Michael Caito, CEO of MAP Consulting, discussing the essential qualities of successful CEOs, common mistakes in leadership, and the importance of systems and processes in business growth. With his leadership experience with thousands of organizations and CEOs, Caito and host Jason Niedle discuss the significance of having a clear vision, effective communication, and accountability within organizations. The conversation also touches on the constraints to growth and the necessity of taking time for strategic thinking.
Takeaways
- Successful CEOs balance involvement and delegation.
- Empowering teams is crucial for effective leadership.
- Common mistakes include lack of systems and processes.
- Regular performance reviews — done right — are essential for accountability.
- Think time is vital for strategic decision-making.
- Personal well-being always impacts professional performance.
- Building trust within teams fosters open communication.
- Understanding constraints is key to overcoming challenges.
Show Notes
BeyondSaaS Transcript
Jason Niedle (00:00)
Today we’re talking with a really special guest, Michael Caito CEO of MAP, about his experiences guiding literally thousands of CEOs.
Caito (00:14)
Yo.
Jason Niedle (00:15)
Michael freaking Caito
Caito (00:16)
There he is. Can you hear me okay? You couldn’t hear me a second ago. Wait, which way do want me?
Jason Niedle (00:18)
Yeah, you’re sideways, which is amazing, but…
You’re literally tilted 90 degrees right now. Can you tilt 90 degrees to your?
Caito (00:26)
You’re tilted 90 degrees.
Jason Niedle (00:27)
There you go.
Jason Niedle (00:28)
Before I get into anything, obviously have to say, Caito, I have known you for, I think it’s like 25 years. I am actually really excited you’re here. And on top of that, you have such great depth of experiences. So this is a super special episode for me. It’s number 30, by the way.
Caito (00:33)
25 years.
Jason Niedle (00:44)
I’m Jason Niedle, founder of Tethos. We are a growth agency and we’ve been accelerating tech company growth for over 20 years through strategy, branding, lead generation and conversion. Check out tethos.com/podcast for my new I’m pretty excited about this. I just got that all written and wrapped up yesterday, compiled from interviews with executives like Michael Caito here. I call him Caito. Is that all right, Mike? Caito.
Caito (01:04)
Yes, that’s what everybody calls me.
Jason Niedle (01:06)
So go ahead and look it up at tethos.com/podcast. Today we’re going to talk about tech company growth with Caito CEO of MAP I don’t know how it’s been 25 years when we started out, we were back in EO back in roughly 2000, 1999, something like that.
And he became chapter president of our entrepreneurs organization. I did later also become chapter president. He became global chairman traveling around the world, leading, think, was 10 or 12,000 presidents at the time. There’s just a lot of leadership in there. And I imagine that was an unbelievably educational and rewarding experience.
And Caito’s always been super charismatic and fun. Back in the day, he Orange County’s first food delivery services, Restaurants On The Run. And now he’s the CEO and owner of a management consulting firm that kind of really started it all. MAP Consulting, they were founded 65 years ago. They provide executable management solutions and strategies through their MAP Management System, focusing on Vital Factors.
Caito (02:02)
That’s,
that’s pretty good, by the way. That’s a good, I like that. Yes. You need to be working on my business a little bit. Okay. Keep going. Sorry. I don’t remember seeing that one. That must be a new one. I like that. Okay.
Jason Niedle (02:07)
I just mostly read it off your website. ⁓
And by
the way, to the listeners out there, I have used MAP and it is absolutely brilliant. The vital factors are brilliant. As I was reading up on this, I’m like, damn, I need to do more of this again, because it is really a smart way to do things. And they implement through their team of consultants and digital products for entrepreneurs. So welcome, Caito.
Caito (02:29)
Hey, great to be here. It’s so funny because, you know, like, as we were like, getting warmed up and re acquainted, you know, We talked about this thing about “peerness” and how, you know, you are we hang out with. And we met 25 years ago, and we were both small entrepreneurs trying to figure out what the hell are we doing? And like, when you start a company, any kind of company, like, can’t really like you could you run out of neighbors to talk to about stuff.
Jason Niedle (02:51)
Yeah.
Caito (02:51)
And
some of your old friends don’t have that crazy gene that you have, which is I have to open a business. So you get around people like, ourselves and EO, the entrepreneurs organization, and all of a sudden we flourish in so many ways. So it’s pretty cool.
Jason Niedle (03:04)
thought about this aspect of peerness for a long time and I’m like, why did I resonate? in EO, I made a lot of friends and I was like, why am I making friends with, just because they own a business doesn’t mean I should like this person. And I realized all entrepreneurs are overly optimistic to some degree. Like we all believe the stupid idea that we have is going to be a great idea and it’s going to work. We’re willing to put in the effort and make it work. So we believe in ourselves in a certain degree, right? We have a certain amount of expertise in at least some field and we’re willing to learn and grow or we wouldn’t be there.
