Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - The 3% Rule: Why Your Strategy Sessions Die by Monday | Lee Benson

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

I help founders & executives generating more than $10M in revenue find their Easy Mode. Start here: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribe Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtube.com/ryanmhanley Lee Benson pulled weeds for 25 cents an hour when he was six. By senior year of high school he was living on his own. Forty-six years later he calls himself an overnight success: a nine-figure exit after growing Able Aerospace from two employees to more than 500 across 60 countries. Today Lee is the CEO of Execute to Win, and this conversation is a masterclass in what execution means. Not grinding. Not hustle. Creating objectively measurable value, and building the environment where every person in the company creates more of it over time. We cover the 3% rule of strategy versus execution, why job descriptions fail your team, the compensation system that ended salary negotiations at Able (open books plus 22% of pre-tax profit paid monthly), earned decision rights, and the category Lee puts most strategic initiatives in: please do your job. We also get personal. Kicked out senior year. Credit cards opened in his name. A thousand shows in a rock band. Why the struggle is the point, in business and at home with your kids. And we close on AI: why the leaders trading their coaches for chatbots are getting amazing answers to the wrong questions. If you lead a team, this one follows you into Monday morning. This is the way. Hanley. Connect with Lee Benson:  Website: https://etw.com  Dinner Table: https://dinnertable.com  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lee-j-benson/ Follow Ryan:  Website: https://ryanhanley.com  Instagram: https://instagram.com/ryan_hanley Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You can grind 20 hours a day and never get to where you want to be. Knowing what to do is pretty straightforward for the most part. That's only 3% of the equation. 97% is actually executing on it. The rest of them, I put them in this category called Please Do Your Job. Well, if it was perfect every single day, why would I need a leader? Love the journey, love the struggle. Is there a blind spot?

Is there something we're missing? AI probably isn't going to take your job. But somebody with AI skills likely will. There's a couple things. that I picked up on that like I just I'm just really interested in um and and you actually said something that that kind of captures it which was like the execution side and like digging through your stuff and obviously you know companies you know execute to win and all that but like I I want to differentiate and really hammer on and tell me if this isn't where you want to go

but it's just kind of the path that I had was, what does execution actually mean? Like, I think we all kind of have this ethereal idea of like, oh, I just do stuff or I have a plan and I execute it. But like, we both know you can have the best laid plans. You can do work every day. You can grind 20 hours a day and never get to where you want to be. Like, what does someone who has created, as your words,

generational wealth for themselves and their family in the future, what does execution actually mean and how do we need to frame this idea of executing to be successful? Because I know plenty of people that work hard that are still living paycheck to paycheck, right? And they would be executing a plan. But I wouldn't say that they're success. They're not successful in the way that they want to be successful, right? They're just grinding to produce just enough to get by. and what is the difference between someone that's executing in that way

and someone who's actually executing to win, not to just play off your name, but to get there because I like kept coming back to this idea like when I was looking through your stuff of like, I don't know that I've even ever heard like a really deep articulate conversation about the idea of execution, about what this really means, what it takes, how you make this not just grinding, not just hustle porn, but like a process for getting the things

done that need to get done. And that was kind of where my mind went. If that's cool with you, then I love the question. I mean, to me, execution is creating objectively measurable value. When I talk about creating value, I always think about it holistically. So it's material, it's money. Everybody gets that. It's positive emotional energy, which to me is a scarcest commodity. on the planet for so many reasons. It's the X factor for leaders and their spiritual value creation, which is about connectedness. Whether you're deeply religious or not, doesn't matter. Being connected is really a good thing to sell family, community, and beyond. So objectively measurable value. So let's lay that out. And I think one of the challenges, so I love doing

work in the for-profit, nonprofit, nonprofit, public, private space also within families. and how are we objectively creating value as a family intentionally measured across all three of those? So once we have that foundation, we want to create value this way and we want to get better and better at it over time. And I'm going to get to your question about sort of a system or how to think about holding it all together, just like an operating system for a computer holding all the software applications together. But once we define that, and most companies aren't very good at it, if you ask an employee, create value for the business, they often read a job description. That's a giant opportunity to get them aligned to creating value. You create value this way. You're held accountable to this outcome

primarily. Here's how we measure it. You're either on track or not over time. If everyone in the business, any business out there, any organization is really clear how their role's designed to create value and we're developing them to create more and more over time. To me, that's the foundation for execution. What are we executing on? It's almost like when they say, you know, we want employee engagement to be high. Well, ours is high. Well, how do you know? Well, we did a survey. Well, what is it saying in the survey? Oh, they told me they're engaged. And I always ask, well, engaged with what? You know, it should be engaged with the value their role was designed to create and they're on a team. What's the value that team was designed to create? And then how does that

team fit in with all the other teams to accrete up and continually increase the value of the business. So that's how I think about it. And then when, you know, when it comes to execution, I've heard so many people over time say, you know, I read this book by, it could be Jack Welch, former GE guy, he was my business partner for a while. It could be anybody that was successful out there. I'm just going to do their eight step or 12 step or five step process and it'll just work. Well, it doesn't because they wrote a book and they defined all this stuff, but what they're typically not very good at in these books is telling you how they behaved, how they made decisions, how they navigated all these different hidden agendas, these other forces that are sort of

taking you off the game of creating the value that the company was designed to create. Because as a leader at the top, it's like this big amorphous blob called your organization that you're just holding together and pushing all the sides in as it goes off towards the value you want to create. And if we're not clear about that, that blob is a lot harder to corral. So does this make sense and that I can get into operating system? I actually, before we go too far, I have a question for you that may be super basic, but I just, why is, if I'm employee 327, why is my job description, the tasks and the tasks outlined on it, not my value to the company.

Like, if that makes sense, like what, like, maybe that's too obvious a question, but like, why is that, if I'm sitting here, why I mean regurgitating that back to you is not my value, those tasks that I do? How many things in your life have you done because this is the way we've always done it? Or you've heard other people say when you ask the question, why are you doing this? Well, because we always do it this way. And one of the typical things within organizations is, well, we create a job description for every role.

