Episode 115 Transcript
Heather (00:02.088)
Welcome to the show Chris Catania. How are you? How's it going?
Chris Catania (00:06.346)
I'm doing great. Thank you. Thank you, Heather. Yeah, I'm excited to be here.
Heather (00:08.84)
It's yeah, I'm so excited. Like even Chris and I were just talking about how he's noticed a lot of what I talk about on the show is about the importance of community. And Chris and I met like a few months ago on a call. And, um, when he said he's like, that's what he does for a living in his business is to help people with growing, building and sustaining communities. I thought, okay, now's the time we need an official community building expert on the session.
So, or on the podcast. And that's why I have them here. Cause we're going to have such a cool chat. I know the stuff that we're going to talk about is going to be like life changing for you guys. Cause the power of community is everything. Before we dive into Chris, your background and what you're doing now and actual tips on community. I want to start with you specifically and your business and a few tips, roughly three tips that you personally do to grow your business smarter and just to, you know, kind of rein in the overwhelming.
moments.
Chris Catania (01:05.418)
Yeah, great, great question. Yeah, there's, uh, yeah, there's three things that the, uh, the first one is no, it's, it's no big surprise. Uh, it's to be community led and, and really to, to apply everything that it means to build community and community management and, you know, the collaboration, the connection, the relationship building, like just lead, let that lead your, lead your business. Like that's that, that makes it a lot, a lot easier. It brings the human element into it. It helps you work through.
different struggles and it just, for me, it's helped me keep business centered. Like, why am I doing this and what's the purpose, right? So that's the first one. Second one is create shared value. So whether it's a community getting launched or any kind of product or any kind of service that I'm delivering or thinking of creating, I always have to think of how is this gonna create value for the client or for their customers.
Heather (01:41.352)
Yeah.
Chris Catania (02:03.05)
You know, and it has to go both ways because again, that's how that's how it works in a really good, well -designed communities is that there's shared value for both people in engaged. So again, it just, it just brings back the, the element of, you know, there's, there's humans involved in business. You can't do business without human beings. I know sometimes we forget, we forget that. And so, so that, that helps bring it back. And then the second one is, you know, think, think long game.
And, and, and think long game, uh, in a sense that, you know, the idea of running a marathon, you know, the idea that, you know, building a business is, uh, is, is similar to climbing a mountain, you know, and doing these things that take a series of steps, successes, failures, you know, when you go through a failure, I just see that as, okay, that's an experiment. You know, you're going to learn something. You have hypothesis, you can test it out. Either you were right or you were wrong and just kind of keep it, keep that black and white and, you know, just not.
Heather (02:31.528)
Okay.
Chris Catania (03:00.874)
not to get too emotional about things and just look at it as an experiment. I like to get creative. I certainly have a creative side, but then I like to dip into the science part of building businesses. And to me, that means putting the scientific method to work, hypothesis, and just go, okay, I'm going to test this out, new product, new audience, new content, whatever it is, new way of engaging.
Heather (03:08.968)
Hmm.
Chris Catania (03:30.154)
And if it goes well, great. If it doesn't, I'm going to learn something and we're going to move on. So those, those are the things that, that have really helped over time. I certainly didn't do all those right out of the gate, but over, over the period of time of, you know, working with clients and, you know, working through struggles, successes, um, certainly had a lot of mentors along the way over the years, uh, helped me develop that in myself. And, but those are, those are three things that I come back to, you know, when, as a, as I've been building businesses.
Heather (03:57.896)
Yeah. Yeah, I like them. And you mentioned obviously didn't do them out of the gate. Of course not. Cause it's a learning, learning adventure for all of us. Uh, and I want to know a little bit about you, like your backstory. Cause I actually don't know this. I know kind of who you are today, but where, where did you start in your professional life and how did you end up where you are now with your expertise in community building?
Chris Catania (04:00.554)
or this business. Yeah.
