The Most Important Skill In Business | Lee Benson

Hey, you want to charge the highest possible price, be the best value alternative, which doesn't mean the lowest price, and encourage future business. So look at your top three competitors for what you do. How are they charging, what's going on? Talk to your customers and you start to get a feel for where that is. Don't overcomplicate it. You know, what are the top three competitors doing? And price yourself there and then make it a better experience with a product or a service. And likely you will win.

You know, you've done a lot of tremendous work. Now you're obviously working with a lot of other entrepreneurs, a lot of other business owners and helping them kind of streamline their own organizations and kind of maximize their own output. And you know, you obviously had a very successful exit not that too terribly long ago, and then went on to do greater things. And from my perspective, I'm one of the beneficiaries of your, of your new book here. You know, obviously your most important number and I'm learning a whole ton from it. But you know, the more I dug into it, the more simplistic I thought that the concepts of just getting things down to bite sized nuggets was so important. And I find that a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners, they overcomplicate things. I know I have, you know, trying to think, I need this strategy, I need that strategy, I need that strategy rather than streamlining to what's most important. So how did you come up with the most important number and kind of where did that start?

Yeah, you bring up kind of an interesting point. It seems like most business leaders gravitate towards complex and demotivating ultimately for the team instead of simplicity and motivating and simplicity wins every single time. But it really kind of comes back to how does a team prefer to work together, you know, to win? What does that look like? And you see a lot of examples of sports teams out there and they kind of got it right. You know, there's the most important number, the score of the actual game, and there's a lot of other things they measure and they improve on, but they only measure and improve on those things to make better decisions to win at the overall game. So, you know, kind of backing up and running a number of different companies and I'm on my seventh company, I've started from scratch. What works and what doesn't work in the real world with real people, it doesn't matter what, you know, we think as leaders looks great on paper and it should just work. If it doesn't Work in the real world. That's the way it is. So think of it like this. If you have a product or a service and you want to go sell it, you're looking for that product market fit. It's always best to be fully connected to the prospective customers to see what kind of perceived value they actually see and what you have and whether or not they're actually going to buy it over how much we love this beautiful thing internally and the world should just buy it. So, same thing. When we're working on a product market fit with a service or product, we should be doing the same thing inside our organizations. If it's not working and it's everybody or the majority of them, it's probably your approach, you know, going in. So what, what's the simplest approach that holistically covers all of the elements important to create value as quickly as possible and accelerate that within your organization or, you know, or an organization of any type or size for profit or nonprofit? So that's how we think about it. That's how I've developed this over the last, I would say 40 years. I mean, this has been a long journey for me.

Yeah, well, I think, look, the results speak for itself. The reality is people that use this methodology and use this approach end up streamlining and having quicker operating businesses or more streamlined, more functional, more profitable. And I think the results speak for themselves on that. One of the things that I kind of dug into is the mind methodology. So I actually took the time to go onto your website and go ahead and do the free quiz, which I thought was really cool, by the way. By the way, I just, just knocked that out about an hour ago. I scored a 68, which was lower than I thought it was going to be. And when I was just being honest with myself, and of course, I own several businesses myself, so I'm, I'm looking at it from the CEO perspective. And yeah, I was kind of, I was kind of surprised, like, okay, I got a little work to do, but at the same time, it wasn't all bad. So talk to me a little about the mind methodology and, and how these, the, the skill set of kind of organizing those thoughts and those agree versus disagree came in about.

Yeah, well, the first point, based on what you said, there isn't good or bad. There's only opportunity from my view. And when we look at the work we're doing and if we're really honest about it, and we say, wow, we have a lot of things we could do to improve in 15 areas of the business. I get super excited when I see that, oh my gosh, we have something. What would be different if a company had nothing to improve on and there's nowhere to go? So I love having that big list. When we start with mind methodology, which stands for most important number in drivers, we always do a two hour experience with a prospective client. And this is no cost, no obligation, but we're going to spend two hours doing your work with our methodology and we come out the other side, you know, pretty aligned and both sides have a good feeling for what it would be like to work with each other and then we make a decision at that point. But what the, what happens during the two hours? Start out with, hey, we've got a team of four people, eight people, whatever that senior team is. What does winning aspirationally look like a year from today? And then what does it look like a year from that point in time? And it's really fascinating having that discussion because usually they surprise each other to some degree or to a really large degree in it. And so from there we go over and say, okay, well, what's the most important number for the organization? And this would be for the senior team and the most important number for the company. Just like all most important numbers for every team in the organization should do two things. One, above all others, it says you're winning or losing the game. And secondly, equally, if not more important, it drives the majority of the right behaviors.

