ep. 255 Why Businesses Fail w/ Jeff Fenster

Welcome back, babes, to the Scale Your Sales Podcast! Today’s episode is going to blow your mind as we take you behind the scenes of Infinity Live, featuring a powerful conversation with Jeff Fenster—serial entrepreneur, speaker, and founder of EverBowl, one of the fastest-growing franchises in America. In this candid and energizing session, Jeff breaks down how businesses truly scale, the underrated power of options, and the real reason most companies fail. This is not your average fluffy business chat—this is an unfiltered masterclass in growth, innovation, and entrepreneurial grit.

Topics Covered:

• Why options are the single most important thing in business survival
• The myth of experience: why waiting until you're “ready” is overrated
• How Jeff built EverBowl without any restaurant background—and made it thrive
• The two repeatable problems in business you must solve to scale
• How vertical integration (construction and supply chain) saved his company
• What COVID taught Jeff about staying agile and thinking in opportunities
• Why “relationship capital” is real currency for entrepreneurs
• The story behind landing EverBowl on QVC and getting 500 franchise leads
• How to build meaningful relationships by making deposits, not withdrawals
• Real talk on leadership, pivoting, and building a brand rooted in purpose

 

Companies fail and people go out of business for one reason: they run out of options. That's it. The big other mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make is thinking that they have to be bigger before they focus on scale. That is a dangerous game. Every air pilot in the world is taught that altitude is your friend. Why? Because if you have a problem in an airplane, the higher you are, the more time you have to figure it out before you hit the ground. So options come from scale. Scale comes from mitigation of problems. And so, if you run out of money, you run out of options. If I don't have any money, I can't pay my bills. If I run out of product, I can't sell product. I run out of options because I don't have product to sell, so I have to do something else. I was just trying to figure out how to stay alive and stay in business today. And I was able to do that because I had options—because we vertically integrated and solved repeatable problems before I even knew I was going to need them. And it's not that we were so brilliant. We weren't. We were just doing the things that gave us options. What tool do we have for the current issue in front of us? – Fenster

 

CONNECT WITH JEFF:

INSTAGRAM: @fensterjeff

LinkedIn: Jeff Fenster

 

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