Every business or organization has one very important number. That can be cash flow, profit, retention rate, or anything. It’s what drives your company to create value faster and make an impact. But everyone has to be aligned on this number, and that’s the hard part. But once you fix that, you’ll be making the right decisions all the time.
Join Dr. Patty Ann Tublin as she talks to Lee Benson about his new book Your Most Important Number. Lee has more than 25 years of experience as a CEO and is a professional musician, too. He founded Execute to Win (ETW) to help senior leadership teams focus on what’s essential by working better together to improve their organization’s Most Important Number™. Learn how to increase your organization’s value and accelerate that over time. Discover his MIND Methodology and apply it to your business or nonprofit! Start creating value for the world today!
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How to Build a World Changing Business with Lee Benson
In this episode, I have a guest that is going to leave you singing. Before we go any further, since I know you’re going to love this show, make sure you like, comment, share, and most importantly, subscribe. Our guest is not only a consummate entrepreneur but also a musician. He ranks right up there with the professionals. Truth be told, he may play his music professionally, although I don’t think he’ll admit to it. I don’t need to say anymore. Let me introduce you. Buckle up because Lee Benson is about to take us for a ride. Welcome, Lee.
Thank you, Dr. Patty Ann. It’s so great to be here with you.
I am so excited to have you. When I’m in a room with you, I don’t even come close to being the smartest person in the room because I am amazed at not only how brilliant you are but how versatile you are, and quite frankly, how humble you are. I know you’re here to talk about your awesome new book and all your great work but if you don’t mind, I would like for you to share a little bit about your start. Tell us about your life as a musician.
I’m sitting here in my home music studio. There’s an office portion of it where I work most days, so there are guitars in the background. In the 1980s, most of those years, I played in a rock and roll band. I was in a few different bands over 300 nights a year. It was crazy. It was so much fun. Original music or cover music, it’s how I made most of my income. It was my first business because, at times, we had a light crew, a sound crew, and a stage crew. There was a manager. Musicians are interesting to work with.
That’s a fun way of putting it.
Our job is to convey emotion from the stage. I enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. The audiences ranged from as small as just a cook and the bartender where nobody showed up, to 5,000-plus in the bigger shows that we did. It was a lot of fun. I’m on the seventh business that I’ve started from scratch and working my way through that.
For the audience, I knew he was a professional. Did you see your music as a business or was that a launch pad for your business?
In the ’80s, I saw it as a business. That was my primary business. It’s how I made the majority of my income. I supplemented my income by working jobs during the day. It taught me a lot about working with people and other organizations and club owners. If you fast forward a little bit to ’97, there was another band I had called Three Degrees West.
When we played at our CD release party and the Arizona Music Awards, we were offered record deals with Atlantic and Capitol Records at the time. It was an interesting potential fork in the road, “Do I go down the road of fully doing music and seeing where that goes or do I keep running my businesses?” At the time, I had three different companies that I was running. I chose to keep running the business and play music on my time and my schedule.
I know you love your music. Why did you make that choice?
In the music business, making it big and a lot of money is like winning the lottery. It’s a very small percentage to get there. I love playing music and conveying the emotion that we create when we’re making the music. I don’t need a crowd to do that. I’m making great money running my businesses. I see unlimited growth potential over there. I can have both. If I just picked the music piece of it, I couldn’t have had both.
I jokingly say I could have taken off and done this VW bus tour for a couple of years across the country, playing all the shows and seeing what happens. I’m happy with the choice that I made. I still get to play in bands with friends of mine. I have musicians coming over all the time. You’d be amazed at how many CEOs are good musicians. We get together. We have a group here in Phoenix. They’ll come in and we’ll organically play music for hours and hours. It’s a lot of fun. I’m happy with the choice I made.
There are two things I want to talk about with what you said. Most entrepreneurs are huge crazy risk takers by definition. It sounds like when you made your choice when you had that fork in the road, you opted, “Was it to take the less risky road?” Am I doing you a disservice?
In the music business, making it big with a lot of money is like winning the lottery.
It was to take a more fulfilling road. I remember the early years when I started the next business, I was given this opportunity in the day job I had in late ’93. There were 25 employees. I’m the general manager. We were doing electroplating, the special process to repair aircraft components. We lost our only customer overnight. They were 90% of our business. It was a company called AlliedSignal. It’s now Honeywell. My boss said, “Close it or sell it. You have 30 days.” I couldn’t find anybody to buy it. It went from 25 employees down to 3.
