We were lucky to catch up with Allison Joyner recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Allison, thanks for joining us today. So, what do you think about family businesses? Would you want your children or other family members to one day join your business?

People ask me all the time how I was able to work with my family without wanting to tear everyone’s heads apart, and I give them one word: respect.

When my siblings graduated from high school, my parents trained us to become equal stakeholders in our business to the point where collaboration was effortless.

For it to work, everyone has to respect each other as adults, not as elderly parents who are set in their ways and not as Peter Pan, never growing up sons and daughters.

It’s easy to get into a rhythm with them as your business partners and only talk about work-related subjects around the dinner table. That’s why establishing boundaries for each to adapt helped me demonstrate my maturity and work/life balance at the same time.

Respect is a two-way street, so if a family member refuses to drive in the same direction as you, y’all will hit a dead end, fast.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Hey y’all! I’m Allison Joyner, a freelance journalist and content strategist for my company, Allison Joyner Enterprises.

When I graduated from Clark Atlanta University (CAU) in 2004, I couldn’t find a job in my field of television news. I had five internships, but none of them offered me a job. With the economic climate eventually falling into a recession, I moved back home to Birmingham, AL, to run the Marketing Department for my family’s McDonald’s franchise. Before I could even unpack all of my stuff from college back into my childhood bedroom, the corporation asked my family to sell our 14 restaurants in Birmingham and buy 21 restaurants (eventually 22) in Jackson, Mississippi.

In 2015, our business and my world were shaken when my father, Al Joyner, passed away at age 69. As the “daddy’s girl” I am, I loved working shoulder-to-shoulder with him and helping him build his legacy of passing down something to his children. Not only did this loss have a disastrous effect on me, but it also did for our employees and business. So, in 2018, my mom, sister, and I sold our franchise and wanted to start over.

It took very little time for me to figure out that I wanted to give media news another chance. Still, to be prepared for this competitive industry, I would need to catch up on what journalists were learning after I graduated. I knew they were using social media to enhance storytelling, but Mark Zuckerberg had not created FaceBook before graduating from CAU. I had never used popular platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and X, formally Twitter, and I knew that to be a successful journalist, I would need to follow up on the latest tools and skills.

That was when I decided to get my master’s in Journalism Innovations from Syracuse University. During my studies, I learned about content creation and how major news companies were using it to enhance their storytelling.

It was simultaneously when we sold our family business, and I started working at WLBT-TV in Jackson as their part-time Digital Content Producer before shortly getting laid off (which was a first for me).

I told myself, “Let’s send out some pitches to editors until I find another job.” Six years later, I still use the entrepreneurial skills I learned from my parents and sister. I have started my freelance journalism and content strategy company, Allison Joyner Enterprises (AJE for short).

Using the motto “the source for impactful storytelling,” AJE helps our clients get exceptional freelance journalism and digital content creation to help businesses accurately tap into their target audience. I write for several news sources on a bevy of subjects, including business, Black American culture, DEI, and higher education, with a passion for Historically Black Colleges and Universities like CAU.

I was scared going into my second career in my late 30s in a youth-motivated industry, but I knew that the experiences I endured led me to running my own business and being my own boss.

This new endeavor has been an adventure,e and I am not ready to get off the ride!

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When my father passed away, I felt broken. I felt like something heavy was pulling me under, and I couldn’t figure out how to return to the surface. Sometime later, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety that manifested from grief. During this time, I was not productive in our family business, missing assignments and being magnetized to my bed where all I could do was lie there.

Since I was barely eating and eating the wrong foods when I did, I gained a lot of weight and was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes, which was something my father suffered from, too. This was a wake-up call, and I needed to figure out how to fix this before I could no longer be fixed again.

With the right therapeutic and counseling treatments, I was able to maintain my depression, eat healthier, and live an active lifestyle to where I am also controlling my Diabetes levels.

It was a challenging period in my life that I am still dealing with today, but now I have the resources to help me maintain a better life and a better Allison.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I am so grateful to use my blessings from God to create for my clients. I do a lot of writing from articles, press releases, blogs, and social media posts, almost as if I were Alexander Hamilton when asked, “Why are you writing like you’re running out of time?”

I type 50 to 80,000 words weekly on my laptop to where the letters on my keys have smudged off.

Also, part of my self-love routine is writing in a journal daily where I document what is hindering me, gratitude for the people and things that I love, and draft goals for me to accomplish in my business and myself.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.AllisonJ0yner.com
• Instagram: @TheAlliNicole
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100041754264148
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allison-joyner-hbcu-writer/
• Twitter: @AllisonNJoyner
• Other: Read my body of work: SaportaReport: https://saportareport.com/category/columnists/allison-joyner/ The Atlanta Voice: https://theatlantavoice.com/author/allison-joyner/

Image Credits
Allison Joyner Enterprises, LLC.