Chris Catania (04:07.146)
Yes.
Chris Catania (04:13.354)
Mm -hmm.
Chris Catania (04:23.37)
Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. When I think back to where I started, it is starting as a music journalist back, back 20, almost 20 over 20 years ago, I was going to be a music journalist or I was going to be a journalist. And then this thing called the internet happened and newspapers kind of shrunk and I was like, okay, what am I going to do? So I leaned on my, my content and interviewing and journalism skills. And as all these new tools, things like.
Heather (04:29.8)
Okay, excellent.
Yeah, well.
Heather (04:41.192)
Yes.
Chris Catania (04:53.386)
Uh, you know, YouTube and social media, online forums, uh, we're, we're still, they'd been around for decades, but at that point they're, they're, they weren't being used in the context of business like they are today. You know, so I just started experimenting and I just stacked a bunch of experiences. Uh, I got, you know, opportunities with ad agencies to combine copywriting and advertising work, uh, with building community. Some cases I was at the right place at the right time, you know, to build out different, um,
Heather (05:21.288)
Yeah.
Chris Catania (05:23.562)
You know, different opportunities. And then I got into the idea of, uh, of community and I've always been community driven and just in who I am. But then I realized that you could, you could apply community management, uh, in the context of business and, and use community building strategies and tactics, um, to achieve business goals. And, and that was, that was, um, maybe like.
Heather (05:45.032)
Hmm.
Chris Catania (05:49.066)
10 or 15 years ago where I had that, I had that epiphany and aha moment and light bulb went on. I was like, Oh, this is pretty cool. So I could, I could use all these things that, um, I'd love to do anyways, uh, to help, to help businesses connect with their customers and connect with their staff internally. So I've, I've built communities for large organizations, uh, internal, like that internal social, uh, intranets and internal collaboration networks for enterprises. But then I've also.
Heather (06:17.608)
Wow.
Chris Catania (06:18.282)
helped companies build external communities, digital online forums for product innovation, support call deflection, marketing, all the advocacy groups, things like that. So that's been my journey. And again, it's been very powerful. I feel very blessed to be able to combine something that I love and it's needed in the marketplace because even 20 years.
you know, ago and even today there is still an opportunity to have leaders integrate community into their mindset. And I think we'll get into that in a little, in a moment or whatever, but that is what drives me and to be able to have that amazing connection of, you know, what I love to do. The world needs it. I'm good at it and it can help people. So I think that's.
Heather (06:59.432)
I will.
Chris Catania (07:14.154)
That's what's led me to today, you know, today. And like we were talking before the, before the hit record there was, uh, you know, community is a hot topic and it kind of has been for, for awhile, but it's taken on different forms. And I don't know if we'll dive into that, that, cause that's the whole part, probably a whole nother podcast in itself, but, uh, but that's my, but that's my journey, you know? And then, uh, I've, yeah, I've really, I've really enjoyed it and it's, it's, uh, led me to, uh, work on a book. Um, and.
Heather (07:20.616)
Thank you.
Huge.
Heather (07:31.048)
Heheheheh
Yeah.
Chris Catania (07:43.274)
All that stuff. So it's been.
Heather (07:44.616)
Is your book, is it launched yet or are you still working on it?
Chris Catania (07:47.626)
It's still in progress. Yeah. Yeah. Should be available later this year, early next year and getting all that set up. So that's really been, again, a joy and a challenge, kind of a mixture of that. Writing a book can be very insightful and challenging, but yeah, it's really great. I mean, it's really helped me to crystallize a lot of things that, again, I think we'll talk about in this chat. That's it.
Heather (07:52.648)
Excellent.
Heather (08:04.52)
Yeah, that's definitely.
Heather (08:13.096)
Cool. Okay. Love it. You know, interestingly, a few episodes before this one, I interviewed a guy named Simon Serovino and he of course starts talking about community towards the end of our conversation. And he said to me, community is the new marketing. And I thought that was a really good line. And so now I would like to dive into what's your business name by the way with what you do.
