Creating Value at Scale: A Proven Framework with Allison Maslan and Lee Benson

We're working really hard, but we're not focusing on culture. Then we focus on culture, but we're not working very smart. And now we need to. But if I'm going to sum it up, it's sort of the evolution of alignment decisions and accountability. So getting everybody fully aligned around the work they can do to improve what's most important and agree on what is most important and then make the best decisions to do the right work at the right time in the right order to accelerate the improvement of what's most important and then driving this culture of accountability where everybody does what they say they will do a higher and higher percentage of the time.

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Scale Up Method where we teach you how to reach the next level in business. Build your dream team and scale beyond eight figures. Too many business owners are stuck trying to do everything themselves and their businesses are suffering as a result. And I don't want you to be one of those people. People I am Alison Maslin and my company, Pinnacle Global Network, has helped thousands of business owners scale their companies using my framework, the Scale Up Method. All business owners face similar challenges when it comes to growth and on this podcast we're delivering the tactics you need to finally reach that next level in your business. Build your dream team and scale beyond eight figures. And talking about scaling beyond eight figures, I'm excited to bring our guest on today. Today I'm talking to Lee Ste Benson. He is the CEO and founder of Able Aerospace and Execute To Wind and author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller your Most Important Number. Lee grew his first company, able aerospace, from three to 500 employees before selling the company for nine figures to Textron Aviation. Following this, he committed to helping other leaders achieve similar results. And as his next venture, he founded Execute to Win, where his main focus is to help leaders develop an intentional high performance culture that connects to financial performance, which is so important and so many business owners don't look at the numbers, the important numbers. So the common challenge for businesses and clients he works with is accelerating the rate at which they create value. And this is true for accelerating growth in cash flow and profit as well as impact for nonprofits. The solution he's developed is a business operating methodology that works for all teams, even when a leader is not in the room. He calls this the MIND Methodology, Most Important Number and Drivers Methodology. The MIND Methodology designs every action to improve a team's most important number. So today's operating system is used by businesses all over the world, so I cannot wait to learn more. So Lee welcome to the scale it method, Alison.

Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Yeah. So your story is absolutely fascinating. Three to 500 employees, that's a lot of growth. Now I know it was over a period of time, but you went through many phases to get to that 500 and then ultimately to the exit first of all. And I want to dive into those phases. But what inspired you to jump into the business world in the first place?

You know, when I graduated high school, I had this notion that I want to start at least five things that any one of them would maintain my lifestyle in retirement. And my first business was actually a rock and roll band know. So back in the 1980s, we would play over 300 nights a year. Some of those years, it's how I made the majority of my money back then. I had a sound crew, light crew, rhythm section. We changed out from time to time. It was, it was pretty cool. I just, I just like that concept of business. And I could spend three hours talking about this next piece. I'll just say it in less than a minute. I started my value creation stressing journey really early. Like trading my best efforts for the accumulated best efforts of neighbors. By the time I'm sick, seven years old, pulling weeds, mowing lawns, shoveling snow, it's like, well, that's really cool. I can go out in the real world. This isn't my family. They see enough value in what I'm doing to pay me. And then I just kept taking incremental steps and building on that value creation. So when it got to founding, basically Able Engineering, Able Aerospace, Able Systems and Technology, I'm actually on my seventh company now. I started from scratch. I just kept building on that value creation process. And so it was just a natural evolution, going from three and the one business and thinking value creation. Next step, continually improving what's most important to get to, you know, a nine figure exit. 500 employees and interesting journey. Learned a lot. And, and I would say it was way harder to run the company with 50 employees than when I got to 500. Really?

Really, because we're at 50 right now. So this is a good conversation to have. In fact, that's so funny that you say that. So can you take us a little bit through for, you know, for those that are listening today, the phases of growth, where you saw the biggest shifts, you know, where I mean the culture must have changed the way you run the company at 10 to 50 to 100 to 500, you know, can you just talk a little Bit about those benchmarks.