And so I think this idea of all those key factors together makes it really easy to just relate to people like we jump on the phone after years and it’s like, dude, I love you, I miss you, this is great.
Caito (03:39)
Yeah.
I think that’s it. That’s what that’s what the core was, because it’s so hard to find people that think like that. But you said something really important, like when you like we leaned into EO. And so I, I don’t mean to keep being up EO because but there’s a lot of peer groups, but we leaned in because we wanted to learn, we wanted to grow. And that meant that when we got in there, not only did we want to do that, others wanted to do that, and we wanted to help each other. And before you knew it, it started to transcend business.
Jason Niedle (04:00)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Caito (04:03)
and we started
to have this trust and respect. We had this instant instamacy, or I call it instamacy, which is instant intimacy. And because you have that and the trust goes up, you can start talking about other things that you normally would not talk about with other people. And this isn’t just exclusive to EO, there’s other peer groups that you can do that in. But it was the single greatest
Jason Niedle (04:06)
Mmm.
Mm-hmm.
Caito (04:24)
decision, you know, of course, I’m not going to get into family and the wife and stuff. But the single greatest decision I ever made for my life was joining you.
Jason Niedle (04:31)
I’d have to say so too. And I can even say that my wife was a cause of that because one of the things that I did was a really amazing seminar program. changed my life. It made me open to someone who is cooler than I was, cooler than I am like she is. So I absolutely wouldn’t have met my wife even without that decision. So it was really critical in my life.
Caito (04:51)
I remember that. I remember when you met her. I do and I know you went to that program. And totally.
Jason Niedle (04:57)
I know, I was bringing another date to every EO, because it was a good way to bring my dates to something cool. And then one day I met her and it was done.
Caito (05:02)
And you were.
Well, she’s pretty freaking awesome. So of course. So I do remember that. Wow, how funny. Yeah, so that’s that’s that backstory. And I think as you
For your listeners, you know, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re growing a, you know, a SaaS company, whatever kind of business, you know, I think there’s a lot of peerness. It’s not just getting around people that are in your space. That’s definitely very good to do. I did that in the food delivery space. You’re doing it right now, you know, but it’s also getting around people that aren’t in your space because it can get very myopic when you’re just in your little world. But what changed for us is like we were in that world of talking to all the people in our industry and that for sure helped us make massive strides in our business.
Jason Niedle (05:29)
Mm.
Caito (05:40)
So, I mean, the lesson there is lean into your industry associations because we would have never grown the business to where we grew it without the help of people out there that we were affiliated with the Neds, the Peters, the Andys, the Perrys, people all over the country that taught us like they were a little older than us and they taught us boys, you need to make money. And they taught us a lot about how to make money. And then we ended up scaling the business and selling it. so you lean in there. The other group to lean into is the peers that are just, you know, in the
whatever peer group you want to be in, but separate from your industry.
Jason Niedle (06:09)
I forget, you have a quick tip, a golden nugget?
Caito (06:12)
So I’m going to give you something that we’re using in our business, which is dramatically changing the way we do lead generation. We’re using an AI tool called Clay, which we use for data enrichment and it’s replaced, Zoom info and Apollo and those kind of businesses. I can’t speak super intelligently to it, but I will tell you this, if you look at your funnel and you go from,
Some people will have a lead gen team that’s dealing with building the list and scouring it and then handing it off to the BDR team. They’re setting appointments for your account execs, whatever it is. What we have found is that we’ve eliminated the need for the lead gen team because the data enrichment features of AI and how we’ve built it has been spectacular. And I’ll give you one. We use Clay for all of it. I’ll give you one example that we’ve used. We have a huge database, 65 year old company. Well.
Jason Niedle (06:45)
Mmm.
Caito (06:56)
You when you go into our database and you go 20, 30 years back, we get, can imagine the amount of people that we’ve trained that have gone to new companies. Well, how are we going to figure that out? Right? Cause it’s not like we were getting their LinkedIn profile and staying in touch with them 20 years ago, 30 years ago. So using Clay and some cool data enrichment tools, were able to now go into our database, pull out data sets, and then Clay goes against LinkedIn and some other tools that are out there databases.
And it’s able to spit back to us clients that have left their current jobs and where they’re working now in their in their new titles, which allows our BDRs can call on them, market them, set appointments and see if we can convert some business. So that’s the one tip tool we’ve been using.
