Franchise Radio Show 179 "How to grow a service franchise with Jarrad Goulding, The Local Guys"

Telegraph service franchise with Jared Golding from the Local Guys. Hi everyone. Brian here from Franchise Symphony with another franchise radio show. Thanks for joining us. Delighted to having you here and I'm looking forward to chatting to Jared. As I just mentioned, Jared's the CEO and the founder of the Local Guys group. Previously he had experience in a franchisee in actually Boost Juice, one of the really well respected groups out there and with another restaurant franchise which he declines to name, which is probably fair enough because he and his partner Stace were lucky enough to be part of a great network with Boost Juice but had experiences that were quite contrary with their restaurant franchise. So I suppose the thing is with that experience and isn't life all about experience? With these experiences they saw the, the best and the worst of franchising and I suppose they drew from that the knowledge to mold a successful franchise model with the Lucky Guys and sorry, the Local Guys typo there. I miss. They are. Hopefully they're lucky as well. Yeah, they use provisions such as flat fees, easy to exit agreements and have a very non corporate culture which is quite contrary to a lot of groups. I'm interested to learn more about that when I'm chatting to Jared and I suspect you are as well. What I think is really impressive is in five years they grow into over 78 franchise partners or franchisees. That's quite impressive. Including handling Covid in their first year of operation, which rocked everybody. Jarrah's passion is really helping new franchise partners and helping them take a leap into business ownership, often for the first time and to help them nurture their growth. They have a, you know, so that they're happy and have a successful business. So they've expanded from local or electrical test and tagging through to four divisions they've got now with partners in every state and territory in Australia. So that's, they've spread their wings really, really well. And as well as that, they've got partners in north and south island and New Zealand. So Jared, welcome. Love to have you here today.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Brian. It's. I genuinely appreciate it.

Not at all. It's nice to have a chat and I'm sure a lot of our listeners will have their ears pinned back to hear some of your stories and how you, how you've done what you've done and why you've done some things. And that's really what we're looking to learn today is what are the, what are the techniques, the systems, the process, what is the approach and the attitude that Jared's had, that's giving him the opportunity to grow a far faster rate than many of the groups you see out there and certainly more successfully than many of the big corporates who throw lots of money at the same exercise. So give us a little bit of your backstory. I shared a little bit there, but maybe there's a bit more you can give us that. Give some tip as to who Jared is.