Chris Catania (08:31.338)
Mm -hmm.
Chris Catania (08:40.234)
Yeah, it's called Community First Company Services. Yes. Yeah.
Heather (08:43.336)
Excellent. Okay. So let's talk through community and specifically, uh, I want to take this conversation in a couple of ways, and then we'll talk about how you've specifically helped some clients as well coming up. But to start with, there's obviously the, let's start a community component. And then there's the, Hey, now I have one. What do I do with it to keep it going? So let's start about the, Hey, let's start a community. Um, what, let's just talk about a service based business, for example.
Chris Catania (09:04.042)
Yep.
Heather (09:12.968)
somebody that maybe is in professional services like lawyer, accounting, finance, because it's an interesting, you know, sort of what some people might say is quasi boring area. How might somebody in that space, professional services, start a community and what would that maybe look like?
Chris Catania (09:24.458)
Mm -hmm.
Chris Catania (09:31.978)
Yeah. Yeah. Great question. I think that is the interesting part about community is that there are lots of ways to integrate it into, into businesses. You know, it can be large enterprises, small businesses. Most, most verticals have a fit for community. Some, some don't. And I've found that out over the years. But I think what, what really is the key point that I like to, to guide clients down and the path is like, what do you.
Heather (09:52.84)
Okay.
Chris Catania (10:01.61)
What do you want to achieve with that? Do you want to drive growth? Do you want to reduce costs? Obviously you want to do both of those out of business, but when you're starting out, it's really best to kind of pick one of those goals because it's hard to show progress in a community during the launch phase or that early post launch phase, say like, you know, one to three years if you're trying to do
more than one or two business goals. Usually companies that are successful, they pick some, okay, we're going to try and we're going to use it to reduce our costs, like to reduce marketing costs. We're going to get a bunch of people to create marketing content because they're excited about the product and we're going to create advocacy. Like go for it. Or we're going to reduce costs by not having people have to call in all the time. And we're going to let them help each other and solve each other's problems in the community. And it could be anything related to.
to that. So that's just two examples of like cost savings. And if you're going to do something like driving revenue, then you're going to look at, you know, how are we going to be able to, um, create, create advocates. They're going to create content to go out and share the goodness of your, of your, uh, uh, your products, right. And, and, and sing your praises and, you know, like, you know, advocate for you. So you can, you can do all that within a community, um, by then they, when they create the content, you know, and then.
Heather (11:15.592)
Yeah.
Chris Catania (11:30.378)
Certainly that is what is mostly done with that. And the other thing is, if you have a product, it's very exciting and really important actually, if you can do it, to create the community while you're creating the product, if it's a first time. So if you're a service -based business, everybody has a product and you can get feedback on that. So that is more of like the innovation.
use case with community where you're saying, give us some product ideas. How are you liking it? Um, as we're developing the product, uh, we want to incorporate your ideas and feedback into that. And then when you actually do that as a company, tell your customers, thank you, recognize them, give them a sense of belonging as you're building your product. And that could be a tech product, uh, could be a service product, could be really anything. Um, but it's.
using community for product innovation. And that's, so that's why I love, I mean, that's why I love having these conversations and learning all the ins and outs of a business because it's, you get, I get to have this really cool conversation and learn about their business and like what, what's working, what's not. We tend to start out with, you know, where, where's the pain and you know, what, what is not working and can community, you know, can an online network help that kind of.
Heather (12:50.504)
Yep.
Chris Catania (12:57.418)
community driven mindset, help redirect some things, you know, is there a brand issue? Is there a lack of idea or scaling enough, you know, things like that. So communities are great for, for that long -term. So, I mean, again, I could kind of go, go on and on and on with that, but that's that's exciting part about that.
Heather (13:14.824)
Got it.