They just say that. And I want to back up and say, let's create roles designed to create value. And there's three categories in how I think about it within a role. When you get hired for this position, it's an accountant, it's an engineer, it's a marketing person, it's sales, it's production, whatever it is. In this role, these are the one to maximum three outcomes that you're going to be held accountable to. This is how you create value. And preferably it's just one. You may measure a number of things, but it's all subordinate to the one.

And as long as you do that, things are great. And if it falls below this line, it's not going to work. Now we know exactly where we stand regarding performance 100% of the time, real time. We should know that. So that's the first category. The outcomes are held accountable to it. And then the second category is a list of capabilities they need to have in order to have a really good shot at hitting those outcomes.

And that becomes their training program. We're constantly developing and training them. And then the third category, just general job duties. Hey, when you, when you, you know, clock in in the morning or you come into the office, these are the three things we just do. Like, you know, stuff we just do as part as just general duties. So outcomes, capabilities, and duties for every single role. And that's actually a lot more exciting for somebody, I think, getting a job.

If we're hiring for this particular position, let's just say it says engineer. and you need to have all this experience, these degrees, whatever it happens to be, and it just kind of goes so you're going to be working with other engineers. It's got like a little job description. But if it said we're hiring engineers and here's exactly how we measure the value, your role would be is designed to create and we measure it this way, and these are the capabilities you need and here's some basic job duties, now I'm super clear.

Like it makes it so easy when I walk into that job that this is what I'm going to do you think that it also when you lead with maybe the outcomes or the the value this position or this role is meant to create do you think it also opens up the team members to actually almost manuscript the duties that get to that value like they're able to kind of take maybe the initial set of duties that you may say hey here's what we believe or have seen in the past create these outcomes, but then when we go off outcomes first versus job duties first, you almost get team members can start to say, well, hey, maybe this one thing isn't actually producing as much value to my, to my value that I need for this role.

We actually need to add these two tasks or we're skipping a step here that, that isn't maximizing it. Like it almost gives them the freedom to find new solutions when it's value first activity second versus I think what normally you see is just a list of activities I need you to do and then degrees you need to have and then maybe the outcomes that you're trying to see. 100%. And you know you're doing it right when people, you've created this environment where people are starting to act like the CEO of their own role, which is what you're describing. And I love doing this. And they're constantly creating more and more value.

So we want to create this environment from which all the team members continually create more value over time, responsibly, you know, working together. And I've had in the past, I go one example, a gentleman came in as a salesperson. This is probably when I was employee. I maybe had 60, 70 employees in this company that grew up over 500. And he sold a million dollars this first year in aviation aftermarket business. Great. We repaired and overhauled aircraft parts.

And he'd never done that before in his previous jobs. And he's like, this is incredible. It doesn't get better than this. I just wait for it. So fast forward another 16 years or so when I sold the business in 20, 2016, he was responsible for about $40 million a year in sales. So that's 40x, what he was, you know, 15, 16 years earlier. And it was just constantly developing.

How do you think about sales? Are we going after individual parts or groups of parts? Are we going after assemblies? Are we taking over maintenance shops for airlines? And then we become an extension and all of that work off the aircraft come to us. and it was just this evolutionary thing. So there's nothing that prevents every single role from growing the value it creates over time.

And if they reach sort of a limit in this one area of the business, they've created so much value, then they go to the next area and create more and more. So if an employee ever said, I want to make a million dollars a year, we shouldn't laugh. We should ask the question, what do you think it would take for you to do that?

Because most employees, they don't think if I'm paid 60,000 a year, 100,000 a year, $180,000 a year, I need to generate at least 20%, maybe 30 or 50% more value than that to justify this position. They don't connect those dots. They just don't. So somebody says, I want to make this. Well, let's do the math.

What would it take for you to do that? And I'm all for you doing it, but we need to come up in something that's win-win across the board for the company and you. And it's equitable for all team members in the organization. Yeah. No, it makes complete sense. Actually, I had a similar experience in my company. I founded a commercial insurance agency, national commercial insurance agency. And about two years in, after about two years, you find producers, which is what they call insurance salesmen or insurance people, is you start to get pushback from the high performers. They start to want to negotiate their commission splits, and I get it. They're ambitious, and you want them that way, and that can be part of the game. And I was not offended by their want and all that kind of stuff.

That's what you want out of it. You want someone who's pushing and wants to make more money. Great. We implemented a monthly profit statement. So we would take what they had sold, what their renewal commission that had come in that month was. So the total revenue generated by that individual. salesperson and then we would extract out any of their salary that they got, which they got a small stipend salary. It was mostly commission based work. Any benefits, any 401k match, et cetera.

And then their commission split. And what we would get at the bottom is like, here's what you extracted out of the business this month versus the revenue brought in and the profit that you actually created for the company based on your position. And what I found was I people, I had two, I got two primary reactions. One, some people looked at it and they were like, this is amazing. I've never seen this before. I didn't understand how the economics work. I understand why you're paying me what you're paying me.

Let's find other ways than changing compensation to get there because now I see what's going on in the company. And then at other people, I had one guy who just quit because he looked at it. He couldn't then negotiate against getting higher commissions, et cetera. And he left, which was fine. and other people kind of folded to that. One, like, maybe from a psychology standpoint, I haven't done this at a much bigger scale

than I think my business ever got to for sure. What do you think about that process? Do you think there's any ballbacks? And, like, have you ever seen something like that? It was kind of I just created it out of necessity to a certain extent because I was sick of having these conversations. But I've never really shared that process before, and I'm very interested in your take on it.

