Lee Benson - From 9 Figure Exit To Creating The MIND Methodology

Welcome back to the Casey Adams show. Today we are joined by a very special guest, Lee Benson, the founder of Execute to Win. Lee, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

It's great to be here with you. Thank you, Kasey.

Absolutely. So I've really been looking forward to this interview, man, because not only have you built and scaled and exited massive companies, but your view on leadership, I believe, is very unique from a lot of individuals that I speak to. And before we dive into today's conversation, I would love for you to give a quick background on what Execute to Win is, your past company, and really where you spend your time today.

Yeah, sure. I'm on my seventh company. I've started from scratch, Execute to Win, or ETW as we. We call it or refer to it, you know. But the first real business was 1993. Late that year, I bought a company for debt. Other than closing it down. I was working there. We went from 25 employees down to three. My boss came in one day and said, close it or sell it. You got 30 days. I couldn't find anybody to buy it. So I assumed about $600,000 in debt. And it worked out. I mean, that grew from three employees to over 500. Had a nice nine figure exit in 2016. And there's been several other companies along the way, and a couple of them I've closed and a few of them I've sold and Execute to Win. Today I published a book titled your most important number. And it outlines what I developed as an operating methodology to help organizations of any type or any size create value faster. And the mind methodology is outlined in the book. And what we do today is help companies install that. The last chapter in the book is actually a DIY chapter. And I get notes weekly from companies, leaders all over the planet telling me about how well it's working, which is fantastic. I also run and I've got certified chairs that run Execute, CEO mastermind groups that actually use this methodology. And any, any leader that's in high growth mode and really wants to go for it. This is such a better format than what you can get out there with most of the other popular groups.

Wow. It's absolutely incredible. There's so much to dive into today. Um, and I think to a lot of entrepreneurs, you know, we all start companies and maybe you don't focus on the end result of having an exit, but what you just said there, nine figure exit, I'm sure a lot of people listening are just interested in that was with your past company, which Was Able Aerospace, is that correct? Yeah.

Actually took two companies, Able Aerospace and Able Engineering, combined them into one and sold it as Able Aerospace.

Wow. So what was that company exactly, for those that may not know? And how did that company come into your life and what was the origin story there?

Yeah, the origin story was the boss saying, closer to sell it, you got 30 days. And we were a small electroplating company, so we would apply electroplating on parts that would come out of aircraft, and that was part of repairing it. But we would do the work for a large original equipment manufacturer. And very quickly after I bought the company, I said, you know what, we're charging $300, they're inspecting it and selling that repair to their customer. Could be United Airlines for $10,000. Why don't we go directly to the aircraft operator? And we started with helicopter operators because we knew saving $1,000 would be a big deal to some of these smaller operators, but that wouldn't be a big deal to United Airlines. And we started developing repairs and we started adding equipment and processes as we got more of that work built. And this is fully the plan. It's like, let's get to about $5 million a year in sales working for helicopter operators, and then we'll be substantial enough to start working for larger fixed wing operators, you know, people movers, package movers. And then that just scaled right into $100 million plus business. And doing business in 60 countries around the world, probably about 2,000 total customers on a trailing 24 month basis. And what an amazing journey to get there and did it without raising a dime of outside equity capital.

Wow, that's incredible. So prior to starting that company, did you have any experience of aerospace or getting into aviation in terms of the industry or how did that even come about? I know you said the origin story there, but like, was that something you ever thought you'd be in yourself?

