The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Your Most Important Number: Increase Collaboration, Achieve Your Strategy, and Execute to Win by Lee Benson

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

Your Most Important Number: Increase Collaboration, Achieve Your Strategy, and Execute to Win by Lee Benson Do you know your most important number? Numbers make or break you. Ask any bankrupt business or successful startup and they'll both agree, numbers don't lie. Unfortunately, most teams focus on too many numbers or the wrong numbers or maybe no numbers at all! Author Lee Benson knows numbers. He grew his business from 3 employees to 500 with 15 consecutive years of 20 percent compounded average annual growth. Friends and families asked for his secret. He told them it came down to Your Most Important Number. Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric and "Manager of the Century" raved about Lee's MIND methodology (Most Important Number and Drivers). Welch said, "It is the best business management operating system I have ever seen. Had I used it when running General Electric, our results would have been exponentially better." Because you can't scale complexity, the power lies in its simplicity. In this breakthrough book get ready to: Set your Most Important Number (MIN) so this new North Star empowers everyone on your team to move in the same direction. Craft Drivers to improve your number so you create winning outcomes and results. Do the right work at the right time so everyone knows how to contribute to your team's success. Tap into this simple method to increase collaboration, achieve your strategy, and execute to win, starting today!About the Author Lee Benson has over 25 years of experience as a CEO. He owned and led Able Aerospace, then sold it for 9-figures to Textron Aviation. Next, he founded Execute to Win (ETW) to help senior leadership teams experience similar results by working better together at improving their organization’s most important number. Today, his operating system is used by businesses all over the world. Lee lives in Arizona where he leads ETW, plays guitar, reads, exercises, and spends time with those that matter most. Connect at YourMostImportantNumber.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com.

Welcome to the big show, the big circus 10 in the sky the brilliant minds the uh the people who enlighten you make you smarter and when you're smartier smartier what's smartier what the hell's going on there when you're smartier that's my political license i do what i want i didn't graduate high school no i did uh so uh when you're smartier you're sexier which is the important point about the show in fact we were going to name the show be smarter and be sexier or more hot in bed but apple didn't like it no i'm just kidding we didn't do any of that but it sounded cool which is all the more reason as always with the plugs you should further show your family friends and

relatives i got the most endearing um thing here and i wanted to celebrate it for a second if i could because i'm self-indulgent and narcissistic in that way don't we all know that at this point after 14 years uh thanks for the recent uh five star or it's a four star i guess it didn't quite make five but someone did say something very nice rosanne forte thank you rosanne uh she wrote uh brilliant across multiple topics. His interview style, and this is referring to me, evidently, his interview style allows, is there any other hosts

on this show? His interview style allows for great conversations across multiple disciplines. Wow, man. I love that. I love being a guy who tries to know everything, and in the end, really knows nothing. But I mean, let's face it folks,

but refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Give us that five star review because I need to make up for that four star review from Roseanne. But I love you, Roseanne. Thank you very much.

And thank you to all my people who give us these great reviews in the Chris Foss show. Uh, being, you know, like a Larry King where I can talk about just about anything, uh, is awesome.

And, I didn't know wife and kids. So I spent my life reading stuff and watching the news, which is bringing me brain dead, as all you can tell. Goodreads.com, for just Chris Voss, is a good place to refer people. YouTube.com, for just Chris Voss. And the big LinkedIn newsletter.

Jeez, that thing grows like a machine every day. It's crazy. We just put up an amazing interview over there. You should check that out in the big 130,000 LinkedIn group, as always. And as always, out in the big 130,000 LinkedIn group as always. And as always, we have the most amazing guests. And I repeat myself often because we do. Damn it. We put it in the Google machine and out they spit and come on the show.

He has the latest hottest book to come out June 14th, 2022. And another one that we'll get to as well. But this one is called your most important number. Increase collaboration. achieve your strategy, and execute to win. He's on the show with us today. He's going to be talking about this amazing book. And another one that he just wrote that's great for kids and families. So that'll be good for them.

Lee grew his first company, Able Aerospace, from three to 500 employees with 15 consecutive years of 20% compounded average annual growth before his exit. Next, he founded Execute to Win, ETW. In his senior leadership team's experience, he provides similar results by working together at improving organizations' most important number. Today, Lee's operating system is used by businesses all over the world, and ETW advises many high-growth companies, helping teams uncover their most important number to achieve and identify the work

that drives that number to build their business. Welcome to the show, Lee Benson. How are you? I am really well. It's good to be here, Chris. Thank you. There you go. We just did a roller coaster through the ramble. So Lee, give us your dot coms, wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs. Yeah, go to yourmostimportantnumber.com or themindmethodology.com. And if you go to themindmethodology.com, you'll get all the resources for basically everything that we'll be talking about here today. There you go to themindmethodology.com you'll get all the resources for basically everything that we'll be talking about here today there you go and lee joins us those of you i'm going to give

a youtube plug out because most people consume the podcast on audio lee joins us from his man cave his band cave really it's a man it's a man band cave so if you, go see it on YouTube. You can see all the wonderful stuff. What were you doing there in your band cave there last night, Lee? Yeah, so this is a music studio I built a number of years ago. And there's a full-blown recording studio I'm setting in the middle of it. I mean, it's really world-class. And then there's lots of other open spaces around it. And I hold a lot of fundraisers

here for different charities. I'm involved with occasionally political fundraisers. We can have as many as 200 people here and it works out really well. So I call it my mini man cave, but it's probably a little bit larger than that. And every week I have groups of folks come over and we play music. Last night had a group of guys came over and we played classic rock songs for about three hours last night. It was a lot of fun. That's awesome, man. And as I joke with Lee before the show, you're clearly single. So there you go.

