172: Tandem Leadership: Communicate with Partners and Employees to Grow Your Business with Gina Catalano

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank Show episode 172, tandem leadership, communicate with partners and employees to grow your business with Gina Catalano. Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Robert Plank show. We're here today with Gina Catalano, and she's the founder of venture solutions, a consulting and coaching company focused on the success of small companies and their leaders. With over 20 years of experience leading and working with businesses, she has authored the book the Amazon Kindle best seller, tandem leadership, how your number two can make you number one. In this book, she outlines an innovative strategy for entrepreneurs to work with the number two, or second in command, leader in their company, to achieve the success in all areas of their life. So Gina, welcome to the show. Hey, it's

Gina Catalano 0:48 great to be here. Thanks, Robert.

Robert Plank 0:49 I am glad that you are here. So I guess so we're talking about leadership and dealing if you're the number one and dealing with the number two. Is that right? Yeah.

Gina Catalano 0:59 Or how you work with anybody that you have a strategic partnership with, even if it's not. You don't, you're, you're solo entrepreneur, and you have either joint ventures or virtual assistant or a partner. I mean, what are the things that make that successful?

Robert Plank 1:14 Okay? And, I mean, and, yeah, like, I think that we all deal with that. Like, I mean, I have a business partner who is my equal? And, you know, we deal with with joint venture partners and stuff, and I don't know, like, to be honest, like for at least for me, like there was a phase of some kind of growing pains, where sometimes I would, I would feel like maybe I was pulling more of my own weight than the other person, or maybe I felt like I was kind of letting the other person down. So you do you see that kind of thing happening, or maybe there's some kind of an imbalance one way or the other?

Gina Catalano 1:46 Yeah, and I think a lot of that happens because especially like in the beginning, especially in the entrepreneurial realm, I think we really pride ourselves a lot of the time on being able to be to do everything and to be everything to everyone. And it's a kind of a badge of honor, you know, to being able to do all those things. And for most entrepreneurs, it's something a lot of them like it. I know I do, and like the variety and what they're doing. And I think what happens eventually is when you're working with other people. I mean, there's might be conflict, but we sometimes think that we can do some things better than other people, that maybe other people can do better than us, and that creates some stress. I don't know if that was an issue with you when you were starting to work with other people.

Robert Plank 2:36 Yeah. I mean, that's pretty much an issue I have with literally everyone I've ever come into contact with with her, yeah. I mean, I could totally relate to, like, the the ego, workaholic, control freak, you know, if I have someone else, if I tell someone else to do something, or ask them to do something, and it comes back, and maybe it comes back and I think, well, that's not the way I would have done it. Or, you know, I would have done it faster. So, I mean, is there a quick answer for that side of it,

Gina Catalano 3:01 yeah, because I think at some point, you know, it's super interesting. You know, $100,000 a year is kind of one of those interesting marks that people get over for revenue. And while, I mean, I don't have the stats right in front of me, but there's a huge number of solo practitioners in our country, probably around the world, that make under 100,000 but once you get over that $100,000 mark, the number of businesses that only have one person in them is really small. So depending on what your your growth ideas, you know what you want to do, the ability to work with other people is really important. So I always say, understand, start with you, start with the person, and understand what you do best. And really ask yourself these questions. You know, what do I like to do? You know, what do I have to do? And is there other people that could do this for me that's maybe I can pay less money, or is there? Are they better at it than I am? And in the end, they would maybe pass me at doing that. And

Robert Plank 4:09 that seems like kind of a we kind of have to set our ego aside and take that inventory. It sounds like

Gina Catalano 4:15 Yeah, and I think the ego is an interesting thing. I think that it can help, you know, make when you're up at three o'clock in the morning trying to hit a deadline, it can be great telling you that you can keep going, but it also can masks, you know, it also tells us that we're doing things better than we're not, and so understanding that that some of the things that make our ego keep us going is great in the short term, but it won't serve us in the long term. And if you're ultimately about serving your customer, and that's where I always try to bring it back to a lot of times we come back to saying, you know, I'm not giving everything to my customer because I'm too busy doing stacking papers on you know. Use a dumb example, or I'm, you know, doing something that I could automate, which is something that I know you work on with when you help your customers and your clients, yeah,

