The 3% Rule: Why Your Strategy Sessions Die by Monday | Lee Benson

Knowing what to do is pretty straightforward for the most part. That's only 3% of the equation 97% is actually executing on it. The rest of them, I put them in this category called "Please do your job."

“Well, if it was perfect every single day, why would I need a leader?”

Love the journey, love the struggle. Is there a blind spot? Is there something we're missing? AI probably isn't going to take your job, but somebody with AI skills likely will. There's a couple of things that I picked up on that, like, I'm just really interested in and you actually said something that kind of captures it, which was like the execution side.

And like digging through your stuff, and obviously, you know, companies, you know, execute to win, and all that, but like, I want to differentiate and really hammer on and tell me if this isn't where you want to go, but it's just kind of the path that I had was, what does execution actually mean? Like, I think we all kind of have this ethereal idea of like, "Oh, I just do stuff, or I have a plan, and I execute it." But like, we both know you can have the best laid plans.

You can do work every day. You can grind 20 hours a day and never get to where you want to be.

Like, what does someone who has created as your words, generational wealth for themselves and their family and the future? What does execution actually mean and how do we need to frame this idea of executing to be successful? Because I know plenty of people at work hard that are still living paycheck to paycheck, right? And they would be executing a plan. But I wouldn't say that their success, they're not successful in the way that they want to be successful. They're just grinding to produce

“just enough to get by, and what is the difference between someone that's executing in that way?”

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

And that was kind of where my mind went. If that's cool with you, then I love the question. I mean, to me, execution is creating objectively measurable value. When I talk about creating

value, I always think about it holistically. So it's material. It's money. Everybody gets that.

It's positive emotional energy, which to me is as scarce as commodity on the planet for so many reasons. It's the X-Factor Relators. And there's special value creation, which is about connectedness, whether you're deeply religious or not, doesn't matter being connected is really a good thing to self-family community and beyond. So objectively measurable value. So let's lay that out. And I think one of the challenges. So I I love doing work in the for-profit nonprofit public private space,

also within families. And how are we objectively creating value as a family? Intentionally. As you're across all three of those. So once we had that foundation, we want to create value this way. And we want to get better and better at it over time. And I'm going to get to your question about a sort of a system or how to how to think about holding it all together, just like an operating system for computer holding all the software applications together. But once we define that and

most companies aren't very good at it, you ask an employee, how do you create value for the business. They often read a job description. That's a giant opportunity to get them a line to creating value. You create value this way. You're held accountable to this outcome primarily. Here's how we measure it. You're either on track or not over time. If everyone in the business, any business out there, any organization is really clear how the rules design to create value.

And we're developing them to create more and more over time. To me, that's the foundation for execution. What are we executing on? It's almost like when they say, we want to employ engagement to be high. Well, ours is high. Well, how do you know what we did to survey? Well, what does this say in the survey?

Oh, they told me they're engaged. And I always ask, well, engage with what should be engaged

with the value their role was designed to create and the run a team. What's the value that team was designed to create? And then how does that team fit in with all the other teams

“to a creep up and continually increase the value of the business? So that's how I think about it.”

And then when it comes to execution, I've heard so many people over time say, you know, I read this book by could be Jack Welch, former GE guy. He was my business partner

eight step or twelve step or five step process. And it'll just work. Well, it doesn't because they wrote a book and they defined all this up with what they're typically not very good at. And these books is telling you how they behaved, how they made decisions, how they navigate it, all these different hidden agendas, these other forces that are sort of taking you off the game of creating the value that the company was designed to create. Because as a leader at the top,

it's like this big amorphous blob called your organization that you're just holding together and pushing all the sides in as it goes off towards the value you want to create. And we're not clear about that. That blob is a lot harder to grow. So does this make sense and that I can get into operating system? I actually before we go too far, I have a question for you that may be super basic, but I just why is if I'm employed 327, why is my job description the task and the

tasks outline on it, not my value to the company? Like if that makes sense, like what, like maybe that's too obvious a question, but like why is that? If I'm sitting your why, why mean regurgitating that back to you is not my value. Those tasks that I do. How many things in your life

have you done? Because this is the way we've always done it? Or you've heard other people say,

when you ask the question, why are you doing this? Well, because we always do it this way. And one of the typical things within organizations is, well, we create a job description for every role. That they just say that. And I want to back up and say, let's create roles, design,

“to create value. And there's like three categories in how I think about it within a role.”

When you get hired for this position, it's an accountant, it's an engineer, it's a marketing person, it sales, it's production, whatever it is. In this role, these are the one to maximum three outcomes that you're going to be held accountable to. This is how you create value. And preferably it's just one. You may measure a number of things, but it's all subordinate to the one. And as long as you do that, things are great. And if it falls from this line, it's not going to

work. Now, we know exactly where we stand regarding performance, a hundred percent of the time real

time. We should know that. So that's the first category. The outcomes are held accountable to.

And then the second category is a list of capabilities that need to have in order to have a really good shot at hitting those outcomes. And that becomes their training program. We're constantly developing and training them. And then the third category, just general job duties. Hey, when you when you, you know, clock in in the morning or you, you come into the office, these are the three things we just do. Like, you know, stuff we just do as part is just general duties. So outcomes,

capabilities and duties for every single role. And that's actually a lot more exciting for somebody.

