Reputation is a Nebulous Thing

 Last Friday (18 March 2021) I attended the Asia Debt & Debt Restructuring Forum 2021 at the Pan Pacific Hotel. This was an event organised by Asian Legal Business, a division of Thomson Reuters and it was a chance to distressed debt investors and restructuring professionals to get together.

The single most memorable panel discussion was on “Fraud Warning Signs and Safeguards for Creditors.” The panel members involved the head of Kroll’s Southeast Asian business intelligence and investigations department as well as two guys from Borelli Walsh (now part of Kroll) and a lawyer from Hogan Lovells. During this topic of reputation came up and the lady from Kroll said “Reputation is a nebulous thing.”

 

Panel Discussion on Fraud Warning Signs and Safe Guards for Creditors at Asia Debt & Debt Restructuring Forum 2021

As someone who had spent the better of his working life building up reputations (what else is Public Relations other than the art of building reputation or face as I used to say to my former in-laws), that comment really struck me.

As a freelance consultant with no “big-brand” agency to my name, I always found that one of the major challenges I had was to get people to pay me. It was a challenge because what I was essentially doing was trying to sell something that was very hard to quantify to people who needed to quantify things. I remember one client asking me how much I could make him if I got him press coverage. While I could not get guarantee a sale from a moment of “free-publicity,” I could ensure him that the press coverage I got would contribute to building a brand. The question was, however, tough to quantify and the bean counters would inevitably struggle with the return-on-investment calculations.

The value of reputation is often hard to quantify in way that the bean counters can understand in normal times. However, it becomes surprisingly easy to calculate in a time of crisis. Anyone who worked at Arthur Anderson or Satyam Computers would be able to tell you exactly how much a damaged reputation can cost a business. I remember being told by one of my friends in the Indian IT space saying, “The guys at Satyam used to be regarded as Gods for working there.”

This is exactly why the clients for PR and other forms of branding work are inevitably big institutions who have secured big brands. Someone like Google, for example does not need a PR agency to get them press coverage. What they hire PR agencies and brand consultancies for is to ensure that the brand stays strong and if and when things do go wrong (which is inevitable when you’re big enough), the brand not only survives but somehow gets enhanced from a crisis.

Building reputations or brands is tough, especially when it comes to smaller companies that might have budget concerns because while necessary, its an investment that is hard to quantify. In Asia, where a lot of the economy is based on old fashioned trading or manufacturing, clients will inevitably see the work of PR and branding consultants are creating drawings (hey my kid can draw too) or just chit-chatting to journalist (I’ve lost count of the number of times people have told me they can call the press themselves). Brand building is a bit more than that. It is ensuring that a business behaves and just as importantly, is seen to behave in a certain way. This inevitably takes time because the various stake holders a business may have, need time to get to cement a relationship with the business (think of the need to date for years before marriage).

Reputations take time to build up. I think of a Prince who spent years building up a reputation as fun and caring guy:

 

Copyright Royal.uk

Suddenly, he got married and fell out with his family and the press which had previously celebrated him suddenly decided he was an ungrateful shit as this headline from the Sun (the UK’s best read daily) shows:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14412415/prince-william-reaching-prince-harry-meghan-markle/?utm_campaign=sunmainfacebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1616398399

 

Interestingly enough, the value of reputation or brand has become clearer to me now that my main source of income is in the insolvency and forensic business. Interestingly enough, the one group that becomes vulnerable to a good reputation is the financial one. Banks are more willing to give credit if you have a reputation of being a good paymaster. The same is true of suppliers. I remember having to deal with a large American multinational that had a standard of 60 days of credit terms. I remember groaning to my partner on the job about this. The reply way “But its ….., they are such a big and strong company, they will pay.”

For the most part its justified in as much as the big players like remaining big players. As such, they will avoid getting involved in anything that will pull them down a peg or in the case of very big players – many pegs.

However, now that I do work in an industry where running into financial shenanigans is a fact of life, there’s an angle that few think of. The best and biggest crooks understand that a good reputation is a very good tool in pulling off a heist. Its simple human nature. We are always weary when dealing with strangers. Familiarity, however, makes one comfortable and one focuses on making things convenient for the other party and as one health expert said, “one should run away from things that are convenient.”

Let’s go back to the example of Enron, the company that brought down Arthur Anderson. Enron was not a fly by night enterprise. It was, prior to its collapse, a potential rival to the major oil companies. It’s reputation was such that most assumed that the only need for an audit was, well because it was a formality.

Another case that comes to mind is that of a trader who built up a solid reputation with the banks, who kept giving credit, until one fine day he could not pay them. To their horror, the banks only discovered serious lapses in their internal processes once he had left them high and dry.

For businesses, reputation or brand is an all-important asset. It’s the thing that keeps stakeholders wanting to do the business. However, as was said at the conference, it is a nebulous thing. The really smart crooks understand that a good reputation can be weaponized to lull everyone into complacency. This is something that finance professionals need to be aware of at all times. Sure, a man with a good reputation will probably treasure it but you can never assume that he’s using it to lull you into complacency and convenience.