I went back and said, “Let me assume the debt. You walk away from it. We can turn it around and go a different direction.” He didn’t believe in it. I put my house up as collateral. We went from three employees in that first year, doing $360,000 in sales and almost going out of business about fifteen times. Talk about risk and losing my house and everything else. I am funding it with credit cards and it was all of it. I get risk. I have a very high tolerance for it, and that built on itself. That particular business turned into three different companies with over $100 million in sales. We sold for a nice nine-figure exit later. It worked out. It was always risky.
The band piece of it is a hard life. I still stay in touch with lots of friends that have made it their whole world. A lot of them don’t have two nickels to rub together. They’re having a hard time now at this stage. That would’ve been a more difficult road but very fulfilling. I know I would’ve been successful. I would’ve been a studio musician helping people write music. It would’ve been fine, but now I get the best of both worlds.
You answered the question brilliantly. You took what you saw as the more fulfilling path. You also mentioned that many successful CEOs and high-level executives are musicians. I know that personally as well. I know there’s a connection to neuroscience. I know this is right in your wheelhouse. Educate us in a way that we can understand the connection between music, business, critical thinking, and seeing patterns.
When it comes to connecting the dots, and as a musician, there’s a lot of creativity that has to go into that. Especially when you’re writing original music, you’re working with a lot of different personalities. You’ve got all of this stuff going on. What’s the difference between that and being a successful entrepreneur or leader of an organization? One is conveying value. When creating value in the world, it’s material value, emotional energy value, and spiritual value. What’s the mix for anybody is going to be individual.
On the music side, we’re creating positive emotional energy in the world. I believe that’s a scarce commodity we have. I would rather live 5 years on 10 of emotional energy than 80 years on 1 or 2. In the music business, I believe that’s the goal. It’s to create this positive emotional energy in the world. On the business side, we’re creating material value in the world. In the for-profit world, it’s going to be what we call profit or cashflow, and creating this incredible environment with all the team members to create value, raise their self-esteem, and get everybody acting like a CEO of their own role.
There are a couple of different ways of creating value. There’s a lot of creativity that goes into it, so I see the link. You actually get it, but a number of folks have said, “I don’t understand how you can be a musician and run a company. Aren’t they two completely different things?” It’s not really, in my view because of the creativity that’s required, and how you need to get everybody to work well together. You’re producing and creating value. You know that you’re doing the right work on the music side when things are moving forward. You are conveying that emotional energy value. People are liking it and get into it. On the business side, you know you’re doing the right work when the most important number for the business, which is profit or cashflow or impact if it’s a nonprofit, is improving consistently and the rate at which it’s improving.
I did want to go to neuroscience. There is an understanding or gross oversimplification that the pathway for musicians and mathematicians is the same for critical thinking on some level. You mentioned the Most Important Number Driver, MIND. Full disclosure, I never watch Squawk Box before COVID, but every morning, my husband has it on. Every morning, I’m home, going downstairs, getting my cup of coffee, and there’s Joe, Becky, and what’s his name.
As you know, it’s the people dynamic that I love. At first, I’m like, “Joe, this curmudgeon,” but he has grown on me. You are on with Jack Welch. You might not know this, but I’m based in Connecticut now. I used to do consulting for GE. Jack Welch is not my favorite guy for a lot of reasons. What he wrote after he retired from GE is not how he led at the time, but I understand the number obsession. Talk a little bit about that. You can throw your book in there. Go wherever you want.
I have a new book out. I published it in June of 2022. The title is Your Most Important Number. It’s an operating methodology. It’s a way for any organization of any type or size to create value faster and get everybody fully aligned. What’s interesting was when I was building my other companies, and the biggest one had over 500 employees, keeping everybody fully aligned was a challenge. Everybody would say that. Most companies have some form of traditional goal setting that they roll out. In fact, in my aerospace company, with over 500 employees, every employee had a quality, cost, safety delivery, and culture goal that they had to interact with on a monthly basis to keep them fully aligned from the top all the way to the frontline.
I was able to do that. I have the discipline and the drive. I can do all of it. A number of folks try to do the same thing, and they can’t sustain it. I’m looking at all the other operating systems, whether it’s OKRs, scaling up or 4DX. There’s a whole bunch of them out there. Goal setting is a central part of it. I realized that traditional goal setting does not stand the test of time. What would be an operating methodology that will work for 80%-plus of all teams anywhere, especially when a superstar leader is not in the room? That’s where I came up with a MIND Methodology™, which stands for Most Important Number and Drivers.
In this methodology, every team has one number that does two things. Above all others, it says you’re winning or losing the game. Two, it drives the majority of the right behaviors. For an organization at the top, there’s going to be one most important number. Every functional group or department will have a most important number that does those two things. You can cascade this all the way to the frontline. We’re working with clients as small as four employees that deploy this methodology, all the way to 40,000 employees. All these teams easily bolt together.
