Creating Inevitable Value as a Leader

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There's such a big difference between mindsets. The one where I'm going to do all this, look how cool I am, how smart I am, and within three years, I'm going to have this exit and it's going to make me all this money.
Huge difference between I'm going to get into this business, have a real business that's creating incredible value. I'm going to keep building on it.
I'm going to do the consistent work over time to do it. And I love this.
And if I ever do sell someday, an equally good, if not even better option is keeping my business. Let's go.
Yeah, make it look, make it look, make it look easy. The goal of this podcast is to share original insights and conversations on the habits, mindsets, and strategies of elite performers that produce exceptional results.
Let's go. Lee, it's such a pleasure to have you here and glad you could make some time and excited for our conversation.
I am as well. I've been looking forward to it.
Thanks, Ryan, for having me. So when I have someone like yourself on the show, I get very excited and a little nervous at the same time because there's like 10 bazillion things that I want to ask you.
And I also know that I need to craft a piece of content that people actually want to listen to. So sometimes it's hard for me to know where to start, but I think where I would like to begin our conversation is actually around your initial company, the aerospace company.
In particular in that, what intrigued me the most was the consistency of growth over the time period in which you were able to do it. And so often today you see people who are like, I need to get out in three years, or I'm growing this to be bought in X amount of time.
And yeah, sure. They can throw some like high scale, you know, high cost of acquisition, you know, uh, uh, lead tactics on and maybe drive some top level growth.
But to be able to consistently grow a company, a decade plus takes an entirely different skillset from my perspective. And I would love for you to start maybe by comparing and contrasting what it took you to be able to do that versus, you know, maybe the scenario that I just described, which tends to be, I think, a miss for a lot of people, which is that fast scale, rapid growth, get in and get out type business model.
Yeah, well, there's such a big difference between mindsets, you know, the one where I'm going to do all this looks at look how cool I am, how smart I am. And within three years, I'm going to have this exit, and it's going to make me all this money.
Huge difference between I'm going to get into this business, have a real business that's creating incredible value. I'm going to keep building on it.
And I'm going to do the consistent work over time to do it. And I love this.
And if I ever do sell someday, an equally good, if not even better option is keeping my business. That's the mindset that makes the difference.
And that's the one that, in my opinion, contributes to consistent growth over time. Because I believe, and I had a recent guest founder of Ugg Boots, Brian Smith, on my podcast, and he said, it's not a continuous upward growth trajectory.
It's a bunch of plateaus. Like you figure something out, you get to a plateau, then you kind of stale along, and then you figure something out.
Well, if you consistently do this work to create more and more value, we end up with what we had, you know, over 15 years straight of 20% compounded annual growth on average. But right before we sold it for nine figures in 2016, because that's how we thought about it.
And I remember walking away from the deal three times they approached us to buy us i wasn't