Jason Niedle (07:31)
is amazing.
That’s a great tip.
Caito (07:33)
It’s a great tip. Yeah, Andrew who works for us that we hired and recruited for years, he came in and immediately started implementing that and then out and then once he puts it in place, he finds overseas people to help manage it.
Jason Niedle (07:43)
Awesome. Tell our listeners about MAP.
Caito (07:45)
Yeah, so Listen, can I start with a backstory? like, yeah, The backstory is, you know, we in college started a business called Restaurants on the Run, which was the business when we met 25 years ago, and we were five years into it at that point. And, it’s what’s we were delivering food from restaurants to homes and businesses, think DoorDash. Okay, but think DoorDash before there was the internet before there was mobile phones. So we were literally answering phones using two way radios and all this stuff. And over time, we had
Jason Niedle (07:48)
Yeah, stories are great.
Caito (08:12)
adapted to mobile tech. We adapted to the internet. We had a really good tech stack. And so eventually we started, we were able to buy companies and aggregate them into our business from different parts of the country. But about six or seven years into the business, we had a small investor slash advisor. Without about getting too deep into the story, he would ask me questions on a regular basis. And I just really didn’t have good answers. I was one of those
overly enthusiastic and optimistic entrepreneurs. And for those of you listening, whatever kind of industry and you know what I’m talking about, it’s like when we got a business and we see everything through a rose tint, and we may understand our client, we may understand our people, but we may not exactly understand how to scale. And so I was at this critical point, where I was, maybe a good entrepreneur. And I had two business partners, but I wasn’t really
building a business that you could scale. And he looked at me one day and he literally said to me, he goes, Michael, if this was a publicly traded company, we would fire your ass as the CEO. And so I had to take like a big step back, and, you know, take some time to reflect on how that made me feel. And yeah, I was disappointed. I was hurt, but you know, I was frustrated, but more than anything, Jason, I was just fired the eff up.
to go to figure it out. And in my mind, I wanted to make this transition from being an entrepreneur to being an entrepreneurial CEO. It’s a shameless plug. Just started a podcast called the entrepreneurial CEO. And we as entrepreneurs can put company on our back, but eventually we get to the point where we’re like, okay, entrepreneurs create; CEOs scale. How am going to bridge that gap? Cause I can create, but I’m not good at scaling. And so I went to my forum, my EO forum, told them the story. Some of the boys, which you
Jason Niedle (09:33)
Mm.
Caito (09:52)
know were like, they didn’t, they didn’t have answers for me. But one of them, this guy, Chris Deering, who’s a CPA, after the meeting, he had this guy from MAP call me and, know, never forget this guy, Ed Stein, Philadelphia Eagles fan. And he goes, you know, I talked to Chris that sounds like you got some issues. go, yeah, yeah, we do. do. Yes. It’s all me. I have some issues for sure. So as we, we have this workshop we do, which we still do right now. Uh, so I went to this two and a half day workshop in Newport.
And it was like, it was this workshop was a deep dive on me 360 from peers and employees. But I really figured out like how I ticked why I was good at certain things. So I was bad at certain things. But more importantly, I got this like toolkit of how to run a business. And there’s six things managers have to get right in business, which I can talk about later if you like. And after I went to the workshop, I was like, this is what I need. This is the discipline of execution. Because Matt not only trained me and then eventually trained my managers, but they helped us put in this
execution system, a management system, like you said, you’re going to build a strategy with a company. Well, if the company doesn’t have a system to execute, they’re not going to get it done. And it’s like in marketing, marketing has system sales, has system, but a lot of times companies don’t have a management system. And that’s what we put in, which was bottom line goal setting up and down the organization. So we did that. And I brought a coach in to help make that happen because I wasn’t capable of doing it all myself.
And it was a long story short, we did that for 15 years. You know, we grew the business spot companies and we ended up selling it to Grubhub 10 years ago. But two years after that, as I was searching for what’s next for me, which a lot of your listeners eventually will get to, if they’re not already, what’s the next phase? What am I doing next? Um, I realized that it was more about meaning than money and that I wanted to connect my purpose, which is all about impact around in the entrepreneur world. Like I’m all about, how do we help?
entrepreneurs grow businesses because when entrepreneurs grow businesses, the higher employees and they raise the standard of living in the community. we can change the world to entrepreneurship. That’s my passion. so MAP seemed like the perfect fit. So we put a deal together and we bought MAP so that we can help more companies do what MAP did for us.
Jason Niedle (11:52)
That’s amazing. I love
the arc as you found it on your own and then ended up taking it over.
