How he got here.

Long before Ben had a business of his own, he had a front-row seat to one.

Watching his father manage his own operation, day in and day out, taught him something no classroom could: what it actually looks like to be responsible for a business, start to finish. It planted an idea early, that he didn't just want a job or a title someday, he wanted to build and run something of his own. That idea never really left.

By high school, that idea had a focus. He gravitated toward business, and started investing in stocks and learning the value of a dollar starting at age 14, well before most people think about either one.

Before any of that idea could turn into anything real, Ben spent years just working, at all kinds of jobs, across all kinds of industries, from wealth management to aerospace defense to agriculture to retail, and plenty more besides. None of it was glamorous. All of it mattered. Hard work has always been the one constant, no matter what the job was.

The moment Ben got to college, he started building, before anyone had handed him a title, a business, or even much advice. He started two ventures of his own out of his dorm room, one moderately successful, one that did not do nearly as well. Both taught him the same lesson: that he wanted to build something for himself. That instinct to build first and ask permission later has stayed with him ever since.

That instinct is what got him picked up by an early-stage consumer products startup, where he got exposed to just about every part of running a young company at once, marketing, customer support, data and analytics, and the unglamorous day-to-day of keeping a small business moving.

From there, he joined a team acquiring small software companies, and that's where things really clicked. He was seeing, firsthand, how corporate America actually works behind the scenes, how a struggling business gets diagnosed, restructured, and turned around. Get into a company that's been neglected, cut what isn't working, fix what's broken, grow what's left, and put the cash to work on the next one. It's a simple model, and it's the one Posner Group is built on.

That path eventually led to Davison Publishing Co., a 160-year-old directory publisher that needed someone willing to get hands-on and run it. Ben took the job, and founded Posner Group LLC to keep doing the same thing for more businesses like it, small, overlooked, and worth the work.