It's no secret that communication is key to a successful business. After all, how can you expect your team to follow your lead if they don't even know what you're trying to achieve?
As a business owner, it's important to be able to communicate your vision for the company to your team. However, sometimes we can get so caught up in our own plans that we forget to listen to what our team has to say. This can lead to problems down the road when it comes time to execute our vision. Luckily, there are ways to overcome this problem. One way is to hire a professional who can help you learn how to communicate with your team and build the right team for your business. Victoria Caldwell is one such professional. She specializes in helping business owners learn how to communicate better with their teams and build the right teams to help them execute their vision.
In this episode, Victoria Caldwell shares her advice on better ways to communicate with your team and to get your visions executed. Her insights will help you develop productive working relationships and achieve your goals.
Listen to the Episode
Atiba de Souza: Hey business owners, sometimes we're the problem. Yeah. Sometimes the fact that we're visionaries and we've got this plan for our company is the problem that hinders us from building solid teams and communicating well. Well, my guest today on the Build Your Team show, Victoria Caldwell, good friend of mine who happens to specialize in helping us super visionary business owners, figure out how to communicate better with our teams and build the right teams to help us execute our vision. Now, as always, we are brought to you today by Client Attraction Pros. If you are that visionary business owner, and it is time for you to take your business to the next level, and it's time for you to get your name out there and for people to know that you exist and that you are a recognized leader in your field, we can help you make that happen through video marketing.
Atiba de Souza: So Victoria, we're just going to have a nice, friendly conversation. I appreciate that you're smiling to get started.
Victoria Caldwell: I'm always smiling.
Atiba de Souza: I know and so it's awesome. So Victoria Caldwell first, thank you for being here with us today, right on the Build Your Team show, and first, just tell us, tell us about you and a little bit about your business and what you do.
Victoria Caldwell: Okay. So I'm, my name is Victoria Caldwell. I'm the founder of Team Impress and we're pretty much marketing, digital marketing. I'm a CMO, fractional CMO for bribe trade. And my focus is on building high performance teams.
Atiba de Souza: High performance teams.
Victoria Caldwell: High performance teams. Teams that get ish done.
Atiba de Souza: Okay.
Victoria Caldwell: You know.
Atiba de Souza: Yes.
Victoria Caldwell: And it's what I found to be my zone of genius. It took me a while to find it. And once I found it, it was kind of off to the work races. So I worked with a lot of visionary entrepreneurs, business owners who are very high-frequency, high level thinking and my move super, super, super fast. And then the translation of that vision to the team is where things start to get a little bit tricky and leaders start to get frustrated with the team and that things are not moving. And so I come in and just calm things down, get things done. And everybody's happy.
Atiba de Souza: Oh, that's awesome.
Victoria Caldwell: When mama's happy.
Atiba de Souza: Everybody's... that, that's right. Y'all heard that here, when mama's happy, everybody's happy. Right? And that is so true. And you know, in your house, that's true too, right? But I want to jump back to the beginning because you use a term and I just want to make sure that everybody knows what this term means, fractional C M O.
Victoria Caldwell: Yes. So CMO is basically a chief marketing officer and fractional means that we are not hired full time. We come in, we get stuff done and you don't need to have, cause a CMO role is a very high-level role, but it's also could be very costly and not every company can afford the expense of having, you know, you can be paying a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in salary and that CMO role is an, a very important role. If you're having a team that you want to execute marketing strategy and get things done, marketing and sales. And it comes with more than that. It comes with at least the way I implement it, not everyone implements it this way, I recommend it though, being able to lead teams, not everyone can lead teams, they can lead marketing strategy, they can come up with things, but they can't always execute with people. And so that's a key distinction when... cause there's a stat that says, you know, out of the C-suite, the CMOs are usually the first to go. And a lot of times it's because CMOs in corporations are, they inherit those roles and they're very great marketers. They're great at ideas, but they're usually not great at leading people, but then they have that role and then they get all of these things that all of these tasks and responsibilities that they didn't have before. So I'll, like 80% of the CEOs that hire CMOs are not happy with them.
Atiba de Souza: Okay, yeah.
Victoria Caldwell: So that's a, that's a,
Atiba de Souza: that's a big, big number.
Victoria Caldwell: That's a big number.
Atiba de Souza: So most of the companies you work with have a CMO or you're coming into just to be their fractional?
Victoria Caldwell: It's mostly coming in to be their fractional.
Atiba de Souza: Okay.
Victoria Caldwell: It's mostly coming in to be...
Atiba de Souza: All right. So, so then these CEO's haven't hired a CMO yet, but do they have marketing teams?
