Author: wildgreenquest@gmail.com

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Ask “can I defend this?” at the idea stage, not after competitors show up. Score your moat honestly on a one-to-five scale and pick one action to move up a point in the next 90 days. When entrepreneurs come up with an idea, they usually start with the exciting questions: How big is the market? How fast can we grow? How much money can we make? I ask those questions too, but years of starting, scaling and exiting companies have taught me to add another one very early: Can I…

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Every growing business reaches breakpoints — the moments when a business outgrows the systems, leadership and habits that made it successful during the previous stage. Founders must shift from making every decision themselves to delegating responsibility, developing leaders, documenting processes and empowering their teams. The businesses that continue growing don’t avoid breakpoints. They recognize them, adapt to them and build the leadership, processes and accountability the next stage requires. Do you remember what it felt like when the business started gaining momentum? New customers were coming in, revenue kept climbing,…

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Incumbents don’t lose simply because startups use newer AI technology. They lose when they fail to adapt to customers’ evolving needs and leave opportunities for competitors to solve emerging problems. Regularly review customer feedback, renewal and churn calls, and unmet needs to uncover changing pain points. A strong product strategy focuses on solving the customer’s problems, not simply adding features. Companies need to build technology for adaptability and remain students of the customer’s evolving problem. I’ve sat through many conversations lately about which incumbent software categories AI-native startups are about…

Burger King is giving customers a shot at scoring a one-of-a-kind 14K gold-plated Hello Kitty figurine, but only if they can grab it with a claw. The chain’s “Golden Claw Machine” pops up at its Downey, California, location on Oct. 23 starting at 11 a.m., according to MediaPost. Players can also win a regular Hello Kitty toy. The stunt kicks off a nationwide collab with Sanrio, the Japanese company behind Hello Kitty. The new Hello Kitty and Friends King Jr. Kids’ Meal, available as of Oct. 20, comes with a collectible figurine hidden inside a mystery blind box. There are…

Key Takeaways Kelly Schultz, an antique seller by profession, operates The Great Pumpkin Farm for about seven weeks a year. Schultz had no farming experience when he bought the 85-acre property for about $650,000 in 1993. Today, the farm draws more than 100,000 visitors each fall with pumpkins, hayrides, live entertainment and other attractions. About 33 years ago, Kelly Schultz told his friends and family that he was going to open a pumpkin farm.  “Everybody laughed at me,” he said in a new interview with CNBC Make It.  The endeavor was outside Schultz’s area of expertise. He was a second-generation…

Key Takeaways Young didn’t want to spend $6 on several cups of coffee or matcha throughout the work day. She teamed up with nutritional scientists to formulate her caffeinated gummy brand Rallee. After a February relaunch, Rallee landed in nearly 2,000 Walmart locations. This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Georgia Young, a 28-year-old entrepreneur based in New York. Last year, Young was working in consulting when she started her side hustle Rallee: a line of caffeinated gummies for energy on the go. Rallee landed in 1,940 Walmart stores in eight months and is projected to bring in about $1.8 million…

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Building a great organization is a beautiful mess. It’s hard, humbling and full of lessons you would never have chosen. Make sure vision and culture come first, lead with customer experience, build resilience, don’t burn bridges, stay ahead of the curve and evolve with your organization, rather than stay stagnant. It’s a strange moment to write about what makes companies last, with global uncertainty at historically high levels and leaders being asked to make huge bets on AI, talent and where the world is going. At the same time, employees…

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared that “AGI has arrived” after OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra launch, but OpenAI itself never made that claim, and researchers call the term “jagged” rather than general. Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 post near identical scores on several benchmarks, yet produce noticeably different real world output. The gap traces back to the “harness” wrapped around the model, not the model itself. SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of Cursor shows where the real competitive fight is moving. It’s not the raw model anymore. It’s who controls the layer around…

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways A shrinking bank balance is a symptom, not the disease, so figure out what’s causing it before you try to fix it. Financing can buy you time, but it can’t repair a broken pricing model, bloated overhead or slow collections. A few months after I started working with an entrepreneur I’ll call Virginia, I discovered something in her financials that stopped me cold. Her company had been operating for four years, and during that entire time, it had never generated positive operating cash flow.Virginia didn’t seem to know that until…

Key Takeaways Steven Bartlett, host of The Diary of a CEO podcast, projects $60 million in revenue this year from the podcast alone. Bartlett’s business earns money from ads, products, subscriptions and events. He prioritizes retaining his audience over taking lucrative advertising deals. In 2017, Steven Bartlett had no college degree and no guests — just a $100 microphone and a diary. At the time, he was CEO of a marketing agency, and he turned his own diary entries about entrepreneurship into podcast episodes. Those early solo episodes, recorded at 2 a.m. at the end of the week, were the start…