Decked in snazzy fits and leather footwear with sleek smartphones, Joel Lee looked set for lifestyles seven years ago thanks to his soft corporate activity.
Yet, he felt the other.
I didn’t need to paint for someone else,” he confesses, unhappy with his life as a corporate drone. He knew this wasn’t the lifestyle he turned into meant to steer. There becomes no epiphany, no grand scheme to make thousands and thousands or trade the arena. He wanted to become his boss and start his personal, commercial enterprise, irrespective of what it was. “It ought to be any business,” he tells me, count number-of-factly. “At that point, I wanted to start and develop something out of nothing. Without a stable “Big Idea,” his choice to sell juices became more practical than anything. To Joel, each person should sell juices; the demand becomes perennial and no longer seasonal, and it wasn’t a fleeting fad like churros.
A sensible, sustainable commercial enterprise becomes essential to Joel. He had made up his thoughts: There changed into no manner, and he changed into returning to his vintage process if it failed. It had two paintings.
While putting in the hours at work, he labored on registering his new enterprise and scouting for places; however, he quickly realized that he couldn’t do each. “A lot of humans say that you can start a business while balancing a full-time activity; however, I’ve not heard a variety of success stories for such corporations. Something was given to provide.
Finding His Way
Walking far away from his stable, substantial earnings in 2013, Joel sooner or later bit the bullet. He took the plunge, sinking $ 150,000 of his financial savings from his former activity into launching Mission Juice, a cold-pressed juice bar. Every penny came directly from his bank account. “I don’t come from a wealthy family. Everything right here is self-funded, without the assistance of bank loans,”
said the younger entrepreneur. As relieved and exuberant as he felt the day he unveiled his juice bar, it changed into the beginning. The hardest hurdles had been but to return. “When you begin a business, you must be organized to lose. If you install $50,000, you must be organized to part with that money. “And if it’s your very own commercial enterprise, you may find paintings your ass off to ensure you don’t lose the $50,000. If you position your two feet into this, you must fight to make it work.
Unable to have the funds for additional personnel, Joel turned into the primary and frequently simplest employee. Working each shift, from dawn to nightfall, from Monday to Saturday, Joel fought to keep his F&B enterprise afloat. Even on Sundays, he had no time to rest, sacrificing his personal life to put together special orders and activities. One saw him operating until 3 a.m. for two days
straight to serve many juice bottles for a client event. Surviving on simply two hours of sleep each day, he struggled to hold himself conscious at some stage. Besides cutting again on the flowery clothes and creature comforts, he needed to move unpaid at instances as properly. Holidays have become nonexistent.
It changed into the fee for being in the price of his existence.
Gradually, matters began looking up. After all of the difficult work, Mission Juice subsequently broke even in its first 12 months. The humble juice bar in Singapore started gaining greater traction as bigger brands like Disney and L’Occitane approached Joel for non-public activities. Everything peaked with the juice cleanse craze, a wild duration where it felt like the cell phone was ringing off the hook each short while with a new order. It seemed like Mission Juice had a big earnings ability, with a strong call for even without juice advertising. Yet, simply as the enterprise blossomed, Joel got complacent and paid for it with a loss.
The Blunder
Eager to increase the brand and department into salads, Joel rode on the recognition of juice cleanses and opened a 2D outlet—a hasty choice he made four years ago that cost him $ 2,000. “[The success] got to me, and I rushed into starting a 2nd outlet without considering the options,” he recalls. “I was given a piece too adventurous. I desired to attempt something exceptional.” It closed after handiest a year and a half. In hindsight, Joel admits he knew nothing about cooking. Salads became out to be harder to grasp than juices. Not to say, he had entirely long passed towards his very own precept of practicality using chasing the juice cleanse fad in Singapore.
