as part of their assignment and others who came to the Olympics only when there was “news of some kind. Steve looked at each segment of the media and planned our approach. The local media came first, quite literally; immediately after my acceptance speech to the board, they were waiting for an interview. Steve’s philosophy with the local press was to be entirely forthright and fully accessible. I couldn’t have agreed more. In fact, that’s all I knew.

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. . . to Coltrin, the basic strategy remained the same: admission of fault, commitment to rectify the situation, and boundless visibility. Openness, integrity, and media, media, media, Coltrin insisted, were the only way to restore the confidence of potential sponsors and recapture the good graces of the public.

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The local media were important to us, very important. Steve explained that the hundreds of media outlets around the world would follow the papers in Salt Lake every single day to see what they were reporting about us. If there was a big story, they would follow up, perhaps with their own reporter. So the Tribune and the Deseret Morning News were creating the electronic footprint that would characterize us. Beyond the press, any executive considering a sponsorship or licensing deal would first run a quick search on us. When they put “SLOC” or “Olympics” into LexisNexis or Google, what were they going to find? How many articles on ethical lapses and how many articles on progress? In our campaign to restore credibility, every article is a vote of confidence or no-confidence.”

. . . in an organization like SLOC, there were tons of people doing important things, not just me. It made sense to me that Mark Lewis make the marketing announcements, John Bennion do the ticketing announcements, etc. But Coltrin said no. He explained that the media and the public associate one person, one face, with an organization. When they think of Ford, they think of Bill Ford. Michael Eisner was Disney; Jack Welch was GE; Lou Gerstner was IBM; and Auggie Busch was Budweiser.” Now that I’m a governor, I have found just how right Coltrin is.

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. . . Steve was insistent that I be front and center with the media. All major announcements, all major controversy, I was to be the spokesperson. And I should speak only when I had all the facts clear: “Don’t go out to the press and speculate on something and have to come back later with a different answer. That is how you lose credibility. Steve called his approach “single voice messaging.” Multiple voices and multiple messages were confusing, possibly contradictory, and led to a loss of credibility.

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. . . Steve organized a national media tour with folks like ESPN, USA Today, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, Time, CNN, NBC, and others. I assumed that he planned for these folks to write articles about SLOC after my interview, helping me to get things back on track ASAP. But that wasn’t what he planned. Sure, he would try to. spin a story out of the meetings, but his real intent was to build credibility and trust for the long term.

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Steve’s formula for building credibility was a great deal more extensive than just meeting reporters. He explained that I should make clear statements of our objectives and milestones and then return in the future and measure ourselves against those milestones. You built credibility by demonstrating it, not by having a big smile and a funny line. Steve turned out to be right. Those relationships were eventually critical.