Caito (11:59)
It’s not easy. Listen, it’s a new business. we all know that past successes don’t necessarily translate. There’s certain things you can do, but every business is different. Every culture is different. And, you really got to settle in. And, and the first five years, six years, I was really a part-time CEO. And when you’re a part-time CEO, you’re going to get part-time results. So I’ve transitioned to way more involved in full-time, than I was for the first
five or six years, got a new executive team. They like to hold me accountable and push back. We spend most of our time really on strategy. Like we know how to execute. Now it’s more about the choices you need to make in strategy like you like you do with your clients.
Jason Niedle (12:33)
So we just took a quick break to fix a couple of technical issues. And right before the break, you were talking about two things that kind of piqued my interest. One, I wanna know about the six qualities that you were talking about. And then The other thing I keep thinking about is like you’re a CEO of CEOs.
You know, what does that mean to you? What’s at the heart of your role? How you’ve seen all these other CEOs and then your job is to help them be better CEOs. What’s at the heart of your role?
michael caito (12:58)
Well, have a, company has a bank of people that work with CEOs. I work with some myself, and then I also work with our CEO coaches. So I’m at the heart of, what we do. What I do is there’s probably three pieces to it. Number one, how do we get the organization focused? which a lot of that is strategy, but also a lot of that is measuring the right things. Okay.
The second thing is once we kind of get focused, how do we get the organization aligned up and down? And once again, that’s making hard choices, communicating that to the organization, and then make sure that we’re measuring the right things, as I said the first time, up and down the organization. So this way everybody knows what they’re doing, everybody knows their job, but they also know how what they’re doing impacts the vision and the strategy to business.
Three, put accountability in place. Because what good is trying to get your organization going in the right direction if nobody’s being held accountable to getting the job done. So those are kind of the three things that we, at a very high level, decided to accomplish with our companies. that we work with, and any CEOs that I work with.
Jason Niedle (13:57)
I love that. And what are you doing for your own learning? Like you’re in this seat at the top of the pyramid, so to speak, you know, you have your own coach, like who coaches you?
michael caito (14:03)
I would not say that.
Yeah. Well, I get a lot of quite honestly, like right now I don’t have my coach. My coach was, the best coach you could have that worked at MAP. And now he’s kind of an employee. So he does some, coaching to me, adjacent coaching, but it’s nothing as formal as it needs to be. So it’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately about who’s the next coach that I can have. mean, I, you know, I interact with a lot of my
peers and so on and so forth. there’s, you know, you can learn from your peers, but you also have to have that next level where you’re talking to somebody that can help make sure you’re being held accountable.
Jason Niedle (14:36)
Yeah, 100%. So I’m kind of torn. Part of me wants to talk about the meta learnings, the learnings of what you’ve learned seeing all these CEOs. And then part of me wants to get down to like the nitty gritty, like what’s Caito doing to grow Caito’s business. But maybe let’s start broadly. What are common traits in CEOs that are growing companies that are doing well?
michael caito (14:48)
Yeah.
Well,
it’s funny you should say that a lot of them are, there’s a lot of traits we could attribute to great leaders, but the one lately that I’ve been observing a lot is I think some of the great CEOs, they figured out this balance between being really involved in their business
and inspecting what they expect so they know the numbers, they’re in there looking, they’re digging.
but they’re not micromanaging. So they’re empowering their people, but they know enough to have the tough, the conversations that need to be had. I said earlier, you can’t be a part-time CEO because you’re going to get part-time CEO results. And I learned the hard way for that, cause we bought this business and I was like, Hey, this is great. And it’s cashflow. And I thought I was, and I was, and I was in the business. Like I’m like learning it, knowing it, communicating every single day, but wasn’t really doing all the things that needed to be doing. So
You know, the best, the best CEOs that I find are their full-time CEOs. They understand they have to understand. know that they have to be in the weeds to some extent, but they need to empower their people, delegate properly and not think that because they’re the CEO and they built a good team that they can just go off and gallivant and do whatever they want to do. The time that they’re not in the business should be spent in the ecosystem of the industry. Understanding the
players, whether they’re people you compete with, people you don’t compete with, people you can learn from, whether it’s private equity, venture capital, whatever your strategic exit might be, talking with customers. All of those things play into what the CEO is supposed to do because the best CEOs have, their eyes can go in two different directions. One is looking at the current state of affairs for the business. And that might be 70% of what they do. But the rest of the time is spent looking forward, thinking,
What’s next? How do I see around corners? Who are the people that can help get us to where we want to get to? So it’s a combination of both of those in my mind that make that’s one of the attributes. The one I’ve learned the most from lately by watching CEOs of companies that I’ve worked with and say, Holy shit, you’re crushing it. And there’s one thing you’re doing that I’m not doing putting real solid time into the business and understanding it, but not sacrificing, your health and your family and your children.