Nope, never occurred to me as a kid going through it. I came from a super low income family. I was kicked out of the house the beginning of my senior year in high school. And it was the best thing that probably ever happened to me. It was a pretty toxic and I would say in some ways dangerous environment and not just dysfunctional, because I think that's totally normal. So it was good to be completely away from it. And there's this thing that I developed over time, and I call it the value creation struggle cycle. And so you struggle to get a capability, it builds your confidence. You use that to create value and you keep going. So I'M you know, six, seven years old. I have a neighbor that's I didn't really know, but unsolicited asked me, would you be willing to pull weeds in my garden for a quarter an hour? And back in the day I could buy two candy bars and have change. I'm like, yeah, I'm in on this one for sure. And I did that. And I said, oh, this is really cool. And I. It just built my confidence. And then next thing you know, I'm knocking on doors and I'm shoveling snow. I grew up in Spokane, Washington, for 50 cents and only took me 30 minutes to do a driveway and sidewalk. So I just, you know, fourfolded my money essentially. Then I got a paper out, then more paper outs, and then a, you know, a dishwasher, busboy, a cook. And by the time I'm kicked out of the house, I'm already financially independent, not just competent. And. And I just kept thinking, you know, what if I can apply myself, trading my best efforts and, you know, learning a new capability and then using that to create value. And I can take bigger and bigger and bigger steps over time. So right out of high school, how I made most of my money in, in the 1980s was playing in a band. You know, during the 80s, I played over a thousand nights out in concerts and clubs. And I don't count that as one of my seven businesses. However, it was like a business. We had a sound crew, a light crew, and, you know, rhythm section and out. And what an amazing experience that was. But starting really early on, this value creation struggle wheel or cycle gave me the confidence to do anything I wanted to do. And it. And rather than getting sucked into a toxic and, you know, somewhat dangerous environment, you know, some family members in and out of prison or. And worse, it was, it was really not good. I could trust this whole world out there. I'm creating value. They believe enough in it to pay for it. And it's not a friend or a family member doing you a favor. And I just built on that. And that turned into what happened, you know, for my life story so far. And I think from a. When I think about value creation, I think about material value, which that's where most people go, but I also think about emotional energy value, in my view, the scarcest commodity on the planet. And I think about spiritual value. And so it's about creating all of this value and having that mindset has got me here. And I think my material value creation, my biggest days are yet to come. There's so much over there. But I think if I did have one of those three buckets, Value creation superpower. It's emotional energy. It's getting people jazzed up about things and encouraged in a win win way about creating more value in the world.

Yeah, I was just about to ask you about that. How do you define value creation? But you've done. That was such a great explanation there. And I want to ask you, you know, from scaling a company to 500 employees, you talk about the emotional value and more. So being a leader, how has your leadership strategies changed over time from the earliest business ventures that you had to then scaling to 500 people? And especially I want to relate this to how people can use these strategies today in a world where there's a lot of remote working. Yes, some large companies are, you know, bringing everyone back in house. I'd love to get your thoughts on that as well, but would love to just talk about high level leadership strategies and how they've changed over time for you and how you recommend entrepreneurs think through that in the early days.

Yeah. Well, foundationally, what does it mean to be a leader? Right. And as you start growing your company and you have four employees and 10 and 20, what is the definition of what it means to be a leader in your organization? And one that really works well for me is in this organization, leaders get results and they foster an environment where every team member is intrinsically motivated and empowered to create more value over time. And if you ask most leaders, or let's say whoever founded a company, what's the definition of being a leader in your company, they won't have a good answer. And so I think it's that like they're creating this environment that creates this intrinsic motivation. And then when it comes to leadership development, it seems like most go in the direction of a one size fits all. Like, here's this course or let's have the leadership team read a book and talk about it. Well, why are we doing leadership development? And I think anything and everything we do in an organization should be done at least with the intent of making it measurably better. Right? Should be. And so everything else is a waste of time and resources. So we're going to do leadership development. We should be coming out the other side where leaders can actually create more value for the organization, really for all stakeholders. Right. Employees, customers, shareholders, et cetera. And so, okay, the first thing they have to answer is the question, how do you create value for this organization? And usually you get a job description they can't even Answer that one very well. And in my mind, methodology, which stands for most important number and drivers. Every team has one number that does two things. It says above all others, you're winning or losing the game, and it drives the majority of the right behaviors. So when a leader says, this is how I create value for the organization, this is my most important number, let's just say it's gross profit or something, somebody in operations and here's where we started the year, here's where we're going, it's midpoint, we're a little bit behind plan and drivers are categories of work that this leader is leveraging with their team to improve that number, get on track or overdrive it. So now the leader would say, this is how I'm creating value for the organization. This is why it drives the majority of the right behaviors. Here's the best work I, myself and my team are doing to improve it. Once you can see that and what they're talking about in meetings, how they're making decisions, how aligned they are, that tells you in a very surgical way, this is exactly where this leader needs to develop right now to be able to create more value as opposed to, I don't know, let's talk about leadership concepts. What do you think of servant leadership and all this other stuff? It's like, oh my gosh, it's just a big mind exercise and that's cool to explore concepts. But if the purpose of leadership development is to develop leaders to create value faster for the organization, we need to understand how they are designed to create value that leader in their team. And we need to see the work that they're doing and then it makes it so easy to do leadership development in an effective way. And it probably took me at least a decade to figure that out. Right. I had to reinvent the wheel every other month. You're like, what am I doing?

Sure. I was just going to ask how that methodology, the mind methodology, was truly formulated. Yes, of course, through time. But why did you end on these final pillars that you spoke about and how long did that truly take to get to a point where you know that, okay, this is the methodology that I want to not only instill in my team, but teams around the world. What was that? I guess you could say like pinnacle point for you where you realize that and therefore made it this methodology that you start to follow?