Yeah, sure, not a problem at all. So as you've mentioned in the bio there, that myself and Stacy, we've been franchise partners ourselves. So yep, being part of a fantastic network like Boost Juice, which was, we learned so many great things being a part of that team we're still in contact with and made some fantastic friends there. So that was a great blueprint to be able to see how franchising can really work exceptionally well. It was more than just a commercial agreement. There was something sort of special going on there in regards to just genuine humans connecting with each other and trying to rise above. And I know, you know, first attending the support center there, it didn't have that corporate vibe at all. And it was very fun and exciting and things like that. And then as you mentioned before, we'd later we'd grown from one store to two stores and we thought the obvious step, next step would be to go up again and we took on a hundred seater restaurant franchise in a big shopping center. And I guess that's where we sort of discovered that not all franchises are made equally. And we had a lot of problems in that particular franchise. Cost blew out considerably, hundreds of thousands of dollars on the build and a lot of broken prom and things like that and the culture just wasn't there. Luckily for us though, as you sort of said, you know, you learn through all experiences and quite often you'll learn more from the negative experiences than you do from the good experiences. So we were lucky enough to I guess have that Ph.D. in dumb. And we went in and saw some fantastic side of things in franchising and some not so fantastic side on the other side of franchising. So it gave us a real opportunity in a model to say, all right, we want to take some of these elements over here for these elements over here, that's the pitfalls and that's where things can definitely fall over and we want to put in whatever we can into the franchise system that we want to build out to stay away from those areas. Now that was all really good. I guess the only caveat I would say to those is for us personally, I'd Had a test and tag business prior to that and sort of had it throughout that whole process. Now hospitality is a whole another thing. We definitely. Hospitality, as you'd know, you speak to many franchisors and stuff like that, especially in Australia, the margins and the stress that it can put on you, the amount of work that you have to put into a hospitality business for the potential returns, the margins are razor thin. I had someone explain it to me once, exceptionally well. And they said if you look around the world at different hospitality businesses, different restaurants businesses or whatever, you've got the three main key metrics. You've got labor, you've got cost of goods and you've got rents, okay? And in Australia, unfortunately, all three of those are really high. Let's say you opened up a restaurant business in say Bali, for example, you might have really high cost of goods, you might have really high rents, but your labor is typically going to be quite low. So that gives you a good, excuse me, a good margin there for profit. In Australia, unfortunately, our experience has been that all of those are really high, which means the percentage for profit generally tends to be quite low. You have to have everything dialed in absolutely perfectly. There's no margins for error. As soon as, you know, wages go up or rents go up, as they're constantly doing, it just really eats into that really thin profit margin that it had. Now flip that onto the other side. As I said, I'd have been in test and tag for many years and service based industries. The great thing about those are that your biggest expense is the vehicle. You've got your own time. Generally cost of goods are very low. Most of the time it's a man in a van. You may have one or two staff members, but majority of people as men in a van by themselves. So the great thing about that is, is the profit margins tend to be a lot higher, which is fantastic. So hence when we decided that we wanted to, that was a big part of the reason why we decided to franchise. What we've got is we saw this great model for franchising and the not so great side of it. So we had some great experience there. But we also had this other model which was the test and tag. And you know, I remember I might have been doing $1,000 days quite regularly, if not on average with the test and tag. But I would hold on to the large, a very large percentage of that. Extremely large percentage of that. Stickers are like 15 cents each little bit of petrol and the rest is pretty much all profit. However, in the Other businesses, we would be doing $1,000 days as well, but we'd be probably holding on to around about $100. We're doing everything right. And then we had to pay a loan out of that as well. So hence why, I guess the local guys was kind of formed in the fact that we thought, well, we've got this great opportunity. The amount of effort that's going in versus the return that's coming out was quite high, very high. So why not give some other people this opportunity? Hence why with the local guys will only ever sort of do service based divisions. We've got the cleaning, pest control and test and tag currently. And they're great because it's the exact same model that I was talking about before. And it just allows our franchise partners the opportunity for a large percentage of profit. So it sets them up for success from the beginning, basically.

Right. So you moved into your service business. It's already been operating.

Yeah.

Why did you decide to franchise it as opposed to growing it corporately, for example? Jared? I mean, I think the answer is pretty obvious, but I'd like to hear from the horse's mouth, it work?

Yeah, sure. So we had looked at that option and we. I did have a staff member on. I think the thing with it is, is I love the fact of one giving someone else the opportunity to grow, grow their thing. I'm an entrepreneur from the day I was born, I think. So I love business and I love seeing other people grow and all the rest of it. The other component, I guess from our side of things is as you would know, employees need a lot of hand holding. Where when you've got a franchise partner who's bought into the business, the care factor goes so much higher. I know that even say Boost Juice for example, and Boost Juice would say this directly to us. They would always say that the franchise run stores will always run way better than the company run stores. And when you've got someone who's got a buy in in there and they're part of the business, are brought into the business in the part owners and the brand really, they might have their house on the line. They might at very least made a significant investment into the business, there's a lot less sort of micromanaging. And you knew that there was someone out there that was really supporting the brand and growing the brand as much as possible. So I think those two things just probably for the lack of headaches, to be honest with you. I want to be able to go into work every day and really enjoy it. And not fighting, you know, tiny little fires here, there or wherever, especially all around Australia. So yeah, having people out there and giving them the opportunity to grow their business as large as they want, I think was really appealing to myself and Stacy, my wife.

Nevertheless, it must have rocked you a bit. What was your reaction five years ago when Covid hit Jarrod?