Yeah. Starting out, it feels like a succession of Patrick Lencioni novels. And we're working really hard, but we're not focusing on culture. Then we focus on culture, but we're not working very smart. And now we need to get strategy right. But if I'm going to sum it up, it's sort of the evolution of alignment decisions and accountability. So getting everybody fully aligned around the work they can do to improve what's most important and agree on what is most important, and then make the best decisions to do the right work at the right time in the right order to accelerate the improvement and what's most important and then driving this culture of accountability where everybody does what they say they will do a higher and higher percentage of the time. And. And that really kind of goes to organizational trust. And of course, culture's a pretty big deal. And, you know, you mentioned culture early on. It wasn't very intentional. Every company has a culture. Most of them are unintentional. And in my opinion, it's an organization of any size, even tens of thousands or more employees. Once we started making that very intentional and connecting culture to financial results, things got better. And I would say the. So there's all this learning and one of the business maxims out there that. That folks will talk about, you know, the founder that got you here can't get you there. And I just never believed in business maxims. You can have it all. You can be the lowest cost producer and the most profitable if you just really focus on it. So that was my mindset as I was growing through it. My mindset was the single biggest limiting factor in my business is the person at the top. That was me. If I don't think it, allow it to happen, agree to it, you know, constantly develop myself personally and professionally, it will significantly limit even more, you know, what our potential is. So as I'm going through that, we got to about 150 employees, and I was like, wow, this is, you know, 70, 80 hours a week. It never felt like work. I just loved it. Absolutely loved it. But I would look out and, you know, we had a number of leaders, and some of them always seemed to get really good results and do what they say they would and others wouldn't. So, so what was different? And I just simply categorize the types of things leaders do. You know, for example, foundational readiness. Do they have everything in place to be able to get the results and get better today and get better results in the future? Or how do they show up as a leader, what kind of environment do they create, you know, et cetera. So we're going through all this stuff and it's like, wow, this is really interesting. We have these categories. We break it down into elements, and I just simply ranked the leaders red, yellow, or green, and each, each of these elements within the categories. Green is you're. You're definitely at or above what you said you would do. Yellow, you're sort of at risk there. And red is you're consistently behind. And. And I posted it for everybody in the company to see. And it was wild. We were stuck at around, you know, seven and a half to eight and a half million in sales for three years. And once I did that and, and got that piece of it more right, we just started accelerating. In fact, it was two years later we're at 20 million and we're just climbing, just chunk, chunk, chunk, you know, going up. And then my job got significantly easier because I'm not running around constantly holding it together, trying to stump speech my way into motivating everybody. Now I'm water skiing behind the team. And this is really cool. And so that sort of evolved into. By the time we had 500 employees, you know, 15, 20 hours a week was all it really took for me to run the business. And I spent the rest of the time, I'll just travel the world, get bigger contracts. I could do really bigger things for the business and take even bigger steps. And then that led to this exit that I think was fantastic for us, fantastic for the buyer, fantastic for the employees, mostly, if not almost entirely because of the way we connected culture to financial results and kept everybody really focused on improving what's most important, important. And again, back to alignment decisions and accountability. How are we continually improving those things to accelerate the overall value that we create as an organization?

Wow, I love that. So you kind of called people to the table, but you also empowered them at the same time. Did you? When you say the red, yellow, green. I'm just curious. You said for everybody to see, do you mean for the leadership positions in the company? And I'm thinking it was for all.

The leaders and every employee to see. It went up on a board so everybody could see it in the entire.

Of their leader, or it was just for the leaders or the leaders were the ones that were up on the board for everybody to see.

Everyone in the company got to see how every leader ranked in every single area. Now, if you have a culture of fear and not wanting to look dumb or command and control and lots of silos to just instantly do this. It could destroy the business. I mean you could take over half the leaders. But we built a culture where every employee we took 16% of our pre tax net profit, paid it to everybody as a bonus proportionate to their income. So we would do the best we could to make sure everybody's paid fairly relative to each other. You can never get it perfect, but we really went after it to get it right. So everybody, yeah, okay, I see what they're doing. I'm paid this amount, that person's paid more, she's making even more. But that's the role they have. Those are their outcome based responsibilities. If I want to make more, I know how to do it in my role and I know how to develop for another role. So you get that right and then, and then this amount of profit, which was pretty big going back proportionate to everybody's income. And by the way, we would pay 25% monthly, 75% held for interviewer accumulation. And you had to be there at the end of the year to get it. This drove a culture of everybody helping everybody else earn another dollar for the company, create another dollar in cash flow, improve customer experience. So our culture was it's all about accelerating the value the organization creates. And at any point in time, somebody or some team is going to be kind of on the hot seat that they're limiting our ability to create value more than all the others. We all understood it. It's not personal. When that happens now more resources surround them to get that balloon back on track with everything else or floating at the right level and then somebody else drops. So it's this wildly fun game, I call it organizational structure bottleneck game of just running around, shoring up how we create value, right?