looking to sell i would have been just fine keeping the company i would be happy today maybe even happier if i if i wouldn't have sold it i probably would have made more money not selling it so that's the difference in the mindset you know let's get rich quick and figure it out and look how cool and smart we are versus let's create some real value in the world how does that land on on you, Ryan? No, it lands perfectly. And so I started a commercial.
My industry is the insurance industry, particularly property casualty. And I started a commercial insurance agency from scratch in 2020.
And I had no intention of it being a fast turnaround. And we grew so quickly that especially in COVID was a big catalyst because while most of our competition was figuring out how to connect employees from home to their mainframes in their office, we were digitally native because that's where we were born.
So we captured a couple market waves as well, but I sold the company two years later. And at the time, it felt like the right thing to do for a whole bunch of reasons.
Some of them were the instability in the market was making me very nervous. I knew at some point I was going to need capital, but now we're in 2022 and interest rates are starting to rise.
Things are starting to change. Money's starting to drive.
I got all these fears and anxiety around, you know, am I just going to be stuck in one place? And you mentioned plateaus. And I, you know, I look back on that wonderful experience, learned a tremendous amount, had a successful exit.
You know, I don't want to complain, but I loved being an operator and I'm kind of where you are, you know, doing, you know, so kind of my business is half media company, which we're in right now. And then I do, uh, some, not exactly what you do, but I do some startup and executive coaching as well.
And while I love helping people there being an operator is there's something to be in an operator that I think we, we talk about all the things that come from being an operator, but I feel like we don't talk about being an operator enough. Does that, does that resonate with you? Like, I feel like we don't talk about what that means to show up every day, have a team solve problems, you know, know that this decision is going to compound on five other decisions that are going to take us to a new place or open up a new market.
Like you can advise people on that stuff and you're happy when they take advantage of it. But when you're the one making those calls and driving that ship, it's a, it's especially in unique scenario.
Yeah. Well, somebody has to be on the front lines, creating value in the world.
It can't be everybody with a bunch of money being really smart and investing and getting a great return and not doing much more than providing capital to create value. Yeah.
So I love it. It's kind of in the same bucket for me as most leaders of organizations.
They love the strategy conversation, creating strategy way more than executing. And I say that you have to love creating the plan equally as much as executing.
Most like the plan way more and they don't execute. There are some that love executing and there's not much of a plan.
And so they're kind of swirling around going different directions. It has to be equal, in my opinion.
In my book titled Your Most Important Number, the chapter on strategy, I say, congratulations, you have a strategy. You're 3% of the way there.
97% is going to be executing and all that stuff. And I think a big part of what they miss when they create the plan or strategy is what's going to be the intentional way of executing on it and building on that over time.
So you have strategic initiatives to make step changes in your results, and you have continuous improvement that should be built into absolutely everything going through. But being an operator, I mean, that's where the real value is created.
I never want to be called an expert because experts, in my opinion, the majority of them stop learning and worse, they stop listening. And so every single day, I'm still on the front lines doing this work with my clients and with my businesses.
So I've got tons of clients that I work with where we install this intentional operating methodology to create value faster. I call it the mind methodology.
Lots of companies I've invested in, but they're also using the mind methodology. So I can really see what's going on around that.
And then working with groups of CEOs to do it. So I'm on the front lines every day.
At any point in time, over 20 different companies I'm personally working with, and I've done this with hundreds of companies over time, learning and refining it, you know, I never say, oh, this is the way to do it. What I do say is this is the best way I can think of right now of creating value.
And I know there's a better way and it's my job to find it. And that's why I stay in the game every single day.
Um, I feel like every year that goes along, I develop my value creation capabilities, um, at a rate of two X the previous year, because I stay in the game on the front. Yeah.
Yeah. And you can, I don't mean this to be derogatory to anyone, but you can smell on someone when they've been out of the game for too long, when they're still pitching things, but they haven't actually practiced in a, in a while it, it, you can, you start to sense it, you know, and you can see some people, and this has always been my, it's why I, when I, when I exited, I almost immediately started taking on advisory clients was I did not want to become stale.
I wanted to know what was going on, what they were struggling with. And it's always, you know, all, you know, the same buckets of stuff.
And one of those buckets that I, that I wanted to ask you about before we get into like frameworks and that kind of thing, because that's really where I want to spend our time. I'm so intrigued about your methodology.
But as far as the implementation and execution piece of our strategy and our plan, one of the places that I feel so many lose this is not that they don't want to execute or that they don't actually put the plan in place, but they lack the skills or guts or whatever it is. And this is where I'd like you to extrapolate on holding their team accountable to the things that actually need done.
They put this plan in place with just hope that people are going to do the things and execute and perform. And they miss that accountability piece on the backend, both from just a pure tactical, having regular meetings, having regular checkups.
Sure. I'm sure they look at the balance sheet and income statement at the end of the month or whatever, but there's no formal accountability plan in place.
And then no set of criteria for what happens if individuals on the team consistently do not meet the goals or standards by which the plan demands. One, do you buy that?

And two, how do you recommend someone who's listening to this that struggles with accountability?

What are some maybe some initial steps, thoughts, or resources that you have that you provide that

could help them with that particular piece? Yeah. And I'm so glad we have eight and a half hours