Robert Plank 5:09 yeah. I mean, it is, and I think that that, you know, recently, I've, in the last few years, like, I've kind of gotten over that, not like, the entire way, but a little bit where, like, you know, I split the revenue 5050 with my business partner, and we now hire someone to jump in on the Help Desk. But it took a long, long while to get over so, I mean, so, like, a few minutes ago, you were saying that. So a lot of businesses, once they get past that $100,000 mark, if they remain just a one person business, then that's really going to slow their growth. So, I mean, how, what does someone do? Or how does someone get over that, that mindset of, okay, well, now if I'm at 100 grand, or from at, you know, 120 or 150 grand, and how I bring someone on now I'm back down to 50 grand. Now I'm back in the 75 grand, because now I have to split the money. So I mean, what are your thoughts about that? Yeah,

Gina Catalano 5:59 I think what I like to think about it as is that, you know, this is an old it's an old adage. But you know, if you ever had a goldfish as a kid, if you put a gold, if you ever put a goldfish in a small bowl, it will stay to the size of the bowl. If you make the tank bigger, the goldfish will grow. And I think of the goldfish a lot. And if you've ever seen a carp, if you've seen how big a carp is, they're huge, and they're in cart ponds or in the ocean. And so think of yourself trying to grow. Yourself is that you want to be in a bigger environment. You want to have a bigger goal. So if you know you want to go to, say, $500,000 for example, and you've, you know, you're at 150 and you virtually do not want to work any more hours, because that's one of the reasons that we become business people, our own entrepreneurs, because we we're tired of working for somebody, and we want to be able to control. We want to have control. So the idea is, think of that bowl getting bigger, and then figure out what are the things that you can do that really aren't your secret sauce. There aren't the things that somebody's going to pay you the big ticket dollar to do. And quite frankly, when I start working with people, there's a lot of things that they're doing that somebody else could do. So then, so say you want to grow your business by 50,000 so can you afford to invest 25,000 to get to that 50,000 I mean, and that's where you start looking at and everybody has their thresholds, and that's how you start working through some of those issues. And some of it's just what we are stuck in our brain, that we have these myths that we need to break.

Robert Plank 7:43 Okay? And then, yes. So what I'm hearing from you is that so, so just to to kind of put that back into, like, the event, the numbers we were making up. So if someone gets to say 100 grand, and they say, Well, I want to get to 500 then maybe they'll have to take a little bit of a dip for now to bring on some other person, or some other people in the team, but in the long term, because they won't get burned out, because they'll, you know, have more time freed up because more stuff will get done, then that will continue to increase. Is that right? Yeah,

Gina Catalano 8:13 exactly. That's a great way to say it. And I think too, it also allows you to freeze you up, to do some things, to to work on some bigger ticket items that maybe you don't have time to work on, that will yield you that 20 you know, maybe you can get, currently get $5,000 for doing something. Now, maybe you can get a $30,000 ticket, and that's what you want to look at, and you have to give up $2,000 of that to have somebody else work on that with you. So, so

