#ASKJIM Facebook Live Q & A with Jim Penman Replay September 2026

So welcome to #AskJim. So we've got him live there, which is fantastic. So we thank you very much for that. Real quickly, guys, we're just gonna go through a couple of housekeeping. If you don't know, anyone who asks Jim a question on the microphone will get a prize at the end. And we want you to ask as much as you can. We're actually going live tonight on TikTok as well, Jim. So obviously on TikTok, there's a big following there. So we're gonna go live on there as well. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna throw it over to these people here who can just ask Jim anything they like for a prize. Let's get into it tonight. So first up, ask your question.

Hey Jim, would you rather watch 1 very grumpy Great Dane or 10 excited Chihuahuas?

I'd rather go for the Great Dane. The little dogs are murderous. You know, my— our dog called Apollo is notoriously— he's that big and he is a vicious, vicious biter to anybody who tries to wash him. We had one lady who tried to do it and she had blood coming down her arms. They've given up on him. So I'd go for the big Dane, Great Dane. Absolutely I would.

Very good.

What would you rather wash?

Any.

You like all dogs?

Yeah.

They're all great. Okay, good on you.

There you go. Good one.

Jim, how are we?

Yeah, very good.

All right, so I've got a bit of a 2-parter question. So the first one is cybersecurity. Is there a possibility of that actually coming as a franchise? And then to add to that, what are the requirements for you to actually choose what franchises do get created and what don't?

That's a really good question. We have— we do do things with cybersecurity with IT. They would handle such things already.

Because IT do do it, yes.

They do do it, yes. So there's an existing division. So one of the things about any new division, if you're interested in that, Jim's IT is great, great division, and they do lots of things, but cybersecurity amongst them. Okay, it can't conflict with an existing division because franchisees have territory rights which are very important in our system. So anything that territory rights are involved, you cannot do it. We will look for a division where you can make at least $70 an hour as an average operator. Doesn't have to be brilliant, just an average operator, $70 an hour. If I don't see that, I'm not interested. Something like, say, babysitting would be very, very difficult to do for that reason. There just isn't enough money in it. We look for a big service. It has to be a service that you come to. We don't do site-based. We don't understand that. We're good at service. You ring, somebody comes to you or comes to give you service. We want something like that and we want something that's fairly big in terms of something that people are really hunting for, like that's got Google AdWords, got sponsored ads in. The reason for that is because our division is, our business is very modest in terms of its percentages. So to make it work you need numbers. Having 2 or 3 franchisees in some kinds of business would be okay, that'd be enough. But a good Jim's division, you'd need at least about 20 franchisees to be worth running because we don't make so much from each person. It's a bulk thing. So this is the thing. Now that's your basics but the really hard part is finding the right person to run it. You've got to have somebody who knows that business inside and out, who's been doing it. Also get a bit of capital to actually push it forward. You'd have to have about $50 grand capital.

And what's the new one that's come up as a suggestion? Because it went pretty viral when we suggested— when you went through it.

Funerals.

Jim's Funerals.

Jim's Funerals.

That's unusual.

Somebody rang me a couple of weeks back.

Of a TikTok video he saw.

We've had like 600,000 people express an interest.

600,000?

600,000.

Had a few views, yeah, had a few views. Had around a million in total actually.

A million total views? So much interest. We're actually planning— actually, I've talked to— what's his name? Patrick?

Frank.

Frank, Frank, Frank, that's right. We talked to Frank about it. We're actually planning to do a fake funeral, but using a Jim's mowing trailer and everybody dressed in green.

That's kind of wicked.

And instead of having your funeral march, you'll have people singing, Jim's, Jim's, Jim's, Jim's, Jim's, Jim's. So we've got it all planned out as a publicity stunt to get going. Sorry, Frank doesn't know what's hit him, but he's a good guy though. He's— think about things. We don't do it. It's go to somebody else. You don't need a showroom for it. And it's a big business. People are dying all the time. Thank goodness. There you are. And then all we need, and all we need is Jim's midwives, and we can do it from— we can birth you, we can get rid of you, the whole thing.

We got everything now, hey?

Plus give you a career in the middle of the gym.

Corridors of Grace. Oh yeah, I haven't forgotten that part.

Yes.

Yeah, that's wonderful.

No, that's awesome. Well, thank you for your time.

That's all my questions. Thank you.

Good question.

Thanks so much for the new division. Appreciate it.

Hello.

G'day.

Okay, so I've got 2 questions myself. First question is, um, in regards to franchising, has it ever come up, uh, Jim's Catering?

Yes. It was a division at one stage. Mobile catering was at one stage.

We had a sort of a mobile service do it, but like a lot of things, it's about having the right person to drive it. We had the van, we had van, the guy had a van.

That was the mobile pizza thing as well, yeah.

