This is Yang Zhen, the chairman of Jiajia Food Group, who resigned from his hometown Chinese teacher and started his business all the way to the "King of China Soy Sauce" with a worth of tens of billions. This is his understanding of his struggle for many years.
The desire in his heart prompted him to choose to resign
Like many successful entrepreneurs, Yang Zhen was born in a poor family. In 1962, he was born in a rural family with many brothers and sisters in Ningxiang, Hunan. My father died when I was a child, and my two sisters got married early because of their family situation. My mother dragged their three brothers with difficulty. In Yang Zhen's heart, his greatest wish is to make more money in the future and let his family live a good life.
Although his family was in difficulties, it didn't stop him from dropping out of school. The whole family tried their best to provide him with education, hoping that a college student would come out of his family in the future and lead his family to change the fate of poverty.
after graduating from the Chinese Department of Yiyang Normal University, Yang Zhen was assigned to Ningxiang Middle School as a Chinese teacher. Although the teacher is an iron rice bowl, but the monthly salary is only 1 yuan, for Yang Zhen, the desire to change the family's economic situation will be in the foreseeable future. Yang Zhen, unwilling to live here all his life, resolutely chose to resign and start a business after being a Chinese teacher for two years.
In fact, his original idea was very simple, that is, to start a business and make more money, to take his mother to the city instead of going to the fields to do farm work, and to marry his two brothers.
whimsy on the road to starting a business
In the first 1 years of starting a business, Yang Zhen successively carried out special breeding, food processing, promotion of invisible screen window technology, etc. These projects made money and lost money. Of course, Yang Zhen also earned the first bucket of gold in his life and became the first batch of "ten thousand households" in Ningxiang.
Running around all day for starting a business is naturally much harder than being a Chinese teacher, and the income is not fixed, but these can bring people hope and are more exciting than the same life. Yang Zhen likes this different life challenge.
In his spare time, Yang Zhen likes cooking. When he was pouring soy sauce in a stir-fry, he found that the bottle cap had to be punctured with a sharp tool before the soy sauce could be poured out, and the soy sauce might get dirty when it flowed back into the bottle, which could bring some troubles to the cooks.
So, Yang Zhen began to wonder if he could design a soy sauce bottle cap with a pull ring and an orifice, which would be convenient for pouring soy sauce without getting his hands dirty.
Yang Zhen really invented such a bottle cap on his own. He was so excited that he hoped that some enterprises would be willing to use the bottle cap, and the patent transfer fee would soon change the face of his family. Yang Zhen took this bottle cap to negotiate with several soy sauce factories in Hunan, and wanted to transfer the patent of the bottle cap at a price of 5, yuan. Unfortunately, no enterprise agreed to use it.
A creative bottle cap was born in a soy sauce factory
What can I do? Yang Zhen firmly believed that the bottle cap he invented was a good thing. He made a bold decision to start his own soy sauce factory and put the bottle cap with pull ring and orifice in his own enterprise.
Although Yang Zhen has started his business for many years and has experienced different types of projects, he knows nothing about making soy sauce. It is impossible to produce soy sauce with a bottle cap.
This can't beat Yang Zhen. He started thinking for himself again. First, I spent two months in the library looking up information, and then repeated experiments at home. As a result, I found out the brewing process of soy sauce without a teacher.
In p>1996, Yang Zhen established Jiajia Food Factory in Ningxiang, Hunan. Soy sauce factory has been established, and it is the first to use the bottle cap with pull ring and orifice. The next step is how to open the market, let people know the brand and buy Jiajia soy sauce.
Big marketing strategy made soy sauce popular
From the whole process that Jiajia soy sauce was quickly known by consumers and entered the national market, it was largely due to Yang Zhen's familiarity with and emphasis on product marketing and brand promotion, and he did not take the usual path.
Advertising, which was never done by soy sauce enterprises at that time, made Yang Zhen the first person to eat crabs. The advertising effect made Gaga soy sauce quickly known to the common people.
Wencui Newspaper was the largest newspaper in Hunan Province at that time, with a monthly circulation of several million copies. Before Jiajia Soy Sauce attracted investment, Yang Zhen chose to publish an advertisement in Wencui Newspaper, and published several issues. The advertisement content was only "Wheat+Soybean =?" The reader read the newspaper and couldn't guess what it was at all. Such suspense hung everyone's appetite.
When the advertising reached its peak among readers, Yang Zhen began to formally attract investment. As expected, as soon as Gaga soy sauce was listed, dealers flocked to it, and they found that Gaga soy sauce was really different from other brands of soy sauce. Firstly, the bottle cap is a pull-tab bottle cap, and secondly, the bottle body is a style similar to a wine bottle. Different designs and previous advertising effects make Gaga soy sauce stand out from many soy sauce brands immediately.
In p>1997, the annual business income of Jiajia Soy Sauce reached 13.68 million yuan. Then, Yang Zhen carefully studied the marketing model of Jiajia soy sauce, taking prefecture-level cities as units to develop exclusive distributors, that is, only one distributor is allowed in a city or region. Facts have proved that Yang Zhen's model is very suitable for Jiajia soy sauce. It took him only three years to integrate the soy sauce market in Hunan, and then he successively entered Hubei and Jiangxi.
In Yang Zhen's mind, there is a bigger goal, that is, how to enter the national market.
In p>23, Yang Zhen won a two-month "standard king" of the Central Committee for 48 million yuan. At that time, many people said that Yang Zhen was crazy. 48 million yuan was all the profits of Jiajia Food since its establishment seven years ago. In fact, Yang Zhen himself is not sure what effect the two-month advertising campaign will eventually bring, but he must "gamble" once.
from may to June of the same year, Gaga soy sauce was advertised at 7: sharp and at the end of the news broadcast at 7: 3, and the effect was surprisingly good. Gaga soy sauce brand was instantly printed in people's minds, and dealers all over the country asked to join, and the products were suddenly in short supply.
In p>24, the annual operating income of Jiajia Food reached 5 million yuan; In 212, the operating income of Jiajia Food increased to 1.657 billion yuan, which was the first among domestic condiment enterprises at that time.
In p>28, Yang Zhen began to prepare for the listing of the company. On January 6, 212, Jiajia Food was listed on the A-share market, becoming the first soy sauce in China. At this time, Haitian Weiye has just started listing, and Qianhe Weiye is still a small brand in a place.
It has been more than 2 years since Yang Zhen resigned as a Chinese teacher in a middle school. A casual idea while cooking prompted him to set up a soy sauce factory. Today, more than 8 products of Jiajia Food have been put on the market, with nearly 1,2 distributors in China. The comprehensive strength of the enterprise ranks second in the domestic soy sauce industry, and he has also become a billionaire "King of China Soy Sauce".