Yeah, well, definitely when you see it right in front of you, you know you can't get away from it, you can't hide from it. It's like what are we going to do about it? So I love that, I love that. And where do you feel, Lee, that most business owners get stuck there, that that does keep them from scaling? You said you were stuck at kind of that 8, 10 million for a while. What, when you talk to other business owners, what do you feel keeps them from getting to that 500 employee size, that nine figure business?

The three things that I said seem to be universal. I haven't been proven wrong yet when I go work with a client. We worked with hundreds of companies ranging from four employees to 40,000 employees. And the alignment challenges are consistent everywhere. And then the decision making process, they don't even for the most part, most organizations don't have a standard way of making decisions. So there's thousands of decisions, you know, tons of really small ones that every leader makes throughout the year. But there's a couple critical decisions relative to what that leader, you know, the value that leader is charged with creating that they need to make. So what is a critical decision? And you ask people that question and you don't get a solid answer. I mean, they'll fumble around like they're supposed to know what they're talking about. In the mind methodology, the most important number in drivers, the top of the organization has one number that does two things above all other numbers, it says you're winning or losing the game. And the second thing, and equally, if not more important, it drives the majority of the right behaviors. So they may measure 15, 20 other things. And you should, as long as those measurements can help you make better decisions to improve the company's most important number. And then as you cascade down, if you just have a few employees, is probably one team and one number. But as you cascade down, HR and marketing and sales and customer service and production, they will all have their most important number that does those two things. And you can eloquently just sort of cascade that all the way to the front line. Doesn't matter how many employees you have. Now, when you ask the question, what is a critical decision? What's the definition of that? Every leader would say anything that has the potential to materially impact my most important number, that's a critical decision. Or what's your process for making these decisions? And then you can walk through that, how you do research, you don't want paralysis by analysis, et cetera, but be really intentional about how you make critical decisions. And then you get to a place with the mind methodology where every decision and every action is through the lens of improving your team's most important number. And all that accretes to the top of the organization. So where do they get stuck? They're down in the details trying to prove that they're right. I've seen silos in 10 person companies like, oh my gosh, how did you pull that off? It must have been a very intentional effort to create silos within a 10 person company. But getting alignment on the value we create as an organization, most aren't really there. Even some billion dollar companies that we start working with, what's our, what do you think our most important number is that does these two things? They've Never once been aligned on that. And then now how do we make decisions and why are we making decisions? And then now this culture of accountability and culture is a bigger thing that we can get into if we have time. I think that's where they get stuck is they're not focused on improving what's most important and the alignment, decision and accountability piece.

Well, culture to me is the thing that I enjoy the most in business. I love it. I love the connectedness. We have an amazing team. In fact, we have a leadership retreat. We're all getting together next week. They're coming here to Mexico. Really looking forward to that. I have a question with your, your most important number. Are you saying for each department there is one number, just one, not two, not three? Because I'm thinking, okay, marketing, right? So obviously ultimately it's your conversion, which is sales. But you've got, you know, number of, of prospects, number of leads, obviously ultimately going towards the sales. But you're saying each department just has one that you focus on, is that.

Well, each department will have one most important number that says above all others are winning or losing and it drives the majority of the right behaviors. So if I just run with marketing for a minute or two in a lot of organizations, it would be qualified leads. Then you've got sales, which is closing profitable sales, and there's a number over there. But marketing is going to also measure in some way the quality of the leads. Because you're constantly. You want to define what a qualified lead is. It closes that percentage of the time, converts, whatever that is. We're measuring traffic to the website, we're measuring, you know, social and how we're getting it out there in a number of different ways. So there's tons of things to measure to make better decisions to improve. In this example, the number of qualified leads that you have. And then what would be the drivers, the categories of work that marketing should be really good at to improve the quality, quality and number of qualified leads. And as you start getting into that, so you've got a website, you have social media efforts and how you're getting it out there, you have your brand. There's like a number of drivers that marketing would pick. And when you think about these drivers, if you could describe a 10 state for your brand, what would that look like? We can't think of anything better for our brand to be a 10 state. And you list all of those things, snap your fingers, wow, that we've achieved it. We can't think of anything better job to do here on a scale from 1 to 10, how would you rate how well you're leveraging your brand to improve your most important number today? And most companies would say maybe a three or a four. We have a long ways to go. Great. Now let's start assigning action items to the team to improve how we leverage our brand to drive in this example, more qualified leads. And so it's such a simple way of thinking about it. You will measure other things, but it really helps with decision making to measure them. And I can't tell you how many teams, in fact, it's most teams when we start with the mind methodology, they're measuring things that they have. They're not making any material decisions from. It's just an activity, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I love that because you get super, super clear on that one point and then you are reverse engineering that to say to get to this point we need to optimize this driver and this driver and this driver. Right?