Yeah, that's such a great question. It's like the pinnacle of my 40 year overnight success story is coming out of this. And I remember when my aerospace business the larger one that we've been talking about. I did a version of traditional goal setting. So we had a quality, cost, safety, delivery and culture goal at the top of the organization for every senior leader. And it cascaded all the way to the front line. Everybody had those goals, and they had to interact with them every month. If I backed off even for a second, they would back off. So I was really good at keeping it going. But most leaders don't have the discipline to and drive to keep that going. So I started thinking, well, what would work for any team? At least I set it out. I actually said it this way. 80% of all teams anywhere, any type of organization of any size, because traditional goal setting does not stand the test of time. And I've proven it because I've worked with hundreds of organizations. I audit their goals, goals. And 95% of them just aren't very thoughtful. And they've got a process. Hey, create your own goal. Every quarter or three goals, get it approved by your manager, rinse and repeat. And you run into scenarios where everybody's achieving their goals, but the company isn't going anywhere. And so what would really work? And, well, people love sports. And what's that one score that says you're winning or losing and it drives all the other behaviors and you want to make sure you get it right because you could pick a wrong most important number and it would drive all the wrong behaviors. So you want to get that part of it right. But that's what I learned. I was very successful and had lots of CEOs and different CEO groups that I belong to want to replicate those kinds of results. And I said, well, this is what we're doing. I even built software to help hold it together. You guys can use it, do whatever you want. And I brought them through it. And out of a couple of dozen that ran down that road early on with what I was doing to build my aerospace company, fast forward two years, and there's only two left standing, barely doing it. And they didn't say it didn't work. They were embarrassed in a lot of ways. They didn't have the drive and discipline to keep it going. And so we shouldn't need that. If the operating system works, it should catch fire on its own within your organization. And this most important number in drivers methodology is really working. The book's selling really well. It's selling all over the world. And I get notes weekly from leaders that are applying at diy. And the last chapter in the book is actually a DIY chapter do it yourself. And it's incredible the difference in their results just by changing the language. In other words, every decision and every action is through the lens of improving what's most important. Every leader gets a most important number. And now rather than being a little bit behind each month and scrambling to make up the performance, they're overdriving each month and now it's become more fun. So yeah, it's, it's, it's really important and it's. It was quite an evolution to get here. I was, wasn't satisfied with okrs and scaling up and EOS and 40x and all the other systems out there that make process more important than what is most important. That's how I, how and why I evolved into this.

That's incredible. So, so your book, your most important number. I would love to talk about what inspired the book. And also too, I know people that are watching this interview. You have the guitars in the background. We were chatting a bit before. You've been a musician for a very long time just in terms of finding time to pursue passions. Whether that's cultivating this incredible book that you published to working on music. How do you find or how do you determine that number outside of business in terms of where you spend your time and what's important to you and how you prioritize these items when you have a lot going on in your life?

Yeah. Everything to me really is about creating value in the world in one way or another and actually genuinely doing it. I feel like we live in a world today where there's a lot more virtue signalers than those that actually practice virtue. Because I think real virtue is being a constant driving force to advance good things in the world and a constant driving force to push back bad things that are going on in the world. That's what I think. But I think 90% of people are more into the virtue signaling piece of it. So once you start to figure that out, I mean just speaking for myself, what am I really doing here? Like what makes me feel good, what elevates my self esteem and it's creating value in the world. So I, I've dedicated a lot of time to helping organizations for profit and nonprofit accelerate the value of their organizations. And now I've published another book with my co author by the name of Scott Donnell. And the. The book is titled Value creation kid the healthy struggles your children need to succeed. And so the, the goal here is to operationalize value creation in literally millions of low and middle income families and get to them even before they get to kindergarten. And so I, I love that mission. This, this encompasses everything that I do. And, and in the value creation kid book, we, we talk a lot about the three different macro buckets of value creation. Like I said earlier, you know, it's material, it's emotional energy and it's spiritual. And I think about music and let's say you perform for a group of folks and it elevates their emotional energy. You just created more positive emotional energy in the world. You made the world a better place. Let's say you take it further and you write a song that gets picked up and it's distributed all over the planet and a billion people listen to the song and they're elevated emotionally when they listen to it. Look at the difference that you made. Wow, it's incredible. And I think for leaders, that's in companies, it's really important to be able to lift people, people up around. Here's what's possible and organizing productive ways to get there. And emotional energy, I mean that's, that's everything. You know, when I said it's the scarcest commodity on the planet, I would rather live 20% fewer years on, on nine or 10 of them, you know, with emotional energy as opposed to, you know, 20, 30% longer on one or two. What a miserable life that would be. Right?