Mobile pizza. So we had a couple of goes, never got past the person driving it. We'd absolutely look at it. I think it's a good one. I think food trucks or catering or those kind of things would be definitely interested. It's a big business, you can make good money out of it. What we need is the right leader and that's the hard part. I probably get 100 enquiries about, because I'm very easy to reach, jim@jims.net, you can send me an idea and I'll talk about it. But finding the right person to drive it, that's the hard part. They've got to be the right sort of person with the right background and we've made some mistakes, I have to admit, in the past which we shouldn't have done because we're very careful about it. In fact, we had last franchisee training, we had 3 people coming forward to be a divisional role and 2 of them failed the course.

Wow.

We looked at them in terms of the way they were operating in the course and said, no, this person is not suitable. In terms of the way they're acting and so forth.

Good to know.

The second question I have is, if you were to start again, out of all your franchises, what would you pick?

Oh, mowing, come on. I just thought you would try something else. Look, the whole thing about business, people often ask me, they say, which is the best division for me? And they often ask it in the form of, which one can I make the most money? I say it's the wrong question. What do you like doing? Now, if you're a dog nut, dogs is a fantastic thing. But frankly, I like dogs okay. Frankly, I prefer cats anyway. So I wouldn't be a great dog wash person 'cause I'm not for that. But I love gardening. I love being outside. Guess what I do at the weekend now? I haven't— I garden. I've got a small farm just up the bush there and I go up there and I love to get out there and I love to weed and dig my vegetables and—

That's great.

And fertilise and prune and to me it's fun. So that's why I'm mowing.

No, I just thought, didn't you have—

Carpet cleaning is a great, great business. I tried it once, I hated it. Sorry, I'm not offending anybody who loves carpet cleaning. I spoke to Haydar about this once, the cleaning guy, and I said, why on earth would you want to be cleaning houses when you could be out there in the fresh air mowing lawns? He said, you've got to be kidding, you're going to get rained on, you're going to get hot, Cleaning is so much better. Thank you for your great question.

Thanks for that one. Appreciate it. Go for it. Next one up.

Howdy, Jim.

You almost ruined the question before it started.

I was going to ask, given I'm assuming you've got a little bit of grass, do you still mow your own or do you use a Jim's franchisee to do it? Well, no, actually. I use Jim's for a lot of people, like cleaning, For antennas, for mobile tyres, for lots and lots of divisions. We need lots of divisions personally. But in actual fact, I have a— in my farm, I actually like to use a push mower. I find it very good exercise, very good therapy. I go out there pushing with the— you know, one of those things that—

Not powered, old school like this.

Not powered, human powered. I go out with that and I do it with that because I find it's just really good therapy to mow lawns, just for fun.

Take that to the day.

Weird as it may sound, I reckon mowing lawns is a fun job.

Love your answer. Very good question, thanks for that one. Go for it, next one up.

How you going, Jim?

Jason Morehouse from Perth, WA. When are we sponsoring the first football team?

Sponsoring a footy team, Jim?

Yes.

Nah.

Do you want to talk about why, Jim?

Yeah.

Why?

Okay, the reason is this. It's a funny thing, we used to sponsor the Richmond Football Club. Now this was a decision made by basically franchisees, franchisors, not me. And everybody assumed that I was a rabid football fan, Richmond fan. In fact, I've never been to an AFL job— game in my life. I have no interest at all in that sort of thing. When we spend our franchisees' money, we look for one thing: how can we get you the most money, most leads, most customers? from the dollars that we spend. So we're really focused hard on cost-effective advertising. These days the most cost-effective advertising is the stuff where people are looking for your service. So that means things like Google, like Facebook, those kinds of areas. We're very good at promoting them. We don't do broadcast, we don't do sponsorships.

Yeah.

So basic reason we do it— one thing that actually can be problematic, we had one particular franchisor who was sponsoring 2 teams. One was netball team, a kids' netball team and the other was surf lifesaving. Now it happened that both of their kids happened to be in those teams.

Okay.

When we discovered that, we said, you can't do that, it's a bias, you're acting on behalf of your franchisees, not yourself. So we actually changed the system so that you can't do that kind of thing unless you get written permission from your franchisees. And one other question, when is the Jim's stage play coming out?

Jim's stage play?

Stage play? It's a good idea, maybe you should star in it. No, no, no.

With the sponsorships though, so franchisees do sponsor clubs at local levels, so they'll sponsor footy teams, they'll sponsor their kids' soccer teams, all that sort of stuff. That's a really good thing to do locally for marketing. But Bill from Jim's Laundry Services, they just sponsored Richmond, would you know.

Have they?

They have, they've become the official laundry partner of Jim's Richmond Footy Club, Jim's Laundry Services. So they do all the jerseys, they do all that, they've got the big laundry services in the change rooms, all that sort of stuff as well. That's something the division agreed to.

