Many times in our businesses, we have systems that are too complex.
We're accomplishing many goals, but they aren't that fruitful because we're forgetting the few goals that we actually specialize and excel in.
In Lee's book "Your Most Important Number" he talks about alignment decisions and accountability. As Lee tells Brett one of his main sayings is 'Execute To Win.' Which is one of Lee's organizations.
In this discussion, Lee delves into the importance of alignment in organizations as well as accountability. What is your Most Important Number & What are your Drivers? What one number above all others 1) reflects the value of your organization and 2) drives behaviors of everyone in the organization? These are critical in understanding and creating the right business strategies for your company and executing effectively.
If you get this right at the top, and communicate it clearly, this will trickle down to each team within the organization for them to create their own unique Most Important Number that will flow into the overarching most important goals. Not only does clarifying the strategy and plan help everyone understand what it is they need to accomplish, but it helps everyone in the business take more initiative and ownership and drives them to add more value to their position.
Lee emphasizes that this can't be something that sounds good ideally, it must also be a believable and achievable strategy for proper execution to take place.
Lee overstates that if we can get everyone to understand the vision and empower the team members to truly create value, the planning and execution of goals becomes much more enjoyable. And even though there are struggles, the struggles end up being viewed as fun, because we know there are achievable goals we get to utilize real developed skills and creative cognition that energizes us as our team knows they absolutely were built to overcome each struggle they face.
This is the Iron Deep podcast with Lee Benson. Today we're talking about what is your most important number? Let's go!
Hey what's up? This is Brett Snodgrass with another episode of The Iron Deep podcast. I got Lee Benson on the podcast episode with me today. What's going on Lee?
Hey good to be here.
Yeah man. Super excited to have you on the show. Bestselling author, business entrepreneur... You've had a lot of success in your life, man. And you know I kind of was just going through your bio. You've built a company from three to 500 employees with 15 consecutive years of 20% compound and average annual growth. You founded Execute To Win which we're really going to be talking about today. Which really is just advising many high growth companies and entrepreneurs to uncover their most important number to enter growth and success. You're a bestselling author, two times Wall Street Journal bestselling author. With... "the most important number" and "the value creation kid" which I... I love kids. I'm a family man, so I'm going to talk about that a little bit today. But man... you are the the real deal. You know how to grow and to scale it sounds like, right? Where did you learn this from Lee? Were, you know... is this just hard knocks or in a way...
You know somebody said something this morning that is perfect. It's like there are no hacks. Do the work and and you could say hey this is my my you know 40 50 year overnight success story if you will these aren't things that just happened and you know over the years in different companies I've gone through hiring thousands of team members and I've had a few say exactly that how come this doesn't just happen for me I'm like wow I'm thinking back to the 100h hour week years on end going well it doesn't really just happen right maybe you win the lottery and something happens there but it it's uh you know to answer your question is just years of relentlessly creating more and more value directionally and then learning what works what doesn't work doing more of what does and it's evolved into a a way of thinking and operating methodology personally with business with families all of it
Yeah no I love that. Your business Execute To Win... you're helping you know you obviously teaching what you've learned uh by running your own particular business we talked before this episode about wanting to connect culture to Value creation which talk to us about that I mean connecting this amazing culture whether business or family into value yeah so when we talk about value creation what does that really mean most people immediately go to money and they get stuck there and then all the virtue signalers come out and say it can't be about money but when you look under the cover for 95% of them it's you know it's really all about the money and and so when I think about value creation it's it's holistic it's in three buckets it's material value creation it's emotional energy value creation we're talking positive emotional energy and it's spiritual value creation so I think all three have to be in balance and their each things to be cultivated and they're necessary of going through and so how do we get organizations uh to operate that way and and when they're talking to team members you know hey we're having this impact on the world whether it's for-profit or nonprofit and and we were able to do it with this amount of resources help us cultivate even more value Creation in the material bucket so we have more resources to have a bigger impact on the spiritual side and in the in the context of organizations you know I think about spirituality as being its connectedness it's the larger group it's how we care for each other it's it's the community the strength of that that we're building and and they they get that it's it's more of a complete answer and that that third bucket positive emotional energy I think in at least in my view it's the scarcest commodity on the planet it's not time it's positive emotional energy when it's running a nine or 10 on a scale from one to 10 doesn't matter what happens you can you can plow through it you can do anything when it's on one or two you might get a flat tire and have it run your week right so to me for leaders