This is a first-part interview with Jarrad and Stacey (The Local Guys) describing their trajectory through service-based businesses, hospitality/retail experiments, and franchising. They recount a negative restaurant-franchise experience (poor training/support, large unexpected costs) that motivated them to build a franchise model focused on documented processes and franchisee-first terms (fixed fees, partnership language) to deliver real work–life balance and scalable operations.
Chapters
You hear all the same buzzwords, don't you? You could make $600 in a day and go home early. Greatest work, life balance. Never have to work weekends. Come in and live the dream that you've been waiting for your whole life.
No one tells you the difficulties and struggles. They just sell you the dream. We have definitely tried other avenues, hospitality and retail. As much as they were fun and we did them, I think we were in it for about four years. We kept coming back to the service based business.
We haven't found anything in our lives that compared to that.
We experienced all facets of the business, not just, you know, being the boss. We did the accounting side, growing the business, marketing. We've really, yeah, we've really learned all areas of the business.
We had no idea how to sort of do any reporting or anything like that. We didn't know how to invoice a customer. We just sort of had to learn as we went. It was difficult because, you know, it was such a basic, raw version back then. There was no systems and policies and procedures and all the rest of it like there is today. While I was out testing Stacey sitting there being a salesperson, the accounting person, the office manager, the whole lot.
I literally sat there with a list of schools and I rang every single school.
Yeah.
Basically just tried to get their work.
Yeah, yeah.
Had a chat to them on the phone, sent out so many quotes and it slowly, slowly started to come in.
I didn't really ever want to leave the service industry because I just knew that how good a lifestyle it was for us and how well it was for us long term. But we knew it would take us some time to sort of grow that business again. That's how we kind of got into franchising. They were just fantastic. You know, the passion that's in the company and the overall vibe that was in the company was just, you know, it was electric. All the franchise partners were all super close and everyone had like a really strong positive connection that was there.
We learned, you know, a lot about customer service and how important customer service is. It's number one.
You know, if this is something that we could potentially recreate, we still weren't happy with the quality of life that we were sort of getting. And we weren't happy with, I guess, the returns that we were sort of getting. So we thought, oh, what we need to do is we just need to go a bit bigger. So we thought, oh, the obvious thing to do there is to get a restaurant franchise. We sold our two little juice stores and we got a restaurant franchise and.
We thought, oh, they're going to be great. The dream was we were going to have 10 restaurants in South Australia. We're going to grow the whole of South Australia.
As soon as we signed the line, I think that, you know, there was zero training. Like just the ongoing support was something that was crucial for us in those early days of being a franchisee. When you're new and you're wide eyed and stuff like that and that's when you need the franchisor the most. And unfortunately, I guess we found out that not all franchises are the same. A lot more difficult experience where, you know, there was broken promises and just lots of, lots of things that didn't go right.
We were sold something we weren't bought into. A partnership.
Yeah, we were sold a franchise. We weren't recruited as a team member. Yeah, exactly right. I mean the costs blew out. Hundreds of thousands of dollars more. We were in another state to them and it's just good luck and you're on your own. Typically the franchisor franchisee relationship is very weighted to the franchisor. We managed to see the really great side of franchising and how things should be done. And then we also saw the not so great side of franchising and how things can go badly as well. It kind of, I guess, connected the pieces. The franchising model is fantastic. Even if, you know, the retail hospitality is not the right thing for us, maybe we can morph it into what we already know.
That was probably the biggest light bulb.
Moment for us and bring the two together. And I guess that's how the local guys were formed. I guess our biggest aha moment was when we realized it's all in the processes, it's all in the procedures. And if we can get that down packed, then everything else will flow on from there. So, you know, we were working the longer hours and we were sort of, you know, giving up the weekends and stuff like that. And when we realized it's all in the procedure, it's all in the processes, it didn't matter what we were doing, it didn't matter which service it was. If we had it down packed, then it was going to go across for any, any service that we were doing. It would have made sure that we can get all of those exciting things like, you know, you're not working weekends, you're not working 100 hour weeks, you know, you can finish early, start late, but still make that great money in the day. And it was because we were so streamlined and the procedures were so well done that anyone could come in and follow those same steps that we had and they could achieve all of those things for themselves. And that's what we've created.
I definitely agree with that. We realized that that's the key to success and that's what we need to focus on going forward. And that was what we do every day. We focus on getting our processes and procedures down packed and improving them and fine tuning them. We are living that lifestyle. We're getting the work life balance everyone promises you.
And I mean, that came from 10 years of chipping away at it. But we finally worked out okay. We wanted it to be franchise minded and franchisee first. So that's why again, like we only refer to our franchisees as franchise partners because we're in a true relationship with them. To attract the best people and to keep the best people, you need to be able to offer the best deal. So it's not about selling something to us, it's just about putting something together that says this is so attractive that anyone can sell this. Because it's a no brainer that we do it fixed fees. We allow our franchise partners to grow their business as large as they want and they never pay us another cent so that we can attract the best people and keep the best people. Because we know that's what we would want. That's right, yeah.