Victoria Caldwell: Most of them have marketing teams or they're in the process of wanting to build a marketing team. And a lot of times that's the mindset. A lot of times they want to come in and they want to build a marketing team because they've been ripped off by a marketing agency. And there is a couple of different, you know, when you get ripped off, especially if it's more than one and you know, you know, the industry, we know the industry, there's a lot of people,
Atiba de Souza: Lot of shady people.
Victoria Caldwell: A lot of shady people. Okay, We go leave it at that. And so sometimes there's this knee jerk responses that, well, they have a big enough company. They have a big enough team. I'm just going to bring it in house, but there's a problem. You didn't.. There's a problem because how are you going to hire a marketing team? When you didn't know how to hire marketing agency.
Atiba de Souza: Right. Who's leading them?
Victoria Caldwell: Who's leading them and who's training them and then it creates another hole. So you start hiring people that don't, you don't know, you can't really vet whether they have the skills to execute no more than you could have vet the agency.
Atiba de Souza: Right. Right. Right.
Victoria Caldwell: Right. So when you're looking at that, that's kind of the mindset and sometimes they don't need that. We go in and we look at what do you actually mean? Because you don't know what you don't know. So we're looking at what do you actually need because what they want is to get things done.
Atiba de Souza: Correct. Correct.
Victoria Caldwell: So then I'll look at, this is what you need to get things done. And if that means having a fractional CMO, that's what we do. If that means something else, then we'll work on that too.
Atiba de Souza: Okay. And so, I mean, that, that's huge because I think there are a lot of CEOs and a lot of CEOs who watch this show or in that place where it's like, Hey, I need marketing.
Victoria Caldwell: Yeah.
Atiba de Souza: And yeah, that agency over there or this one, or I had this experience and man, we just gone, I'm just going to hire somebody. We're going to do it, but it's the blind leading the blind, right? Or maybe it's the blind leading the deaf. Maybe that's a better way of even looking at it. Right. And so, so, so, so then that creates a real issue, which you help solve.
Victoria Caldwell: Right. And, and the key point of that with a CMO role is being able to get things done with people, lead people too. And I don't like the word manage, but, but lead and develop people. That's, that's the piece that's usually missing in a CMO role, that's critical because they have, several people doing different things. And we know as in a marketing team, there's so many different roles within the team itself. And so it's a psychological profile that can manage all of these different other psychological profiles because of the way
Atiba de Souza: Of marketers, yeah.
Victoria Caldwell: Yeah. I mean marketers or people in general, because the way I do it and it's intuitive for me, I have to be able to look at this person and say, oh, I need to speak this language to them. Now it's a second nature for somebody like me, but you look at it and say, okay, this person is very creative, very high level thinking they want to get to the point quick. They want this, that... You know how to communicate then you go to the analytics person. They want a lot of details. They want all the details. So you've got to switch, you got to pivot and know what it takes so when the visionary whether cause I work with pretty much all visionaries because you know that
Atiba de Souza: Visionary CEOs
Victoria Caldwell: visionary CEOs,
Atiba de Souza: Okay.
Victoria Caldwell: CEOs, business owners, whatever they call themselves. And when their visionary sits there are a lot of times they struggle with that communication, communicating their vision. They see it,
Atiba de Souza: But they can't get it out.
Victoria Caldwell: They can't really communicate it to people and especially different people who process information differently.
Atiba de Souza: Yes.
Victoria Caldwell: And that's why, you know, you, we talk about the integrator role, which not everybody's heard that term, but I, I like to just use the second in command. These are the people who get things done.
Atiba de Souza: Right.
Victoria Caldwell: And you, you're gifted at ideas and visionary. They're gifted at people and getting things done with people. And they're usually people that people actually like to work for.
Atiba de Souza: Yes. Because they have great vision and it's so inspiring, right?
Victoria Caldwell: It's inspiring. Well, which role you're talking about?
Atiba de Souza: The CEO.
Victoria Caldwell: So it's, so the visionary. Yes. It's inspiring, but sometimes there's the communication gap in communicating that vision because the visionaries there they're very high-frequency thinkers, they're very fast thinkers.
Atiba de Souza: Yes,
Victoria Caldwell: and
Atiba de Souza: that's me, by the way,
Victoria Caldwell: I'm talking to you. But then when you're talking to someone who likes to slow things down, it can get very frustrating because in my experience, they don't really like to repeat themselves.
Atiba de Souza: Absolutely.
Victoria Caldwell: And then you're just like to set that and it was just like, well,
Atiba de Souza: When did you get it?
Victoria Caldwell: Right. And you get it because it's in your head, the whole business is in your head. And so having a person like let's say, I'll call them the second in command and the way I do it, I'll call them a supporter, they can get them, get it quickly enough, and then communicate that to the team and just say, be the buffer.
Atiba de Souza: Right.