“I think getting a job, if we're hiring for this particular position, let's just say it says in”

general. And we need to have all this experience. These degrees, whatever it happens to be, and it's just kind of go. So you're going to be working with other engineers. It's got a little job description. But if, if it said, we're hiring engineers. And here's exactly how we measure the value. Your role would be as designed to create. And we measure it this way. And these are the capabilities you need. And you're some basic job duties. Now, I'm super clear. Like it makes it so easy when I walk into

that job that this is what I'm going to do. Do you think that it also when you lead with maybe the outcomes or the value this position or this role is meant to create? Do you think it also opens up the team members to actually almost manuscript the duties that get to that value like they're able to kind of take maybe the initial set of duties that you may say, hey, here's what we believe or have seen in the past, create these outcomes. But then when we go off outcomes

first versus job duties first, you almost get team members can start to say, well, hey,

maybe this one thing isn't actually producing as much value to my to my value that I need for this role. We actually need that these two tasks or we're skipping a sketch here that that isn't maximizing it. Like it almost gives them the freedom to find new solutions when it's value first activity second versus I think what what normally you see is just a list of activities I

“need you to do and then degrees you need to have and then maybe the outcomes that you're trying to”

say. Oh, 100% and you know you're doing it right when people you've created this environment where people certainly act like the CEO of their own role, which is what you're describing and I love doing this and they're constantly creating more and more value. So we want to create this environment from which all the team members continually create more value over time, responsibly, you know, working together. And I've had in the past, I go one example of

in this company to grid over 500 and he sold a million dollars this first year and in aviation

“after market business great we repaired an overhauled aircraft parts and he'd never done that”

before in his previous jobs and he's like this is incredible, doesn't get better and that's just wait for it. So fast forward another 16 years or so when I sold the business in 2016, he was responsible for about $40 million a year in sales. So that's 40 acts what he was, you know, 15, 16 years earlier and it was just constantly developing how do you think about sales? Are we going after individual parts or groups of parts, we're going after assemblies? Are we taking over

maintenance shops for airlines and then we become an extension and all of that work off the aircraft come to us and it was just this evolutionary thing. So there's nothing that that prevents every single role from growing the value it creates over time and if they reach sort of a limit in this one area of the business, they've created so much value then they go to the next area and create more and more. So I'm going to play ever said I want to make a million dollars a year. We shouldn't

laugh. We should ask the question, what do you think it would take for you to do that? Because most ways they don't think if I'm paid 60,000 a year or 100,000 a year or 180,000 dollars a year, I need to generate at least 20% maybe 30 or 50% more value than that to justify this position. They don't connect those dots. They just don't. So somebody says I want to make this. Well, let's do the math. What would it take for you to do that? And I'm all for you doing it,

but we need to come up with something that's win-win across the board for the company and you and it's it's equitable for all team members in the organization. Yeah. No, it makes complete sense. Actually, I had a similar experience in my company. I founded a commercial insurance agency, a national commercial insurance agency, and about two years in, I, after about two years, you find producers, which is what they call insurance salesmen or insurance people is,

you start to get pushback from the high performers, right? They start to want to negotiate their commission splits and I get it. They're ambitious and you want them that way and that can be part of the

“game. And I was not offended by their want and all that kind of stuff. That's what you want out of.”

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

And then their commission split. And what we would get at the bottom is like, here's what you extracted out of the business this month versus the revenue brought in. And the profit that you actually created for the company based on your position. And what I found was people I had to I got two primary reactions. One, some people looked at it.

And they were like, this is amazing. I've never seen this before. I didn't understand how

the economics work. I understand why you're paying me what you're paying me. Let's find other ways than changing compensation to get there because now I see what's going on in the company. And then at other people, I'm one guy who just quit because he looked at it. He couldn't then negotiate against getting higher commissions, et cetera. And he laughed, which was fine. And other people kind of folded to that. One, maybe from a psychology standpoint, I've been done this at a much bigger

“scale than I think my business ever got to for sure. What do you think about that process? Do you”

think there's any ballbacks? And like have you ever seen something like that? I was kind of I just created it out of necessity to a certain extent because I was sick of having these conversations.

But I've never really shared that process before and I'm very interested in your take on it.

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

and when you put those things in place makes it easier to scale the business so you're not revisiting the same issues and drama that's created from it. And compensation candidly is one of the single biggest drainers of productive energy inside a business if it's not perceived as equitable. And so one of the ways I got around it is I went to every single team member. So imagine

month. Every and if you're a front-line team member, you're cleaning parts, you're you know, entry level, you got a plain English detailed trial balance version of what you spent in your apartment. And these folks are looking at like why do we spend that much on tape? That doesn't make sense and we shouldn't have done this. So they're constantly improving the numbers. Now how did you how did we make it worth a while to do it? We took about it ended up being

when you factor everything in about 22% of the total pre-tat next pre-tax net profit every single month and we paid it back to all the employees' proportionate to their income. So pay roll for around

number six was a million dollars and there's a hundred thousand dollars in bonus because of that

“22% profit then everybody got a 10% bonus that month. And I think the highest month ever for the”

front-line team members was about 31 almost 32%. And there were there were multipliers in there for leadership and the global leaders senior leaders that were driving global business. They got a two X multiplier. So if a front-line person got 30% they got 60%. And what I want to do is create an environment where every single team member was incentivized to help all the other team members wherever it made sense earn another dollar for the business because they benefited from it.

And they all all understood how it worked. And another another piece, I mean this all sounds so easy to say and it takes a little work to put this stuff in place. But we had to make sure that in it's hard to get perfect, but everybody was paid in an equitable way relative to everybody else in the business. Because we're paying a bonus relative to payroll if somebody making 18 bucks an hour feels like somebody making 40 bucks an hour is creating less value than them. And if it was true

“that'd be right, then it wouldn't work. So we would scour every year sometimes every two years”

depending what's going on, all the roles and what light companies are paying. We want to pay in the upper 20% of what light companies are paying. But with bonus we're in the upper 1% if we perform.