The most important number does those two things. The driver piece of it would be categories of work that that team should be good at to accelerate improvements in their most important number. There’s a way of meeting that makes a lot of sense that’s rolled into this operating methodology. This is how teams like to work. If you’re on a sports team, there’s the ultimate score that says we’re winning or losing. We may measure 20 or 30 other things, but we’re measuring those things to make better decisions, and take actions to improve that most important number.
What we’re finding here is that it catches fire on its own. I’m seeing it everywhere, working with hundreds of companies and thousands of teams. When you deploy traditional goal setting and you back off at all from a senior leadership standpoint, everybody starts backing away from the requirement that you laid out to do it. Whereas with this, it catches fire on its own. It’s an operating methodology to accelerate value creation. It’s working everywhere. My goal was 80%-plus of teams, but so far it’s 100% of the teams are getting significantly better results faster because of the methodology.
Can you give us a concrete answer? The sports analogy, everybody would get. It’s whatever number like baseball. It’s a statistician’s dream. Every number is to drive the winning number. Can you give us an example that’s very concrete and simplified? You have a sales team. What would be their number? Sales are driven by numbers as well. What is an organization’s most important number at the top? Make that connection first.
Let’s say at the top in the for-profit world is generally going to be whatever they call profit. It could be net profit or EBITDA. If it’s a capital-intensive business, cashflow may be their most important number because we can make lots of money on paper and go out of business because we ran out of cash. It’s going to be in the category of one of those two for a for-profit organization. At the top, when I ask what’s the most important number that does these two things for an organization, I’ve never seen complete agreement on that. Isn’t that fascinating?
That’s interesting.
If we’re not fully aligned at the top, what are we cascading out to everyone else? That’s fascinating.
How do you get that alignment? I work with business partners. Getting them aligned is hard. How do you do that with a team of executives that are all type-A and all right all the time?
I don’t believe they’ve ever approached it that way. They haven’t been asked the question, “What’s the one number that does these two things?” They’ll say, “It can’t be one number. There are lots of numbers involved.” There really is one number.
Do they find it simplification?
They find this simplification. A lot of folks like to make simple complex and make complex impossible.
Because then they’re smart.
They’re super smart. You don’t want to be the one that’s going to say, “I don’t understand anything you said.” You probably don’t understand what you just said if you were to do it. I’m okay with facilitating and having the discussion. I said, “We’re measuring a lot of other things.” What’s interesting about the supporting measures is to look at all this cool stuff we’re measuring. I’ll ask the question, “How are you using each of these measures to make better decisions and take actions to improve that most important number?”
In a business, you’re not fully aligned at the top if you disagree on your most important number.
A lot of times, they don’t have anything. It’s like, “We’re not going to measure it because it doesn’t matter.” I see a lot of CFOs that have this amazing report with all this data. I’ll go around the room and ask the senior leadership team one by one, “How are we using this information to make better decisions and increase the value that we create as an organization?” Ninety-five percent of the time, they don’t have anything.
I look at the CFO and they’re very proud of themselves and all the reports. I love the data. I like studying it for hours to understand the business, but I don’t think that’s their job. It’s like, “Let’s have the data over here, but let’s split it out. Let’s help every leader in the organization discover the numbers that matter to them with their team so they can move the needle faster.” The CFO’s job is to make that happen. Present the data in a way and develop the teams in a way that they discover those numbers. Deciding what’s best for everybody, giving it to them, and assuming they’re going to make great decisions, I never see that work a high percentage of the time.
It’s so interesting that you’re using that as an example because there’s a company that I’m consulting with that’s always cutting costs. It’s absurd. The CFO is one of those penny-wise and pounds foolish guys. The message as to why the budget is the way it is navigated across. I’m thinking now as you’re speaking, other than the fact that he’s cutting the number and making the number go from big to small for everything, including the number of peanuts you can buy in the kitchen, there’s so much angst within the organization. If you asked him that question, he wouldn’t be able to answer it other than, “I’m cutting the budget.”
I always think about in our methodology what the best net effect is. It depends on the business on the timeframe for this, 1 year out, 2 years out and 3 years out. It’s that difference between cost thinking and investment thinking. Maybe we make a little bit less now, but the net effect a year or two years out is going to be significantly greater.
You play the long game.
The right best net value game is how I’m looking at it. That’s always an interesting discussion. The short term and the numbers, that’s what we have to play because it’s Wall Street or the shareholders. It’s all a cop-out. It should be the best net value game over time. That’s how I think about it. At the top of the company, it’s whatever they call profit. As we go down, you get to have an interesting discussion with each of the functional groups.
