Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Creating Value with Lee Benson

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to The Radcast, a top 25 worldwide business podcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast. I'm Ryan Alford, your host of your number one marketing and business show on Apple Podcasts. We appreciate you wherever, however, wherever, and whenever you're listening to this show. We say if it's radical, we're covering it.

Starting point is 00:00:40 And today, we're talking about radical scaling. We're talking about effectiveness. We're talking about value creation. We're talking to bestselling author, Lee Benson. What's up, Lee? Hey, Ryan. Good to be here, man. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:00:54 Yeah. Hey, I mean, scale or bail, baby. I like to scale. I've been scaling business forever. I was like, Cameron said, hey, this guy sounds really interesting. I think he'd be at a lot of value. And ironically, I think that's what we're going to talk a little bit about. How do you get to be known as the business scaling master? For me, it's all about value creation. I've heard CEOs ask the question, what is my primary job? And I said, your job is to

Starting point is 00:01:21 continually increase the value of your organization and And over time, accelerate the growth in that. And everything's healthier when you do it. Oh, yeah. You keep everybody happy, depending on your business. The companies I've worked for, I'm an entrepreneur, I think by heart, but I've worked for other people for 17 years. And when things were growing and efficient and value was adding up, life seemed to be better. That's all I know. Yeah. Yeah. A lot better. And it's interesting. Okay. Ask the question, what's the job of a CEO or founder or startup leader, whatever that is. That's great. Now, if you ask everybody else in the organization, hey, how do you create value for this organization? What would they say? And most of the time you get a job description answer they don't even really

Starting point is 00:02:05 know. So imagine creating an environment where the most important number that talks about value of an organization is profit or cash flow, some version of that. And every other leader with their team had a number that clearly described the value they create or another way of saying it. What's one number that says above all others, you and your team are winning or losing the game and it drives the majority of the right behaviors. It's no wonder that every organization that adopts this way of running at it, I call it the MIND methodology, which stands for most important number in drivers, the results start accelerating within three months. It's wildly simple. And I think that's the whole point. You and I were talking before this about complexity and how that can be a value creation killer.

Starting point is 00:03:28 I think we as leaders and each never, and it's maybe more as people, hopefully not as leaders, do a good enough job of being clear on what success. And I think they know, like in our business, new business is good. Okay, we understand that. But beyond that, there's a lot of other smaller numbers and there's things that add up to the success. And I don't know that, I think about the companies I've worked for. I'm like, they just didn't communicate that. I think you're right. They make the assumption or we do that everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing and they should be creating value. We're investing all this money in payroll and we want to return on it. We never connect the dots for them,

Starting point is 00:04:02 at least not very effectively. And to your comment about, hey, new business is good. Not all new business is necessarily good when it comes in. But I think you're hitting totally right on the point here. We assume they're connecting the dots and they're not. And because they're not, I would argue that 90 percent of employees throughout organizations of any size don't even know how to set an effective goal. Yeah, that's, I want to get down that path. Lee, let's, I always like to set the table. What made you the skill expert and so damn smart about all this stuff? Let's give everybody a little bit of your history and background. Yeah, this is a good 40-year overnight success story. It just happens so quick, right? You know where it goes. The way I've started talking about this

Starting point is 00:04:51 is I went from six years old being asked unsolicited by a neighbor, hey, would you pull weeds in my garden for 25 cents an hour? And back then you could buy two candy bars and have change. It was a good deal for a little kid. And then I started shoveling snow. 50 cents is 30 minutes of work for a driveway and a sidewalk, and then a paper route, then four paper routes, and then a dishwasher, busboy, cook. And then in the 1980s, I played in a band over a thousand nights. That's how I made most of my money back then. And then I started setting up businesses in the early 90s. I'm on my seventh business. I've started from scratch. And I got on what I'd like to call this value creation struggle cycle.