Yeah.

So in the for profit world, is typically profit and, and, or cash flow of your capital intensive. But we still measure a lot of other stuff. And, and that most important number, when some people say, well, it just can't be about money. Well, it's not. But foundationally, it's a measure of the value that we're creating as an organization. And the more of it we have, the more good we can do in the world for the communities we engage with, for all of our stakeholders, team members, you know, et cetera. And so at the top they have that most important number, they create a list of drivers which are categories of work they should be good at leveraging to improve it. You know, at the top of an organization, it could be strategy. As a driver, how well are we leveraging, leveraging our strategy process to improve our most important number or leadership development or culture, how well are we intentionally implementing and driving culture to improve financial results and the experience for all stakeholders? And then as you go out towards the front lines now, Maybe it's a four person company, 100 person company, 10,000, we've done this within companies of, you know, up to 40,000 employees so far. Doesn't matter. Every team has the most important number of drivers they leverage and regular actions they're taking to improve how they leverage those drivers to, to hit their most important number. And then I guess the last point here, the, the most important number will always have a plan. Where you at today? Where are you going at any point in time? Are we on track? At risk? Falling behind? Are we overachieving?

Yeah, no, I think that's good because I can tell you from building the businesses I've built so far, the times that got us in trouble, where oftentimes we weren't paying attention, we weren't really focused on a, A metric or a number or a circumstance or an objective. It was kind of, hey, things have been working great for a while. We're just going to grow kind of like by osmosis that all of a sudden now you have organizational issues, you end up with culture issues, you know, leadership issues, in some cases end up with financial issues.

I think it's one of the reasons I want to come back to the most important number because one of the things that I, that I took away from your work so far, too, is in different segments of the business. So call it marketing, sales, operational, fulfillment, you know, retention, all of those, all of those, in many respects, seem to have a common denominator of their own most important number within each of the divisions. So, you know, as a management team, it might be profit or cash flow or a combination thereof. I go into my marketing company. Okay, what, what do we need? Or we need, you know, 10,000 leads a month, you know, to, to. To drive something else. And then, you know, kind of that, that concept, let's break it down, if you're all right with it. And maybe, okay, let's look at marketing. Let's look at sales. Let's look at fulfillment and kind of maybe talk about the different types of either drivers and, or numbers that might play a key role in each of those buckets.

Yeah, marketing. And you, you said it. So what would their most important number be? And marketing is different. Depending on, on the business, marketing could drive most of the traffic and, and instant downloads. You don't need a big sales team, do it. But let's assume you have marketing and you have sales. So marketing's most important number typically would be the number of qualified leads. And a qualified lead would be well defined, and there would be an average closing percentage. And they should be continually working on improving the quality of the qualified leads. So the value of each is higher and the closing percentage is higher. Then you have the sales side of it. So they're, it's a profitable revenue number. Right. So they, maybe they have some leeway and how they can price, maybe they don't. But there should be a pricing policy and the one I like the most. And it applies virtually everywhere. Charge the highest possible price while being the best value alternative and encouraging future business. We want to make sure that we never gouge anybody or give special deals. It gives us a bad reputation. So.

That would be those two if you took hr. And let's dig a little deeper on this one. Every most important number needs to be developed in a conversation with that team. So with the HR team, what would be that one number that says we're winning or losing above all others and it drives the majority of the right behaviors? Almost always HR says one of two things when we first start that conversation. Oh, for sure. It's retention or it's engagement. It's like, all right, well let's play it out. So if, if, if retention is our most important number and you hire me to run HR and I could see a future where three years down the road we have 95% retention, but 75 or 80% of the employees can't perform at the level we need them to in their roles. Yeah, I just failed, but I won on my most important number. So a better, most important number really would be, and I use this example in the book, percentage of seats filled with capable people. And so with that, you've got the structure of the organization, you know, all the functions, fulfillment, sales, marketing, finance, et cetera. And within there would be well defined roles. And then each of those roles would have one to maybe three, usually never more than four outcome based responsibilities that are measurable. This is what they signed up to accomplish. And there may be a list of 30 tasks in a job description, but you're only, you're doing those things to achieve your outcomes. Now when I want to measure percent seats filled with capable people, what percentage of the seats across the board are meeting or beating the requirements within, within those outcome based responsibilities and what percentage are below and, and all roles are not created equal when it comes to creating value. You get a CEO that isn't doing it. That's a pretty big deal. You get a frontline team member that's part of, you know, 20 people cleaning parts or PA painting or something like that. Not as big of a deal the bottom line, but we should be working across the Board to make sure we get it right.