He's got the band cave band cave. Tell us what motivated you to write this book and give us some of your origin story. Because you have a really cool origin story as well. Yeah, I've actually started seven businesses and I don't count it as one of them, but my first probably business was a band. And I graduated high school in 1980. I was the kid that got kicked out of the house at the beginning of my senior year in high school. Came from a low-income family, but it was a non-event because I was working full-time as a cook. My rock band was already starting to gig and make money. And some of the years in the 80s, we played over 300 nights. It was incredible. I mean, the crowd could be just the cook and the bartender because nobody showed

up or it could be thousands and thousands. But we had a sound crew, light crew, had a manager. I mean, there's a lot of things going there in it. And then, you know, fast forward, mid 90s, I was running this small electroplating shop. And we really only had one client, they were 90% of our business. And they cut us off overnight. That's a really interesting story and decision making. But they cut us off overnight, went from 25 down to three. So myself and two guys left standing with me and my boss at the time said, closer to sell it, I'm done. And he said, you have 30 days. Well, I went everywhere, lots of interest and encouragement, but nobody willing to step up and buy us. So I went back to my boss and I said, look, let me assume

the $200,000 in creditor debt. I'll put my house up as collateral. And if I turn it around, I want to go this different direction that you don't believe in. I'll pay you the additional $400,000 in paper debt we haven't been able to pay you. And he did it. And so great. So we started marching down this road. The first full year, we did 360,000 sales with a brand new I remember it was hilarious. I said, I've got this great idea. You guys are going to love it. We're going to go this direction. One of them said, yeah, sign me up. This is fantastic. I don't need to get paid this year. And the other one said, it'll never work. We don't have money. We don't have customers. We don't have any equipment, but sign me up anyway. I just want to see what's going to happen.

Wow. So you fast forward to 2016 when I rolled up three companies into one and sold to Textron. One of them got a check for around $30 million, the other one around $20 million. It worked out well for them. And we did so well the second year that I went ahead and paid them back for everything they didn't get the first year and they kept their equity. I mean, it was just such a fun ride. We had a lot of fun. In fact, I would say it was a couple of weeks ago, we had a reunion of the senior leaders that were the biggest part of growing this to what we turned it into. And I even flew a couple of people in from Singapore. And the next day, my stomach was hurting from laughing so hard. And it hit me that

the harder it got with our team, the harder we laughed. I look at some companies when things aren't going well, you know, startups are really at any stage and you see finger pointing and other stuff going on. So, you know, you have the right team when everybody's performing, nobody's carrying anybody and the harder it gets, the harder you laugh. That's a, that's a hell of a challenge. I mean, that's a hell of a challenge to go through, build the companies. And then when did you do the sale to the biggest part? Textron Aerospace. So Textron Aviation essentially is the company we sold to, but it was part of the bigger Textron conglomerate.

There you go. There you go. Well, that's awesome, man. And you take a company that basically no one wants and build it into something, which is quite extraordinary. And then you map that experience into your book, Your Most Important Number. So let's talk about that.

You even got a great plug here from Jack Welsh, the former CEO of General Electric. And a lot of people believe he's a brilliant business mind. I believe that he was for sure. He became a really good friend. You know, it's an interesting story in how I met Jack in 2008. I go to a leadership course that he's teaching and he's facilitating everything breakfast, way through dinner and afterwards for two and a half days.

Limits it to 100 people in the room. All of us paid $10,000 to sit there and most of them managing over a billion dollars in business. And I'm just coming off a $10 million year. We were roughly 100 million a year in sales when I sold it. And day one, he calls on each table to somebody from each table, state your mission and supporting values because that was really important to him and how he how he managed. Nobody at my table knew their stuff. And I'm sitting right up front. The podium's right there.

Jack's right there. He looks at our table and picks us first. And so, OK, well, here's our mission, which is to safely reduce aircraft operating costs. We developed it to tell customers why they should do business with us and tell every employee why they get a paycheck because we have to do this every day or our jobs are in jeopardy. He goes, okay, that's great. What about your values?

And I said, well, we threw values out about nine years earlier and we changed the behaviors so there's no subjectivity in it. And we wanted to create the conditions where at any point in time, 50% or more of our team members are performing leading all of this better than the top 10 percent at our strongest most admired competitors and then i went through our our behaviors like um high performing team members throughout able aerospace do what they say they will they have a personal commitment and result and i'll remember these uh forever because we lived them but But I remember it was super awkward. There's this uncomfortable silence that's going on for a long time after I finish.

