The greatest crises of all is reputation crises

I stumbled upon an article by Michael Fertik, CEO and founder of Reputation.com an award winning company in the area of online reputation management in California. He states that: "The number one major risk to a company is not financial risk or catastrophic risk, but reputation risk". He also states that it costs 20 times more to solve a reputation crisis as opposed to preventing the problem happening in the first place.

Two things strike me:

- Today everyone in talking about online reputation and very few about reputation IRL - which is the most important part. This is also the solid ground for creating an attractive online reputation - you can not reach it without knowing every corner of your professional reputation.

- A company can not have a reputation by itself - instead it is formed by its leaders and key employees. Their reputation decides whom the customers will listen to and trust and a company's brand and reputation is tested in every meeting with their customers. Your own and your key employees professional reputation is  100 percent decisive to the company's reputation.

As indicated above by Michael Fertik, the prevention of a reputation crisis is extremely profitable and the investment of analyzing and developing yours and your key employees professional reputation is extremely small compared to what you gain.