How Brunswick's Lee Gordon Runs Comms at Warp Speed

Lee Gordon: Foreign.

Pat McGovern: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Over a Pint. I'm your host, Pat McGovern. I am really excited to be talking to Lee Gordon today. Lee is chief communications and government affairs officer at Brunswick Corporation. Hey Lee, how you doing?

Lee Gordon: Good. How are you, sir?

Pat McGovern: I'm great. Uh, we were just talking before I hit record. I'm really excited to be talking to you. You've got a fascinating career. Um, so let's bust right into it, sir. Lee, give us a quick background about you and how you got into the comms space. Cause you didn't come out of college and go directly into it. You took a little bit of a route. So give us the, give us the Lee Gordon origin story.

Lee Gordon: I did. You know, like many people, it starts with a door slamming in your face. And that door for me was the realization that I was not going to play shortstop for the Chicago Cubs as much as I wanted to. And I started to realize through my high school and college days of, uh, that's probably where my baseball career was going to end. But I really enjoyed sports. I just always loved sports and I, I remember vividly going to Cub spring training and usually you wait outside for autographs for the players and whatnot. I waited for the TV news anchors to come through because I wanted to talk to them. And I always just had this fascination with broadcast journalism. It was just a thing that just always, how do you get on the nightly news? How do you do that? That just to me was. It was almost an art form and entertainment in and of itself. Um, and so I did. I kind of have two careers. I spent 15 years as a television anchor and five years as a radio, uh, host for ESPN radio. And then I transitioned into, um. We always kind of used to call it the dark side. You would never go into PR and comms. Uh, but I went into corporate communications and I've now, that's kind of the second half of my life. But I really enjoyed the TV side of it. I always think that that prepared me for the role that I have today more than any single thing, just because of the deadline driven focus that you had to have every single day. But uh, I started in, in Chicago as a producer. I went to Billings, Montana as an on air talent. I covered the rodeo and you know, six man football. And I went to Tallahassee, Florida and then I went to Jacksonville, Florida, back to Tallahassee and then made my way back to the Midwest. But it's been, uh, it's been a great ride and I hope it Continues for a long time to come.

Pat McGovern: Lee, you said it prepared you, and I get the deadline aspect of it. Right. The news is going to happen. You've got to have a story. I get that part of it. How else did it prepare you for

Lee Gordon: life? Um, in comms, as you know, Pat, in our world, you're juggling a thousand balls at one time. And if you watch the show Friends, which a lot of people watch, so Friends, I look at my calendar and I call them pivot days. Every 30 minutes is a different meeting about a completely different topic. And you are pivoting from zoom to teams to an in person meeting. And you have to be able to keep all the balls in the air and on air. You know, you are in the newsroom and you're just living your life and a, uh, plane crashes, or you go through Hurricane Katrina or you go through these major events and you have to just drop everything and pivot and figure it out. Because the people on the other side of the screen don't need to know everything you've went through. All they need to know is what they need to know. And it was my job to tell them that. It was my job to share the news and do it in a way where they're not seeing us disheveled. I feel very similar. In our world, it could be at any given day, there's a product launch, a death in the family, um, an incident that you have to deal with, um, earnings, town hall, anything that's going on with the war in Iran, gas prices, you name it. There's just always something. And I truly believe that, that life prepared me for living in a, in a world where I actually don't mind some controlled chaos. If I don't have it. I'm bored. I need. Now, I don't want anything bad to happen, but you learn to deal with and manage controlled chaos. And that is especially since 2020, where our world is right now, especially in the comm side.

Pat McGovern: You're at Brunto Corporation, Lee. For those who are not familiar with that, what is it does the corporation do?

Lee Gordon: So we're the largest recreational boat technology company in the world. So we are a publicly traded company, have been for, uh, more than 100 years. But we make, uh, exclusively boats, engines, parts and accessories and boat clubs. So we own 18 different boat brands. Some of the bigger ones, Boston Whaler, Sea Ray Bayliner. We own Mercury Marine Engines made in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. The only US outboard engine manufacturer, um, with about three and a half million square feet of manufacturing we own Freedom Boat Club. So think about joining a country club. You don't have to own the boat. You can join the club, go boating, come back, give us the keys, we clean it for you. And there you go. 445 locations around the world and then about 40 or so technology companies through the years. We've owned bowling, we've owned billiards, we've owned Life Fitness, uh, we've made some peloton bikes or treadmills at one point. We've owned McGregor Golf Clubs. There hasn't been many different things we haven't been a part of. But today Brunswick is a pure play marine company.

Pat McGovern: Amazing. I didn't know that. Thank you for that, Lee. That's great. Your title is Chief Communications and Government Affairs Officer. I kind of get the comms part of it, the government affairs part. So break it down. Lee, what do you do? What's your day like? Right. Uh, what is a comms? What is your comms side? What is government affairs?

