Creating Value with Lee Benson

 Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack.
 Sure, you can post your job to some job board, but then all you can do is hope the right
 person comes along, which is why you should try Zippercrooter for free.
 At zippercrooter.com slash zip.
 Zippercrooter doesn't depend on candidates finding you.
 It finds them for you.
 It's powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites
 them to apply to your job.
 You get qualified candidates fast.
 So while other companies might deliver a lot of, hey, Zippercrooter finds you what you're
 looking for.
 The needle in the haystack.
 See why four out of five employers who post a job on Zippercrooter get a quality candidate
 within the first day.
 Zippercrooter, the smartest way to hire.
 And right now, you can try Zippercrooter for free.
 That's right.
 Free.
 Zippercrooter.com slash zip.
 That's zippercrooter.com slash zip zippercrooter.com slash zip.
 You're listening to the ride cast, 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 rad cast.
 I'm Ryan Alford your host of your number one marketing and business show and Apple podcast.
 You appreciate you wherever, however, wherever and whenever you're listening to this show,
 we say if it's radical, we're coming at it.
 And today we're talking about radical scaling, talking about effectiveness, we're talking
 about value creation, we're talking to best selling author Lee Benson.
 What's up, Lee?
 Hey, Ryan.
 Good to be here, man.
 Thank you.
 Yeah.
 Hey, I mean, scale or bail, baby, I like to scale.
 I've had scale and 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 continually increase the value of your organization
 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, how do you create value for this organization?
 What would they say?
 And most of the time, you get a job description answered.
 They don't even really 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.
 That'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.
 Yeah, and I'm sitting there and listening to talk Lee and I manage the company and I'm
 like, I think we as leaders and each never.
 And it's maybe more people, hopefully not as leaders, but as people.
 We assume that everyone knows what the goal is or what value or success looks like.
 And I don't think most companies, I'll even love myself in there, do a good enough
 job of being clear on what success and I think they know it like in our 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.
 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 and payroll and we want to return on it.
 We never connect the dots for them, 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% 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 always like to set the table.
 What made you the scale expert and so damn smart about all this stuff?
 Let's give everybody a little bit of your history and background.
 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 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, 30 minutes of work for a driveway in a sidewalk
 and then a paper out, then four paper outs and then a dishwasher bus boy 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 seven business.
 I've started from scratch.
 And I got on what I'd like to call this value creation struggle cycle.
 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.
 We 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, you know, exits from a few million dollars to well into 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 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
 that 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 scarceest commodity on the planet is positive emotional energy
 because when that's 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 runs 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 a water skiing behind them now instead of kicking to get them out
 of bed in the morning.
 I love that analogy.
 We spend a lot of time on the lake at the Alfred House have four sons and it's really
 fascinating.
 Like my mind's swirling a bit now.
 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, 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 shortlyly.
 But think about the business thing.
 I was sitting there listening to you talking, 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 businesses, a service based company and you think of, okay, what 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 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.
 I feel like to be there, but in a meeting 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.
 I think about my aerospace business, I had when I sold it probably 64 leaders 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% more money.
 They won't take them because they love doing that so much.
 What is that?
 It's the positive emotional energy is 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, you are most important number that fully describes the mind and
 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, 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 over
 any 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 that 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.
 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 how much think of a 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 success, then you're happier and you're more motivated in all these
 things.
 So it all seems, it all ties together, right?
 It all ties together.
 And when we create these rules of engagement, 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, 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.
 And I've heard CEO 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 talked to, 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 could not do the job to save themself, 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 it's okay.
 And they said, but we know what'll go faster with you helping us.
 And they said that 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
 were winning or losing the game and drives the majority to right behaviors.
 What would be that most important number?
 And so it isn't an amazing.
 You're finally having a discussion around how you create value as not only as a company,
 but as a function to support it.
 This is fantastic.
 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
 skill for what adds value in helping 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 thing.
 That would be curious how you balance all of that when dealing with it.
 Yeah.
 There's a chapter in my book on strategy and it says, hey, you've completed your strategy.