Robert Plank 8:42 it's more of like a, like a long term thing. So you can, you can get out of the putting out of fires mode. And so you have your your tandem leadership book, and I'm looking at it right now at tandem leadership book.com and I'm looking at some of the bullet points and things. And one thing that really sticks out for me is where they say, you know, why your second in command, or your partner should be a compliment to your talents and skills, and not your clone or your opposite? And what that makes me think of is, you know, like, for like, for a long time, I thought that it had to be just me, and I had that kind of selfish mindset. And I thought that, you know, I can do everything, and if I have a business partner or I have someone on, then that might mean that I'm, you know, weak, or I'm shy, or I have these flaws or whatever. But then I got over that part. And then I partnered with someone for a few years who was kind of, I don't know, like, like, lazy or a flake, just to say, to use some harsh language, right? And, and I felt like I was always kind of, like, just trying to motivate him to do some stuff. And, and that worked for a while, but you know that that kind of fell apart. And then I partnered up with someone who did a lot of stuff on his own, right? So though, so we would, we would agree on some stuff. We work on a project, and I do my part and go and see what he was doing. And then it turns out that he would do, he was doing, like, five other things on his own. And then. And that kind of ran its course too, but that was, like, a pretty good partnership. And then the business partner I'm with now, I'm always thinking about this, like, I was like, Well, how does he relate to me? And so, like, I'm a, I'm a computer programmer, like I do the coding side of our business because, you know, that's fun for me. And he does, like, the, I don't know what you'd call like, the, like, the setting up of servers and, like, maintaining stuff that and like that, getting the traffic, that's his fun part. And I was thinking maybe just like a week or so ago, that what, I guess, the way that our skills or our personalities fit together is he's the person who does the experimenting and the dabbling and kind of figures out the path for us, and not to the extreme where he's off doing other projects, but he's, he's like, the problem solver, right? He'll figure out how to get something working, and then I'll be the one to like, to like, expand it and make it all crazy. And so, I mean, have you seen things like that, like, as far as the how the the skills and talents of people kind of fit together, like that,

Gina Catalano 10:58 absolutely. And I think what you sounds like, what you and your partner have stumbled upon, upon is is awesome, and is a little bit of magic too, especially in partnerships. And that's why I think this, the model can work either if it's a, you know, an employee in a suit, you know, a supervisor relationship, or in a partnership relation. Because what it really focuses on, you said two things that I thought were just awesome. You said the things that I'm good at and the things that I like to do, and those two things are what make make it so that a Monday morning isn't a Monday morning for you, right? I mean, those are the things that you like doing. And when you can find that, I think it's I think it's great. A lot of people want partners because they think it'll share. And maybe I'd be curious to know what your experience has been. But a lot of people say they want a partner because they want someone to share the burden of the relationship of the business with they and the good things, but the hard things, a lot of times, but partnerships don't work out a lot of times because of the things that you found out in your earlier ones. It's just not a good values fit, and you're not complimentary to each other in a way that's super rewarding for both of you. And I think what I'm trying to get with business leaders when they need to not everybody can have a partnership. And so what I what I work with companies that need to have more than one person in them, and what I found is, if that as a leader or an owner, if you can find someone that does that same thing, that they get just as big a kick out of the things that you don't like to do or you aren't good at, all of a sudden the burden feels relieved because you're not worrying about things that you don't like to do.

Robert Plank 12:46 Interesting, yeah? And that's that's making a lot of sense here. And to answer your question, yeah, like, I've come across a lot of people who say something like, well, I'll bring the idea, and you can do all the work, and we'll split the money, 5050, or, or, you know, maybe that's or sometimes that's kind of what they think. And they I get, I get, I've been, uh, baited and switched a little bit where it started off, as, you know, I had a certain set of tasks, and they had a certain set of tasks. And then after a while, I kind of felt like we were almost playing a game of chicken, like, who could do the least amount of work and and so that that wasn't healthy either. So, I mean, is that just the secret for someone who, who's trying to, like, bring more people into their business, and they're trying to, they're trying to figure out, like, how the how the skills and personalities can fit together. I mean, is it just a matter of listing the things that they do and then sort of setting aside what they what they're good at and they enjoy, and then what's left over is what the other person should do. I mean, would that be? Yeah,

Gina Catalano 13:41 that out. That's one way to think about it. I think at the top of the whole pyramid, which I think you probably found out, is the value system. You know, I've always really, for me, personally liked working with and for people that worked as hard as I did. And so that's, that's regardless of what your skill sets are, I mean, so the values have to match. What I typically do is have somebody track their tasks for as long as I can get an entrepreneur to do that over a course, even a couple of days. And what we've typically found is that people don't even realize some of the stuff that they're doing. And that came out of my old consulting days, when we would do continuous improvement in manufacturing plants, and people would track or we'd do videotaping of their work out in the factory, and they would look at like, oh my gosh, I never realized I did that we are such creatures of habit, I mean, humans, that there's so many things that we do that we don't even realize that we're doing. It takes away from our time. And one of the number one things I hear from entrepreneurs is I don't have enough time. And typically it's not that you don't have enough time, is that you don't realize what you're wasting your time on,

Robert Plank 14:56 interesting. So to figure that out, to figure out those, those. Time wasting tasks. I mean, what would someone do? Like, what would some be writing down like during the day, like, for example, like, so, if I was sitting in my computer, would I go, like, okay, like, 8:20am check my email, nine o'clock AM, answer customer support. Like, what I track? I mean, I like, am I looking for, like, you know, five things in a day or 10 things in a day? Am I tracking the amount of time I do for each task? What am I writing down here?

