The Convincing Company was cofounded by an ex-FBI negotiator.
On a recent afternoon in Northern Virginia, Adele Gambardella and her business partner, Chip Massey, stood before an audience of DC-area entrepreneurs and introduced themselves. “I’m a publicist, and he’s a former FBI hostage negotiator,” Gambardella said. “I didn’t think those skill sets would get together, but we have.”
Over the next 90 minutes, Gambardella and Massey turned a private room in the Tysons outpost of Maggiano’s into something akin to a Quantico training session, showing the assembled business owners how to apply the tactics of hostage negotiation—“emotional labeling,” “ ‘I’ messages”—to the world of commerce. “It’s learnable for anyone,” Gambardella later explained, “and can be highly effective in customer-service issues and in so many other business settings.” Gambardella and Massey have conducted similar sessions for Goldman Sachs, software giant SAP, and Princeton and Columbia universities.
Gambardella’s PR specialty is crisis management, and she has found Massey’s particular expertise especially useful in that area. When the two first met in 2019, Massey had retired after more than two decades in federal law enforcement, where he’d used his FBI training—as well as his prior experience as a pastor—to peacefully resolve all manner of standoffs. Gambardella, an ex-journalist turned PR consultant, quickly recognized the former G-man’s value in her work helping business leaders handle corporate firestorms.
A persistent complaint among crisis-PR pros is that during times of turmoil, many CEOs are simply unwilling to follow their advice. The Convincing Company tackles this problem head-on. Once Gambardella draws up a media plan to try to extricate a firm from the controversy in question, it’s up to Massey to ensure that the executives actually do what they’re told—whether that’s issuing an apology, recording a video, or perhaps even firing an employee.
To do so, Massey deploys the same tactics he once used on kidnappers and would-be bombers. He offers “mitigation” to his embattled executive clients—“Hey, buddy, this could happen to anyone”—in order to reduce the stress-inducing chemicals in their systems and “get their executive functions back online.” Only then, Massey says, are they in position to execute the directives Gambardella has laid out.
“We’re handling both their emotional needs and their critical business needs,” says Gambardella, who will publish a book next year with Massey called Convince Me that explains their techniques. “If you don’t get the emotions right,” Gambardella continues, “they’re not going to listen.”
