Your Most Important Number with Lee Benson

About this episode

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…