Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Justin Eats. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Justin, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

I don’t have a lot of regrets in my life.

I mean, yeah, we all have some regrets. It’s a piece of our timeline’s life puzzle, and without it, something would feel suspiciously missing. I don’t have many, however, and I have to thank God and my therapist for that nonsense.

One of the few regrets I do have is wishing I had come to the conclusion sooner that I have to establish these creative outlets to survive–not just financial survival, but for my mind and for my soul as well. The typical corporate workplace establishes a culture around what some entrepreneurs identify as the “golden handcuffs”: an exchange of the sort of stability, security, and benefits that we’re accustomed to believe is what makes us successful, under the guise that you can only receive it the corporate way, which instills a fear of trying anything else to achieve that very American concept of success. We all have the keys to unlock these handcuffs, but the decision to use them is frightening, because what you gain from using them initially pales in comparison to what you lose. Personally, I think I waited too long to use them.

I’m a podcast addict–a listener, a host, an audio editor, and a former coach. Podcasting was my first real taste of any type of entrepreneurship–building something for myself that I could distribute, earn an income, and listenership or audience–and it was an incredible feeling. Now that middle ground between acting rashly and simply waiting way too long to act at all has to be navigated. So once I finally finished that game, and beat the final boss–imposter syndrome–I started my podcast and established podcast editing as a separate business. This was in 2017. The office job I was working at the time was egregious and soul-crushing. Not all office jobs are…but mine certainly was. Leaving in part to to dedicate more time to this podcast dream was one of the greatest decisions of my life, not because I became rich and successful off of podcasting–I didn’t–but because it was the push I needed to use my keys to unlock the golden handcuffs. Having little money, but having more time with my daughter, more time doing something I loved, and more time to rest, trumped the stability, security, and money I was making with the golden handcuffs on.

Leaving the corporate world is not always an immutable choice. Life changes, new goals are established, and sometimes we need the resources that corporate America offers to fuel our creative dreams. Mastering coming back to the corporate world without the golden handcuffs is just as important as removing them in the first place, which is what I’m doing now. I have five jobs–and four of them are things that I would absolutely die without, including my most recent (and most successful) venture as a food reviewer. I truly wished I had started this sooner. I was so reluctant because I did not believe it’s what I wanted or needed. I was still stuck on the podcast dream, largely because I was doing it for a profit, and I learned something important in that journey: when you live a dream for a profit, it quickly becomes a nightmare. You have to do it for the love. Had I done it purely for the love, I would have started sooner, but this idea that these dreams I had were not initially lucrative kept me from starting sooner and figuring things out quicker.

Everybody’s journey is different, and the goal is not always to start as soon as possible in order to retire as sooner as possible. Some of us LIKE to work! Some of us, like myself, are single parents and want to develop something to pass down so our kids are good. Yes, I do wish I had started sooner, but we all are supposed to start this journey when we’re supposed to.

These days, I’m beginning to regret that decision even less.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I am very passionate about food. I may not be a chef or understand the complete science or mystery behind certain recipes and flavors, but I do understand the sociology behind it, and that comes with connectivity and history–regional history, psychological history, spiritual history. Food–great food–can change the course of someone’s life, and in a time of COVID, that sort of force was needed to bring people together whenever seemingly everything else felt weaponized in order to divide us. With my humor and high energy, I decided to give food reviewing a try.

The idea, however, was not my own. My ex-wife recognized maybe more than anyone how much food meant to me, and it was her suggestion to review food around town for fun that serves as the progenitor for Justin Eats, but it became something much more. My daughter and I started eating better. I gained a sharp following, and discovered who my audience was. Restaurants started to notice, and they began to contacted me instead of the other way around. I was featured on the news. I shook hands with politicians and television/radio personalities. It was, and still is, a roller coaster ride.

I provide my audience with insight into local restaurants that deserve support, love and attention, without bias and without manipulation. I bring restaurants customers who prior to watching me may never have heard of them before. In this way, I’m able to support local business in a clear and authentic way. Nobody reviews food the way I do it.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Finding my audience on social media wasn’t terribly difficult. The original concept of Justin Eats was to review on a place where it would seem “easy” to go viral on: TikTok. My very first video was uploaded there and only there, and after a week I noticed a few views. Yippee, right? Honestly I thought very little of it, and kept it moving, realizing that I was already a part of at least two different locally-based Facebook groups built around the concept of sharing favorite restaurants, mostly local ones. So I uploaded that same review into two of those Facebook groups. I didn’t ask if it was okay to upload the review, I just went ahead and acted like I belonged there. Lo and behold, the viewership and engagement absolutely exploded. The best part was that everyone not only asked who I was, but asked when there would be more reviews. I reckon people really craved my type of humor in 2020. I’d found my people: it was Facebook.

Secondarily, my newer videos I was able to to engage with in deeper ways on Instagram. Although I’m undecided on whether I want to jump back into TikTok now that I have a decent following on both Facebook and Instagram, I know where my audience is. I don’t want to go to Twitter, and unless I find it highly beneficial, I’ll likely stay off TikTok. I don’t need to be everywhere–most small businesses don’t. Without a committed team with delegated tasks, it can be difficult–albeit not impossible–to be active on every social media platform. For me, two platforms is just fine!

Every social media platform has an audience that speaks a different language. Facebook is commonly local. Instagram is commonly more national or global. Twitter is so large and accessible that it feels universal…maybe too big a space for some. Figure out how to speak the languages of your audience on your different platforms and you will be golden.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

John Lee Dumas, host of Entrepreneur on Fire, taught me an invaluable lesson after taking one of his older podcast courses back in 2016. He said something along the lines of, “There is no such thing as competition, only collaboration.”

Imposter syndrome is the absolute enemy of progress, new beginnings, and new surroundings. We all innately yearn to belong, as the discomfort of believing or knowing we do not is next to unbearable. We also know that it takes a product or service that is actually needed and necessary to a target audience, convincing advertisements and marketing, to actually solve the problems we as entrepreneurs have set out to solve. Yet, all it takes is one non-believer sometimes to cause us to crash in the initial stages: one invalidating executive, one bad reviewer, one significant other who doesn’t believe, etc. Oftentimes, though, that one person is our own self.

We live in a saturated space of folks who are already doing what we are doing, creating what we are creating, and marketing toward the same people we had hoped to market to. In this way, we feel like we have already lost before we start, like we were in a race and have already been beaten. This can’t be farther from the truth. There is no race. Nobody is trying to be faster, or better, than you, nor should you strive to simply be better than anyone else, lest you discover solace in discouraging them from living their own dreams. All these people we fear, that we allow them to inadvertently bring terror and a sense that we don’t belong in their realm, are not competitors–they are collaborators, mentors, allies, and assets. Ask them for advice, assistance. Ask how you can support their business and learn from them personally.

You’ll be surprised at just how many established and successful “rivals” are actually waiting to help the next generation.

Contact Info:

• Website: justineatsalaska.com
• Instagram: @justineatsalaska
• Facebook: facebook.com/justinsalaskaeats
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWso3Rr6eAJ-y02vuN3Hmg

Image Credits
Justin Williams