This Entrepreneur Said Yes Too Many Times. Then He Learned to Say NoThe founder of Crown & Caliber needed help, and discovered that 'no' is the secret to success.

ByJason Feifer

Crown & Caliber

This is an episode of our podcast,Problem Solvers. Each week, an entrepreneur reveals how they overcame an unexpected problem in their business -- and were happier and more successful as a result. The show is hosted by Entrepreneur's editor in chief, Jason Feifer. Listen below, or subscribe oniTunes,Google Play,Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Entrepreneurs love to say yes. We're vision people. We're enthusiastic. We see opportunity everywhere, and we want to seize it. Yes, yes, yes!

But sometimes, yes isn't actually such a good thing. Just take it from Hamilton Powell, who founded a online ecommerce site for secondhand watches calledCrown & Caliber.

"As an inexperienced CEO, I was chasing a lot of different opportunities," he says. "Anything that was shiny, I was kind of going after."

Related:Why This Entrepreneur Broke Up With His Biggest Client

Soon his employees were calling him the "Good Idea Fairy." He was working 100-hour weeks, barely had time to see his family, was feeling lonely and stressing out his employees.

Powell knew he needed to make a change. He needed to fix how he was running the company. And above all, that meant one thing: "Essentially killing the Good Idea Fairy," he says.

That's why Powell hired a former military man as his COO, who came in with a challenging and firm philosophy: To grow the company, he'd first need to break it.

Two years later, Crown & Caliber is a very different company. It recently completed its 15,000th transaction, expects to double business in 2018 and end up with about $45 million in revenue. And how did it happen? How was the company broken for the better? In this episode ofProblem Solvers,we explore how everything started with one fatal blow: They killed the Good Idea Fairy.

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Wavy Line
Jason Feifer

Entrepreneur Staff

Editor in Chief

Jason Feifer is the editor in chief of狗万官方magazine and host of the podcastProblem Solvers. Outside of狗万官方, he is the author of the bookBuild For Tomorrow, which helps readers find new opportunities in times of change, and co-hosts the podcastHelp Wanted, where he helps solve listeners' work problems. He also writes anewslettercalled One Thing Better, which each week gives you one better way to build a career or company you love.

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