Absolutely. Yeah. And it's optimizing. So we're describing what a 10 state looks like and we're always thinking like every action, every decision is about improving our most important number. So we never want to make process more important than what is most important. And the way we talk about it in the mind methodology, we're saying the same thing a little bit differently. Is, are we leveraging the best way we possibly can this driver to improve our most important number? And if not, are there some actions we can take to improve how we leverage it? Oh, and by the way, we might have six or eight in some cases. I've seen 12 or more drivers at any point in time. Improving two or three of them will probably create more value over the next quarter or year than all the others combined. So which ones are in focus? So it's just a way to really keep the team hyper focused on accelerating the rate of improvement in their most important number.

Yes. And simplifying. And like you said, you know, it's kind of like that 80, 20 rule, figuring out what are the going to be the drivers, they're going to have the biggest impact and so that their focus is not so diluted.

Yeah. Or it's not. What can we do? Oh, we can do that. Let's go do that. It's what do we have available? We're aligned on what we could do to improve it's most important. But which one or three or four of these things can we really get done and do it? Well, that will most improve our most important number? The way we've defined it, it says we're winning or losing more than all are the numbers, and it's driving the majority of the right behaviors. And that second piece, you'll see that problem almost everywhere in organizations driving the behaviors. My favorite example, two of them, which are huge offenders in my view, or opportunities missed, is HR and finance. And in hr, for whatever reason, I don't know if this is culturally in the country or the world, but they always say it's retention or engagement. That's got to be it. And then as you play that stuff out, if retention is our most important number, you just hired me to run HR. We have 150 employees or a thousand employees, and three years later I have 95% retention. But you know what? 75 or 80% of the people can't perform in their roles the way the roles were designed, what they signed up to do. But I won with my most important, that did not drive all the right behaviors. But that's a metric that we want to look at. But a better, most important number there would be the percentage of seats filled with capable people, as defined as, here's the role, here's the 2 to 3 max measurable, outcome based responsibilities for that role. And they're capable if they're meeting or beating those if they're below it, they're not capable. Yeah, now we're driving all the right behaviors, we're recruiting better, we're giving leaders better tools, we're doing better training, all of it. Does that resonate, Allison?

Yeah, 100%, definitely. So, yeah, that makes perfect sense. I mean, yeah, the retention is great, but we're looking also at the output and the results from that. So you gotta have those a players on your team or people that are really working to their full capacity or at least close to it. And so how does, and I think you kind of said this, but I want to just speak to it specifically with the mind methodology. How are you connecting culture and financial results? Can you give some specific examples, maybe how you did this in your companies?

