Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2022 i Entrepreneur Magazine

Look up from your office desk, and there’s a lamb gamboling by in a diaper … Uh, are you dreaming? Not if you’re working at FarmHouse Fresh. The multinational botanical skin-care company, which launched 17 years ago from Shannon McLinden’s kitchen sink (where she made its first foot scrub), did $40 million in retail sales last year with products in thousands of spas, salons, and resort hotels. But the staff is equally inspired by “colleagues” like Flower (that’s the lamb’s name), whom employees have been bottle-feeding after his mother rejected him. FarmHouse Fresh didn’t originally intend to run an actual farm. But that changed 10 years ago, when McLinden and her sisterin-law Delia McLinden, who serves as vice president of sales and business development, took part in a common practice:…

Research has found that when you lean even a few inches forward, it activates a specific part of your brain that is action-oriented,” Van Edwards says. (Study citation: See page 48, study No. 1.) Why? Leaning is often a precursor to action: If we want to touch something or see something better, for example, we lean toward it. So if you want to show someone you’re engaged, lean forward when they’re talking. “This shows them, ‘I respect what you’re saying so much, I am ready to take action,’” she says. Likewise, if you’re feeling tired or disengaged from your work, physically lean toward your computer or book. “It will wake your brain up. ”When we step backward or lean away from someone, we’re usually signaling that we don’t like something…

As much as Kathryn Berta enjoyed living in Boston and working for a startup, one of her biggest joys was traveling elsewhere. She and her husband, Alan, would pack up their camping gear and road-trip to different Kampgrounds of America sites around the country. During one trip, a campground owner jokingly offered to sell them the business. Berta laughed it off, but it sparked something in her. She couldn’t shake the idea. The couple started actively looking for campgrounds in 2017, and in 2019 they purchased one of KOA’s 500-plus campgrounds in East Dummerston, VT. Their decision surprised many of her family members and friends, especially since the couple bought a franchise before they’d even owned a home. But three years into the adventure, 31-year-old Berta likes the flexibility that…

What do a dating app, Uber, a nightclub, and Airbnb all have in common? “If your customers come to this product, and there aren’t enough other people around, then they’re just going to bounce,” says Andrew Chen, a general partner at the high-profile Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, who sits on the boards of Clubhouse, Substack, and a dozen other buzzy tech startups. These companies require what’s called a network effect: They become more valuable as more people use them. (After all, nobody hangs out at an empty club.) That means founders need to attract an active and connected base of users quickly, or they may fail to attract anyone at all. This isn’t easy, but it is possible—and one strategy to make it happen applies to any business…

“WE LOOKED AT EVERY OTHER FUNCTION IN THE BUSINESS, AND WE SAID, ‘OK, HOW CAN WE DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY?’ ” One day in 2005, Olivier Bernhard, a superstar athlete sponsored by Nike, got a call from a stranger asking for his shoes. “Do me a favor and send them to me,” the man said. He was an engineer. “I’ll put something on them, and you go run.” Bernhard, a duathlon world champion and six-time Ironman winner, is famous in Switzerland, where he grew up running in the mountains. He’s also a performance junkie; he loves tinkering and pushing to find an edge. Intrigued by the call, he mailed off a pair of his Nikes. “I got my Swoosh shoes back with cut-up garden-hose pieces on the bottom,” Bernhard says with…

Mad Science was looking for a mad scientist. In 2013, the brand, which runs educational science programs for kids, wanted to shake things up. The company needed a new leader, and it turned to Shafik Mina, who seemed like an unusual choice at the time: He’d spent the past four years as the company’s lawyer, and the only businesses he’d run were a catering company and a wholesale bakery back in the ’90s. But he believed he knew what Mad Science needed to stay relevant—and he was right. Nearly a decade later, Mina is the president of two brands—Crayola Imagine Arts Academy and Mad Science—and the CEO of their parent company, 2inspire. Overseeing Mad Science’s 133 units and Crayola Imagine Arts Academy’s 24 units has been no small challenge. However,…

The franchising model is built for growth, and nothing during the past two years has altered that fact. Despite numerous unforeseen challenges, many franchise companies have managed to keep on growing by dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of units a year. In fact, the brands in our annual list of the fastest-growing franchises—which you’ll find on the following pages—represent a grand total of 20,882 net new units added in one year. The companies on this list have innovated, acquired, and hustled their ways through the last year to make sure their brands have not just survived the pandemic, but thrived and grown. Their ranking order is based on their total systemwide unit growth—that includes U.S. and international franchises, as well as company-owned units—from July 31, 2020, to July 31, 2021,…

Everyone makes decisions. But entrepreneurs have an especially challenging time of it because so often we must make decisions based on incomplete, inconclusive, and often contradictory data. In my four-decade career as an entrepreneur, I have learned a few things about how to make those decisions, including the most important thing of all: Just make a decision. It may sound trite, but it’s also just plain true. When so much feels like it’s on the line, it’s easy to become paralyzed, unable to choose which direction to take. But even a wrong decision is better than no decision because at the very least, by implementing a wrong decision you’ll learn a little more about the problem you’re trying to solve, making it easier to know which way to go next…

Q I can’t deliver for my customers, but it’s not my fault! What now? —LISA, MISSOULA, MT PLANS AND STRATEGY are great … when they work. But if the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that plans are made to be disrupted. Running a business in unpredictable times can feel debilitating. Any problems outside of your control, like supply-chain issues, are extremely frustrating. But businesses that survive and thrive know that a customer’s frustration is both a stressor and an opportunity. In his best-selling book, The Obstacle Is the Way, author Ryan Holiday shares how stoic philosophy teaches, “What stands in the way becomes the way.” For you, this means reframing unfortunate circumstances as a way to improve your business. First, assess the opportunity and determine if you should…

Vanessa Van Edwards nods at me. I nod back. Why did we just do that? “Our cues are contagious in a good way,” she says. “Because they create a cue cycle.” Van Edwards geeks out on these things. She is, in her words, “a recovering awkward person” who has built a career out of studying human behavior. Now, through her company Science of People, she teaches introverts and ambiverts how to connect with others and succeed. Her new book, Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication, examines the little signals that we send to each other—and how, by knowing how to trigger and use those signals, people can take more control of their lives. Which brings us back to the cue cycle. The result of a phenomenon called mirroring,…

Successful people, and successful companies, tend to follow a similar path: The changes they make from year to year seem orderly, but over decades, the changes can take on an unexpected, nonlinear shape. For example, I began my career as an entrylevel analyst at Deloitte. Now I run a thriving growth-coaching business. The leap directly from one to the other seems absurd, and looking back, I couldn’t have foreseen or planned it. But broken down into smaller steps, it makes sense: One job led to another, and an opportunity here created a logical new opportunity there. This is the magic of uncertainty: Our paths are forged in satisfying but unknowable ways. But it can be hard to know what to do with this knowledge—because nobody likes to feel adrift, and…

Here’s a situation familiar to anyone in franchising: You (or someone in your sales team) are in touch with a potential customer. Maybe you’re a franchisee trying to sell them a product. Maybe you’re a franchisor trying to sell a franchise. Either way, you’re in touch and the prospect seems interested—but then they disappear. You’ve been ghosted. And you’re left asking: Why? I’ve been involved in franchising since 1994, am now a coach to franchise executives, and have seen this problem repeatedly. Here it is: You lost control of the sales process. That’s an easy mistake to make, particularly given our bounty of modern communication tools. You might think that digital tools make sales easier, but it’s often the opposite. Technology has shifted the control to buyers, and it allows…