It’s the case of the mysteriously popular growler! The e-commerce company Huckberry sold tons of growlers during the holiday season—but the people who bought the growlers disappeared afterwards. They never came back to buy more products, which was very unusual for Huckberry. What was going on? The answer forced the company to rethink its entire marketing approach. (Here’s a hint: The buyers weren’t who Huckberry expected.)

What do you do when conditions change, and your business starts to fail? You could try to save the business. Or, you could “kill your business with a better business”—essentially take what you’ve learned from the failing business, and create a new one that thrives. That was the strategy employed by Adam Schwartz, who killed his t-shirt business called BustedTees with another one called TeePublic. (And “kill your business with a better business” is a direct quote from him.) On this episode, he walks us through the transition.

Be honest: What do you do when the world around you changes? Most people probably say they change along with the world... but few actually do. Most people resist. And resistance leads nowhere. That’s the big lesson of the rise of chain stores, a transformational event in American business that pitted entrepreneur against entrepreneur, and ultimately led to some big lessons in what it takes to be competitive. This episode comes to us from Pessimists Archive, another podcast hosted by Problem Solvers host Jason Feifer.

How do you get what you want—from customers, partners, investors, and more? You don’t just come out and ask for it! Instead, you focus on what THEY want, and how you can deliver it. In this episode, Mazda CMO Dino Bernacchi and host Jason Feifer (editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine) and discuss how this works, and why entrepreneurs and brands must always stay relentlessly focused on value.

It’s a classic managerial mistake: You know an employee isn't working out, and yet you give them more time. You hope—foolishly, of course!—for some magical turnaround. And in the meantime, your company suffers from that employee's bad work. This is what happened to James Heller of the startup Wrapify, but at a bigger scale. He was growing his new advertising company, and hired a sales team he thought would lead to fast growth. Instead, the team stumbled and James moved too slowly to fix the problem. On this episode, we learn what happened when James gave his employees more time... and how he finally learned to take control.

You know Smarties. It’s a classic American candy—and so classic, in fact, that its leadership became afraid to make any branding changes. As a result, decades passed and the brand looked increasingly stale. Then a new generation of leaders took over the company and had to wrestle with a big question: What’s worth changing… and what’s worth keeping the same? On this episode of Problem Solvers, Smarties co-president Liz Dee takes us through the change that’s rolling out onto stores now.

When things are going wrong, how do you know whether or not to keep going? That's the question that faced Kabir Shahani of Amperity, a company that, in its early days, missed a huge deadline and seemed unable to develop the technology it needed to thrive. Important, difficult questions had to be answered. Investors wanted to make sure their money wasn't being squandered. And in the end, Kabir learned an important lesson—both about when to keep going, and how to measure success. Episode sponsored by Shapr - https://bit.ly/2U0InkC

What’s the secret to having a great work partnership… with someone you’re also personally close to? That’s what we aimed to learn in this special conversation, in which we put two Entrepreneur readers on the phone with our March issue cover stars, the Property Brothers. We asked Drew and Jonathan Scott (better known as HGTV’s Property Brothers) to counsel the husband-and-wife duo of Dean Praetorius and Kiki Von Glinow, founders of Toast Media Group. Kiki and Dean are actively learning to refine their working relationship, and the Scotts had a lot of wisdom to offer. Check it out, and then read more about the brothers in our March, 2019 issue!

Employers often discourage their team members from having side hustles. That's an insane policy, guaranteed to drive your most ambitious and creative people out of your company. Here's a better idea: Think of flexibility as a retention strategy. On this episode of Problem Solvers, we make the business case for embracing your side-hustling employees, and then talk to Jack Taylor PR founder Jon Bier—an employer who has completely changed his view on this subject.

Numbers can be deceptive: Just because you have more customers, locations, or dollars coming in, that doesn’t necessarily mean your brand is growing strong and stable. That’s what Jill Salzman discovered with her company The Founding Moms, a collective of meet-ups and resources for mom entrepreneurs. At first, she wanted to be in every city as fast as possible. So she expanded rapidly -- and although her membership numbers were going up, her brand was falling apart. This is the story of how she stepped back and fixed it.

It’s become a truism of startup life: To grow a company, first go out and get investors. But is that true? Does every company need investment? Not really. That’s what Eric and Sasha of the men’s retailer Buck Mason discovered, after they went out to raise cash and were rejected by every investor they met. It forced them to step back and rethink who they are as a company, and how they can thrive. Their conclusion: They needed to grow smarter, not faster. And now they’re doing just that.

How do you find your first customers? It’s a question first-time founders are often flummoxed by. But Keith Krach has developed a tried-and-true strategy—starting during his days at Ariba (which sold for billions), and extending into his current time as chairman of Docusign. In this special live edition of Problem Solvers, taped at Entrepreneur Live in Los Angeles, Keith explains how to turn a company’s first customers into valuable ambassadors. (This episode originally aired 2/26/18. At the end, we catch up with Keith for an update in 2019.)