So we did that work. And once that was in place, never had those conversations again. Like having

a front bonus programs incentive commission programs that are individual based that was ridiculous. I got to where I was spending half my time in the early years dealing with the dysfunction associated with it. Once I put this performance compensation in place based on profitability and you got paid relative to your income, all that noise went away. And I got to focus on other things which was fantastic. Yeah. The other thing I found is high performers seemingly

love that environment. And those people who, you know, not to, you know, like the Jack Walsh idea of fire your bottom 10%, which I, you know, I'm kind of whitewashing the overall theory. But like those people kind of self-select out of that system. Like those individuals who may have

otherwise been at your door knocking every year and, you know, are constantly trying to, you know,

just get over the bar to hit a hurdle or whatever. Like they seem to self-select out. That's what I've found, you know, throughout my career is that when you go to a more transparent performance or outcome based system where people understand how they get there, the problem children, I guess, to a certain extent, kind of just choose to not be part of it because you can't really hide in that type of system. Yeah. And I've had a few of those over the years where they just say,

I don't want to participate in any of that. I just want this money and I want this guaranteed raise every single year and I want to be left alone. Well, that's not the culture here. So this is going to work, but I appreciate you trying and give us a chance. And here's a list of all of our competitors. Can I write you a recommendation letter so you can go work for them? And, and yeah,

“it's, I, and I, I think everybody feels best when they're performing and contributing as a team”

in your, and fulfillment is really, you know, escalates when we're accomplishing challenging things. So I think we can create an environment and I believe I've proved it over the years where even those that are kind of a stick in the mud and don't want to do this stuff, it starts to feel pretty good and they actually, they, they get on board. And it's less than five and gosh, the last three decades I've had to let go because they didn't want to participate. Because I think you and I,

when we, when we build our businesses and any leader out there doing it, we create an environment that causes human nature to move in one direction or the other. And if we have a lot of ambiguity and we're just thinking everybody should know what to do, but we're not being, you know, clear about it, however you want to describe it, that's not an environment conducive to winning as a team, but if, if we're super aligned to our vision where we're going, our strategy, how we're

going to get there and we've got a great common operating methodology throughout the business and how we intentionally create value, that environment to me brings a lot more people into, I call it productive

I don't want to survey that says they have a best friend to work. I want productive engagement.

And when that's elevated, they're just leaning in more and you know it's effective when they're creating more and more value. And I want every single leader, every single team bolted together, driving that alignment, driving that accountability, cross-functional collaboration, and we, we know from the macro sense that we're doing the right work, when the value of the businesses continually and responsibly increasing over time. Yeah, I love this

productive adding, adding that on to the engagement part because it's one of the the biggest

“misnomers that I think came out of the early Silicon Valley era, where we're playing ping pong”

with each other and pool and all these surveys came out to your point around like, well, if you have a great culture where everyone's friendly and friends with each other, that's it's like that's great until the best friend leaves. And now that person's going to because the whole reason they were there wasn't the company, wasn't the work, wasn't the mission, wasn't driving forward. It was the friends they had, they played ping pong with that lunchtime. And like that, that to me was such a

misread on why people were engaged with many of these early companies was not the ping pong games in the bean bags and the story times. It was the fact that they felt like they were building, you know, some application that was going to change the world. And you know, in that idea of a productive engagement, I think, is something that like logically, I think immediately hits you and you're like, yeah, yeah, I can buy into that. But I feel like way too often, we don't press

people on that. And I guess I want to move off of hiring and people and not to some other topics, but just just wrap up with this. Like if someone listening to this is going, you know, I'm in that quagmire. I'm in that situation, Lee was talking about we're 50% of his time, early in his career was spent negotiating salaries and dealing with all these types of things.

What's the first step to get them out of that type of culture and start moving them towards

what you explained, you know, the middle and second half of the business where people were aligned, they understood their value, you know, and you get to this point where everyone's starting to push in that direction. Like, what is that first or early couple steps to start to turn that ship? Yeah, that's such a gigantic question. I start with alignment in the senior leadership team, maybe if it's only you and a one partner, but alignment around vision, where we going,

are we really clear on that alignment around strategy, your plan to actually get there and strategy to me, as I mentioned earlier, knowing what to do is pretty straightforward for the most part, that's only 3% of the equation, 97% is actually executing on it. So you've got vision, you have your strategy, now we need to get the team right, and collectively, that leadership team is there so that number one job of the CEO to me is to continually respond to increase the value

of their business. So by proxy this senior leadership team and really all the leaders in the organization collectively is to work together as effectively as they can to increase the value of the

“business. Start there, like that philosophically, that's what I believe, and I've walked into”

so many rooms senior leadership teams, why are you here? Like each one of you, why are you having

this senior leadership meeting every week? And I never once have gotten the answer to work together

to collectively increase the value of the business. And so I just want to see what's going on. And I'm going to report out the financials. I'm going to do this. They're missing the foundational premise and why they're there. So once we get that, you can go down another layer and I call it the management operating system layer. How do we know that everybody's creating the value they were designed to create? How do we know that every team is actually doing it? How do we

know we're driving accountability? What about collaboration, communication all of it? And one of the ways I think about the, see that this management operating system layer, it's holding everything together, just like your computer's operating system holds all the applications together. You don't want to compute it or crash. You don't want your company to crash.

“And rather than a traditional structure of a business, I think about a business in terms of”

value creation flows or traditional structures, CEO, direct reports, you know, going all the way down. That's important. We need that. But it's really valuable to understand the value creation flow of the business to know where to really focus at every single point in time. And the value creation flow to me is you have you have marketing, general awareness. How do they even know about us? How do we then we get to generate marketing qualified leads and then sales qualified leads and

close sales. And we have to make the product or design the service. We have to deliver it. There's

value creation flow, are they red green or yellow? And it just tells me exactly where we need to focus here. And more often than not, it could just be marketing qualified leads. We're not getting enough. They don't know what to do. So they push harder and all the other things and yet the most

“important thing to work on. They're not putting the intention into it that they really should.”