Oh wow, I did not know that.

That's a new one that only came out last week, but some people do it.

But it's, I guess the point I'm saying is it's a decision made by franchisees and by franchisors.

But if you're a local franchisee, if you want to sponsor your footy club or something, go on.

That is different.

And a lot of people should do it.

Especially local clubs.

Yeah.

The one that's in your town, that's a very good one to do. I should have, yeah.

It's really effective for local clubs.

I should have qualified that. I was thinking about Jim's Group as a whole. But a local football club, especially in a regional area, can be a very, very good way of spending your money. But not overall, not the big clubs.

Go for it.

Hey Jim, it's Stuart from Central Queensland, mate. Just want to say, how much energy you got for someone that's seen so many moons?

How many moons has he seen?

I reckon he's probably about 70. Yeah, 74.

Yeah, there we go.

Doing good, mate. Any plans on the future about, you know, more into cross-divisions, like say aircons, smoke alarm compliance, stuff like that? Yeah, we were talking to somebody about— I think we have got somebody we're talking to about heating and cooling.

David Larrett, they're going to start up. They're going to start it up. Yeah, yeah, heating and cooling is coming for sure.

It takes a while. We don't rush into these things. They've been talking there for the last 6 months or so, but they are coming along. Yes. So we're interested in that.

Smoke alarms, part of fire safety? Jim's Test and Tag Fire Safety?

Yeah, smoke alarms would be fire safety. But we've got a new division which is starting up very shortly about testing.

Drug and alcohol testing.

Drug and alcohol testing. That wasn't covered by anything at all. So they're all good.

Awesome, mate.

Thank you for your time.

If you've got an idea though, you can come when you start as a franchisee, you can obviously reach out to Jim and let him know.

Hi, Jim.

Jay from Diagula. I've got 2 questions for you. One, what is the number one trait or mistake that separates those who fail from those who succeed? The biggest difference is that people who succeed are the ones that look at what they're doing and say, how can I do it better? What can I improve? And they're relentlessly learning all the time. They are thinking about the job as they do it, they are talking to other franchisees, they're talking to their franchisor. They're talking to their customers, how can I do it more efficiently? How can I amaze my customers? How can I cut down my costs? How can I improve? That is the single biggest thing of a good operator. The single biggest thing of a poor operator is somebody who always blames somebody else. Like you've got a franchisee, a typical example, somebody who says, you're sending me lousy leads. Only 1 in 5 of my leads is any good, the rest are garbage. I'm only getting 20% of my leads turned into jobs. And we point out there's other franchisees in the region who are actually converting 60%. Okay? Now what are they doing different? No, no. You're sending me lousy leads. What you've got to do is to send me high quality leads, Jim. Come on. High quality, good leads. That's your job. Not my job. My job is perfect. I'm doing everything right. I need you to do your job better. And the problem with that is that we're sending the same leads to both. What they should be doing is thinking, why are they getting 60%? What are they doing different from me? So that's a very good question. That's almost the— that's the one single biggest difference. We even have a word for it. We talk about a franchisee who's always looking for ways to improve is gold. Somebody who will listen to coaching and improve and maybe move to gold is called bronze. Somebody who says, no, I'm doing everything right, you need to change, That's, that's led, and they're the ones that tend to fail. Yep, okay, thank you. Very good question. Um, and secondly, how do you see AI? It's all the rage, so how do you see that within the Jim's Group? Very, very big. Actually, Joel knows more about that than I do, but we're using it very widely in IT for a start. We spend several million dollars a year on software development. IT is really speeding that up.

Yeah, well, obviously the developers use it a lot. Um, it will be integrated within Jimbo app, which will be the most important thing because you can basically ask AI how to optimize my schedule. At the moment you have to use ChatGPT to put in your schedule to do that and all that sort of stuff, whereas we want to integrate within the Jimbo app, which will make it really powerful and it can save people money.

What we want to do eventually, this comes around, is you can go out with the Jimbo app, you take a picture of somebody's yard, or get someone to take a picture of their yard, send it through, you get a quote. So they can use their app to get themselves an actual quote and then use that to actually book the job in automatically into their— into their— that kind of improvement.

Yeah, excellent.

What else do we use it for?

Franchisees mainly use it for, um, a lot of quoting now at the moment. So you're a mowing, right? Mowing is a great example of this. So mowing, they'll do like a landscaping quote. They'll go to Mrs. Jones's backyard and she'll say, I want to have this, this, and this, and this. They'll take 4 photos, they upload it to ChatGPT and say, hey, we want to put this, this, and this in here. Can you give me the 4 draft photos for Mrs. Jones for client. Within 1 minute they'll have 4 photos. Is this what you want? And she'll think you're a wizard. Oh, that's what I want. Now just send me the quote. And then ask AI to do you the quote and then email it to her, and then you can convert the job. And most franchisees now who are using AI to do visual quotes for customers, they all will say they win every single quote. They don't have any problem with conversions as well. That's one practical example.