emotional energy is The X Factor that supercharges everything else around spiritual value creation as well as the material value creation piece of it so you when I start reading your book you start talking about just aligning and uh it kind of starts from the top you talking about the leader obviously we're talking to a lot of business owners here aligning and and getting your team aligned uh with with that emotional energy as well can you talk about what are some what are some ways maybe in your own business in your own life that how can we get aligned in our in our organizations yeah and you're referring to the book your most important number Y and and you know we think about in that book um with all of our clients you know alignment decisions and accountability and and there's something in there that um I've developed over a lot of years of trial and error trying to come up with something that stands a test of time and will catch fire and go on its own not have to be driven by the leader um or senior leadership team and they back off for a second it it dissipates right so I wanted something that stood the test of time I called the mind methodology which stands for most important number and drivers and so for any organization without exception whether it's a startup all the way to 60 plus billion dollar organizations that I get to work with and I love all of them by the way at every stage there's one number that above all others does two things it's a reflection or measure of the value of the organization and it drives the majority of the right behaviors so in the for-profit world you know it's usually some version of profit unless you're Capital intensive then it probably would be cash flow um and then as you Cascade from the top out to the front line every single team will have a most important number that does the same thing you still May measure lots of things but you have to run those measures the additional measures through the filter of how is how are these measures helping us make better decisions to improve our most important number and so you can see this all the way through the organization you can see where they started where they're going where they're at at any point in time you can just easily look hey red green or yellow and then when you go look at a team you can see their most important number you can be you know considering those questions is this really the value they were designed to create and will it drive the majority of the right behaviors and then you can see the work they're doing the best work they're doing to improve it and the drivers within each of these teams are just categories of work that the team should be really good at doing or leveraging to improve their most important number so what I what I love about the work once it gets established um we're aligned at the top because we're not aligned there what do we cascading out it's confusion right in a lot of ways and I'm sure you've seen this yeah um but once we have that and every team has their most important number and I can see their drivers the action items are taking what they're talking about in meetings I know within minutes if they're just checking the box or if they're really going for it and you know they're going for it when they're you know two or three steps ahead of you thought was possible and they're all acting like they're running a business within a business does that resonate with you Brad yeah definitely definitely I want to dig in to this most important number concept I come from the Sports World I think you you resonated a little bit in your book about sports that uh obviously we keep stats uh I was a basketball player or football Pi pick your sport we we're looking at the scoreboard and typically the most important number in a sports world would it be the the number of wins the number of losses but I want to ask you like you know in a business maybe it's not that clear or is that that even the most important number so like what are some ways to identify the most important number obviously some business would say it it's how much money are we making right but is that really the most important number can you talk about this a little bit um and just identifying that it's it's a great question every team has to go through the ex exercise of developing their own most important number so the senior team of an organization um there's two ways that I work with companies I've got quite a large number of um Consultants that are either certified um or internal that work with companies to holistically do this um the other thing I do is I work with groups of CEOs and masterminds that I call execute and they we limit it to eight and it's about using this methodology to hold each leader accountable to increasing the value of their organization and I've had a number of leaders CEOs presidents Founders you whoever is the top leader asked me the question you know what should my job really be and I said well you I believe your job should be to continually and responsibly increase the value of your organization and they're like you know what that's it I'm going to latch on to that and by proxy the senior leadership team should be doing that as well so they go through that process and again the most important number has to do two things it's reflection holistically for the organization at the top of the value of the organization so let's say you picked eida or pre-tax net profit or cash flow or public company company shareholder value Etc um as that goes up the multiple that you get um you know will establish the value of the organization the better you do that work throughout the organization and the consistency of growth and the believable plan going forward increases the mult mble and you know one of my aerospace companies that I exited in 2016 uh we were about aund million business uh uh you know very profitable and because of having 15E straight of uh 20% on average compounded annual growth before selling and a really believable path going forward and a strategic partner that could leverage it in Aerospace at the time in the aftermarket um most at best were getting a