I recently led the communications strategy for a global B2B SaaS company navigating Chapter 11 while simultaneously undergoing a broader business transformation and evaluating the sale of one of its international entities to a strategic buyer.

To say the least, there were a lot of moving parts.

And to add to the complexity, the company’s international businesses were excluded from the Chapter 11 process. That meant communications could not be approached with a one-size-fits-all strategy as there were variations depending on whether you were a stakeholder in the U.S. or abroad.

I had to think through messaging and sequencing across:

• U.S. employees

• International employees

• U.S. customers

• International customers

• Vendors

• Shareholders

• Potential media inquiries

The communications plan itself became an eight-page sequencing spreadsheet supported by more than 40 pages of draft deliverables, including employee communications, FAQs, customer messaging, leadership talking points, vendor outreach, and a shareholder letter.

I’ve seen situations where every communication to every stakeholder group gets written from scratch. The result is usually too many people reviewing documents line-by-line over Zoom, multiple rounds of follow-up meetings, version control chaos, and approval bottlenecks across legal, leadership, advisors, and communications teams.

That experience is what pushed me to refine a more scalable communications playbook. It has since become the foundation of my work as a strategic communications advisor.

Ahead of the filing, I sat down with the CEO and CRO to get their take on the following 5 questions:

• What’s happening?

• Why is it happening?

• What does the future look like?

• Why is this worth sticking around for?

• What will be better on the other side?

From there, I translated the discussion into five core messaging pillars designed to work consistently across stakeholder groups.

That part is critical.

Employees, customers, vendors, and shareholders may all require different levels of detail, but my goal is to keep the underlying story as consistent as possible. Misalignment in messaging across stakeholder groups leads to more questions and a lack of trust because stakeholders are already looking for signs that they aren’t getting the whole story. On top of that, you want teams to feel confident explaining what’s happening. If a sales team member fumbles during a call with a customer because they are not sure whether something was an internal talking point or a customer talking point, you are not leaving that customer with confidence in the path forward.

Alright, back to the key messages. We spent a lot of time getting these five messages right. I’d estimate seven rounds of revisions, pressure-testing language, simplifying terminology, and refining how we were positioning the filing to stakeholders.

But once those five messages were aligned across leadership, legal, advisors, and communications, the buildout of the deliverables moved quickly despite eventually totaling more than 40 pages.