Heather (13:20.488)
When you're starting like a community with somebody, and I love the user generated content piece and all of that. Whenever I'm talking marketing, I talk about the customer journey and how you have loyalty and advocacy is a huge part of that. And a lot of businesses fall down in that space. What sort of tools, if we go a little bit more tactical, are we just talking like a private email list? Are we talking like a Facebook group? How would you communicate and have this sort of user input? What sort of channels would you do to make that happen?
Chris Catania (13:32.426)
Mm -hmm.
Chris Catania (13:50.794)
Yeah, yeah, great, great question. Very, very popular question. Um, at time can be a very contentious, uh, question as well, because you want to build your community where your audience is at. Uh, if you know, if you know where they're at, um, but also, uh, what I've found is that, you know, when you try to build a community, say on a social media platform, say Facebook, right. Um, you don't quote unquote, like own, you don't own that experience. You don't own the data.
Heather (14:02.728)
Yeah.
Chris Catania (14:19.626)
And the UX UI can change, as I've experienced many times, many years. That's why if you're going to build like a brand community that's about your company or your product, most likely better to buy something off the platform, off the shelf, an actual platform that you can design and launch and control for the most part. And then you can still use...
You know, the, the social media channels and tools to, to do that. Um, but I like to think of them as outposts. If you're going to have a branded community experience, you still want to go out where people are at, but you want to, you want to bring them into the party. You don't want the party to be on social media, um, to the extent where like everything is there because then all your data and all your conversations and all your customer, um, insights things, and you really can't go what I call deep.
Like in social media, it's hard to do that. So if your use case is, you know, wrong product and you want to invest in a deeper, more meaningful experience, probably not a good thing to use social media. But you could start there, because I know sometimes resources aren't there or they're tight and you need to start with a Facebook group, whatever. You know, so there's...
There's different channels. I don't think there's any, any one clear cut solution for, for that. There's an idea that community is everywhere. Some, some, some thoughts are out there about, about that. I like to think of community and, and decide on platform and channel based off of the, I use a lot of the CX, you know, the customer journey, like where are they at? Are they, where are you going to put community and discover, you know, the, um,
Heather (16:12.104)
Yeah.
Chris Catania (16:18.058)
Uh, consider purchase, uh, you know, advocate like that whole cycle, right? That think about where community is going to sit. And then that, that helps you decide on your platform. What tends to happen where community doesn't work is that you get led by the shiny tool syndrome. And, and, and you're just like, Oh, that looks like, uh, we should, let's just pick that platform. And you, you put technology selection ahead of community design.
Heather (16:20.968)
Yep.
Heather (16:36.456)
Yes.
Chris Catania (16:48.426)
And then that's, that's, that's, that's where the, you know, problems can happen. I've seen that happen before where you just, Oh, let's just launch a Facebook group or let's just go pick the platform. Cause it looks slick and it appears to do it. But when you uncover it, oops, we didn't, uh, are the requirements of the platform. Don't meet our business requirements. I don't need, they don't, they don't, they don't like how let's grow. We don't have control over this stuff. So community goals, this is design like that tends to, to drive all of the.
Heather (17:00.328)
Mm -hmm.
Chris Catania (17:18.442)
the platform discussion, but it's really tricky to want to go and like, oh, what's the cool, hip new tool to go to do that.
Heather (17:27.88)
Exactly, and then you're going to try and get people into it as well, which can be a challenge if you're not thinking through where they're hanging out and the types of people that are actually in your community either.
Chris Catania (17:33.514)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. And that takes time. Like it takes it takes time. And best communities, they start over a period of years and they grow just like relationship. I mean, relationships grow, communities grow. You can't force them.
Heather (17:46.728)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It takes community and they change. You know, it's interesting. You talked about Facebook too the other day is there's a big problem right now on, on Meta with people getting their accounts hacked. Um, I was talking to a woman who literally ran her business in a Facebook group and like that's where she did all of her communications and her updates and got her business coming in from, and her account was hacked completely.
