Lee Benson's boss told him to shut the company down. Instead, he took on six hundred thousand dollars in debt and two employees he couldn't afford to pay. He almost went bankrupt fifteen times in that first year. Twenty-three years later, he sold Able Aerospace to Textron Aviation for well north of a hundred million dollars — and the guy who said "it'll never work" walked away with a check for over thirty million.
Lee and Bill go deep on the origin story: how refusing a buyer's demand for all-expenses-paid Vegas trips cost them their only customer overnight, how Lee pivoted from job-shop electroplating to going direct to helicopter operators at twenty-three percent of new-part costs, and how a company that started with a data plate and a dream eventually grew to three hundred thousand square feet of manufacturing.
The conversation explores Lee's MIND system (Most Important Number and Drivers) — one number per team that let him run a 540-person company in fifteen hours a week while growing twenty-plus percent compounded for fifteen straight years. Plus: AI as an accelerator of value creation, why meaningful struggle is non-negotiable, and why the scarcest commodity on the planet is positive emotional energy.
In This Episode
Guest Links
Book: Your Most Important Number (WSJ bestseller) | etw.com | Dinner Table community: dinnertable.com
Quick favor: I'm in the middle of my doctoral research, and I need CEOs
Here's the question: is there a point where working more hours actually indicates a worse leader? Nobody has measured it. I'm measuring it.
If you're a CEO or president with at least ten people in the business and three direct reports, it takes just a few minutes. And Your team answers a few anonymous questions.
What you get back is a report comparing how you rate yourself to how your team rates you. That gap is usually the interesting part.
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