CRISIS KIT PRO™
Crisis playbook — free

You made a mistake. Publicly.

The hardest one, because it's you. Two failure modes: the defensive non-apology that makes it worse, and the groveling over-apology that keeps the story alive. There's a narrow path between them.

First: the next 15 minutes

Draft it, then have one person you trust read it cold. Writer is never the approver — especially when the subject is you.

Say nothing publicly yet. Nothing you publish in the next 15 minutes fixes this — but one wrong sentence lasts forever. Then:

Score the severity — free, 2 minutes
What NOT to do
  • Apologize 'if anyone was offended' — conditional apologies are gasoline
  • Explain your intent at length — nobody reading the thread cares what you meant
  • Delete and hope — it's already screenshotted
Your likely lane

Almost always Apologize — short, specific, first person: what you did, why it was wrong, what changes. No excuses paragraph. If the claims about you are factually false, it's Clarify — with receipts, once.

Not sure which lane? Run the 60-second lane picker →

This page is the first aid kit. The full system is the hospital.
The Crisis Kit Pro™ gives you the fill-in-the-bracket templates for this exact scenario, the six-factor severity calculator, the approval workflow, and the hour-by-hour plan — $149 USD one-time payment.
Get Crisis Kit Pro — $149 USD pilot

Other scenarios:

A negative review is going viralA journalist wants comment by morningAn ex-employee is making allegationsProduct outage or failureA co-founder dispute is going publicAnnouncing layoffs because of AI

Educational guidance, not legal advice. If safety, money, data, or legal rights are at stake, involve qualified counsel before any public statement.