If we went to HR, and these are companies that are a couple of hundred to tens of thousands or whatever, what’s the most important number that we’ll do the two things we talked about? It says above all others are winning and losing the game. It drives the majority of the right behaviors. Almost every time, the first thing they throw out, even when they’ve set back and seem to be thoughtfully thinking about it, it’s employee engagement or retention. Those are the things.
HR would say that.
HR says what they say. Every single time, it’s one of those two things. Let’s play that out. If it’s retention, I’m running HR, and we have 1,000 employees, I want to make sure that nobody leaves. Here we are, four years into the future, my retention is over 90%, but 70% of our team members can’t perform at the level we need them to for the role that they’re in, but I hit my number. That didn’t drive the right behaviors.
A way better and most important number for HR, and it’s my favorite so far, is the percentage of seats filled with capable people. If you had 1,000 employees, you have 900 seats filled and 100 that you’re trying to fill. Let’s say 100 of those employees are not performing at the level they need to. We’re currently at 80%. We’re now driving all the right behaviors. We’re developing leaders to develop their team members. We’re looking for capable people.
Part of that design would be, for every role, we need to have clearly defined 1 to 4 outcome-based responsibilities that we can objectively measurably determine if they’re meeting the requirement, over-delivering or they’re falling below. That’s an example of a most important number that will move the needle for the company and say where the HR team is winning or losing, which is about supporting leadership throughout the organization with whatever they need, and fully driving all the right behaviors.
We get over to finance. That most important number could be cashflow and helping all leaders discover the numbers that will allow them to make the best decisions to move the needle. They need to be able to articulate that in what they’re doing with their team members. I personally want every team member in an organization to think, feel and act like they’re the CEO of their own role. They’re running a business within a business, “I’m a leader with a team. This is my business. I’m an individual contributor. This is how I create value for the organization.” With the CFO in this example, the most important number is cashflow and improving that.
You know they’re winning when every leader can say, “This is how my team and I can create value for the organization.” Every individual contributor can say, “This is how I create value for the organization.” You then go from one functional group to the next, and have this meaningful conversation around, what is that number that does those two things? What are the supporting measures that will help us make better decisions? What are the categories of work that we should be good at that we can leverage and continually get better at leveraging those things to accelerate the improvement in our most important number?”
Let’s go back to HR for a moment. It sounds like your most important number would eliminate the whole quiet quitting because people are in seats. I’ll say it my way. They’re not operating 10 out of 10. Maybe they’re operating at a 7.5 or 8.
I believe it.
You hesitate.
It’s such a big and important thing. The number one job for the CEO would be to continually increase the value the organization creates and accelerate that over time. That’s their job as CEO. As they go out, the second job is so critical to making it happen. It gets at the quiet quitting and some of these other things going on with the Great Resignation, etc. It’s to create an environment that releases the positive, intrinsic, and productive energy from everyone where even for 20% more money, they wouldn’t want to work anywhere else because they don’t want to lose the feeling of this winning team they’re on.
Now you’re talking about culture.
I have a webinar coming up about Connecting Culture to Financial Results. It is the X factor. You can intentionally and objectively drive culture and connect it to financial results. A big part of every leader’s job is to create an environment that releases that intrinsic, positive, and productive energy.
This will come out after your webinar, but I’m sure you’ll have a link for it. Tell people how they could sign up for it, look for it, and check it out. I think I will sign up for it as well.
Go to YourMostImportantNumber.com, and you get access to lots of free resources, including webinars. For any webinars that were missed, there are links so you can watch them. You can order a copy of my new book, Your Most Important Number. There are nuggets in there in the book and the tools that we have on YourMostImportantNumber.com for anyone, whether you’re leading an organization, a leader at any level in an organization, or an individual contributor. It will give you tools and ideas to make things significantly better.
I’m going to tell people at the end of the interview how they can find out more about you and get all your good stuff. You mentioned the webinar, so I figured let’s tell people how to get that info. You talk about driving behavior. Now you’re talking my language. I hear data and numbers. I get the heebie-jeebies. I know that so much of your work is about the people, culture, and wanting to feel a part of something greater than yourself.
It’s a reason to come to work. You’re a part of a team. It’s not just about me. It’s about we. Everybody talks about that noise. I don’t know what percentage of the companies actually live it. Perhaps you do. I know you’ve worked with other companies. I know from an education perspective, you’ve been instrumental in driving an awesome change in the education system in Arizona. Is it that people can take their individual textiles and go to any school they want? Is that what you did?
Yes.
Playing for the short-term because of Wallstreet and shareholders is a cop-out. Instead, play the best net value game over time.