Chris Catania (18:00.714)
Hmm.
Heather (18:14.439)
no access to her group, her page, her ad account, all of it. And it took her like three months to try and get it back. So I love that you mentioned using it as like outposts, but making sure that you're not building it on borrowed land.
Chris Catania (18:24.042)
Mm -hmm.
Chris Catania (18:27.882)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I love that phrase. I love where you said that because that is exactly what you don't want to have happen, which can't happen. I've worked with clients before that, again, for whatever reason, they couldn't see why they needed to invest in an owned platform. And then unfortunately, go through a little bit of a pain and oops, Facebook changed their algorithm or Facebook
Yeah, it does that to get, you know, there's, there's security risks and things like that. So, yeah, I mean, if you can do it on your own platform, best to best to do so.
Heather (19:01.8)
Yeah. Yeah.
Heather (19:07.848)
Good, good. So we're gonna talk now about sustaining community and sort of that long -term growth. I remember Chris like a while back when I had a membership site, this was probably eight years ago, and I remember getting like community burnout, because I was like trying, I felt like I was pushing against like a mountain to try and keep it interesting, to try and keep myself interested.
Chris Catania (19:24.49)
Hmm.
Heather (19:34.76)
What do you recommend for people that do have a community already, a business community, to deliver value long -term and how to continue with it as well?
Chris Catania (19:47.306)
Yeah. Yeah. Great. Again, great question. I, what I've done over the years is I've developed a system, uh, call it the, I call it the three E system, shared values, community strategy system. Essentially it's comprised of three, three E's, uh, experience, which is this combination of, uh, business operations and, and CX, the idea that don't, don't silo community in just one area, but have a long game idea of like, you're going to put it across the entire business. So that's, that's E experience.
Heather (19:52.552)
Okay.
Heather (20:13.48)
Ah.
Chris Catania (20:15.722)
Second one is enablement. So strategically and consciously enable your staff and your customers. So that means make sure your staff, whatever size company you're is, might be, explain why you're doing community, what it is, and how it fits into their role. Because do not assume that your staff know how to do that.
because everybody has different definitions for community. And if you're at a company and say your job is sales or your job is marketing or your job is support or product development, just those four or five roles all have different goals and are going to leverage community in different ways. So you have to invest in training and enablements and have that clear idea at the beginning. And then the third E is evaluation. So this is like, this is the data. This is.
Heather (20:48.136)
Yeah.
Chris Catania (21:11.818)
This is why we go and say, well, what are our business goals? Uh, and, and, and what are the business KPIs and what, what parts of the community data are we going to use as success metrics, success KPIs to do that. So in evaluation is also this concept of, uh, using what I call hard metrics and soft metrics to do this, like storytelling to say, okay, we're on track with our numbers, kind of the hard.
piece of that, you know, the numbers and the data. And then the soft piece is the storytelling, the human piece. How is this community impacting people? How is it changing the lives of your customers and making them successful? And then, so those three E's together in the middle of that is shared value. So what I've found over the years that is if you, if you take out any one of those E's out of that equation, the community,
Heather (21:41.992)
Yep.
Heather (21:56.776)
Nice.
Chris Catania (22:09.322)
doesn't deliver as much value as it could, or it gets, it gets deprioritized. For example, say you don't enable customers or you don't, you don't train your staff. You launch this thing, you put it in one part of the company. Uh, you were going to measure it, right? But nobody knows why, like, why are we doing this community thing? Like, what's the purpose of it? If you don't tell anybody why it's going to be like, Oh, it's a, it's an extra thing. I got, I got my list of things to do. I'm not going to do this community thing because you're only going to get a
Heather (22:19.464)
Yep.
Heather (22:29.896)
Right.
Heather (22:38.567)
Doesn't seem important, yeah.