Yeah, well, it was quite funny actually because we had brought on our very first franchise partner and we thought, oh, this is going to be fantastic. There's going to be no 1 in offices and we're just going to have a clean, straight, straight through all these offices and all the computers are going to be shut down. So we're going to be flat out and it's going to be super easy. And what we discovered was that Test and Tag was the last thing on businesses minds and they had a lot of other fires that they were fighting, going through a lot of uncertainty in the business and all the rest of it. No one was. Everyone's trying to hold on to the cash at that time as well. So Test and Tag was the last thing that people were thinking of. So it was myself, I was still on the tools at that stage and we had one, one franchise partner and we just came to a grinding halt. We, we tried to do some, some amazing promotions to just get any sort of money through the door. Luckily that only when we had friends we were already having inquiries, strong inquiries that people were coming on and we were sort of saying to them, look, just pump the brakes, stay in the business you're in at the moment because they're already employed. We don't recommend you make any changes right now. Just stay where you are and we'll let you know when it's time to come on. Now luckily that only sort of lasted for about three months and our franchise partner that was with us at the time was our first franchise partner was, was great and, and understood the situation and it was all fine from there. And then all of a sudden it started to come back again and then we onboarded those, those franchise partners, that shelf there a little bit and we continued on and got super busy again. But yeah, no, it was, it was a scary time, that's for sure. And not the best time to be starting up a brand new franchise, that's for sure.

You certainly accumulated some experience over your period in the three businesses, really. So yeah, I appreciate that you're pretty generous with the terms that you offer your franchisees and I'm interested because yeah, a lot of people's attitude of franchising is to tie things up as tight as they can.

Yeah.

Be very, very dogmatic about the way they run things.

Yeah.

Could you share a bit of your philosophy and, and what you actually do restrict and what you don't restrict if that's not too much of a. Yeah.

No, that's, that's totally fine. So we make it very easy for our franchise partners to exit the franchise. So ours is we've got a seven year plus seven year term. However, franchise partners can exit at any time for any reason and it's just a $3,000 exit fee which just covers the cost of the legals and some of the administration there. So we base that on the fact that if we. I've seen it in other franchises and stuff like that before and you know, some competitors and stuff like that where they'll purposely make it very difficult for franchise partners to exit. I think the problem with that is it's very short term thinking. If you are doing that, then the problem is that you've got a franchise partner there that might want to exit, might have wanted being exiting for the last year, two years, whatever. But because of maybe a large exit fee or something like that, some strong terms in there where they can't exit, they're going to stay in. But the problem is that that's got what's going to, that's going to do to your culture. So all of a sudden you've got a franchise partner or multiple franchise partners in there that don't want to be there. So all of a sudden it's just rotting from the inside out. And then all of the franchise partners are talking with each other and then you've just got this negative culture that's breeding in there and all and it's just not going to do any favors long term. So we would rather support if a franchise partner wants to exit, make it as easy as possible for them to do it. We really need to earn our royalties every single month. Just like another example I'll quickly talk about on that one is a lot of other competitors and things like we'll say we review your request. So we asked every one of our clients for a review after we've completed the service and all of our franchise partners need to maintain a 4.5 star review rating otherwise coaching and stuff like that. But we don't actually ask a lot of other franchises and stuff like that. They'll send a message out to the, to the customer saying hey, what do you think of us radius from 1 to 10 anything that's 8 and above will automatically get sent out to the world to tell them and put out live to all of the different platforms, Google, all that sort of stuff and then anything sort of below that will be dealt with internally and they'll try and complain, manage internally. We don't do that at all. We actually just say just tell the whole world. No matter good, bad or indifferent, we just want you to tell the world about it. And what we find is when we do occasionally get those negative ones out to the world, we actually jump on it a lot more because we know the weight behind it. If there's negative ones that are constantly being put out to the world world and being put out in Google and all the rest of it, it has a lot more impact to us than what it would have if it was done internally. So yes, so we just say tell the whole world about it hence, and as a result of that, I think that that makes our internal process a lot better. We just won the product review award for the fourth year in a row based on that and just putting all of those out there. So I think it just keeps us accountable. Just like the same thing with royalties and franchise partners being able to exit it easier. It keeps us accountable to be making sure we're continuing to provide value.

One area that people can be paranoid about is someone leaving and then setting up in competition. What's your approach with regards to that, Jared?

