When Hal Elrod was 19 he was involved in a car accident with a drunk driver that left him with brain damage, 11 broken bones, and doctors telling him that he'd never walk again. While many people would understandably give into grief or anger or any other whirlwind of emotions that come after such a traumatic event, Elrod instead made the conscious choice to be at peace with himself.

He knew there was nothing he could control about his situation, but he could control how the situation affected him. While he accepted the fact that he might never be able to use his legs again and was at peace with it, he was also determined to find a way to walk again.

“I’m going accept the worst-case scenario, while I focus on the best case scenario.”

Three weeks later, defying all odds and expectations, he began to walk again.

Since then, he's called upon his life story and lessons he's learned along the way to become a highly sought-after motivational speaker and bestselling author of the book The Miracle Morning. Through his book, Elrod has touched the lives of millions of people with his simple philosophy and has guided them to become more productive, happier, less stressed, and at peace with themselves.

In this interview you will learn:

• How you too can start becoming a better entrepreneur, and a better person overall, every single morning
• Why the most successful people in the world take their mornings very seriously
• When to accept the worst and how to turn that into a weapon
• What your potential is and how to reach it
• What it truly means to put mind over matter and how to do it
• & much more!

Brian Scudamore of O2E brands knew all along that he wanted to be an entrepreneur. Relying on that sense of determination, he's built up a sprawling multimillion-dollar business empire, with franchises all over the world. But it all began with junk.

To be specific, it all started in a McDonalds drive-thru, with Scudamore sitting in his car trying to figure out how he would pay for college. What he saw was an old pick-up truck filled to the brim with junk, and he immediately knew that this would be his ticket to chase his entrepreneurial dream.

'A week later, I had a business hauling away junk, and that was the way into my job and a career path that's now been 27 years of pure entrepreneurial passion,' he says.

The first business he founded was 1-800-Got-Junk, which has since turned into multiple franchises all around the world and spun off into three more business in the home services niche. Altogether they generate a revenue of $250 million per year!

But it hasn't been smooth sailing over the past 27 years, with many ups and downs along the way and some valuable lessons learned. We're very lucky to learn those lessons directly from Brian today through this week's podcast episode.

In this interview you will learn:

• How to get your first round of customers within your first day of business
• The secrets to building a successful international franchise
• What the franchise business model looks like and how you can make it work for you
• Why you need to always hire for culture and fit rather than skill
• Traps and pitfalls to look out for when running such a large international conglomerate
• & much more!

On November 9, 2013, I released the first episode of the Foundr Podcast. It was with Fabio Rosati, then-CEO of Elance. To be completely honest, I wasn't quite sure what I was trying to achieve by releasing a podcast. At the time, it was just another way for us to give to our community, by releasing the audio of our interviews for free.

Fast-forward to today and I can't believe we're at our 100th episode! It's flown by and so much has changed since. But the entire time I've kept in mind this piece of advice from my friend Daniel DiPiazza:

'Keep producing content on a consistent basis every single week, keep getting next-level epic interviews, and people will come.”

He was totally right. In the years since that first episode, we've managed to become one of the top 10 podcasts for business, we have over 70,000 downloads a month, and it's done wonders for our business.

So to mark this occasion, we decided to do something a little different in this episode. Instead of me asking all the questions, I'll be the one getting interviewed for a change! My good friend Dan Norris of WP Curve took over as host, and we took a look back at how Foundr started three years ago and how far we've come since then.

I'm going to share with you the story behind Foundr, how it all started, and the strategies I used to start the company on the path it's on today. I also took a crack at some predictions about where we'll be by our 200th episode.

In this interview you will learn:

• The story behind Foundr and how it all started
• Who my biggest sources of inspiration are and how they shaped Foundr's vision
• My strategy for pitching and landing interviews with the best entrepreneurs in the world
• Why you need to focus on design if you want to be successful
• What's going on behind-the-scenes at Foundr and what's coming next!
• & much more!

As much as entrepreneurs can go on extolling the virtues of a great marketing strategy or knowing your target customer, at the end of the day, it's all about having something worth selling. No matter how great your advertising campaign may be, if you don't have something that people want to buy then you simply don't have a business.

And yet, entrepreneurs all too often tend to gloss over this fact. They'll focus on everything else, but somehow forget to question whether or not their product is a winner, or even if it's a good idea in the first place.

This is where Janna Bastow of ProdPad steps in, because she, more than anyone else in the world, knows exactly why effective product management is so instrumental to your startup's success.

For Bastow, effective product management is when you're able to find that delicate balance between what's technically feasible, valuable for the customer, and profitable for the business, and define a roadmap on that basis.

Ever since launching ProdPad in 2012, a tool that lets startup teams formally gather ideas, pick out the best ones and turn them into profitable products, Bastow has helped hundreds of startups and entrepreneurs in finding out what their perfect product is. More than anyone else, she knows how just difficult this process can be and why you shouldn't take it for granted.

In this interview you will learn:

• What a product manager is and why you need one as part of your startup
• The best way to talk to customers and figure out what they actually want
• Step-by-step instructions on how to design a product roadmap
• Why you need a user story and what it means
• How to manage a remote team as a bootstrapped startup
• & much more!