Open for Business

Open For Business is a branded podcast from eBay and Gimlet Creative, about building a business from the ground up. Open For Business launches Thursday, June 16th.

What makes a successful entrepreneur? If you are one, were you born that way?

No one hires the wrong person on purpose. In this episode, we hear some hiring horror stories and about how to learn from our mistakes.

Setting your prices is harder than it sounds and making a mistake can be costly. We outline concrete steps to get to the right number, starting with one of the most incredible wins in game show history.

How do you tell your company’s story in a way that resonates with customers? In this episode, we learn marketing lessons from a failed Silicon Valley pioneer and two entrepreneurs who gained major success with minimal marketing budgets.

Immigrants to the United States make up about 13% of the U.S. population. And yet, from Silicon Valley to Main Street America, they make up a disproportionately large number of American business owners. In this episode, we explore why this is.

The gig economy is growing so fast, it might just be the future of entrepreneurship as we know it — but it is also still a work in progress. We explore its past, present, and future with two entrepreneurs who ditched the traditional idea of work to launch their own companies on gig economy platforms.

We'll be returning in March with Season Two of Open for Business, and we'd love to hear what you want us to cover. Visit ofblistener.com to share your thoughts.

From eBay and Gimlet Creative, we return with season two of Open for Business, a show about building your business from the ground up.  This season, we’re diving even deeper and exploring essential topics from financing to how to kill it at customer service to how to pivot when things don’t go as planned.

In this episode, we hear stories and lessons from two entrepreneurs who had to reinvent their companies in order to survive.

It’s easy to satisfy your customers when everything’s going well, but how do you handle it when things go wrong? We’ve got stories from small business owners who’ve learned the hard way about how to get customer service right.

Less than 1% of companies get seed money from either venture capital or angel investors. So, how do regular people find the money they need to get their businesses off the ground? We bring you stories of how three entrepreneurs did it, complete with all the nitty gritty financial details.

What happens if it all falls apart? Learn how to weather the storms of failure from two entrepreneurs who refused to give up, and have survived to tell their stories.

Recent research indicates that U.S. entrepreneurship is increasingly clustered in just a few metro areas. What can we learn from entrepreneurs outside those hubs? We hear from entrepreneurs in three very different places about how to make the most of wherever your business is located.

Every company knows what they sell. What’s harder to define sometimes is why? What motivates you beyond...money?  A great mission captures that reason behind why your business exists today. But it also leaves room for your company to aspire for more in the future. It can guide every single decision you make - whether you’re a business of one or one-thousand. In this episode we hear two very differe...

A big part of building a business is hiring and then creating a workplace culture where your team members want to stay and grow with you.