I'm The Real Jason Duncan, back with another edition of Beyond the Grind – helping entrepreneurs like you stop being slaves to your businesses. 🚀

At the end of 2018, I decided I wanted to sell my lighting company.

We had just closed out the year with $1 million in net profit – actual profit, not revenue – and I remember thinking I had finally made it, that all those years of grinding had paid off and now I could cash out and move on to whatever came next.

So I called my business coach, BJ Howard, and told him the plan.

His response still haunts me.

“Jason,” he said, “the same reason you want out is the same reason no one else would want in.”

I heard the words. I even nodded along like I understood. But if I'm being honest (and I wasn't, not with myself), somewhere in the back of my mind I thought he was being a little dramatic. 

A million dollars in profit. How could a business like that be worthless?

Then 2019 happened.

I got pulled into a legal battle with a former business partner – the details don't matter and I'd rather not relive them anyway – but the point is that for most of that year, my attention was somewhere other than daily operations. 

I wasn't answering every email.
I wasn't closing every deal.
I wasn't personally putting out every fire the way I had been for years.

And by the end of that year, we had lost $1 million.

Not “made less than the year before.”

Lost a million dollars.

That's when I finally understood what BJ had been trying to tell me. My business wasn't an asset – it was a prison, and I was somehow both the warden and the inmate at the same time. The moment I stepped away, even involuntarily, the whole thing collapsed because the very success I'd built was entirely dependent on me being chained to it every single day.

BJ was right. (He usually was, and I miss him – he passed away unexpectedly in 2021.) 

The same reason I wanted out was exactly the reason the business was worthless. Without me at the center of everything, there was nothing there worth buying.

The Real Problem

There's something I call the Law of the Prisoner.

Most people hear “prisoner” and immediately think of someone who's been incarcerated for bad behavior – orange jumpsuit, metal bars, that sort of thing. But the real definition is broader and, honestly, more unsettling.

A prisoner is anyone who feels trapped by circumstances, especially circumstances of their own making.

And here's the uncomfortable truth that took me way too long to accept: most entrepreneurs are prisoners who don't even know they've been convicted. 

They built their own cells – brick by brick, sale by sale, hire by hire – and they just didn't realize what they were constructing until they tried to leave and found the door locked from the inside.

There's an ancient saying: “If you want to fly, give up everything that weighs you down.”

The cruel irony for most business owners is that the very thing weighing them down the most is the thing they're counting on to help them take flight – their business.

So let me ask you the question I had to ask myself back in 2018, even though I didn't like the answer:

Do you want to be a prisoner of your business interests, or a pioneer of your own future?

Why This Matters

Here's what I've learned since that painful year (and the even more painful year that followed):

There's a massive difference between a small business owner and an entrepreneur, and most people who think they're the latter are actually the former.

A small business owner builds a job.
They're the first one in the office and the last to leave. 

Even though they sign their own paychecks, they've essentially bought or built themselves a position where they're trading hours for dollars just like any employee – except the hours are longer and the stress is higher. 

The business has become so reliant on them to function that they can't step away without production and revenue collapsing. (Ask me how I know this one.)

Their exit strategy? Run the thing for as long as they physically can, knowing full well that the day they step away, it probably closes. That's not an exit strategy – that's a life sentence.

An entrepreneur builds something different.
They focus on putting processes and systems in place, sometimes from day one, because they understand they're building an asset – something that has value independent of their daily presence.

A true entrepreneur works ON the business, not IN it. 

They spend their time setting the vision for the company and communicating that vision to their people, not answering emails at midnight and personally putting out every fire that flares up.

Here's the thing though: I didn't start out trying to be either one.

When I launched my lighting company, I was an unemployed schoolteacher with a wife and kids and bills that needed paying. I didn't know what entrepreneurship was. I'm not even sure I could have spelled it correctly if you'd asked me. 

I wasn't trying to build an empire or create generational wealth or any of that – I just wanted to make enough money to keep the lights on at home. (Ironic, given what industry I ended up in.)

And that worked for a while. Money started coming in. I started attending entrepreneur-type events – business breakfasts, business journal luncheons, that sort of thing – and I began meeting successful business owners and learning what this world was actually about.

But I didn't truly understand that I was a prisoner until 2018.

A million dollars in profit. A business worth nothing.

That's when the cell door finally became visible to me.

Now What?

Sometimes circumstances outside our control delay our plans. That's just life.

But here's what I've realized over the years: most entrepreneurs aren't actually trapped by circumstances outside their control. They're trapped by circumstances entirely within their control – they just haven't recognized them yet.

Words of Wisdom

"The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty." – Proverb 27:12

I was the simple one in 2018.

I saw the warning signs – or at least, my coach pointed them out to me clearly enough that I should have seen them – and I kept going anyway, convinced that a million dollars in profit meant I knew what I was doing.

I paid the penalty in 2019.

You don't have to.

Until next time...

Go beyond the grind,
The Real Jason Duncan 🚀

P.S. Next, I'm going to introduce you to the opposite of the Law of the Prisoner. It's called the Law of the Architect – and it's the mindset that finally set me free. But here's the thing I've learned: knowing the law isn't enough. You have to actually live it, and that's harder than it sounds when your whole identity has been wrapped up in being the hero of your business.