This man is a genius.
A For Arizona is the organization. AForArizona.org is how you would look at what we’re doing. Our CEO, Emily Anne Gullickson, has done an incredible job. They’re using the MIND Methodology to create value. We lapped our second year. They brought in tens of millions of dollars for these different programs and passed lots of legislation that’s getting national attention to create better conditions for kids to learn. This is all about creating better conditions for K-12 students, including transportation.
One example is we have transportation grants where we’re giving tens of millions of dollars away to people applying to get kids to be able to go to schools that are typically out of the radius where they normally could go. Even though we have backpack money that you’re talking about, where a parent can put their kid into any school in Arizona they want to, most families can’t get them there. With this innovation and transportation grant, we can get them there. Rather than one low-performing school, they’ve got access to 10 or 20 schools they can go to. It’s so great.
You got this buy-in. I’m connecting it because you use your MIND concept. We all know that in the educational system and business, you can’t even say the words in the same room. The budget is insane. It’s bloated at the top. How did you do that? How are you able to get buy-in from the academic community? Can I say unions? I don’t know.
This nonprofit’s most important number is what percentage of our 1.3 million K12 students have access to high-quality classrooms. That’s what we measure.
Was that a pathetically low number?
Not only low but there’s a lot in the system with teacher’s unions and a ton of stuff going on where they lobby hard not to be measured. They don’t even want to be measured.
They don’t even want to know.
I made up these t-shirts that say, “It’s all about the kids… change my mind.” As we go in, we’re completely nonpartisan. We’re about creating better conditions for kids, and everybody’s coming on board from both sides. If you look at the transportation grants that are going on, I call them The Yellow School Bus Contracts, those things are in jeopardy if the money’s going somewhere else to provide less expensive, very safe, and better transportation in terms of the flexibility to get the kids to the schools that they want to go to.
The MIND Methodology works over there on that side. It’s just a way of focusing on what’s most important. Every decision and action is about getting more aligned around what we can do to improve what’s most important. We’re seeing it everywhere. We have lots of nonprofits that are getting extraordinary results. Most nonprofits, unfortunately, are trying to survive and make payroll and not have an impact.
Our goal is to quickly better define the impact that they’re trying to have, solidify the programs to objectively improve the impact, and get more people to support it. When all that stuff is going on in the nonprofit world, it’s not uncommon that within 2 years, they’re raising 3, 4 or 5 times the amount of money they were the year before we started engaging with them because now we’re moving the needle and making some great things happen.
I don’t want to have a political discussion, but I wish you could take this national.
There are up to twenty other states that are asking us to help them pass the same legislation, “How did you do it? Will you help us do it?” We are and it’s exciting. They’re our future. When kids launch out of high school, I want them fully ready to be productive adults and survive emergencies, cover themselves, and help friends, family, and causes that make sense, etc.
Here’s the last question on this. Lee and I met a couple of years ago. We were sitting in a courtyard outside of Genius Network. You were telling me about this program. It was about 95 degrees in the shade because it was Arizona. We were sweating a little bit, but it was an amazing conversation. It’s so heartwarming to see how it’s come to fruition. Let me ask you the question this way. What is a common main obstacle that you faced launching this educational opportunity for children and what do you see in the business world? Can you talk about alignment? I’m wondering if the main obstacle is in there or something different.
The biggest obstacle to this operating methodology is going to be the mindset of the senior leadership team. That’s going to be the biggest obstacle.
When you have an ego the size of this room, how do you tackle that?
There are so many ways you can run at it.
The one that works.
Most of the time, we can get it to work. Out of 100 clients, 2 of them won’t work. We know it right away and we don’t even engage with them because the senior leader isn’t willing to be transparent with the most important number. If you’re not going to share that because you’re worried about everybody knowing how much money you make or whatever that is, the Most Important Number and Driver’s methodology is not going to work. It’s just not.
In fairness to most CEOs, you always have outliers. In fairness, they want to do right. They want to do the right things for their people. They probably are open to you.
They want it but are they willing to do it? One of the things about the MIND Methodology is it requires a lot of transparency and exposes everyone. You have to be willing to sit at that senior leadership table and be open to new ideas and continually improving. Some people can’t handle that. This will expose a CEO that’s insecure and not willing to learn, grow, and create more value that way, probably more than just about any other methodology. That can be a challenge but it happens maybe 2 out of 100 clients where we see that.
What you said about transparency is that being a process that has to be overcome, which you do 98% of the time. What’s screeching it to me in my brain is you’re dealing with creating enough trust at the highest level where leaders will become vulnerable or allow them to be vulnerable. How do you approach that? How do you manage that?