Starting point is 00:05:31 And I think struggle is good. And we should learn to trust and value struggle because we identify a capability we want. We struggle to get that capability. It builds our confidence. We use it to create value. And if we just stay on that path, I never got off. And I'm just passionate about how do we get teams to work better together to create more and more value over time? And that's what led to exits from a few million dollars to

Starting point is 00:05:57 nine figures. My best, I would say, material value creation days are yet to come. And it's not even so much about that for me. It's about are yet to come. And it's not even so much about that for me. It's about accomplishing amazing things. And that's just a byproduct of it. But real quick, when I think about value creation, and I wrote another book I released back in April called Value Creation Kid, the healthy struggles your children need to succeed. And in there, I talk about value creation in three buckets, material value creation, emotional energy value creation, and spiritual value creation. And I think the scarcest commodity on the planet is positive emotional energy, because when that's

Starting point is 00:06:35 operating on nine or 10, anything could go wrong and it's no big deal. We'll get through it. It'll be fine. If it's operating on one or two, you get a flat tire and it ruins your week. get through it'll be fine if it's operating on one or two you get a flat tire and it ruins your week so value creation isn't just money it's this whole thing like you and i when we energize our teams it's not that we come in and we think about how do i energize everybody if we're high on our emotional energy and we're passionately talking about what's possible and productive ways to get there, it's pretty infectious. And then next thing you know, leaders in our organizations are starting to do the same thing. And then they're running without us. I like to call it, hey, we're water skiing behind him now instead of kicking to get him out of bed in the morning. I love that analogy. We spent a lot of

Starting point is 00:07:20 time on the lake at the Offord House. I have four sons. And it's really fascinating. Like, my mind's swirling a bit now, Lee, of roads to go down, having children and thinking about that aspect. I'm going to table that for a second, stay with the business, and come back to it because I think it's super important. It starts, look, everything starts, it's like nature and nurture. Like, we wonder why things can be better as well. If we make our kids better, the world gets better. But I digress. We'll go down that road shortly, Lee.

Starting point is 00:07:51 But think about the business thing. I was sitting there listening to you talk and I'm like, okay, when you're helping a company think about like value creation, it's interesting to me of like internal versus external. So like in our business is a service-based company and you think of, okay, what's the internal value they bring versus sometimes the value they bring is externally pleasing clients or getting scopes of work done and things like that. I know that's really getting to the nitty gritty, but it's just where my mind

Starting point is 00:08:22 went when you were talking about it. Yeah. Value creation should be for everybody involved in what you want to touch, where you want to influence the communities you're engaged with, your suppliers, the customers, the team members, the shareholders. It's really everywhere. And it's not just money. It's the whole thing. What does it feel like to be there, but in a meaty way, not in a flowery HR, everybody should just be happy and float on a cloud all day kind of way. We can have cultures where self-esteem is on 10. Everybody's acting like the CEO of their own role, and it just feels so good to win. It just feels amazing. And you'll never peel those people out.

Starting point is 00:09:02 I think about my aerospace business. I had, when it probably 64 liters and i never once had a leader quit on their own i've had to ask a few to leave because they we exceeded their capabilities but we always preserve their dignity we help them find another job but when you create that environment competitors will try to poach people away they can't even for 20 or 30 percent more money they won't take them because they love doing that so much. What is that? It's the positive emotional energy. It's the self-esteem. It's the rules of engagement, the environment that we create as leaders from which everybody creates value. And in my book titled Your Most Important Number that fully describes the mind methodology that I'm touching on here, everything is in there around how to actually create this. And one of the things that I firmly believe with adults as well as children,

Starting point is 00:09:51 motivational nudges don't stand the test of time. They just don't stick. So we have to create an environment where everybody in the organization discovers their value creation superpowers, if you will, and they cultivate those over time. But sending them to a sales class or watch this video or read this book, which is what a lot of folks do to develop their team members, it's just not that effective. This is a lifelong value creation discovering journey that everybody can do more and more. And I remember on the aerospace side, hired a kid, came in first year in sales for us. He had sold for other companies in aerospace, sold a million dollars a little bit

Starting point is 00:10:30 over. And he thought, man, I've never done that before. This is incredible. I said, just wait for it. Let's keep developing this capability. And when I sold the company in 2016, the year prior to selling, he sold just over $40 million. This is one person. And this is super high margin work. And I know he can get to a place where he's selling billion dollar deals, right? So there's no end to this value creation process as long as we create an environment that cultivates that, not a motivational nudge strategy. Does that resonate, Ryan? It does.