Jason Niedle (16:57)
Yeah, if we flip that question on its head, what common mistakes do you see over and over again in leadership and company leadership?
michael caito (17:04)
I mean, first of all, you can micromanage, you can not focus on hiring the right people. You can, you know, not focus on continuous learning, because as companies start to grow, your people need a different kind of leader because now you’re not employing kids anymore. You’re potentially employing families. So it’s a different, you know, you have to, it’s that it’s never making that transition.
Jason Niedle (17:16)
Mm-hmm.
michael caito (17:24)
or putting the system in place to really be a CEO, or to have process in place that allow you to be the entrepreneur, but have the systems in place to support it. So, I mean, that’s a big one. There’s a lot of mistakes. There’s a lot of mistakes that we make as leaders. I we could go on, but that’s the big one that I see the most. And again, for entrepreneurs, what comes with putting the discipline in place in your business?
Jason Niedle (17:27)
Mm.
So not having the system in place.
michael caito (17:48)
are really our attributes that help grow a company. So you stop chasing shiny objects. You focus on, we’re going to get these people. Are we onboarding them the right way? Okay. Do we have a system to retain our best people? Okay. Are we organized in a way that allows us to execute against what we want to do? Do we have a plan? Do we measure the right things in the business?
How often do we check up on the performance of individuals, teams, and companies? Those are all byproducts of putting of a disciplined CEO or a disciplined entrepreneur trying to be a disciplined CEO. Those are the things that help take it to the next level, but never losing sight of the grind. And I know people are going to be like, well, you can have it all. No, you got to fucking grind a little bit. If you’re trying to build a company that you can sell, okay, just no way around it. You got to be in it. And it’s really hard your second time around.
Okay. And that’s where I’ve struggled, but now I’m back in it and I’m going to continue to get a little more grindy and gritty, but you got to do it. And I know people are going to listen to say like, well, you got to have work life balance bullshit. You got to have integration of your life. You got to make sure that you’re focused on yourself, that you’re healthy, happy, fulfilled, emotional, you’re strong. You’re in the gym every day. You got habits because if you do that, then you can make sure that your family is great because you got to be a great husband or wife. You got to be or spouse. You’ve got to be a great dad.
Okay. And if you’re doing those things, right, if you’re, if you’re strong physically, mentally, emotionally, you’re getting the help you need, you’re focused on your family. Now the business becomes that much easier because we’ve all seen the entrepreneurs Jason, that they go to work and they’re not taking care of themselves and they have a f****g heart attack, excuse my language, or they’re getting a divorce and they’re totally distracted. You cannot be your optimal self as a CEO, unless you’ve got your family in check and your personal life in check. If you can’t do that, you’re, you’re only going to be operating at 60%.
Jason Niedle (19:21)
Yeah.
Mm.
michael caito (19:33)
So anyways, I don’t know if you asked for that, but I had to say it because we all do it.
Jason Niedle (19:38)
I like it. it’s interesting. had one guest who said, I don’t want to be like my dad. He worked too much. I never saw him. I work 18 hours a day right now. And I was like, wait, let’s talk about that, Seven, seven days a week, you know? And I’m like, there’s a little disconnect between the desire and the action right now.
michael caito (19:46)
That’s not what I mean by grind.
Because Jason there’s tools now that we can like if you’re a CEO and you don’t have a virtual assistant or you’re not using tools that are out there to make it so that you can have family dinner with your kids. You can coach the games. I mean, I know you can’t do it all as if you’re not working, but there’s you can lean in enough if you’re leveraging and delegating the problem with a lot of these entrepreneurs that are working 70 hours a week is they’ve got the big red S on their shirt Superman. They think they can do everything better than somebody else.
That’s what I meant the difference was. That’s the difference between micromanaging and empowering. If you remove the S and you empower and train your people and delegate properly, okay, that’s how you can have the life that you really wanna build as an entrepreneur.