And then Jack says, that's perfect. I wouldn't change anything. And then he started going to all the other tables. And I realized why he hesitated because everything else sounded like a marketing slogan. Nothing you could sink your teeth into. And I'd go to lunch on that first day. And I didn't get selected to sit at the Jack table that's on a podium in the corner of this big room. And I take my first bite and he plops right down next to me and says, I've done this thousands of times. Nobody's ever gotten

it right till you. How the hell did you do it? Wow. And I still remember I answered because I believe it today. I said, if we're trying to increase the value we create and we're applying math, common sense, logic and facts and not letting political BS and other things, you know, cloud judgment, we're going to go down the same road, see the same insights, all of that. And yes, you were running something with 400,000 employees. And at the time I had something with 180 employees probably. And we became friends. And I went to a couple of additional ones over the next few years. And it was the same program. And he comes to me after the third one, he goes, why do you keep coming back? And I said, well, my questions get better because I listen,

I go apply it, I learn so much and I get deeper and deeper and deeper questions. And he goes, what do you want? And I said, really, I'm here to learn, but I'd love for you to look at my operating methodology I'm using in my aerospace company. And he said, sure. So let's take a look at it today. Spent 15 minutes going through it. And he stepped back and said, whoa, that's that's pretty incredible. I wish I had something like this, you know, at GE. He said, why don't you check in with me on how this is going sometime in the spring? And this was around Thanksgiving. I said, sure. I wake up the next morning. There's an email from Jack.

Come down to Florida. Let's go through this. So I fly down to Florida. We spend nine and a half hours one day going through my operating methodology. And that's when he said this is the best business management system I've ever seen. Holy crap. And had I had it at GE, the results would have been quote, exponentially better. And I said, you have to qualify that because you are manager and CEO of the century. And he said, for everything you ever heard about GE and how they develop people and Crotonville and that whole feeder system going up, the best they could ever do is fully follow position and develop the top five to 600 leaders.

That's it. And he goes, with something like this, assuming the data is good, I could personally do it with 2000 leaders. Wow. And so it was a, we started a friendship, helped with some of the curriculum at the Jack Welch Management Institute. I wrote a course. Students and alumni came out to my aerospace company for a couple of days, and we went through all this stuff.

And it's just been a heck of a journey. So my motivation for writing this book, and I learned so much. What I could do in my aerospace company, I figured out that most CEOs won't do. They're not disciplined enough. They don't have the energy to do it. That's fascinating. And so I set out on this journey. How do I come up with an operating methodology for any organization of any type or size that will work for 80% of all teams?

And that's what we've developed here is what I've developed in this mind methodology, which stands for most important number and drivers. And so every company has one most important number that above all others says you're winning or losing the game. And it drives the majority of the right behaviors. So at the top in the for profit world, it's typically whatever they call profit could be net profit, EBITDA, et cetera, or cash flow of your capital intensive. And then as the organization grows, and this could be an organization of any size, every team has the most important number that does those two things. And when improved, it accretes up and improves the next. And so we have clients from four employees to 40,000 employees. And it's really cool watching these value creation Legos connect together via these most important numbers. And then the drivers for each team are just categories of work that each team should be really good at doing in order to achieve their most important number. And the most important number becomes the primary goal. Where are you at today? Where are you going? Are we on track, ahead, at risk, or behind all the

way along the way? And what's the best work we're doing to make that go? And so that was my motivation. I know I can make hard work, no problem, but I know a lot of leaders can't. But it shouldn't be hard work. It should be something that feels right for every team member. And that's what I set out to do. And it's been a lot of fun watching that come to fruition. It's been a long road, but hard things are hard. There you go. So what is the most important number? How do you know what your most important number is?

How do you set it? In the book, you refer to it as MIN, the most important number standard. How do you discover what that is? Yeah, there is one for the overall organization. And I remember doing an interview with Jack Welch a long time ago, and he said, you know, it just needs to be a few numbers, two or three, four max. And I said, no, I think it's one. And this is what kind of led me down this road. And he hesitates a little bit and goes, yeah, you're right. There is one that does it and everything else is subordinate to it. So I think the job of every top leader of an organization,

let's just talk about the for-profit world for right now, is to continually increase the value of the organization. And that's how much profit it generates, cashflow, how ready it is to potentially sell and get a higher multiple so that's their number one job to do it so what is that one number and every organization will be a little different but as i said it'll either typically be profit or cash flow for for a going concern if you're a startup it might be a launch date for your product is most important. And then it switches to users, then eventually switches to revenue and then profit and value. But that's for the overarching organization. And then you look at the different functions within a company. In some small companies, they only have one team and everybody's doing everything and they have contractors.

But as you start to grow, you might have an HR team, you might have a supply chain team, you might have engineering, you might have marketing, sales, and all these other things. They go through the same process. When we work with clients, really large or really small, everything in between that have an HR department, we ask the question and the first answer is almost always retention or engagement. So, okay, well, let's play that out because we want something that says we're winning or losing and drives the majority of the right behaviors. So let's just play with retention. And I said, okay, assume you just hired me and you gave me the goal of retention. We want to keep as many of our people as we can.