How do you turn a great idea into a great business? It’s an infinitely complex question. You have to build an infrastructure around that idea -- one that amplifies it and makes it compelling enough for someone to pay for. On this episode, we learn how Brian Kelly did just that. He turned a grueling side hustle into The Points Guy, which is now arguably the most well-recognized and influential site in the credit card world. It time, grit, and a lot of failure -- but that’s the real a recipe for success. (This episode is a replay, and originally aired 8/28/17. An update from 2019 is included at the end.)

What’s it like when your company goes viral? Take it from Kristen Tomlan, the founder and CEO of a viral cookie dough company called DŌ: “It’s terrifying.” And exhausting. And it exacerbated every weakness in her business, including staffing, supply and production. We learn how she fixed it, and harnessed the kind of huge opportunity that may have sunk others.

There are a lot of Uber-like startups out there—companies that connect customers with some set of service providers, such as cleaners, lawn care pros, or, in the case of Storyhunter, companies looking for video freelancers. But these companies all face the same danger: They're at risk of disintermediation, or being cut out of the deal. (After all, if you're a consumer and find a great cleaner through a startup, why keep using the startup? Why not work with the cleaner directly?) This is the problem Storyhunter faced, and solved. Its solution: Understand its users, and then become incredibly valuable to them in every way possible. (Original air date: 7/31/17)

IAC CEO Joey Levin told Problem Solvers host Jason Feifer that everyone -- everyone, at every level! -- feels like they're making things up as they go. On this episode, Jason dives deeper into that idea. At times when you feel intimidated, or worry you're not up to the task, or feel at a loss for the right answer, let this be your guide: It’s knowing that in actuality, nobody inherently belongs. Nobody is ready from the start. Nobody has the answer already prepared. And nobody sees you as an impostor any more than they see themselves that way.

Lauren Berger was like many solopreneurs: She'd built a one-person business called Intern Queen, and it made her a good amount of money. But it wasn't scaleable. She could only do so much. In this episode, we learn how Lauren ultimately transformed her one-woman shop into a company that can scale... and in the process, discovered a new line of work that now makes up 90% of her revenue.

In 2015, Carrie Sheffield founded a live-streaming news service called BOLD. Two years later, a pair of gigantic public media companies announced that they, too, would be launching a live-streaming news service called BOLD. In this episode, we follow what happened next... and turn to an IP lawyer to help us make sense of it all.

When the home security company SimpliSafe launched, it marketed itself entirely towards renters. After all, they were an underserved marketplace—no other home security system was made for people who rent apartments. But SimpliSafe wasn't growing as fast as its founders expected, so it dug into its customer data and discovered something surprising: Half its customers were home-owners, the people it explicitly wasn't trying to reach. Now it had a big decision to make: Does SimpliSafe keep going with renters, or change everything (including its product!) to court this new marketplace of customers?

Andy Monfried's company Lotame was thriving, but he saw trouble on the horizon: His industry was changing. Lotame was a major player in the complicated world of digital advertising, and although there was plenty of growth still to be had and plenty of money still to be made, Andy knew that his company's long-term future was going to be rocky. So he made a difficult, gut-wrenching decision. Rather than wait for the decline to come, he was going to shut down a major portion of his company now—sacrificing $30 million in revenue!—and rebuild it as a different company whose future looked brighter. This is the story of how he took such a big risk, and why it paid off.

Every entrepreneur struggles to manage their time, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal (Ret.) knows that challenge especially well. He previously commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and now oversees a 90-person consultancy called the McChrystal Group. How does a guy this busy keep on schedule? In this episode, we learn how McChrystal uses a calendar with the level of rigor only a former military general would think of.

When Joshua Tetrick founded his plant-based food company JUST, his goal was to disrupt the entire food industry—and to do that, he decided, he'd hire industry outsiders. He didn't want people with lots of food-industry experience, who'd just carry all the marketplace's old assumptions with them! But then his company began having massive problems, and losing massive amounts of money. And Joshua came to a realization: He was totally wrong about who to hire.

In this special episode, host Jason Feifer gets personal. Whenever he tells people that he wrote a novel (Mr. Nice Guy) with his wife, their reaction is always the same: "You're still married!?" To celebrate the release of the book, Jason and his wife Jennifer Miller talk about how they built a healthy working relationship while also strengthening their marriage, and what it takes for everyone else to do the same.

When Ari and Gavi started Indiewalls, a company that wanted to manage sales of art on cafe walls, they hadn't fully thought through just how difficult it would be. But that turned out to be for the better: Because they were willing to dive into this crazy industry, they were able to meet people who wanted art, understand the marketplace, and then transform into an entirely different company. This is the story of how they began with an idea that didn't work, and pivoted into one that does.

What happens when your customers are willing to use your product, but they're not willing to pay for it? Answer: Your business model may be wrong. That's what Ilir Sela learned after launching Slice, a company that helps local pizzerias sell online. He found plenty of early customers, but they weren't paying their invoices. As he dug deeper, he realized the problem wasn't them -- it was him. And he began the long process of figuring out what (and how) people were willing to pay.