Absolutely terrible aside, as you were saying that too, I would love to bring up where you grew up and when. And did you, I'll rephrase like this. Did you have any mentors in your life early on that helped instill some of these foundational elements in the way you think? For example, I know you talk about this new book, Reaching Children. I think it's. I interviewed someone yesterday that's an incredible speaker at thousands of high schools over the course of his career thus far. And he speaks about these kids and how his message and these students stories, how they truly impact them. And as someone who's 23 and I now have a 7 year old niece, I think about this a lot. And I'm just curious to hear from your perspective of if you reflect back on your life and you think about some of the early ideologies or you know, the mentors in your life that maybe helped frame this for you. What comes to mind and how do you think about that today when putting out a book like this in terms of the impact that you hope to make?

Yeah, I didn't really have mentors as a kid. I didn't get it from my family. What really saved me and pushed me in this direction was starting that value creation struggle cycle on my own, you know, with the starting with the pulling of the weeds and the evolution that came from that. And then as I'm thinking about just creating more and more value over time, I'm meeting different people. So there wasn't. I can't say I had one mentor that, that got all this going, but I've had hundreds of mentors, you know, over time. You know, listening to a radio show, I was like, oh, my gosh, that was incredible. I mean, there's things there, right? A good book could bring ideas that, you know, take what you're doing to the next level. You know, as I got probably midpoint in my career, in 2008, I met Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric. And he was teaching a two and a half day course. And the exercise on day one was around mission and values. Every table huddled. And then somebody had to report out, well, I was the only one that knew our mission and values. And we were the first table to go. And there was this really long, uncomfortable silence. And then Jack looks down at the table and says, well, that's perfect. I wouldn't change anything. And it was my mission for my aerospace company and the supporting behaviors, actually. And then as he went around the room, he asked the same question of each table. And I realized why he paused. Because everybody had marketing slogans, not a mission and set of values or behaviors that employees or team members could really sink their teeth in to create more value. And that first day at lunch, he blew off the table he was supposed to sit at, sat right next to me, found me. And his quote was, he sits down and goes, lee, I've done this thousands of times. Nobody's ever gotten it right till you, how the hell did you do it? And I just said, well, obviously, we're totally different scales here in what we're doing. But I believe if you apply math, common sense, logic, facts, reason to creating more and more value over time and solving for that problem, we're all going to go down the same road past the same insights and wisdom and everything else. When you did it, I mean, you're. You had a $400 billion plus market cap organization with 400,000 employees at its peak. I've got at the time, my little, you know, in 2008, probably a $10 million business, you know, with 160 employees. But it's the same thing. You know, what is a large company or a small company, It's a collection of teams trying to create value. So he Was an amazing mentor. He became an awesome friend. He was a 10% partner in my current company, ETW, until he passed. Really miss our conversations. It's while looking at him and reading stories about him and following him over the years before I met him. It's amazing how when you rise to a certain level, you're completely misunderstood by the vast majority of the planet. He was an amazing guy. He was a horrible guy all over the place. But what he was going after was creating more and more and more value over time, regardless of what the stories are. That was my experience. And he was passionate about like he was in the laboratory, like I was trying to. Again, totally different scales, but figure out what's the most effective way to get organizations to create value faster.

That's an incredible story. And when you think about someone like him in your life, that's been a role model. I know you said at the top, people can have these different perspectives of you. What did you learn from him that you've reflected on now that he's no longer with us in terms of his mission and his purpose? And how do you quantify just his impact on you?

Yeah, his value. The value I got from that relationship was his emotional energy, the affirmation of what I'm doing, believing in me. It was interesting to me that over the years I've met at least a hundred people that Jack has mentored. And you would think when I talked to these folks, they were the only person he mentored. It felt to them like this is the time that he spent with them. And then it didn't take much of an interaction with him to just launch me and my energy in a direction that was really positive and making amazing things happen. So, you know, being that person that in the right way, it can't be, can't be false, but in the right way, believes in you energizes you. Going through. He really lived that. And that's an amazing quality that I think all leaders should have. And I asked him once, you know, what are you most proud of? Is it what, you know, how big you build GE and what's going. He goes, what I'm most proud of is the people I developed within the organization, or we collectively develop, went on to run some of the, if not most of the biggest companies on the planet. And I think about that as well. You know, I sold my aerospace company. We had roughly 64ish leaders, and many of them have gone on to work at other companies and they're treated like unicorns because of how they're able to create value and set things up quickly. That's what I'm most proud of. I don't miss the company, the culture we built, the people we developed. That was, if you're going to say it that way, my baby, if you will. And I'm so proud of all of them and I stay in touch with most of them.