So three years out, I'm 98% retention. I did everything I could to keep everybody we had. Never mind that 50 to 60% of our team members can't do what we hired them to do. I kept them, so I won. So, yes, here's the most important number I think we should measure retention, but it didn't drive all the right behaviors, did it? Yeah, you kept the worst people, right? I mean, you, but in the example.

I don't care. I got my retention goal. Yeah. And so I said, well, let's go with a different number. Let's make the most important number for HR, the percentage of seats that are filled with capable people. So all these roles, you've defined outcome-based responsibilities for each one of them. You fill those with people, assuming we have the structure of the organization correct and allocation of resources, et cetera. Now, what percentage of all those people are delivering or over delivering on their outcome-based responsibilities? And if I have a hundred employees and 80 are delivering or over delivering and 20

are falling below, I'm at 80%. Now I'm driving all the right behaviors. I'm recruiting better. I'm training better. I'm giving leaders the tools they need to develop their people faster, you know, all of that. And then every function, marketing and sales, they all do the exact same thing. And they're really interesting, powerful discussions that you have to have the team develop it together. You just have to, so you get the ownership. It's their stuff. If as leaders, you just say, here's everybody's numbers and this is what you're going to do, you don't get the buy-in. Because I think, I talked about the number one job of the top leader of a company, the CEO, founder, et cetera,

to continually increase the value of it. Well, the job of every leader, first, get results. Two, create an environment where every single team member is intrinsically motivated and empowered to create more value over time. And if you make it their work because it is their work, they came up with it, this is what they committed to, then they're all in. I mean, that level of engagement is significantly higher. And when people say we want to engage employees, engage with what? And I would say engage with creating value for the organization, which in turn creates value for themselves. Not just we did a survey and everybody said they were engaged. That means nothing. Engaged at work or you have a fiance? What is it? What's going on? Yeah. You got to see the connection to the

bottom line or at least on some sort of result thing that comes down. How does this mind methodology that you use impact leadership development? The thing I probably love most about the mind methodology is how effective it is at developing leaders. I forget the number, but it's literally tens of billions of dollars spent annually on leadership development just in the United States alone. It's a crazy number. And I would argue that 95% of it is a complete waste of time and money. Absolutely. Because it's, they think a one size is going to fit all. Now I know why they structure programs that way, because it's easy to scale by program A, B, or C, you go for different price points, et cetera. But when you take a leader in the mind methodology and you look at their team, and here's their most important number, here are all of these additional

measures that are, you know, key performance indicators that they're tracking that are subordinate to it to help them make better decisions to improve their most important number? You know, is it the right goal in terms of where we're at, where we're going? Okay, yes. And then what's the best work they're doing to improve that number with their team? When I can see that, what they're talking about in meetings, the quality of the work that they're doing, I know exactly where to develop that leader next in order to create more value faster. Exactly. It's like a surgical approach to leadership development. Does that resonate, Chris? It does. It does because, you know, my book, Beacons of Leadership, I talked about how, you know, the leader sets the beacon that says, this is where we're going.

This is how we're doing it. We're going to go there. Steve Jobs said, we're going to build the iPhone, and it's going to revolutionize everything. It's going to have all the shit in it. And he told my friends like Andy Grigdon and others to, you know, you figure it out, you know, the technical details. But this is the vision. And that's a lot of what the pitches to Steve were about were, you know,

what is this vision? And that singular sort of vision and communicating that vision was everything. And so I like the idea of just having people go to a one singular goal, that one number, as you say, because it hyper-focuses what the organization wants to do. And instead, you're not just running around like crazy heads with 50,000 spreadsheets going, well, do we meet our goal at, I don't know, inventory reduction or something?

Which is good, but it's good to follow, but it shouldn't be the ultimate goal. I completely agree. I run into so many leaders of companies that say it's incredible. Everybody's hitting their goals, but the company isn't going anywhere. And so we're just checking boxes. And to kind of your point, it just

activity seems to be the goal. Yeah, activity seems to be the goal. And I love the way you're talking about the vision. There should be this North Star. As a company, that's where we're going. We can never get there, but we can keep getting closer and closer. But to make that happen, you start making it more granular. You've got all the functions within the right structure to create that value and leaders over these functions. You're going to have to all do your part and it all has to fit together to move in that direction. And that's where the most important number, the best work, and if one of them's falling down on one of their numbers, it could potentially hold the entire organization up. When you look at it, it's self-evident exactly where that leader needs

to develop next to get back on track and keep accelerating that number. And sometimes you find out that leaders just aren't capable yet. And sometimes you have the time to wait and develop and other times you might not have 30 years. I mean, some people are really, really behind the curve in positions that they never should have been put in the first place. Yeah. Sometimes, you know, a lot of these leadership courses and stuff that I see, or, you know, where people are always going to leadership things, it almost becomes like what I call, uh, what I call motivational porn, uh, where you, you know, I know people go to like Tony Robbins, like all the time, but they never learned anything from him. Like you look at their lives and you're like, you don't even espouse anything that Tony's taught