Victoria Caldwell: Because it helps with the mental health of everyone, because it's like helping you get the vision out, get it executed, get it done, get stuff done. But also making sure the team doesn't like completely capitulated, because they're like, okay, if I say the wrong thing today, you know, they're going to be like...
Atiba de Souza: Exactly. And so let me ask you this, and this is, this is an assertation of mine. Okay. And, you know, we're in marketing, we, we've built marketing teams and that type of thing. And I firmly believe that all communication is marketing, internal and external. And so as that fractional CMO, what I just heard you saying is, you know, it's also about the management of the internal communication, the internal marketing, right. We've got to market to our teams.
Victoria Caldwell: Yeah.
Atiba de Souza: Not just outside.
Victoria Caldwell: Yeah
Atiba de Souza: 'cause it's all communication.
Victoria Caldwell: It's all communication. Matter of fact, that's one of the parts I teach, even when you're attracting people because a lot of, at the level that I'm usually working at is when they're having them, like they're doing a million or more and they have a team already. The problem is like, I don't have a team of A-players where you might actually have a team player, eight players, but you might not know how to get the best out of them.
Atiba de Souza: Right.
Victoria Caldwell: Because either they're great, but they don't have the tools in their environment to thrive. And that's really typically not the visionary role, that's the role of the support, the second in command. If you got the right person who can do that.
Atiba de Souza: If you've got a Victoria Caldwell.
Victoria Caldwell: If you have an in... I didn't say that, but you know, I'm just saying it's the psychological profile.
Atiba de Souza: Right. Right.
Victoria Caldwell: It's just particular just like, just like you're a visionary. This is a profile, not the easiest people to find because typically not. I can find them easily because I know what we're like. And you, would you know what they're like. You can see them too, but you're not out there just...
Atiba de Souza: Hanging out.
Victoria Caldwell: Hanging out, you know? I mean, we are very extroverted, but you're just like, oh, when you talk to a visionary, you know, you're talking to a visionary.
Atiba de Souza: Yes.
Victoria Caldwell: You know? And, but when I'm talking to this role, I know I'm talking, I'm like, oh yeah. But then I can, yeah.
Atiba de Souza: Okay so, I've got so many different angles to go. Right. I'm going to say it right now. We need a second show. Okay. So I'm just letting you know I'm bringing you back. Yes y'all she's coming back. Cause I know y'all got some questions too. She's coming back. Okay. Cause we got, cause you mentioned the word integrator. We got to talk about that. We didn't even get into that part yet. Okay. That's we'll do a whole show on just that alone on tape. Okay. You know, you just started talking about the fact that, you know, visionaries know visionaries and, you know integrators, you know those second in command you, can see them, you can see the qualities that exudes out of them and you can spot it. Right. And I can tell you as a visionary, as a business owner, it's hard to, it's hard to spot. It's hard to spot you because I see me. Right. And, and so here's my question for you for, and it's a two parter, for the business owner who's at the point where they've fired the marketing team and they're thinking about going out and
Victoria Caldwell: The marketing agency
Atiba de Souza: Marketing agency, sorry, I misspoke. Thank you. The marketing agency and they're frustrated and they're ready to go hire their own team, right? And to the business owner, visionary, who fired and has already hired a team and is communicating like... to them and they don't understand what's going on and they're frustrated.
Victoria Caldwell: Right.
Atiba de Souza: Give me a piece of advice with each one of them.
Victoria Caldwell: Okay. So which one you want first?
Atiba de Souza: Your choice. Dealer's choice.
Victoria Caldwell: Okay. So for the one who is already has a team in place, that one is a little bit easier because one, depending on your budget and everything, I would first recommend getting the integrator and getting the training because integrators are so, so, so resourceful. You don't really have to do much. You need to tell them what they need to done and they will figure it out. They will figure it. They will take it and run with it. Matter of fact, and oh
Atiba de Souza: That's a music to my ears.
Victoria Caldwell: That's why everyone needs one. It's you, you find that integrator. Tell them what you want to happen. Leave it to me I'll get it done. Now they going to find the people, they're going to find the best people, they ain't go do it themselves.
Atiba de Souza: Fair enough.
Victoria Caldwell: We're not going to turn... We're, we're natural delegators, that that comes out of the womb. No one has to tell us how to delegate. Ever. We come out the womb knowing just like you come out with your ideas and everything. We come out knowing how to get stuff done through people.
Atiba de Souza: Got it.
Victoria Caldwell: And encouraging people and motivating and inspiring people to get things done. I mean, we're just not in there just you know, cracking whips. We know how to get stuff done, but we know how to inspire to get it done.
Atiba de Souza: And build the team and get it. Yes. Cohesiveness. Yes. That's great. Okay. So that's the business owner...
