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Jackson MillerJumpstart Episode 6: Jackson Miller

  • Jackson Miller is founder and CEO of Bizen.
  • Bizen, founded in Sept 2010, provides intelligence for franchises and restaurants using their POS sales.
  • Jackson is a learner and explorer who has always had side projects.
  • His first business was in 2000.
  • In 2007 he decided to cut the chord and go for it full time.
  • He owns two retail stores in Nashville, TN., called Plato’s Closet. The stores provide passive income to feed his family.
  • Best growth path is to do his own thing.
  • He meets with a peer group regularly who inspire him.
  • Inspiration also comes from his father who is a partner in Plato’s Closet.
  • You can change generations of your family through entrepreneurship.
  • entrepreneurs mostly begin by making jobs for themselves, this can result in also creating jobs for their entire families.
  • Jackson subscribes to Hacker News for great articles on being a startup CEO, and how to best succeed at entrepreneurship, news.ycombinor.com. Hacker News was started by Paul Graham and Y Combinator. It’s an incredible resource for startup entrepreneurs.
  • Contact Jackson at Bizen.com, as Jaxn on social networks, or email him at jackson AT bizen DOT com.

Jackson’s 3 tips every entrepreneur needs to know

    1. Just get started. Quit waiting around.
    2. Try to track everything. You don’t know what works unless you’re tracking the success or failure of it.
    3. Surround yourself with the best people you can.

Bonus. Push yourself out of your comfort zone.

Please SUBSCRIBE to the podcast in iTunes, so you’ll get new episodes as they are available.

Jumpstart theme song “DLDN Instrumental (ft. Onlymeith, Mellotroniac)” by: St. Paul from ccMixter.

TRANSCRIPT

Dave: Welcome to Jumpstart. I’m your host, Dave Delaney. My guest today is Jackson Miller, founder and CEO of Bizen. Hey Jackson, how are you doing?

Jackson: Hey Dave, I’m doing great. Thanks for having me.

Dave: Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for joining me. Tell me a bit about Bizen. What is it that you guys do?

Jackson: Bizen provides better intelligence for franchises and restaurants. It’s an online dashboard tool that connects with your point of sales system and will allow you to see your key performance indicators as well as receive text messages when certain things happen in your business.

Dave: That’s great. How long have you guys been around now?

Jackson: I founded Bizen in September 2010.

Dave: And going strong.

Jackson: Yes, yes, it’s been, it’s been a very fast journey.

Dave: Yeah.

Jackson: But yeah, it’s going great.

Dave: Awesome! What point in your career personally did the entrepreneurial bug bite you? When did you realize you needed, you needed to do it alone, or not alone necessarily but at least do it for yourself?

Jackson: Well I’m a, I’m a learner and explorer. So I always had side projects. But the first, the first actual business was in 2000. So most of my professional career, I guess has had an entrepreneurial slant to it. It was in 2007 that I finally had enough courage to just cut the core and go for it full time.

Dave: What gave you the courage? Was it somebody that inspired you or different business or just …

Jackson: So I have two retail stores called Plato’s Closet that I’m a partner in…

Dave: Right.

Jackson: And a couple of other people. So part of it was that there was enough, mostly passive income to help me feel comfortable to feed the family.

Dave: Right.

Jackson: So that was a big part of it. But also it just seems that, you know, as you look at your growth path in your career that the best growth path for me is to do my own thing.

Dave: Uh-hmmm… And who inspires you?

Jackson: You know I have a peer group that I’ve been meeting with for a couple of years. And the guys in that are a big inspiration to me. I guess I feel I just keep my inspiration close to home, if you like my peer group and my father.

Dave: Right. What does your father do, out of curiosity?

Jackson: Well, he and I are partners in the Plato’s Closets. But he’s also just have sort of a self directed, high growth entrepreneurial career path even though a lot of what I was working for (Inaudible – 02:53) university.

