Sacked in 2019, he sold $85,000 of bagels from his kitchen
Jeff Perera had never made a bagel before he lost his job. He estimates he has now baked more than 1.5 million, and the business he and his wife built has 35 locations.
In 2019 Jeff Perera lost his job. His wife Danielle went back to work and he stayed home with the children.
The family's complaint was that a decent bagel meant a 45-minute drive. Danielle's suggestion, as Perera tells it, was that he learn to make one himself.
He had no culinary background. Three months later neighbours were asking to buy them, which he found hard to credit at the time.
The kitchen operation ran until it could not run any longer. Perera and Danielle sold roughly $85,000 worth of bagels from home before outgrowing Florida's cottage food laws and going looking for a storefront.
That is the first channel decision in the story, and it was made for them by regulation rather than ambition. Cottage food rules set a ceiling; the demand went through it.
The second decision cost more. The couple sold their house to help fund the first shop.
Danielle was the harder sell. She had a corporate career, a steady paycheck, benefits, a 401(k) and stock options, and Perera's argument amounted to "go full bagel".
Danielle budgeted about $800 in sales for opening day. Perera says they took about $1,600 — double the plan.
He estimates he has baked more than 1.5 million bagels. About 800,000 of those came before Jeff's Bagel Run started franchising, which puts most of the volume in the owner-operated years.
The chain has since reached 35 locations with another 180 in development.
The marketing was free and relentless. Perera posted an Instagram Story every morning for 397 consecutive days, naming the bagel of the day.
He attributes the following to that and nothing cleverer. The same habit now runs through a podcast, The Weekly Run, in which he and his team talk about what they are learning.
In August he was in the kitchen at the JW Marriott in Phoenix during the 2026 Restaurant Leadership Conference, boiling and baking nearly 300 bagels for more than 650 restaurant executives, on unfamiliar ovens, while explaining why bagels are boiled before baking and why he uses barley malt syrup.
The lesson for a founder is in the sequence, not the sentiment. A home kitchen proved demand at $85,000 before anyone signed a lease, the opening-day number tested the forecast within hours, and the audience was built by turning up every morning for more than a year before there was anything to franchise.