Lee Gordon: So I'll answer the second part first. And I would say it has certainly changed in the last two years, the government affairs piece of it, because there is a, you know, when I talk to comms professionals, um, you know, that are in my network, there's certainly a synergy between government affairs and communications. So I'm, I'm not a registered lobbyist, but I lobby a lot. I'm in Washington D.C. every month. I go to Brussels, I go to Ottawa. Uh, because we're a global business, we have things all over the world that we need to deal with. And we've got to be very close with our members of Congress and Senate. And in this administration and this administration, very differently than anybody else is kind of a newsroom in of themselves. They create their own news, they break their own news, they report their own news on their own networks. And then all of us kind of run to figure it out. That's different than it's ever been. And all the government officials or all the government affairs professionals that I work with have a comms background because you have to be able to manage that and navigate through it. The days of flying into Washington D.C. and lobbying for a day and meeting your member of Congress and making it happen, it's not linear. It's not linear anymore. So I have somebody who works for me on my team, lives in Washington D.C. um, almost talk every morning and then he's on the hill by 10 o' clock in the morning, meeting with members of Congress, Senate, with the administration on whatever the topics that we need to deal with. And so that's kind of one side of my head. But then the other side is, is the communications piece. And it is, you know, the internal communications, the executive comms, the voice of our leadership team, our town halls, all of our newsletters, all of our HR communications. Then there's the external side, which is, you know, the earned media, the owned media, the press releases, dealing with the media, the investor relations, communications sustainability report. Um, as a corporation, we have, you know, different papers, like the annual report, the proxy annual shareholders meeting. So I'm involved in all of that. So you. You wear a lot of different hats and, you know, the. The title could run off the page. Uh, but again, that is. I love that. I love being part of all of the different areas. And kind of back to your original question is, because there is so much in the last two years in the government affairs side that needs a communications piece to it. You're writing letters to Congress. You're filing for an exclusion. Today, there's companies, we don't quite know the process. We might have to file for a tariff refund. You got to write. You need writers. You need people who can understand the process. And so having our own little newsroom of sorts here at Brunswick has helped because we've got that drive. And those who work on the team, they don't have the, well, I can't do this today mentality. It's the, uh, I'm going to run through the wall mentality of it. And you kind of need that in today's world because things are changing so fast, and we haven't even talked about

Pat McGovern: AI yet, which we'll get to. But here's what Lee, that says, just that description right now, what you just said sounds completely overwhelming. And I understand the part about, hey, we've got to just be nimble and we have to react and we have to do certain things, like run through a wall if need be. Let me flip it a little bit, though. How do you try to stay on top of things, right? How do you kind of plan out for. I don't know, Is it. Is a year crazy? Do you try to plan out for, like, hey, guys, team, let's look at the next three months. This is what I want to do, to be ahead of the curve rather than always be reactive. How do you think about that part of it?

Lee Gordon: The great question, and it's something I talk with my team about all the time. From a government affairs side, we know there are. I bucket it into two areas. There are the defensive issues. So things that we want to make sure don't happen, you know, and you fight those, and you argue those, and you try to prove the reasons why they would negatively impact your company or jobs or the economy. You try to get your member of Congress to go, if this happens, you know, there's a risk of job loss in your district. You don't want that on your head. On the inverse side of it, there's a lot of opportunity. You know, there's a lot of opportunity for us. We make boats and engines. The Coast Guard has boats and engines. The Navy has boats and engines. There's drone boats that, you know, are coming on strong. There's a lot of opportunities for fishing, um, to make sure that, you know, our customers have years and years and years of open access to water. So we can plan for what we know to be true. Now, there's kind of things that are going to happen. Covid. We didn't plan for Covid. We didn't know that was coming. Um, that certainly sends a, uh, you know, that could send you kind of into a different way. You know, there are things that happen with these deals with. With the tariffs that, um, you know, you can't necessarily plan for, but you've. You've got enough to go on that. You can kind of see it coming. On the comm side, though, that's where we've. We've really tried to not be, as I always call it, a short order cook. I don't want our team to be just grinding out press releases and copy because somebody asked us for it. I want us to create events. I want us to create opportunities to be pitching, to proactively be pitching mainstream media. How do we get into Forbes and Wall Street Journal? And, you know, we know we have quarterly earnings, so that's on the calendar every year. We should be on CNBC or Bloomberg or one of the others, the day of earnings or the day after earnings. And if we're not, that's on us. That's on us, too. We're either not selling the story enough. Our story is not good enough. Um, but, you know, there's always a twist to that, because you may be butted up to, um, a topic of the world that you don't want to be a part of. So, you know, there are times I'm like, whoa, let's. You got to know when to pull back, too. You got to know when not to be part of the broader conversation that you don't need to be a part of. But that is something we work On a lot is how do we be proactive? How do we, um, you know, ensure that we have the seat at the table so we are driving the conversation versus the other. And I'll tell you one quick other story, because again, I'm going to throw a bunch of sports anecdotes at you throughout this. As the sports guy, ESPN does this better than anybody else. ESPN and our administration today is kind of doing it similar. But ESPN does the best job of creating a story, reporting on their own story, and then watching as everybody else reports on the story that they created and reported on first. So they created a story, they broke the story, they are first to it, and now everybody's following on top of it. That's what we should be doing from a corporate comms side of it. We launch our own products. We know when things are going to happen. We know when we're going to win awards, and it's great to send out the press release, but we have to be the ones to be doing more. We have to be the ones to have our own voice. And that is where we need to continue to go as a comms team. We have 14 people on our senior leadership team. That's 14 brand voices. We have 14,500 employees. That's 14,500 people who go out to dinner with friends and are in the public and go on vacation. Who could be and should be talking about us if we are seating them with the right information to do it.