There's a lot of versions of it a long time ago. I read a book called The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack, and it's all about open book management. And so what you're talking about is everybody understands the numbers, and ideally they're taking action to continually improve the numbers. So we need to lay all that out. And so, yeah, there's lots of versions of what you did, and it just makes sense. And I developed those things over the years because I got tired of having the conversations,

and when you put those things in place, it makes it easier to scale the business, so you're not revisiting the same, you know, issues and drama that's creating. created from it. And compensation, candidly, is one of the single biggest drainers of productive energy inside a business if it's not perceived as equitable. And so one of the ways I got around it is I went to every single team members. So imagine 540 team members getting a complete set of the financials for a global aerospace business every single month. And if you're a frontline team member, you're

cleaning parts, your entry level, you got a plain English detailed trial balance version of what you spent in your department. And these folks are looking at like, why do we spend that much on tape? That doesn't make sense and we shouldn't have done this. So they're constantly improving the numbers. Now, how did we make it worth or while to do it? We took about, it ended up being when you factor everything in about 22% of the total pre-tax pre-tax net profit every single month. And we paid it back to all the employees proportionate to their income. So payroll for around numbers sake was a million dollars. And there was a hundred,

thousand dollars in bonus because of that 22% profit, then everybody got a 10% bonus that month. And I think the highest month ever for the frontline team members was about 31, almost 32%. And there were multipliers in there for leadership. And the global leader, senior leaders that were driving global business, they got a 2x multiplier. So if a frontline person got 30%, they got 60%. And what I want to do is create an environment where every single team member was, incentivized to help all the other team members wherever it made sense earn another dollar for the business because they benefited from it. And they all understood how it worked. And another piece,

I mean, this all sounds so easy to say and it takes a little work to put this stuff in place, but we had to make sure that, and it's hard to get perfect, but everybody was paid in an equitable way relative to everybody else in the business. Because we're paying a bonus relative to payroll if somebody making $18 an hour, it feels like somebody making $40 an hour, creating less value than them. And if it was true, they'd be right, then it wouldn't work.

So we would scour every year, sometimes every two years, depending what's going on, all the roles and what like companies are paying. We want to pay in the upper 20% of what like companies are paying, but with bonus, we're in the upper 1% if we perform. So we did that work.

And once that was in place, never had those conversations again. Like having different bonus programs, incentive, commission programs that are individual-based, that was ridiculous. I got to where I was spending half my time in the early years dealing with the dysfunction associated with it. Once I put this performance compensation in place based on profitability and you got paid relative to your income, all that noise went away. And I got to focus on other things, which was fantastic. Yeah. Yeah.

The other thing I found is high performers seemingly. love that environment and those people who, you know, not to, you know, like the Jack Welsh idea of fire your bottom 10%, which I, you know, I'm kind of waywashing the overall theory, but like those people kind of self-select out of that system. Like those individuals who may have otherwise been at your door knocking every year and, you know, are constantly trying to, you know, just get over the bar to hit a hurdle or whatever. Like they seem to self-select out. That's that's what I've found throughout my career is that when you go to a more transparent performance or outcome-based system where people understand how they get there, the problem children,

I guess, to a certain extent, kind of just choose to not be part of it because you can't really hide in that type of system. Yeah, and I've had a few of those over the years where they just say, I don't want to participate in any of that. I just want this money and I want this guaranteed raise every single year and I want to be left alone. Well, that's a few of those. not the culture here. So this isn't going to work, but I appreciate you trying and give us a chance. And here's a list of all of our competitors. Can I write you a recommendation letter so you can go work for them? And I think everybody feels best when they're performing and contributing as a team and fulfillment is really, you know, escalates when we're accomplishing, challenging things.

So I think we can create an environment, and I believe I've proved it over the years where even those that are kind of a stick in the mud and don't want to do this stuff, it starts to feel pretty good and they actually get on board. And it's less than five in, gosh, the last three decades, I've had to let go because they didn't want to participate. Because I think you and I, when we build our businesses and any leader out there doing it, we create an environment that causes human nature to move in one direction or the other. And if we have a lot of ambiguity and we're just thinking everybody should know what to do, but we're not being clear about it, however you want to describe it, that's not an environment conducive to winning as a team. But if we're super aligned to our vision where we're going, our strategy, how we're going to get there, and we've got a great common operating methodology throughout the business and how we

intentionally create value, that environment to me brings a lot more people into, you know, I call it productive engagement. So when we talked about engagement earlier, I want productive engagement. I don't want a survey that says they have a best friend at work. I want productive engagement. And when that's elevated, they're just leaning in more,

and you know it's effective when they're creating more and more value. And I want every single leader, every single team bolted together, driving that alignment, driving that accountability, cross-functional collaboration. And we know from the macro sense that we're doing the right work

when the value of the business is continually and responsibly increasing over time. Yeah, I love this productive, adding that on to the engagement part because it's one of the biggest misnomer that I think came out of the early Silicon Valley era where we're playing ping pong with each other and pool and all these surveys came out

to your point around like, well, if you have a great, culture where everyone's friendly and friends with each other. It's like, that's great until the best friend leaves. And now that person's going too because the whole reason they were there wasn't the company, wasn't the work, wasn't the mission, wasn't driving forward. It was the friends they had, they played ping pong with at lunchtime. And like that, that to me was such a misread on why people were engaged with many of these early companies was not the ping pong games and the bean bags and the story times. It was the fact that they felt like they were building, you know, some application

that was going to change the world. And, you know, and that idea of productive engagement, I think, is something that, like, logically, I think immediately hits you and you're like, yeah, yeah, I can buy into that. But I feel like way too often we don't press people on that. And I guess, I want to move off of hiring and people and onto some other topics, but just just wrap up with this. Like, if someone listening to this is going, you know, I'm in that quagmire. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm in that situation Lee was talking about where 50% of his time early in his career was spent negotiating salaries and dealing with all these types of things. What's the first step to get them out of that type of culture and start moving them towards

what you explained, you know, the, the middle and second half of the business where people were aligned, they understood their value, you know, and you get to this point where everyone's starting to push in that direction. Like, what is that first or early couple steps to start to turn that ship? Yeah, that's such a gigantic question. I start with alignment and the senior leadership team, maybe if it's only you and one partner, but alignment around vision, where are we going? Are we really clear on that? Alignment around strategy, your plan to actually get there. And strategy to me, as I mentioned earlier, knowing what to do is pretty straightforward, for the most part. That's only 3% of the equation.

97% is actually executing on it. So you've got vision, you have your strategy. Now we need to get the team right. And collectively, that leadership team is there. So the number one job of the CEO to me is to continually responsibly increase the value of their business. So by proxy, the senior leadership team and really all the leaders in the organization, collectively is to work together as effective as they can to increase the value of the business. Start there.