You want to, you want to, you want a quote on the dog, for example, you take a picture of the dog and it'll give you a price. Exactly what it's going to cost and it'll be the individual franchisee's prices, not the generic one, individual franchisee's prices. Potentially, they'll look it up on the Jim's app, the customer app, you know, I want a dog wash, it's got my details already in it. I want a dog wash. Okay, take a picture of the dog. Bang, here's a picture. Okay, your price is going to be $95 to do it and we can book you in for tomorrow morning between 10 and 12. Is that okay? Yes. Bang, all done. That, that kind of improvement, we're going to see really exciting things happening in the next 6 months to a year.

Well, the thing would be good because it knows your— it'll know what you're charging, because if you're charging out of the Jimbo app, it'll know what you charge and how long you add things and for what it is, right? So you have all this good data where you can just have AI hooked in with it and say, look, you know, here's the job, you know, whatever, based on my previous quotes, what would you estimate I should be charging for this, right? Now people are using ChatGPT now for that, but they're going between multiple things and they're giving it a lot of context into that. Whereas the Jimbo app, because you're using it all the time, already has that context and knows your rates and things like that. So it's just a matter of putting AI on the top of it to make you better and all that sort of stuff. That stuff's going to be hopefully coming really soon. So we've been talking about it a lot.

Excellent.

Thank you. Yeah, that's good. Great question.

Great question.

Hi, Jim.

My name's Travis. I'm from Piara Waters in Western Australia. I'm coming on board as a dog washer. We can tell.

That's good.

Dressed in the red. What advice could you give me for my first 30 days?

30-day plan from Jim.

So new area, you know, not a lot of other franchisees around the area. Well, it's going to take you a while to pick up speed unless you've done this in the past, which you presumably haven't, which is not normally the case. So you're going to have to learn. You'll be a bit slow in the beginning. Don't rush it. You'll pick up speed with time. Quality cannot be compromised. Take the jobs that you need to do them, but I would say very strongly to make yourself— set yourself an aim from the first week that you're going to make at least your pay for Work Guarantee level every week. If you don't have enough leads coming through, then work out how to do freebie services, which starts with your friends, neighbours, relatives. You can use social media, you can use franchising from other divisions, which is a great source because you can refer jobs to each other. There are so many ways to do it. There are wonderful videos that Joel and his team have done, which I can send you the link. If you have any problems at all with that, you email me, jim@jims.net, and I will go through a whole stack of things with you. I do this all the time. So make that your minimum. You know what your pay-for-work guarantee level is?

Yeah, yeah.

What is it? How much?

$2,500.

Okay, there's your aim. Now the only reason you shouldn't make that is because you're a bit slow in the beginning. But you should aim to make that from your first week. And frankly, I'm your franchisor directly, so I'm paying it and I want you to claim it. I do not want to see any week where you haven't enough work to make at least $2,500 a week. Unless, as I said, because you're really slow to start with. So that's my 30— and please ask for help. Ask your support person. Contact me, contact anybody, just ask for help to achieve it because we know how to do it. Don't suffer in silence. I write one-month letters and it's frustrating. I get people who haven't started doing paperwork. Why not? Why not do it first week? Because if you start doing it quickly, you won't have to do it for long because you'll pick up so many customers. You'll do a freebie, oh, done a wonderful job on my dog. How often can you come back every month or whatever?

There's your—

What's the next step? automatically a client or the neighbour comes across the road or all kinds of things will happen. So yeah, there's my plan. Thank you for that. And then my second question is, what is your most favourite inspirational quote? Oh, there are so many. I love Churchill. We will go on to the end. We'll fight them in France. We shall fight them on the seas and in the oceans. We will fight with growing strength and growing confidence in the air. We will defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight them on the beaches. We shall fight them on the landing ground. We shall fight them in the streets and in the hills. We shall never surrender. I love that.

It's very powerful.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Jim.

Thank you for that question.

That's a great question. I dug that one. Hey Jim, Tim from Sydney, New South Wales. I was just curious, what was your PhD in when all this kicked off? Formally in history.

History.