for this podcast so I can answer your question. But let's say, you know, foundationally, I agree with you.
Most set strategy based on what they want to have happen. And it should be set strategy based on the foundation that you have objective results that you can sort of extrapolate and say, yep, this is believable.
We can actually achieve it, right? Totally different. So what's the foundation from which you're creating value? And then the next piece of it on the accountability side, if you ask the question, how does each leader create value for the organization? Ask that question to every leader.
What would they say? And I look at it and in my mind methodology that I've developed over literally decades, and it works literally 100% of the time, unless the top leader in the organization is just making terrible decisions around that. And I know you talk a lot about that in your podcast.
I listen to some of those. So every single team should have one number that says above all others, they're winning or losing.
And really importantly, it drives the majority of the right behaviors for that team. So every team should have that.
And so if you ask a leader, how do you create value for the organization? They'll say, well, this is our team's most important number. This is where we started.
This is where we're going. We're currently on track or maybe we're ahead or behind.
And this is the best work we're doing to improve that number. Right.
And if you think about this, it's so simple and elegant for the entire organization, whether it's one team, five teams, 10,000 teams, it doesn't matter when each team achieves their most important number goal. It accretes up, improves the next one all the way to the top of the organization.
It's the perfect way in my experience to get full alignment to creating value as an organization. And by the way, philosophically, I think the primary job of the CEO is to continually increase the value of the organization and responsibly so over time.
That's their job. So all this going through.
Now, every team will have maybe five, 10, 50 other metrics or KPIs that they're measuring, but they're only measuring those things to help them make better decisions to improve their most important number. If they can't articulate how they're using it to make better decisions, stop measuring it because it's just a waste of time.
It's an activity. Now, what I like to do on the accountability side, the third part of your question, I bring somebody on board and say, great, we're so happy to have you here.
This is your role. You have two or three, it's usually four max, outcome-based responsibilities that are measurable.
We're going to hold you accountable to this. This is why we're investing in you to be able to achieve these outcomes.
If you're leading a team, primarily it's the team's most important number. And then here's a bunch of capabilities that we think you need to have.
So you have a shot at achieving the outcomes and maybe a list of administrative job duties or whatever, but this is it. Now, if we're hiring you to get this result, here's the plan.
Great. Do you think you can do it? A hundred of the time, they always tell me, absolutely.
Yep, I can do that. I've even heard a number of times if I can't do that, something's wrong with me.
Well, nothing will ever be wrong with you. It's just you didn't have the capabilities to do it.
That's OK. And so there'll be one line saying, OK, well, this is the plan at any point in time.
We want to be on track or ahead of it. But here's the other line.
If at any point in time, and you get to set that for your business, for any of the listeners, you're below this line, it won't work. We'll make a change, but thank you so much for trying, right? This is not personally way, shape or form.
We're investing this in your position to get this result. We both have an agreement here.
We're going to keep our end of the bargain 100% of the time and pay you the wages, give you the benefits, all of that. And we need, this is our plan, but if it goes below this, it doesn't work.
And if we left somebody in place where it wasn't working, you're jeopardizing, you know, potentially on a position, everybody else in the organization. Do you agree with that? And they're like, oh, yeah, absolutely.
And now when over the years and I've, you know, employed in different companies, you know, thousands of different individuals, amazing team members now, nine or more times out of 10, when they fall below that lower line and I bring them in or one of my leaders brings them in and says, hey, this isn't working out. Yeah, I know.
I thought I could do this. I didn't have the capability.
And by the way, this capability list, if you get it complete enough, it's the training program for all of the folks setting in these different roles. But they'll just say, I didn't, you know what, I didn't get it.
I thought I would be able to. And I really appreciate the opportunity.
Occasionally, employees will try to weaponize false morality. That's what I call it.
Well, don't you think I'm a good person? You must be a bad person letting a good person go. It's like, no, I bet you if you hired somebody to paint your house and they painted it the wrong color and the paint was peeling off, you wouldn't be happy about paying them.
So let's not go with a whole double standard thing. We had an agreement and, hey, can I help you find another job? And by the way, one of my policies has always been, at least since around 99, if an employee leaves for any reason whatsoever, the leader that hired them has to follow them to check in for at least a year after they leave.
Yeah. And it's, it's the right thing to do.
Um, especially now with social media, I mean, they can be really upset and do all kinds of things. It's like, you know, this didn't work.
We both gave it a good shot. We had an agreement.
Um, we want you to do well in the world and we're here to help. Yeah.
I think the other thing too, is that if that person leaves and is an advocate, they'll refer someone. And I've had this happen in previous companies.
They'll refer someone in that they know now that they know the position, all of a sudden you'll start, Hey, my friend, John, or my friend, Sally, she'd actually be perfect for this position and, you know, reach out. And now you have this goodwill coming back to your company and, and people also can reapply.
I had someone who was a poor sales professional for my organization, just, just didn't have the capability, thought they could do it, hit high on scoring for it, but just for whatever reason, it had a lot to do with discipline, couldn't pull themselves together and they left. Well, six months later, they reapplied for a different position in the company that matched their skill sets, but didn't have some of the same sales requirement aspects to it.
And they were incredibly successful and happy. And it was like, you know, because on the way out, it wasn't just like, Hey, you're you suck.
Get out or or, you know, some uncomfortable conversation.