Chris Catania (22:39.626)
doesn't seem important, right? So, and then the other side, you know, if you say you train people and you have metrics, but you silo it, you silo this community experience in one part of the company and you don't have a long game. So that's not going to work either. And then you don't get as much value of like taking community across the entire company. So I've had, I've had a lot of fun and, and, uh, and some, some heartache, but really mostly, mostly fun coming down to the point where I know that.
If you combine these three E's in this way, you create that shared value, both with internal stakeholders across the company. Everybody knows leadership is all aligned. And then you also get a chance to create shared value for customers and they're all involved. So that's how I sustain it. Cause I've seen companies that don't do that. And they, for whatever reason, don't have a long game approach. And
Heather (23:22.12)
Hmm.
Heather (23:32.392)
Yeah.
Chris Catania (23:37.962)
They, you know, they get forced by them, you know, market shifts, you know, priorities change shareholders are asking for this, um, you know, product development changes direction and the community is not there. They don't get it. And they just, they stop investing in it. And then it doesn't sustain. But if you do all those three E's, I've seen companies be very successful. They get it. Leadership's engaged. The training staff, they're measuring their storytelling and it's starts in one part of the company.
you know, say product development, and then they put community across the whole, like the whole company. And then it's truly a community driven company, not just like one part, one part of it. So that's, that's what I love to do. It's a.
Heather (24:12.616)
smart.
Heather (24:16.488)
Ah, yes.
I can see that. Yeah. And I can, I love some of those, the little nuances in this conversation as well around, I'm thinking back to some of the stuff that I did that failed. And yeah, I mean, I didn't clearly communicate with the team, you know, why it was there. I didn't even really think why it was there. I just like, Oh, it's good to have a community. But like the core reason to do it and then getting it across the company as well. There's, yeah, some smart little piece of advice in there.
And you said something as well around being like a community led company. So I do want to talk to that a little bit because a lot of us in business, we can, you know, it gets lonely and you sort of sort of start to grind in and go, you know, if it's up to, if it's going to be, it's up to me. And you're like, I'm a solo leader and you have this mindset thing that's going on. So talk to me around shifting into that community led company sort of leader mindset.
Chris Catania (24:47.85)
Mm -hmm.
Chris Catania (25:12.426)
Oh man. I'm, I'm glad you asked that because that's, uh, that's something I've really been exploring, especially with, with the book, uh, that I've been working on. Cause it's like, I wanted to write something and put together what I've seen over the years as, as I've interacted with all different types of leaders, um, you know, CEOs, VPs, um, operators. And I've seen two types, two types of leaders, uh, what I call community first community led leaders who get the value of community.
Heather (25:28.904)
Yeah, okay.
Chris Catania (25:41.13)
Maybe they have it on a personal level and they they've seen it. They have experienced it. They know the power of community belonging is not just a warm and fuzzy, but they know that this is, this is business too. Like this is combined the human and the business and those, those two can coexist. So the community led and they lead with that idea. They're open, the collaborative, they promote trust. They want to enable. They're like saying no to for the most part to command and control a type of.
Heather (26:10.376)
Yeah.
Chris Catania (26:11.082)
You know, they're not thinking like, Oh, I'm the only one who could do this. And I got to like squeeze control or I, you know, they're not afraid to hear feedback from customers and out in the open. Cause the other flip side is what I've been calling. Um, and I'm still kind of playing around with how I talk about this, to be honest, but it's the idea of this, uh, lonely leader or the lone wolf type of type of leader. The reason I say lonely is because the opposite of community is alone.
Loneliness, which there's a loneliness epidemic happening in the world now. Like it's been documented since 2017, 2019, whatever. Oddly with all our technology and with all the things that we could stay connected with each other, a lot of people, millions and millions of people are saying that they're alone. So I call it the lonely leader because everything associated with loneliness is negative, right? Is, is things that don't allow for collaboration. It's a solo mindset.