you. Like you just, but you just keep going. Um, and, and they, they do like, they'll do like every, you know, I've known people in the real estate business. Well, they're not in the real estate business, but they're real estate buyers. And they've been to like eight freaking, you know, $20,000 a pop real estate courses. And yet when they go buy their real estate, they'll make all the wrong decisions that they were taught in the course not to do. And you're like, what is going on? Like you need to be able to apply the stuff you want and maybe another good example of that is we recently saw that there was a lot of fat in in tech companies like facebook and other things and they just seemed to have scooped up everything they could uh during during the covid crisis and they were trying to get you know meta, meta, the metaverse, the work and all that sort of stuff.

But a lot of companies seem to be scooping people up and just cause just hoarding basically people. And now we've seen a lot of bloodletting that it really seems like in interviews with the people that were working there, there was just a lot of that going on. There was just a lot of wasted time, lots of wasted numbers, a lot of just people doing things that go through the motion. And, you know, I've seen it over the years since I, I grew up in the eighties, you know, lots of wasted numbers, a lot of just people doing things that go through the motion. I've seen it over the years since I grew up in the 80s, and the whole middle management, get rid of the bloated middle management stuff started. You see a lot of that in middle management, where there's just bloat,

just people wasting time and numbers and just kind of filling in the blanks, as you say. Yeah, and the mind methodology doesn't really allow for that to happen unless you want to let it happen. Because every team is designed to create the most value possible. And if it starts to get out of whack, the most important number drops and you get more eyes on it to help you with that. And it's kind of this, I call it an organizational structure bottleneck game. Some leader, virtually every leader at some point in time will be holding back the company more than all the others when it comes to creating value. When that happens, you want help and in the right way to go through it. And back to leadership development and kind of to your point of what I was talking about earlier, I think we would do a

lot better job if we just bought movie tickets for our leaders than send them to leadership development courses. They can see the movie they want. You won't waste all this time. It'll cost a whole lot less. And then the other thing you said about, I call them motivational nudges. You go see a Tony Robbins or whatever, and you can feel good and it's up and you want to be part of that community. But they're just motivational nudges. Yeah. And they don't stick. And so like in any organization, if you want the adults and people working there to discover their value creation superpowers and create value, you know,

faster and faster over time, there has to be a operationalized operating environment from which they do that. And that's the whole mind methodology. This is a very intentional way of creating value within any organization of any size. But if you leave it up to, you know, the CEO meets with everybody once a quarter or whatever it is, and rah, rah, this is where we're going. That's a motivational nudge, not a system by which everybody creates value. Because every day, correct me if I'm wrong, every day people are showing up and going, okay, this is our goal today. This is what we need to achieve.

And it's almost like, I don't know, would a hive mind be like a good example of it? A hive mind where people are working towards the same goal? Yeah, as long as it's the right goal so there's a lot of operating method out there right so it there's um there's there's 40x there's okrs they're scaling up there's eos there's a bunch of popular ones and thousands that have been developed by consulting companies and individual consultants and the challenge that i believe that virtually all of them have is they make process more important than what's most important. We spent so much time on this. We ran a meeting exactly with this format and we only did this. And then everybody's checking these boxes,

including goals. And I've learned that traditional goal setting, I've never seen it stand the test of time anywhere, like literally anywhere. Even CEOs say, oh no, we set our goals and everybody follows and everything happens. Really? Let's go out at some of those goals. And usually it's everybody come up with two or three goals every quarter, get it approved by your manager, and then rinse and repeat every quarter. That feels terrible for most employees. You got 40,000 people going 40,000 different ways and different goals. Oh my gosh. It's like if we could just all be on one time across the country, how much time would we save in collective hours of not resetting clocks and everything else? It's like they just intentionally did that to their entire organization when they put

this together. But if we're on a team, here's the number that says we're winning the game and it's driving all the right behaviors and you're doing your best work to contribute to that, that feels really, really good. I mean, that's really the difference here. Every decision, every action is through the lens of improving what's most important, not checking boxes, making what's most important, the activity of an operating system that isn't the mind methodology. Would it be true that almost a lack of a leader, a CEO saying, you know, here's our top goal, here's our number, here's what we're focusing on, the lack of that creates that sort of vacuum

where people are just doing whatever to get by through the day because they're just like, you know, I just cruise through the day and get're just like, you know, I just cruise through the day and get my paycheck. And, you know, I mean, how much actual work really gets done? There's a lot of discussion about that nowadays because people are talking about the four-day work week and how they're finding that it's actually just as productive as a five-day work week. So is that kind of the result of all that? Yeah, whether it's happening from the top leader or not happening, whether or not setting a vision and saying this is the goal or a leader of any team within any organization of any size, of course. And I always say if you're not fully aligned at the top,

then what are you cascading out to the front line of your organization? And the front line team members typically in a lot of organizations create the most value or take the company backwards the most. And then I see a lot of top leaders in the organization. They're the CEO or founder, and we're going to do this, but it's not based in reality at all. They didn't back into anything. It's just what they would like to see happen, but they don't have the resources. They don't have the product market fit and all of it. So there's a lot of mistakes everywhere being made, but there should be clearly a vision. There should be a really good plan, full alignment at the top. So when you cascade that through, we have a much better shot of connecting everything all the way up.