Jason Niedle (20:31)
that takes the system we talked about, right? They have to get organized with the strategy and measure the right things. They have to get everyone in alignment and then they have to hold those people to accountability, right, ultimately themselves to the accountability, but pushing that downstream so that they know that things are getting done.
michael caito (20:44)
Jay, totally. I could walk you through the six things. I’m not going to go deep, but if you want, can walk through the six things. Every company or every manager needs to get right. Okay. I’ll go high level and I’m going to approach it from a CEO’s perspective. Cause this is the book I’m writing. So this is good practice for me, but there’s six things leadership, communication, staffing or people planning,
Jason Niedle (20:53)
Yes, please.
michael caito (21:06)
organizing, and controls. I’ll walk them through slowly. Leadership. We as a CEO, our job is to paint that envision future we’ve got to have a vision for the organization. That’s why people follow us. Okay. So there’s a couple of things that I talk about as it relates to leadership. You got to have your vision and you’ve got to get rid of this S on your chest because that’s a really big part of leadership. So leadership is understanding where we’re going and understand that I have to take a different role in running this company
than what I might have done for the first year. The second thing a great CEO has to do is we have to be able to communicate that vision. We’ve got to be able to put the brand story together that you’re excellent at and be able to communicate that not only to
employees and not only to our clients, but the other constituents that are out there, supply chains, future customers, future investors, future acquirers, the media, whatever it is.
We’ve got to have that story buttoned up because when you go to market and you at some point say, you know, we want to sell the business. You don’t want to be starting from scratch. So you got to be able to understand leadership. The third one’s easy. We all know what we got to the right people in place. And it starts with the executive team. It’s our job to make sure we have the right people and not only get them on board them and freaking retain them, train and retain.
Okay. So now you’ve got a vision. You’ve been able to communicate that vision because that will help you attract people. So now you got your team. Now this team needs to build a plan. And I think of a plan in two parts. The first step is your strategy. You know, who are you in the marketplace? And there’s certain choices you need to make. And the second part is what’s your actual operational plan that you have on a year to year basis. So that’s planning and you got to lead that. The fifth piece is
how are you structured internally? How are you organized to achieve that? The goals that you set in your plan. Okay, what’s onshore, what’s offshore, what’s in-house, what’s out-house, what’s your structure look like, where are you located? All of those decisions need to be made. Does everybody have a clear job description? Does everybody know exactly what they’re being measured on? Because remember, A players wanna win, so they wanna know
how they cross the finish line. So what are the two to three things? If you built an org chart, could you put two to three vital factors in each box so that everybody knew what they, you how they won. And the last piece is performance management, which is how often are you reviewing your plan to see if you’re on track? How often are your people setting goals in our company? At MAP all of our employees set goals every single month. And they’re tied to what they’re, what they’re, what I just said, what they’re measured for, you know, what their job is.
So it’s easy. It’s like, if you’re listening to this and you want the, I’ll give you this nugget at the end, but, cause there is something, there’s an easy way to do this, but just to recap it, do we have the vision? are we talking about our recruiting the right people? Are we putting the right strategy in place? Are we structured the right way to execute our goals? And are we measuring the performance of our people and of our, and of our company on a regular, regular monthly basis? Those are the six things that you gotta get right in a business.
at a high level. I’m sure people can poke holes in that. And then I would push back and say, well, that hole you just poked fits over here. That one fits over here. I’m just giving you a broad base framework.
Jason Niedle (23:55)
Mm-hmm.
I love that. And by the way, I might’ve designed hundreds if not thousands of books. So if you want some help when it comes time to your book, then let’s talk. So talk about your company. Often the Cobbler’s, the Cobbler’s kid has no shoes. I am a marketing company and I didn’t really start marketing until a year ago, myself. It was just never a priority. We had enough business coming in and I never had to do it.
michael caito (24:05)
didn’t know that.
Jason Niedle (24:20)
How do you get out of all of the telling people how to grow and make yourself grow?
michael caito (24:25)
Yeah. Well, we just practice what we preach. and I’m not saying we, you know, When I came in that we were doing that, we did it pretty, pretty regularly. or we did it. We had a good cadence in place, but the cadence has really expanded. I’ll give you the best example. It’s like, I have this new executive team, they were all former clients of MAP who built companies and exited and now they’re sitting on the executive team with Wendy who’s been there for 30 years. And it’s a great team, but teams have to kind of blend together.
You know, they have to form what’s called form, storm, norm and perform. And, know, we have to go through that phase. But the other thing I noticed is like the crux of what we do is we put a coach in a business every month, you know, for that one, we call it a vital factor team meeting once a month, the coaches in a business and they’re sitting with the executive team and they’re looking at, it’s like a three hour meeting could be a four hour meeting. And it’s like, but it’s that one time every month that like the executive team is like, we’re digging in. Okay.
And we’re looking at what’s working celebrate, celebrate, celebrate. Then what’s, what challenges do we have? And then we spent some time problem solving and creating action out of those problems, you know, so that they build momentum. We don’t get stuck. We don’t have a meeting where it’s like, let’s talk about a problem for an hour and nothing happens. Then we look at the dashboard or the scorecard for the executive team. Those like 15 metrics we call them Vital Factors that really matter. And like, how are we doing? Are we on track? What corrective actions do we take? And then we review everybody’s goals.
that they set last month and everybody sets new goals for the following month. And then we wrap it up with a key takeaway that happens across. I mean, it’s happened across thousands of companies on a monthly basis. So that’s how we work with clients. Well, guess what? I was having that meeting.