The way we look at this is we’ll come in and have a discussion about the most important number that we all agree on now. That starts aligning the work, and people are less defensive around that. That works. We agree on the categories of work that holistically affect the organization, or if it’s an individual team, that team, and what they can leverage. That gets rid of a lot of the defensiveness, and everybody knows more about what to do and what the goal is so it feels better in that environment. That helps a lot. We’ll often have leaders and individual contributors that aren’t living up to what that role requires. I see it everywhere.
We come in and think, “We’ve defined the outcome for the organization. We’ve got the drivers. We look at the structure of the organization. Do we have all the pieces we need, that could be department functions, partnerships, etc., to create the value to drive this most important number for the organization great? Within this structure, have we defined every role in the outcome-based responsibilities for each of those roles?” There are never more than 1 to 4 outcome-based responsibilities for each role. There just isn’t. There might be a list of 30 things they need to be capable of doing.
Most nonprofits lack impact because they focus more on surviving and making payroll.
Those are sub-actions.
Yes, but only to achieve those outcomes. We now look at people. When we do the design, it’s outcome, structure, and people. Who do we have that can achieve those outcomes? Most organizations go the other way. They say, “These are the people we have. Let’s see what they can do.” That’s not an intentionally designed value-creating organization. Once all this is laid out, it becomes apparent who can and who can’t achieve the outcomes for their role.
Do you find that you are helping companies move the seats around more than having people have to leave the organization? Is it just that their unique ability, as Dan Sullivan would say, is not being accessed in a particular role?
It could be both. In some cases, they move around. In other cases, we find them another place to work or another company that’s better for them.
How did you get from being a musician to a data-driven successful CEO entrepreneur? I don’t know if it was a transformation, but what was the personal journey that you went on? We know you are a brilliant businessman and entrepreneur. With that beautiful smile of the good guy, tell us about Lee, the person.
It was a blended journey to get here. I go all the way back. In the last several years, I’ve spoken to probably 3,000-plus high school students, mostly seniors and some juniors. I espouse the virtues of entrepreneurship and my view that anybody who is starting a business and creating a job is my hero. I talk about my journey and where I go. I call it the value creation stressing journey. By the time I’m seven years old, I’m pulling weeds for $0.25 an hour. Pretty soon, I’ve got this circular. I’m delivering papers. I have a full-blown paper route. I’ve got four paper routes. I’m a dishwasher, bus boy and cook. By the time I was kicked out of the house at the beginning of my senior in high school, it was a no-brainer and no issue whatsoever to afford my own apartment and finish my last senior year in high school.
You’re a nice guy. What could you possibly have done to have gotten kicked out of your house? Did you do something?
The reason I was kicked at the time is that I went to school during the day. I worked virtually every night in a restaurant. I was never home. Unfortunately, my parents had a hard time raising themselves. It was a pretty difficult environment. I never held anything against anyone going through that. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
Most successful entrepreneurs have had incredible trauma. Most people have had trauma.
Also, relative to them and what they can handle and all of it. Because I started that value creation stressing journey early and started building on it, I never stopped. I loved it. When I talked to kids and asked them, “Did I have an advantage over you or a disadvantage?” Most kids would say a disadvantage, but a few of them get it, “You had a huge advantage because you’re learning all this early and building on it.”
A lot of us, here we are, seniors in high school, and we’re scared to death to go into the world. You’re already in the world by our age going through. I said, “Yes.” I’m on this big kick to get every kid to start this value creation stressing journey earlier and earlier. Getting money from family members doesn’t count. It’s got to be the real world with real people where you’re exchanging your best efforts for their accumulated best efforts, which is their money and see enough value to pay you for it. Now you have something.
It’s like the guy that goes on third base and acts like he hit a triple.
It’s challenging because a lot of parents with the best of intentions, “I want them to have a better life and everything else. You get this way more than I do,” we mess them up. We don’t set them up for success. We go into what I love to call the emerging adult phase, 18 to 36 or something like that, rather than being an adult by the time you’re launched out of high school.
This is a personal opinion. A lot of the angst, depression and anxiety that’s going on in the world has to do with the fast pace of change. We can’t even internalize and process what we learned yesterday and the technologies. It’s already outdated. It’s the yin and yang of physics. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Technology is fabulous. It’s also ruining people’s lives. On top of that, what is going on is the biggest way parents have failed their children for decades now is they have not allowed their children to fail. We already are having to deal with this in the business world and the entrepreneurial world
It is an epic parenting failure, especially in the States. It used to be that you had the helicopter parents, hovering over their kids as soon as they fall and pick them up. We now have the snow plow parents where the parents are snow plowing in front of the kid to smooth the way, so they don’t even fall. You now go into the work world or get married. Guess what? Your boss and partner do not think you’re the best thing since sliced bread. You’re not always right. By the way, you might suck. What do you do? You collapse and fall apart. I agree with you there. Do you feel differently about anything I said?
