Show Your Value with Lee Benson

Joe Colopy built Bronto Software from a simple email tool he made to help a friend into a company with over 300 employees. He never raised a dollar of venture capital. In 2015, NetSuite bought it for $200 million.

Joe sits down with Lee to talk about why he never played the funding game, even when his VC friends kept telling him he’d need them eventually. He talks through the 18 months he spent building a product nobody wanted, and why that failure meant the next one took him two and a half weeks.

He also opens up about the May Massacre, a rushed release that left nearly every customer unable to use the product and put the whole company at risk. Joe explains what they changed afterwards, and why he believes great companies are bought, not sold.

If you’re weighing up whether to raise money, Joe’s advice is to go in with your eyes open. Taking investors is a long-term marriage, not a funding round.

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

Derek Bullard sold his first company at 42. He had money, young twins, time to travel and coach soccer. Within 90 days he was miserable, and he spent the next year in a depression he couldn’t explain to anyone, least of all himself.

In this conversation with Lee, Derek talks about what he wishes he’d planned before that exit. He picked the buyer mostly on valuation, when the partner, the arrangement afterwards and what he’d do with his days mattered just as much. On every exit since, he’s mapped it out first.

He also shares the night in 2008 when his company went from making money to losing millions a year, with his house on the line for the loan. The only way through was telling his team the truth, and he says that honesty did more for the business than anything he’d tried to hide.

Plus the stretch of his early career he can’t remember. A former employee recently thanked him for lunches they had years ago, and Derek has no memory of them. He was so stressed and so short on sleep that whole parts of the journey are gone.

Derek became a foster parent at 22, taking in a boy for what was meant to be three days. It became four years and changed the course of his life. Today he’s CEO of Already Autism Health, with around 1,400 staff across seven states.

More from Derek: alreadyautismhealth.com

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

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/

Mike Tecku built and sold companies, was ready to retire, then his girlfriend went blind in one eye and was diagnosed with MS. She ended up on 50 different supplements and pills a day, and one morning she physically couldn't swallow them anymore.

He put them in a shake. That became Momentum.

In this conversation with Lee, Mike explains why he has no interest in building the billion-dollar version of his company, and what he thinks the private equity playbook is doing to good businesses: outsource the production, the sourcing, the customer service and the distribution, spend everything on marketing, then pass it to the next buyer before the value runs out.

He also gets into why complexity is usually an ego defence. If you make something so complicated only you can run it, you never have to admit you're the bottleneck. His own conclusion: "I need to fire myself as CEO."

Lee shares his side of it too, including the years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in doctors and protocols that made his health worse, and the $8 batches of homemade yogurt that turned it around.

Plus why he sources vanilla from one farmer in Uganda, had a custom enzyme blend developed in Japan, and spends more on single ingredients than most companies spend on an entire product.

More from Mike: momentumshake.com

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

Building the team, systems and customer base your business needs can take years. Could buying another business help you get there faster?

Tom Shipley joins Lee Benson on Show Your Value to explain how he used acquisitions to solve problems he couldn’t afford to fix from scratch, including buying an established business to help scale a $331,000 skincare brand.

They explore how to evaluate an acquisition, understand what a seller really wants, and bring two companies together without losing the people and value you paid for.

In this episode:
• How acquisitions can unlock growth beyond sales and marketing
• Financing a deal without giving away too much ownership
• What makes buyers discount the value of your business
• Partnership and equity mistakes that become expensive later
• What to do during the first 30 days after an acquisition
• How to prepare your business for a sale before you need one

If you own a business and want to grow, reduce its dependence on you, or prepare for an eventual exit, this conversation will help you ask better questions before your next move.

Subscribe to Show Your Value for conversations about building stronger businesses, leading better teams and creating lasting value.

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

Bruce Cardenas helped Quest Nutrition for nine months without being paid. He walked away with equity in a billion-dollar company.

He was 46 when he met the founders, and he'd already been a police officer and built a protective services business. He wasn't looking for a break. He solved problems because that's how he'd always shown up, something he traces back to watching his father.

In this conversation with Lee, Bruce is honest about the part nobody says out loud: there was no promise, some owners will absolutely take advantage of you, and you have to know when your self-worth is starting to erode.

He also talks about the lieutenant who corrected him on an arrest early in his LAPD career, and the line that stuck: that's someone's brother, someone's father. And the anonymous survey at Quest that showed employees felt disrespected while leadership had no idea.

Plus the intern who kept showing up on weekends when it wasn't her job, and went on to become CMO.

Take the free two-minute Executive Alignment Diagnostic at etw.com.

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

What makes successful people want to help you? Chris Widener learned that it starts with a different question: “How can I help you?”

In this episode of Show Your Value, Lee Benson sits down with the bestselling author and speaker who worked alongside Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar and John Maxwell.

Chris shares how he moved from an unstable childhood to a life shaped by faith, purpose and mentorship. Together, they explore the four qualities that build influence, why knowledge means little without action, and how to pursue success without sacrificing your peace.

You’ll hear why a CEO paid $70,000 to learn his employees’ names, how Chris and his wife approach disagreements, and when protecting a relationship matters more than proving you’re right.

Follow Show Your Value for conversations about creating meaningful value in your business, relationships and life.

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

Eric Malka sold his car for $12,000 and asked himself the smallest possible question: what's the tiniest business I can start with this? Twelve years later, Procter & Gamble bought The Art of Shaving.

Three businesses failed before that one. The last one left him ready to quit entrepreneurship entirely, and it gave him the philosophy he's built everything on since. Start small and grow big, because starting big is a great way to grow small.

In this conversation with Lee, Eric lays out the choice he puts to every founder he advises: you can succeed in fifteen years or fail in five. He explains why most entrepreneurs he meets are ahead of their skis, what a business model actually is, and how a thousand conversations with customers in one tiny store wrote his entire brand for him.

He's also frank about the people who came after it. The supplier who demanded half the company or he'd cut off the products. The private equity firm he says deliberately wrote covenants designed to trip. The investment bank that cost him a third of his exit.

The last stretch is the one worth staying for. Eric hit every financial goal he'd set by the age of 40 and still felt anxious, and what he did about that is the part he says changed his life.

Take the free two-minute Executive Alignment Diagnostic at etw.com.

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