Pat McGovern: I want to dig a little bit deeper into the storytelling aspect of it. Lee, when you're putting. You and the team are working to get onto Bloomberg, to get into Forbes, to get into the Wall Street Journal with whatever story you want to pitch. How do you ensure that that's the best story to tell at the moment? What are the things that you're looking, the levers to pull, the emotional connections? Whatever it is, what is it that that makes. Like, this is what the story has to have. It's gotta be A, B, C, D or whatever.

Lee Gordon: That's where I. You know, to your first question, that's where I put my TV hat on. If a company was pitching me and I was in the newsroom, what do I need? What is it that I want? It cannot be. You know, we sometimes sit in our bubble and we think our story and our key messages are gonna resonate with everybody. 99% of the time, it's just marketing speak. It's not. That's not what they need. It's not what they want. They're not going to do a seven minute commercial on our company unless I'm paying them to do a commercial. And I think that is where earned media and owned media and paid media are so drastically different. And there's a big disconnect when we get asked, well, why can't we just be in Glamour magazine or gq? It doesn't work that way. But for a Bloomberg is a perfect example. I know. And I can't say what our earnings are going to be, but I know that directionally, um, you know, our industry was here two years ago and now it's here and now it's here. And here are some of the macro topics. I know they're going to want to talk about tariffs. I know they're going to want to talk about gas prices. I know they're going to want to talk about something, something, something. So instead of me just trying to sell them on. Okay, I've got my CEO ready. Uh, we just reported earnings. Will you do us a favor? I'm going to say, let me do you a favor. I know this is a big story for you. Can we come on and talk about our earnings? But feel free to ask us about how gas prices are impacting boaters or feel free to ask us about how a US manufacturing company is impacted by tariffs. So now I'm giving them something that they can go back to their producer and say, I've got the CEO of a publicly traded company who wants to talk about the industry. They're the largest player. But they're also going to talk about the story of the day, which is the Iran war, which is gas prices, oil prices, whatever it is, as the story of the day and trying to do it that way also. I've been really fortunate in my time to have some incredible interns when I was in the newsroom who are now producers at Fox Business and cnbc. And so I don't have to pitch them as much as I just call a friend and say, hey, let me know when you have a. Let me know when you got a free block. Because I'll get us, we'll get us on. And as, as AI changes things or enhances things or helps. The singular biggest advantage communications or marketing professionals have is their personal relationships. M AI cannot take that over, but it's the relationships that you build. And that is what I try to drive on we you, if you get on Bloomberg, make sure you are prompt. Make sure you are there. Make sure you give them what they need. Give them the B roll, don't cancel on them. Don't make them do their. Don't, don't. Don't do that to them. The other thing is, as well, um, we have a product that people like, uh, you don't need a boat, but we like to think you do. But there are a lot of boaters, um, in the media, there are a lot of boaters in our administration, there are a lot of professional athletes who are boaters and actors who are boaters. And so you can find that connection pretty quickly by just doing a little bit of research about certain bios of anchors at some of these networks. It's amazing to see how many of them love fishing with their kids. And the second you pitch them on the story, you say, hey, I noticed you love fishing with your kids. How about getting the boat and coming on? And it's an immediate, immediate hit just doing that extra work.

Pat McGovern: When you got to Brunswick, how much education did you have to provide to the C suite about how effective comms works? Because here's what I have experienced in my career, not as a comms person, but person who's been in marketing, who's dealt with comms people. A lot of upper management want to tell a story, and they think because they've got time right here and now that everybody else should pay attention. It doesn't work like that. As you just said, hey, they'll come on, they'll have us on, but they're going to want to talk about tariffs. I don't want to talk about tariffs. Well, then they don't want to have me on. How much, uh, again, how much education did you need to, like, did you need for the team at Brunswick?

Lee Gordon: A lot. I needed a lot because it doesn't happen. You're 100% right. It doesn't happen overnight. I've worked with people who do not want to go on TV or do an interview unless they have the question sent to them, unless they know exactly how it's going to turn out, unless they can script it. And I say to them, if you want that, go into advertising, because you pay X dollars. You can put anything you want, and you create it from top to bottom. If you want earned media, that's why they call it earned, is because you earn the opportunity to get a story done on your editorial. However you look at it, you have to take the good and take the bad and take the risk and the reward as well, because there's nothing better than walking in one day. And you've just done this interview with the Wall Street Journal, and they do an amazing article on you. But on the flip side, they could also do a hit job too. And you have to know and have to be able to gauge that. But it doesn't happen every day. And I've talked to, I'm so fortunate because I work for a CEO who is the best at media relations. He is incredible on camera. He is incredible with reporters. He knows what to say, when to say, how to say it, and he also knows what not to say and how to get out of a question. I've had to do as little prep with him as anybody I've ever worked with in the past. And that I know that is an anomaly. It is a unique experience and I am eternally grateful for that. But not everybody is like him. Not everybody is like that. Many people are scared of it and they are very outgoing when we talk like this. And the second that red light turns on, they freeze up or they want the control of it. And if somebody had asked me when I was on the news and this happened many times, can you either A, send me a list of questions or, or B, send it to me before it goes on, I would just shut the interview down. Um, you know, we're no longer interested in this because it's disrespectful to the journalistic nature of what we did. If you wanted that, you know, we've. I've got a sales team who works at the TV station and be happy to take your money and create a 30 second spot.