Starting point is 00:11:04 It resonates a lot. I'm thinking through again, back to the practical application of it is in finding what adds value. There's always some things are hard to put a number on and then some things are crystal clear. There's the subjective measures of success and then there's the crystal clear ones. And I think at the end of the day, what I'm hearing is once you have clarity around those things, everyone knows what their purpose is. I get, I almost think of Stephen, like purpose-driven life or whatever that is, but it's almost like that in business in a way is if you're clear on what your purpose is, what the values are, you're delivering the value internally, but it's also swelling inside of you, this confidence because you're having success. And if you're having

Starting point is 00:11:57 success, then you're happier and you're more motivated and all these things. So it all seems, it all ties together, right? It all ties together. And when we create these rules of engagement or this environment from which everybody's creating value, when we're really clear about what it means for a leader and their team members to create value and drive the majority of the right behaviors,

Starting point is 00:12:20 they'll perform significantly better. Because like we talked about earlier, if we're not fully connecting the dots we can't expect the majority of the team members to actually do it so they're just doing stuff and they're creating goals that don't matter you know i've heard ceos say hey everybody's hitting all their quarterly goals but the company isn't going anywhere they're not aligned to creating value and i i talked to a we're starting up a new client and we still, I still do a lot of this work every day. I want to be on the front lines. I don't want to be so detached from it that I'm one of those gurus that talks about it and couldn't do the job to save

Starting point is 00:12:54 themselves, which is probably 80% of the folks on the road out there on the speaking circuit. So here we are. And they said, Hey, at first we thought we're going to try the mind methodology in our own, and this is a decent sized company. We're going to DIY it. And I said, okay. And they said, but we know it'll go faster with you helping us. And they said, they really started getting stuck at just senior leaders with their functions, having conversations around what would be a number that says above all others are winning or losing the game and drives the majority of the right behaviors. What would be that most important number? And I said, well, isn't it amazing you're finally having a discussion around how you create value, not only as a company, but as a function to support it? This is fantastic.

Starting point is 00:13:34 It's no wonder that results accelerate within just a couple of months of starting to go down this road. Literally for 100% of organizations, there's a couple over the years, and I've worked with a lot of them, that it didn't work. And the only reason it didn't work is the senior team was looking for a silver bullet and wouldn't own anything, if that makes sense. Yeah, it makes total sense because I was sitting here thinking again, how much of this, once you create the system process and you make these things clear, you still got to execute, baby. You got to like the people have to get it done and you can provide clarity. You can provide like absolute expectations and or clear grading scale for what adds value in helping them. them. But then you still got to have the right people because at some point, no system can help either cancerous toxicity within someone or an organization or those kind of things. I'd be curious how you balance all of that when dealing with it. Yeah. There's a chapter in my book on

Starting point is 00:14:41 strategy and it says, hey, you've completed your strategy. Everybody's excited. Congratulations. You're 3% of the way there. 97% is actually going to be executing on this. And the thing I love about the methodology is that every team, every function will have their most important number. They'll have a set of categories of work that we call drivers that they should be good at leveraging to continually improve their most important number. So when you look at every leader and you can see whether they're on track, at risk, or behind, or hopefully even overdriving their most important number at any point in time, and you can see the best work they're doing to stay on top of that, it exposes everything.