Gina Catalano 15:24 I like to make it as simple as possible. When I work with folks like you that are in the online realm, they like to develop a big thing to do it. But I typically just say, put a piece of paper down there and don't even have any value no value judgment on anything, right? Because you just start and you just write as you switch tasks, you just switch and you do as much as you can do. I mean, because you don't want to be so crazy about it, like at the micro, but if you can track it in half hour increments, I think that that typically will I mean, better. More is better. But if you can do it in half an hour increments, because typically what you'll find the checking email is a great example. People are there. People are letting their business or their computer or their screen time or their phone run them, as opposed to them running their business. And we don't even realize how often we're doing it.

Robert Plank 16:18 Interesting. Yeah. And I think, yeah, like, I mean, I'm no stranger to that. Like, I for sure fall into that like all I'll stop being aware of how much I check, you know, email on my phone or Facebook, until, you know, weeks ago by and I'm thinking, oh, man, I haven't put my phone down in so long. I kind of need to reset. And so along those lines, along the lines of, of, kind of getting out of the the pattern of being a habitual checker of all this stuff, like, is there, is there a secret to to not having to monitor the, you know, the new person that you bring on? Or is that just a matter of the trust building up?

Gina Catalano 16:56 I think the couple things, one of the values of doing that first exercise is when you when we go through the list, and we start, we start crafting what you know, what really makes you do your thing great, and what you really need support in is it basically starts becoming a job description, and it doesn't have to be a or a project description, or whatever you want to call it. And then once we do that, then we develop a plan to train someone to it. Because this, these are the two things that I always find out that happens. It's with entrepreneurs. It's either it's at either end of the spectrum, either A, they want to micromanage the person to death, or B, they want to just throw it over the wall and expect that they get the result that they want. It's never in the middle, I have to tell you, it never is. And so if you want to hire someone or work with someone that has the same amount of passion and interest in what they're supposed to do for you, you have to train you have to give them your expectations about what you want to have happen at the other side. And you have to be able to have accountability, and you have to follow up, and however that works for you and for them, you got to figure that out at the beginning. And

Robert Plank 18:09 is there a certain stage of growing pains when figuring all that stuff out?

Gina Catalano 18:16 I'm not quite sure what you mean, but I think typically it does take practice. And the thing that I suggest to everybody is, in the beginning, just set up regular expectations. And meeting times, or check in times, doesn't have to be a meeting necessarily, but check in times, because once you do that regularly, then it doesn't again. It becomes you're not making a decision about it. It just become you're expecting you get a progress report if it's every day, if it's once a week, if it's once a month, if it's four times a day, that way everybody understands what the expectation is, and you're not spending a lot of time managing. If that person can't do your minimum expectation, then you already know you have an issue before you even go down the path. Okay?

Robert Plank 19:00 And yeah. And that sort of answers my question. And just, you know, what I was, what I'm kind of imagining in my head is, so if someone says, okay, like, I know I'm at the point where something needs to change. I have these skills. Here's what I do during the day, and then here's, you know, here's this, this job or project description where, you know, I can, I can hire someone out. And so I guess what I'm asking is, is there a period of time, like, like a two weeks or three week period when there's all these meetings, when you're just trying to, trying to get a feel for the person, as far as, like, their their work ethic, or how often that that you need to check in with them. So like, if you, if you have them be accountable to you four times a day, maybe over time. Does that get dialed back, or does that get adjusted in any way?