Yeah, no, that's incredible. I want to talk about just something that a lot of entrepreneurs think about and I'd love to get your perspective on. Right. Just this idea of an acquisition. What led to you guys deciding to go down the acquisition path? Obviously you said a nine figure acquisition, so you don't have to say much more. But in terms of how that changed your life for the business, from your leadership, from working with the people that you've spent so much time and effort on, how did that acquisition change you, your business and your life overall?

Yeah, lifestyle. The house I'm in, I built it in 2002, so my lifestyle hasn't changed at all. I made millions of dollars a year before I sold the company, so that didn't change anything. Yes, it's a big chunk of money, but the way I thought about it was it. And I coach all of my CEO clients around it this way too. It's like at any point in time, you should be positioned to sell for the most possible money. You just should because you don't know what life changes. It can bring all kinds of things up that you didn't expect. And if you run your company right and you're thinking about creating value and really doing all the right stuff, keeping your business should be an equally good, if not better option to selling it at any point in time. And I was clearly in that position. You know, we really, really followed that, that philosophy. And you know, when we sold the company, I think we walked away at least three times from the deal. It's like, I don't really care. I'd have been just as happy keeping it. It wasn't even my idea to sell it. It was some of the other folks. I owned the majority of the stock. I controlled everything. And there were other shareholders in the business that over time I would give them an opportunity to get equity when they were thinking and acting like, and getting results like an owner. And they approached me and said, hey, this is the right strategic buyer. We should consider it. And I said, okay, well the number, minimum number's got to be this and, and then I can just go do something else. So I was able to take what I did in that company. So I guess the biggest change for me is sell it now. You got this money off to the side and I've got a bunch that I'm invested, I'm investing or have invested in a lot of different businesses, some, you know, real estate, a lot, a lot of that, which is great. But now I can take this mind methodology out to. I'd like to get it into a million organizations over the next 10 years. And so rather than just, you know, five or 600 employees in a couple of small companies that I have now, it could be millions of employees across the planet. So it's allowing me to pursue my value creation passion in a really big way, lifestyle wise. Really hasn't changed. And I know it sounds super cliche. They'll say, well, money won't make you happy. And it's absolutely true. I've worked with so many companies where they went from barely making it to the owner making millions of dollars a year relatively quickly. And it completely screwed them up because it wasn't their familiar. They just imploded everything because it wasn't normal. So you're either a balanced person working on elevating your human consciousness, that is figuring more stuff out and having this personal fulfillment that grows over time, because be happy all the time, it's impossible. But if you're really doing that work, it won't matter to a large degree what you have. You'll be that person again. I know it's easy to say, yeah, but a lot don't believe that. And I believe the drive to recreate your familiar is stronger than the drive for self preservation for most people. And so if you have a miserable life and all of a sudden you got all this money where it could help you turn it around and most just gravitate back towards turning it into a miserable life again. So how do you work on yourself and over time increase your personal fulfillment quotient? And I've got my thoughts on that. But what do you say, Casey? I mean, this is a big deal.

Yeah, I mean, I think you're spot on. And I say that because I've interviewed and I say this not only from my perspective, but just having interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs from Larry King to just the owners of Twitch and Netflix, you hear a lot, just this idea of like, what success means to them and how they, how they think about it in their life. And yes, some of them may have a financial milestone, but at the end of the day they will always reflect and either say, hey, I was once that, you know, person that had the money, but was the most unfulfilled, miserable human. And you hear that time and time and time again, and it was because they neglected that internal self work. And this is, you know, coming in the collective of interviews that I've done over the years. I think it's a very, you know, you said the word cliche. I think it's just something that people put off in the pursuit of greatness where they can sometimes lose themselves. And I think as being 23 years old, my last company I actually sold last year was in a tech company called mediakits.com and I think this idea of the chase to do more, to be more, to become that next best version of yourself has never been greater in my life. And being able to understand that from a personal perspective of being a young, ambitious entrepreneur, but also having the foresight from these incredible leaders, including yourself, Lee, I think has allowed me to really understand what's important and what you need to keep close to you. Because if you don't, you can quickly lose yourself and you'll only be able to then go back and reflect on, wow. Like, I missed so much throughout the journey trying to get somewhere, when in reality I, I was in this most beautiful place all along, just trying to get better every day and really embrace that.

Yeah, yeah. When you do it right, I think you do both really well.

Yeah.

