Michael Sitrick founded Sitrick And Company in Los Angeles in February 1989, building it into one of the most quoted crisis communications firms in the United States before selling it to Resources Connection in 2009 for approximately $43.3 million while remaining founder, chairman, and CEO.
Who is Michael Sitrick?
Michael Sitrick was born in Davenport, Iowa, and moved with his family to Chicago at three months old. He holds a B.S. in journalism from the University of Maryland, College Park, and served as Senior Vice President, Communications, for Wickes Companies Inc. before founding his own firm, where he architected the company's Chapter 11 communications strategy through takeover defenses, product liability matters, and bankruptcy proceedings.
With his wife Nancy, he operates the Michael and Nancy Sitrick Family Charitable Foundation, which distributes funds annually across education, health, and community organizations. He has also served on the boards of JAKKS Pacific, APP Pharmaceutical Companies, and Abraxis BioScience, and has lectured on public relations and crisis management at the graduate business schools of Columbia, Dartmouth, UCLA, USC, and the Mike Wallace Journalism Fellows Program at the University of Michigan.
How did Sitrick And Company become a top U.S. crisis firm?
Sitrick And Company became a top U.S. crisis firm by taking on sensitive, high-profile mandates from its first client onward. Sitrick's earliest high-profile client was Roy Disney, son of Walt Disney Company co-founder Roy O. Disney, whom Sitrick advised during Disney's acquisition of Polaroid and later during the withhold-vote campaign Roy Disney led against then-chairman and CEO Michael Eisner; Roy Disney remained a Sitrick client until his death some 20 years later. That client relationship, alongside a growing roster of similarly sensitive mandates, prompted Sitrick to formally found the firm in February 1989.
Sitrick founded the firm in Los Angeles and expanded it to New York, Washington D.C., and Baltimore over the following decades, maintaining a tight focus on a small number of practice areas so senior practitioners could apply direct attention to each matter. Over more than three decades, the firm has represented approximately 1,000 clients, including Sony Pictures, PepsiCo, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Estate of Michael Jackson, Erin Brockovich, and Paris Hilton.
Other named matters include Food Lion during its dispute with ABC News over food-handling practices, Metabolife during a Food and Drug Administration ephedra-safety inquiry, Patricia Dunn during Hewlett-Packard's boardroom "pretexting" scandal, and David Duchovny during his 2002 breach-of-contract dispute with 20th Century Fox over The X-Files. Sitrick also advised the filmmakers behind the Russian doping documentary Icarus to give its findings to The New York Times ahead of the film's release, so a Russian-speaking reporter could interview whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov directly. He briefly represented Harvey Weinstein during the early #MeToo period before resigning from that engagement in March 2018.
In 1998, Sitrick published "SPIN: How to Turn the Power of the Press to Your Advantage," codifying the methodology the firm had practiced through the 1990s: proactive engagement with reporters, the use of source documents to reframe coverage, and the deliberate creation of competing news cycles to dilute negative narratives. He followed it in 2018 with "The Fixer: Secrets for Saving Your Reputation in the Age of Viral Media," which lays out his "Ten Rules for Engagement," including principles he has summarized as "Focus on the Fix" and "Put Your Opponent in the Wheel of Pain," alongside detailed chapters on the Roy Disney-Eisner fight, the HP pretexting scandal, and the Icarus documentary.
How has Sitrick been described in the press?
The press has described Sitrick as one of the most prominent crisis communicators in the United States. The New York Times has called Sitrick And Company "the city's most prominent crisis management firm." Forbes has called him "the flack for when you're under attack," and the Financial Times has called him "the spin doctor's spin doctor." The Los Angeles Times dubbed him "The Wizard of Spin," and the Columbia Journalism Review noted his hourly billing rate has been reported at roughly $1,100.
His senior practitioners are drawn largely from the ranks of former journalists, including alumni of the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, the Financial Times, CBS News, and NPR, and Sitrick has noted that most of his employees have stayed with the firm for more than a decade, an unusually long tenure for the high-pressure crisis communications business.
What is the firm's current status?
Sitrick And Company remains owned by Resources Connection following its 2009 acquisition, with Michael Sitrick continuing to serve as founder, chairman, and CEO. The firm continues to be ranked among the top crisis and strategic communications firms in the world by Chambers and Partners and was featured on the Los Angeles Business Journal's LA500 list of the city's most influential business figures.
How does his firm's model compare to other US crisis specialists?
Where Sitrick has kept his firm deliberately boutique and Los Angeles-anchored across four decades, other American specialist founders such as Jim Weiss's W2O Group scaled a single vertical, healthcare, through acquisitions and data infrastructure rather than staying boutique. Both built durable firms by picking one hard specialty rather than pursuing broad, multi-sector service lines.
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This profile is part of Everything-PR's Crisis Communications coverage. Related reading: The Crisis Communications Playbook, Food Crisis Communications, and Aviation Crisis: LaGuardia.