And again, back to the mind methodology, why did we do this? Well, we want to accelerate value creation. And when employees are accomplishing challenging things, it feels good. And that self-esteem is amazing, right? That permeates out into their families, into the communities and everything. I think it's just the right thing to do and and and uh it just it creates this incredible environment you know i remember after all the years of running the companies that i you know rolled up and sold

north of 500 employees at the time we sold it and never once did we have an EEOC claim stick. Never once did we even have one employee lawsuit ever. Wow. That's pretty spectacular. And we didn't have an HR department. Wow. Like there was literally no place you could go with a grievance other than your boss and you could skip it all the way to me if you ever needed to. And usually the ridiculous ideas or grievances that we would just stop right away because they knew it was ridiculous. But the couple over the years that got to me, I'm so glad that it did. And every time I would do a metaphorical public hanging for every single employee to see in the company and say, we don't stand for this behavior. We don't do this. And here's how we're dealing with it. And we never had issues. But what typically happens, we'll go to HR,

make it really quiet. Nobody, you know, get with them. What are your legal options? What are your legal, you know, stop it. We're a bunch of adults here. Somebody behaved stupid and we don't stand for it and we're correcting for it. And in those cases, every single time, you know, we help them get a job at our strongest competitor so they can go mess their company up. Oh, wow. That's some good shit right there. I like that. I never even thought of that. You know, I mean, back in the day when we only did it with the really toxic employees, the bad employees, like you say, the ones that are performing badly.

But I would do an open door firing of them in the sales room. And we would have them march through the room. We give them their box and march through the room out the front door. And yeah, we made it very public because we needed to. Sometimes their toxicity was, you know, it's that infection where they start infecting other employees with their negativity and their bullshit and uh you know i we saw sometimes i remember one time we had 10 employees walk off our our big telemarketing department that we have from our mortgage company and they just got up and walked out and said fuck this place one night and so i called my vice president i go dude like 10 employees just walked the fuck out and said fuck this place what's going on in your department because he oversaw the telemarketing and uh uh it turns out we we'd had one you know

one of those bad eggs dude i forgot there's a term we have i i heard from once but they're basically the they're just they're just a bottomless empty pit of depression hate and self-loathing and and what they do is they get into everybody's head they're a tuber we used to call in the car business they tube everybody out they bring them down and um and so yeah we would do those public firings for those people if we got a hold of them because if if they infected the rest of the organization and usually they'd be telling all sorts of lies and crazy stuff and so yeah we do those public filings those are always good i i those are the only times i enjoyed firing people but yeah we do an open door one so the whole office could hear me yelling at people and and shipping them down right i think that's right so i i believe in preserving dignity

sometimes there's dirt bags that like okay okay, you just got to walk. Nothing that you can do. That's a pretty small percentage. And every time we had employees that were super toxic, disgruntled, lots of stuff going on, generally it wasn't, I want to take this company down. It was just they were toxic. And one of my policies was when they do leave, we hope they get a job at one of our competitors. But when they do leave, we have to follow them for at least a year. And it doesn't matter who the employee was. Like anybody that leaves, if you hire them, you're the manager,

you have to follow them for a year. And the most disgruntled ones, not the crazy dirtbags that are just freak shows, the most disgruntled ones, I would follow them. And I'd call them in a couple of weeks, hey, how's it going? And they're yelling. And yeah, I get it. This wasn't the right culture for you. Hope you find a better culture. Try to talk about hobbies. Because I do want them to do well. The world's a better place if they're not out there with that kind of, you know, anger. And then not uncommon within a year or two, they're working back in the aerospace days. They're working for United Airlines or somebody else. And they're starting to send us work.

They send us work. And there's folks I'm still following 20 years later today. Wow. Disgruntled employees that left. It's like this larger sort of community. And it's like we're all in it together. Theregruntled employees that left. It's like this, this larger sort of community. And it's like, we're all in it together. There's no,

nobody perfect that I know, you know, let's, let's go for this. It's just, you're a nicer guy than I am. Well, in a,

in a way it's, it's the right thing because with social media, they can do a lot of damage too. Right. Especially nowadays. Yeah. Not good for them to feel that way and can be really not good for the organization to have all these bad reviews flying in yeah and then uh

what's the other thing glass door yeah those you get those bad glass door reviews now which are extraordinary i sometimes i have like uh i'll get on glass door every now and then and uh read like you'll see some companies that you like. Clearly, that CEO is really toxic because everybody hates the hell out of him. And you just read through the things. But, yeah, that can hurt your, you know, what people think of you and all your good stuff. I wonder what Facebook's Glassdoor looks like. Well, you know, Chris, the challenge I have today is I don't know what to believe.