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

and everybody by the end, regardless if they're hosted by a consultant or internally organized, you know, we're pounding the table and excited to go grab beers and talk about the day and all that we're going to conquer the world and then tomorrow shows up and we get right back to doing all the same stuff. If you are the top of the pyramid, you're the CEO or wherever you sit on that chain in terms of what chairman of the board, whatever. I've found so many well-intentioned

leaders have these meetings, right? And they're able to get to where every maybe that that first phase of why these five, you know, SVPs or, you know, other C-suite members, what is the value you create? Why are we here and we're all kind of in agreement and then man, they struggle to hold people accountable to those things or to actually execute on the plan that they all agree on in the first place. So how if you're that leader who's sitting here and you're going, we're listening

“to this going, man, I believe you, I agree with you, but I've done like 10 of these over the”

last decade and they never seem to change anything. Like what do you find most often that person,

that leader is missing and why they can't actually take it from the strategy meeting or strategy retreat to actually executing that plan, you know, inside the business on a daily basis and ongoing. Yeah, one of the, I think biggest mistakes that are made is, hey, we're just going to do an off-site. We need to get together and hang out and the magic will happen and out of that will come all of this execution and amazing success for the business. That's just not true. Like it just,

it just isn't. And I like team building is fun. Let's go out on a long hike and do stuff and laugh and talk about books. I mean, I think that's amazing. I love relationships. Some of the

best lifeline relationships I have right now are with people that I built incredible businesses with.

But when it comes to strategy, like what is the purpose of having a strategy session? Well, strategy to me, it's approaches to increasing the value of the business. And whether I work with a startup or a hundred billion dollar market cap company, I'll get these strategy decks before I go in to help them organize it because they're struggling with exactly what you're talking about. I look at it and for the bigger ones, it's not uncommon to have over a hundred strategic initiatives.

So I go through all of it and I come back as of great. I've distilled this out for you before we get started here. Out of the hundred strategic initiatives and a really large business, only 22 are actually strategic initiatives and that when you accomplish it, it'll cause the step change in the value of your business. The rest of them, I put them in this category called please do your job. And so now let's take these 22 strategic initiatives and divide it by function

within the organization. And then we actually assess each one of them. What's the risk to

of the value of the business or the most important number if we don't do it? What's the positive

impact that we do do it and how difficult is it to do and what's it going to cost to do? And when do we think we can get it done and what have the major milestones along the way? And every single week we're tracking to that and who's the one accountable leader to be navigating, you know, this this thing happening or getting across the finish line. And now it becomes a lot simpler. So if you have a strategic planning session and we want to come up with things that will materially

“move the needle, not continuous improvement. I think that should be part of all of our cultures.”

Everybody's continually improving and developing. But what's something we can do that's completely different or different enough from what we have been doing that will cause a step change in our results. And let's follow those. And generally for companies, you know, let's say in the middle market and below having three or four is kind of the the max if they're really meaty. And we want to make sure I believe that we've got an operating methodology in place that

But if we just focus on those few things, it makes it easier to be super impactful. But if we if we let our leaders come in with a bunch of, you know, PowerPoint decks or whatever, you know, version of, you know, candor, whatever they're using today, all that all sounds really good and we just

“had a raw raw session. What a complete waste of time. And then if you want to track it you're going”

back to all the decks, how's it going? You're not getting good information. That's a complete mess. What are the two or three things that are really going to move the needle? And let's let's follow up on those. How does that land? Ryan, that's so different than how most do it. Yeah, I completely agree. I think, you know, it's it's it's sad to me how how many fantastic strategy sessions will say at a

high level, just end up never producing yet and they get everyone gets together and they have the

same exact conversation the next year, right, just different location, different activity. You know, this year, you know, we're going to go to Nashville together. And that's what's going to break the strategy. I, you know, damn that we have. When you hear that, what is the, what is the wildly successful strategy says? Because when I hear that, it's like, oh, we had a great raw raw session. Yes, no, I agree. And I love that that you said that what it is, it's like meeting the meeting

makes us feel good and somehow things are going to magically change. The other thing that I see sometimes and I'm interested is, again, maybe the CEO is unwilling to give ownership to either the department lead or or that particular value creation bucket. They are unwilling to extract themselves

“from it in a way that allows that person to own it and run it and manage it on their own, right?”

It's like they end up that the CEO ends up being the bottom that because they want to be involved and say all four major initiatives. And now the person who, you know, technically walks away with the ownership title of that value bucket, they're instead of being able to make it their own of being able to dig in and figure out their unique or specific ways of solving that value problem and driving real value as per the strategy meeting. The CEO ends up continuing to be a bottleneck because they can't

maybe their ego or fear or just they've never been taught the right leadership strategies or

philosophies feels that they need to be so engaged that they can't get out of the way and they end up being the problem. And it's the same thing over and over. There's nothing more important to me than getting the team right. And when you've been exposed to amazing talent where you haven't been before, it's crazy what you can actually get done. And it's so dangerous for the CEOs to keep their toe on the water or in the middle of all the different projects. Because now when it doesn't work,

well, yes, you did what you told me to do, it just didn't work up as your idea. So we want people capable of taking across a finish line. And the other thing I don't like is when people say, oh, just delegate, you're just not delegating and you didn't stop it. It's like we have this team, they need to prove that we can delegate to them. So I'm a big fan of earned decision rights and earned autonomy over time. You know, even I had an example of a gentleman walked in and wanted to buy a

machine for the machine shop, one of my previous businesses, and it was a million bucks. And he walked in, I want to do this. And I said, why are you in my office? You have earned the decision-making

