This is Help Wanted, the show that makes your work work for you. I'm Jason Pfizer,

editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine.

And I'm money expert Nicole Lappin. On Tuesdays, Jason and I answer the helpline and help

callers solve their work problems. And on Thursdays, I give you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love.

And it starts now.

You know when you're trying to solve a problem and you just can't get anywhere?

You know, you're like, like okay I know what I want and I know I know the outcome and I know the direction of the solution and I just can't

get there I just I have feeling stuck. What do you do? Well, here's what I would

suggest you do. Stop trying to move forward. Move backwards because you might have gone down the wrong path without even

realizing it. Today I am going to show you how to back up and ask what I call the

earlier question and I'm going to start by showing you how I used this trick to help a big company solve a big problem.

So let's start with that big problem.

All right, I'm going to tell you a story that walks you into it.

So about two years ago, I spoke at an entrepreneur event that we had put on for franchise marketing leaders.

So those are people who run marketing inside of franchise companies.

And so I spoke at this event, but the real heart of the event were these roundtables, where

a group of franchise marketing leaders would sit around and each brought a specific problem that they were facing.

And then the group would ask them questions about it and then offer solutions.

And I was sitting next to this guy whose name was Mike Millett.

Mike was the VP of marketing for a company called Stratus Building Solutions.

They're a leading franchise in the commercial cleaning space,

which is to say that they provide janitorial services.

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