Gina Catalano 19:47 Yeah, I think so. And I, you know, I don't, I don't recommend not ever checking in with a person, because I think that that's not good. But I typically, I. What I've seen is that people get into a rhythm and a routine, and it's when they stop the there's some sort of minimum routine they need to get to. If they stop it, that's when they run into problems. So say, at the beginning you're looking for daily check ins from somebody, and then you can move it to a week a month a lot of times, isn't going to work for most things. You know, it's hard to do big generalization, but you do still have to have some sort of rhythm. Because what I found is we as entrepreneurs expect someone to keep doing things even without any any more feedback. And they're looking for feedback, because they want, they want to help you achieve the results you're looking for,

Robert Plank 20:45 right? And I think that when thinking about just like that, that sort of aspect of it, like, you know, how like are they on track, or how much am I monitoring them? Like, I just, I've noticed that in the past maybe year or so that the the relationship between me and my business partner has really become more ironed out. And for a long time, there was just, there was a lot of periods of, you know, like where and me and him. I mean, we only check in maybe once every like, every other day, maybe, maybe twice a week, sometimes, and and I like that, right? I like that. I do my thing. He does his thing, and if we get stuck, we'll message one of the other. But we don't. We don't let getting stuck kind of kind of hold us back and and in thinking about all that, I think that my mistake for a long time was I would do a bunch of stuff on my end, and then, and I wouldn't, you know, tell him what I was doing, or I wouldn't even say much about what I was doing, and then I would look at what he was doing, and I would get really frustrated thinking like, well, what the heck is he doing? Because I wouldn't see on my end what he was doing. And I realized, looking back on that now that, well, he was probably doing his own thing too, but I wasn't seeing the, you know, the hour to hour output that he was doing, in the same way that he wasn't seeing my output until we met again. And I think that, you know, me and him would kind of clash sometimes, because I would, I mean, I wouldn't say anything nasty, but I would say, like, Well, can you do this? And then I wouldn't, you know, hear from him and and then on the flip side of it, I felt like I wished during that time that he had kind of nagged me more, because he's more of, like, the the laid back, easygoing one in the relationship, and I'm more of the that, that control freak type that you're talking about. And so from my point of view, I'm like, well, I need to, I need some of that feedback. I need some of that encouragement, and I don't see it as him, him getting on my case when he does that. And so just in the past, especially the past year or so, once, I kind of realized that he's not, he's not my clone, he's not my opposite. It's, it's a, it's a complimentary sort of relationship. Then I realized, okay, I need to back off a little bit, and I need to tell him to push me a little bit more too.

Gina Catalano 22:52 That's super interesting. I think the compliment thing, because I think it's a really subtle difference between being opposite. Because I think a lot of time people think it means being opposite, it means having the same sort of direction, but that you're kind of two pieces of a puzzle that help each other along. And I think it's awesome that you were able to realize that you really want as a partnership. You really wanted someone that challenged you a little bit, because that's working by yourself. It's hard to do that. I think, yeah,

Robert Plank 23:27 and I agree. And so, like, you know, as you're as you're kind of hearing about about my situation with my business partner. I mean, do you have any advice in that area, like, in that sort of case study, as far as, as far as what we should do, like, should we look in into bringing on a third person? Or, like, what, what do you think we could do, as far as, as far as, like, taking the better inventory, or as far as you know, making more money, or growing the business? Like, do you have any thoughts in that respect?

Gina Catalano 23:57 I think that one of the things is, and I don't know how often you guys do this is just more of a strategy standpoint. I don't know how often you guys check because of the kind of business that you're in, or having a general idea that you guys are metrics, very metrics driven. But I'm curious how often I would be curious, how often do you do a reset, in terms of further out than six months or a year in terms of looking at but what you guys want in your partnership, very

Robert Plank 24:26 little, and that that's a really good idea. And, like, that's one of those things where I'll think about that every now and then. Like, I'll think sometimes about, you know, like, well, because, because we don't really have like, actual, like, yearly income goals, it kind of just is whatever kind of comes out of it, and then, and then we don't think too much, like you said, about what we're going to be doing in two or three years. And it's one of those things where every now and then that that thought comes into my head, but then by the time I meet with him again, then I haven't written it down, or I've forgotten about it. So like that, that's a good idea. So we should think about more of like, like. Every now and then think about the long term type of stuff you're saying, yeah,