Yes, so we've got a 12 month restraint period around that, but outside of that 12 months, there's nothing to stop anyone coming on from doing that. What we've sort of found in that scenario is that for the, say 10 grand a year or whatever our flat fees are for the value that we, our franchise partners get out of that, whether it's, you know, full time, full time call center, whether it's us providing leads, whether it's the CRM, whether it's ongoing coaching, so we have quarterly scorecard coaching where we took a look at the business top down and look at what levers that pull in their business to be able to be more profitable. The support group of the actual franchise partners themselves, so they're involved in chats together and all the rest of it where they all help each other out. I think that for the investment of the, let's call it 10 grand that they're putting in per year, I think the value that they're getting on that side of it is far and exceeds what they're spending anyway, that if they were to sort of go out and do that, I think it's a no. Our franchise partners know it's a no brainer. I'm getting 10 grand worth of value and probably then some. So yeah, if, if we weren't doing that and they did just want to learn everything and then go do it themselves, that's fine. But now you have to sit on every seat in the bus. You have to be, you know, the person that answers the phones. You have to be the person that looks at the it. You have to be. I've got no support person and all the rest of it, no network to be around on. And I think that a lot of our franchise partners probably evaluate that, that every year at tax time when they see the royalties and all the rest of it and go, no, it's still worth it.

So that's, that's fine. Now I've seen franchise groups in the past and there's a couple that stand out very, very clearly to me that once they've stopped recruiting, maybe because they've saturated an area, for example, or just generally they've run out of steam or reached their optimum level, what they found after a year or two is that their cash flows dried up out because they not budgeted for enough revenue in their ongoing monthly royalties to cover the cost of their, over their, their own support office and their ongoing, you know, marketing, website maintenance, whatever it might be. What, what's your view on that one? How do you make sure that you don't fall into that trap?

Yeah, it's an interesting one that you talk about. I was literally just this morning listening to your podcast on the Grow cfo. I've forgotten the gentleman's name, but he was talking about this exact aspect of it. I guess this is probably one of the elements that I'm very lucky in, the fact that I've got Stacy, my wife is, who's an accountant and we're, we're very much numbers geeks. So, you know, we, we utilize a lot of tools. We've just moved over to fathom, which is, which is incredible. And so we're constantly doing forecasting and projections based on that every single week. Myself and Stacy, we are sitting down for a meeting and we're looking at our financials and all the rest of it to make sure that when we do get to that sort of tipping point, that it's sustainable enough to be able to make sure that we're not constantly. Because a lot of franchises do that. As you're aware, they're profitable up until the point that they're only selling franchises. But as soon as that stops, then the royalties aren't there to sort of sustain that. So we have an annual review on our royalties. We've got a marketing fund and a lead fee. So it's very important that whether it's a division that's a smaller division or a larger division, that they're sustainable up to the point. I guess that's the good thing for us as well in regards to having multiple divisions is you've got scales of economy so that helps considerably. And also just from the learnings, to be honest with you, originally, you know, going from one division to another division in a different industry, we were a little bit concerned that we're, you know, going to lose a bit of focus and stuff like that off that actual industry. But what, what it actually did in reality is it taught us a lot more of different things that we could do, whether it was marketing or just systems or training or anything like that, that, and then we could implement that over to the other divisions. So it's actually lifted all of the divisions a lot higher.

That's interesting because there's something that I was talking to one of our members who's been up and franchising just for a few years and yeah, issues with a, with a, with a rogue franchisee who actually ran off with a six figure sum of, of his, of, of his customers. Deposits are in the building industry and he said diversification. He happened to have, have three divisions himself. That saved him in the business.

Yeah.

And it's whether, you know, I don't think you can anticipate, you'll probably have an ex, you know, example like that. But the reality is, you know, businesses come and go pop, seasonal efforts come in competitors. So some, some businesses have ebbs and flows if you like, compared with others. So having that diversification. Yeah, it really makes a lot of, a lot of sense. So. Okay.