Pat McGovern: I want to just stick with this a little bit longer, Lee. And that is how the sausage gets made, because it's fascinating to me. And again, this is working from a proactive standpoint. Just describe again, uh, what's a, maybe the planning season for you and the team. You know, certain things are going to be happening. Like, hey, we're going to make announcements on these dates. So that means let's back it up from there. We know maybe there's going to be a new product launch this year. Okay, that's going to happen when? Roughly here. Okay, we got to back things, but how do you guys just work that kind of content calendar? How do you think about that?

Lee Gordon: So we have, you know, I almost look at it as kind of two halves of the year. So the very beginning of the year for us, January, we exhibit at the Consumer Electronics show, the largest tech show in the world. So we have arguably our biggest media bang right off the top of the year. And that sets us up for all of our trade shows. You know, we do Miami and Dusseldorf and New York and Seattle and Vancouver, and there's so many within that kind of February to March timeframe. But CES sets the table in a way that no other show can. So I know that in that first quarter of the year, we're going to have a huge media bang. And you can look at the analytics any which way you want to, but I also know that during that time, we're going to have. I'm, um, making this up. 15 major product launches. So there's 15 press releases. Uh, we've got to do a media event somewhere along the way. These dates are set in stone. So, you know, a product launch doesn't surprise me overnight, you know, um, that that doesn't happen. So we know those are happening. Then there's. There's the. I call them the created stories. So we go to the Miami Boat show, and in Miami, we have record market share, we have record sales. We've won 10 awards. We do these things. And that's. I'll call. The show ends on a Sunday, Monday or Tuesday. I want that announcement to go out. Look at us. Before the show even reports on the attendance numbers, I want Brunswick to always be the first one to proactively say, look what we just did. Now, we also have our earnings, um, which is quarterly, so those are set in stone, too. So we know those are going to happen. Um, then fortunately, we win awards along the way, so kind of overlay the awards on top of that. Not every award needs a press release or an announcement. Um, but some of the major ones, you know, Fast Company or Forbes or Newsweek, all deserve some kind of a press release. So that's, you know, kind of looking at the external piece. We've got a big bucket of shows in the first quarter and then a huge bucket of shows kind of at the end of the year. In the middle of all that, we create our own events. So we have a media event every year in New York City. Why do we do that? Because all the media live in New York. And so why not bring the party to them? And we bring our boats at, uh, either Chelsea Piers or in Brooklyn, and we invite media who are not boating media. I love our boating media and they are more than welcome to come. But I want automotive reporters who've never been on a boat, but they can, they can see the. They see it, they get it. They get the synergies, you know, CNBC's and the Bloomberg's and the mom bloggers. And so you've. You've now creating there. Then on top of all of that we have our internal comms or our executive comms, and we do a CEO letter, 51 of those a year. So every Monday, except for the Monday before Christmas. And that is a four to five page, um, newsletter, uh, that goes out that highlights all the great work that is done by the teams, the awards, what's happening in the world. It has provided our CEO a voice. So that is one of the most opened. It is the most opened email that we send out. It still gets in the high 70% range, which is still incredible to all of us that people are reading it that much. But it is just, it is our goal in all of this is the best compliment you can say to me is, you guys are everywhere. I can't turn the page. I can't go anywhere without seeing Brunswick or, uh, our brands. I don't ever want communications to be, you know, one of the things in our Glint surveys at the end of the year that our employees are upset because we didn't communicate enough. We communicate a lot now. We don't take an opinion on everything as we should not, but we are very heavy on communications in terms of trying to create those voices internally. And then how do you take those internal stories and make them external? And how do you take that external story? Like CES. 70 people will go to CES. We have 14,500 people. So we bring CES to our employees through podcasts and videos and emails and pictures and social posts. And so it is a long winded answer to your question, but it is, it is. It is never linear, but it is always, we know these events are happening. We know these launches are happening. We know these events we're creating, we know these internal events are happening. So all of those are plotted. And then you have to be willing to pivot. You know something is going to happen. There may be a hurricane that takes out one of our facilities. Now, it's probably bad to have this story out. Let's hold this off. So you've got to be able to pick and choose and be able to pivot is kind of my. It's kind of my word for 2026. It's the Ross Geller Friends pivot.

Pat McGovern: That's a great segue into my next question, Lee, which is crisis communication. That's a big part, I'm guessing, of your job when it comes up. It's got to be all consuming. How do you approach an issue when it comes up? I'm guessing you already have some scaffolding, some structure in place, but each crisis is going to be a little bit different. So how do you and the team pivot and what do you look for to make Brunswick come out shining? Uh, in a situation that's less than

