Entrepreneur Magazine July/August 2022

IMAGINE THAT you cleared your calendar of meetings, and then only added back the ones that mattered. Even better, what if you scheduled those new meetings for only the amount of time they required? You don’t need to guess the answer. Work management company Asana ran an experiment just like this. The results: Some meetings disappeared, and some 30-minute meetings shrunk to 15 minutes. In total, people saved an average of 11 hours per month—totaling three and a half workweeks per year! What can we learn from this? There’s an obvious answer, of course: We have too many meetings. But we already knew that. So here’s my bigger takeaway: There’s great value in starting from scratch. We often live our lives and do our work based on layers of precedent. We do this because…

Russ Roberts was trained to solve problems. But he has found a kind of problem he cannot solve—at least, not with the tools he was trained with. Roberts is one of the most recognizable names in economics, thanks to his popular podcast “EconTalk.” He’s currently president of Shalem College in Jerusalem and a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. This means he often thinks in numbers and systems, and to solve problems with cold logic. But when a friend asked for advice on whether to have children or not, Roberts realized that humans often grapple with what he calls “wild problems”—the big, life-changing decisions we all must make, where there is no single right answer and where outcomes are unpredictable. So how do you solve those problems? That’s what he set…

1/ Listen to the rumblings. “I keep an ear out for what questions people are asking, what studies are coming out, and what’s sparking the curiosity of the Wooden Spoon team. For example, once I started hearing rumblings of, ‘Mushrooms are having a moment,’ I upped our Mushroom Magic tincture inventory. Now the wellness industry is experiencing the ‘shroom boom,’ which is exciting because we already have a product in place.” —LAUREN HAYNES, founder, Wooden Spoon Herbs 2/ Synthesize small clues into a bigger story. “We recently launched a product called The Ice Box. It was difficult to drum up enthusiasm internally, but product development is like detective work. You find small clues and synthesize them into a story. I knew ice storage was a universal pain point for consumers, and with The Ice…

East Fork didn’t start out as an equitable workplace experiment. Its 2009 origins were more “intense, heady, craft legacy stuff,” says cofounder and CEO Connie Matisse—in part because her husband and cofounder, Alex Matisse, is the great-grandson of the impressionist painter Henri Matisse. But as the couple and their friend John Vigeland grew the pottery company into a cult-favorite, direct-to-consumer brand—complete with a viral mug—things got heated in different ways. It started in 2018, when they moved their headquarters—from a tiny North Carolina town to a larger factory in nearby Asheville. They wanted to hire a diverse staff, but also to be conscientious of what that meant in a city with extreme racial and economic disparities. “We wanted to be intentional,” Connie says. That resulted in a company-wide culture of radically…

As entrepreneurs, we’re often told to set boundaries. But that can be challenging when work and life are so intertwined—especially in the early stages of a fast-growing company. I’m the founder of Charlie Health, an intensive virtual therapy program for teens and young adults. We launched in mid-2020, as rates of depression and anxiety among youths skyrocketed. Because Charlie Health offers care to patients 24/7, we’re a first and last resource for families in need. And as the founder, I’m truly the last line of defense. If everyone else on my team is unavailable, the call goes to me—no matter the time of day or night. My friends will tell you it’s hard to hang out with me. I get calls at breakfast, during movies, on Saturday nights. Clearly, the timing of…

Fresh Prints is a thriving business that began with a very bad decision. “We bought the company pretty blind,” says Jacob Goodman. This was 10 years ago, when Goodman and his fraternity brother Josh Arbit were students at Washington University in St. Louis. At the time, Fresh Prints was a failing clothing company that sold fraternity, sorority, and college-branded merch, started by a few other students. The two friends bought it for $16,000, paying with Arbit’s bar mitzvah money. They figured it would be an education. They were right. “We didn’t know what due diligence was. And we were like, ‘Oh, are we going to have to shut this thing down right away?’” Goodman says. That’s because, within a month, they were scammed by a customer for $8,000 and owed $25,000…