Because if somebody wants to take a company down, they'll get 30 people that are paid to go in and do bad reviews. And if it confirms a confirmation bias, then people will go with it. Right. So I don't whether it's good or bad news, like maybe like literally maybe so that all that stuff means nothing to me. What means something to me is, is there a real win win exchange of value? And the customers that are working with us that are that are we're exchanging that win win value, we can grow it forever. They could see a couple of bad reviews, but they know what the relationship is and it doesn't matter. So I'm I'm just having a hard time today believing anything. And now with these advancements and ai um like what can you really believe somebody has 300 000 followers really are they bots i mean it's like it should be about intensely creating

value in the world not how you're seen like look how cool i am i've got all these followers and all this stuff going on so you should do business with me. Or even better yet, look at this person's degree, or they're an author. You're an author. Oh, my gosh. No. How did you use your degree, or how did that book move the needle to create more value in the world? That should be the conversation, in my opinion. I mean, it's a lot of work to get a degree, a lot of work to write a book.

I've written two now, but I didn't write them to be an author. I wrote them to move the needle in a couple areas, and it was a foundational piece required to do it. And it's a lot of work. Definitely. Definitely. So how do, you know, say I'm a CEO listening to this or reading your book, or maybe I'm an organizational leader, HR, whatever. How do we implement this? How do you, when's the best time to start this i should ask and then uh how what's a simple way to implement it you know we you can just give me the overview if you want we don't otherwise we won't be here all day yeah um step one is read the book and the last chapter in the book is a diy chapter and i was on a call with a ceo of um a group of companies essentially last week. And he brought in one of

the leaders of the business. He goes, you know, we've all just read the book here a month ago, a month and a half ago. And he says, I know you don't need any more success stories or testimonials, but I got to tell you what's happened. We had all these metrics and everything going on. And now every leader has one most important number that follows the guidance in the book. And everything is easier. I'm not scrambling to get that extra two or 3% to make the number for the month or overdriving two or 3% and looking for more on their own. And so read through the book, you get the understanding and the thinking. A lot of people look at it. Oh, numbers. yeah, of course, what measures, you know, matters and all of that. No, you don't get it. And until you read the book or experience this, it's not what a lot of people think it is. But he just said it's completely changed their

world. So read the book, that's step one. Go to themindmethodology.com. You can get the book there or just go to Amazon or anywhere books are sold i think we're in 40 000 different channels and one of the things i did with the audio book um actually recorded it right here in my my studio when i narrated it is that i did 25 minute interviews after every chapter for even more insights and background oh i love that i love it did you do any music since you're in the studio there with all the band stuff? Okay, so I probably shouldn't say this, but I'm going to give it away. At the end of it, I just plugged in my guitar,

did an impromptu three-and-a-half, four-minute guitar solo at the very end of the book. So when people say they read it, did you read the whole thing? Did you listen to the whole thing? Oh, yeah, yeah, I listened to the whole thing, and they don't mention it so well i like that i like that that's pretty brilliant let's get a plug in here too uh because you mentioned your you know you really want to move the needle and and make a difference you you wrote this other book that's new march 30th 2023

called value creation kid the healthy struggles your children need to succeed um most parents 2023 called Value Creation Kid, The Healthy Struggles Your Children Need to Succeed. Most parents want their children to succeed. Let's plug a little bit about this book and get in there. Yeah, this book was something really important to me. And I kind of work backwards from what would an ideal high school graduating student into adulthood look like? They can think critically. They're not only financially literate, but they're as financially independent and as competent as they want to be. They understand the value of healthy communities. Everything they do, everything they vote for, every individual they vote for is about creating better conditions to

work live learn and play for their families or their friends the communities they engage with so how do we work backwards from there and in the current k-12 education system if we really cared about kids we'd actually teach them life skills to actually launch but instead it's it's feeding what i consider one of the biggest crony capitalistic machines on the planet, which is higher education. Get a good grade, get a diploma, get a degree, get a job. And we've all heard that a lot of that doesn't matter. They're not ready for adulthood. They come out of college and not all programs, some of them are really good, of course, if you want to be an engineer or a doctor, but a lot of them, they come out and they're not ready for anything. And they, and especially high school, they're just not taught the basics. And so working backwards from there,

and we talked about it earlier in the interview, I don't think motivational nudges work. I run into folks that say, if I can just get my book in the hands of every kid in America, it solves all of our problems. Nope. It's like sending them to a, you know, a motivational seminar. It's a nudge. And just like operationalizing value creation within organizations, which is what my first book, Your Most Important Number is all about. This is about operationalizing value creation within families. And so imagine this. Even before kindergarten, the family's talking about value creation. And there's three main buckets that you can create value in. There's material value, money, things. There's emotional energy value, which in my view is the scarcest commodity on the planet. When that one's on 10, it energizes everything else. And then there's spiritual value. That means something different to everybody. Connectedness could be Jesus, could be whatever it is, but those are the three buckets. And then when you start kindergarten, you start working your way through that K-12 journey. Why don't we say, which is the truth, the purpose of an