Dave: It’s nice to hear family inspiration for sure. I know a lot of people are inspired to obviously as you said make a living and make sure your family are provided for. But I haven’t heard in this show so far anybody really mentioned, you know, their parents or siblings or someone that have inspired them to do this. So that’s pretty neat.

Jackson: So actually, a really interesting thing about entrepreneurship is that I think you can change generations of your family through entrepreneurship. You know I know a lot of people who grew up in an entrepreneurial family carry that mantle and so you know they say, sometimes that an entrepreneur is mostly creating a job for themselves. They can also be creating jobs for the entire family. So, I’ll be really interested to see what my kids will do if they sort of follow in this path.

Dave: You know as a dad of two young kids that’s really, and something I hadn’t considered with entrepreneurship is going in alone just you know not just more but certainly as a great side effect of inspiring your own kids which is, which is, yeah it’s really neat. Are there any blogs or websites that you visit, you know, daily or strapped to their feet that you find are important for entrepreneurs to subscribe to?

Jackson: You know, I actually, I read Hacker News.

Dave: Right.

Jackson: And for me that sort of my feed reader, it’s not subscribed into one particular RSS feed. It’s sort of curated, a curated feed almost.

Dave: Interesting.

Jackson: And I just sort of scheme titles for things that are relevant to what’s going on now that look super interesting. There’s not a lot of link bait there necessarily.

Dave: Right.

Jackson: And there’s been a lot of really great articles on being a start up CEO and you know, how you are supposed, you know, how to best succeed in that, which is a lot of what I’ve been doing lately. So it’s an incredible resource since when I’m dealing with a technical problem, there’s an answer with what I’m dealing with. And so with entrepreneurial problems, there seems to be answers. So it’s a community of likeminded people. Hacker News is available at news.ycombinator.com.

Dave: Okay.

Jackson: It’s from the, it will start with a hologram and the Ycombinator sort of seed fund incubation program.

Dave: Right.

Jackson: As a way for the nth, for those companies to communicate but it’s open to everyone and it just has a lot of really great start up entrepreneurs which is big.

Dave: That’s great. That’s really cool. I’ll definitely leave a note, a link in the Show Notes to this podcast as well so people can find that easily. What three tips would you offer, any entrepreneur, you know, could be someone seasoned and doing it a long time, doing it for themselves a long time or maybe somebody just starting out.

Jackson: I think that the number one thing is to just get started and quit waiting around. I guess my second tip is to try and track everything. I mean obviously that’s the nature of my business is…

Dave: Correct….

Jackson: – is watching your key analytics. But I’m a firm believer that you don’t know what works unless you’re tracking success or failure of it.

Dave: Uh-huh…

Jackson: And then tip number three, surround yourself with the absolute best people that you can and stretch yourself out of your comfort zone. Maybe that’s two more tips but…

Dave: Oh, it’s a bonus, a bonus tip.

Jackson: That’s right, a bonus tip to push yourself out of your comfort zone.

Dave: Right.

Jackson: But I’ve been really forced to hire some people and found some of them are much better at doing their job than I would be and really pushes me harder and faster which is… which is really great.

Dave: Yeah.

Jackson: So surround yourself with excellence.

Dave: I would love for you to share how people can get a hold of you, maybe learn more about Bizen and what you’re up to.

Jackson: Sure. We just bought Bizen.com, B-I-Z-E-N dot com, which is a really great domain name I think.

Dave: Yeah.

Jackson: Yeah…

Dave: That’s great.

Jackson: And then you can find me individually on JAX and pretty much everywhere on the internet, Twitter or wherever, and my email address is Jackson@bizen.com

Dave: Cool. Well thank you so much for taking the time this morning. I appreciate it.

Jackson: Great. Thank you, Dave. I appreciate the opportunity.

Dave: Thanks.

Jackson: Bye

Extro: (Music Playing) For show notes, links discussed in today’s podcast, and much more, visit jumpstartpodcast.com. Thanks for listening. (Music)

Posted on April 24, 2011

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