Yeah, no, that's good. You know, I was just, I want to, maybe I'm gonna stay in HR for just a second because I was just thinking through the most important number. Our HR administrator, you know, she's always, she wants to increase retention, she wants to increase, you know, engagement. We would, we would have kind of, we would refer to it as a liability or team member buy in. It's kind of that, that same kind of thing. So, but I recently had a discussion with her from my perspective, said, look, I, I totally agree with you. We want to, we want a well defined team. We want to be highly responsible, highly accountable, highly relational. We want to enjoy working with the people we work with because obviously we spend a ton of time with them. So we want all of those things. However, one of the things that I've learned in taking a business from, you know, zero to almost nine figures is almost everybody. Along the way the business got to a point where the business had outgrown the team members capability. And many times where the business got stalled it was because I wanted to hold on to somebody just because I know no, liked and loved them to death and kind of wanted to kind of do that. So if we're using the most important number aspect, how would we, how would we kind of use that as a gauge block to say this person is truly capable of doing this role? Are we going to be more focused on KPIs specifically of that role?

Well, the beauty of the most important number when it comes to leadership development is that every function will have a most important number. And once it's baked out, the senior team agrees, like the major functions have a most important number. Where they're at, where they're going, the drivers is the work they're going to do to get there. And there could be lists of other things that could be called strategic initiatives or whatever, but there's that plan. And for leaders that are falling below, once you look at their most important number, their drivers, their, their leading indicators that they're making decisions from all the action items their team is taking, doesn't take very long to see exactly where that leader needs to develop to get back on track with that most important number. So if it dips and they don't have the capability to give it, get it back on track within a reasonable time frame. And the answer to that reasonable is it depends based on the business, where you're at and everything else that shows you immediately where to develop them. And if they can't do it then you've now exposed it and it's not, it's not personal in any way, shape or form. We have this value creation machine called our business and there's a lot of moving parts. At any point in time, one of those will be holding us back more than the others regarding the value that we're trying to create. And it's a moving target and everybody's going to be in that seat. But if somebody's there too long and they're dipping, we see it, we make a change. And to your point, as I built something from three employees, the largest company that I've had, and exited to over 500, I think during that evolution, I changed out the senior leadership team in all or part at least five or six times over the years. And you sort of do it. And a lot of those would just move to another area where they can really create value for the organization. But with every team having a most important number, somebody leading it, all the team members, you see really quickly when it's falling below and you can see why start the development process and maybe you don't have enough time. I mean, I'm one of those that believe everybody can get there, but sometimes we don't have 30 years, you know, we have to.

Yeah, that's, that's really good because I, you know, a lot of our, a lot of our subscriber base and, and email list and all that kind of stuff, the folks that kind of buy into what we're, we're, we're talking about kind of what we share. Most of them, if not of them. Well, all of them are at some stage, but most of them are early stage entrepreneurs. They're in that zero to three million dollar top line revenue bucket, which means they're have, they have anywhere from zero team members to probably 20, you know, at any given moment. And one of the things I've always tried to do is to teach them from the stuff that I screwed up. You know, kind of like, you know, this, this was the symptom, this is what happened when I didn't address the symptom. And that's one of the reasons why I like this work so much is because it does, it brings a lot of light to a lot of areas that should be clarified for you right in that moment. You know, we're a big believer that you should be watching kind of like what's right, what's wrong, what's confusing, what's missing, you know, at all times. And for me, being confused on the direction myself is obviously going to help me be more confusing to the people I'm trying to lead. And sometimes it's because the feedback I'm also getting from the team is not clarified in such a, such a fashion, which I can then kind of like make good decisions off of it. I want to talk a little bit about something you say in the book that I really like. I actually jotted it down, says do the right work at the right time. So that, so everyone knows how to contribute to team success. I like that a lot for a lot of different reasons. But one of the primary ones is I see a lot of team members even now in my organizations who are working as hard as they can work, but in some cases they're working in the wrong direction or they're put, they're expelling an effort, you know, on a Monday and then you expel the effort on a Friday, you know, and kind of scalability year after year, month after month. Talk to me a little about that.