Like philosophically, that's what I believe. And I've walked into so many rooms, senior leadership teams, why are you here? Like each one of you, why are you having this senior leadership meeting every week? And I never once have gotten the answer to work together to collectively increase the value of the business. So I just want to see what's going on. I'm going to report out the financials. I'm going to do this. They're missing the foundational premise and why they're there.

So once we get that, you can go down another layer, and I call it the management operating system layer. How do we know that everybody's creating the value they were designed to create? How do we know that every team is actually doing it? How do we know we're driving accountability? What about collaboration, communication, all of it? And one of the ways I think about the, see that this management operating system layer, it's holding everything together, just like your computer's operating system holds all the applications together. You don't want the computer to crash.

You don't want your company to crash. And rather than a traditional structure of a business, I think about a business in terms of value creation flows. So traditional structure, CEO, direct reports, you know, going all the way down. That's important. We need that. But it's really valuable to understand the value creation flow of the business to know where to really focus at every single point in time.

And the value creation flow to me is you have marketing, general awareness. How do they even know about us? How do we, then we got to generate marketing qualified leads and then sales qualified leads and close sales and we have to make the product or design the service. We have to deliver it. There's ongoing experience. So whatever that looks like for your business, for every one of those stages in your value creation flow, are they red, green, or yellow?

And it just tells me exactly where we need to focus here. And more often than not, it could just be marketing qualified leads. We're not getting enough. they don't know what to do, so they push harder on all the other things, and yet the most important thing to work on, they're not putting the intention into it that they really should. So you asked a really big question. Start again with vision and strategy,

get your leadership team right, and agree on why you're there, and then start doing the work to actually make it happen. I guess my one fob question to that, because this is where I've seen. So my home industry is the property casual, insurance industry. I've said I had a business there and I've been working in that industry for more than 20 years. And I've been part of countless strategy meetings, leadership meetings,

and everybody by the end, regardless if they're hosted by a consultant or internally organized, you know, we're pounding the table and excited to go grab beers and talk about the day and all that we're going to conquer the world. And then tomorrow shows up and we get right back to doing all the same stuff. If you are the top of the pyramid, you're the, you're the, the CEO or, you know, wherever, wherever you sit on that chain in terms of what chairman of the board, whatever, I've found so many well-intentioned leaders have these meetings, right? And they're able to get to wherever, maybe that, that first phase of why these five, you know, SVPs or, you know, other C-suite members, like, what is the value you create? Why are we here? And we're all,

we're all kind of in agreement. And then, man, they're, struggle to hold people accountable to those things or to to to actually execute on the plan that they all agree on in the first place so how if you're that leader who's sitting here and you're going lee you're listening to this going man i believe you i agree with you but i've done like ten of these over the last decade and they never seem to change anything like what do you find most often that person that leader is missing and why they can't actually take it from the strategy meeting or strategy retreat to actually executing that plan, you know, inside the business on a daily basis and ongoing.

Yeah. One of the, I think, biggest mistakes that are made is, hey, we're just going to do an offsite. We need to get together and hang out and the magic will happen. And out of that will come all of this execution and amazing success for the business. That's just not true. It just isn't. And I like team building is fun. let's go out on a long hike and do stuff and laugh and talk about books. I mean, I think that's

amazing. I love relationships. Some of the best lifelong relationships I have right now are with people that I've built incredible businesses with. But when it comes to strategy, like, what is the purpose of having a strategy session? Well, strategy to me, its approaches to increasing the value of business. And whether I work with a startup or a $100 billion market cap company, I'll get these strategy decks before I go in to help them organize it because they're struggling with exactly what you're talking about. I look at it and for the bigger ones, it's not uncommon to have over a hundred strategic initiatives. So I go through all of it and I come back and so great, I've distilled this out for you before we get started here. Out of the 100 strategic initiatives

in a really large business, only 22 are actually strategic initiatives and that when you accomplish it, it'll cause a step change in the value of your business. The rest of them, I put them in this category called Please Do Your Job. And so now let's take these 22 strategic initiatives and divide it by function within the organization. And then we actually assess each one of them. What's the risk to the value of the business or the most important number if we don't do it? What's the positive impact if we do do do it? And how difficult is it to do?

And what's it going to cost to do? And when do we think we can get it done? And what are the major milestones along the way? and every single week we're tracking to that and who's the one accountable leader to be navigating this thing happening or getting it across the finish line. And now it becomes a lot simpler.

So if you have a strategic planning session and we want to come up with things that will materially move the needle, not continuous improvement, I think that should be part of all of our cultures. Everybody's continually improving and developing, but what's something we can do that's completely different

or different enough from what we have been doing that will cause a step change, change in our results. And let's follow those. And generally for companies, you know, let's say in the middle market and below, having three or four is kind of the max, if they're really meaty.

And we want to make sure, I believe, that we've got an operating methodology in place that causes everyone to continually improve and develop this environment that we've created here. But if we just focus on those few things, it makes it easier to be super impactful. But if we let our leaders come in with a bunch of PowerPoint decks or whatever version of, you know, Canada,

whatever they're using today, oh, that all sounds really good. And we just had a rah-rah session. What a complete waste of time. And then if you want to track it, you're going back to all the decks, how's it going? You're not getting good information. That's a complete mess.

What are the two or three things that are really going to move the needle? And let's follow up on those. How does that land, Ryan? That's so different than how most do it. Yeah, I completely agree. I think, you know, it's, it's sad to me how many fantastic strategy sessions will say at a high level just end up never producing. And they get everyone gets together and they have the same exact conversation the next year, right? Just different location, different activity. You know, this year, you know, we're going to go to Nashville together. and that's what's going to break the strategy, you know, a dam that we have.