Starting point is 00:15:23 It exposes who's capable of doing it, where assumptions wrong, et cetera. And it does it very quickly. And then the team can make a choice. Some actually self-select out and say, I'm not getting it done. I'm in charge of the marketing function and I'm not generating enough qualified leads coming in. And we have a clear definition of what a qualified lead is. And I'm holding the whole company back. And so we bring somebody in that's capable to do it. And there's other times where the CEO might say, yeah, but Bob or Susie's been with us for a really long time. We can't let him go.

Starting point is 00:15:54 And I said, OK, when you're making a conscious choice to limit the growth and the value of your organization based on what this individual can do instead of everybody's rising constantly. And I think about the aerospace company that I had from day one with three employees, counting myself, I've changed the senior team out five times and they didn't all leave the company. A couple of them did, but for the most part, they went off to do other things where they could really add a lot of value. And I remember when I sold it, I would give small pieces of the company way along the way. And it was nice giving out checks to 13 different individuals from a couple million dollars to

Starting point is 00:16:34 into the $30 million range because they were thinking and acting like owners. And especially when it came to not having an ego, I have to have a seat at the top table and be there. All they cared about was accelerating the value of the entire organization because they knew this is what's going to be best for them. And it was pretty cool. It worked out really well for them. Yeah. You said an important word there. I would imagine with a lot of this and ego drives a lot of, I think, the behaviors at the senior levels. And I don't know, like, it's not accountability as much as it's people like, I've earned this or I expect this or all of those things that some of your biggest challenge may be in implementation. And I'm sure once they've hired you or you're helping an organization

Starting point is 00:17:28 or they're implementing something like this, they've bought in. But as humans, we naturally, and I think some CEOs are this way, they want to do what they think is right by the employees and by the team on an emotional level. And it doesn't always come with the filter of rationality around like what you're saying. And I imagine you run into that sometimes. The process itself will expose everything. And on the very few occasions where a CEO didn't like that, they would blow the whole thing up. And even a year into an engagement where

Starting point is 00:18:07 the profit is fourfolded for the company, they don't have the same influence, at least that they want. People aren't looking to them for every answer because now the whole senior team is doing it. We're helping with it, et cetera. And it freaks them out, even though they're making four times the money and they blow the whole thing up. So can happen i'm super sensitive to that and i'm going to be very candid but always caring and understanding and everybody's on their own value creation journey and you see a senior team it could be four people could be 12 people how do we guide this whole thing in a direction to create more and more value when everybody's at a different place in their personal and professional development path? So it's, yes, we see that.

Starting point is 00:18:52 Now, for the CEOs that aren't quite ready and even the ones that are ready for it, one of my solutions for that is I started, and I think this is something significantly better than traditional CEO forum groups out there. But I started something called Execute and we limited to eight CEOs. And every two months we get a full deep dive into each member's business. So we meet one day a month, six and a half hours. And it's incredible what happens with these CEOs and how they accelerate the value of their organization. We know so much about each other's business that when they bring an issue in most other groups, because you did so little, you address the issue in our group. Most of the time, it's a symptom of something else going on. And we look at that group and we say, metaphorically, this is as though we've invested half of all of our retirement money in this conglomerate. And we want to make sure we get a really good return.

Starting point is 00:19:46 So what do we want to know? What do we want to see happening? What risk are we not seeing that we can get in front of? And that really develops the CEOs to accelerate the value of their organization so much faster because we keep them at that critical point in their business that moves constantly, sometimes, at every point in time. that moves constantly sometimes at every point in time. And then usually within six months, 12 months, 18 months,

Starting point is 00:20:11 they're fully doing some version of this mind methodology in their own organization. So I found that's a great starting point for CEOs to come in there. And it's less threatening on the ego side to do it. And they love being in that competitive environment and that accountability environment with other CEOs. Does that make sense, Ryan? It makes a lot of sense. I'm sitting here thinking I'm in marketing, so I'm like, I like to title things and like what they are. It sounds like a almost like a virtual board of like in a way, but maybe the boards can even get incestuous

