Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2024 i Entrepreneur Magazine

WHEN THINGS go wrong, ask yourself this question: Did I just run an accidental experiment? The answer might be yes. And once you realize this, you’ll feel a lot better. Because here’s the thing: Mistakes suck. But the “accidental experiment” concept completely reframes them. It gives you something to ponder, explore, and learn from. I stumbled into this idea recently after messing something up and feeling awful—until a friend helped me see the benefits of disaster. Here was the scene of the failure. I’d organized a webinar for some of my newsletter subscribers (join at jasonfeifer.com/newsletter). My friend Richelle DeVoe was hosting; she’s a consumer psychology expert, and was teaching the art of interviewing customers. Lots of planning went into this, and we met on Zoom for a 60-minute call.…

Maybe we don’t even need salespeople. As Molly He prepared to launch her company’s first product, that thought actually crossed her mind. “We believed it would sell itself,” she admits. He and two cofounders had created a startup called Element Biosciences, which made a DNA sequencer positioned to be cheaper and better than anything on the market. Why wouldn’t everyone buy this? they thought. And at first, when they released it in 2022, it really did sell itself. “Then reality hit,” says He. Sales slowed to a trickle. By that moment in her life, she’d already solved more than your average person’s worth of challenges. She’d grown up in the destitute boondocks of China, made her way to Los Angeles with $20 in her pocket, and rose to the top…

1/The sounds of nostalgia. Here’s a Lego set for music lovers of a certain age—and the centerpiece of your next office party. It’s called Retro Radio [$100; lego.com], a 13-by-9-inch, 906-piece set that plays actual tunes. How it works: The left and right knobs control a sound brick inside, which produces radio-like audio: a baseball game, country music, DJs, old-timey radio ads, and of course, static. But you can also slip your smartphone into the Retro Radio’s back, so that it blasts more modern audio through the radio’s front, open grill. Your 2024 podcast never sounded more timeless. 2/Chilly drinks, sans ice. Leave the ice in the freezer! The 28L Dometic CFX2 [$600; dometic.com] chills up to 36 cans with a built-in refrigerant and compressor. Plug it in on your…

The franchise world can be an extremely competitive one, with thousands of brands in a wide variety of industries vying for both franchisees and customers. So what does it take to be the leading franchise brand in any given industry, from car washes to childcare, pizza to pest control? Our annual Best of the Best list, comprised of the franchisors that ranked at the top of their industry categories in the 2024 Franchise 500, might just hold some clues. More than 1,300 franchises applied for this year’s Franchise 500 ranking, and were then evaluated and scored based on more than 150 data points in the areas of costs and fees, system size and growth, franchisee support, brand strength, and financial strength and stability. The 500 top-scoring companies became the Franchise…

I spent 14 years at Google and YouTube—long enough to watch those companies go from scrappy upstarts to careful giants. I always prided myself on being quick to act and adapt, but by the end of my time in Big Tech, these traits weren’t always seen as positive. We typically spent months, even years, building out commercialization strategies—getting customer feedback and buy-in across the organization before executing. Often, managers told me to slow down. So when I left Big Tech in 2021 to found my software company, Digiphy, I thought I was ready. In retrospect, I had no idea. I knew startups moved fast, but I didn’t realize how fast. At Google, my “move fast” mentality still allowed for strategic deliberations and data-driven decisions over several months. As a startup,…

Here’s the most important question a company can ask, according to a leading patent attorney: Do we anticipate others will also use this in the future? This question is helpful because it reframes the way we think about patents, which can unlock many millions of dollars. “Companies looking to achieve the greatest success understand that patents are their greatest asset,” says Keegan Caldwell, founder of Caldwell, a corporate law firm that specializes in patents and intellectual property. According to new data from PitchBook, there’s a compelling connection between patents and earnings. For example, between 2011 and 2020, in the pre-money stage, companies with patents received 93.2% higher valuations than those without. When companies with patents are acquired, their median exit value is 154.9% higher. Between 2011 and 2022, VC exits…

Whether you’re guessing which style of bra will sell faster or which job candidate will thrive at your company, AI can help with that. There are countless ways to use artificial intelligence at your business—so many, in fact, that the possibilities can be overwhelming. That’s why we’re starting with the basics. Here’s how seven very different companies are using AI to help tackle essential problems that most businesses experience. AI helps with recruiting. Recruiting used to be a major pain point for Barge Design Solutions, an engineering and architecture firm based in Nashville, Tennessee. “There’s never been such a thing as a people pipeline,” CEO Bob Higgins says. “We don’t have 10 people waiting for every job we post—we have to go find them.” Then Higgins wondered if AI could…

