DENNIS KNEALE
September 2016
For fifteen years as a journalist on the other side of the table, I watched Mike Sitrick work his magic. In the most perilous business crises and in the most painful personal scandals, this Merlin appears on the scene to quell the outcry and ease the fallout. The more difficult the situation, the more ferocious the criticism, the more likely it is that he will get involved. His cases span the globe: Russia, Japan, China, Brazil, Europe, and the United States.
I played a part in several of the cases he profiles in this book. As one of my old colleagues in journalism would say, “When Mike calls, you know there’s almost always going to be a story you want.” When I was the managing editor at Forbes, and thereafter as an anchor at CNBC and then at Fox, I felt the same way. Mike doesn’t call with “fluff.” He understands what makes news and what a journalist will want and need. Quite simply, I was a Lead Steer for Mike Sitrick, and my readers and viewers were better off for it. What Sitrick And Company does is not what most people think of as PR. It is more akin to high-level management consulting.
Since leaving journalism, from my standpoint as his co-writer, researcher, and editor, I have spent months studying how he does it. I have learned how he views his relations with reporters, the paramount importance he gives to the facts, and why he insists that social media is often but a means to an end. He has explained how he worked with some of the best lawyers and other professionals in the nation to resurrect the image of Michael Jackson, exonerate the chairman of Hewlett-Packard, and help bring about change at the top of the Walt Disney Company.
He also has shared insights on how to make short sellers go away and how to restore the reputation of a legendary investment professional (and save the Twinkie). Mike Sitrick should be spent by now, but if you know him, you know he is anything but. He cites as his role model his father, who is still working full-time at age ninety-two.
Over the years I have had countless email exchanges and phone interviews with Mike. (At a time when the live, real-time phone call is a rarity for many of us, it remains the canvas on which Sitrick does his best work.) But face-to-face meetings have been rare, so I was pleased to arrive at Sitrick’s New York office one mild but muggy mid-September morning in Manhattan as we prepared to wrap up our work together on this book.
My aim was to get his undivided time to discuss a few big thoughts, tie down some final loose ends, and bring the reporting of this book to a close. That’s a lot more difficult than one might assume, for Sitrick is forever keeping track of ongoing email threads, fielding calls from flustered or panicked clients, reaching out to reporters, and meeting new prospects. In a single day, recently, he worked on a dozen separate cases.
He had arrived by jet a day earlier, in time for a charity dinner. Later he had meetings with the general counsel for one billionaire client to discuss a lawsuit, with private-equity legend Thomas H. Lee (not the Mötley Crüe rocker Tommy Lee), and with a New York Times reporter to pitch her a story on a new client (and to try to get her to include, in a second story, points that are important to another client of his). The next day he would meet with another reporter from CNBC and the Times, and the day after that he had a meeting with a new client in New York.
Sitrick strolled into his Times Square offices on the twenty-sixth floor on time at 10:00 a.m. (after an 8:00 breakfast meeting) and said he’d see me in five minutes, but he couldn’t get free for half an hour. When I finally entered his office, I saw that he was every bit as trim as when I met with him seven months earlier, on a sunny Saturday in Pacific Palisades, near LA, thanks to his daunting ritual of doing pushups and crunches every morning. The vacation goatee he had just started growing back then is a fixture now, giving him a devilish glint that his wife tells him she likes.
Our chat starts with the broad view: why do this at all? Is it for the money? And though I long have regarded wealth creation as a major driver of all business, for Mike Sitrick this wasn’t a motivation at all. He tells me he could have stopped working after he left Wickes Cos., where he built his bankruptcy expertise before going out on his own in 1989, though he adds he couldn’t have supported his current lifestyle. Certainly, he could have stopped years ago. “It’s not money-driven,” he tells me. What, then, keeps him going?
“I feel a commitment to my clients, and I love the game,” Sitrick answers. That’s it. He prefers laconic over loquacious. He admits to getting tired, sometimes, of never having any weekends or evenings or vacations to himself and his family. There never is time off, though he insists there is no other choice. “There’s no such thing as hitting the off switch,” he explains.
When he was on vacation with family in Italy a few years back, at a nice dinner out, his phone rang, and he lost the better part of an hour on an urgent matter. “Had I not taken the call, there would have been a quote in a story that embarrassed the client and created problems,” he says. “It’s not like it can wait until tomorrow, because, most of the time in what we do, it can’t.”
Mike Sitrick doesn’t charge his clients a premium for late-night calls, weekend calls, or anything of the sort. “You’re either a professional or you’re not,” he says. He tells the story of a rival PR exec who balked when a client asked him to attend a weekend meeting. The PR man declared, “Saturdays are for my family, Sundays are for my God.” The client retorted, “And your agency is for someone else.” Fired on the spot.
Some of the better insights on the Mike Sitrick Method come from the people who work with him—his firm partners and staff; the two executive assistants, who have been with him forever (Anne George in New York, having started with him thirty-plus years ago at Wickes, and Stephanie Bruscoli, with him twenty-one years in Los Angeles); and some of the reporters, editors, and producers who have gotten Sitrick exclusives. And above all, past clients, who share a certain satisfaction and gratitude coupled with a kind of bewilderment at what Sitrick is able to pull off.
There emerges a fuller picture of Mike Sitrick than I had seen in the years I had known him, a little, before taking on this assignment. His enigmatic, deadpan demeanor and his high-profile clientele could lead a journalist to regard him warily, and the formidable impression he makes has grown with his fame in the PR profession.
So it is surprising to learn that Mike Sitrick turns out to be a supermensch. I base this observation on what I was told, again and again, by other people who know him far better than I.