Starting point is 00:20:42 a little bit too. And like sometimes not as adding the value that it needs to, depending on who's in it. But it sounds a little bit like having that virtual board or virtual council of people that you can go to. It makes a lot of sense. That's what I'm hearing. It's way more of a virtual senior leadership team. Yeah. senior leadership team. Because in all the other groups, and I've been members of groups with Overlap for probably 40 years, the groups can be 12, as big as 18 members. And once a month, one of the CEOs gets to make a presentation. They all have an issue processing process,

Starting point is 00:21:17 state your issue, everybody asks a clarifying question, and then they give you a solution and you move on. Because you can see less than 10% into each other's business. You can't use 80, 90% of your brainpower to help them. You get to use 10%. And this, you get to use over 80% of your brainpower to help. So it's a value creation or value of the organization, accelerating senior leadership team that you have, this sort of extended senior leadership team and so much more powerful for those that are in growth mode. And all the other ones just say, get a bunch of bright leaders in the room and amazing things will happen. But there's no process for them. And in our groups, we follow the mind methodology with the collection of CEOs.

Starting point is 00:22:01 with the collection of CEOs. Smart. I would, I, a part of our core business is helping leadership do personal branding. And I feel like I'd want the list of people that have done your stuff because then they're out of the weeds. Like you said, they get maybe a little soft or sensitive because maybe they're not having to do

Starting point is 00:22:24 or be in the weeds like they were and their team doesn't come to them for the things. But as part of the leadership of CEOs working on the business that in the business, I'd like to know who that is because I think that's we could help those CEOs because they can help the company by elevating their own profile. If they're the right person, there's a lot of caveats, but firmly believe in the more known and out there, the CEO is if they have the capacity and are the right person, the better it is for the company. In the right way, I completely agree. And every business is different and it's credibility. So as potential customers are looking to do business with this organization, everything goes better. I, I completely agree. And even for our groups, your point, um, I would say one out of three or four that say they want to join qualify

Starting point is 00:23:12 from a persona standpoint. Like you can't be a narcissist. You have to be in growth mode. You have to believe in personal and professional growth. You can't know everything. And so it doesn't take me more than 10, 15 minutes of talking to these individuals to figure out where they're at. And I only want folks that are going for it, that are just all about personal and professional growth. I couldn't go any further in the episode today without talking about our favorite sponsor, Caldera Labs. This is premium in skincare. And look, I need all the secret weapons I can get. I'm 46 this year and these fine lines are starting to show,

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Starting point is 00:25:14 Where did that originate from, wanting to help kids and seeing? I mean, you obviously started, I think, at the professional level, but working your way back and seeing the impact that this approach could have on children. Yeah, I know that the reason I'm here is to spread this ideology of value creation. And I've been doing it in my own businesses to prove it, worked with hundreds of other organizations, thousands of leaders, proved it there, for-profit, non-profit. And then I look at all the challenges in the world right now, and I think to myself, what would an ideal graduating high school senior being launched

Starting point is 00:25:51 into adulthood look like? They would be self-reliant. They can think critically. They want to create value in the world. They're financially competent if they choose to be, like I was when I got out of high school, fully financially independent. And if we had that, they wouldn't be falling for all the craziness going on in the world right now. And just like we talked about not connecting the dots for team members in our organizations, we're not connecting the dots for kids in K-12 education. The purpose of an education is to create value in the world. It's not get a good grade, get a diploma, get a degree, get a job. In that environment, the kids are doing mostly what they think they're supposed to do,

Starting point is 00:26:30 which is leading to all of this intrinsic motivation stuff that's going on that's super unhealthy. And if they knew right out of the gate that the purpose is to create value in the world, and it's material, it's emotional, it's spiritual. Let's help you discover your own value creation superpowers over time. Now it's completely different. You start building intrinsic motivation. They discover why they're here, what they're really meant to do. And we don't have all the BS out there in the world and tens of millions falling for it and creating the environment that we have. So that's what's important to me. And the book Value Creation Kid, The Healthy Struggles Your Children Need to Succeed, that subtitle, so important because parents with the best of intentions have been taking all the struggle away from kids that they