education is to create value in the world. It's not to get a degree and get a job. That's not it. It's to create value in the world. And so everything you're learning in this whole operationalized environment for the kids helps them discover their value creation superpower as they go through it. And so everything they're doing is around that. And what Scott and I put in the book is something we call the gravy stack method. And there's four simple pieces that any family can incorporate. First is value creation and how you talk about it. Second is house rules. What's your job for the family? What are the expectations? What are the expenses you pick up as a child as you get older? More and more of those. And how do you earn extra money so you learn how to manage it? Third is financial competency. You're not just learning

about it, you're applying it. And then fourth, and the most important part, is financial competency. You're not just learning about it, you're applying it. And then fourth, and the most important part, is healthy struggle. So we as parents, we should be, for all of our kids in the country, whether they're a part of our community or our own kids, we should be designing healthy struggles for them to build a capability, to build confidence, and don't stop there, use it to create some value. And then stay on this wheel as you go through and let's do it right into adulthood. And, you know, with the best of

intentions, you hear it all the time. We want to take all the struggle away from our kids because we struggle. We don't want them to. Well, we just handicapped them significantly. You know, when I was kicked out of the house at the beginning of my senior year in high school, I learned to hustle when I was six years old, pulling weeds from neighbors that weren't friends or family for a quarter an hour. That was a long time ago in, you know, 68. And then shoveling snow and mowing lawns and paper routes, dishwasher, busboy, cook. And so I'm making plenty of money. I could trust that value creation cycle. I struggled to get a capability, build confidence, used it to create value and just kept going. There was nothing I thought I couldn't do.

I had a huge advantage because I did this. So how do we create? Now, maybe my environment wasn't the healthiest and that's just the way life is. I think it made me who I am and I value every minute of everything so far. But what about this possibility of designing healthy struggles in an organized way for all the kids to go through that K-12 journey and come out the other side, these self-reliant, incredible value-creating adults? Yeah. And having that goal and that mindset, how do I create value in life, is a little bit more entrepreneurial as well.

Well, I think so. Yeah, absolutely. That's usually what entrepreneurs do is they, they look to create value in the world and, and your mindset is very different than just like, Oh, you should get a job.

Right. That's not very motivational. It's not. It's not. And, uh, you know, I,

it's that old fight club, uh, scene, uh, where, where he goes, uh, you know, I called old fight club scene where he goes, you know, I called my dad. What do I do? Go to graduate high school. What do I do now, dad? Graduate college.

What do I do now, dad? I don't know. Find a wife and get married. Get a job. You know, it's like it's not very inspirational when, you know, people look at the world. I remember looking at the world going, this is really messed up crap. But I love the beauty of being an entrepreneur. Anything more we should have covered or anything more I should have asked you? Yeah. Something to add to this latest book, Value Creation Kid,

I'm interested in making an impact in low and middle income families because that's the largest part of the population in this country. And so I've been over the last six months to a year of messing around with this gravy stack method and operationalizing it in households. It's incredible how they're adopting it. And it's usually the mothers that run the most with it. And I'll text, hey, I'd love some feedback. I know you've just listened to the book or you started reading it. And they'll text back a stack of books that they bought to give to all their friends. Nice. Like that is really cool.

You know, so it doesn't matter what I think should happen. What matters is it's like product market fit. Will this operating methodology to operationalize value creation in a family resonate and will they run with it? And so far the books really just come out but oh my gosh it's it's uh it's really going i'm super happy about that because i i as i slow down or age out in this world um i want an amazing world to be in and the kids today are going to be running the world that we age out in yeah i love science fiction dystopian movies and all

that but i don't want to live in one yeah we really don't i mean it's uh what is it 30 of the workforce i think by 2025 or maybe now or next year is supposed to be gen zers so you know we're we're dependent on those kids to uh pay my social security so there's that yeah and i'm i'm still super optimistic there's a way through this. This is kind of a crazy time, but we've gone through a lot of those throughout history. We'll get through it. Yeah, it'll be an interesting time.

Well, this has been great discussion, Lee, to have with you on the show and get your insight and stuff. Anything, give us a .com so we can get those plugs in for you. Yeah, anything around the mind methodology, go to themindmethodology.com and you can get free leadership content there. It can show you how to order the book.

And the first step to understanding the mind methodology and implementing this way of creating value in your business is to read the book and look at the DIY chapter at the end. And then, of course, go to Amazon or anywhere books are sold and order a copy of Value Creation Kid, The Healthy Struggles Your Children Need to Succeed. And this is really the right book for virtually every family out there to take a look at. There you go. Anything to improve the world and the education system that's going on now. Well, thank you very much for coming to the show, Lee. We really appreciate it. All right. Thank you, Chris. There you go. Order up wherever fine books are sold, folks. Your most important number, increase collaboration, achieve your strategy, and execute to win. Available June 14th, 2023. And pick up the new book as well as always, Value Creation Kid, The Healthy Struggles Your Children Need to Succeed.

Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out.