Jason Niedle (25:53)
I
was going to say, I’m hoping you’re doing it yourself.
michael caito (25:56)
but there was no coach in the meeting. And I built this executive team and I tried to like run the meeting and it was Jason, a total disaster. I can go run it with a company. I just did it this morning and that, you know, everybody loves it. We get a call afterwards and one of the guys like, bro, that was our best meeting ever. And I’m like, really? I’m like, okay, that’s good. Thank you. I’m glad we took away, you know, but removing the needle, but I wasn’t doing it the business until literally in the last four or five months, once the executive team settled in and now we have a coach.
Jason Niedle (25:58)
Mmm.
michael caito (26:22)
working with us every single month and it’s, you know, dramatically changed. I don’t know if that’s what you were looking for, but I’m just telling you, you’re totally right. You know, I, when I talk about MAP, I say we have to eat our own dog food because I want MAP to be a case study for MAP I want MAP to be a case study that we can give to our clients to say, this is the process we ran. This is what we did to make choices around how we’re going to grow.
Jason Niedle (26:44)
I like to look at constraints a lot too. you have leadership, communication, people, plans, organization, and performance management. Like where is your constraint to growth? Where, what’s holding you back?
michael caito (26:54)
Well, I think every,
well, before I go there, I think every organ, every CEO has to have a little bit of healthy paranoia, which is, what’s around the corner, what’s out there in two or three years, I was literally just studying a case study on Taylor Swift and how she is the ultimate entrepreneur and how she
identified her niche. mean, the story with her is like, she literally was successful. She was a 15 year old singer. when she went to the people that were helping her build, you know, build her career, she said, I want to go after teen girls in the country space. And they’re like, there’s no market there. And she’s like, well, I’m one of those girls. And like, we’re listening to a bunch of music that isn’t for us. So she went and hit a home run in the niche of country music.
then said, you know what, it’s time to make an adjustment. And she had an adjacent strategy to start going into pop, but she didn’t leave country. She would release her albums in country first and then go to pop. And she evolved into that. Then she got focused on her community. Then she became obsessed with her clients or customers or fans. And so she’s a, if you follow her little roadmap, there’s like, it’s pretty interesting roadmap for a lot of entrepreneurs to learn from, but our biggest constraint, it’s a very good question.
Jason Niedle (27:43)
Mm.
michael caito (28:04)
Everything that I think about from a constraint perspective is distribution. The biggest question I’m trying to answer right now, Jason, is strategy. When you look at strategy, one of the choices you have to make is distribution. How are you getting to your customer? Do you have a sales force? Are you a marketing-driven company? Are you a partnership-driven company? Are you completely based off referrals? Are you going through distribution? How are you getting to your clients? And it’s the biggest constraint I see right now, because we’re trying to answer that question.
We’re trying it from a sales perspective, a marketing perspective, a partnership perspective. We don’t really do social media yet except LinkedIn. So the biggest constraint is what’s the most efficient way to get to our clients, knowing that we have an industry structure that has some limitations on where you spend your money. Cause you have consultants that make the majority of the money, which leaves you with a smaller pie to work on. it’s like, how to best use those funds to scale your business. So some people might, someone might look at me say, why don’t you franchise? Okay, that’s an option. I could.
Jason Niedle (28:51)
Mm-hmm.
michael caito (28:57)
Some people might say, why don’t you license? That might work. Some people might say, write a book, which is what I’m doing and see what that can do for lead gen. Some might say, change your model to lead with technology. You know, some people might say, put all your efforts into partnering with YPO. So the constraint is in my head.
Jason Niedle (29:13)
Every one of those would work, right? But how well would they work? How well would they fit within your culture? How do they fit with what you’re doing?
michael caito (29:19)
I may be wrong here, Jason, but I’m a little impatient and I don’t have 30 years to build this business, to make the impact that we want to make. You know, my time, my horizon is much, much shorter. And that doesn’t mean we won’t do it for 30 years, but I don’t have 30 years to figure it out. I don’t want to go from, where we’re at today to five X and take 30 years. You know, I’d rather do that in, you know, seven years.