Yeah, if, if every team has a most important number and it all fits together and it's pretty easy to see the map, no matter how big it gets, when you improve one, it'll always improve the next one up. That's part of the criteria and so on and so forth to accrete to the ultimate most important number for the organization. Hard to, hard to get misaligned around that. And we've been doing this for a while and we have a lot of solopreneurs that are actually clients and or have just changed the language inside their organization themselves. When I say organization, it's like the solopreneur, their contractors, their partners and all. So they have a team even though they're not full time employees. And the results, not uncommon. Within three months, six months, it's 50% or 100% better in terms of revenue and profitability. So short example, a guy I used to work with wanted to leave and start his own maintenance business doing residential maintenance, air conditioning, plumbing, a lot of stuff. And so he finally makes the choice. He goes out there and he says, well, let's talk about this. And I said, okay, well what's your most important number? Since you're a solopreneur and you charge for your, your parts that go into the work, it's really about total revenue. So how are we thinking about this? And so his most important number is revenue. Once he starts hiring, people will be about what's left over. And that's coming as the next stage here soon. Now, what would the drivers be? One of them is pricing. So his pricing was 65 bucks an hour. I said, well, it's still a little bit of research. First, let's have a pricing policy and it's the one I stated earlier. And looks like all of his competitors are in the 90 to $160 an hour range. So let's just, let's raise it. And he's, oh, I don't want to raise it. I want to get people. Well, you're already giving him a better deal per hour than anybody else, in my opinion. Let's raise it to 85. So he did that on the commercial side. When he did that work, it went from, I think it went from 90 to 140. And so instantly everything's better than last year. And, and there were other drivers in it. So just changing the conversation, looking at what drives that most important number, here's a solopreneur example where it wasn't that hard to basically increase revenue 30 to 60%, depending.

Yeah, let's, let's take it a little bit further because pricing, pricing is the lifeblood of a business. I mean, it determines, you know, kind of your structure, what kind of margin you're going to have, what kind of outflow of cash you're ultimately going to have over time. How would a business owner, early stage, or call it moderate stage, somebody with under $10 million a year, how would they go out and shop the marketplace in a worthwhile way where they actually have the data that they need to then kind of work on developing a true pricing policy?

Yeah, it's a hard question to answer in a universal way, but that basic pricing policy, hey, you want to charge the highest possible price, be the best value alternative, which doesn't mean the lowest price, and encourage future business. So look at your top three competitors for what you do. How are they charging, what's going on? Talk to your customers and you, you start to get a feel for where that is. Maybe you've got a really simple business and you only have one or two products or a service. I remember in my aerospace company we had 10,000 repairs that we developed over time and all these different verticals and different products within there. So you had kind of do the research on what are, what are our top three competitors charging for each one of those things that had material sales for us. And then we adjusted our pricing there. But we also looked at reliability, actual long term value. So we might sell something for a thousand dollars and it lasts three times as long as somebody's selling it for, you know, 500 bucks.

Yeah.

And it was actually better value in that case. So there's a fair amount that goes into it. But don't overcomplicate it. You know, what are the top three competitors doing? And price yourself there and then make it a better experience with a product or a service and likely you will win.

Yeah. Well, to take that step further, I'm curious to know.

I think one of the most difficult things that I've had to develop over time, or learn over time specifically, is when the, I guess the most important number is ultimately driving either a people issue versus a process issue and process. When I say process, it could mean the actual system within the process, or it could mean the organization of the process. You know, a good friend of mine, his business basically quadrupled over the last, you know, two years, basically. And he wasn't really operating off any kind of CRM or any kind of cell solution or nothing internally. And then we had a quick conversation. I was like, well, maybe you should consider X, Y and Z at least as an opportunity for you to have a more. You know, the businesses I have have to have robust accounting infrastructure to handle the amount of transaction volume we have. How does a. How would somebody know or how could they use the most important number to drive out the fact that maybe they need a. A new process or a new system, whether it be a computer software system or more time to organize the process?

