Ten minutes is long enough to toast a bagel badly, miss a train narrowly, or turn an institutional problem into a public one. Connection Point, a strategic communications firm founded in 2023, has made those ten minutes a kind of unit of account. In its view, the earliest stage of a crisis is not a writing contest. It is an organizational test. Does anyone know who can speak? Does legal know what operations knows? Does the police department understand what City Hall will say? Is there a holding statement that sounds like a person wrote it?
This is a useful distinction because most agencies sell the visible artifact: the campaign, the video, the media hit, the tasteful deck of messages. Connection Point sells those things too. Its service menu covers strategic communications, content and creative work, campaign planning, and crisis management. But the firm's more interesting product is the machinery underneath the sentence. It helps municipalities, nonprofits, law firms, public-safety agencies, and purpose-driven companies decide how information should move when the organization is tired, watched, and short on time.
The first failure is usually a hallway
The message exists. The facts have been checked. The public is asking. Still, nothing moves. Connection Point calls attention to the ordinary culprits: legal review, leadership hesitation, overlapping authority, and an approval path that resembles a municipal parade route. These failures are boring right up until they become expensive. Silence does not remain empty for long. It is occupied by witnesses, screenshots, old grievances, and the person online who is most certain and least informed.
The firm's response is notably procedural. Its Stay in Your Lane training asks local government and public-safety communicators to separate roles before an incident. Its basic municipal course covers news releases, interviews, press conferences, brand, image, and perception. The advanced course moves the communicator from delivery person to strategic adviser. A fourth program, Curated Leadership, uses discussion and point-counterpoint to examine trust, groupthink, and service. Custom tabletop exercises make the whole arrangement uncomfortable on purpose, while the stakes are still fictional.
“The first ten minutes determine whether you establish credibility or have to spend months rebuilding it.”Connection Point, The 10-Minute Crisis Test
That claim is the heart of Connection Point's market position. A conventional PR shop can be hired when someone needs attention. A crisis boutique can arrive when attention has become hostile. Connection Point sits between those moments. It wants the brand plan and the emergency plan to recognize each other.
A young firm with old scar tissue
Connection Point is young; its founders are not new to the room. Chief executive Dr. J. Eric Kowalczyk spent more than two decades in crisis communications, leadership strategy, and public affairs. As a Baltimore Police captain and director of media relations, he worked through the unrest following Freddie Gray's death in 2015 under national and international scrutiny. He later wrote The Politics of Crisis, spoke at TEDxBeaconStreet, advised political campaigns, and, by the firm's count, trained more than 2,000 communications specialists across 41 states and 75 cities.
Co-founder Khristina Cook supplies a different kind of pattern recognition. Her career runs through L'Oréal USA, Forever 21, Caesars Entertainment, Baby2Baby, the Gary Sinise Foundation, and the Center for Policing Equity. She has worked across brand identity, owned channels, events, sponsorships, cause marketing, influencers, and nonprofit communications. One founder knows the televised briefing under pressure; the other knows what a brand sounds like on an ordinary Tuesday. That pairing explains why the company can sell a creative campaign and a crisis protocol without pretending they are unrelated species.
Where the work concentrates
Editorial map, not reported revenue: Connection Point's public material puts unusual weight on readiness and coordination alongside familiar agency craft.
Four verbs and a bill you have to ask for
The company organizes its work around four verbs: communicate, create, amplify, mitigate. Communicate means messaging, earned media, leadership counsel, and change management. Create is multimedia content and brand identity. Amplify covers integrated campaigns, cause marketing, and audience engagement. Mitigate is the crisis practice - protocols, stakeholder alignment, reputation counsel, and support before, during, and after an incident.
This is a services business, not a software platform. Organizations buy tailored expertise, projects, counsel, training, or some combination of them. Connection Point does not publish consulting rates, customer counts, revenue, funding, or valuation. The visible front door is education: webinars, articles, public conversations, and a long training calendar. Its May 2026 10-Minute Crisis Test webinar was free, as were several of its public online sessions. The bespoke work begins after the diagnostic conversation.
The public test costs nothing
Several webinars are free. Custom consulting and training prices are not posted, which is normal for a scope-driven professional service but makes comparison shopping difficult.
The customer list tells you where the thesis is most persuasive. The firm's site displays organizations including the San Antonio Police Department, FBI-LEEDA, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, New York State's homeland-security and emergency-services division, Boys & Girls Clubs of South County, Humans of Public Service, advocacy groups, and law firms. These are institutions whose audiences do not merely consume a message. They judge whether the messenger deserves authority.
Trust is not a tone of voice
Plenty of agencies say they value trust. Connection Point is more specific about where trust leaks out: a delayed acknowledgment, two departments contradicting each other, a leader who waits for perfect information, a lawyer editing for liability while the public edits for motive. The firm's instructors have worked at the NYPD, the Baltimore Police Department, city governments, transit agencies, newsrooms, global brands, and nonprofit organizations. The pitch is experience converted into rehearsal.
Its culture is also part of the proposition. Connection Point describes itself as LGBTQ+, woman, Black, and Latina-owned and operated. It reports that 58 percent of its team is Black and Latine, 67 percent is women, and 17 percent is LGBTQ+. Those figures do not guarantee a wise message. They do widen the number of lived assumptions available for interrogation before a campaign or crisis response reaches the public.
A five-question drill worth stealing
- Who has authority to release the first confirmed facts?
- Which audience must hear directly from you before social media does?
- What can you say truthfully while important details are still unknown?
- When will you update, even if the update is that verification continues?
- Have operations, legal, leadership, and communications practiced this path together?
The drill works only if the answers have names, backups, and a clock attached. It is less useful when leadership will not delegate authority, when legal review has no emergency lane, or when an organization treats community relationships as something to invent after the cameras arrive. A ten-minute framework cannot manufacture trust from nothing. It can reveal, with uncommon speed, where the nothing is.
That may be Connection Point's most transferable idea. The first draft of a crisis statement matters. The first draft of the organization matters more. If the institution has decided who listens, who knows, who approves, and who speaks, the words have a chance. If it has not, the clock still starts.