Like you, you've got the centering for yourself and the personal fulfillment growing over time and all the relationships that you have and, and all those interactions and you're, you're creating value in the world and, and what is that? And the, the most important thing is yourself and that centering. But boy, is it fun to accomplish stuff. And as long as we're doing it in a win win way where everybody, all the partners are winning, everybody engaged, and as all the stakeholders, you can sustain that for almost ever. It's incredible. If you embrace win, lose, which a lot of business folks do, losers won't hang out very long, and all that kind of comes back to bite you. But yeah, I think you're right on if you're thinking that way. At 23, imagine how scary it is for some of these folks that I bet you've interviewed that all of a sudden they have way more money than they can spend. It's like, oh my gosh, I can do anything I want. Now I have to look at myself.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think I was actually listening to a podcast yesterday with a guy named Jay Shetty, and he interviewed the CEO of wme William Morris Entertainment Group. And he was talking, Ari Emanuel, he was talking about this idea of throughout the majority of his career, he didn't want people to really understand who he is. He didn't want people to meet the man in the mirror. Right. And he went on this long, thorough rant about how that blocked him from so many opportunities, but also just restricted a lot of elements of his growth because he didn't want people to meet, quote, the true version of him because he was just in his own way at times. Right. And I think that was just super top of mind because I was listening to it yesterday. But it's very on point to what you said.

Yeah, yeah. Is, you know, how do you, how do you continually cultivate and strengthen who you are and you know, intrinsically motivated, you know, self reliant value creating win win. And I think the only way to do that cultivation work in a really effective way is in the middle of the messiness of how human nature can be and all these different people around you. Because it's one thing to stay in your head and come up with all this stuff, but it's a whole other thing to apply it in the real world with real people. And no matter what's going on, advance value creation. That's the way I think about it. I believe that most people on the speaking circuit, whether they might talk about sales or strategy or business or whatever it is, they're so far disconnected from doing it, they couldn't do the things they talk about to save themselves. And for me, I feel like I'm in the laboratory every day. Every single day I'm working with clients, senior teams, middle management teams, frontline teams. I want to know what the heck is going on and I want to keep my stuff fresh and continually refined and make sure what I'm talking about works in the real world with real people. It's not some academic exercise.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I love that. So I want to ask you about Execute to Win. And one thing I Love, you have etw.com One is, when did you get that domain, the three letter domain? What's the story there?

Well, I think I grabbed it, I want to say around2012, 2013. It was just an idea. I'm still running my other companies, like, hey, I need to do something here. And I found the domain and I think they wanted like a quarter million for it and I ended up paying like 110,000 for it. I just knew that would be valuable someday.

And that was the acronym at the time, Execute to Win got It.

Well, the company started because I thought I was solving for the performance evaluation problem and that's what Jack Welch and I were talking a lot about. So it was evaluate to win and then we changed it. It's really about execution. And one of the chapters in my book, your most important numbers on strategy. And I say, hey, congratulations, you're 3% of the way there. You have a strategy, 97% is going to be executing on all this stuff. And so I've just learned that people love talking about things way, way more than they love actually going and doing things.

Yeah, absolutely. No, I appreciate you sharing that too. I think just this idea of some people thinking through domains and knowing that as entrepreneurs there's so many of us that will buy domains, sit on them for years until the idea matures or the timing's right. So it's cool to hear that you had that in 2012. I believe you said that's awesome.

I think it was within a year of that. I did it.

Yeah, absolutely. So you said something earlier that, that I think a lot of entrepreneurs think about differently. This idea of raising capital versus not raising capital. You said you didn't raise a dime of outside capital throughout your the time of building and scaling the company. What was your reason not to raise capital, which I'm sure you could have and how do you think about that when speaking to early stage entrepreneurs that are either A going to go validate that idea or B are having successful cash flowing businesses that are growing but they're now considering it. Just curious to get your thoughts on all things outside capital and the do's, the don'ts and your thought process overall.