And, you know, what I heard in what I heard from that as well was around this idea of setting expectations up front. That feels like.
part of the reason why I feel so many leaders struggle with accountability is because they

don't actually know they haven't actually communicated to their team or that particular

individual reason why I feel so many leaders struggle with accountability is because they don't actually know, they haven't actually communicated to their team or that particular individual what they're supposed to be held accountable for. So when the conversation happens, it's like, whoa, you're not doing a good job.
Well, what does that mean? Why? What am I not doing? You know, you haven't sent me to training. All of a sudden, it becomes a very difficult conversation where, as you described, and it was so articulate.

And I hope, guys, if you're struggling with this particular aspect of business, go back and rewind that section and listen again to what Lee said.

And I'm sure you have resource on your website for this, too.

But, like, this idea of up front clearly setting expectations, goals, capabilities, et cetera, so that that conversation when they don't hit them is, is not an emotional one. Right.
And it shouldn't be emotional. Um, you know, unless they do something, you know, uh, immoral, et cetera.
Um, but yeah, no, I, I love that. I love that.
Well, I want to, um, I want to transition to frameworks and I, and I've shared this on the show before. Well, I was told not to refer to my brain as broken by a previous guest.
I said, my brain is broken. So I had to use frameworks in order to be successful.
She was appalled at my usage of the word broken know, and she's like, don't, don't talk negatively by yourself, et cetera. But I'll say it because it's the way I think about it.
Um, you know, my brain is whatever it is and whether it's hyperactive bipolar or hardcore ADHD, I am all action, all gas pedal all the time, left to my own devices without guardrails. It is gas pedal, go build, break.
I don't care. I'm fine to fail in public.
Just go, go, go. And while there are advantages to that, which I am aware of, there are also a lot of pitfalls that come with that mentality.
So what I had to do was, you know, I started reading about mental models and frameworks and in different things of this nature as a way to like check myself to be like, okay, here's my idea. And I'm ready to go a hundred percent in let's walk through a couple of mental models real quick and start to think through this.
And if what I get out the backside matches what my initial thought was, then maybe I have an idea that I can present to the leadership team or the team or et cetera, whatever the situation is and change the course of my career. I mean, literally change the course of my career because I had had all these ups and downs, tons of success, fired, et cetera, different things happened.
And it wasn't until I found these. I would love to know, was this just something that naturally developed for you? Do you have a similar story where you needed to use these to run your business, et cetera?

Where did you start to, because I found, and I just, one more caveat to this, and I promise I'll let you respond, but this is why I'm such a terrible podcast host. I have found

Particularly in my

Since I started doing advisory work

I thought more people used

Frameworks, mental models, etc. as a way to operate.
And I was behind. And what I've actually found is that most people, the vast majority of people do not.
They kind of fly by the seat of their pants and work off whatever their natural skills are. Or maybe they came across a good mentor here or there.
And I'm just interested one, how you found it and, and, and how you started to apply them and when they became part of, of what you do. Yeah.
Uh, and, and I feel like in, in this area, I've reinvented the wheel. Um, I don't know, hundreds of times, you know, going through, cause I, I want to figure out what really works to create value.
So my foundational framework is holistic value creation and how I think about that. So there's three parts there when I say holistic.
So there's material value creation. Everybody gets it, money, things, all of it.
Second bucket, emotional energy value creation, which to me is the scarcest commodity on the planet, positive emotional energy. It's the X factor for leaders and organizations.
Their job is to create an intrinsically motivated, energizing environment for team members to create more and more value over time and obviously get results. So, you know, you're doing the right work.
And then the third bucket I call, you know, spiritual value creation, which is connectedness.

And that means something different to everybody.

But in the context of an organization, how connected are each team member to themselves?

Do they understand themselves so they can interact better with others?

How connected are they with the other team members, the communities, the suppliers, the customers, all of it?