I think the other thing to that as well is that, you know, we're up to, I'm going to New Zealand next week to train up some new franchise partners. We'll be up to 85 at the end of that training. It's just more vehicles on the road with the local guys branding out there as well. A lot of the actual divisions complementary to each other. So we might go out, do a restaurant. We had one just, just recently where we did the restaurant for Tesla and Tag. They ended up asking us to do the pest control and now we're doing the cleaning in there as well. So yeah, it sort of helps out. Everyone can help each other out in that regard.

So you're doing test and tag cleaning, you're doing pest control.

And we've. Yeah we've. We're also. We're doing a bit of a split one at the moment. So currently. Well previously, sorry we sort of had had cleaning and carpet cleaning in the same sort of division. What we've established is that carpet cleaning and cleaning. Carpet cleaning is so specialized it's not funny as you're aware. So it's actually a unique technical person that needs to go out there and do the carpet cleaning. There's so much chemistry involved in it, there's so many aspects to it to make sure that you're providing the highest level of service service. So we've split that division into two now that's going to be launched very soon so I think this is the first time I've mentioned it but that'll be a new one that will be going to market to who specifically on carpet cleaning. Just so that we are the experts in each division. And it doesn't just happen to be a cleaner that's got a, you know, a thousand dollar carpet cleaner and going out with. With some chemicals or whatever. It's someone that that's you know, completely trained and licensed and it's got, you know, 20 grand plus ver of gear that they're going out there with and they can handle any sort of carpet. So yeah, that's, that's the new one that's.

We've got a bit of science attached to it. Much heavier investment.

So what makes Absolutely is. Yep, for sure.

So you've expanded statewide.

Yeah.

You're off to New Zealand.

Yeah.

How do you manage to grow your tentacles? Yeah, manage the operation and keep things happening on the ground in these different locations. What's been your, your model? You know some people, some people put managers in, some put franchisees in regional areas like Jim did for example when I worked with him in the early days.

Yeah.

Model have you used Jared? Yeah.

So we've tried a bit of everything to be honest with you. So in the early days we wild having state master franchise partners. We've still got one of those running in the test and tag division up in Queensland. We had a couple of those in test and Tag in other states. Our cleaning. Sorry, our pest control division, we have a master franchise partner for that for Australia and New Zealand. So we've sort of tried a little bit of everything and we've had mixed success. Success with both. If you get a fantastic one it works exceptionally well. We've got a couple of fantastic ones at the moment, if you get one that's not so fantastic and when I say they're not so fantastic, what typically we see is they tend to be more focused on running of the actual cleaning business or the test and tag business than they are of actually growing the actual network. And I understand that to a degree because I guess they sort of see the opportunity of I can go out and make a thousand dollars now that's a lot more secure than sort of trying to grow the business. And yes, maybe I'll sell a franchise and make some money on that, but maybe I won't. Where with this thousand dollars it's guaranteed to be out there and they sort of fall into that trap and then it just, it becomes majority of the focus that I'm, I'm running this business and then where I've got time I'll kind of do the other stuff. So we've had a little bit of both. I think both, both systems can definitely work. We're currently out to market for the UK so we're advertising over there for our pest control division. So different country. We would definitely go for a master franchise model. With New Zealand being so close to Australia, close time zones and all the rest of it, it, we can kind of run it as another state. I'm over there every six weeks so I'm doing, I run the training myself over there. I'm heading over there this week, next week, sorry. So yeah, I think it's, it's really about recruiting the right person and making sure that they've got the passion for the business and if they don't, we've got huge amounts of passion at the local guys and support center. So if we see they're running it part time and we know that we can put our passion into it, we'll do that. But if we've got someone that's got that buy in and looks long term and really wants to help franchise partners grow businesses, then that model can work exceptionally well as well.

Right, so. So you're faced really with saying look thank you Harry, but this is not quite working. How do you manage that scenario if you face that one, Jared, you're talking.

More from a master franchise franchise ors.

If you like, you know, for Victoria or Northern Territory or wherever it might be if it's not working and you can see they haven't got the passion or the commitment or whatever it is, the formula is not quite right. How do you handle that situation?