But that means integrating everything from who’s your customer to what’s your value to how are you finding those to what are your capabilities that reinforce everything? How do you make, make that fit together? So you asked me, what’s my biggest constraint? My head is my biggest constraint right now. Trying to make the right decision without all the data and push forward and test, fail, test, fail. And we’re doing that. But I think the constraint for the business is perhaps me not taking enough time to think through it.
Jason Niedle (30:01)
Mm-hmm.
michael caito (30:07)
Every CEO, like I described the CEO before that I talked to you, every one of those CEOs that I said, they’re in the business, there’s a little bit of a grind factor, they all schedule think time every week. And they take the two to three hours a week and just get above everything. And I haven’t, done some of that, but that’s my next huge step in addition to my next, who my next coach is, is to have more think time to help guide the organization.
Jason Niedle (30:17)
Mm-hmm.
So one of my guests, Mark Rickmeier of TXO,
he saw an interview with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. And the question was like, show us your calendars. And Bill Gates was super proud. He’s like booked wall to wall with meetings. And Warren Buffett holds up his and he’s like, you’re doing it wrong. And he had like one meeting on his calendar, you know? And then Mark, the guest said he started something called Walkshop which is like a workshop. And he takes a bunch of CEOs and they go out in the woods and there’s no rooms. You walk, you walk all day. You walk and you talk.
And sometimes you’re in the group and sometimes you’re one-to-one and he’s like, when you’re out and you’re moving and you’re on your feet and there’s no paper and there’s no device, things change. And I think both of those things are just ways to get to the point that you said, it’s like, it’s so important to find a minute of solitude, a minute to actually like let the waters calm so that I can figure out where did they settle, where am I, who am I? And then, now I can look ahead and I can see something ahead because I’m not particularly, haven’t been particularly great at that and spend my time.
flustered and running around and preparing for my next meeting in nine minutes when I could be happy talking to you for the next two hours. And like that time is so critical.
michael caito (31:33)
Well, Jay, you know, that’s a great point. You know, sometimes we hear these things. Like I’ve heard that. I think I’ve heard that story before or saw it or something. Maybe… I can’t remember, but like we have to be ready to hear those things. Like I could hear something today, then hear it in six months. And today wouldn’t phase me. It’s six months. I’d be like, my gosh, I’m ready for that. So I think you’re right. It’s making the time. What you just said that I love is that if you combine what I said, which is think time with what you just said, walk time, you just did a lot of think about how many things. Cause
that walk time could not only be think time, be learning and development time, but you’re building, you’re working on yourself as well, physically and mentally. So you’re two birds with one stone. And that’s what the smart CEOs do. They’re going to do that. And so it’s like, I didn’t get to the gym today, but I had a 60 minute walk and talk. I love that. Yeah, I’m a little more vulnerable. This is probably the most vulnerable I’ve been on a podcast, but
you you kind of brought it out of me and you’re making me think a lot about what I need to do to be better because we never be satisfied.
Jason Niedle (32:27)
By the way, tell the listeners your new podcast name again.
michael caito (32:30)
Yeah, so new podcast is The Entrepreneurial CEO. I know it’s on LinkedIn right now. That’s where we started with it. And we’re doing it. We’re interviewing a lot of clients and past clients. And I’m really shooting a lot of content that you’ll see on LinkedIn. And then the website is and I can be reached at MC as in Michael Caito @ MAPConsulting.com.
Jason Niedle (32:49)
mc at MAP consulting.com. Hey, what are some of the questions that I should be asking that I’m not? I always like to see that like, where could I ask like a more insightful, deeper, let’s fix this kind of a question.
michael caito (33:01)
I think your best question today, which I’ve never been asked, especially on a podcast was, what’s the constraint in your business right now? And I would argue that might be the most important question to ask because that’s going to drive a lot of dialogue that will bring you back to strategy. And if you can break through the constraints in your business and then potentially break through the constraint in your industry,
you’ve got something special. Yeah, there’s a guy named Barrett Ersek, and he talked about this thing called the X Factor, which is 10x your business by breaking through the constraint in your industry. And so I thought it was that was the best question. I’m not sure if there’s other ones, but I don’t care because that was the most important.
Jason Niedle (33:34)
Mm-hmm.
I love it. This has been amazing. Look up mapconsulting.com. Michael Caito, his book’s coming out. Caito, thank you so much for being on Beyond SaaS. For leaders in mid-stage tech looking to grow, we drop episodes twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And you can find me, Jason Niedle, at tethos.com. That’s t-e-t-h-o-s.com. We can also grab that report on hypergrowth because I’m a marketer and I need to give you good lead magnets.
Of course, drop any questions or comments for future guests and feedback below. And if you found some value, I really appreciate you sharing that. That helps us a lot. Until next time, this is Beyond SaaS.