Lee Gordon: desirable, certainly the best thing that could happen is that nobody ever hears about it. There is a sense of gratification. More so than getting on the Today Show. I would rather you not hear about something really bad that happened here than I would celebrate a, uh, hit on Good Morning America, the Today Show. I get more pleasure in the defense of it. And you're right, not every crisis is created equally. You know, Covid, hurricanes, um, a cyber incident, um, ah, a sickness at a facility, an injury. There's a lot of different things we deal with. And yes, we have the initial thing is how do we help whoever needs to be helped first? On the side of it, I'm thinking in the back of my head, I need a holding statement, I need to deal with whatever it is. But in the front side of it is how do we deal if it's employee based, how do we help the employees or the managers or the team around, make sure that this stays as contained or help the person maybe who got injured or whatnot? You know, we similar to athletes, you can't just wake up in the morning and run a 40 yard dash. You got to train, you got to practice, you got to run plays. You've got to work at different scenarios. And we do that with, you know, we have a very small team, but I make them run the plays. And what happens when? What would you do if this happens? What would be the first thing you do if that happens? And we have myself, our, uh, head of hr and our head of legal. We kind of call us the Triangle. And if something happens, whatever it is, one of the three of us has to know about it immediately. Then we'll get together as a threesome. We will figure out do we need to get the CEO involved? Maybe we don't need to. We can tell them after the fact, who do we need to get involved right away? Who do we need to tell right away? What kind of communications do we need? Um, but usually we try to make sure that the employee is handled. And then now, if it's an external situation, for example, a hurricane takes out one of our Freedom Boat Club locations. There's a whole set of, what are we going to do, a fire overnight? Um, you know, all of these things happen. The cyber attack, those are. It's kind of not an if, but when. And, you know, when you run the playbook and you Run through all the different scenarios. And you have to do that because it's going to get you on a Saturday afternoon, which you're at a kid's ballgame, it's going to get you when you're on vacation. It's never going to be on a random Thursday at 1:00 clock when you don't have a meeting. That's just not how crisis work.

Pat McGovern: Lee, do you literally have, you know, a three ring binder that's like step one, step two, step three, uh, when you say, hey, I make my team run the plays, is that what you're talking about?

Lee Gordon: I have a binder. That is a crisis playbook. I absolutely do. We don't print it anymore because we try to be sustainable. But yes, I 100% have a crisis management playbook. And we have about 20 different scenarios and we will break into it every now and then. Do we need to update this? Has this person left who needs to call? What would we do if. And things change? There is, um. You know, I've seen so many stories recently with AI creating different crises or being a bot or, um, you know, our cyber team has shown us videos. You know, you go in, they say, say these three words. These seven words say, I'm at a higher octane, a lower octane smile for the camera. And all of a sudden they've created this video of me with a hat on walking, like crashing into walls in a hotel room, yelling at somebody at a grocery store. And it looks just like me. And it's picked up my voice because I've done that and it is scary to see what is possible. And so that's a whole other crisis that we're going to have to try to figure out in the future.

Pat McGovern: How do you look at it in terms of over communicating or, uh, what's enough? And m. I'm sure there's not a straight answer, Lee, but how do you judge it? It's like, no, I think we've said enough here. I think saying less is probably more effective. Or no, there's still a lot of communication we need to do around this topic.

Lee Gordon: That's the one area where I will always argue that no matter what your playbook is, you need to be flexible because that is a gut decision. Uh, there is not any scenario where you can go, well, this is what the playbook says, so we have to stick with it. That just doesn't work that way because you might say, okay, we're not going to communicate. Well, our plan in this situation is to say nothing. And then you are getting barraged by the media and others, and you go, you know what? We actually have to say something. We, we've got to tell our employees. I will give you, uh, an example of something that happened to us. Again, you don't plan for it, but you never know. Um, at one of our facilities a couple of years ago, a, uh, former employee came back in. He found a way into this hole, kind of where the trucks go. Um, and he shot two employees. And he got one in the back of the head, got one in the hand. The one in the hand took off running. Uh, the one in the back of the head. They both survived. Um, but this happened late at night. Um, I was. I was in a plane because you're never at home. You're never in the office. You're always somewhere where you need to be. Um, I was on a plane, actually flying down to Florida, which was nearby where this was taking place. And I was going to Florida for a completely different meeting. I landed, I rented a car, and I went straight to where they were. Fortunately, I was there. Our plan was, we're going to say very little. We're going to have our holding statement if we need it. But then as the more we kept talking about this, the employees were hearing about it. They wanted to know what was going on. Why are the police there? What is happening? I'm hearing all these things on social media right now. We've got to tell our employees, okay, here's what we know. Here's what's going on. We'll update you more when we know. And it's okay to be honest. It's okay to say, this is what we know, this is what we don't know. But we're working on X, Y and Z. If you get any media inquiries, send them my way. Do not be a hero. Do not talk to the media. Then you let the world take a couple turns. It could be 30 minutes, it could be an hour, it could be a day. And then you reassess as a leadership team or your comms team. Okay, we think we need to say something again because the story is not going away or people want to know. That could be the same with a cyber incident. You've got to communicate during that because your emails have been compromised. Maybe your personal information has been compromised. People don't know what they don't know. But if there's something happened that is, uh, a fire happened at one of our facilities, I don't want to tell anybody about it. I would rather nobody know about it, because maybe it's just a piece of rubber started on fire, but there was a hundred police, one, uh, hundred fire trucks because that's just what they do. And then we're making it into a much bigger story than it really was. So there is not a cookie cutter approach, in my opinion, to how much you communicate or don't communicate. You really need to feel the moment and see where you can kind of push and pull on that and get alignment with your management team. As to where do you think you don't want to externally over communicate if you don't have to? Because then you start to put yourself in a position where you're now setting the tone for what will always be the case and you can't take the toothpaste back once it's out.