Victoria Caldwell: So that's what I would recommend for that. If they have that budget, hire an integrator, tell them the vision, let them get on, give them the resources or whatever. So with me or whatever, it's looking at, what do I need? Who's going to be the best one? I mean, not anyone who's going to be the best to help us get this done and we can manage the processes, manage the execution and all of that live in that space. Love working with the team. So you get an integrator, you let them know what the vision is and let them figure out. But they will be communicating with you, but just don't micromanage them.
Atiba de Souza: Gotcha.
Victoria Caldwell: That's, you want to lose a, you want to lose a good integrator
Atiba de Souza: Micromanage them
Victoria Caldwell: Manage them and don't pay them.
Atiba de Souza: Don't micromanage, make sure you pay them. All right. So cool, and then for the one who hasn't built a team yet,
Victoria Caldwell: Somebody who hasn't built the team yet, but they're considering building their in-house team.
Atiba de Souza: Yes.
Victoria Caldwell: In that case, one, looking at your resources. Okay. Looking at your resources, then getting an overview of what's needed. Okay. Now typically that's when I would have a conversation with them, because sometimes it's not that you need the team in-house. You just need to get stuff done. You know, so that's where it gets a little bit tricky because if they're considering it, that may not be the solution to the problem, that may not get you the results or you may not have to go that far to get the results. You may just need a conversation to understand, because you know how when you're in marketing, right? A company will come to you and say, I want to do this, this, this, and this and this, but really they want the end result. But the end result may not be, getting to the end result may not be what they envisioned.
Atiba de Souza: Right.
Victoria Caldwell: Now how many clients or prospects come to you telling you what they want to do when you're the marketing company, but you know, okay, this is the result you want. This is what you need to do. So if you haven't hired it yet, it's having that conversation to know, do I even need to hire them or do I just want to get this done?
And so looking at that, having a good overview of the marketing journey, like what that is. And, you know, with digital marketers, do the CDJ or whatever, but let's say...
Atiba de Souza: So y'all, you see what she just did there, that's now the third episode we going to do. Okay. We're going to come back and we're going to talk about, she just talked about the journey and she threw a term CDJ at you. Go ahead though. The third interview, it's coming y'all. I'm telling you it's coming.
Victoria Caldwell: Okay. So the journey is how you take whole prospects all the way to repeat buyers. Each and every step, whatever you want to call it. Okay. So how you take prospects from being, and this is the marketing side. So what happens at each stage and from a marketing spot, how should that, how should you be more moving people through this? And so what happens with a lot of marketing companies they don't really, they think, oh, throwing something on social media. That's the marketing side.
Atiba de Souza: Right.
Victoria Caldwell: They don't understand the whole relationship and everything is done intentionally. It's, it's intentional. There's a lot of moving pieces to it. And if they don't know, if you don't know that the, all of these pieces exist, then you can't even begin to make an informed decision.
Atiba de Souza: That's right.
Victoria Caldwell: You can't because you don't have enough information.
Atiba de Souza: You're clueless.
Victoria Caldwell: So I would start with understanding what this is like, what, like, what do you need to make this result come to pass? And then you can sit back and say, okay, I thought I needed this, but actually what I really need is this, because now you're, you're making a decision based on what, the information that you had and it's usually like that agency sucked.
Atiba de Souza: Right. Right. Exactly. So, listen, I must have you back. However, I understand that there are people who are watching this right now who heard you talk about some of these things and they said, hold on, you're talking to me, I need more. I can't wait for the next time y'all decide to get together and tape an episode and put it up so I can learn more and they probably want to get in contact with you sooner than that. So how do they reach you?
Victoria Caldwell: My website?
Atiba de Souza: Okay.
Victoria Caldwell: So I got two ways, if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, Victoria E. Caldwell on LinkedIn, I can connect with you there. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I'm on Facebook too, but you know, I like LinkedIn.
Atiba de Souza: Yes.
Victoria Caldwell: Then my website, if you want to book a call teamimpress.com, there's an apply button, or you can do teamimpress.com forward slash apply. There's a short questionnaire, very short and then it takes you straight to the booking calendar. We'll book a meeting, see what it is, see where you are, what's the challenges and then we'll set up a meeting and we'll, I'll explain to you everything that you need to understand about this process and grant you a customized plan.
Atiba de Souza: Fantastic. So that's teamimpress.com forward slash apply. Y'all got that? Go ahead and hit the website.
Victoria Caldwell: Or if you just go to the website, there's an apply button, but you know.
Atiba de Souza: That works just as well. Victoria, thank you. This is, this is, this is our first, but it won't be our last, right. You're going to be a regular spot. I can see that already. We're going to have some fun together. All right. Thank you for being here.
Victoria Caldwell: This is fun. Thank you so much for having me.
Atiba de Souza: And I'll see you next time.
Victoria Caldwell: Well, thank you. I'll see you. Bye.