Starting point is 00:27:13 can. I had to struggle. You shouldn't have to. Don't you realize that struggle we went through made us these amazing value creators that we are, a lot of us? And if the concept of removing struggle was going to be so great for the kids, then the less I go to the gym, the stronger I am, the more flexible I am. It just, it doesn't work. And so it's all about, it's all about encouraging families to design in healthy struggles for children. And we lay it out in a really workable way to operationalize it within families. We call it the gravy stack method and it's value creation, it's house rules, it's financial competency, and it's healthy struggle.

Starting point is 00:27:50 And I'm following a number of low and middle income families and wow, is it working. And I can share a short story here in a few minutes. But that's why I'm doing it. You said it earlier, fix the kids, it makes the world a better place. Yes. That's 100% right on. Yeah. I was reading pre-episode, get to know you, and then hearing you talk, I'm like, yeah. It goes back to the assumptions and simple.

Starting point is 00:28:20 It's not that complicated to think through, but we like to make it complicated. Or we like to fix the problem on the back end for some reason, i.e., we want to make the adults, we want to fix the adults instead of instilling in the children. Well said. That's 100%. 100%. And so a really short one-minute story I'm following. Yeah, I want to hear it. Three-part one- minute story. Following family. So in Boston, dad texts me, read the book. Here's what my daughter, his nine year old daughter told him. And he's got two daughters,

Starting point is 00:28:54 nine and six. Daddy, thank you for saving the dirty dishes for me to help me with my value creation work. And so that's fantastic. Thanks for sharing. Then he calls a few weeks later and he goes, let me tell you how value creation summer is going. And he said, it used to be my daughters would argue over who had to do the work. Now they're arguing over who gets to do the work. And the six-year-old is getting up intentionally before the nine-year-old to walk the dog and do all that stuff. And so fast forward to last weekend, I get a call from him. We talked for about an hour and he says, my nine year old daughter in the school she's in on day one, she met with a counselor. On day two, the

Starting point is 00:29:30 counselor called me and asked the question, what is value creation summer? Please tell me all about this. And she goes, I'm going to use that language with all the students that I meet with, the parents, everything. So I'm sending books back to this counselor. So here's this simple method, middle-class family, the kids had changed the complete culture within two months and the kids are talking about it in school and faculty are paying attention. Unbelievably cool. And this is just one of many stories like that it's not surprising i'm sitting here thinking i have four boys and it's and my wife and i are incredibly motivated people very both professional very successful and but you tend to like and we're not i don't think we're the parents that

Starting point is 00:30:20 like try to make it easy for the kids as much as if we see something we do something instead of like stuff that we know the kids should do it it's not because we have the kid the boys are great like they don't get in trouble grades are good they're responsible but it's like i even catch myself like rolling the trash to the street doing something i just do it because i'll just do it but when i think about, like when I allow them to do it, they take pleasure would be the wrong word, but they do see that they've added value and that they've done something. And they like my seven year old, he's the youngest. And so he'll race to do some of those things. Like you mentioned the girl getting up early or whatever. He'll race to do that because he's the youngest. And I think he wants to show that he's doing something of value and adding to the household.

Starting point is 00:31:10 And I think I know we could be more intentional that, but it's clear that kids want that. And I think it gets in this messy middle of I'm providing a better life for my kid than what I had versus, okay, doing the right things and creating some natural struggle and duties, right? Yeah. And all struggle doesn't equal trauma just because you're not fitting in at school very well. That's not trauma. That's social struggle. You'll build the capability and you'll be able to do it. And we lay out all of that stuff. I've got a co-author, Scott Donnell, in this book, Value Creation Kid. We lay all of it out in the book, the whole methodology, everything.