I completely agree. It’s all with the best of intentions.
No malice. That’s correct. Any entrepreneur needs this to be successful. At an early age in high school, at 16 or 17, you might not have even said it, but innately you knew that you either were going to allow yourself to be a victim or a victor.
If I was going to add to that, I could trust that. My thinking back then, the home environment wasn’t just dysfunctional. It was toxic. There were a lot of bad things that were going on. When I was out there in the world trading my best efforts, mowing lawns, shoveling snow, etc., I could trust that I could create more value. I get paid more. I felt valued in what was going on and kept building on that over time. It saved me in such a big way from the dysfunctional and toxic environment that I was in. It turned out great. I spent a lot of time with nonprofits, trying to make a real difference in the world.
That is great. Don’t be humble. Clearly, you are so gifted and talented. If somebody is lucky enough like I’ve been to spend five minutes in your presence and speak with you, you want to listen. Even I keep my mouth shut for two minutes. Out of all the attributes that you feel have made you successful, what would you say was the most important one?
I believe it’s helping everyone create more value for everyone in the whole world. Help everybody whenever you can. We all have limited capacity to do that to create more value in the world. When that happens, more things expose themselves to me in opportunities. It could be investment opportunities, new clients, new friendships, etc. I’ve always done that. It has been in my bones, seeing examples in the home where I didn’t want to be that way. I learned more from folks about what not to do than what to do.
For me, I internalize that and try to do it better. What I noticed in my larger business with 500 employees was that it was such an incredible community. Every weekend, there are lots of things going on. People are helping each other. When tragedies would happen, they would all surround an employee and support them. This is incredible. I’ve thought this for decades now. If we can strengthen communities where they have each other’s backs, especially in bad times, you need less and less support from the government. It’s the answer to everything wrong now.
I wish our elected officials just like a strong community should be doing everything they can to create better conditions to work, live, learn and play for every citizen here, not gain power, keep power, grow, power, money, and all the things that are going on. Healthy communities do it better. What I believe in the MIND Methodology is when you deploy this in an organization, when you start, it could be a dysfunctional culture. After a year, everybody is having fun. It’s so different. It strengthens the community. I was able to impact thousands in my different companies.
I looked at the employees’ families, community, circle of friends, and other things they engage with like our contractors and customers. They can all feel it. My goal now is to get it to tens of millions of people in terms of how the MIND Methodology touches them because it strengthens the community. It teaches people how to create value faster. It elevates self-esteem. That’s where I want to make a difference in the world. My exits have been from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars. I do this work because I love the work. It keeps my brain moving. I keep growing personally and professionally by doing it. I’ll never stop as long as I can do this. This is so important.
Thank you for all that, but it feels like when life gives you a lemon, you make lemonade. It feels like you’re doing for everybody what you wished came easier for you and what was done for you. You are healing yourself by healing others and being a servant leader. That’s how you describe yourself. The community is helping each other. The words tribe and tribal have a negative connotation, but that is what a tribe does.
More opportunities will reveal themselves if you start helping everybody because that’ll create more value in the world.
You gather around. Nobody starts or everybody starts. There’s enough to go around. There’s no hoarding. There’s a sense of the greater good and the commune, the community. It’s brilliant. To be able to do that on a global level, that’s big. I’m going to make a big assumption, and correct me if I’m wrong, that you’re happy. When did you know you were happy? You couldn’t have been happy in all those years in that toxic environment.
When people throw out happiness and easy and all of it, it has to be hard at the right interval for everyone to grow and to truly be happy from time to time. You can’t be happy 100% of the time. We’re back to what parents are trying to do for kids, and then they don’t develop character. Everything I went through, I’m thankful for everything. It made me who I am, how I look at the world, how I think about creating value, and all of it.
I said earlier that the most scarce commodity to me is not time. It’s positive emotional energy. You have to have lows to have higher and higher positive emotional energy that’s real. It’s the way I like to think about it. What’s easy for me to deal with and handle now, 20 or 10 years ago was hard. I love that growth path. It can’t always be easy and smooth, and everybody is happy all the time.
You know this better than I do with the work that you do. I intentionally think about that stuff. I want to grow. I can change how I feel about things, but you have to work at it over time to make it happen. This is part of how I’m looking at the MIND Methodology, working with teams, and developing everybody to go down that road. I love starting with a client or a team anywhere, and then reflecting back a year and how it’s so different, the conversations they have, how they feel about things, their self-esteem, and all of it. It’s incredible.