multiple of EIT of X we got 21.6 X wow right so so the top numbers reflective of the value of the organization how well you're doing it throughout all the way to the front lines including the story to get there and the believable story going forward is the rest of it so let's say for example EIT is most important at the top great and that would be our multiple and we're all working on it and then I come to HR and I talk about this example in the book what would be hr's most important number if you you know smaller companies probably don't even have that department but once you get to around a hundred they start to think about it but they Lo always typically say hey it's got to be you know retention or engagement and of course my question around engagement is engagement with what you know do we send a survey out and they say they're engaged and are we won like what is that really and I said okay well let's play this out you hire me to be your head of HR and we make retention the uh most important number for HR and 3 years later I've kept 95% of everybody I've won never mind that 80% of the employees can't achieve the outcomes required of their role but I won because we we had a retention so what we did do is answer the second question how will it drive the majority of the right behaviors and so a better most important number for HR for me um and I I love this one is percentage of seats filled with capable people what's a capable person when you look at their role the 2 to four Max outcome based measurable respons possibilities that they need to hit and there'll be a list of capabilities they need to have to be able to achieve those things and that's kind of their training um guide um they're either delivering or overd delivering now they're capable if they're underd delivering they're not capable so we look at it and all rules aren't created equal as senior leader that's not capable can create a lot of um you know negative value creation within an organization whereas a Frontline team member maybe not as much but in my view they're all critical um in the organization so you just go you Go finance you go Marketing sales um uh you know Administration U all all of that without exception in most cases they'll say well we can't do that there's no way there's one there's always one when you go through the process no that's awesome that's awesome this sounds like um I mean this takes a lot of work I mean I was I was going through your book just you know the most important number again this one we're talking about uh just just the strategy and the time that it takes and what do you what do you say uh a lot of times there's a difference between the strategy and planning so sometimes you know I I work with a lot of young not young but just uh they don't have a huge team right they might have five six seven 10 members um and they they they do do some planning and maybe they'll pull a number out but strategies I mean you really digging into some of the strategy going into the sports world like you know what's the strategy we're going to do here and what does that look like for organizations even smaller talk maybe even smaller organizations because I know you also work with them but like what does strategy look like or rhythms um what does that look like in in in Your Vision with with your business owners the the thing that's most important to me is that we don't make it an academic exercise oh here's this template we're going to go through all this stuff and I'll look at these things and go oh my gosh you really literally wasted 95% of your time going through it yeah and if you do this right I mean you said hey this looks like a lot of work it's actually a whole lot less work when you go through it and the the the book The chapter and your most important number on strategy and know one of the things I say right in the uh beginning of the chapter is hey you've completed your your strategy congratulations you're 3% of the way there because 97% is going to be executing on it and one of my maxims is do less better and every organization without exception I don't care how big they are um within you know one business unit whether it's a startup five employees 100 employees it doesn't matter there's typically only two to four things that drive 80 plus percent of the value they create and so I always like to ask the question well how well are we doing those two to four things to to drive the value and it's never as good as we can think of but interestingly they go through the strategy process process and they're doing 15 or 20 other things that collectively won't create as much value often as one of the two to four things well how about we get that right and we're doing it as well as we can before we start bolting other things on so it can be a lot less work yeah you know I I believe we should simplify complexity but it seems like a lot of folks like to make complexity impossible and go the other direction what what does that how does that land on you Brett yes I I mean I love I mean our our business actually called uh simple C we're a real estate uh firm and we're always trying to to simplify right you know our our Mantra is to have a simple and seamless real estate experience for for everybody for all right so uh so even in my business I'm always trying to like Hey how do you make this simpler um sometimes it looks like you know you're an OP seems like you're an operator you you thrive with operations a lot of the guys that I talk to are more idea I think you're an idea guy too but Visionaries they struggle with the operations so they never even get to putting things in place but the whole operations thing is yes it takes a little bit of work to do that but once it gets in a place your life in business is a lot simpler at the end of the day right yeah you know you know to that point um at least in my view it's never a set it and forget it exercise it just isn't and why can't we make executing on strategy fun and engaging it mean it should be hard energizing work it it shouldn't be arduous it should be it should be fun so I I struggle when people say well I'm the Visionary and I don't