Problem Solvers

Nobody can see the pathway ahead of them. We’re all blind. But the people who succeed are the ones willing to walk in the dark anyway. On this episode, host Jason Feifer shares his six-step plan for success (step one: start moving!), and then talks with Gregg Clunis, host of the podcast Tiny Steps, Big Leaps, about how to find the motivation and will to take those steps.

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Namogoo is an Israeli company that solves a problem most companies don't know exist. That became quite a sales challenge: Its founders needed to get clients' attention, and then convince them to pay attention to a problem they'd been completely overlooking. Here's how they did it.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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