Well, when I assumed the debt and took the company over, all of this was new to me. I didn't even know that raising investment money was that big of a thing. I knew it was possible and I saw some of it going on, but I just went out and got enough work selling it to pay for what was happening and I just built that way. And this was a super capital intensive business too. You know, our capex budget the first year was $175 and we bought a bunch of shells at an auction. And then, you know, we had, we had equipment lines and other lines totaling, you know, close to $40 million at the time that I sold it. So we were able to, with debt financing at really reasonable bank rates, finance our growth that way. And it worked. It worked beautifully. I spoke recently at a, at Phoenix Startup Week and there's a lot of founders in there and they've got their ideas and they all have their pitch decks and they're learning about how to do it. And the title of my talk was Startup Mindset, the difference between a 90% plus chance of failure and a 90% plus chance of success. And those entrepreneurs that are really focused on creating value in the world and just leaning in and they're passionate about it are few and far between. The vast majority of these startup founders are playing startups. And some of the questions that I would get are, what would you want to see in my pitch deck to make you give me money? Because I invest a fair amount, I've got a lot, I've got tens of millions out in investments. And I said, well, that's the wrong question. You already told me I wouldn't invest in your company because you're, for lack of a better way of saying it, you're playing startup. Where are you passionately trying to create value in the world? So a company, for example, could say, hey, we're going to do this particular service and we're going to have software going to be this giant SaaS company, and it's going to be amazing and we're going to get millions of subscribers. Well, along the way, how are you proving there's any real value there? You could actually go out and do workshops and training and other things and build, you know, revenue quick enough to pay for everything and then prove it and probably learn a bunch of stuff to, you know, change your course a bit, if not significantly to make you wildly successful. They're not willing to do that stuff. They all have their same hockey stick graph and we've figured it out and all we need is this money and it's going to be amazing. It's okay. Well, let's stay in touch. I'm not going to invest, but get back in a year. Well, how's it going? You figured it out and you got the money? Yep, we got the money. Well, we're out of the money. Well, we didn't factor this in, but now we figured it out and if we just get this money, it's going to go well. Yeah, let's stay in touch. A year later, it's the same story. And that's the vast majority of them. And you look at it, there's so many things you could have done differently. But I would say the key point here is they're more interested in playing startup in that whole game than they are about really creating value in the world. And there was only one young woman that was in this group at The Phoenix Startup Week telling me about her product, like, oh my gosh, I need to know more about what the experience would be, but I would buy that. And I could see this thing at scale and she couldn't stop talking about the value that it's creating for these particular customers. And that's it. And that's what gets me wildly excited. So that's how I would answer it. So are you playing startup or you're really trying to create value in the world and you want that end result? You care about the end result. What do you say to that, Casey? I mean, you're an entrepreneur.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I want to say I've heard a lot of great answers on the show, but that was by far one of the most incredible answers and the way you framed it and just the simplicity of it. So thank you so much for sharing that. But yeah, I think you're spot on. I mean, just for context here as well, I'm 23. My last company, media Kits. Before that I was running a lot, doing a lot of advertising agencies. I've had this podcast for six years. I've worked with clients, but I launched a software business and speaking in that in the terms of the word value, right? Like this whole podcast for me has been a value creation for me machine in terms of emotional value and the connections I've built through the podcast, but also the knowledge I learned. And it's created this incredible network of world class leaders that I can lean into and get advice from. And then also of course the value for the audience has been tremendous in terms of the impact it's had on entrepreneurs. And I say that because when I went to go raise money for my last venture, a business was called mediakits.com, the easiest way for creators, social media creators, podcasters, musicians, to aggregate all of their cross platform data in one place to then easily share it with a brand where they would never have to go back and update their media kit if they're sharing it to get brand sponsors. And one I think to your question of how do I think about value? We ended up raising a pre seed round of funding for that business and ended up getting acquired 18 months later. But my co founder and I on that company, this idea of solving our own problem, right? And like creating the value for ourselves that we know based on our own experiences have is lacking. Right? Like there was no easy way to aggregate all of your data in one place to share it with a brand. You're having to screenshot and write these numbers down manually and go back and update it. And if you do that at scale for a large talent agency or record label that has dozens of talent and it's extremely valuable for them to save all of that time to not have to go back and fix all their numbers and data. So for us, when I think about value and how we initially executed on the roadmap, it was just solving our pain. Point number one for the individual, but making it valuable at scale. If you think about how it's increasingly more valuable with more people part of the roster, part of the organization that you are actually building media kits for. But I think it's just how I think about it in my life of like the value I get from the podcast and how I can think about creating companies and products and thinking through things has been awesome for me. And that's just, I guess some high level overview of how I think about it.

Yeah, well, you were doing it right. You obviously did it right. And that's not my experience with the majority of them them. And for the longest time there's a lot of, I would call sort of dumb money out there that would go anywhere. They would confuse enthusiasm for real value and people lost a ton of money doing that. And early on in my investing, I've lost millions for a number of different reasons. But now I'm betting so much better because of those lessons learned. It seems like when we lose money, those are the most expensive but also best lessons that we can learn going through. And even in business, I could point to 10 people that each cost me personally more than a million dollars in income just because I left them in place too long, made the wrong choice, whatever that is. Net effect is really good. And everybody has this issue. It's just over time you learn to be smarter and smarter about it and it all comes down to, I know it sounds so simple, but it all comes down to evalu value creation mindset and creating that culture in our business.