do those kind of things and we've got all these gurus out there saying oh you're in this box or that box I'm like no this is your business it's designed or should be designed to create value in the world what does it need next from you to take the next step to create the most value as an organization I'm not big on these boxes at all in fact I'm I'm not high on most of the business gurus out there because I I get why they're doing it and I I get other operating methodologies that are teaching new languages to try to make it sticky and scale and do all of it I like to look at each individual business how is it designed to create value and what do you need to be doing next as as the leader the top leader and it needs to be whatever it is yeah yeah yeah I get I mean I love that it's this is your business and sometimes you have to do things that are a little bit more difficult that right uh for you um no I love that we're talking about building teams building organizations in culture you talk about this emotional element uh I also see businesses struggle with accountability where okay you have some of these targets but now struggling to keep people accountable but also having this culture right there and can you talk a little bit about that because in one of your chapters you even said performance reviews people love I mean what how do you develop that you got this culture but you got accountability and people are getting reviewed for their performance talk to us about about what that looks like yeah that's such a big question well first we call them in our mind methodology performance snapshots because when you sit down with a team member and we' like to do these snapshots with their team around them so we get feedback from everyone live we don't want to go through the process of 360 reviews everybody does a review you do it on yourself your boss does it you collect all the data you all get together what a Monumental waste of time in my view you can do it so much more effectively by sitting in the room and saying okay how did you contribute to our most important number for the team what did you do well what needs to be improved we talk about that and then for your role in the very specific measurable outcome based responsibilities you have how well did you do that talk about that what needs to be improved what what you do well Etc and then culture what are the cultural align Tools around Mission behaviors leadership traits Etc um and how are you living them to increase the value we create as an organization whether it's the spiritual side uh the emotional energy side or the material side and keeping it appropriately in responsibly and balance so there should be no surprises when you sit down because everybody knows what's expected regarding their performance and where they stand 100% of the time we call it a snapshot because we're taking a snapshot and we're having a discussion about how to create even more value going forward and that's fun and it's energizing 100% of the time we get positive feedback doing that yeah I love that I love that because you sp it on in a positive way like how can we create more value people everyone wants to grow like we all don't want to stay the same we all want to grow in some areas of our life so if you look at that instead of being like Oh what are they goingon to say negative about me and that's a that's a downer obviously yeah or I mean and and what's typical is they don't really communicate uh one side that you know the leadership side is frustrated but not saying anything the other side thinks they're doing an okay job and they the leader hasn't been clear about what they need to be accomplishing and then the review happens and everybody gets frustrated well no wonder we everybody should know what's expected where they stand 100% of the time now here here's another challenge if you're not aligned at the top and you're setting goals because you would like to have 20% growth in this or 50% more of that but there's no believable traction that you can build on to make it happen and you give it to your teams and you're supposed to hit this thing that you don't have the resources to hit and there's no market demand for it that's kind of crazy and I see a lot of that going on well we should just be growing 25% a year because and you know they have this great intellectual discussion about why that's important and then they give it to their team and their team look back looks back and my gosh we don't have anything yeah so so alignment at the top something believable based on provable Traction in the marketplace and then let's continually improve I think doing everybody's job is continually improving every day it's part of it but then you have the strategy piece and what are the I don't know for each team two to four Max five maybe strategic initiatives you're going to take on by definition a strategic initiative is something that when you put it in place or or do that thing it's going to cause a step change and improvements over what you were doing in the past that's the definition of a strategic IC initiative and I've worked with some Billion Dollar Plus companies with well over a hundred strategic initiatives when I start working with them and I get the decks and then I categorize them first category is here are the things that will make a step change in in improving results and here are the things that should be in the category of please do your job and if they have 120 it's not uncommon to only have about 16 strategic initiatives and all the rest of them are please do your job and they all laugh like yeah you're right it's almost like they felt like they had had to sound smart in putting the decks together and then we focus it on those one two three four things that create the most value for the organization and lo and behold the results 100% of the time get significantly better regardless of the size of the organization especially in the startup world no I love that buiness I love that what uh when we were talking about the performance reviews one of the things I just kind of picked up on was giving a little bit more ownership to