 Everybody's excited.
 Congratulations.
 You're a 3% of the way there.
 97%'s 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 over driving 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.
 It exposes who's capable of doing it, where assumptions wrong, etc.
 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.
 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.
 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, they, 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 of million dollars
 to into 30, the 30 million dollar 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.
 Said an important word there that I would imagine when with a lot of this and ego drives
 a lot of I think the behaviors that the senior levels and I don't know, like it's not accountability
 as much as it's people like, like I've earned this or I expect this or all of those things
 that kind of come with it.
 Now I would imagine, I'm going to ask a question and pontificate a bit that some of your
 biggest challenge may be an implementation and I'm sure if they once they've hired
 you or you're helping an organization or they're implementing something like this,
 they've bought in.
 But as humans, renactually, 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 the profit is forefolded for the company, they
 don't have the same influence that at least that they want.
 Like 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 it 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 that 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.
 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 it 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're 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
 our retirement money in this conglomerate and we want to make sure we get a really good
 return.
 So what do we want to know?
 What do you 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.
 And then usually within six months, 12 months, 18 months, 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?
 I make a lot of sense.
 I'm saying you're thinking I'm in marketing some like I like to title things and like what
 they are.
 Almost like a virtual board after like in a way, but maybe the boards can even get insetuous
 a little bit too and like sometimes not as adding the value that it needs to if there's
 depending on who's in it.
 But it's found a little bit like having that a virtual board or a virtual council of people
 that you can get to.
 It makes a lot of sense.
 That's what I'm hearing.
 It's way more of a virtual 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 senior CEOs gets
 to make a presentation.
 They all have an issue processing process, state your issue.
 You everybody ask 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 brain power to help them.
 You get to use 10%.
 In this, you get to use over 80% of your brain power to help.
 It's a value creation or value of the organization accelerating senior leadership team that you
 have, this 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.
 In our groups, we follow the mind methodology 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 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 could
 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 completely agree.
 And even for our groups at your point, I would say one out of three or four that say they
 want to join qualify 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.
 But the only thing keeping me fine is Caldera Labs skincare, got face lotion and this
 body bar.
 Let me tell you.
 Lathers up perfect.
 But in all seriousness, you have to rub in all the lotions and then you use this stuff
 called the good, the serum, this might be the serum of the gods.
 I'm telling you, like this stuff is awesome.
 It may, I never thought you could have the glow in the morning.
 I was like, I hate to ask about that.
 I watched the women's commercials.
 They talk about this, the glow they get and I might, that's what happened.
 But no, it does happen with Caldera Labs.
 All natural ingredients perfect for the skin and it makes you look younger.
 I feel at least five years younger.
 We were making no claims here, but I'm telling you, this is the best skincare I've ever
 used.
 I only promote what I support and what actually works.
 And if you use rad Ryan, you'll get 20% off.
 If you go to CalderaLabs.com and you learn more about their products, I'm telling you,
 you will thank me for it.
 And look, if you're young, you need to get ahead of the game.
 So you avoid the wrinkles.
 If you're my age, you're just trying to hide a few.
 And if you're a little older, you're trying to hide a lot.
 And let me tell you, this will help make your skin feel great.
 Mine's never felt better.
 Never looked better.
 And it's all thanks to Caldera Labs, the official skincare partner of the Radcast.
 Yep.
 Let's talk kids a little bit.
 What did that originate from wanting to help kids and seeing, I mean, 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, work with hundreds of other organizations,
 thousands of leaders, proved it there for profit, nonprofit.
 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
 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 a 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 and 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, 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 its material, its emotional, its 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.
 In 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 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.
 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 its value creation, its house rules, its financial
 competency, and its healthy struggle.
 And I'm following a number of low and middle income families, and wow, is it working?
 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 it.
 Right.
 Yeah.
 I saw it.
 That was reading pre-epsides, I would get to know you and then hear you talk.
 I'm like, yeah, it's, it, it goes back to the assumptions and simple like, it's not
 that complicated to think through, but what 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 it's a really short one minute story.