Yeah. If the most important number, and this is the top of an organization, is profit, and one of the drivers could be automation, another driver could be sops or Standard Operating Procedures. And then the question is, how well are we leveraging SOPs today to improve our most important number? And that's not an uncommon driver because it holistically affects the entire organization. And we always rank those drivers in terms of how well we're leveraging them to improve our most important number on a scale from 1 to 10, not uncommon for it to be a 1 or a 2. Some people joke and say, can we put a negative number in there? And so now we can intentionally go after, like, what are all the processes or practices inside the organization? And it could be like how we set strategy, how we do performance reviews, how work processes through the, you know, through the sort of value chain going in, and which ones, you know, based on the return on investment for solving for it and really getting it right. Should we do first, second, third, and fourth? So this right work, right time, right order, wildly important. And think about it in terms of alignment decisions and accountability. So alignment is. Are we aligned on all the things that we could do to improve what's most important could be a really big list right now, making the best decisions based on all the information we have to do the right work at the right time in the right order. And then the accountability piece, we're continually strengthening our culture of accountability to make sure everybody's doing what they said they would do when they said would do it. So that's that, that's how you, you would look at it. And every business is different with, with a lot of transactions and accurate financial information being required. And we don't want a bunch of labor to do it. We don't want, you know, 200 virtual assistants. We just want it to be automated from a website somewhere. Yeah, that's pretty darn important for that, for that business model.

Yeah, no, no, that's good. I always like to bring that up because I again, my early stage entrepreneurs or the everyday entrepreneur that I kind of. It's the people who are in what we refer to as the testing phase of the five stages of building a business. So basically you're testing things that, that need to work for you or work on your behalf. Computers and people are obviously part of that. I'm curious to know, when it comes down to drivers, how does one come down to the most common denominator for a key driver? Because one of the things about the book that I love, absolutely love about the book is we've talked about a lot of different concep concepts and they're all intertwined in a lot of different ways. One of the best things about this is there's actually a roadmap so you can kind of, you get into alignability and you kind of think about the things that go through that. But there's a, there's a large emphasis on creating the drivers. How does, how does a, you know, early stage entrepreneur have a better understanding of what driver needs to be created to achieve a certain number when they haven't had a lot of experience?

Yeah, yeah. Once we've come up with, hey, this is what winning would look like in a year and then two years out. And I know it's, it's kind of hard to predict, but we're just thinking as per operationally and then here's a list of things that probably have to happen over the next couple of quarters to set us up to win, you know, this year and the following year. Now think about drivers as evergreen work. It never goes away. Categories of work that, that you should be able to leverage to improve Your most important number. So I'm an early stage company, I've got a small team, and, and we're, we're looking at this. So profit is our most important number. Or maybe it's revenue or something. But profit's the most important number for the reasons that we've stated. And then now the drivers, these are things that holistically at the top, holistically affect the organization. So marketing should be a driver. Sales should be a driver.

Process should be a driver. Your operating system, how you intentionally run the organization to create more and more value over time should probably be a driver. Strategy can be a driver. How do we think about it? How do we make decisions so they never go away? And then you would rank each one of these on a scale from 1 to 10, how well are we leveraging each to improve our most important number? And then once we go through that, we look at usually not trying to significantly improve more than three drivers at a time, but what would be the top three? Because if we can improve how we leverage those, it'll make the quickest improvements in our most important number. And always describe for a driver like pricing or sales or marketing, what would a 10 state look like and what would that really look like? And if we're only a three, then the question is, well, what actions can I take to improve how my team leverages this driver to move it to a four or a five that will materially increase our most important number. And so that's really it. This is evergreen work. Now when you have your strategy, you might say, well, here's some projects that have an end date, but once we get them done, it'll make a step change. Improvement on our most important number. Those are what I would call strategic initiatives. Off to the side. So you've got your evergreen work, you've got a list of strategy initiatives to accomplish. And a quick note on that. It's always interesting to look at an outcome of a strategy session. And here's all these things, usually only about 10 or 15% at most are truly strategic initiatives, defined as doing something today or starting something today that'll create a much better result in the future. Most of them are in the other camp, which is please do your job.

I think what a lot of us start out with for that. And then we're not, then we're not really good at telling them how to do their job or what we expect out of them. That's been my Achilles hill. It's my, I used to train by, hey, just, just do what I Do just do what I do and you know, very quickly realize that I do different things differently than most people would do them some better, some worse kind of thing. And I think that that's kind of interesting. Which kind of brings me to an interesting point. What if some of our listeners or viewers are in the C suite category or they're part of a smaller organization and the person who desperately needs to hear this content specifically or read this book or operate in this way, get into the mind methodology. What if that person is the business owner, if you will, and or the CEO of the company? How does a C suite person incentivize them to maybe become a better CEO?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I've always said the leader of an organization is the single biggest limiting factor. They don't believe it, allow it to happen, happen, do something, then it limits it. So I've always spent my career just trying to get out of the way and grow as fast as I can. But a great way to do it. I mean, just recommend that the team reads this book, your most important number, and then have a discussion around the methodology. And hopefully the leader in this scenario is open to a better way to create value faster as an organization. So. And it never works well to walk in and say, you're really doing a terrible job and I think you should do this. But to say, hey, I read this book and here's some, you know, really simple, elegant changes we could make that I think would accelerate the profit we make. I think we should take a look at it. Yeah, and I think that's a good approach.