Starting point is 00:31:52 And I think the key for parents, any parent listening to this, is work backwards from what you think the ideal graduating high school senior being launched into adulthood looks like. graduating high school senior being launched into adulthood looks like. And I was, I had a pretty interesting childhood and my family is dangerous and toxic. I was actually kicked out of the house at the beginning of my senior year in high school. And I was already financially independent. It was a non-event to go get my own apartment. And I slept one night in my truck. Ooh, big deal. It's like the best thing that ever happened to me in my entire life. deal. It's like the best thing that ever happened to me in my entire life. But I started that value creation struggle cycle really early and I never got off of that. But think about working backwards. What would that look like? The ideal launched brand new adult into adulthood. And we get that right. Wow. What's that going to do for the family? It's just going to be incredible for the strength of the family. Yeah, no question. It's interesting going back to something you said,

Starting point is 00:32:51 whether it's school or how we're bringing kids up and like their expectations of the intrinsic versus extrinsic. And I think it's on some level, it's as simple as thinking about we instead of me. And I think because when you add value, sometimes you might go, oh, how do I value myself or what I'm doing? But really, it's adding to the greater whole. And furthermore, like what you're saying with education, it used to. And I remember growing up to be like, what are you going to do for your country? Like when they were trying to get people to join the army or whatever, because like it's your duty or, and then the same thing, are you, what are you going to do to make the world

Starting point is 00:33:34 a better place with your job or whatever? And at some point we'd just stop talking about that. It just became about me and not we. Yeah. if I can add on that, if more people understood the value of win-value creation, they wouldn't embrace win-lose. So people will use the word selfish like somehow it's bad. No, it's not. Everybody does what's in their own best self-interest either for this life or the next. So by definition, everybody is selfish. But are you win or are you win-lose? And I intentionally develop everybody all the time, every way I go, to create more and more value in the world. And that does two things.

Starting point is 00:34:12 It exposes me to opportunities that I can choose to take advantage of on the business side, new friendships that can really enrich my life, et cetera. And intrinsically, it makes me feel absolutely amazing doing that. And so it helps the business, exposes me to lots of opportunities. I feel selfishly, I want to feel great. Like even all this work around getting it right for families so the kids can launch into these amazing adults. I want to do it at scale. I want to be in a million households within a couple of years with this. My co-author and I talk a lot about it. Selfishly, that's going to make for a way better world for me to live in and interact with my friends, my family, everyone out there. So there's no such thing, in my opinion, as altruism or selflessness, because we're all doing it for some

Starting point is 00:35:01 personal best interest, whatever that happens to be. And this has made me, money's the goal. Shoot, this has made me a lot of money over the years and it'll make me way more into the future. But again, it's a byproduct of accelerating the value of my organizations and so many other clients that I work with in their organizations. I just love the work. And this is what comes from it. So this strategy makes people way more successful. Why they don't do it, it's crazy to me.

Starting point is 00:35:35 There's a few that do, but it's the minority. Why do you think it is that they can't see this? That's a marketing question, if you ask me. Marketing and positioning sometimes. So I'll tell you this, Lee. I started in the ad agency business in 2000. I'll age myself a little bit. No one wanted in 2001, no one wanted to carry a cell phone. We came out with Can You Hear Me Now? And the rest is history. In 2005, no one wanted a smartphone because it was for work and for BlackBerrys. And we launched the first iPhone and the rest is history.