“rights up to just over a million bucks. You know, you need to be here. We just, you just wasted”

walking all the way down here in the building, you talked to me. So there are others that you need to get approval on a dollar. You can't spend anything until we know that you can be really smart with our money. And you have an ROI mindset in how you're using it. But we develop every that way. But once you've developed them, let them run with it. And when it doesn't work, why didn't it work? What did you learn? And if we've been developing them correctly, they're not going to be, you know, ridiculously

defensive. And I can't believe you're questioning it. They're going to be reflective and say, you know,

really miss this one big piece when we start the project. Never do in that again. This is what

I learned. This is how we're going to get back on track. I think that's the right environment, not the CEO in the middle of everything. And I know a couple of CEOs right now that I'm actually working with, they believe when somebody isn't getting great results, it's something this CEO didn't do. It's like, well, how long is this person been there all like nine years? Like, okay. We need to start thinking about building a stronger team or being more intentional around, you know, developing the

people that we have. Yeah, I had one of the, one of the most proud and, I guess, leadership moments of my career. I was about three and a half years in my agency. And, you know, I did my little morning routine or whatever. And I finally pop up in my calendar and I knew I had a couple meetings on the

Like, that's odd. So I called my assistant and her name's Clarissa. She's great. And I just said,

“Clarissa, like, I could have swore yesterday. Like, when I logged off for the day that I had a”

couple meetings, like, what's going on? And she's like, oh, yeah, we, we removed you. And I said, what do you mean? She goes, well, you know, we know what we need to do here. You don't need to be there. And this meeting in the afternoon, we dropped from an hour to a half hour because we really don't need that much time. And frankly, we just have a couple things we have to discuss. And you don't need to be there for that one either. She goes, why don't you go golfing or something? And I like,

I literally had this, like, physical reaction where I was like, what? What do you mean? You don't need me? She's like, yeah, no, we, we know what you want. We got it on this one. And you don't need to be at this one here. Like, she goes, go, go, go, go. I went in, it balls. I did go do that. I did not play golf because I just couldn't remove myself for that long. But I was like, this whole empowering your employees and, like, use, I love this term. I, I hadn't framed it this

“way. This like earned autonomy over time. Like, they had gotten to that point. Like, I wouldn't have”

articulated it that way. But it, it's essentially what you just said. And when, what did it allowed

me to then do? And it was that day. And this is the part of the story I've actually never told on this,

those, those that day of, of not having the meetings and in the space, I actually was able to create a whole new marketing channel, or in this case, it was a referral channel for us, but just because I had time to sit down and go, okay, where we're getting qualified leads, where, what are some, look alike type lead sources that we could find that could be new avenues that I could bring to the marketing team that could potentially be there. And it gave me all this

brainstorming time. And like, as a leader, I feel like, if we have to have our hands in everything, we lose that visionary capability that is really one of the primary functions of the role. Is that makes sense? Yeah, I agree. And we, again, we should have leaders that can hold up their part of the business. And when they do that, you and I can more effectively, another term, like all these business virtues signaling terms out their work on the business, not in the business. What does that really,

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

because rather than walking in and kicking them to get them going in the morning and always

following up on things that are done, we know we're doing it right with the right environment, developing people, the right team, when there were one or two steps ahead of where you thought they would be. And then you get to add, and again, I call it a super coach way to drive it even faster. Then we can think about, okay, now that my team has really good at executing at this level, and continually increasing and improving, what can we do to change it up a little bit to where it

could be at a development program, it could be another product or service, could be a partnership. We start to think that way rather than being worried about, is this leg going to fall out the business over here? So it's this ongoing journey. You know, one thing I would say is, if you don't love what I just said, like all of the things going great, things not going great, the leg

“ready to fall off, like this is, this is the job. And I think you should love that, because it's never”

going to, it's not my period. And how many leaders out there when things don't roll out perfectly, they get upset. They act like a victim. I can't believe this is happening. Well, if it was perfect

every single day, why would I need a leader? I've never had a perfect day. So love the journey,

love this struggle. There's something I referred to. I call it the value creation cycle. And people asked me, hey, where'd you get your stars? Well, it was six years old pulling weeds for 25 cents an hour in the mid 60s. And, and it was a neighbor that flagged me down on my bike and, and I didn't know her. And it felt so good, you know, I earned my own money in that. And I said, then, I struggled to get other capabilities. I'm shoveling snow, mowing lawns, one paper out,

four paper out, dishwasher, bus boy cook. By the time I'm kicked out of the house at beginning of my senior year in high school, I did already afford my own apartment. I only had to spend one night in my truck and I was good. I put myself through my senior year in high school. And, and then I, first half of the 80s played over a thousand shows in a rock and roll band playing guitar and singing, started my first, I didn't count that as a business, but it really was,

started my first real business in 93. And I kept struggling to get a capability. It would build internal fulfillment, self esteem. I'd use it to create value. And I just kept choosing. And I still choose today to take bigger and bigger steps. And some sort of building on this, that's the journey. That's the fun. And I've heard you talk about it in some of your other conversations in your podcast.

