This is the reflection of Yang Zhen, chairman of Jiajia Food Group, who resigned from his hometown Chinese teacher to start a business and became the "Chinese soy sauce king" with a net worth of tens of billions, about his years of struggle.

The desire in his heart prompted him to choose to resign

Like many successful entrepreneurs, Yang Zhen also came from a poor family. In 1962, he was born in Ningxiang, Hunan, a rural area with many brothers and sisters. family. His father died when he was young, and his two sisters also married young due to family circumstances. The mother struggled to support the three brothers. Deep in Yang Zhen's heart, his biggest wish is to make more money in the future so that his family can live a good life.

Although his family was in difficulty, he did not drop out of school because of this. The family tried their best to support his education, hoping that in the future a college student would emerge from the family and lead the 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 being a teacher is a guaranteed job, the monthly salary is only more than 100 yuan. For Yang Zhen, his desire to change his family's economic situation will be out of reach. Yang Zhen, who was unwilling to spend his life here, decided to resign and start a business after working as a Chinese teacher for 2 years.

His original idea was actually very simple, which was to start a business to make more money, take his mother to the city, stop working in the fields, and marry wives for his two brothers.

Fantastic ideas on the road to entrepreneurship

In the first 10 years of entrepreneurship, Yang Zhen successively carried out special breeding, food processing, the promotion of invisible screen technology, etc. These projects include Some make money and some lose money. Of course, Yang Zhen also made his first pot of gold in life and became the first batch of "ten thousand yuan households" in Ningxiang.

Walking around all day long to start 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 promising than a static life. Yang Zhen likes this A different kind of life challenge.

In his spare time, Yang Zhen likes to cook. When he was pouring soy sauce for cooking, he found that the bottle cap needed to be broken with a sharp tool before the soy sauce could be poured out, and the soy sauce still flowed back into the bottle. Hands may get dirty, which can be a minor annoyance for those who cook.

So, Yang Zhen began to wonder whether he could design a soy sauce bottle cap with a pull ring and an opening, which would make it easier to pour soy sauce without dirtying his hands.

Yang Zhen worked hard on his own and actually invented such a bottle cap. He was very excited and hoped that some companies would be willing to use the bottle cap. The patent transfer fee would quickly change the appearance of his family. Yang Zhen brought this bottle cap to negotiate with several soy sauce factories in Hunan, and wanted to transfer the bottle cap patent for 500,000 yuan. Unfortunately, no company agreed to use it.

A soy sauce factory was born from a creative bottle cap

What should we 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 use the bottle caps with pull tabs and holes in his own business.

Although Yang Zhen has been in business for many years and has experienced different types of projects, he knows nothing about making soy sauce. You cannot produce soy sauce with just a bottle cap.

This did not trouble Yang Zhen, and he began to think about it on his own. First, I spent 2 months in the library looking up information, and then repeated experiments at home. As a result, I figured out the soy sauce brewing process without a teacher.

In 1996, Yang Zhen established the Jiajia Food Factory in Ningxiang, Hunan. There is already a soy sauce factory, and it was the first to use bottle caps with pull tabs and holes. The next step is how to open the market and let people know the brand and buy Gajia soy sauce.

The generous marketing strategy made soy sauce popular

From the perspective of the entire process of Jiajia Soy Sauce being quickly known to consumers and entering the national market, it was largely due to Yang Zhen Familiar with and attaches great importance to product marketing and brand promotion, and does not take the usual path.

Advertising was something that no soy sauce company had ever done at the time, and Yang Zhen was the first to do so. The advertising effect made Jiajia Soy Sauce quickly known to the common people.

"Wencui Daily" was the largest-selling newspaper in Hunan Province at that time, with a monthly circulation of millions of copies. Before Jiajia Soy Sauce attracted investment, Yang Zhen chose to publish an advertisement in Wencui Daily for several issues. The content of the advertisement was only "Wheat and Soybean=?". Readers who read the newspaper could not guess what it was. The suspense whetted everyone's appetite.

When the advertising reached its peak among readers, Yang Zhen began to officially attract investment. As expected, dealers flocked to Jiajia soy sauce as soon as it was launched, and they found that Jiajia soy sauce was indeed different from other brands of soy sauce. First of all, the bottle cap is a pull-tab bottle cap, and secondly, the bottle body is similar to a wine bottle. The different designs, coupled with the previous advertising effect, make Jiajia Soy Sauce immediately stand out from many soy sauce brands.

In 1997, Jiajia Soy Sauce’s annual operating income reached 13.68 million yuan. Immediately afterwards, Yang Zhen carefully studied the marketing model of Jiajia Soy Sauce and developed exclusive distributors based on prefecture-level cities, that is, only one distributor was allowed in a city or region. Facts have proved that Yang Zhen's model is very suitable for Jiajia soy sauce. It only took him 3 years to integrate the soy sauce market in Hunan, and then successively entered Hubei and Jiangxi.

In Yang Zhen’s mind, there is a bigger goal, which is how to enter the national market.

In 2003, Yang Zhen won the "Bidding King" of the Central Bank for 2 months with 48 million yuan. At that time, many people said that Yang Zhen was crazy. That 48 million yuan was the 7th anniversary of the establishment of Jiajia Foods. All profits for the year. In fact, Yang Zhen himself was not sure what effect the two-month advertising campaign would ultimately bring, but he had to make a "big gamble".

From May to June of the same year, Gaga Soy Sauce broadcast advertisements during the two prime time periods of 7 o'clock and the end of the 7:30 news broadcast. The effect was surprisingly good. Gaga Soy Sauce brand It was instantly engraved in people's minds, and dealers from all over the country inquired about joining, and the product was in short supply.

In 2004, Jiajia Food’s annual operating income reached 500 million yuan; in 2012, Jiajia Food’s operating income increased to 1.657 billion yuan, which was the top among domestic condiment companies at that time.

In 2008, Yang Zhen began to prepare for the listing of the company. On January 6, 2012, Jiajia Food was listed on the A-share market, becoming the first soy sauce stock in China. At this time, Haitian Flavor Industry had just started its listing work, and Qianhe Flavor Industry was still a small local brand.

It has been more than 20 years since Yang Zhen resigned as a middle school Chinese teacher. A casual idea while cooking later prompted him to found a soy sauce factory. Today, Gajia Food has more than 80 products on the market, with a nationwide presence. With nearly 1,200 dealers, the company's comprehensive strength ranks second in the domestic soy sauce industry. He has also become the "Chinese Soy Sauce King" with a net worth of tens of billions.