It was in the history department, but the history department might have a different view of what I actually did because I started out studying history and I ended up trying to work out what the reason for history, and I ended up with what a mixture of history and biology, things like Lemming cycles and so forth, and the way animals react to food restriction, and there's a whole lot of psychology and all kinds of things. This is a version of the book. It's soon to be outdated. Next week— next month there's coming out Birthrate Crisis, which is a simple version, and back in that will be the latest version of Biohistory behind it. But it's basically an attempt to try and understand the reason for the rise and the fall of civilisations. It's huge. In actual fact, it was— I nearly didn't get it because in the end I had this thesis which was so different from a normal— so I had 3 examiners. 2 of them just put a paragraph. Normally they spent several pages. They looked at it and they said— and the 3rd person made some comment. He said, if this was a magnum opus at the end of a distinguished career, well, maybe we'd consider it. But who is this guy? He's just overturning every idea. About how history works. And did you get your doctorate? I did eventually. I had to rewrite it and rewrite the methodology but I did eventually get it so I am technically Dr. Penman, not that I use it in the business sense but in scientific terms I do. I'm off to visit our labs in China next week, Friday week, so we're going to see— I've got a multimillion-dollar research programme done which is actually testing my ideas based on history. and we're doing things like trying different kinds of drugs and stuff on mice and looking at food restriction and all kinds of interesting stuff. We're looking at CRISPR to change epigenetics. So it's very— it started off history, but it's actually very, very broad society. Does that mean there's Jim BioLabs franchises coming? It's not to make money. It's actually what I use my money for. We only live on about 3% of what Jim makes. Most of the rest just goes into science, into basic science, because I think it'll change the world.

Hoping.

Cheers.

Great question.

That's an original division suggestion, Jim. We've never had the Jim's Biolabs suggested.

Yeah, well, it wouldn't work because I'm not making any money out of it.

No, that's true.

Jim's Biolabs, yes.

Hi, Jim, this is Rez. I'm from Adelaide, so it's amazing to see you. Yes. who came in here, maybe everyone came here to make money and maybe everyone has the same character to become independent businessmen.

Yes.

So my question, 2 questions to you. What character or identity you feel to become successful and the people who are working with you? Because look, in Adelaide I talked to franchisor in here, the presenter, I feel they're very, very strong, but what character actually when you hiring people or choose people, you identify and that's basic questions.

What kind of character? Talking about myself, I am very, very persistent. You know, I had my thesis knocked back by a whole lot of, by basically the academic community. I had intended to have a job as an academic, I completely failed. So nobody believed in me. But I believed in myself and I said, okay, I'm going to go out and I'm going to do something that will allow me to make enough money to fund my own research institute. And that's what I did. So you have to be very fanatical and unreasonable to do something like what I've done because it's not normal. Okay? I'm not normal. Anybody will tell you that, including my wife. So how do I choose people? Look, to be honest, I'm not particularly good at it. I've made a lot of very bad mistakes. I've got some great people who've come through the organisation like Joel who started in a very low-level job, about as low-level as you can get in Jim's, and has become now one of the top managers. He's one of the best social media experts in the country actually. He was on the front page of— what was the magazine?

Franchisees X Mag.

Franchisees X Magazine, yeah. Joel was just somebody who came through the system and I got to know him when he was working in insurance. So, I have some people that have come through the system like that. Harpreet's really valuable, she was my lawyer but she's now got a different kind of role. So, I can find people but I've made some terrible mistakes. I would say my son, now 17, one of the questions he would ask me in the past is, Dad, what superhero would you like to be? Would you like to be like Batman or would you like to be like Superman or would you like to be like the Flash? And I said, there's one superpower I would really love to have and that's the ability to read people. If I could know that a person was going to be successful or know they were going to fail, that would be absolutely brilliant. That was the one thing that I would most like. So it's very difficult to choose people. I think to a large extent where we can succeed is through the franchise network where you can look at a person who's succeeded at one level and see their talent. So Dan Cale, for example, who now runs mowing everywhere— Australia, New Zealand, Canada— he was originally a franchisee who just proved to be a very good franchisee. Made very good money, 5.0 rating, so that when he said, I want to become a franchisor, we partially funded him into the region and then supported him and now he's got those roles. So he came up through the system. So that's, to me, that's one of the best ways to do it. Look for your talent. wherever it appears amongst my staff including junior staff and amongst my franchisees. And you never know, there might be somebody in this room comes up with a new division one of these days. It's happened in the past.

Thank you. Actually what I feel actually in my current job, I hire people every week and I feel people telling the thing in interview, in workplace I feel some difference and sometimes I feel Maybe I give them opportunity to get the job or to start their job, but sometimes I feel I did the wrong decision. And I know that's maybe one part, but when I'm hiring my own people, that's relevant, the question I ask you. Thank you.

Yes. One of your benefits will have is, do you know people from your— who speak the same language from an ethnic group who don't speak very good English, that's a big advantage from your point of view. If you want to hire staff, you can find someone who's a really hardworking immigrant, doesn't have good English and that's a tremendous thing. Like Poppy who does the cleaning at our place for Jim's Cleaning. She's Thai and all her workers are Thai. So that's her superpower. So you may have that same advantage. You may also know people in your previous job that you've hired who you know are good. The way that Dan actually, when he wanted workers for his franchise, he went back to his time at McDonald's. So any contacts you've got could be really useful if you wanna build a major business.