And so I, I just, I love this and my hack for me personally, making it work. And my most

“important internal number is fulfillment every year. That's increasing because of the work that I'm”

doing. It's impossible to me to be happy all the time because there's a lot of struggle when you're developing, but internal fulfillment is continually going up. And if I'm intentionally creating objectively measurable value, materially, emotionally and spiritually, and the right balance for me, this is a pretty cool journey to be on. It's, it's, in it, gosh, it's only, I'm on my, since I became an adult, this is my 46 year overnight success story. It's only taken a few decades

to get here. But how does that land on you as I kind of described that? So I love it. I completely

agree with it. And it's, I'll say, personally, in some regards, I was in a musician, but in some

regards, my journey has, has a lot of similarities. I started working at 10. I got up at 530 every morning and trolled the streets of my small little rural town and picked five cent recyclable bottles, got a little blue bins that everybody put out on Thursday mornings. And I can make about $40 in before school by myself. And then eventually I recruited, then I bought a wagon, one of those old red radio flyer wagons. I bought it like a garage sale for like two bucks. And then I could get

60 bucks by myself because now I didn't have to go back to the house. I could just pull, keep pulling it with me. And eventually I recruited two friends and you know, just by getting them into the business, I took a small portion of what they did and they trolled other parts of our small town. And then eventually an adult figured out what we were doing and to use this car and put us out of business, which was another good life lesson. Also completely ridiculous that an adult did that. But hey,

God bless them. It's capitalist environment. And I like to play in that space. But my point is,

“I think, I love how you embrace and I just, I respect it. I love isn't the right word.”

I have a tremendous respect for how you embrace this idea of just perpetual improvement through time. I guess, have you ever struggled with, and I think some people, you know, this is where some people get caught or they give up too early, when you see the next skill that you want to take, or the next leap that you want to take. And you're used to having success here, right? And now you want to make that jump. You want to level up. You want to go take on that bigger challenge. And now

all of a sudden it feels like you're back at square one again, or the success that you had just experienced in the previous iteration or previous season of your life isn't there immediately. How do you, and to your part of emotional fulfillment, how do you work through that and stay emotionally positive and leaning forward during that time of more friction than you may be used to with that makes sense? The thing I like about what I described as the value creation cycle is that when you go

through it enough times, every time you come up to something hard, it could be starting a new business, or really anything learning a new language. You've done it enough that you know you'll get through it.

It'll be amazing. You've got the other side. And so in your example is starting a new business,

and every new business even though you've been wildly successful before, it's still going to be hard. You're starting from scratch. There's so many factors in there that people don't really think about. All the sort of interconnectedness around around all of it. And when it drives the successful business, but the harder it gets, I start to get this feeling. It's like, oh, this is going to be incredible because I've done it enough time. It's going to be incredible when we come out

the other side of this. And all the opportunity in the world is in the struggle. So if somebody's like, I can't believe it. I was successful in them doing this. Are they really engaged with

“their journey, or do they just want to be seen a certain way, or they feel entitled to it?”

It's like we develop when we're struggling effort, like more effort going in. And so it's kind of a break. And then if you embrace that, you understand the value of it, you've done it enough times, manage expectations. You know, you're going to go through this just because you, you know, I could take my aerospace company 23 years from zero to well into a nine figure exit. If I started another one, what would be the reasonable expectations? I'm going to, I'm going to get there

in two years. This, no, it's going to take a while to build. You've got the team. You've got customers. You've got all, you have got more resources. I can get a better launch. But it's still going to be hard, and it's going to take a while. There's going to be things that you go through. So it's really managing expectations, understanding that you're going to have to go through it. And also,

and how challenging it's going to be. It's going to feel way worse than that at times.

“Understand that, too. But if you don't value struggle, I think that's, that's going to be a”

challenge for anyone. What's the right balance of struggle for you? Anybody listening? You know, for me, I have a mix of, I'm comfortable doing this where you talk about, you know, the easy mode. But I've got kind of a mix of where I'm in flow because I'm really good at this, but I'm still improving and then brand new stuff. It's really hard that I'm going through. And I've got a couple of projects right now, company type projects that I'm involved with, complete ridiculous hot messes.

Yay, I've got a skill here, but if I tried to do it even 10 years ago, what I'm doing today, probably would have melted me down emotionally. And, you know, in fact, I've heard you touch on

this, too. Your conversation is still good in your podcast. When, when something's super stressful,

and it's really getting to us, it's our emotional reaction to something that if we were looking at somebody else going through, which I would just do this or do that. And it's training ourselves to over time feel that way. Is that resonate? Yeah, you know, you mentioned like all the entrepreneur porn cliches and stuff that people get thrown around. And I wrote this blog post a few years ago, and most of the stuff that I rise, maybe more therapy than anything else. But I was like,

maybe maybe the journey really is the destination, like this cliche that I hated for so long, because I grew up very poor. And at that early in my life, you know, some of these things that you hear, you're like, oh, you know, I'm like, it's the destination. Like, I'm poor shit. Like, I need money. You know what I mean? Like, like, I hear what you're saying. And I'm supposed to love this. But I'm wearing holy sweatpants to high school because we can't afford to buy jeans. Like,

you're in a, like, where, when does the destination happen? Where, like, I can actually afford a car. And, you know, I mean, all the things that I need to do to live. And, and as much as, you know, at the time, you know, now I can look back on that mentality and go, okay, well, I understand that's a very reactive emotional response. And it's fear driven and all this kind of stuff. You know, it, I came back to it. You really do to your point.