So I always thought about creating value in all three buckets and helping everybody get really good at intentionally creating value in each. So we're here to make money.
What are all the things that go into that? Now it takes just as much work and sometimes more to cultivate your ability to create a positive emotional value or energy. And then the same on the connectedness side.
So for example, if you want to go back to the case study of my aerospace business, we were very profitable. We consistently grew over time.
All that was great. We were really good at cultivating that piece of it.
And a big part of that is because we cultivated the other two. They supercharged it.
With leaders, I talked a lot about that. You know, their job as a leader is to, you know, first and foremost, get results and then foster that environment where every team member truly is intrinsically motivated to create more value over time and empowered to do so.
And it's almost like they have this mindset where they're the CEO of their own role going through. And then all the connectedness stuff.
So we're really strengthening community with the team members. In that aerospace company, I put in a 10,000 square foot gym, told employees train two days a week with other team members.
On average, we'll pay 100% of the health insurance premium for the following month. If not, you pay 20%.
We pay 80%, still a great deal. Bring your family members, you know, spouses, kids, you will put even more money in your paycheck.
And out of a little over 500 team members, we had, you know, close to 400 that were doing this on a weekly basis. And then all the other stuff, like every weekend, I would get invited to no less than 10 to 20 barbecues and other events going on that employees had.
So we, we had that. I was, again, I think you're getting this.
I was super intentional about creating value in each of the three. And I love it.
I mean, there's probably at least a hundred of those team members since I sold this thing in 2016 that I follow. Um, and where I'm really good friends with a number of them.
So that's my foundational when you look at something are you creating net positive holistic value in the world yes or no and that's why i have zero respect for larger companies that will show hey we we made billions of dollars in profit this quarter if i look at it and say yep but you took tens of billions out of the economy but but you made that. And it's wild when you don't have the value creation mindset, people that invested in those companies will be super happy.
They got a great return and they don't care that it hurt everybody else 10x. They don't care.
And the whole reason I have my podcast, Show Your Value, The Art of Value Creation, is to permeate out holistic value creation behaviors and thinking into the world, it would be a much better planet to live on if everything we did was about net positive holistic value created. And we would choose not to get involved with things that are rigging the game to make them a bunch of something over, you know, at the expense of others.
How does that land with you? I mean, 100%. I mean, even from a, like a moral standpoint, I'm completely on board.
It's to me, you know, one of the, one of the reasons that I, so this show a year ago was focused on the insurance industry and mostly, you know, same topics, but primarily in insurance industry. And the reason that I opened it up and I wanted to get into the broader market and talk about bigger issues was that.
Like I had I had a woman on a few episodes ago and she works with female leaders to help them. She was fighting the, and people who are listening, please don't take this the wrong way, but she was fighting the toxic feminist kind of girl boss stuff that she had felt like corrupted female leaders to be, to be more positively engaged, to be more about community.
And she had a whole thing to it that she had that, you know, this, I was just listening to her take, but what I thought was phenomenal about her message was different, but similar to what, to what you were saying is that there are, there are these toxic ideas of, you know, I have to be the king or queen of my kingdom. It's a, you know, I'm the one that initially founded this company.
Therefore all value creation must come to me. I need to reap maximum reward, et cetera.
Um, you know, that kind of killer be killed mentality. And look, some of that is business.
I mean, we do, you know, there, there is business to be done. And, uh, there are people that would come in and take our market share, et cetera, if we let them, however, there is a way to do it.
I believe that can be spiritually positive and it's not more work. It's just a different way of framing the way you think.
Like, I think there is a general sense out there that to be a quote unquote, like good company, you either have to go like to the, to the, to the kind of, and I don't mean this to be political, but more to like the left's version of that. Like every single human is equal on all regards.
And that doesn't necessarily play, or you have to be this like badass hierarchy where whoever's at the top is the authoritarian and it's like no there's all this amazing business that's possible in the middle where we support each other where we help each other people play their roles uh and and understand what those roles are but they all are pushing in the same direction and belief of mission and in support of people and um there's not enough of that talked about because, and, and, you know, this is where I'll, I'll kick it back to you, but like, I feel positivity doesn't get clicks. So unfortunately we hear so much negative, right? If you're, if you're thinking about the spreading of a message, a negative message or a negative headline or a negative spin on something will go viral faster and farther and the message will spread.
And I feel like too many people are playing into that game to get that attention or those clicks on whatever they're sharing and not spending time and grinding on the topics that I think bring more positivity into the world. So I couldn't be more morally aligned with what you're saying.
I guess my question to you is, as someone who is now coaching, advising, you have the mastermind, you're working with these companies, you see people coming in, getting your message out is part of branding and bringing new people in. Do you think that take is correct? Or do you, you know, where do you kind of see us today and positively in general as a message online? Well, the frustration with everything you said that's felt by everyone, you know, it's almost the same as hiring an employee and telling them, not telling them what's expected.
And as we talked about earlier, and then when you have a performance review, it's like, how come you didn't do what I didn't tell you to do that? I didn't even understand, but it didn't happen. So I'm letting you go.
Like that's really the thing, right? And what's missing here and creating all the frustration and what you said there is they're missing the value creation framework. So it's not this or that, and you need to be this way.
There's so much virtue signaling going on. And the majority of the world virtue signals way more than they practice real virtue.
And I can talk about what that means to me if you want to hear it. Yeah, please.
But when I look at the value creation lens, we're all in here to create value. We're all cultivating material, emotional, and