 I'm following it.
 Yeah, I want to hear it.
 Three part, one minute story.
 Following family, so in Boston, dad texted me, read the book, here's what my daughter,
 his nine year old daughter told him and he's got two daughters, nine and six.
 Daddy, thank you for saving the dirty dishes for me to help me with my value creation
 work.
 That's fantastic.
 Thanks for sharing.
 Then he calls a few weeks later and it 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 and we talk for about an hour.
 And he says, my nine year old daughter in the school she's in on day one, she met with
 the counselor on day two, the 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 senior thing.
 I have four boys.
 And it's, and my wife and I are incredibly motivated people, very, both professional,
 very successful.
 But you tend to like, and we're not, I don't think we're the parents that 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's not because we have to keep the boy 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 roll the trash to the street doing something.
 I just do it because I just do it.
 But when I think about it, 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
 earlier, 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.
 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.
 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 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 about a creation kid.
 We lay it all of it out in the book, the whole methodology, everything.
 And I think the key for parents and the parent listening to this is work backwards from
 what you think the ideal 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 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.
 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, whether it's school or how we're
 bringing kids up in 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, go, how do I value myself
 for what I'm doing?
 It's adding to the greater whole and furthermore, like what you're saying with education, it
 used to, and I remember growing up, but be like, what are you going to do for your country?
 Like when they were trying to get people to join their 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 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 when value creation, they wouldn't
 embrace when lose.
 So people will use the word selfish, like somehow it's bad.
 I said, 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 winner?
 Are you win lose?
 And I intentionally develop everybody all the time everywhere I go to create more and
 more value in the world.
 And that does two things.
 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 it intrinsically, it makes me feel absolutely amazing doing that.
 And so it helps the business, it exposes me to lots of opportunities.
 I feel selfishly, I want to feel great.
 Like even all this work around getting it right for family 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 personal best interest, whatever that happens to be.
 And this has made me, the money's the goal.
 I'll 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 right.
 So this strategy makes people way more successful.
 Why they don't do it, it's crazy to me.
 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.
 Marketing and positioning, sometimes.
 So I'll tell you this, Lee, I started in the A to A at agency business in 2000,
 I'll reach 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.
 But in 2005, no one wanted a smart phone because it was for work and for blackberries.
 And we launched the first iPhone and the rest is history.
 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 and it's not just performance marketing, put a price point
 on it and hook them on Facebook at.
 This is old school marketing.
 I think this positioning of getting people to understand the wind side of it.
 You've been set some of the terminology today and you probably have it and all your stuff.
 But I think, yeah, it's fascinating.
 Yeah, but 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.
 The vow, how well you've done in business.
 And like you said, money and things that have come back to you in 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 these thought processes that you've turned 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 fail.
 And I think they fail because the founders just want to make a bunch of money
 and maybe 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.
 It's 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 the richest and 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 celebrity, everything else.
 And one way or another, we get around that topic.
 And that intrinsic kind of selfishness, this people are not happy.
 And they at some point the light comes on or the lights go out if you do what I'm saying.
 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 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 we don't have time to go into all that, but it's a pretty interesting story.
 But why 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 or elevating your human consciousness?
 So things get easier and more fulfilling over time.
 But that's a whole new podcast that we probably do.
 Yeah, I know what to do.
 What does it tack 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 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 3.5 minute
 impromptu solo.
 It's at the very end of the book.
 So you got that at the audio book.
 If you want to always add value, just value on value.
 Yeah, ETW.com.
 You can learn about 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 to 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.
 So win for the Radcast and win for our audience.
 I really appreciate you coming on, Lee.
 Thank you, Ryan.
 It's great to be here with you.
 This is the story of the one as head of maintenance at a concert hall.
 He knows the show must always go on.
 That's why he works behind the scenes, ensuring every light is working.
 The HVAC is humming and his facility shines.
 With Granger's supplies and solutions for every challenge he faces,
 plus 24-7 customer support, his venue never misses a beat.
 Call quitgranger.com or just.by.
 Granger for the ones who get it done.