Yeah, so I mean we don't run that model anymore. In Australia and New Zealand, we, we're so passionate about it and we have the ability to do it. We've got the team and the support center that can do it. So we, we just manage all of that ourselves. However, in the past, I mean, that'll come through a lot of coaching sessions trying to give people the opportunity, trying to break down where, where it's broken in the critical customer flow or critical workflow, where is it breaking down and what elements can we do on that. But ultimately if the buy in's not there, I mean we can teach skills, but if the buying's not there and the focus is on, on the business itself and we can't expand the mindset on that, then it's very difficult.

Okay, so you have your, your support office basically operates Australia and New Zealand.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. All right, that makes sense. You can afford to put decent resources in there because you've obviously got a spread of, you know, close to 80 franchisees. Okay, yeah. One of the tips I picked up there in our earlier conversation was if you don't have a Stacy or someone equivalent and you, and you're becoming a franchisor or you are, are, then get yourself an accountant that you can basically rub shoulder to shoulder with, have them, have them meeting with you regularly and make sure you dissect those KPIs and keep a finger on things. It's so easy to let these things drift off a bit. Really, really hard to straighten it out.

So, and the hard part about that as well is you're stuck then because you've obviously got a, maybe a five year, seven year agreement or the rest of it. You can't renegotiate those obviously partway through the agreement.

It.

So you don't realize the hole you're kind of digging yourself into until it's too late. And then it's very time consuming to dig yourself out of that hole. So. Yeah, completely, completely. Right, Brian, like you need to have that proper planning from the beginning stages, do a lot of forecasting to sort of know, all right, what happens when we, we hit that point of maximum growth and do we have the commercials that's going to be sustainable for the business past that point?

Well, I mean you've been, you've been quite, you've been very smart with what you've done. You've learned the experience, you've got the qualifications and experience I suppose between yourself and Stacy. So you've got together. The key to people listening is build that team before you try going up the escalator too far. I think that's important to have.

Crucially important.

Crucially so from your point of view. You've got a lot of experience, you've tried lots of different models, you've been involved in different, different industries. What, what do you think makes a successful franchise partner or franchisee? Jared.

Attitude would always be number one. Again, back to the point. Before you know, we can easily teach skills, but attitude is very difficult to teach. If we can get someone who comes in with the right attitude, it doesn't matter whether you've worked in a factory. What some of our most. One of our most successful franchise partners comes to mind right now, a Kiwi, Kiwi guy, Maori guy here in South Australia and been working in factories his whole life, had no business experience whatsoever, but just had that can do attitude and was a sponge during, during training as well. I think that's the other element as well, is stand on the shoulders of the people before you. So everyone's got great ideas and all the rest of it. But if you're entering into a brand new industry, take the 12 months, take 12 months to sort of just follow the process exactly. And then if you want to reinvent the wheel, if you want to adjust pricing, if you want to do things yourself after the fact, that's great. But we find that we, if franchise partners decide that they've had a look at competitors and stuff like that and they go, oh, I can see that person's charging this, I want to charge that. Because they start doing numbers in their head and they say this many clients times this price equals to this. We don't know if that person's been in business for 20 years, years and has already built out a client portfolio this big and only has a little bit of time left. And they can charge an absorbent amount because they're just trying to fill up that last little bit of time effort or get rid of the bottom 10% of customers and refill it up with higher customers so you don't know where it's kind of at. So we strongly recommend that everyone comes in and just follows the model for the first 12 months. By that time you've got your feet wet enough to understand the industry and then you can go off and do all this different sort of things and, and change things and all the rest of it. But definitely attitude is. Attitude and being a sponge is, is, would be your, your best thing. Just constantly trying to say green.

Yeah, I remember that from Janine Alice, founder of Boost Juice. Of course.

Yeah.