Yeah, absolutely. Starting with foundationally, I believe, you know, you create values in organization and through the culture. It all comes from the beliefs, the accountability, the practices and the decisions from which we create value. That is the foundation of culture in our view, in the mind methodology for every organization on the planet. Doesn't matter. Now you take it to the next level and say, and I love your term, variable vision is one of the big blockers to getting there. That was pretty cool when I was reading some of your stuff, so you would have A purpose, a vision, a mission. Maybe you have a set of behaviors or values or leadership traits, but you'll have these alignment tools that you develop as a team. The whole team needs to be part, appropriately part of developing these things so there's real ownership. This is our stuff. We did it. It wasn't Lee or Alison or some other CEO just giving it to everybody and saying, you will like this. So they develop it. Now how are you applying these cultural elements to measurably improve the organization? And what I did at the aerospace company, and this is probably way harder than what most companies would do, and you don't have to do it this way, but every six months, we had a mission, a vision, a quality policy, leadership traits and behaviors. And every employee, for each one of those, every six months, and they do one or two a week, they would put in one example of how they applied it in their role to measurably improve the organization. And they would even take a shot at the roi. So how did it improve customer experience, internal or external? And how did it improve cash flow or profitability? And so now you're developing everyone, and you'll get a lot of blank stares in some larger companies, frontline employees that are. Maybe they're cleaning parts or painting. They've never even thought this way before. Now start the process. Now watch the magic. A year later, oh my gosh. Like, for example, we. We set out one year. I think this was 2012. We wanted to uncover 25% capacity in. In operations in the aerospace company. We did everything in house. Machining, grinding, electroplating. We had one of the largest, if not the largest, captive electroplating shop in Arizona. So we're doing all of this stuff. So we wanted to be able to do all this work with 140,000 less hours a year. That way we could grow more profitably. And so we set out one year to do that. We actually uncovered 200,000 hours. That was 100 people we didn't have to hire. We still hired because we were growing. But 100 fewer people we had to hire and we became more profitable. Bonuses were bigger and everything. And all of those examples of, here's how I'm doing this thing here, to save money or save time or improve customer experience so we get more work. That's how we connected it back then in the mind. Methodology. For most organizations, employees, with very few exceptions, only have three goals. They have their team's most important number goal and what they're doing to contribute to improve it. They have their role Based goal. So here are these couple of measurable outcome based responsibilities and they're, you know, meeting, beating below, you know, make it, make it really simple, but it's just you're doing it or you're not. And then they have their culture goal. And so during the performance review, we call them performance snapshots because everybody already knows where they stand and what's expected 100% of the time. So we're just capturing a point in time and we're looking at, well, how are you applying culture to improve our results, to improve the team's most important number and the experience for all of us within the organization? And are you a cultural fit? Yes or no? Are you living these alignment tools to improve results for the organization? Do you have some examples of that? Which alignment tools do you live the best and which ones offer the biggest opportunities for improvement? So you go through this conversation including, are you encouraging other employees to live these alignment tools, mission, vision, values, etc. So they only have three goals. It's baked into the operating system. We're super intentional about it. This is our purpose. This is why the world's better, because of us. This is our vision. It sets our direction no matter what's going on in the world. I love the way you talk about that, Alison. Mission. What do we do every single day to create value for our customers? And if we don't do it, our jobs are in jeopardy. It's not the reason we get up in the morning, but this is really important for everybody. Getting a paycheck and then how do we agree to interact with each other? What are the best, I'd say behaviors and leadership traits of the highest performing folks you ever worked with on their best days. Distill those out, hold everybody accountable to it. What an amazing management tool. So this is about being intentional with culture and how you design it and making it part of your operating methodology. It can't be a look good, feel good, sound good, really nice looking wallpaper. Experiment inside the organization and come up with these examples of where it goes. So I've seen very few organizations that do it that way. It's really easy to do. You just have to go through the work, survey everybody, collect the data, get them involved and then start working on it. And you know, you get it right. When every single time something doesn't go like it should have, you can find one or some combination of the alignment tools that weren't exemplified. Now what an amazing developmental management tool.

That is so powerful.

Yeah. I mean, again, this is a three Day conversation culture is so powerful and yet so many people completely miss it.

Yeah. Yeah, it really is. I love what you talk about because you are empowering every single person on the team to see how their role, large or small, impacts the big picture, the ultimate outcome. And that's, that's inspiring, you know, because I think sometimes, well, a lot of times people work in a silo and they don't really understand the part of the whole of how what they, they try to do their job well. But how, how does that make a difference in the end result for the customer, consumer, whoever it is, that's without utilizing the product or service?

Yeah. Wouldn't it be really cool if in every organization you asked an employee, whether a leader or a direct employee, how do you create value for the organization and they had a powerful answer for you? Most employees don't know how they create value. They'll just give you a list. Well, I do this. Okay. But if they said a leader said, I lead my team to improve our most important number, this is why it is our most important number. This is why it generates or drives the majority of the right behaviors. And every non supervisory team member says, this is the team I'm on. Here's our most important number and here's the best work I'm doing to improve that number. That is powerful. Now you've made everybody the CEO of their own role.

Yeah. This is really, really phenomenal. And for us, culture has just been this evolutionary thing, I think because we are so locked into our values and really hiring towards value and we have a very heart centered culture, but very smart, smart people, that the culture has just evolved to this something that is really a beautiful thing that people are all in. And what I found is the vision very much ties into. I don't know how you feel about that, but what I've seen is that when we can bring vision into every meeting, you know, many, many conversations with the team, not just at our leadership retreats and things like that.