Lee Benson sold his aerospace business in 2016 for 21.6x EBITDA in an industry where 8x was considered a great result. For fifteen years before the sale, the company grew more than 20% a year.

Ten years later he walked back in for the first time. The business was still running well, still a respected global brand, still improving bit by bit. In a decade it had grown 20% in total.

In this conversation, Lee explains what he thinks happened, and the difference between a business that runs without you and one that keeps growing without you. Most owners build the first and assume they’ve got the second.

He also gets into why he shows every employee the company’s numbers, despite the fear most CEOs have that it’ll start pay fights. In decades of doing it, he says it has almost never happened. He explains why every person in the business should be treated as the CEO of their own role, with clear outcomes, the skills to hit them, and the numbers in front of them.

Plus the hard truth about selling. Most businesses that try to sell never do, and the time to make yours worth buying is years before you want out.

Take the free two-minute Executive Alignment Diagnostic and see where your business is leaking money: https://etw.com

For more free videos, tools, and resources about the MIND Methodology go to https://etw.com/

Erik Qualman has written five number one bestsellers, spoken in more than 60 countries, and reached over 60 million people. He also tracks how many nights a year he's away from his daughters. Last year it was 37, down from 52, and that number shapes what business he takes.
In this conversation with Lee, Erik makes the case that time management is the wrong problem. Give anyone 48 hours a day and they still wouldn't clear the list. What actually runs out is energy and attention, and the question is what drains the battery and what puts something back.

He's blunt about the advice we give young people too. Follow your passion is a bad short-term instruction. Follow your talent, get good at something, and let that become the stepping stone to the thing you're passionate about.
Erik also shares the system he built for saying no, including the time he turned down a volunteer request at his church, got asked a second time, and copied and pasted the same refusal straight back. The rule underneath it: if it isn't a heck yes, it's a no, and a fast no is kinder than a slow one.

Plus the two-minute habit he's kept for years, scoring every day from plus three to minus three with a reason written next to it, and what the patterns told him.

Lee shares his own version, including why internal fulfilment is the number he measures everything against.

For more free videos, tools, and resources about the MIND Methodology go to https://etw.com/

Mike Zisman wrote his first program in 1967. He built and sold Soft Switch to Lotus, then watched IBM take over Lotus eleven months later, going from a company of 450 people to one of 250,000 in under a year. He's 77, still writing code, and runs Golf Genius, which now handles over 40 million rounds of golf a year.

In this conversation with Lee, he explains the thing he thinks most companies never account for: coordination cost. The friction of getting people pointed in the same direction, which rises exponentially as a company grows. His head of engineering worked out that a part-time competitor was moving faster purely because he had none of it, so he went off and did the same thing, and what came back changes what they ship next.

Mike is also blunt about AI. 95% of the code his team produces is now written by Claude. His headcount has been flat for two years and there are no new hires in the 2027 plan, and he's clear that he doesn't have a good answer for what that means at scale. He also points out the trap nobody's solved: stop hiring junior developers and in ten years you have no senior ones.

Plus why he thinks vibe coding misses the point, and the line he uses on anyone who says their own software is easy to use.

Lee shares his side, including the competitor who approached him asking to sweep floors just to learn what they were doing, and what Mike makes of a 21.6x multiple when the average business sells for six or seven.

More from Mike: golfgeniussoftware.com

For more free videos, tools, and resources about the MIND Methodology go to https://etw.com/