For other Brands these days, she's dynamite. But I remember back in her early days she was, there was a conversation about recruiting stars on franchisee. She said, I'll take anybody who've got the attitude. That's all I need. I can teach them everything else. Yeah, it was a very bold statement. But you know, it's worked really, really well for her. There's proof there. There's no question about it. And obviously from your point of view, it's that one, it's that one thing, I guess, and that's the, that's the one thing about franchising is that people have that commitment, you know, the hip pocket and they've got, they've got a bit of skin in the game. Whatever expression you choose and you views, it just makes such a difference. I mean, remember years ago, Paul Keating saying, never dismiss or, or discount the value of a vested interest. Yep, yep. Subconsciously, yeah. There's a human, well, I'd say a human attribute, but you could call it human failing. Depends where you. So the other thing I know you've got a generous attitude towards helping the community and so forth. So you've got a very generous model. You have, I think. Could you explain it to us?

Yeah, sure. Yep. So from the very beginning, before we even started the franchise, we wanted to be more than just coming out and doing business and just making money. We want, it was important to us to have an element of giving back. So from the very, very beginning, we reached out to World Vision and we formed a partnership with them. And based on that, what we basically do is $5 from every single job that all of our franchise partners do gets donated to World Vision. So from the franchise partners perspective, we only ask that they contribute 50% of that. As a franchisor, we contribute the other 50% and it's been a fantastic partnership for us. I think that one thing is, it's almost like a great test to the type of franchise partner that joins. I remember having speaking to one franchise candidate that sort of was joining us and, or looking to join us and said, I like everything, I like it all. But the whole giving to the World Vision thing, I don't want to have to do that. And we said that's totally fine, but that's just a belief that we have and that's, we want to give back to the community. And if that's not right for yourself, then we're probably not the right franchise. So it's great for us because it actually helps us recruit the type of franchise candidate that we're aligned with that, don't mind giving a little bit back. I mean, we cap it at 10 jobs, so it's capped at 10. So it only ever cost a franchise partner maximum of 25amonth. But we like to work with people that don't mind having that little bit of giving in there. And then as a result, we've got amazing franchise partners and I think that that's been almost a little great barrier to entry in some ways, but in other ways it's helped us to really recruit the franchise partners that we're looking to recruit.

That's a great method you've got there. I think that's tremendous. And, and capping it as well. Yeah, it's a sensible. That would be an easy trap to fall into. Just. Yeah, but that means even for the franchisees who are perhaps, you know, a little bit shorter, cash, whatever it might be, they know there's a limit. So that's fantastic. Well, congratulations on that. I really do agree. That's wonderful. The other thing, one of the reasons I'm talking to you is, is your exposure from the point of view of awards, you littered with them, so. And you've been getting them continually. Can you give me a little bit of your, I suppose your, your philosophy behind getting the, the awards and so forth and how you've managed to achieve that?

Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I guess the biggest thing for us and you know, I, I talked to, I just, we just had franchise partner tr. So I was talking with our new franchise partners coming on this week. And the biggest thing that I try and demonstrate to everyone is we talked about before about being a money chaser and we very much try and do the opposite of being a money chaser. I think that there's a lot of people out there that would sort of go, I don't care. Whatever industry it is, I don't care what it is. I just want to. Whatever's going to pay me the most money. I just want money, money, money. And, and the problem with that is it tends to elude people who are constantly chasing money. It just eludes them. On the flip side of that, if you be someone that's just constantly trying to put value out to the world and you're constantly trying to add more value than you receive, what tends to happen as a result is you actually get people chasing you down, trying to throw money at you, because all that money ultimately is, is a certificate of appreciation. It's just a standing ovation for a good job. And that's why ultimately, with Our franchise partners and we try and plant this, them from day one is that you just want to be constantly putting that value out there, working out what element, looking at your critical workflow, when you're, every time you're speaking to a customer or you're dealing with a customer, doing a job for a customer, what elements can I just increase a little bit, put a little bit more shine on? Is it the initial call, is it doing the actual technical work, is it doing the job? Is it sticking to the promises that I made the customer when I left and just constantly trying to increase your game by 1% every single day. And then that ultimately is going to provide more and more value. Now if we've got franchise partners out there that are constantly doing that every single day, the awards and all that sort of stuff just tend to flow. It's just a byproduct of just adding more value out there than you, than we're receiving. And then ultimately the good thing is that they end up making a lot more money just from those certificates of appreciation.

It's true. That's great value. So just in wrapping up a couple of last very quick questions.

So.

