Entrepreneurship influencers are all over social media today. These people sell the dream of entrepreneurship, encouraging people to quit the 9-to-5 lifestyle and make the jump to starting their own business. They paint a glamorous picture of being an entrepreneur, complete with luxury cars, designer apparel, and expensive trips overseas. However, what most of these entrepreneurship influencers don't show are the sleepless nights and the huge amounts of stress and hardship entrepreneurs need to endure to be able to get their businesses off the ground.
Jasan R. Julius, the founder of Double J Franchising and creator of the Coffee Junkiez and Pizza Junkiez brands, has experienced these numerous in the 19 years since he started his business, making him qualified to speak about how entrepreneurship isn't for everyone.
Born to a blue-collar background, Jasan first entered the workforce at age 14, working 40 hours a week in the food industry. When he was 19, he joined a major American automaker, spending almost 14 years with the company. Towards the end of his career there, he was elected as a union representative. However, tragedy struck, as he lost one of his sons to cancer.
"I started Coffee Junkiez six months after my son died in 2005, to give my brain something to latch onto so that I didn't wallow in grief," Jasan says. "After about eight years of mistakes and trials and tribulations, I wanted to take all of that that I had learned and apply it to a new brand, so I created Pizza Junkiez in 2014. Pizza Junkiez is now 10 years old, so I have been successful in creating two brands from scratch and getting them both across the 10-year mark, which I believe is the milestone for being a veteran entrepreneur."
According to Jasan, the pains he underwent in making businesses that lasted more than a decade convinced him that entrepreneurship is a fool's errand, especially with 90% of startups failing. He believes that the glamorous image being presented on the internet has distracted people, hyping them up on the fancy things yet setting them up for failure. And when the business fails, this leaves a trail of misery and financial destruction in its path, with aspiring entrepreneurs often left deep in debt and their employees out of their jobs.
"If an entrepreneur builds a million-dollar business, they're not any further down the road than a regular employee making $100,000 a year," Jasan says. "The entrepreneur that actually makes it worth their entrepreneurial journey is shooting for over 5 million dollars in annual recurring revenue – and only around 1% achieve that. That's why I say it's a fool's errand because only 1% actually get to that point where all of that pain, all of that sacrifice, all of that pressure that you tolerate actually becomes worth it. I believe that people can live more fulfilling and more successful lives if they pursue leadership development rather than entrepreneurial development. When I say that my mission is to cut the failure rate of entrepreneurship in half, it means that half of them never should have tried. I'm not trying to crush people's dreams, I'm encouraging deep internal analysis before you take the deep plunge into the relentless abyss that is entrepreneurship."
Whenever a person needs to determine whether they are cut out for entrepreneurship, Jasan says they need to ask themselves three things: 'How do you feel about anxiety?' "How do you feel about stress?', and 'How do you feel about pressure?'
He says that these three are constants in entrepreneurship, are most likely to paralyze people and that this paralysis is one of the top killers of businesses. He also adds that people pleasers, who don't know how to tell other people 'no', have no place being entrepreneurs.
Two years after founding Pizza Junkiez, Jasan merged the two under one roof, founding Double J Franchising, seeking to take his two successful brands nationwide. According to Jasan, one of the biggest reasons new businesses fail is the "dummy tax", or the losses incurred by trial and error in building the branding, systems, and processes. When franchising a business, the franchisee is saved from the dummy tax, as they are executing an already-established brand and system.
Jasan talks about his experiences of entrepreneurship through his podcast and a book that he is publishing soon, titled Straitjacket or Handcuffs.
"The title of my book comes from the fact that the only reason I succeeded was that every day, I told myself that the only way I'm not taking a step forward is if I were placed in a straitjacket or handcuffs," Jasan says. "If I kept myself out of a padded room or jail, then I could accomplish anything. The dummy tax led me against so many brick walls that told me to stop, but I was prepared to barrel through and bust down those brick walls every day."
