ITT 200: How to Think Like an Entrepreneur with Patrick Vlaskovits, Megan Reamer and Bret Boyd

Today’s panelists are Megan Reamer is the co-founder and CEO of Jackson’s Honest, a healthy foods company. Jackson’s Honest makes potato chips, tortilla chips, and grain free puffs all cooked in organic coconut oil. Patrick Vlaskovits is an entrepreneur and 2 time New York Times, bestselling author. His writing has been featured in the Harvard Business Review and the Wall Street Journal, and he speaks at technology conferences worldwide. And our third panelist is Bret Boyd is the CEO of Knoema, a software platform for data access and discovery. At Knoema, Bret and his team build tools to help public and private-sector organizations make better decisions with data.

During today’s episode, I’m interviewing not one, but three exceptional CEOs. This episode is a bit different than my other podcasts, because we recorded it live in front of a audience of hundreds of executives, so the style and format is slightly different than usual.

In this broadcast, Patrick, Megan, Bret and I talk about:
-How did Megan differentiate her product in a saturated marketplace
-Why a successful product usually stems from need
-How did Patrick perceive and evaluate pockets of opportunity for his business
-Where in the value chain should you focus your efforts
-In what ways did Brett implement business cycles as a founder and founder
-How do the panelists incorporate partnerships into their business
-How to conduct market research?
-What would keep someone from rolling out a new product?
-In what ways should you organize your business to profit from extreme growth
-How to think and act like an entrepreneur as a member of an organization
-When hiring, how can you find and hire employees who can drive a business and organization forward
-How do you properly measure employee performance so you know if someone is genuinely not pulling their weight

The audience Q&A is from 42:40 - 57:00.

-How does Megan think about new extremes in her business
-What has Megan done to get her business story out to consumers
-When is the right time to say yes this is a successful investment
-How can you handle personal risk and stick with your decisions
-Has Megan ever felt like she had to compromise her values as a mother or woman

#inthetrenches #tommorkes