It sounds like you thrive in the challenge of the processes. You are thrilled when you see others get it. What drives you in your personal life?
For me, it’s all blended. I do this in my personal life as well. Selfishly, when others do well and things get better like the kids in high school that I talk to, they launch faster and better into adulthood, and I feel good. I want to feel good when I help somebody.
There’s good selfishness. Please bring to the world more selfish people like Lee Benson.
People use selfishness as a bad thing. It’s almost bad but everybody has what’s in their own best self-interest. By definition, we’re all selfish but are you win-win or win-lose, which is what you’re talking about. Are you somewhere in the middle? A lot of people are floating in the middle somewhere. It should be a win-win. The more of this work that I do, the better world for myself, my family, and my friends to interact with. That makes me feel good. I feel like I’m doing the right work and I love to feel good, so I’m very selfish that way.
It’s your life to live. People also say narcissism is a bad word, but there is such a thing as healthy narcissism. It’s why we get up in the morning and wash off our faces and take a shower. It’s healthy narcissism. Anytime I speak with Lee, I always say I could listen to him all day. Two more questions, and then I’ll let you go because I want to respect your time. What’s the last book you reread and why?
I read a couple of books a week. There’s one that stood out. I listen to them when I exercise. It’s hard to sit down, but I’ll go on 10-mile hikes behind my house and listen to books. The one I loved was Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict. She interviewed me before as she was doing research for the book. She describes how people get to this state where math, common sense, logic and facts don’t matter. They just take a position. They’re in high conflict, “I’m good. You are bad. I’m moral. You are immoral. You’ll only be good or moral when I see you are based on some standard that’s not reflective of what really happened.”
That’s the state of the political world nowadays.
Because of this high conflict state, she makes a good case to say, “This is why it’s so easy to manipulate everyone. This is how to recognize when you’re in that state and how to get out of that state because the story that got you there, the reality is almost never what you think it was.”
It’s a great story.
I love it. Have you read that book yet, by chance?
I know of it. I haven’t read it, but can you send it to every single person in Washington, please?
Every adult on the planet should read that right after my book Your Most Important Number.
I’m familiar with it. I haven’t read it myself, but I’m going to read it. Here’s my last question, which I can’t wait to hear your answer to. What is the one song you cannot live without?
That’s such a great question. There are so many classics. I’m going to go back to the beginning and say Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple. The world needed that song. I’m so glad it’s here.
Why is that? Why do you feel that way?
It’s a classic iconic rock song that every guitar player has played. I started playing the guitar when I was five years old. I don’t remember not being able to play the guitar. I have 50 guitars hanging around my studio here. That was one of the first songs that I learned in a junior high school band that we played together. It’s such an iconic song that everybody recognizes. Everybody will have their song. What a great foundational song in my history of learning to be a rock guitar player back in the day.
That is great. I know you mentioned it a little bit before, but please let the audience know where they can get your book, learn more about you, and find out about your worth. Tell everybody and their mother about your MIND program.
The MIND Methodology is completely framed in my new book titled Your Most Important Number. You can order a copy of the book by going to YourMostImportantNumber.com and getting it in all forms. I believe it’s in 40,000 channels out there. Also, you can get a lot of free material. There is access to previously recorded webinars. There are lots of free tools. You can sign up for different communities within the MIND Methodology. There are various communities that we’ve set up. There’s a lot there. Go to TheMindMethodology.com, and you can get all those resources.
Lee, thank you. I am so grateful to have you as a guest. I would have you again if you would share your wisdom one more time.
Dr. Patty Ann, I love speaking with you. Every time we talk, I feel we could keep going for three days.
We will in November 2022. Thank you so much, Lee. That concludes this episode. As promised, Lee not only took you for a ride, but he gave you a song and left you with some music in your heart. Make sure you like, comment, share and subscribe to this show. Until the next episode, be well.
Important Links
- Lee Benson
- Your Most Important Number
- MIND Methodology™
- Connecting Culture to Financial Results
- AForArizona.org
- Genius Network
- High Conflict
- https://ETW.com/
- https://www.Linkedin.com/company/execute-to-win/
- YourMostImportantNumber.com
About Lee Benson
Hi, I’m Lee Benson. I grew my company from 3 to 500 employees with 15 consecutive years of 20% compounded average annual growth. Now I help coach other leaders on how they can do the same.
#entrepreneur #executewin #data #datadriven #metric #behavior #behavioranalysis #numbers #musicians #giver #ceo #growth #community #compassion #empathy