When you hear that, what is the wildly successful strategy says? Because when I hear that, it's like, oh, we had a great rah-rah session. Yes, no, I agree. And I love that you said that. That's what it is. It's like meeting, the meeting makes us feel good. And somehow things are going to magically change. The other thing that I see sometimes and I'm interested is, again,

maybe the CEO is unwilling to give pure ownership to either the department lead or that particular value creation bucket, they are unwilling to extract themselves from it in a way that allows that person to own it and run it and manage it on their own, right? It's like they end up that the CEO ends up being the bottom net because they want to be involved in say all four major initiatives. And now the person who, you know, technically walks away with the ownership title of that value bucket, they're instead of being able to make it their own of being able to dig in and figure out their unique or specific ways of solving that value problem and driving real value

as per the strategy meeting, the CEO ends up continuing to be a bottleneck because they can't, maybe their ego or fear or just they've never been taught. the right leadership strategies or philosophies feels that they need to be so engaged that they can't get out of the way and they end up being the problem. And it's the same thing over and over. There's nothing more important to me than getting the team right. And when you've been exposed to amazing talent where you haven't been before, it's crazy what you can actually get done. And it's so dangerous for the CEOs that keep their toe in the water or in the middle of all the different projects. Because now when it doesn't work, well, listen, you did what you told me to do. It just didn't work. It was your idea. So we want people capable of taking across the finish line. And the other thing I don't like is when people say, oh, just delegate. You're just not delegating. You need to stop it.

It's like we have this team. They need to prove that we can delegate to them. So I'm a big fan of earned decision rights and earned autonomy over time. You know, even I had an example of a gentleman walked in and wanted to buy a machine for the machine shop, one of my previous businesses. And it was a million bucks. And he walked in, I want to do this. and I said, why are you in my office?

You have earned the decision-making rights up to just over a million bucks. You don't need to be here. You just wasted walking all the way down here in the building to talk to me. So there are others that you need to get approval on a dollar. You can't spend anything until we know that you can be really smart with our money and you have an ROI mindset and how you're using it. But we develop everybody that way. But once you've developed them, let them run with it.

And when it doesn't work, why didn't it work? What did you learn? And if we've been developing them correctly, they're not going to be ridiculously defensive, and I can't believe you're questioning it. They're going to be reflective and say, you know, really miss this one big piece when we started the project, never doing that again.

This is what I learned. This is how we're going to get back on track. I think that's the right environment, not the CEO in the middle of everything. And I know a couple of CEOs right now that I'm actually working with. they believe when somebody isn't getting great results, it's something the CEO didn't do. It's like, well, how long has this person been there?

Oh, like nine years. Like, okay, we need to start thinking about building a stronger team or being more intentional around, you know, developing the people that we have. Yeah, I had one of the most proud and, I guess, leadership moments of my career. I was about three and a half years into my agency. and, you know, I did my little morning routine or whatever,

and I finally pop open my calendar, and I knew I had a couple meetings on the day, and I look in both, there's no meetings. My day from 8 a.m. to 5, there's nothing on my calendar. Like, that's odd. So I called my assistant, and her name's Clarissa. She's great, and I just said, Clarissa, like, I could have swore yesterday,

like when I logged off for the day that I had a couple meetings, like, what's going on? And she's like, oh, yeah, we removed you. And I said, what do you mean? She goes, well, you know, we know what we need to do here. You don't need to be there. And this meeting in the afternoon, we dropped from an hour to a half hour because we really don't need that much time.

And frankly, we just have a couple things we have to discuss. And you don't need to be there for that one either. She goes, why don't you go golfing or something? And I, like, I literally had this, like, physical reaction where I was like, what? I was like, what do you mean? You don't need me. She's like, yeah, no, we know what you want. We got it on this one.

And you don't need to be at this one here. Like, she goes, go golf. I went and hit balls. I did go do that. I did not play golf because I just couldn't remove myself for that long. But I was like, this whole empowering your employees. And like you said, I love this term. I hadn't framed it this way.

This like earned autonomy over time. Like they had gotten to that point. Like I wouldn't have articulated it that way. But it's essentially what you just said. And when what it allowed me to then do and it was that day. And this is the part of the story I've actually never told on this. those those that day of not having the meetings and in the space I actually was able to create a whole new marketing channel or in this case it was a referral channel for us that just because

I had time to sit down and go okay we're we're getting qualified leads where what are some lookalike type lead sources that we could find that could be new avenues that I could bring to the marketing team that could potentially be there and it gave me all this brainstorming time And like as a leader, I feel like if we have to have our hands in everything, we lose that visionary capability that is really one of the primary functions of the role. Does that make sense? Yeah, I agree. I mean, we, again, we should have leaders that can hold up their part of the business. And when they do that, you and I can more effectively, another term, like all these business virtue signaling terms out there work on the business, not in the business.

What does that really mean? But we want leaders that are holding up their part of the business, and then we can step back, and we're sort of navigating all of that and making sure they're all in balance. We get a view that they don't get. And we become, I call it a super coach, because rather than walking in and kicking them

to get them going in the morning and always following up on things that aren't done, we know we're doing it right with the right environment, developing people, the right team, when they're one or two steps ahead of where you thought they would be, and then you get to add, And again, I call it a super coach way to drive it even faster. Then we can think about, okay, now that my team is really good at executing at this level

and continually increasing and improving, what can we do to change it up a little bit to where it could be a development program, it could be another product or service, could be a partnership. We start to think that way rather than being worried about, is this leg going to fall off the business over here? So it's this ongoing journey. You know, one thing I would say is, if you don't love what I just said, like, all of the things going great, things not going great, the leg ready to fall off, like, this is the job. And I think you should love that because it's never going to, it's never a pretty, and how many leaders out there when things don't roll out perfectly, they get upset, they act like a victim. I can't believe this is happening. Well, if it was perfect every single day, why would I need a leader?

I've never had a perfect day. So love the journey, love the struggle. There's something I referred to. I call it the value creation cycle. And people ask me, hey, where did you get your start? I said, well, it was six years old pulling weeds for 25 cents an hour in the mid-60s. And it was a neighbor that flagged me down on my bike and didn't know her. And it felt so good.

I earned my own money. And so then I struggled to get other capabilities. I'm shoveling snow, mowing lawn. one paperout, four paperouts, dishwasher, busboy cook. By the time I'm kicked out of the house at the beginning of my senior year in high school, I could already afford my own apartment. I only had to spend one night in my truck and I was good.