No, that is a good approach. You know, I was, it was reminding me of a story I actually heard you share as well about a CEO who was really struggling with the implementation part of this process. And then he quickly was able, once he started making the changes in pivots, he was quickly able to see a lot of the profound changes in a positive direction. Have you bumped in that, bumped in that a lot or is it a lot of times? Is it the CEO or the founder of the business who's very open minded about kind of putting this most important number process in place?

Yeah, I think everybody develops at their own pace. And some leaders of organizations, if not the entire senior leadership team, will say people are our greatest asset. It's incredible. And we do everything we can for them. They go out and buy the million dollar piece of equipment, but they won't invest a dollar in developing their leaders. So they don't really see the value in it. And it, it takes a little while for senior leaders, really any leader to see the value in doing certain things, like having an intentional way of operating a company to create value faster. Some think, oh, we'll just download software and everything will be fixed. No, what's most important is the methodology, like how we agree to interact with each other to create value faster as an organization, I. E. The mind methodology, as one example, then the tools matter because it allows us to sustain and scale a lot more effectively. Most people don't have the discipline gene to do the right work every single day where the software can make it super easy to do that work and sustain and scale it. So on the development side, I'm sure you've heard this too. A lot of senior leaders will make a presentation to a group of junior leaders or non supervisory team members and they didn't get it right away and the leader says, oh, they just don't understand that stuff. And then I always reply and say, look, it probably took you about three years to get this concept right in your head. Can we give them at least three minutes, three months or something to come along? So it's a development journey. And my, my test for this is at any point in time, can I look back six months and say, you know what, the conversation's better, the understanding is better, the results are better today than they were then, then I'm doing the right work work rather than just being frustrated that people don't get it to the degree that I do. And you know, for those folks, I hope those that get it to a degree that's much greater than they do, that they're a lot more patient with them than they are with their team members. You know, that's what we do as leaders, right? We develop people to create value faster.

Yeah, no, I think that's, that's important. I also think that one of the things that we did strategically a long time ago and I stumbled my way into this, you know, before we hopped on officially and, and hit the record button and I was sharing with you about my, my first mentor and you know, how he kind of taught me and poured into me and I had some interesting epiphanies along the way. So my first business was the construction business. I literally drove the first nail and, and screws and cut stuff and you know, nice in the, in the snow, in the rain, in the heat, like you know, just a one man show for a while and then, you know, finally started hiring this person, that person, contractors, etc, and built it over time and I had this interesting epiphany one afternoon that Steve, while he was trying to teach me to use my head, it was actually the use of my hands that taught me how to use my head and then later my heart. And then that translated into when we started bringing people into the business specifically, I started telling them on the onset when they first get done and said, hey, guys, you know, you're probably coming into this because you, you know, you're in the construction field, you got construction acumen. You, you know, either you're managing, you're cutting, you're doing something in this field, and you, you, you may have stumbled your way into it like I did or, or any number of reasons. But what I want you to understand more than anything else is we are actually a personal development company masquerading as a construction company. Because I learned a long time ago that as I was growing myself, I would begin to say things and even begin to teach things, which is how I created the unstoppable startup programs for the early stage entrepreneurs of essentially learning from my failures, learning from mistakes. You know, like, we will actually be circulating this book specifically to our management team so we can then have a conversation about, okay, guys, what are our most important numbers? Because we're not, we're not operating like this right now. And it's, and it's a sizable organization. It's, you know, it's not really, it's not a Google, but it's, you know, it's sizable enough where there's quite a bit of, to manage and, and responsibilities and, and relationships, et cetera. And one of the things that I've seen more than anything else is when the management team is seen growing, meaning people are watching you read or watching you go to the conferences, or watching you watch YouTube or listening to podcasts, they stumble. They kind of like stumble over your shoulder. It's kind of like your children always become the person they watched you be. You basically be right through illustration, it develops a culture of personal growth. You know, it's not uncommon for our team to run around the office and say, hey, I just heard this new podcast. You should check it out. And it's on, you know, sales or marketing or copywriting or construction acumen or any number of things. And I'm curious to know how difficult it is for a company to go from zero to bought in in regards to kind of having an internal personal development system, which is a lot of what I think this ultimately drives. This, this drives behavior change more than anything else.