Early on in elementary school, Maria Washington’s son was struggling to sit still and pay attention. “His teachers wrote him off,” she says. “They said he’s not capable of this, or this, or this. They were telling me he wouldn’t amount to anything.” But the Washington family disagreed. Maria’s husband, Aaron—her son’s stepfather, and a former adjunct chemistry professor at the University of South Carolina—started tutoring the boy. They soon discovered that he learned better with visual prompts, so they tailored a plan to his needs. By the end of fifth grade, “My son’s teacher said he should move into general education classes,” Maria says. “He finished with all A’s.” So when the Washingtons decided to start a business, it was Aaron’s success with tutoring Maria’s son that drew them…

Kenny Clark was looking for a failure. In 2014, the lifelong Texan decided he wanted to buy a Minuteman Press franchise because he liked the business: It was closed on weekends, required skilled workers (versus high school kids that come and go), and offered a royalty cap. But locations were expensive. Opening a new one could cost him more than $200,000, and he realized the demographics near his home just didn’t support it. So Clark had a different idea: What if he bought a failing Minuteman Press location on the cheap, then turned it around? This strategy is often overlooked in franchising, where the main focus is on new units. But there’s plenty of supply. At any given time, according to the industry experts we talked to, an estimated 10%…

From a young age, I collected role models. In school, as a teenager, I tried to channel Beyoncé. In the working world, after my first big promotion in retail operations, I paid close attention to our female executives. By watching and emulating others—especially women of color who looked or sounded like me—I gained confidence in my own abilities. But when I started my own company, my pool of potential role models shrunk. Only 2.1% of venture capital goes to women-founded companies, and a small fraction of that to women of color. Who could I look up to? I wondered. Who can I emulate? I decided to create an inspiration wall in my offce, with framed photos of the role models I could see—women like Katrina Lake, Sara Blakely, Oprah, Michelle…

1/A project manager who enables innovation “Several years ago, a member of my management team convinced me we needed to hire a project manager to oversee research and development. I was reluctant; my skepticism stemmed from a lack of understanding about how critical that role was to help everyone on the team better manage their projects. Now I know how wrong I was. I don’t know how any company can be innovative without meticulous project management across the organization.” —FRANK JAKSCH, CEO, Ayana Bio 2/A CEO who handles what the founders can’t “I never thought I would hire a CEO for my own company. I had successfully guided us to 30 employees, but started to feel like that growth was coming at the expense of my own personal fulfillment. I…

Connie Goodnight runs human resources at Tank Connection, a rural Kansas company that makes liquid and dry bulk storage tanks. Five years ago, their head project manager made an unusual request: She was looking at early retirement, and wondered if she could reduce her hours gradually, instead of calling it quits on a set date. At first, Goodnight wasn’t sure it was feasible. “We employ about 350 people, and like most companies in our size range, we’re very cost-conscious,” she says. “So it was a question: Can we really do this?” Today, they have their answer: Yes, happily. Tank Connection has since worked with over 10 employees on a phased retirement plan, and Goodnight plans to jump on the bandwagon herself within the next year. Arrangements like this—known as either…

First came the hype, with people claiming that AI would do everything. Next came the fear, with people claiming that AI would replace everyone. Then came the scramble, as seemingly every company raced (often clumsily) to integrate AI into their products. And now, finally, we’ve arrived at the best part: reality. The reality is this: AI can’t do everything, it won’t replace everyone, and you cannot rush it. But you can use it—with excellent results. Because as entrepreneurs are finding out, AI is great at improving your workflow, speeding up your tasks, catching your errors, and many other applications. There’s also a wide range of useful, practical, under-the-radar, AI-powered products and services out there. That’s why we started calling entrepreneurs with a simple question: How are you using AI right…

IF you’ve ever worked a minimum wage job, you’ve surely watched a lot of training videos. Narrated training videos are a key component of Learning Management Systems, or LMS, and they’re how you learn your job. I am now ashamed to admit this, but I made a lot of those videos. I spent years in the executive suite of an international company, working as a global senior vice president of customer experience, where I directed and produced many training videos. I thought they were smart and helpful. I assumed they increased effciency. And then I left my well-paying job and became a frontline worker making $16 an hour at a big-box retailer in Florida. I spent my first two weeks watching LMS videos, which trained me on the art…