The star New York litigator Marc Kasowitz, described by CNBC as the “toughest lawyer on Wall Street” and by Bloomberg Financial News as an “uberlitigator” and has been a close friend of Sitrick’s for more than twelve years, tells me Mike is one of the really good guys, loyal to his clients, family, and friends, yet hard-charging and very focused, so that when you meet him you could get a tougher impression. Sitrick, he adds, understands how to meld what the writer wants with his clients’ needs, and he is inalterably devoted to the facts—a good thing.
Stanley Gold of Shamrock Holdings of the Roy Disney fight tells prospective clients that Sitrick will be 100 percent devoted to his clients, 24/7, no questions asked, and San Francisco lawyer James Brosnahan, who was named among the top thirty trial lawyers in the United States in the Legal 500 US and worked with Mike on the Pattie Dunn case, speaks of Mike’s empathy for his clients and his willingness to do whatever it takes to come to their rescue (though Mike will insist that I add “within the law and the appropriate ethics”). Another nationally-recognized lawyer, Patty Glaser of Los Angeles, who Chambers and Partners describes as a “trial icon,” calls Mike the “epitome” of imagination, street smarts, and relentlessness.
Dan K. Webb, a former U.S. attorney in Chicago and the former Iran-Contra prosecutor, who today is one of the leading trial lawyers in bet-the-company cases, has worked with Sitrick on half a dozen cases in the past seven years. From their first case together, Webb spotted two “enormous strengths” in Sitrick—having the ear of all the right journalists and his ingenuity and perseverance in getting the job done for his clients.
Lew Phelps, now of counsel to Sitrick And Company and the longest-serving professional there after Sitrick himself, says Mike has an innate ability to snag the cases that are the crisis PR equivalent of Center Court at Wimbledon—or lifting cases to Center Court importance. Sitrick often ends up defending the players who have the most to lose and who look most likely to lose it. Sitrick has a soft spot for the underdog, taking on impossible cases to prove himself . . . to himself.
Inside Sitrick And Company, the founder is known as a demanding boss who expects his people to give their all, but who is willing to work harder than anyone else. He is a relentless representative of his clients’ interests and a stickler for the minute details of a strategic plan. His extensive network of reporters, editors, and producers—journalists he knows well, on more than a one-time basis—may be the most important asset of the firm, in Lew Phelps’ view.
Sitrick’s colleagues describe him as a magnanimous boss who can surprise them with his generosity. A few weeks after Phelps joined the firm, a client called Mike Sitrick directly to complain furiously about something he had done. Sitrick felt it was a misunderstanding at best and overblown at worst, but it needed to be addressed. Phelps feared he would be fired, and he braced for the worst when his new boss strode down the hallway and leaned into his office, telling him, “We have to call the client and fix this. Come on.”
Sitrick escorted the apprehensive new hire back to his office to call the client together. At that moment, when it felt like Phelps might break down, Sitrick turned to him and asked: “Are you scared?” Yes, Phelps said. “Don’t be,” the boss told him, “I’ll handle it.” And he did.
It was the message that Phelps needed to hear, delivered at the right moment, as he would recount later, and he never forgot it. It won his loyalty from that day on. It also embodied the approach that Mike Sitrick takes with clients in crisis—don’t be scared, we will handle it. And invariably he does.
I won’t elaborate further on Mike the mensch, lest we make him feel like he is attending his own funeral. Besides, Mike’s colleagues would rather talk about his nose for news—his ability to handle the most difficult cases, not just enduring or neutralizing a situation but redirecting it or, occasionally, even creating news to serve the client’s larger objectives.
While most of his cases involve businesses, giant corporations, or corporate executives, Sitrick also specializes in cases involving celebrities and the trials (literally and figuratively) of the rich and powerful, as you have seen in this book. Although a significant percentage of Sitrick’s cases involve what he calls the more routine, day-to-day tasks of strategic communications—launching and repositioning brands, handling investor relations—the firm is best known for its work on cases where the stakes are bet-your-company, bet-your-career, or even bet-your-life.
In taking on these high-profile cases—celebrity matters, as well as headline-grabbing business stories—his firm is able to build relationships with media at the very highest levels, far more so than if it handled only routine M&A and investor-relations work or just celebrity cases. These are stories almost any journalist would want, and reporters are open to Sitrick’s pitches—an advantage for his non-crisis clients, too.
Forty-five minutes into our wrap-up interview, Sitrick was offering a few final thoughts on his brand of crisis management—crisis fixing, really, as he practices it—speaking between intercom buzzes, client calls, texts and emails, and interruptions from partners who need him, now, when suddenly, and subtly, interview time seemed to be over. Mike dismissed me without really dismissing me (he is too smooth and too polite to do otherwise), and he was on to the next matter, our conversation never having quite ended. Conversations with him can be like that, they don’t so much end as pulsate on and off, only to recommence later, smack in the middle of where you were the last time you spoke to him.
My best guess is that Mike Sitrick will continue handling cases and quelling crises for clients for years to come. This is what he is best at, and it isn’t just his clients who benefit. Journalists and media outlets are beneficiaries of Sitrick’s work as well, feeding on the exclusives, leaks, profiles, and controversies that he brings to their attention. Readers and viewers benefit, too, as he feeds their appetite for scandal, celebrity, controversy, resurrection, in-depth analysis, opinion, and debate.
It’s a virtuous circle, starting with consumer demand for sizzling content, which fuels media focus on providing it, which sets up an eager market for the goods that Mike Sitrick can deliver. His biggest stories bring more news consumers to the media, which hunger for still more stories to feed the crowd, which Sitrick And Company is happy to provide (when it suits the interests of the client).
Enough cases, perhaps, to fill a third book by Mike Sitrick.