Thank you.

Yeah, good question. Go for it, next one.

Hi Jim, Charlie from Western Australia. Listening to your talk today, it seems like you've got a really good spot. support network, talking to your franchisor. In the early days, who was your support network when you didn't have this? Who did you rely on to talk to for advice and confidence when you were starting out?

I had good people fairly early, like Phil Maunda, for example. He was one of my first franchisors. He was in Adelaide. He was a Melbourne franchisee who was pretty good at what he did and then he shifted to Adelaide and then took on the regional rights there. I learnt a lot from Phil actually. So in the early days there was a group of franchisors in different states and we used to meet together quite often, about every 6 months.

And did you have a good relationship with family when you started up in terms of being able to have that support?

Not really, no. My family is not particularly entrepreneurial. I think the only advice my father gave me in business terms is, don't bet the farm. Which is pretty good advice. So, don't take, don't risk everything. So, I make a lot of, entrepreneurship is always about taking chances 'cause you never know how things are gonna work out but you don't bet everything on an idea because quite often you're wrong. But yeah, my parents were great. My mother was always supportive. She was a wonderful lady. What about your father? Business, in terms of business terms, I don't know if I've got much advice, but moral support, you know, your mother always believes in you, doesn't she? Even when nobody else does. I've actually got a bit of a second part to the question as well. Yeah, go ahead.

I've seen you talk about the decline in birth rate.

Yes.

Would you encourage someone of my age to procreate?

Absolutely I would. I'm known for being on that subject. When I get interviewed, I'm often asking the people who are interviewing me, how many kids have you got? If not, why not?

How old are you?

I'm 25.

Yeah, absolutely, get going! I would definitely. Look, I believe in a life, a good life is one based on purpose, on meaning. I have purpose in my life and one of my purposes is to do with my research which we just talked about. It's to do with you guys. My sense of my franchisees, that's a strong purpose. But my family's purpose too. And that's having kids and giving of yourself and sacrificing and loving them and helping them to rise is one of the greatest, greatest tasks that anybody can do with their lives. It gives meaning to everything. Are you married?

Not yet.

You got the right person?

Hope so.

I think so.

Alright.

Pop the question. And get her pregnant.

I'll show her this video on TikTok.

Yeah, you can show her that one.

You tell her if she wants some help to get excited, you tell her to contact me and I will give her the glad word. I'll also provide a free copy to her if she likes to go and make up her mind of Birthrate Crisis, which is coming out next month. And I'll talk all the reasons why you should have kids and why it's good for you.

She's already got something.

Oh geez, there we go. We'll have to get her one.

You know, one of the greatest things that happened, Dan Cahill, I talked to you about before, He has a direct influence from me and he says it's purely because of me they had twin boys. They've got 2 kids already, they've got twin boys and their middle names are David and James, which is my first and second name. I thought that was one of the nicest things anybody ever did.

There you go.

Good question.

That's a very good question.

I'm going to put that down as a win.

I'm going to give him a free book as well, so reach out for that free book and we'll sort that out.

Now you tell me, you tell me, you send me who you— it'll be October. You send me your address and I'll inscribe it to your girlfriend with some helpful advice.

You might ask for how many number— what number kids on there, Jim? How many kids?

How many kids? Yes. At least 3, possibly 4. At least 3. Good man, great question.

Alright, well, hello again, Jim. I'm back again. I have a new question for you.

You get basically as many questions, you get as many picks.

Okay, just make it catchy.

Say no more, man.

I've got more questions. Say no more.

All right, so obviously, as previously stated, you are doing very well in terms of health. What would you say are the 3 top priority things for people as we continue to age? Because I'm only 22, so I've got loads of time till I reach your age, right? But how do I maintain physically fit and active? What are you doing that has brought you to this excellent health that you're at now?

Okay, exercise, very, very high up on the thing. I got up this morning at— what was the time? 7:30, that's right. I went for a run on my trimble for half an hour. I lifted weights. I worked on the mowing machine, had a cold shower. That's before I came in. That's what I'd done before I saw you guys this morning. So exercise, really important. At the weekend, I go out to my farm and do hard physical work, chopping wood, all kinds of things, okay? Exercise. Diet, eat healthy. Lots of vegetables, lots of fruit, not too much salt and fat. I practise 16:8 fasting which means I don't eat for— I don't eat for 16 hours a day. Like last night I finished about 7 o'clock, I had my first meal today at 1 o'clock. So at least 16 hours a day I don't eat at all. I might drink but I don't eat and I would say— What time do you eat? Those are fairly basic. I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't take drugs, needless to say, like those kinds of things. But a lot more than that too, it's the personal side. It's having a sense of meaning and purpose in your life, which I do. I'm very driven by purpose. And also having good social relations. Like I have a wonderful wife. I mean, that's something that's just a blessing. I didn't deserve her. I really didn't because Lee is just amazing. She's also drop-dead gorgeous too. I'm probably a bit biased since she's closing on 60, but anyway. I adore my wife, she loves me, I've got great kids, we had a tremendous Father's Day meeting last night which was so good and Lee cooked and it was— I have a good social life too. I play chess with guys and I love chatting to Joel at times too. We often talk about politics and all kinds of things. So those are all the elements. It's physical health, but also mental health too.

