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Podcast: What to Do When Your Best-Laid Plans Turn Out Wrong In the new episode of Entrepreneur's podcast 'Problem Solvers,' we learn from a founder who reworked everything after only six months.

By Jason Feifer

GLORY Kickboxing | Instagram

Introducing our new podcast, Problem Solvers with Jason Feifer, which features business owners and CEOs who went through a crippling business problem and came out the other side happy, wealthy, and growing. Feifer, Entrepreneur magazine's editor in chief, spotlights these stories so other business can avoid the same hardships. Listen below.

What happens when your best-laid plans turn out to be wrong? You did all your homework, you lined up the right investors, you hired the right talent, you built a compelling product... and then you launch, and realize you severely miscalculated?

What do you do then?

Related: How Do You Keep Buyers and Sellers Inside Your Marketplace? (Podcast)

Well, here's the first thing you can do: You can think to yourself, "I'm in good company." Because even the best and brightest and most experienced entrepreneurs will discover that once their product actually gets out into the marketplace, everything they planned could turn out to be wrong. That's certainly what happened to Scott Ruddman when, in 2012, he launched a new kickboxing league called GLORY Sports International, with ambitious plans to make it the biggest stand-up combat league in the world.

"Six months into the process, we learned that our initial plans -- and indeed, fundamental tenets, fundamental pillars of the strategy that we were executing -- were completely wrong," he says. "And not only did we need to make adjustments; we needed to completely rethink, and rethink it fast."

Related: 22 Qualities That Make a Great Leader

GLORY is no fly-by-night operation. Ruddman has over 20 years of experience in investing, financing, and operations, founded the private equity firm Nectar Capital. He has an MBA from Harvard. He knows how to run businesses. And yet, even he got everything wrong to start.

But he fixed the problems. GLORY holds live events around the world, which are televised in 175 countries and watched by 10 to 12 million people each. And Yao Capital, which is headed up by former NBA star Yao Ming, recently invested $25 million for a minority stake in the company, and Glory is about to make a big impact in China.

So, how did Ruddman turn things around when his original plans failed? That's the story we're telling on this week's Problem Solvers.

To subscribe on iTunes, click here. Or, click play to listen below.

Thanks to our sponsor, Best Self, maker of the Self Journal. It's a notebook that travels easily, and helps users set and achieve goals, make the most of their time, and more.

Jason Feifer

Entrepreneur Staff

Editor in Chief

Jason Feifer is the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine and host of the podcast Problem Solvers. Outside of Entrepreneur, he is the author of the book Build For Tomorrow, which helps readers find new opportunities in times of change, and co-hosts the podcast Help Wanted, where he helps solve listeners' work problems. He also writes a newsletter called One Thing Better, which each week gives you one better way to build a career or company you love.

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