If you're not, if you're going to take on something big and worthwhile, that's going to create fulfillment and satisfaction and not be willing to embrace the friction that the journey creates. And all the growth that happens in there, right? Like, there's things that you can do that I can do that everyone listening here can do that they couldn't do before for the sole reason is they went through something really freaking hard. And it was the other side of that hard

that gave them that skill, that knowledge, that ability. And I think we forget it. Like, we, we learn it and then we forget how hard it was or our ego takes over, right? Like, like, we, you had a nine figure exit. God forbid, you start a company that doesn't go right back to nine figures again because, oh, what did he lose it? Oh, he lost all his, you know,

“no, it's every time it's hard. Like, if you want to do something else amazing, especially”

something different, there's a new set of skills. Yes, you have skills you can apply. But like, I think we just, there's a, there's a lack of living in reality. I guess like one of the

biggest unlocks for me in the second, you know, I'm 45. So the second half of my 45-year-old life

here has been this idea of just living as close to reality as I possibly can. Now what I hope happens, now what I wish happens, not the way I want the world to work. But like, what is the game as it, what, how is the game playing out on the field right now? That's what I have to play. And that comes with pain. So, so, you know, not necessarily physical pain, but it comes with frustration, friction. You thought you hired a great hire. That person ends up not being who you

thought they were. And now you need, you know, there's all these things. And if you, you know, if you embrace the growth that's going to come from those things, not that you look forward to them, because no one wants that stuff. But, but you don't look at them as, oh my god, my world is ending or there's something wrong with me or I'm not good anymore. You just look at as a new opportunity to become even more than you were before. You know, I view all of those is healthy struggles.

“And if you want to get super fit, which you are, and I think you used to play baseball, right?”

But you're, you know, what that means to get there, you have to work to get it. This is the same thing you're going to the business champ. These aren't unhealthy struggles. We're not victims. We actually get to do this. And that's, that's a mindset and, and our internal dialogue is so important as, as I think most people know, most people don't work on it the way they should. But, but it's, it's so important. So, so yeah, value the struggle. That's where we grow.

is to create an environment that allows for those healthy struggles at the edge of what's

“appropriate for each kid, family member, employee that we have. You know, I came from a very”

long-come family as well. I had, after being kicked out of the house, I began into my senior year. My mom called me and, and her first words were filed for bankruptcy. You'll be fine. So, what did you do? And they charged up four credit cards in my name. $2,000 plus each, 23 to 28% interest because they had my social security number. And I work with a bunch of low-income families in my dinner table communities. And it's a very common thing that parents do, because it's just

they're scared of death. It's, it's a way to get money. Everybody's, you know, fight or flight. They're, they're doing one or both. Sometimes, at the same time, it's just crazy. And, and even had parents that told me when I'm, imagine being a 5-6-year-old kid with a mom telling you, she's embarrassed to be seen with you in public. So, I would go out into the world. And when people looked at me, I thought they were seeing what my mom told me. I was. And it was just like, "Oh, my gosh,

this is so bad." But by the time I was kicked out of the house, I realized, my gosh, they, they can't raise themselves, let alone five kids. This is not about me at all. And I felt horrible

that they were in that emotional state. Never knew my national father's stepfather, but I'm

“going through all of it. And I think about those struggles and most people react and I can't believe it.”

And I, I looked at all the other kids in the high school. It's like, "Oh, my gosh, I had an advantage over every one of those other 3,400 students in my high school." And, and, and I think families, and this is a big part of what I do. I'm actually CEO of two companies. One's execute to win for organizations, business, and ones for family. But CEO of dinner table. And we have 40,000 plus parents in our community. And it's a, it's a really common thing with the best of intentions

to take is much healthy struggle away from the kids as possible. And they're not even close to being ready to be an adult by 18. And so we're creating environments where we're setting up these healthy struggles. How do you, how do you want to show up as an adult someday, character traits, capabilities, beliefs? What, what are healthy struggles we can design today? And for sure, not take away from you to get you ready to do that. And when they're struggling emotionally, physically,

whatever it is, okay, well, let's leverage that to learn and grow to make you this amazing

self-reline adult, which all kids want to be. And I, and I work with so many high school kids around this stuff. So this is really fascinating to me how hard as somehow bad if you're struggling, if you're not happy 100% of the time, something must be wrong. Give some guru a bunch of your money and he'll make you happy all the time. It's like, nope, we're completely missing it. How do you want to create that in the world, kids, adults? All of it, what are you doing to

move in that direction and how are you growing? Yeah, there's this clip. And I'm going to butcher it guys. So please just bear with me. But there's this clip. And it's from a movie. I'm going to forget the actor's name. But he's in top gun. He's in a couple other movies. But he's a boxer in this movie. And he's being interviewed and the reporter asks him, "What's the biggest lie you were ever told?" And he said, "It's not that simple." And she goes, "What's not that simple?"

And he goes, "No, no, no, that's the biggest lie you were ever told." He said, "The biggest lie you were ever told is that it's not that simple." He goes, "You just have to go do the thing that you want to do." He goes, "It is just go do it." Like, there's going to be hard. It's going to be a struggle. But it is there for you. And it is literally as simple as pointing in the direction that you want to go.

I'm paraphrasing a little bit here. But I always love that. And I come back to it in this particular

“moment because I think we've been told that like everything is complex. And there's these people who”

are constantly looking to push you down. And it's all about oppression and this. And you know, you're a victim. And you're entitled to certain things. And if you don't get them immediately, then somehow someone is keeping you from them. And it's like, "No." No, the frankly, if you're born in this country, regardless of where you start. And I start about as low as you can in a rural environment. Like, it's all there for you. It's just as simple as pointing in a direction and moving forward,

regardless of what smacks you in the face. Right? I mean, there's tons of stuff in there. I mean, I'm, I'm, you know, but at the end of the day, it's like just keep putting your feet in front of your child and one foot in front of the other. And understanding that there are going to be days where the sun is shining and there's rainbows and money is falling from the sky. And there are going to be days where it all just gets washed away in a flood and you're starting from zero again. And both

Well, if, if I can add to the framing, it is that simple, but simple in this context is really,

“really hard. You have to move into it. And if you want, as you want to take bigger steps,”

it's going to continually be hard, but it's super rewarding, wildly fulfilling. And then, if you take the, it's not that simple. And you add the complexity all the other things. It gives you an excuse, a reason to be lazy, not lean in, not do it, takes struggle away, take, take healthy development away. But yeah, simple, I think it's, it is very straightforward. It can just, it can, it's hard often. And yeah, learn about that. Yeah, we've been talking for over an hour already,

man. This is, yeah, well, I want to, I want to, I want to, I want to be respectful of your time, but I do, and this may be, take this question wherever you want, but I just would like to put this in front of you and have you address it as you can. Obviously, you know, AI is a big part of our world now. And we don't have to, I don't want to necessarily dig down into AI and specifically, but I guess, from your perspective, from the people you're meeting, the leaders, or you, you can even go

“to the CEO of the family side, right, whichever I take this wherever you want. What do you think?”