Pat McGovern: Uh, Lee, you've been in the space a while. How would you say PR comms has changed from the time you started until now? What are some of the differences? What are some of the similarities? I'd just love to get your take on the space.

Lee Gordon: When I first started in PR comps, the reason why I didn't ever want to go from TV to PR or to communications is because I always thought, uh, uh, a PR or comms professional, they wrote press releases and they pitched stories. That's just what they did. And you know, it's, when you work at an agency is what you do. Uh, but it has changed drastically. You know, today I, I sit on the management team, I report directly to the CEO and there is a reason for that, is because communications is in our company. You have to see everything from everywhere. I have got to be involved in every meeting or topic or conversation or decision. I'm not always the final decision making, but I have to know what is going on. If we're about to acquire a company or sell a company, I can't know the day before we're about to do it. And they go, oh, wait a minute, we need a whole comms strategy. You know, for you it has changed in the sense that I truly believe communications is getting more, um, responsibility, less service orientated. I think comms is becoming part of senior management teams at companies that value it. And those are the ones that I enjoy talking to because to me that just means that you understand that there is a humongous difference between marketing and communications. And while they work closely together and in some cases in parallel paths, they're completely different. You know, a marketing team cannot handle a crisis situation. Nor can my communications team run a, uh, you know, a three month Long product launch with all the different variables you need to do. You're trained differently. But if done right, and especially now, since COVID since tariffs, since wars, since politics is becoming part of the everyday conversation. Communications has changed in a way that it's hard to say where it's going to be the three to five years from now. But I do know it continues to be more important than ever before. I'll give you one more example with that too, is within our board. We're a publicly traded company. We have our board of directors meetings all the time. Uh, communications never had a presentation to give. I was there. I showed up for the meetings, but I smiled and sat in the back and asked a question. Every now and then. I've got multiple presentations in every board meeting, in every one of our leadership meetings. I start with a, uh, what's going on in the world? What is happening? What do we need to know about? And then a communications and a government affairs update. If a company truly believes in it, then their comms teams can thrive. Now, my team is, you know, 1/1,000th of what the marketing team is in terms of headcount, but we get involved in everything. And to me, that's the rush that I miss so much about the TV world that I can still get in the comms space.

Pat McGovern: I want to talk about that marketing in comms, and you laid it out really nicely. There are certain things that you guys do well. There are certain things that marketing does well. Um, but how do you, how do you. Where do you overlap and how do you work together to get the greatest efficiency as possible? Like, look on that for a little bit.

Lee Gordon: It's. It is, it's probably the biggest gray area, I think, in any company. If you ask any comms professional or marketing professional, there's always the, you know, there's. There's a lot of shades of gray. We try to look at it as marketing sells the product so they are accountable. In a racy document, they are accountable and responsible for the sale or the promotion of the sale of our product. We can come in and do media events and different communications that will help support that. We on the comm scene are selling our brand. We're selling our people. We're selling. What do our stakeholders need to think, believe and know about Brunswick? What does our government officials, our investors, our board, our employees, the general public need to think about us when they talk about us in the public. And where we overlap is more on shows and events than anything else. Because at a typical, call it the Miami Boat show. So the Miami Boat show will have six or seven different exhibits for many of our brands. Boston Whaler, Sea Ray, Mercury Marine will have their own. All of them will launch a product or two or seven in some cases. So the marketing team helps launch that product. What is the social strategy? What's the advertising strategy? What is the go to market strategy? We and the comms team will come in and we have events within events within events. So we're in Miami. I'm going to invite the governor of Florida to come and kick off maybe one of our events. We're going to have a media event to launch one of our products. So 50 people will be there. We're having our board meeting there. Is our board there? They need to be there to see this. Wait. Our employees all want to know what's going on. Maybe we live stream it, maybe we do podcasts, maybe I do social videos to bring it to life. And so that's the area at an event. How do you maximize every opportunity? And that's where kind of where I believe we have the best collaborative approach to things. You know, the comms team doesn't get involved in Amazon marketing, um, Amazon sales, whereas the marketing team doesn't get involved in corporate, shouldn't get involved in corporate brand or government, uh, relations, if you will. And yet there's still a little bit of gray area all the way around. But yeah, I, I'm, I'm so fortunate and so truly believe in the. They. These are two separate functions. One can't really report into the other one because you're just not doing a service. The, the CMO is never going to be as strong ah, at comms as the comms lead and the comms lead is never going to be as strong at marketing as a CMO is. And to do that, I've, I've, I've seen it, um, I've lived it and I definitely wouldn't do that. I would not recommend it and wouldn't do that again.

Pat McGovern: Lee, when you look out at the landscape from a comms point of view, who do you look at and say these guys are doing it right? I'm sure you got Brunswick in there, right? But who are the others that you look at and go, yeah, this is how you do it, right?