the person right A lot of times I might think of kind of coming in and my boss is talking to me about what I could do be doing better things like that but how big is just developing that culture with the team members having some ownership of their number I mean do you have some of that collaboration with their team members about you know them coming up with the important things and the priorities and and uh in that and and then you know just kind of owning um some of these different values and growth well 100% you I I look at small and medium-sized companies and this applies to really any any type of organization and do you have a command and control for the benefit of a really small control group it could be one owner two owners three owners and everybody's doing what they're told or do you have an organization where everything is about what's best for the entity because that will be what's best for everyone and ideally and we're showing everybody everything all the numbers all of it so they can see the bullseye because in the other scenario they can't see the bullseye but we expect them to hit it and we get frustrated when they don't but when they can see the bullseye and every decision every action is all about increasing the value of the organization what's best for the entity then people start acting like the CEO of their own role they're running they're going for it right when you're small you can stay in touch with all of it but even when you're small it's nice to have them running with everything so you can do as the top leader or anybody in the organization U much more higher value things with the time that you have available I love that because you kind of La laid out uh giving them everything I mean do you show everything to to the team the and and that obviously helps know uh where the entity at where the team's at because a lot of times bus especially small businesses the the team doesn't really know and all if you have to do certain things they think about their own individual pay and it kind of gets wonky but if you set the vision because a lot of times the team emerg just thinks that the business owner is just making all the money but if you but if you show it and then uh that comment it Paints the picture obviously so in every business I've ever had I've showed everybody everything even with over 500 employees in the Aerospace business that I exited everybody got all the financials every month as much as you wanted for those that didn't understand debits and credits and offsetting inventory Etc um we would give them a plain English version of the detail trial balance you use five pencils 10 pens four rolls of tape Etc so they can look at that and say oh my gosh we're not using this stuff wisely and make changes again if we don't show them the bullseye um how they supposed to hit it but there's some foundational things that need to be put in place um like um and you'll never get this perfect uh but when it comes to compensation and base wages everybody should be paid fairly relative to each other including the top leader in the company based on the value they create what again what's best for the entity so we can see that and I always set the bonuses up to incentivize back to driving behavior how do we get everybody to help everybody else in the organization earn another dollar of profit for the company and improve emotional energy and Community you know strength and all of that so I would say you know payroll was $100,000 and bonus was $10,000 that month based on their percentage of profit um then everybody got a 10% bonus um whether you made $100,000 a year you know $15 an hour it really doesn't matter now we're all in the game so you kind of have to get that right but even on the pay side I would let everybody see what everybody makes you know we're supposed to be fair if you want to make more money now you can see exactly what you need to do to to contribute to making that happen wow and it's it's super objective not oh the the boss feels great I'm going to give out a bunch of money and they feel good about it and then half the employees are upset like they don't appreciate what I do it's like you know it's your fault as a leader you didn't create the conditions to drive the right behaviors and show them where to sink their teeth into how to earn even more money if that's important to them and improve emotional energy and strengthen the the community within your organization and external team members too yeah awesome hey before we just dive into the book value creation kid uh last thing your Mantra obviously in your business execute to when uh I think a lot of business owners love to plan and and and cast uh execution sometimes is is where uh the struggle at you obviously you know build this strategy around execution can you talk about there was a book I I read you a few years ago the four laws of execution something like that like uh not a lot of books about execution a lot of books about planning uh talk talk about execution just to our audience um because we can have a good plan but difficult executed we we we can want to work out and want to lose weight but tough tough to do right yeah I I've kind of landed on you have to love the execution piece of it equally as much as you love the planning strategic planning whatever you want to call it piece of it like they have to tie together and and and as part of planning strategic planning whatever you want to call it uh what's right for your organization U you it has to be in balance and executing has to be part of the Strategic plan like how are we actually going to do this how are we going to Cascade the Strategic initiatives appropriately be able to see them follow up on them um so that's where that's where I land and if you and most like planning because it's so fun to talk about way more than executing and then they get frustrated when it doesn't happen and I go like well why are you acting like a victim because you did this you decided that DCT your world this way and then there's some that love the executing way more than the planning and they run off doing all kinds of things that are