Okay.

But one thing is you're ultra consistent. Like he doesn't miss a day. So there's no days off. It's routine every day.

What's keeping you consistent? Is it just the mentality you've built all this time or like what helped with the consistency, especially at the start? Like I think that like starting is the most difficult thing and then maintaining. So like I'd say the first 6 months, once you build that foundation, I'm sure you could do anything.

Yeah.

But how, how do you, how would you suggest someone starts?

Oh, that's a very, very good question. What you've got to do is to establish good habits, and that's difficult. One of the things I strongly recommend to you is books and reading. It could be podcasts, but useful stuff. If you go to jimpenman.com.au, you'll see a list in there called books, and you have a look at those. There's books that I recommend called Atomic Habits, Tiny Habits, those kinds of things. There's a lot about exercise. There's a lot about diet. You read a lot of stuff and you absorb a lot of stuff and it becomes part of your way of thinking. Then what you do is you create an image for yourself. You are the kind of person that exercises, you're the kind of person that eats well. You set a self-image, you share with other people to some extent and that therefore you can't not do it because you're betraying yourself, your very nature. I am that kind of person. I am— the idea to me of being unfit is just not acceptable. So it's quite difficult. But I really— I find talking books incredibly useful.

Okay.

But the right kind of podcasts can be great too. Listen all the time until it burrows into your mind. And then it becomes part of your way of thinking. Talk to other people who have similar views and they will encourage you. Get together with a group or other people, get moral support. It's difficult to do it by yourself.

Yeah, no, I like that. Do y'all do— are y'all okay with politics on the podcast?

Ah, yes.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, I gotta, gotta play it safe sometimes, you know. So like, with where the— with the direction that this nation is going, yeah, well, we all know. What would you suggest for us young people In terms of how we choose to vote, and then maybe if you would say who we should be voting for at this current moment. Obviously things can change, we've seen that over time.

Alright.

Well, if you live in Norfolk, you can vote for Jim in November, so—

You can vote for me, I'm standing for State Parliament in, in, in, uh—

Well, everyone vote for Jim then, if you live in Norfolk.

Okay, that— look, it's a good question, it's complicated. First of all, Labor has been a disaster. In Victoria but across the country, our standard of living is slipping, we're actually falling behind. Our GDP per capita, not GDP because of immigrants, but GDP per capita is going down in the last 4 years despite all the technology and there's reasons for that. One of them is that the government is becoming more and more a maze of bureaucrats. Everything you do in business you are surrounded by it, everything. Whether you're talking about employment, you're talking about building things, You're talking about hospitality. Everywhere, more and more, day by day, they pile up this bureaucratic garbage of red— it's just ridiculous. It's crazy. The whole mess of the franchising code is just obscenely stupid and yet they can't do anything about somebody like 7-Eleven goes in and steals businesses off these guys. Just takes the business off them and they say, hey, government said nothing to do with us. It isn't. It's theft.

Yes.

But you can't do anything about the most basic things. but you can drown us in a sea of regulations. We have taken on— this Victorian state government is the worst in the history of Federation— has taken on 22,000 new net gain in bureaucrats since they came to power in 2024, 12 years ago. That money that they're spending on those, if you'd spend that, you could actually get 20% more doctors and nurses in our public health system, which we need And you could also give every doctor, nurse, policeman and teacher in the state a 10% pay rise for the money that we spent on these useless parasitical bureaucrats. Okay? That's a very fundamental thing. Now, labour is terrible. You watch, you go by a building site, like a road site, now our roads are falling to pieces. Do you know why they're falling to pieces? 'Cause they waste the money. You go there and you've got 7 people around, one of them is pushing a broom and the rest are holding up signs or doing nothing. You see it all the time.

Why?