Lee Gordon: You know, I think of the people there are and it's nobody in our industry. I look at a company like ConAgra, you know, they make Slim Jim and those kind of products. Um, they do an incredible job of communications. You know, they are, um, they are involved in the WWE and wrestling and they do such a great job of some of those things. You know, I monitor a lot of sports, uh, teams. I think some sports teams do it really well. Um, they can be a little cheeky, if you will, because they have the ability to do that, whereas we can't do that as well. I like um, Lululemon. I think they do a really nice job of, of communications. They've had some hiccups along the way in crisis management. Certainly, um, there are some automotive companies, you know, you can always point to Tesla, um, but they've got a, they've also had their issues certainly, for sure. But you, you try to find like minded comms teams. John Deere and Caterpillar do a really nice job of uh, promoting what they do really well and also staying out of the news for reasons that they don't need to be in the news when something bad happens. There's a shooting, there's something. Nobody looks at Brunswick and says, I want to get a boat company's opinion on, um, you know, the, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, um, was shot. They're not looking at us. We're not the first phone call that they make. But I do look at how others respond to that or don't respond to that and take notice of those things. And you also try to take notice of companies who do a really poor job. I never want to have to put out a statement that we apologize for saying something or for someone that would just crush my soul to see us have to do that. Because that would mean that I have, uh, made such a colossal error in judgment and what we've done and too aware of what we're doing all the time to do something like that.

Pat McGovern: I want to pivot a little bit. Lee, using your word and talk about personal branding. You've helped and coached executives, athletes. Personal branding seems to be a big thing in 2026. It has been for a number of years now. What do people get wrong with it? What do people get right with it? How do you approach personal branding?

Lee Gordon: You know, it's, it's, it's a really good point. Those who shun it, those who turn their nose up at it, are the ones who are going to get hit in the head with it. I've worked with professional athletes, college athletes, executives. Um, you know, I, I'm on several, um, boards. Uh, we, I'm on the board of the Children's Hospital in Chicago. I work with some of their executives on not just personal branding, but board presence, media relations, Media training. You've got to, you have to, you know, you exercise your body if you want to be in shape or you want to stay healthy, you have to exercise your brand as well if you want to stay relevant in that space. You know this. And I know we're on audio, so I'm, um, holding up my phone, but, you know, the phone has changed everything because everybody has a voice. My kids do not know what Google is, but they do know what TikTok reviews are. I, um, mean, they know what Google. They just don't care about it. Everything they do, every decision they made and currently make is because of somebody they saw on TikTok or they've gone to the TikTok reviews. So, you know, when as we're growing up and you think about the Walter Cronkites and the Dan Rather and the Tom Brokaw, uh, and the local newscasters and the local voices, these are people you grow up watching. And what they said meant something. They were the newscasters that you listened to. Now, Today you've got CNBC, Jim Cramer. He has about 150,000 people who will watch him every day. Well, Kim Kardashian has like 250 million or God only knows what she has on people who you trust people differently today. The voices are differently today. All that to say is every single person should invest time in their personal brand. And because you have to, you have to do it for a lot of different reasons. There's not a better salesperson of you than you. And if you're not doing it, somebody's going to do it for you. And you probably don't like what they have to say. So how do you continuously use LinkedIn or use social media? What are people saying about you when you walk out of the room? That's important to me. You're not going to get everybody to love you, not everybody's going to like you, and that you're never going to get to that place. But are people going to miss you when you're gone? Are they going to remember you? Are they going to want to buy into you? Are they going to want to invite you to things? Are they going to want to, um, allow you to have a larger voice? That all has to do with how much are you investing in yourself. And I can't stress how important investing in your own personal brand is, whether it is just your resume, your LinkedIn profile, your social, whatever it is. But don't half it. If you're going to do it, lean into it and spend a little Bit of time with it. I'm also talking to myself here, uh, because I probably need to. Well, I could. You could always do more. But we stress that here all the time. We don't want people to promote themselves so much that they go take a job somewhere else. But use it in a way where you're another voice to help us promote because it is earned. Media Owned Media. There's a great opportunity to really promote yourself, your company, what you're doing, all the great work you're doing, but you just have to invest time in it.

Pat McGovern: I have to talk to you about AI you brought it up earlier. Lee, how are you? Said you have a small team, right? So you've got to be very nimble. You got to be very efficient. How does Lee Gordon think about AI using AI? Break it down for us.

Lee Gordon: It's a great intern today. I use it more for efficiency than anything else. It's not going to write a press release for me on a product that has not been launched yet because it doesn't have the context of, of that. Uh, but it is a really good way to get a first draft or to proof if, you know, Copilot is great. You know, is. Is this the strongest language I could possibly use? Where I've used it a lot more recently is on the government affairs side. You know, here's a thousand page document. Can you tell me the top five things I need to know? I have lawyer friends who, who do it as well. And they're a little bit concerned because their billable hours may be going down. Because people truly understand that it doesn't take as much time to do this work as it did in the past. But I went to Brussels recently to go meet with members of parliament and I said, here's who I'm meeting with. Here are the topics I'm thinking about. What are they going to hit me with? What are the things that I need to be prepared for what's on top of their mind? And it was. It's not perfect, but it's at least something to give you a starter. You're going to have to go in there, you've got to fix it, you've got to tweak it, you've got to make sure it sounds good. But for our team, we use it a lot for efficiency. Award submissions is another good one that is a time suck, but it's extremely important. Um, it gets you started, it gets you going. Writing bills, writing letters, uh, any of those things are extraordinarily helpful. Now where does it go in the future. That is a great question. You know, on the comm side, I look at it a lot more. Not taking anybody's job. I don't see this replacing anybody. I see it allowing the comms team to really focus on the relationships and the strategic work and letting the AI do the grunt work. Also, when you think about where the large language models are pulling today, type in anything into Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini. They are pulling press releases and copy from our website. They're not pulling SEO, they're not pulling advertising. They're pulling from the stuff that we do. So part of our AI strategy is to even level up more in our how many more press releases can we send out? How much more copy can we put onto our website? So when people start to search certain things about us, they get everything they need from just this constant stream of news. The million dollar question in all of it, and there's probably $8 million question is, you know, who and where are, uh, you know, who's. Where is this? Where is ultimately these large language models pulling from? And do we trust it? And can it be manipulated? And can it, you know, if somebody takes it at its core and copies and paste it, how much trouble can they get into? And that is where we haven't seen it yet. But, you know, it's on the tip right now.