disconnected yeah they they and and so let's let's find that perfect balance um of loving both equally and make execution fun when it comes to the organization and tie it to holistic value creation material emotional energy and spiritual and the last thing I'll say about that is most companies don't have a definition of what it means to be a leader in their company they just don't and and the one that I like to land on and this isn't about leadership traits trust and all the other stuff that goes with it um but leaders they get results and they Foster an environment where every team member is intrinsically motivated and empowered to create more value over time that's the definition of being a leader in an organization that resonates with me and I think should really be everywhere and you know the biggest challenges in the world are being caused right now by a lack of capable leadership that don't understand that yeah no thank you I love that this perfect balance between planning strategy and execution so thank you uh thanks Lee uh for really just talking about awesome book uh your most important number I want to talk about the value creation kid obviously you've taken some of these different things putting them into the home the family this is a book that I have not personally read yet can you talk to us about this like why why this book's probably a different uh industry obviously talk to us about value creation kid what is it about well it's still connected to Value creation and you know the short version is fix the kids fix the world um I'm 62 to and when I age out whether it's 10 years 30 years 40 years I have no idea I want it to be an amazing world to interact in you know for my friends my family U the the business team members that I have all of that and if we don't get it right um even though I love distopian future movies I don't want to live in one I Don't Want to Be Mad Max I mean I'll have a cool car and a nice outfit right if that happens so um I want to get to the kids even before they get to kindergarten because the purpose of an education should be to create value in the world not get a good grade get a diploma get a degree get a job in the current environment kids are mostly doing what they think they're supposed to do and adults are doing that too instead of um creating the environment where they're discovering what they're meant to do going forward and so in the book U you know very quickly uh Scott Donal and my co-author and I talk about the gravy stack method there's four parts to it there's how you talk about value creation of the three buckets there's house rules there's Financial competency and then there's healthy struggle so the house rules um there are expectations which it's your job for the family and they change as you get older there's expenses more and more expenses you pick up as a kid as you get older you know moving towards launching into adulthood and then there's extra money we call them the three EES um how do you earn extra money in an equitable Fair Way not just giving you money so they canar if they make money they can learn to manage it going through and then Financial competency it's not about literacy it's can you apply this stuff and and start building savings you know for what you want all of that and then the last part really important and and uh gosh the majority is really missing this it's healthy struggle you I see so many adults U that will tell me you I just don't want my kids to struggle like I did and I said wait a minute you're an amazing individual creating incredible value in the world it's because you struggled right yeah so we need to be we need to be really comfortable letting the kids struggle just because they go to school and somebody's a bully and how they're talking talking to them well now we're learning how to it's a healthy struggle to fit into society there's going to be people you like you don't all this is going on that's not trauma it's healthy struggle same thing in the household it's like putting them in a you know we train employees to create more and more value over time you start them out and you've got them marching down this road and there's tons of examples in the book value creation kid the healthy struggles your children need to succeed to kind of walk through that process and they could start at any age books for parents um and it's a bit of a trojan horse for parents so they can learn this stuff most parents are doing pieces of it but this ties it together and I'm really interested in getting this right for middle and low-income families because it makes up the majority of the folks that live here in the US and really the world and we're getting lots and lots of just great testimonials and stories that are coming out of families about how this is working and we're um we're in north of 300 families today and Scott and I would like to be over the next 5 years and at least two million households you know practicing this and what we're going to get there yeah so what is what is what does that look like you got the offer that you guys are putting in uh kind of this system this operating system into into the homes um just like just like you would in a business right yeah it's um I I can say and this is a true statement but it's not language most understand hey we want to operationalize value creation within the family they W understand that um so for me hey this is the gravy stack method it's how we create more value as a family they understand that and for all the parents listening when you think about the ideal launched you know a child into adulthood you know graduating high school what would the characteristics look like you know so for me personally I would love that they're self-reliant they can think critically they're financially competent if they choose to be even financially independent they're they're launching forward to create value in the world they value family they value Community there's a solid moral Foundation this is how I think about it and so you work backwards from there how are you building on this as you go over time and so for every parent you're going to have a