Jeff Dudan, Undercover Boss: How I Built a Thriving National Franchise From Scratch | E51
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Lack of focus leads to a lack of greatness. Many entrepreneurs are screwed into existence by circumstances. Personal brand is valuable to the extent that you're actually willing to live up to the messages that you're saying. It comes down to reach, and then it comes down to know, like, and trust. Nobody can buy anything from something they've never heard of. And then there's, okay, well, now that you're reaching people, what are you saying? What do you stand for? Like, what can people expect? Don't be so afraid of what other people think. Fear is an emotion and it has no place in wisdom.
Jeff Duran, CEO of Homefront Brands. You bring decades of experience funding, building, operating, and exiting franchises to help others do the same. And you're also a published author, a podcaster on the Homefront podcast. You appeared in CBS show, An Undercover Boss. Oh my God, that is really cool. Highly recommended to everybody to watch this. Like I was cracking up, but you were driven by, as a kid in sport right off the bat, right, Jeff? Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Take us back in time.
So many entrepreneurs out there, not like you, I don't believe, but I probably suffered from a lack of focus. And when you're growing up, I think you have this entrepreneurial gene. It manifests itself in a couple of ways. First of all, you're not a very good rule follower. You want to learn independently. So I was a voracious reader. I was a Discovery Channel guy. I just I learned and I learned and I learned. But then when I sat in school, it didn't land on me and I didn't want to conform and I didn't want to comply. And I look back now and I realize that probably maybe things could have been different if I was a better student. But at the end of the day, there's a reason why people like me end up doing what we're doing.
I took the standardized testing and I made a really high score. And my guidance counselor called me in and he's like, your grades and your test scores do not match. I was an athlete. I mean, I was a gym rat. I grew up in Chicagoland and out there on the playgrounds playing basketball every weekend or in the rec center. came to play football. You know, we got a new coach and he wants to throw it and you recruit people. Basketball players have good hands, like we can catch it. So recruited me to the football team and that was great. And I loved it, but it wasn't very good. So I had to walk onto a school that would also academically accept me, which was the University of Northern Iowa. I'm not saying anything about their academic standards. I'm sure they're very rigorous today. This was, you know, 1986. Yeah. Only made it through there one year, dropped back to a junior college. That was an inflection point in my life where I said, I'm going to get out of here and I'm going to have one shot to do it. It's going to be through a football scholarship.
So I basically pulled myself out of anything that I was doing. And I just focused on... really a couple of things that I needed to do to get that. Some of it was grades, some of it was working on some speed and things like that, deconstructing speed and doing the things I needed to do. And I just was barely good enough to get a scholarship out to Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and got there, met my wife February 2nd, 1989. She took on the project and I attribute our longevity to many things, but we're passionate about similar, but one of which is we're both constantly working on me.
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