Pat McGovern: Comms is changing a lot. I'm sure government affairs is changing a lot. You just talked about AI. That's changing the game a lot. The world is just moving faster, right? It's just spinning around faster. Lee, how do you stay abreast of just best practices in the comms field, bringing that to bear to not only your team, but to the rest of the organization? Are there, you know, podcasts you listen to? Are there books that you really focused on? Are there? How do you, how do you stay relevant?

Lee Gordon: I. Not lack of sleep probably more than anything. Um, you know, I, I'm not a big podcast listener, although I do enjoy them. When I get on a roll, I get on a roll. But in, I listen to more of it to be for the entertainment of, of the podcast, you know, like the new heights or, you know, I listen to kind of things that I enjoy. Um, I, I read as many articles as I possibly can from, you know, Reagan Communications or PR Daily. Try to talk to other comms professionals. What are you hearing? What are you seeing? Um, go to, going. Speaking at conferences are always a good idea because not only do I get a chance to, to go speak at the conference, but then I can sit through the whole conference too, and I can learn and listen and be around others, you know, and not just in kind of the PR comm space, but government affairs and public affairs. They're seeing some very similar changes as well. And you're right, the world is moving at warp speed right now, and it's only going to get faster. We've never, ever had a world where machines are smarter than human beings. And we're about there right now. So what does that mean for us? Are we listening to the machines? Are the machines listening to us? How do we delineate what is true and what is not? When I was on the news, as, uh, I said it before, we went on at 11 o' clock and people watched and they always joke. They're like, you're the last thing I see when I go to bed at night. I'll watch you, and then I'll watch the weather and then I go to sleep. There's nothing that you can see on the 11 o' clock news now that is actually news unless some major hurricane or plane crash at 10:59pm it's not. It's. You've got. Everything that you could ever want in your life is on your phone. Uh, you can watch it the way you want to watch it. You can watch it whichever network you want to watch it. If you're a Republican, you love Fox News. If you're a Democrat, you love CNN and you think the other is terrible. And we've all gone to entertainment. You know, it's, it's where, um, it's, it's kind of where we've, we've gone where, you know, you, you watch what you want to watch when you want to watch it at whatever device you want to watch it on. You could watch American Idol on your big tv. You can be texting who you want to win on your phone and then you can be on a side chat on your iPad. Like, it's nuts how much access we all have to each other. And you don't have to be right anymore. That is, I think my biggest concern with kind of the comms world is you could be like, oops, I was wrong, and just quickly go in and edit it and people move on because it's expected. And that is a weird place because we could not be wrong. We were never allowed to be wrong. You had to be, you wanted, you had to be first and right. And that was a, uh, interesting dynamic.

Pat McGovern: Lee Gordon, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Do you have the final word? How do people find out more about you, about Brunswick? Whatever you want to promote, Lee, the mic is yours. Take it and run.

Lee Gordon: Would love to connect on LinkedIn. Uh, Lee Gordon brand is my LinkedIn profile. Brunswick.com is our website. You know, I appreciate the opportunity. That's. As we talked about this before, we could be talking for four to five hours on so many of these topics and look forward to having that opportunity again. But, you know, the communications world is changing. For the comms professionals out there, even the marketing professionals out there, it is. Everything you thought was true two years ago, five years ago, is not going to be true two or five years from now. My daughter is a junior in high school. Uh, there are AI majors now in colleges. What she is going to be when she grows up is going to be, uh, vastly different than anything I ever knew to be true when I was in school. The classes she's going to take, the events she's going to be a part of. The access that kids have is unbelievable today at their fingertips. And you got to keep up with it. You've got to keep up with our business needs to run, our business needs to be profitable. And we've got to continue to communicate at the warp speed that we always have. So it's staying on top of it and making sure you've got the right people around you, because you can't do it yourself. And if you got that incredible team who is ready to rock and roll. And again, I'll leave you with this. That, uh, somebody you know. There's always a question, what keeps you up at night? And I always say, what gets me up in the morning? I like to. I pivot it. It's not the, uh. Like when I go to sleep at night, I get up in the morning ready to rock and roll. After the dogs go out, of course. But you just gotta love what you do. And if you do that, the sky's the limit.

Pat McGovern: Lee, thanks again.

Lee Gordon: Thank you.