I'd put myself through my senior year in high school. And then I first half the 80s played over a thousand shows in a rock and roll band playing guitar and singing. I started my first, I didn't count that as a business, but it really was. I started my first real business in 93. and I kept struggling to get a capability. It would build internal fulfillment, self-esteem.

I'd use it to create value. And I just kept choosing, and I still choose today, to take bigger and bigger steps. And so I'm sort of building on this. That's the journey. That's the fun. And I've heard you talk about it in some of your other conversations in your podcast.

If you're always waiting for this thing, you'll never get out of that mode. And so I just, I love this. and my hack for me personally making it work. And my most important internal number is fulfillment. Every year that's increasing because of the work that I'm doing. It's impossible to me to be happy all the time because there's a lot of struggle when you're developing.

But internal fulfillment is continually going up. And if I'm intentionally creating objectively measurable value, materially, emotionally, and spiritually and the right balance for me, this is a pretty cool journey to be on. It's, it's, it's, uh, and it, gosh, it's only, I'm on my, since I became an adult, this is my 46 year overnight success story. It's only taken a few decades to get here.

But how does that land on you as I kind of describe that? So I love it. I completely agree with it. And it's, I'll say personally, um, in some regards, I wasn't a musician, um, but in some regards, my journey has a lot of similarities. I started working at 10. I got up at 5.30 every morning and trolled the streets of my small, little rural town and picked 5 cent recyclable bottles out of little blue bins that everybody put out on Thursday mornings.

And I can make about $40 before school by myself. And then eventually I recruited, then I bought a wagon, one of those old red radio flyer wagons. I bought it like a garage sale for like two bucks. And then I could get 60 bucks by myself because now I didn't have to go back to the house. I could just keep pulling it with me. And eventually I recruited two friends. And just by getting them into the business,

I took a small portion of what they did and they trolled other parts of our small town. And then eventually an adult figured out what we were doing and used his car and put us out of business, which was another good life lesson. Also completely ridiculous that an adult did that. but hey, God bless them. It's capitalist environment,

and I like to play in that space. But my point is, I think, I love how you embrace, and I just, I respect it. Love isn't the right word. I have a tremendous respect for how you embrace this idea of just perpetual improvement through time. I guess, have you ever struggled with,

and I think some people, you know, this is where some people get caught or they give up too early, when you see the next skill that you want to take or the next leap that you want to take and you're used to having success here, right? And now you want to make that jump. You want to level up.

You want to go take on that bigger challenge. And now all of a sudden it feels like you're back at square one again or the success that you had just experienced in the previous iteration or previous season of your life isn't there immediately. How do you, to your part of emotional fulfillment,

how do you work through that and stay emotionally positive and leaning forward during that time of more friction than you may be used to, if that makes sense? Yeah, the thing I like about what I described is the value creation cycle is that when you go through it enough times, every time you come up to something hard could be starting a new business or really anything, learning a new language. You've done it enough that you know you'll get through it and it'll be amazing when you get out the other side. And so in your example of starting a new business, and every new business, even though you've been wildly successful before, it's still going to be hard. You're starting from scratch.

There's so many factors in there that people don't really think about, all the sort of inner connectedness around all of it when it drives the successful business. But the harder it gets, I start to get this feeling. It's like, oh, this is going to be incredible because I've done it enough times. It's going to be incredible when we come out the other side of this. And all the opportunity in the world is in the story. struggle. So if somebody's like, I can't believe it, I was successful and now I'm doing this,

are they really engaged with their journey, or do they just want to be seen a certain way, or they feel entitled to it? It's like we develop when we're struggling effort, like more effort going in. And so it's kind of a break. And then, so if you embrace that, you understand the value of it. You've done it enough times. Manage expectations. You know you're going to go through this. Just because you, you know, I could take my aerospace company 23 years from zero to well into a nine figure exit. If I started another one, what would be the reasonable expectations? I'm going to get there in two years? No, it's going to take a while to build. You've got the team, you've got customers, you get all the, yeah, I've got more resources. I can get a better launch,

but it's still going to be hard and it's going to take a while. There's going to be things that you go through. So it's really managing expectations, understanding that you're going to have to go through it. And also that, you know, what you intellectually understand about the process, how much time it's going to take and how challenging it's going to be. It's going to feel way worse than that at times. Understand that too. But if you don't value struggle, I think that's going to be a challenge for anyone. I, what's the right balance of struggle for you? Anybody listening? You know, for me, I have a mix of I'm comfortable doing this where you talk about the easy mode.

But I've got kind of a mix of where I'm in flow because I'm really good at this, but I'm still improving, and then brand new stuff that's really hard that I'm going through. And I've got a couple of projects right now, company-type projects that I'm involved with, complete ridiculous hot messes.

Yay, I've got a skill here. But if I tried to do it even 10 years ago what I'm doing today, probably would have melted me down emotionally. And, you know, in fact, I've heard you touch on this too. Your conversations are so good in your podcast. When something's super stressful and it's really getting to us, it's our emotional reaction to something

that if we were looking at somebody else going through, we say, oh, just do this or do that. And it's training ourselves to over time feel that way. Is that resonate? Yeah, you know, you mentioned like all the entrepreneur porn cliches and stuff that people get thrown around. And I wrote this blog post a few years ago and most of the stuff that I write is maybe more therapy than anything else. But I was like maybe the journey really is the destination, like this cliche that I hated for so long. Because I grew up very poor.

And at that early in my life, you know, some of these things that you hear, you're like, oh, you know, I'm like, it's the destination. Like, I'm poor as shit. Like, I need money. You know what I mean? Like, I hear what you're saying and I'm supposed to love this, but I'm wearing holy sweatpants to high school because we can't afford to buy jeans. Like, you know what I mean? Like, when does the destination happen where, like, I can actually afford a car and, you know what I mean, all the things that I need to do to live? And as much as, you know, at the time, you know, now I can look back on that mentality and go, okay, well, I understand that's a very reactive emotional response and it's

fear driven and all this kind of stuff. You know, I came back to it. You really do to your point, if you're not, if you're going to take on something big and worthwhile that's going to create fulfillment and satisfaction and not be willing to embrace the friction that the journey creates and all the growth that happens in there, right? Like there's things that you can do, that I can do, that everyone listening here can do, that they couldn't do before for the the sole reason is they went through something really freaking hard. And it was the other side of that hard that gave them that skill, that knowledge, that ability.