Gina Catalano 25:04 and, you know, and, you know, back in the olden days, when I first started my career, I mean, people used to do these 510, year plans, and I think it's so dynamic now that it's not that you can't do, you can't have those big goals, but I don't know if you want to tie it down for five years from now that, you know, I'll be doing X, Y, Z, but it is really powerful to have that little bit longer term vision out of your day to day, to say, you know, either in it can be an income goal, it can be a personal a life goal. You know, maybe there's the thing that you want to free up a half a day in your week to do something crazy. That's, you know, that's not business related. I met with somebody last week, for example, that, you know, the when we started the conversation, they were talking about wanting to sell their business. But at the end of the conversation, it wasn't they wanted to sell their business. What they really wanted is they just wanted a better balance in their life. And I'm not a big life balance person, but they there's some personal things that they needed to get into their life that would allow them to keep wanting to run their business. And so thinking out a year ahead, you know, and you can do it on a rolling basis, you know. You can say, you can have, you can say, every 12 months from now, where do I want to be? You know, who do I want to be and are am i doing those things to get there? Because the income goals are amazing. But I think also the program goals the market. You know how being aware of what's going on in the market, all those things, and it doesn't take a big deal. It takes an hour, just an hour, to blue sky, what you want to do a year from now. And sometimes you start doing those things, and they start showing up, and that's what's exciting,

Robert Plank 26:46 right? And, I mean, yeah, it's kind of blowing my mind, and it's kind of getting the gears turning in that sort of respect, and, and, yeah, so, I mean, you've given a lot for me to think about, and a lot for our our listeners to think about, in whatever sort of situation they're in, and whatever sort of, you know, brick wall that they're they're hitting, or if they're, oh, they've always thought, well, you know, I kind of want more I want to grow the business. I want to bring more people on. And so as we're winding down this call Gina, I mean, when you, when you, you know, consult with people, or you, you deal with anyone who is trying to either bring on a partner, or bring on a number two, or remove somewhat of themselves from the business. Do you see any big mistake happening over and over with this?

Gina Catalano 27:31 Yeah, you know. And this is an old saying, and I hate to use old things, but if you want to grow your business, what got you here won't get you there, and it may keep you where you're at, but it typically won't get you to the it's, it's a building block. So always think of is just, you know, you build that foundation to get you to the certain point, and then now you got to build another level on your foundation. So be doing it different is probably a given.

Robert Plank 28:01 That makes a lot of sense. I mean, time for some people out there to switch some gears, exactly. Well, cool. And then so if someone wants to know more about Eugene, if they liked everything they heard today, they want the book. They want to get on your list and all that good stuff, where should they go? Hey,

Gina Catalano 28:17 they can go to tandem leadershipbook.com, and I'm more than happy it's really important to me. I'm not about selling books, I'm more about helping people. And so I have set up a link for tandem leadership book.com forward slash Robert, and any of your listeners can download and get my book. I'll email it to him directly, or if they want to get it off Amazon, it's available there as well.

Robert Plank 28:44 Awesome. So tandem leadership book.com and then the the special for listeners today, tandem leadership book.com/robert so thanks so much, Gina for coming on the show and sharing your expertise here. And I mean, you've given all of us listening a lot of things to think about. And I mean, it's, it's one of those things that, like, I keep hearing like the underlying thing I'm hearing is that a lot of people that they think they know what they want, but then they need to, for example, track what they're doing. They need to think more long term to figure out what that, what that, that real, deeper need is to to get that, that life satisfaction or fulfillment, or whatever you want to call it. Yeah,

Gina Catalano 29:23 that sounds That's exactly right. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Robert Plank 29:26 Cool. I mean, I'm just doing my best here. So, so thanks, Gina, so tandem leadership book.com, everyone should go there right now. So I appreciate you coming on the show. So thank you so much.

Gina Catalano 29:37 Thanks for having me. I had a great time. Be

Robert Plank 29:39 sure to like the Facebook fan page for the Robert Plank Show on Facebook at www dot Robert Plank show.com. That's R O, B, E, R T, P, l, a, n, k, S, H, O, w.com. You.