Heather (26:41.)
Yeah, yeah.
Chris Catania (27:10.186)
It's lack of trust, you know, it's inability to recognize people, you know, that should be recognized or different things like that. It's basically the ant, you know, the, the antithesis of community. It's like they're, they're at opposites. So I love, I love stories. I love movies. So like every story when you're building community, every story has a, a, a hero and a villain. So the hero is the.
Heather (27:10.6)
Yeah.
Heather (27:26.984)
Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Catania (27:39.786)
community driven leader fighting this good fight, trying to bring people together with their business. And the, the, uh, the villain is, you know, loneliness and those who want to drive leader drive companies with, um, this idea that they can do it all on their own or these really old management concepts, um, outdated in that way, you know, the industrial revolution type of man, you know, management styles and things like that, that people just don't.
you know, fortunately, they're still out there. We still struggle with them. But that's what I mean about community driven versus community loneliness epidemic. And there's a lot of competitive advantage to being community led. A lot of companies are doing that. A lot of leaders are already on board on both. They're quite ahead of those. So, you know, the issue with that is that if you're not
Heather (28:18.344)
Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Catania (28:35.85)
on that boat yet or on that train or whatever mode of transportation you want to use on the metaphor, you're going to be left behind in that aspect. Not only with your mindset, but you kind of put your company at risk in the marketplace because community gives you all these advantages of agility in the marketplace, your deeper connection with your customers, all these different things. So that's that's what I've been exploring. It's been it's been very fascinating to kind of put this duality together with.
Heather (28:43.848)
Yeah.
Heather (28:51.304)
Hmm.
Chris Catania (29:05.706)
community -led leaders and the lonely leader. It's kind of a, I don't know, it always kind of gets me when I think about like a lonely leader, but then I have examples in my mind of lonely leaders that I've interacted with. And it's like, man, and I've seen them go from being a lonely leader mindset to a community -led leadership. And that's pretty cool. Like that's amazing when that happens.
Heather (29:19.624)
Yeah.
Heather (29:25.288)
shifting.
Heather (29:31.656)
That's so cool. You know, there's always sort of like a saying in marketing, the us versus them scenario. If you can create that feeling where you create people that are in, in your advocates, essentially your customers, and then they actually sort of label themselves as a loyal to store or somebody that loves what you do so much that they're out there just talking about you without you even knowing it as well. Creating a tribe. Yeah.
Chris Catania (29:37.482)
Mmm.
Chris Catania (29:55.274)
Yeah, yeah, you're a champion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, tribes. Yeah, I mean, yeah, tribe is very similar to the community concept. Mm -hmm.
Heather (30:03.464)
I want to talk a little bit about who you help. So what would be like an ideal sort of business that you can help? And then what do you specifically do with them? Is it building stuff? Is it consulting? What maybe all of the above? So who do you help? And then what do you do?
Chris Catania (30:20.522)
Yeah, usually working with, uh, with, with leaders, uh, you know, the operators, uh, uh, cause in order for community to be really effective in an organization has to start at the top. Uh, there's just no way around that. Um, of course you could start at different parts of the middle organization, but I usually work with, with leaders, you know, who are what I call community curious. They don't have to be community champions right, right out of the gate, but it's that community curious leader, you know, that has that element of like, okay, I may not give all of this, but I know it's important enough.
Heather (30:40.296)
Yeah, okay. Yeah.
Chris Catania (30:50.698)
to want to work with Chris or explore this more, how do we put this into the business to be guided with that? So that's the idea. I work with all types of different types of companies, B2B, B2C. Tech tends to work really well with community, but there's a lot of examples to use community, not just in a digital online concept. There's...
Heather (31:16.072)
Yeah.