Oh, it, it completely does. And so some companies would say, oh, we need to get our act together and many do. Before we ever tackle something like this, they want their house in order to. That's the wrong approach. With a mind methodology. The best time to start the mind methodology is right now because it's all about very quickly getting the house in order and everybody fully aligned around the best work in the right order and always starting with a senior leadership team and with that experience that I described, that two hour experience a little bit ago, and then cascade at the speed the culture of the organization can actually handle it. And what I would say is that the senior team has to take the methodology serious. You can't just show up to a meeting going, okay, I'm here to answer a question or somebody asks and then say it doesn't work. And I always find that kind of fascinating. And this is a common story. Company says, oh, we're going to do okrs or we're going to do 40x, you know, one of the popular operating systems out there. Then they don't really do it. Then they say it didn't work and then they jump to another popular operating system and then not really do that, say it doesn't work and go to the next one. You actually have to take it serious. And so, you know, step one with the team is saying we want to be really intentional about how we create this value creation machine, build it, and, and, and how we interact with each other going forward, how we align back to alignment decisions and accountability. Yes. Okay. And, and if it, if it is the mind methodology, then you know, get, get the book, everybody read it, come in with your questions and then if you're serious about it, you can, you can self implement or it always goes faster with one of our team members in the room, have us do a two hour experience to really get it organized in the software platform to make it easy to sustain and scale. And at the end of two hours, you know, you decide if that's something you want to do. But, but it's so important that the team takes it serious and they all won't do it at once. Right. Some will be more Biden than others. Isn't that normal, you know, with any team in any organization? But it really goes fast. I mean, I'm literally seeing it work, which is kind of blowing me away 100% of the time. And the few times that it doesn't is where the, and at very few times where the, the founder or CEO of the organization is not comfortable sharing much about the most important number if at all. I'm not going to share profit. I can't let people see what's going on. I've. We've run into a couple of cases where there's self dealing and other stuff and it exposed some really unethical behavior. The process worked, in my opinion. Everything was getting better and it, and it exposed to cancer, but I can't help that stuff. But I'm, I'm proud of the fact that we uncover it when it happens.

Yeah, well, it's, it's hard to go through a process like this and not uncover the things that need to be addressed and actually be celebrated. Like there's, I think a process like this. Yes. It creates behavior change. Yes. It gets more structure, more organization, more optimization. Yes. Well, it'll also, you know, it will uncover, you know, the areas that need improvement, but it seems to me it would also cover areas that, hey, we're really killing it in these 10 areas. We only need to focus on these three or four right now.

Yeah.

You know, and I think that that's a, that's an important message to send to the team as well because that's a morale boost. Because a lot of times, at least as a, as a founder, CEO like myself, I know one of my responsibilities is to talk about the things that need improvement. Specifically in my business, it's either cash flow or top line revenue growth. Those are my two most important numbers in my current seat, followed by my coo, who's then supposed to work, really kind of work on margin, like increase, you know, increase the delta of the margin. However, when I'm doing that, I also have to bring up the things that are causing us to have retraction in top line revenue growth and, or cash position or something like that. Which means if I'm always talking about that, that I'm not actually celebrating the things that have gotten better or the things that have improved. And I think this process is a huge piece of that that I think people could benefit from in a big, big way.

Well, and you and I are saying the same thing, just a little bit different in the language. And I look at it and say, here's a list of all the opportunities to improve our most important number. It's awesome that we have that. So let's keep doing this Evergreen work daily to get results and dreaming a bit on the other side to do this stuff to get even better results in the future. So I never say where are all the problems? This could be improved, that could be improved. It's where the opportunities to make more. And psychologically, it just feels different. Everybody pours in. It's like, here's your most important number. What's the best work you and your team are doing to improve that number and how can we help you? That's totally different than why are you below Plan, show me what you're doing. Like, oh my gosh, now I'm defensive and kind of backing up into a corner. Even though, and I go way into the past, you know, some CEOs, including myself back in the day, with the best of intentions, I'm just wanting to improve, but my style is, know, kind of sucks.

You know, when I've been there myself.