And I think we forget it. Like we learn it and then we forget how hard it was or our ego takes over. Right. Like, Lee, you had a nine figure exit. God forbid you start a company that doesn't go right back to nine figures again because, oh, what did he lose it? Oh, he lost all his skin. No, no, it's every time it's hard.

Like if you want to do something else amazing, especially something different, there's a new set of skills. Yes, you have skills you can apply, but like I think we just, there's a lack of living in reality, I guess. Like one of the biggest unlocks for me in the second, you know, I'm 45, so the second half of my 45 year old life here has been this idea of just living as close to reality as I possibly can. Not what I hope happens, not what I wish happens, not the way I want the world to work, but like what is the game as it's, how is the game playing out in the field right now? That's what I have to play.

And that comes with pain. So, so, you know, not necessarily physical pain, but it comes with frustration, friction. You thought you hired a grade higher. That person ends up not being who you thought they were. And now you need, you know what I mean? There's all these things. And if you, you know, if you embrace the,

growth that's going to come from those things. Not that you look forward to them because no one wants that stuff, but you don't look at them as, oh my God, my world is ending or there's something wrong with me or I'm not good anymore. You just look it as a new opportunity to become even more than you were before. You know, I view all of those as healthy struggles. And if you want to get super fit, which you are, and I think you used to play baseball, right, but you're, you know what that means to get there? You have to work to get it. This is the same thing. You're going to the best.

business gym. These aren't unhealthy struggles. We're not victims. We actually get to do this. And that's a mindset. And our internal dialogue is so important. As I think most people know, most people don't work on it the way they should, but it's so important. So yeah, value the struggle. That's where we grow. And I think our job as leaders inside businesses and as leaders in our families is to create an environment that allows for those healthy struggles at the edge of what's appropriate for each kid, family member, employee that we have.

I came from a very low-income family as well. I had, after being kicked out of the house, they began into my senior year, my mom called me, and her first words were filed for bankruptcy, you'll be fine, so what did you do? And they charged it up four credit cards in my name, $2,000 plus each, 23 to $20. because he had my social security number. And I work with a bunch of low-income families

in my dinner table communities. And it's a very common thing that parents do because it's just they're scared to death. It's a way to get money. Everybody's, you know, fight or flight. They're doing one or both and sometimes at the same time. It's just crazy. And even had parents that told me when I imagine being a five, six-year-old kid with a mom telling you, she's embarrassed to be seen with you in public so I would go out into the world and when people looked at me I thought they were seeing what my mom told me I was and it was just like oh my gosh this is so bad but by the time I was kicked out of the house I realized my gosh they they can't raise themselves let alone five kids this is not about me at all and I felt horrible that they were in that emotional state never knew my natural father

stepfather but I'm going through all of it I think about those struggles and most people react So I can't believe it. And I looked at all the other kids in the high school. It's like, oh my gosh, I had an advantage over every one of those other 3,400 students in my high school. And I think families, and this is a big part of what I do. I'm actually a CEO of two companies, ones execute to win for organizations, business, the other ones for family. But CEO of Dinner Table, and we have 40,000 plus parents in our community. And it's a really common thing with the best of intentions to take as much health.

struggle away from the kids as possible and they're not even close to being ready to be an adult by 18. And so we're creating environments where we're setting up these healthy struggles. How do you want to show up as an adult someday, character traits, capabilities, beliefs? What are healthy struggles we can design today and for sure not take away from you to get you ready to do that? And when they're struggling emotionally, physically, whatever it is, okay, well, let's leverage that to learn and grow to make you this amazing self-reliant adult, which all kids want to be. And I work with so many high school kids around this stuff. So this is really fascinating to me, how hard is somehow bad if you're struggling, you're not happy 100% of the time, something must be wrong. Give some guru a bunch of your money and he'll make you happy all the time.

It's like, nope, we're completely missing it. How do you want to create value in the world? Kids, adults, all of it. What are you doing to move in that direction? How are you growing? Yeah, there's this clip, and I'm going to butcher it, guys, so please just bear with me. But there's this clip, and it's from a movie. I'm going to forget the actor's name, but he's in Top Gun. He's in a couple other movies. But he's a boxer in this movie. And he's being interviewed, and the reporter asks him, what's the biggest lie you were? were ever told. And he said, it's not that simple. And she goes, what's not that simple? And he goes, no, no, no. That's the biggest lie you were ever told. He said, the biggest lie you were ever told is that it's not that simple. He goes, he goes, you just have to go do the thing that you want to do.

He goes, it is just go do it. Like, there's going to be hard, it's going to be a struggle, but it is there for you and it is literally as simple as pointing in the direction that you want to go. I'm paraphrasing a little bit here. But I always love that and I come back to it in this particular moment because I think we've been told that like everything is complex and there's these people who are constantly looking to push you down and it's all about oppression and this and you know you're a victim and you're entitled to certain things and if you don't get them immediately then somehow someone is keeping you from them and it's like no. No, frankly, if you're born in this country, regardless of where you start, and I start about as low as you can in a rural environment, like, it's all there for you. It's just as simple as pointing in a direction and moving forward regardless of what smacks you in the face, right? I mean, there's tons of stuff in there. I mean, I'm, you know, but at the end of the day, it's like just keep putting your feet in front of your child and, you know, one foot in front of the other and understanding that there are.

are going to be days where the sun is shining and there's rainbows and money is falling from the sky and there are going to be days where it all just gets washed away in a flood and you're starting from zero again and both of those are the path to exactly where you want to be. And it's just that simple, as hard as it is. Well, if I can add to the framing, it is that simple, but simple in this context is really, really hard. You have to link into it. And as you want to take bigger steps, it's going to continually be hard, but it's super rewarding, wildly fulfilling. And then if you take that it's not that simple and you add the complexity

and all those other things, it gives you an excuse, a reason to be lazy, not lean in, not do it, take struggle away, take, take healthy development away. But yeah, simple. I think it's, it is very straightforward. It can just, it's hard often and learn to that. Yeah. Again, we've been talking for over an hour already, man. This is. Yeah, well, I want to, I want to wrap. I want to be respectful of your time, but I do, and this may be, take this question wherever you want, but I just would like to put this in front of you and have you address it as you can. Obviously, you know, AI is a big part of our world now. And we don't have to, I don't want to necessarily dig down into AI specifically. But I guess from your perspective, from the people you're meeting,

the leaders, or you can even go to the CEO of the family side, right? Which, where I take this wherever you want. What do you think? what are the questions or the conversations that we're not having right now with AI? Because it's everywhere, right? So there's every, you know, seemingly there's a ton of conversations happening. There's optimists. There's dupers. I'm an enormous AI optimist.

