Can’t wait ? Above is the full interview. Click Play Arrow.
You Can also read Part of the Interview BELOW
Editor:
I’m excited today because our guest is Dino Tartaglia, co-founder of Success Engineers and a leading voice behind the concept of character-led business. Originally from the UK and now based in Portugal, Dino works with founders, leaders, and organizations who want to build businesses grounded in values, integrity and long-term impact. His focus is simple, but powerful. Sustainable success starts with who you are, not just what you do.
Dino, it is great to have you with us.
Dino Tartaglia:
Pleasure. Really, really pleased to be here.
Editor:
Could we start at the beginning? What shaped your thinking around leadership with character?
Dino Tartaglia:
Oh, that’s a great question. I guess just the years and years of, probably like a lot of the readers or listeners, the time in corporate, time in employment, looking at things not being done well. And I’ve always been a humans-first-business-second guy. I wrote a book tail end of last year in the shadow with my business partner, Simon Hartley, who’s written… He’s on his 16th book now. Can you believe? And he’s been badgering me for about eight years to write a book. “Mate, you’ve got to write a book. You got to write a book,” so, eventually, I did. I wrote a book called Misaligned, Why You Get Trapped in the Yo-Yo Business and What You Can Do About It. And, in there, I talk about the journey that I went on from a young engineer.
I was an electrical and electronics engineer, mainly electronics, working at oil and gas all around the world. And I saw firsthand a lot of management, but poor leadership. And it was really management dressed up as leadership, but it never was. And it wasn’t great. And it always came down, I felt, to the character of the person running the job or running the team, so I fell into it, if you like, just this feeling of it’s not right, it didn’t fit. So I moved out of employment, got eventually into consultancy and contracting, self-employment and started getting very, very good at troubleshooting people and processes and systems as opposed to hardware, which is where I’d been.
So the journey into business transformation as it became business improvement basically was quite short, but very deep. And I ended up working with companies from six to 10 billion right down to a few mates that were trying to build a business from their spare bedroom, so I saw it all. And the running theme through all of it was the better the individual and the better they… the more they focused on their business acumen and their character, the better the business, so that I came to the conclusion, which is something I wrote in the book, the business can’t outgrow the character of the person running it.
Editor:
That makes absolute sense. And you mentioned your business partner, Simon Hartley. My next question was going to be about Success Engineers. How did that come about? And what’s the problem that you’re trying to solve with this?
Dino Tartaglia:
Right. Yeah, a couple of great questions again. So Success Engineers, very, very simply, I’m from Glasgow originally, but was living in Newcastle, and Newcastle has been home. Although I’ve lived and worked… I worked this out for the book actually. I lived and worked in 23 countries on five continents in the time that I was working in contracts. The centre of my universe, if you will, was Newcastle. It’s where I got married, divorced now, with two kids, two daughters, two beautiful daughters. And they live there.
So I was sponsoring a player at Newcastle Falcons. Rugby is my first love in sport. Used to play, wasn’t very good, and I met Simon who was a… just when the game went professional in 1998, I think. Newcastle Falcons, as it was then called, Rugby Club. And I was sponsoring a player, Geoff Parling, who’s a phenomenal player in his day. And Simon was there as a young, fresh-faced sports psych. That was his profession. And we just clicked. We just became good friends.
Eventually, I left and toured, and went around. I got divorced. I left the country. I was out in Malaysia for a while, came back a few years later. And I think, 2015, Simon and I bumped into each other. And, by that time, he’d written six books. He’d become a world authority on world-class mindset and had a family, had a couple of kids. And I read a couple of his books and said, “Mate, we’ve got to take this out to…
We’ve got to take this out to the market. I know just the market we can take this philosophy out to.” And one of the books was Two Lengths of the Pool, which this time, working with Chris Cook, who’s a fabulous human being and a double Olympian, 50-metre breaststroke swimmer, and, hence, two lengths of the pool.
And the second book I read was How to Develop Character which really spoke to me. So I said, “Look, we’ll put the methodology of Two Lengths of the Pool and the philosophy of how to develop a character. I’ll pepper it with my stuff. And why don’t we take this out as a product and a service into the space,” which actually at the time was going to be the BizOps space. But what I found was the vast majority of people that we were speaking to in that space weren’t ready for kind of what we had. And we were I think a little bit ahead of our time and where the industry was, so we moved into the coaching, consultancy, therapist, creative space or practitioner business as I call it.
And that was it. So that was the genesis of Success Engineers. He’s the success. I’m the engineer. It’s very, very simple. It’s where it came from. And we call that Business Mind, Business Model. He takes care of largely business mind. I take care of business model, and we fuse that together, and there’s a bit of overlap. So that’s kind of the genesis of it all and where it came from. And, ultimately, what we were trying to do is pretty much what the book is about. I found that a lot of people were building businesses that were misaligned. They were building a business that required a certain set of behaviours, and they were delivering behaviours that were not aligned with that, so above or below, but just not matched up. They were building a business to deliver a lifestyle that they wanted at a specific level, but the business itself that they were building was not going to deliver that. Misaligned.
And the message to the market was not matched. So the market was expecting message A, and they were delivering message B. Misaligned. And I developed from that a technique or an approach called alignment intelligence, AI, go figure, which I’m now leveraging the hell out of with the Profit AI system. So that’s kind of… We exist to help. It doesn’t really matter what phase a business owner is in or where the business is in terms of its journey from what I call a dream-up startup. Dream it. Start it. Build it like that. There are seven phases of growth. It doesn’t matter where they are.
Generally speaking, the foundations are the key. And there’s always something that’s been missed at the foundation level when somebody builds a business, so we always take them back to that and just go, right, have we got the four or five pillars in place? Are they robust? Are you building on something that’s going to shift and break underneath you under the weight of the business scaling or is it going to magnify all the good stuff and not the bad stuff? So we apply that whether you’re in early stage and they’re a founder or you’re late stage and you’ve got a large team. Makes no difference…
<http://wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Dino Tartaglia Interview.mp3>
“>
Note from the Editor:
Above is the full interview. Click Play Arrow. Enjoy!
To return to Making Web Money Click Here