Chris Catania (31:18.41)
We haven't really talked about this a whole bunch yet, but the idea of face -to -face community and building that sense of community with people in person. And boy, do we feel that during COVID, right? It was like, we couldn't get together with people and we're like, the online's great, but man, we miss getting together. So I help companies do that. Like it depends on their business, but small medium businesses, medium sized.
Um, so yeah, I mean, it's, it's anybody who sees the power of community, uh, you can probably fit into your business in some way and you, and you should, if you're not already doing it, like start now, right.
Heather (31:57.192)
start now you guys and then what should they do to learn more about about you should they jump on a call are there resources on your site what would be in like a really great first step for them to take
Chris Catania (32:06.378)
Yeah, yeah, you can go to my LinkedIn page and see what I'm posting there. There's also an opportunity to jump on a call because I tend to do, I love speaking to leaders, you know, in a workshop setting as well, leading workshops, doing different consulting in different ways, just really helping, right? Understanding your business and seeing how we can use community to solve problems. And I like to say, you know,
Make money, save money. I mean, that's what, you know, what we're all here to do in some aspects, of course, help the world, but we're running businesses. If you don't make money or save money, it's hard to be make an impact. So that's the idea. Yeah. Yep.
Heather (32:44.936)
Yeah, yeah we are.
Heather (32:50.12)
Absolutely, absolutely. And community is such a strong leverage point for that. As we start to wrap up, because that 30 minutes just flew by, as we start to wrap up, are there any last sort of words of advice or wisdom for the listeners? Those that are growing their businesses, that are overwhelmed, that are sort of thinking, I'm banging my head against the wall, I've got to do something different.
Chris Catania (33:00.426)
Mm -hmm.
Chris Catania (33:14.666)
Yeah, I would just think, you know, based off of what we've been talking about, like how, how does community fit into your business? You know, we've kind of talked about different aspects, you know, of it. You know, do you want community to help you drive growth? Do you want it to help you drive revenue? Um, and then however you answer that, then just to know that community is, it is a long game. It's a, it's an experiment to kind of figure out how that, how that works. Um, you know, it's, it's something that, uh,
will certainly drive value for you. But just know that there is a sense of exploration of what you can do with community and that it's a journey. It's an adventure to figure it out. But from working with customers and working with leaders, I haven't met anybody who's invested in it that said, oh, I wish we didn't do that. I wish we didn't invest in community when they see the.
the results there, they'll go, wow, I didn't know that we could do that. Or they're like, wow, I've really changed in that way. And being community led, being community driven, also, just reach out, reach out to other customers or other leaders. That's the whole idea behind community is to be able to look at and get help from.
Heather (34:19.272)
Yeah.
Heather (34:29.896)
Yeah.
Chris Catania (34:36.682)
from other leaders. And that's what I'm hoping to do to create a community at some point of community driven leaders who want to do that because it can be lonely if you're a community driven leader at a company who is not of that mindset. Especially I know leadership can be lonely in many aspects and community can help you weather that storm. It can not only transform your company but it can help you as a, you know, a...
Heather (35:00.168)
Yeah.
Chris Catania (35:05.13)
mechanism in your career. It can make you a better leader in that aspect.
Heather (35:08.36)
Yeah.
Heather (35:11.72)
I like that you guys. Thanks for, yeah, Chris, man, thanks for being here and everyone that's listening. Hopefully this has given you a few steps and ideas on maybe if you have a community, what you could do to sustain it and build it better than what you're doing. And also if you're just sort of thinking, you know what? Yeah, wow. It's time. I'm ready. Let's build this community of ours to help us. Cause I love what you said about the lonely mindset and just remembering that.
Chris Catania (35:13.29)
versatile.
Heather (35:38.312)
You guys have beautiful customers. You have incredible team around you already. Structure, give it structure and it will be very rewarding. So Chris, thank you for being here and sharing your words of advice with our listeners.
Chris Catania (35:52.298)
Thank you very much. Yeah. Appreciate the invite. Love the conversation.
Heather (35:55.72)
Thank you.