spiritual value. So again, spiritual is connectedness.
So we're building that on that over time. And that tells us what we need to do.
That's the framework. How are you measuring each of those buckets to make sure that we're making progress over there? And when I think about one um, human nature hasn't changed in recorded history.
It hasn't, um, it's the same. So when people say, oh, you know, younger folks are different today.
No, no, no. The only thing that's changed is the environment.
So all the work that I've done, if you're a startup or you're a small to midsize private company, or you're a public company or you're a government or you're a non-profit, the general

overarching or you're a small to mid-sized private company, or you're a public company, or you're a government, or you're a nonprofit, the general overarching rules of engagement, let's say for 80% plus of organizations in those buckets, causes human nature to act a certain way. It's just different, like in a public company or government or small, I mean, it's just different because of the rules of engagement.
So we as leaders, you know, the listeners that have their own businesses or senior leaders that can impact this, the environment from which everybody creates value, which is rules of engagement, the intentional culture, all that kind of stuff is wildly important. And it causes human nature to move in a certain direction.
People aren't different today than they were 10 years ago, 50 years ago, a hundred years ago, the environment's different. I mean, look how powerful the founding documents that created the environment from which our rules of engagement engagement from which we create value in the United States, you know, the constitution, you look at separation of power, all that stuff.
Unbelievable what it was able to do in creating, you know, value as a country. And for sure, I don't find very many leaders that understand the power of that.
Like we'll see our elected officials today, which is largely a culture of rigging the game, not creating better conditions for the citizenry to work, live, learn, and play at a lowering relative cost over time. It's about rigging the game.
So they're willing to blow up what worked to get what they want right now, not even understanding the ramifications of it. Well, think about your organization.
What's the difference? Create those foundational rules of engagement from which everybody creates value. And, you know, candidly, that's a huge part of the work that I do with individual companies, myself and my team, as well as the CEO mastermind groups that I run.
So I've been part of mastermind groups for over 40 years with overlap and all the big, bigger names. Vistage was probably the longest one.
And they lose pretty quickly their evergreen value. They just don't have it.
And so I created a different environment that is full on. I even call it full contact value creation, but full on evergreen value, one full day meeting every month, smaller group.
You know so much about each other's business model, their strategy, the goals that they have, cultivating each leader to be able to create more value in the groups. Last year of all the members in my three full groups, and I've got chairs that have their groups as well, the lowest performer increased the value of their business 38%, the highest performer, 1100%.
And this is just a normal story across the board when you're applying these concepts that I'm talking about, the rules of engagement that we create, the environment, cultivating value creation capabilities holistically with every leader. So this is super fascinating, you know, work for me.
You know, financially, I'm good. I've done really well on that particular bucket of value creation, and I'm intensely working on all three to stay in the game, to keep developing it.
So that was a really long answer to your question. But that's the missing piece.
The value creation framework and how I think about it and how we align everything to it solves for all of that. One last thing to add, think about education.
Right now, if you just looked across the board, I hear this all the time, go to college. You'll just be successful.
But generally speaking, it's get a good grade, get a diploma, get a degree, get a job. And some people are professional students.
They've completely missed it. Like the foundational piece for education, the purpose of an education is to create value in the world.
Yeah, every kid should be figuring out all the way along. And more and more, it's it's really on them by the time they launch into adulthood, how they want to create value in the world.
And traditional college may not be the best way. Education, wildly important.
And the best education I've gotten, and I think it's probably the same for you, Ryan, is on the front lines, leading a business, being an operator, what works, what doesn't work and applying math, common sense, logic, facts, reason to making better and better decisions to create more and more value over time. And I literally could go on for days about this, but your, your emphasis, and I, and I love that in your podcasts around frameworks to help you with decision-making and, and foundationally to all of it.
Why to create more value? How do you know you're doing it? And you can cultivate that. And it's incredible what happens after a year, after two years, after three years, it just keeps stacking on itself.
And that's the thing I love about these CEO mastermind groups. Where else do you go for this practical CEO wisdom, what works and doesn't work

