Show Your Value with Lee Benson

AI is transforming the global economy, but could the biggest disruption still be ahead of us? In this episode of Show Your Value , Lee Benson sits down with global macro investor, hedge fund manager, and author of The Next Perfect Trade , Alex Gurevich, to explore the economic forces reshaping our future. From the explosive growth of artificial intelligence to rising energy demands, potential job...

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 bu...

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 arrangeme...

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 conversat...

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...

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...

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 ver...

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 acquis...

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 f...

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. Togeth...

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 gr...

A teenager watched a night of news full of leaders behaving badly and asked his grandfather, "Pops, you're a leader. Is that how you lead?" That question became Keith Wyche's book. Keith has been President of Pitney Bowes US, a senior executive at IBM, and ran a 30,000-person region at Walmart. He's on the board of Brinks. In this one he lays out how far trust has fallen,...

"Priority" comes from a Latin root meaning first. So what's the plural of first? Jay Papasan co-wrote The One Thing, which has sold more than 4 million copies in over 40 languages, and he's CEO of Productive, the One Thing Company. In this conversation with Lee, he argues that you can only ever have one priority, and that most productivity problems are clarity problems wearing...

"Jobs are a silly phase that work is going through." Rishad Tobaccowala spent four decades advising the world's largest companies, most of them as chief strategist at Publicis Groupe, and made ten predictions in India's largest business paper that all came true. In this one, he gives Lee the five tectonic shifts reshaping business, why 68% of the world already earns without a j...

Fewer than 1 in 10 performance reviews end with both people walking away glad it happened. Lee Benson stopped running them years ago. In this episode, Lee breaks down the performance snapshot, the replacement he's used across eight companies: three clear goals per person, expectations defined from day one, and the review itself done in front of the whole team. It sounds uncomfortable. He&apos...

Lee Benson has built eight companies from scratch. In this solo episode, he shares the framework that's run through all of them: holistic value creation, built on three buckets, material, emotional energy, and connectedness. His core argument is that emotional energy is the scarcest commodity on the planet, and the most overlooked lever in leadership. Lee explains why the leaders who delibera...

Marty Cagan has spent 45 years building technology-powered products and coaching the companies everyone else copies, Amazon, Netflix, Nvidia. His books are the closest thing product management has to a bible. In this conversation with Lee, he explains why 85% of products still fail in the market, and why AI is making that worse, not better. The two get into the distinction that separates the best...

Most CEO peer groups work brilliantly for about six months to two years. Then they quietly stop. Lee's been in these rooms for over 40 years, Vistage, YPO, EO, all of them. The pattern's always the same. The groups get too big. Nobody knows enough about each other's businesses to get past the surface. Process takes over, and the problem a CEO actually brings to the room is usually a...

Every business problem is a human problem. The companies that win are the ones that learn to decode it. In this episode of Show Your Value, Lee Benson sits down with Johanna Faigelman, anthropologist and founder and CEO of Human Branding, a global consultancy trusted by Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé, Visa, and Logitech. She's spent 25 years studying why humans actually do what they do, and sh...

What if you could multiply the value of your business without adding a single dollar of new revenue? In this episode of Show Your Value, Lee Benson sits down with Alex Osterwalder, the mind behind the Business Model Canvas and one of the most influential business thinkers alive, to unpack the part of business most leaders quietly ignore: the business model itself. Alex explains why the best compan...

Bryan Clayton scaled a landscaping company to eight figures, sold it into a private-equity rollup, then built GreenPal into an app used by roughly 300,000 people a week, all without a coding background. He sits down with Lee Benson to argue that AI isn't going to erase jobs, it's going to erase the meaningless busywork inside them, and that the people who refuse to retool are the ones wh...

Today, we explore the art of value creation across material, emotional, and spiritual buckets with our special guest, Colin C. Campbell. Colin is a serial entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience building and scaling internet companies that have collectively reached a valuation of nearly a billion dollars. He is also the Amazon number one best-selling author of Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat.: Se...

What if the success you worked so hard to build is the very thing making you feel stuck? In this episode of Show Your Value , Lee Benson sits down with Whitney Johnson , bestselling author of Smart Growth and one of the leading voices on personal disruption, growth, and leadership. Whitney explains why high achievers often become restless after reaching mastery, why starting something new feels so...

Did you know that 70% of men report feeling deeply lonely, and over 85% say they don’t have a single "3 a.m. friend" they could call in a true emergency? In this episode of Show Your Value , Lee Benson sits down with Larry Hagner, founder of The Dad Edge, author, and host of a 1,500+ episode podcast movement. Larry shares his powerful journey from a chaotic, broken childhood to breaking...

Businesses do not die. Founders quit. In this masterclass, we pulled twenty of the most impactful moments from seven incredible guests and packed them into one honest episode.  This is the unvarnished truth on what it actually takes to scale a company, lead through deliberate discomfort, and avoid the traps that destroy CEOs. You will learn why high-performing teams actually report more mistakes. ...