What are the questions or the conversations that we're not having right now with AI? Because it's everywhere, right? So I, so there's every, you know, seemingly there's a ton of conversations happening. There's optimists, there's tumors. I'm an enormous AI optimist. I don't, again, living in reality. I don't think there's a positive case for being a tumor, even if the machines do take over and turn us into slaves or whatever, you know, like the matrix, like,

even if that happens, you're not stopping that. So, like, I don't see another option. There's an optimism. That's me. But like, what do you think we're, we're not talking about? Is there a, is there a blind spot? Is there something we're missing? Or is there a part of the conversation that you're seeing people aren't asking that when you meet with them, you're, you're, you're bringing up and trying to work them through? Yeah, perspective seems to be the

wild card right now because people are all over the place. There's a lot of fear. There's a lot of optimism. And I, I do agree, you know, AI probably is going to take your job at somebody with AI skills, likely will going through. And whether you know it or not, you know, 98 plus percent of Americans are using AI in some way. They're apps are using it and it's helping them, you know, make their lives a little better. But I look at it foundationally and say, I don't, this is my belief.

I don't think of United States, just probably holds true for a lot of countries around the world,

we're even creating 10 percent of the value that we could. And, and we're focused on the wrong stuff.

And what I love about AI is it's super charges everybody's ability to create value. So, we can be a lot more intentional about the value on a create in the world. And as we're creating that value, if AI or any other tool can help you go faster in that direction, then you use it. So, imagine drink stay where, you know, 40 percent, 50 percent, 80 percent of the value of being created as a country. AI can supercharge all of this and there's endless things that can be done.

We wouldn't even know what we're going to discover. So, I'm wildly optimistic. One other piece and I get into this conversation a lot, leaders think, oh, I don't need a coach anymore. I don't need a part of CEO, groups. I don't need to be part of any of it. Because now I have my AI coach. Well, most leaders think, if you're leading a business, I know what to do. This is great. Now you start talking and interacting with something that's in a lot of ways to design to agree

with you. And then you get amazing answers to the wrong questions. So, I still think there is a

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

even more of it and go faster? So, I just kind of settle on it. But this is thinking about it. Yeah. Yeah, and I agree with you. I did a short solo episode for the show a couple of weeks ago

“on is on, I heart just came out with, I guess, a tag or a filter human guaranteed, right?”

And I think, and they're essentially placing a premium on their content and their content creators who are, you know, again, I think maybe the sounds odd to those of you who haven't gone too deep into the AI world, but more and more even creators are replacing some of themselves. And I know there are, well, I'm going to do gurus out there that are telling people who are trying to create content or trying to help, you know, create this AI avatar that, you know, all you need to do is

I'm with you, man. I think that more than ever, the there's going to be an enormous premium put on

human connection and human authenticity, where that unfortunately has been bastardized, but it's incredibly important regardless. Like these things, there's absolutely going to be a a paramount, sorry, a premium placed on the human connection side in person events, masterminds, going for walks with a friend or a colleague or a mentee or mentor and those moments.

“And I believe, and I don't, we don't need to go down this path, but I'm also a very spiritual guy,”

the serendipity of of connection and of consciousness that when you share air with someone and you

share space with someone that a computer just will never be able to give you. So I agree with you,

Lee, I can talk to you for hours, man. This is so good. We had a couple of thoughts on that. Yeah, please, please. I've been saying for a while now where we're going and what's going to the highest value is our trusted relationship network. Because when I look at, you know, advertising coming in emails, any communication coming in, trying to do business with me, I don't know what's really anymore. You know, AI can make everybody look like the best company in the planet, but you're

still going to have the same mix of really good, really bad, and mediocre. In there, and I don't even know, but I do trust my trusted relationship network that I have. So to me, that's everything, and, and it's so easy. Right now, just imagine if there was somebody in a various on the planet or group of folks and they wanted to control all social media and they could turn up or down messaging

“one way or the other, any way that they wanted to. The only way I think we can combat that is to”

develop our own legitimate trusted relationship network and our own set of filters for how we process things through. And based on those filters, right now, I literally believe almost nothing I read, see, or hear anymore, unless it's a trusted source. And if I don't have a trusted source, I run through my filters. And that helps me make better decisions. So I think this is going to be really important for people to develop. I even had a couple of t-shirts made up that should be

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

Man, how do they do that? I do have a podcast. It's titled, show your value. They are to value

“creation. If you want to learn about all the work I'm doing on the business side, please go to”

etw.com. And if you want to learn about the work I'm doing to help families intentionally create value. And my goal over the next five years is to reach millions of families doing this. It's going to be so good for all of us is dinnertable.com. Go there and learn about what we're doing there. I love it. I love it. Guys, I'll have whether you're watching on YouTube or listening wherever you do, just scroll down in the description. I'll have all the notes as well as the

show notes on the website as always. Lee, I appreciate you. This has been a tremendous conversation.

And I hope we can do it again sometime. I would love to. Thanks, Ryan. Thank you.