in the real world, and then stack on it over time? It's so energizing. Well, speaking to the college piece, and this transcends our entire conversation, incentives dictate action for life.
What's your incentive, right? What is the incentive that the person has? You will know what they're going to do and you take college for instance imagine how different our higher education system would be if instead of you paying fifty thousand dollars a year to walk out with a piece of paper you went for free except that college got one percent of everything you earned for the rest of your life. How much different would the education structure be? Because they would have to realign everything they taught about helping you become a max value creator because that's how they would make their money.
Right now, that's never going to happen. But the idea and thinking through this simple concept of, you know, kind of everything you've said about setting expectations.
I mean, that's really defining what the incentives are for that person. Your incentive to continue making a paycheck, getting raises, health insurance, membership at the company gym and all the benefits that come with it is to do these things.
This set of this set of of actions yields these incentives. And if these are the incentives that you want, you're going to do all the actions that we need you to do.
And there is a constant conversation in the insurance industry around how to compensate producers, which is what they call outbound salespeople. This conversation has been going on for 440 years.
And I think it's one of the stupidest conversations that I am part of. And whenever I'm at a conference or a mastermind, and this topic comes up, as much as I want to be like a steadfast, stoic person, my eyes roll and my shoulders go back.
Because I'm like, guys, this is not hard. Think about what you want them to do and incentivize based on what they want as incentives that might not just be top line revenue.
It may be, hey, you get a Friday off every month if you hit these target goals or you take these actions or whatever is necessary for you to get to want to be. Just align the incentive structure to what motivates them with the actions that you need them to take to be successful and then let them know what that looks like.
And that could be different for every single business that exists, and that's perfectly fine. But to believe that there's one comp structure, and again, I'm just using this particular example as a microcosm, to believe that there's one comp structure that everyone should be using because it's a best practice to me is insane.
And frankly, I have issues with best practices in general, because I feel like if one, if you're chasing best practices, then you're not thinking creatively and intuitively about your business. But two, if I know that you just run off best practices, then I know how to beat you.
I know exactly what you're doing. You're not taking stock of the market or your talent or opportunities and iterating as necessary.
You're just running your business in a way so that you have a fallback mechanism to at any given time, say to a board or to an investor or to another executive. Well, we're following best practices.
So, you know, that's why we're here. And this, it, I think, and taking this all the way back to the frameworks idea, which is where I'd like to close.
Um, the pushback that I get sometimes about mental models and frameworks is people feel like they box them in. And I'm like, yes, like, yes, you're right.
But that shouldn't be framed as a negative, right? You're putting guardrails up to allow you to make certain types of decisions in certain areas of your business quickly and seamlessly because you've already aligned what your, you know, to your spiritual, emotional, and capital values are are right. So you align those models with the, the, the value that you're trying to bring.
And now there are certain decisions in your business that you don't have to spin cycles on because you have, there's plenty of other stuff you're going to need to think about, but for certain things, you can put these frameworks in place. And now you're not having to recreate the wheel every quarter at your leadership meeting or whatever.
And that to me feels like a very common misconception. One, do you think that tracks? And two, I guess, does that track for you? Does that feel like something that actually is a problem? It's something that I've come across a couple of times.
I don't think it's an accurate bias to say that if I, if I apply these frameworks, it puts me into a box. So frameworks to me are

evergreen as well. And as you refine them to help you make better decisions, you do it.