I love that. And I also think too just to the point of raising versus not raising just comes down to like where is your focus, where is your priority? Like are you prioritizing value creation or are you prioritizing, like you said, playing startup. And I want to ask you just a couple more questions before we wrap up here. Lee, if you were to go back in time and give your 18 year old self, your own self a piece of advice on how to think about value creation. I know we've brought up different examples throughout the interview thus far, but for the early stage entrepreneur that is listening to this or watching this thinking to themselves. I am prioritizing value creation. How can they do a more so personal audit to how they think about their business, how they think about value creation. So they are not wasting years of thinking that they're focused on value. And in actuality, they're might be playing startup or not have their intentions as clear as they think they do.

Yeah, that's a really big question. And I've thought this way for a long time, which is win, win. So whatever I do, the other side has to win and I should win and we win together. And that's something you can really build on. But I also believe that there's always a better way than you can think of today, and it's your job to find it. And in my experience, most entrepreneurs, you know, starting out with their businesses, they have, there's so much more value that they can bring based on all the dots that they connect. They can connect than they see. And so, you know, really look at what you can leverage to create win win value in the world and constantly work on improving how you connect the dots to make that happen. I wish somebody would have told me that at 18, I was pretty confident I could do anything. I set my mind to him and I had all of that, but I wasn't thinking more strategically that way. And there's, I mean, I 16 to 18 years old, I literally thought I knew everything, which, which now I know way less than then, but so much more at the same time. It's weird how that works.

Yeah.

But I just kept reinventing the wheel over and over again because I wasn't leveraging all of this stuff and I had no mentors that would, you know, spend the time with me around it. And it worked out. I think struggle can be really good, but just, you know, in, in general, most have so much more value creation opportunity in front of them with all of the resources that they have and especially themselves and they, than they believe, you know, at the time. So, you know, kind of look at that. And it's rare to find somebody that thinks they bring a lot more to the table than they do. But those people are out there and they're hard to save, but the majority of them can't see what's possible and it's so much bigger than they know.

That's incredible. I love that answer. Well, Lee, before we wrap up here, when you think about the future of what you're building and just execute to win, what are you most excited about and what are you Looking forward to in terms of the next year and the decades ahead.

Well, with ETW and my book, you most important number, as I said earlier, I want to get it into over the next 10 years there's a million organizations around the world. So now we have more of a value creation mindset, more intrinsic motivation that makes in a very selfish win win way a much better world for me to age out in. It's going to be, it's going to be incredible. And then I'm really excited about the book value creation kid and operationalizing value creation within families. And you know, this is just my gut assessment. If I look at the United States, I don't think we're collectively creating 10, 12% of the value we could because we're more interested, it seems in looking for what's wrong with people and things and why stuff won't work right and judgy and all the other instead of hey what's possible and let's get together around productive ways to go make that happen. Imagine I'm successful with this over the next 10 years and it moves the needle and we create twice the value that we have. We're at 20% or 23% or something along those lines. That's what excites me. It's what's possible and why so many won't gravitate that way. They gravitate towards being a victim or you know, just a stick in the mud. It doesn't make sense. It's not helping your personal fulfillment, self esteem, all of that stuff. So in my small way trying to make a dent. This is what I'm pushing for on the organization side and helping families, especially low and middle income families, kind of where I, I came from because there's so much pent up value creation potential there and I'd love to see it realized.

I love that area. A lot of exciting things to look forward to. Lee, before we wrap up here, where's the best place for everyone watching or listening to find you to learn more about your mission, to buy your book and just to stay informed with everything that you have going on?

Oh sure, yeah. Go to our website which is etw.com you can learn about my CEO mastermind groups that we have. You can get the book there but you can also find it on Amazon and 40,000 other channels where books are sold. My audiobook, I narrate it and I do 25 minute interviews after each chapter so you get even more insight and background. And if you make it all the way to the end, I do an impromptu three minute guitar solo because I after two days, let's just record that. And also you can book a call to explore having us help you implement the MIND methodology in your organization. So you can get all that at the website etw.com and if you're a business leader out there, connect with me on LinkedIn. I have thousands and thousands of connections of folks that I've interacted with.

I love that. Well, Lee, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on the show today. I know I learned so much from you, and I'll be sure to link all of that information down below. And once again, everyone listening or watching, thank you so much for tuning into the show today. Make sure you go follow Lee, connect with him everywhere he is is. And I will talk to you guys soon.

Thank you. Casey.