Many times, you know, talk that way. So it's really just getting excited about the opportunities, get excited about the progress. You know, a friend of mine, Dan Sullivan, write it, wrote a book called the Gap and the Gain. Most people are caught up in the gap, and instead of look at the progress that we made, and that doesn't mean that we shouldn't struggle. I, I think as we're learning to create more and more value over time, there's a lot of healthy struggle that goes on. And we should value that because you get three, you come out the other side to create so much more. In a world today where kids aren't supposed to struggle, adults aren't supposed to struggle, well, how do you learn to create value?

And if you do struggle, it's called depression immediately.

Oh, my gosh.

If that was true, I would get stronger by not going to the gym. Right?

Yeah, very true.

So it's just very interesting how the world's looking at us the opposite of what we really need.

Well, I also think that's why a lot of entrepreneurs have a sense of extra struggle, even though it's what they're going through is normal. It's normal to have to build out a process. It's normal to hire great people. It's normal to have to lead them and develop yourself to lead them. It's normal to be responsible with what, whatever cash or margin or profitability you. You have coming in. You know, I've watched a lot of young entrepreneurs, and I'm just, I thank God every day that I wasn't in a position at the time to make this mistake. But, you know, you take a huge portion of your profitability and immediately go shopping after you had one year of success. You're not realizing there's. There's covids, there's recessions, there's housing, economy downturns, there's all These different things that you have to kind of almost single handedly, kind of at least in the back of your mind processing and thinking through as you're kind of developing your most important number, your drivers or your processes. So I don't know, man. I've enjoyed talking to you, dude. I feel like we could do it over and over again for sure. Where can everybody find out more about you?

I recommend going to the website, our website, which is themindmethodology.com and you can easily see how to order the book if you want to. I recommend the audiobook because I recorded 25 minute interviews after every chapter. So even more insights and background. I'm actually talking to you from my recording studio right now and I actually put a guitar solo at the end of the book so I know who listened to the whole thing when they.

Said wow, I haven't gotten to the guitar solo yet but I have the paper copy and the audiobook copy.

And when you go to the mind methodology.com you can see our leadership library. You can sign up for our newsletter. There's lots of free content there and paid content if you want to get into our community in a more deep way. But that's the best way to learn a lot about this. And I recommend as a step one, just get the book your most important number and it'll be pretty eye opening going through that a lot of time getting it right. And I think we did.

I'm also going to recommend as someone who's actively a good chunk of the way through the book, both audio and print, that you have a highlighter and you have a notepad beside you as you're going through it and you're jotting down concepts, ideas and things along the way. It's been incredibly helpful for me. In fact I had a chance to share this with you yet. But I've got a meeting scheduled next week to actually have a conversation with our management team team about many of the concepts and things that are in this. Because even at the scale of a good sized business, one of the things we've been struggling with is communicating our expectations to everybody else. And if I can summarize the expectational value in one or two numbers for each of the roles that was. That was like. Because now they know what they're working towards.

Yeah. And if after that conversation and and you know you've been gracious enough to have me on on your podcast, they would two hour experience, I would be happy to facilitate that personally for your team. Yeah.

Yeah. And I would I would be honored to do that. And I may take. I'm. In fact, I'll probably highly likely take you up on that for sure. Okay. Awesome, man. Well, I appreciate you spending some time with me today. It was a joy. Yeah, I. I could pick your brain all day long. It's. It's funny when you get around people who have built impressive businesses, but you also, when you build an impressive business from zero, you also very quickly understand all the ups and downs. And you know, that. That experience that. That was paid for a lot of times, and in sheer, you know, fight, grit, struggle, ambition, workmanship, leadership, all of it together. So I applaud you for not only doing it for yourself, but then turning right around and want to give it back to the world. It's huge. Huge.

Yeah. Thank you. And from. From my side, it's nice speaking with folks like you because you're a real student of the value creation struggle. Like, you're in the game. You're connected to it, building and doing. So many really aren't. And so, yes, I could. I think I could talk with you for the next week straight. Right.

Absolutely.

Fantastic. Thank. Thank you, Stephen.

All right, Lee, take it easy. See you.

All right.

I hope you liked that video. And if you did, make sure you check out this next video right here.

What is it that you really, really want to see? When people see your visual media, is it a video? Is it a photo? What do you want them to feel? What do you want them to see? That question alone makes them sit back and think. When that transformation happens and you see that sparkle in their eyes, you realize you touch the personal as well as the business at the same time.