Like, why do we have the frameworks to make better decisions, to create value faster? So that can evolve over time. You're not in a box.
It allows you to explore way more things because of frameworks than if you didn't have the framework. Like you keep it in order in how you look at everything.
So you're exposed to more opportunities. You can rack and stack.
You can connect dots better. So it becomes way less limiting to have it.
And the thing I don't like about best practices, so you could say, hey, we want to put a continuous improvement system in place. We could do something like the Toyota production system or whatever.
You hire a consultant, they come in and cookie cutter, put in the things that they're going to do. It almost never works because one size does not fit all.
And I love, and so many people have said this over time, but the best solution is this elegant simplicity on the other side of complexity. So you can look at a best practice or a framework for continuous improvement like the Toyota production system or any quality system.
And it worked for the people that developed it. But when you look at it and the complexity is understanding your system so you can come up with the right way to frame that on the other side of that complexity.
And it'll always be the super elegant, simple, powerful, accelerating all the value that's created in the three different buckets system. So 100% agree with you.
But it is wild when you listen to folks talk about, they're so absolute, it's this or it's that. Nope, I said it earlier.
This is the best way we can think of today to create value at this pace. But I know there's a better way.
And as leaders, it's all of our jobs to find it. So my father was a huge Bruce Lee fan.
So I've watched karate movies and all kinds of different stuff, not just Bruce Lee stuff, but you know, um, and there's two quotes that, that I took from Bruce Lee a long time ago. And before I got a real serious about business about 15 plus years ago, I guess I wouldn't, you know, so I guess when I was more of a kid in my early twenties, you know, I just had these quotes rattled around in my head.
But as I got into leadership positions, as I started founding companies and growing things, there's two Bruce Lee quotes that I have held in my head forever. I've shared them on this podcast.
So many times people are going to barf, but I don't care. You need to hear it again.
And the first is, um, you know, the, the quote that he has about be like water, right? Everyone's heard that one. It's very, very famous, but I honestly think that if you can wrap your head around what he's saying, it's a keystone thought.
It's a primer. It's a first principle thought for running your business.
You have this incredibly powerful force in water that takes the shape that it needs to take in order to do its job. And that fluidity and kind of, I guess, the Mark Andreessen really popularized this, though it's been around forever, you know, powerful opinions held loosely.
I don't know there's another way to act. The second Bruce Lee quote, and this is the one that I think builds off what you're saying and, you know, would love to get your reaction in terms of how it applies to frameworks.
That's less known is the usefulness of the cup is its emptiness. And this is one I struggle with, especially with the way that my brain works early on in my career.
I found myself like finishing people's sentences and getting frustrated with people who like couldn't pick up things fast enough. And it wasn't until I slowed down and said, every meeting I walk into, I'm going to try to wipe my brain real quick before the meeting starts so that I can be a better listener and be more receptive to the ideas of people, regardless if I believe them or not, or have already framed an opinion in my head or not.
That changed the entire game for me because I started to hear where the tracks that I had laid didn't make sense for people. Where before I was just like, get on the train.
Let's go. Like, you know what I mean? This is the plan.
Like, come on. You know what I mean? Like, why aren't you on already? You know, I started all of a sudden I started to hear like, well, maybe we're not going in the right direction.
Or maybe we're going too fast. or maybe this is the wrong train.
I don't know. And it was the combination of having this model or framework that I was pushing towards, but then being open to listen to how I could iterate on it through time that really led to success.
And that's not an easy thing for people to do. Um, so I guess my question for you is, and, and we can, this will be our, our closing for our conversation.
Um, if, if I'm sitting here and I'm listening to this and there, you know, I know there are people listening to this or having this struggle, right? They're, they feel like they're all over the place. They're overwhelmed.
They got people who are on board, people who are off board. They struggle with accountability, et cetera.
What is the best first step for them to take to start to wrangle this in and start to, you know, apply some of these things? How do you, what's the first step you take down this path to starting to take control through frameworks? Yeah, the challenge with a lot of these things that sound really good and make sense, and you said a number of things, is, okay, that's great. Well, how do we do it? We all know if that just miraculously happened, it would be amazing, but how do we actually do it? How do we operationalize it? And the value creation framework as a filter for all decisions, everything you do, and you're measuring your ability to continually increase value created in all three buckets and keep it in the right balance for you.
Everybody's different. Every organization is different.
That's the foundation. If you want to learn more about how to do this stuff with the work that I'm doing, go to my website.
Our website is etw.com, which stands for execute to win, but etw.com. We have lots of free content that you can download.
We just give it to the world. I really want to get these concepts out.
Pick up my book, Your Most Important Number. It addresses all of the accountability stuff, the value stuff, how to align everybody to it.
I have folks DIYing the MIND methodology, which stands for most important number, and drivers all over the planet. I get emails regularly, all this is working so great, we just changed the language.
Your frameworks around performance snapshots and outcome-based responsibilities for roles and all

that have transformed you know the organization you can also learn about the execute mastermind

groups that we have and we're adding more chairs every month and building more and more groups it's truly an evergreen framework to responsibly and and consistently help organizations grow the value of their of their organizations time. And you can learn about how we do work directly with organizations to sort of jumpstart implementing the mind methodology if you want that as well.
So yeah, go to the website, etw.com. You can learn a lot about it.
My podcast is titled, I think I said it earlier, Show Your Value, The Art of Value Creation. And I interview some amazing people that have done all kinds of really, really cool stuff.
And we're exploring value creation in all three buckets. And how does this apply? How can you actually do it? And the thing I love about these interviews is it's really practical wisdom about what works and hasn't worked or won't work or didn't work in organizations that we can all learn from and then build on that value creation wisdom.
Guys, and I'll have links to everything that Lee just mentioned in the show notes as well. So if you forget the URLs, just scroll down, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on a podcast platform, I'll have links there to everything.
Lee, it has been such a pleasure. I love your philosophy.
I love your disposition and mentality and so glad to share what you're doing with the audience today. Ryan, this has been great.
I wish we had another few hours, man. Every week we share the ideas, stories, and insights of elite performers that you can use in your business and

life. Be sure to subscribe wherever you're listening or watching and leave a comment

on YouTube to keep the conversation going. This is the way.

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