I don't, again, living in reality, I don't think there's a positive case for being a dumer, even if the machines do take over and turn us into slaves or whatever, you know, like the matrix. Like, even if that happens, you're not stopping that. So, like, I don't see another option. There'd be an optimism. That's me. But, like, what do you think we're not talking about?

Is there a blind spot? Is there something we're missing? Or is there a part of the conversation that you're seeing people aren't asking that when you meet with them, you're bringing up and trying to work them through? Yeah, perspective seems to be the wild card right now because people are all over the place. There's a lot of fear. There's a lot of optimism. And I do agree, you know, AI probably isn't going to take a job as somebody with

AI skills, likely. will going through. And whether you know it or not, you know, 98 plus percent of Americans are using AI in some way. Their apps are using it and it's helping them, you know, make their lives a little better. But I look at it foundationally and say, I don't, this is my belief. I don't think the United States, this probably holds true for a lot of countries around the world, we're even creating 10% of the value that we could. And we're focused on the wrong stuff. And what I love about AI is it supercharges everybody's ability to create value. So we can be a lot more about the value you want to create in the world.

And as we're creating that value, if AI or any other tool can help you go faster in that direction, then you use it. So imagine DreamState were, you know, 40%, 50%, 80% of the value of being created as a country. AI can supercharge all of this. And there's endless things that can be done. We wouldn't even know what we're going to discover.

So I'm wildly optimistic. One other piece, and I get into this conversation a lot, leaders think, oh, I don't need a coach anymore. I don't need to be part of CEO groups. I don't need to be part of any of it because now I have my AI coach. Well, most leaders think if you're leading a business, I know what to do. This is great. Now you start talking and interacting with something that's in a lot of ways designed to agree with you. And then you get amazing answers to the wrong question.

So I still think there is a ton of value in experiential wisdom. So you've got all these dots and connecting it in a way that you might miss with AI because you think you know and there's so much all of us don't know. So I would just say be around experiential wisdom. So we're applying these tools in a way that's helping you create value. It's not look at this cool thing I can do with it. No, how do you want to create value in the world? Be super intentional about it. and can these tools help you create even more of it and go faster?

So I just kind of said a lot here, but this is thinking about it, yeah. Yeah, and I agree with you. I did a short solo episode for the show a couple weeks ago on iHeart just came out with, I guess a tag or a filter, human guaranteed, right? And I think,

and they're essentially placing a premium on their content and their content creators who are, you know, and again, I think maybe this sounds odd to those of you who haven't gone too deep into the AI world, but more and more, even creators are replacing some of themselves. And I know there are, well, I'm going to do gurus out there that are telling people who are trying to create content, trying to help, you know, create this AI avatar that, you know, all you need to do is spin up an AI script and feed it to the, hey, Jen, or the whatever. And now there's this, you know, I'm with you, man. I think that more than ever, there is going to be an enormous premium put on human connection

and human authenticity, a word that unfortunately has been bastardized, but is incredibly important regardless. Like these things, there's absolutely going to be a paramount, sorry, a premium placed on the human connection side, in-person events, masterminds, going for walks with a friend or a colleague or a mentee or mentor and those moments. And I believe, and I don't, we don't need to go down this path, but I'm also a very spiritual guy,

the serendipity of connection and of consciousness that when you share air with someone and you share space with someone that a computer just will never be able to give you. So I agree with you. Lee, dude, I could talk to you for hours, man. This is so good. We had a couple of thoughts on them.

Yeah, please, please. I've been saying for a while now, where we're going and what's going to be the highest value is our trusted relationship network. Because when I look at, you know, advertising coming in, emails, any communication coming in trying to do business with me, I don't know what's real anymore. You know, AI can make everybody look like the best company in the planet, but you're still going to have the same mix of really good, really bad and mediocre in there. And I don't even know, but I do trust my trusted relationship network that I have. So to me, that's everything.

And it's so easy right now. Just imagine if there was somebody nefarious on the planet or a group of folks and they wanted to control all social media and they could turn up or down messaging one way or the other any way that they wanted to. The only way I think we can combat that is to develop our own legitimate trusted relationship network and our own set of filters for how we process things through. And based on those filters, like for right now, I literally believe almost nothing I read, see, or hear anymore unless it's through a trusted source. And if I don't have a trusted source, I run through my filters. And that helps me make better decisions. So I think this is going to be really important for people to develop. I even had a couple of T-shirts made up that should be delivered next week.

And it just says there's nothing wrong with thinking because I think a lot of people aren't thinking for themselves and letting, you know, It could be a podcast host, could be anything on social media. You know, jerk them all over the place emotionally with their thoughts. And don't do that. Develop a trusted network and have filters for processing and you'll be way better off, I think. I know my audience is going to want to go deeper in your world, man. How do they do that? I do have a podcast.

It's titled, Show Your Value, the Art of Value Creation. If you want to learn about all the work I'm doing on the business side, please go to etw.com. And if you want to learn about the work I'm doing to help families intentionally create value and my goal over the next five years is to reach millions of families doing this, it's going to be so good for all of us, is dinner table.com.

Go there and learn about what we're doing there. I love it. I love it. Guys, I'll have, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening wherever you do, just scroll down in the description. I'll have all the notes as well as the show notes on the website.

As always, Lee, I appreciate you. This has been a tremendous conversation, and I hope we can do it again sometime. I would love to. Thanks, Ryan. Thank you.