Starting point is 00:36:13 It was all about positioning and it was all about UI and a lot of other things. But it was about problem solution and opening people's eyes to what it is. And sometimes it's a positioning exercise because that's what we did with Motorola and Apple and everyone else in making smartphones attractive to non-business people. And it's an interesting exercise on the marketing positioning and human nature discovery. If you do old school marketing

Starting point is 00:36:48 and it's not just performance marketing, put a price point on it and hook them on Facebook ad. This is old school marketing. I think this positioning of getting people to understand the wind side of it. You even said some of the terminology today and you probably have it in all your stuff, but I think, yeah, it's fascinating. I will say this, there's irony for me, Lee, and I know it's purposeful. It's irony to me and I'm sure intentional for you. How well you've done in business and like you said, money and things that have come back to you and the satisfaction that you get when you're just practicing exactly what you preach because of the value that you're putting out and the value that you're instilling and the thought process that you turn into a program. That reciprocity isn't lost on me. Yeah, and I love that point because there's so many startup organizations out there that

Starting point is 00:37:46 fail. And I think they fail because the founders just want to make a bunch of money or be on a magazine someday and not really solve a problem in the world and create real value. And I live this every single day and way too many people. It's just about the money. It's like they value attention and money. Guys, that's not going to get it for you internally. I don't know what it feels like inside for those folks, but it can't feel great. No, it's not happiness. That's why some of the richest and most,

Starting point is 00:38:19 people that have the most attention are not the most happiest. And I've had 400 guests. And let me tell you, I've had 400 guests. And let me tell you, I've had celebrities and everything else. And one way or another, we get around that topic. And that intrinsic kind of, I don't know, selfishness, those people are not happy. And at some point, the light comes on or the lights go out, if you know what I'm saying.

Starting point is 00:38:46 100%. It's about the relationships. I think it's about having, and for me, it's about this value creation spread. I'm doing it with organizations. I want to help families do it. I want the kids to do it for all the reasons we talked about. Having a clear purpose. And then what caring relationships do you have in your life? I don't have a lot of close family and I

Starting point is 00:39:05 won't go, we don't have time to go into all that, but it's a pretty interesting story. But wow, do I have direct family, but why do I have, I've got hundreds of folks out there that are just amazing to interact with and would run through walls for me. And I would run through walls for them. It's those relationships we build over time. That's what it's about. And you don't need a ton of money to do that. You can have a ton of money and not have any of that, like you're alluding to. And it's where does that personal fulfillment come from? How are you figuring more stuff out

Starting point is 00:39:36 or elevating your human consciousness so things get easier and more fulfilling over time? But that's a whole new podcast that we probably need to do. Yeah, I know. We'll have to attack that one. I think that one could be a whole hour on its own or probably multiple hours. But Lee, where can everybody find the books, work with you, learn more about you and all the rest? Yeah, the best place to learn about the things that we do at Execute to Win or ETW is to go to the website and that is etw.com. You can find the book there, but you can also find it on 40,000 other channels, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere

Starting point is 00:40:12 you can get a book, you can find it. The audio book I narrated and I do 25 minute interviews after every chapter for even more insight and background. And I'm actually on this podcast from my home recording studio. And when I finished narrating it, I picked up my guitar and did a three and a half minute impromptu solo. It's at the very end of the book.

Starting point is 00:40:31 So you got that at the audio book. If you want to. Nice. If you want to go to the end. I always add value, Lee. Just value on value. Yeah, etw.com. You can learn about

Starting point is 00:40:42 how we can get involved with an organization to help you implement this. You can, the last chapter in the book, which you can get on the website, is a DIY chapter. You can do it yourself. And then you can learn about our Execute Mastermind groups that are really different and so much better than what's out there now if you're in growth mode. I love it, man. As you say, win-win.

Starting point is 00:41:04 So win for the Radcast and win for our audience. I really appreciate you coming on, Lee. Thank you, Ryan. It was great to be here with you. Hey guys, go find us, theradcast.com. Search for Lee Benson. You'll find all of the highlight clips in the full episode today, audio, video. Go give us a share and follow on YouTube. I'm starting to get heavy over there. We're always on Instagram. I'm at Ryan Alford on all the social media platforms. We'll see you next time. The Radcast.

Starting point is 00:41:31 To listen or watch full episodes, visit us on the web at theradcast.com or follow us on social media at our Instagram account, the.rad.cast or at Ryan Alford. Stay radical.

Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Creating Value with Lee Benson

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