Today, entrepreneurship influencers are all over social media. These people promote entrepreneurship and encourage people to quit the 9-to-5 lifestyle and start their own businesses. They paint a glamorous image as entrepreneurs, complete with luxury cars, designer apparel, and expensive trips abroad. However, most of these entrepreneurship influencers do not reveal the sleepless nights and tremendous stress and hardship that entrepreneurs have to endure to get their businesses off the ground.
Jasan R. Julius, founder of Double J Franchising and founder of the Coffee Junkiez and Pizza Junkiez brands, has been through many of these things in the 19 years since he started his business, and he believes entrepreneurship can help anyone. But I am qualified to talk about things that I am not suited for.
Born into a blue-collar family, Jasan first entered the workforce at age 14, working 40 hours a week in the food industry. He joined the major American automaker when he was 19 years old and almost he spent 14 years with the company. Toward the end of his career there, he was elected union president. However, tragedy struck when he lost one of his sons to cancer.
“Six months after my son passed away in 2005, I started Coffee Junkiez to give my brain something to keep me from grieving,” Jasan says. “After almost eight years of mistakes, trials, and tribulations, I wanted to take everything I learned and apply it to a new brand, so I founded Pizza Junkiez in 2014. Pizza Junkiez is now celebrating its 10th anniversary. Two brands. from scratch and successfully launched both brands over a period of 10 years, which I believe is a milestone for me as a veteran entrepreneur.”
Jasan says that more than a decade of struggles starting a business convinced him that entrepreneurship was a fool’s errand, especially considering that 90 percent of startups fail. He believes that the flashy images presented on the internet distract people and get them excited about flashy things, but set them up for failure. And when businesses fail, they often leave a trail of misery and financial destruction along the way, leaving ambitious entrepreneurs deep in debt and employees unemployed.
“If an entrepreneur builds a million-dollar business, it’s the same as a full-time employee making $100,000 a year,” Jasan says. “Entrepreneurs who actually value their entrepreneurial journey aim for $5 million or more in recurring revenue per year, but only about 1% of them achieve that. I say it’s a fool’s errand because only 1% actually get to the point where it all gets done.My mission would be better if I pursued leadership development rather than entrepreneurial development. I believe that all of that pain, sacrifice, and pressure will actually be worth it, because cutting the failure rate in half means that half of entrepreneurs should never have tried. I mean, I’m not trying to crush people’s dreams. I encourage you to look deep inside before diving deep into the unforgiving abyss.”
Jasan says whenever you need to decide if entrepreneurship is for you, you should ask yourself three things: “How do you feel about anxiety?” “How do you feel about stress?” “How do you feel about pressure?”
He says these three are always important in entrepreneurship and are the most likely to paralyze people, and this paralysis is one of the biggest killers of business. He also added that people-pleasers who don’t know how to say “no” to others have no place as entrepreneurs.
Two years after founding Pizza Junkiez, Jasan combined the two brands under one roof and created Double J Franchising, looking to expand the two successful brands nationally. According to Jasan, one of the biggest reasons new businesses fail is “dummy taxes,” or losses incurred through trial and error in building branding, systems, and processes. When franchising a business, franchisees are exempt from dummy taxes because they are already running an established brand and system.
Jasan shares his entrepreneurship experiences through a podcast and an upcoming book titled Straitjacket or Handcuffs.
“The title of my book comes from the fact that the only reason I was successful was because I told myself every day that the only way to stay on my feet was to be in a straitjacket or handcuffs. ” says Jasan. . “I could accomplish anything if I kept myself away from padded rooms and prisons. The dummy tax led me up a lot of brick walls telling me to quit, but I walked through that brick wall every day. I was ready to break through and break through.” ”