Future, looking into the future, do you have a succession plan, exit strategy or what, what term, how long do you look, project forward as far as the businesses?

Yeah, yeah, great, great question. So I think a lot of businesses, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of franchisors will sort of look for the next quarter or they're looking for an exit and we're not really interested in anything like that. My, I've got a succession plan that one day, hopefully my kids will, would like to take on our business. So you know, the Japanese, they have 100 year business plans. So I like to think long, long term when it comes to that sort of stuff. And we try and do that when we're implementing things into the, into the franchise as well. Is that what are we going to be doing in the next generation, the generation after that? So for us at this stage, as long as our kids want to do it when they get older and stuff like that, that would be our succession plan. So I've got 25, 30 years left in me to continue to help provide as much value to the market as possible. And then if that's something that they would like to do, then we would look for them to pass the torch onto them and continue on from there.

Well, that's certainly a great recommendation or encouragement for your franchisees. I know you're not going to disappoint, disappear with the next, the next storm, as it were. Okay, yeah. So from that point of view then, you've sort of answered this last question. I was going to say what's, what's going to happen next with the local guys, but you probably go to New Zealand this week, setting up in the uk, blah, blah, blah. What, what is your foreseeable future, your horizon then, Jared?

Yeah, so yeah, I mean we've got growth plans, we would like to make a household name, we'd like to continue on to other markets around the world. We've done a bunch of trademarking around the world and stuff like that. I think the only caveat I'd sort of say to that though is that it's really important that we don't grow too quickly. I think that it's kind of like in a battle scenario when you've got fighters out there, if you ask anyone in the army or anything like that, they'll only push forward the front lines at the race of ammunition, fuel and food. So I think in, in our business we need to make sure that we're sticking to, we've got to make sure that we could running at the rate of cash, the rate of our people and the rate of our marketing for our franchise partners. So they're the three elements that we've got to make sure that we've got dialed in. And then when we've got all those elements dialed in, then we can push to the next step and then we sit at that step for a little while until we, we can proceed the front lines a little bit further again and a little bit further again. So as I said, it's a long term thinking, but so as long as, as long as we've got those supply lines there, then we'll push to the next stage, basically.

I love the military analogy. That's terrific. We're just wrapping up now, so is there anything you'd like to add quickly in closing, Jared, before we wish everyone goodbye and happy drive or whatever they're doing while they're listening?

No, I mean I know that you mentioned at the are that a lot of your listeners are franchisors. I guess anything to sort of, if you are looking at sort of that next step of being a franchisor, I think that just proper planning at the beginning stage instead of rushing into it as you mentioned, is probably definitely the best thing. I know myself and Stacy came out and spent some time with Self Improve and the team that these guys have and the amount of knowledge that we got out of, of that was Incredible. That was a really strong team there. So I think looking at opportunities like that, once you put something into place, it's very hard to change it after the fact. So just slowing it down and really taking your time and learning all of those elements before you get something going and then again making sure you've got strong legal and marketing and branding and all that sort of stuff like in place beforehand. It'll never be perfect. So don't just, you know, sit there until perfect happens, because perfect will never happen. You have to pull the trigger at some point. But, but if you can have a good foundation first of all, then I think that that's going to set you up for success a lot more than just sort of going, well, I'll just get the first one in and then I can fix all that later. It never happens. It'll just continue on as it is and then whatever holes you've got in the business will turn into gaping holes. So try and plug as many of them as possible before the fact and then just try. And your biggest customer is your franchise partner. So you know, you got to just over service them and make sure that they're set up for success because that's going to assist you to getting to the next franchise partner. So yeah, that's probably what I'd say on that.

Wise word. Thanks for sharing that wisdom, Jared, and thanks for the conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed it and you shared a lot of knowledge with us and that's very, that's very generous of you. And so everyone, I hope you've enjoyed the session we've had today. I've been talking to Jared Golding from the local guys and leaving it here. Catch up with you for the next radio franchise radio show. So cheers Jared. Goodbye.

Thanks Ryan. Thanks so much.

Growth overseas.

Thank you. Thanks so much. Appreciate the time.

It.