nuanced version of what I just said they have these uh you know these amazing youth going into adulthood that can create value and unfortunately today our school system is not supporting that and most parents with the best of intentions are getting rid of as much struggle as they possibly can so I really think we go you know you're a child from 0 to 18 and then from 18 to maybe 36 you're an emerging adult because parents didn't do their job to get you ready for that so yeah that that's the that's the whole premise of the book and you know there's an audio version of that book as well as the other book and awesome that sounds that sounds amazing I mean I love I love just the coralation between business and and family and I think even business owners I mean we don't do what we're doing in business even with our family like typically we're not even planning and and and executing there's no strategy at all uh to it can you give us just a couple of examples you talk about some of the healthy struggles um talk talk to us about that again you know most of our listeners are business owners um and maybe they're a little bit more well well off uh so yeah there's definitely very comfortable living with their kids talk is there some examples one or two healthy struggles that that you can offer our audience yeah in the book we talk about this value creation cycle and so you identify a capability you want and then you struggle to get the capability and then that builds your self-esteem you you don't stop there you use it to actually create value and then you keep going so for me as a kid and I talk about it in the last couple of chapters in the book I started my journey um for 25 cents an hour at 6 seven years old pulling weeds from a neighbor that asked me that wasn't friend or family and then I started shoveling snow and I would get about a dollar an hour in total then I had paper outs and then dishwasher bus boy so all these were sort of healthy struggles for me as I was going through learning that and then in the 1980s I played rock and roll in a band and I played over a thousand nights and that's how I made most of my money in the 80s that was like having a business and then I started uh my first business early 90s I'm on my seventh company I've started from scratch I'm starting another one next month um I just keep taking bigger and bigger steps and so that's how that's how you think about it you know with the kids and you know starting out the struggle could be hey look every day you need to make your bed and brush your teeth yeah like I don't want you but I'm doing it and wow we have so many cool stories I wish we had another three hours I could share them with you no I love that but you've again even throughout your life you are constantly um you know getting out there uh getting uncomfortable and it the same thing and the whole 25 cent pulling weeds is very similar to now starting a new business but and then the cool thing is you're taking all of the skills with you I think I learned that from um uh I'm gonna butcher it but um I learned that is like you there is no you always take the skills that you learn with you you don't just say oh I learned uh Spanish I'm not going to use that anymore right you take you take this stuff with you well build build on it it's a value creation Journey Keep building on it and what I was suggest anybody listening to this is learn to trust the struggle if you're a business owner at any stage and it's really hard don't act like a victim this is your Healthy struggle you have to go through so you can weather that better next time it comes around and leverage all this stuff same thing with the kids same thing with adults in the world whether you're working for somebody you're on a team or you're you're leading the team learn to trust the struggle I have there's actually a warm feeling inside when it's really hard when I'm working with clients cuz I own the results too you know I'm helping them install this stuff but I'm I'm there with equal ideas as a brain in the room to to you know you know really help move the needle forward and when it's hard it's like it's supposed to be everybody settle down right it's supposed to be hard choose your hard that's what I always say yeah choose choose your hard being broke is hard being running a business is hard it's all hard so love that g use that thank you yeah well sounds good well this is Lee Benson thank you so much for being on the iron deep podcast today make sure if you're tuning in get Le books uh your most important number and value creation kid I'm I've already read most important number I'm definitely going to get the value creation kid something I'm working on with but if someone wants to know just more information about you Lee uh you know where do they go how do how do they get involved with your organization execute to win thank you and please go to our website which is ew.com it stands for execute to win so ew.com you'll learn about the CEO masterminds Maybe you want to be part of something like that you'll you can find the books there you can learn how to implement this in your organization uh but please go there and and connect with me on LinkedIn I've got quite a quite a community over there and I want to get as many people on this value creation bus as possible because the the short version of for me is there's a lot of people in the world that are intentionally creating value and for me that's practicing virtue and there's a whole bunch of other folks out there that are intentionally rigging the game in some way skimming off the top of what we create as value creators so for me practicing virtue is creating real measurable value in the world and proportionately pushing back on things that are taking value out of the world it's been going on for thousands of years I'd love to have as many happy warriors on this value creation bus as possible practicing virtue this way. I love that! Awesome! Well thanks again Lee. We're going to put that in our show notes on our website IronDeep.com. Also on our YouTube channel, and this is a wrap with Lee Benson. Thanks so much buddy. Thank you
Brett