'Cause the unions featherbedding. Those guys with signs, they're paid like school principals. Why do you have them? Because it's the bloody unions and that makes it inefficient. Yet we'd rather have people standing around doing nothing than have our roads repaired. And that's causing damage to cars and stuff because they don't spend the money right. It's obscene, it's really bad. The services that we badly need from government, and we do, they're not being paid for because they're feather-bedding. Look at the way they're doing things like the Snowy scheme, the Snowy 2 scheme. What is it, starts off $2 billion, it's going to be $400 billion. I mean, that's ridiculous. The rail loop, it's so incredibly obscenely expensive because there's so much corruption and feather-bedding going on. These vast projects which is waste, waste, waste. Our debt is rising, we're spending as much money on servicing the national debt as we do on Medicare these days. The things that we need the government to spend money, they're wasting, wasting, wasting. Labor is terrible, Greens is worse. If they get any sort of power, we're going back to the Stone Age, really, I mean honestly, they are shocking, they are economically illiterate. Not one of these politicians has any experience of business. Now, let's talk about One Nation. One Nation, at least Pauline Hanson has owned a fish and chip shop. She has more business experience than the whole federal state Labor frontbench put together. They do not understand what they're doing, they're completely clueless. They make changes that do things like they get rid of negative gearing. Now anybody who's not absolutely economically illiterate or a Labour Party politician would know that if you do that, you're going to put the price of rents up. And the price of rents go up and, oh, I'm so surprised, we've made it so difficult and uncomfortable for private landowners, now landlords, they're raising their rents. Of course they're raising their rents, you nong, that's exactly what anybody would expect you to do if you had third grade arithmetic. Okay? So, One Nation, I don't trust them, I don't think they have much experience, I don't think they know what they're doing, they— their choice of candidates is erratic to extreme. They say a lot of good things, what they can do I don't know, I just don't think they have the competence to form a government. Frankly, I don't really— And then there's the Liberal Party. Now, in economic terms, the Liberal Party is somewhat better, not nearly as good as they should be. I cannot believe they didn't do better last time they were in power. But they're not as bad, but the Liberal Party also really loves property prices going up. They adore it.

Yeah, they do.

They do. And under Liberals, the party, the cost of housing has gone up and the cost of rents have gone up and that really hurts people, the people who are most in need, those who want to buy houses and those who need to rent. And I do not accept that and I had my local federal MP wants to come and talk to me and I said, Aaron, you, your party needs to get their act together and start doing something about housing 'cause it's stupid, it's insane that we're getting half a million people a year into this country and government is doing everything it can to stop anybody from building enough houses to put them in. You need to change your policy and I don't see a nation of that. I'm actually standing for the Libertarian Party. which believes in getting rid of a lot of stuff, government control. Let government do the things that we hire them to do, health, education, safety, that's what we want governments to do. We do not want governments putting in insane policies. You know we pay twice what we should for electricity compared with the United States, why? Because these insane green policies which make no difference at all to the Earth's climate, double.

Why?

And that understates it because when you charge businesses more, guess what, they're all going to charge you more for any service and good that you want. So we're spending, typical household in Australia is spending tens of thousands of dollars a year more than they need to because government inefficiency drives up costs and their bureaucracy and their red tape and their incompetence and their dumb green policies and stuff. I'm sorry, Jim. I'm not a fan. I'll vote Libertarian. I'll give my preference to the Liberal Party, and the rest— well, Greens last.

Greens always last, Liberals first, and then the—

You shouldn't have asked the question! Oh, I shouldn't have, I shouldn't have.

You're in trouble now, eh?

Well, yes—

That's not his Instagram. All his Instagram videos are like this, so it's all good. You can check him out there.

Alright, that's all my questions.

No, I didn't mean that.

It's a good question.

Thank you.

No, no, of course.

You can come and get lots of loops down the front. That's good. I love that one.

Well, thank you so much. Yeah, go for it.

Good day, Jim. It's me, Saurabh, from Adelaide. I got one question for you. Based on your experience, what's the one thing you wish you had understood before investing in a Jim's franchise?

Before starting my Jim's franchise back in 1989? Technology. I spent far too much time worrying about contracts. It took me 9 months to get my contracts. What I should have been doing is focusing on technology and I would have put more emphasis on it. We have great technology but it's taken a long time. So much of our success is basically technology. The reason that our service, our leads have gone up is to a large extent because our customer service is better and that's a lot to do with technology of things like lead fees and surveys and so forth, yeah. So I would have hit that a lot earlier. Yeah, good question.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Go for it, next one.

Hi, Jimmy, it's Jamie from Wangaratta again. What's something about you that most franchisees would never guess?

That's a good question.

That's a very hard one because I'm so loud-mouthed that anyone— That's true.

I'm pretty honest as well, yeah.

Okay. I don't know if you'd guess it or not, but I have very, very strict ideas about sexual behaviour.

Oh no.

I think— okay, I think people should only have sex when they're married to each other. I don't know if most people know that about me, but I am basically a very conservative— Christian values. Is that something that everybody would know? I don't know. A lot of people would. Very strict ideas.

There you go.

I have, I have, yeah. I'm quite conservative on such issues.

I'll tell you something you might not know. He's got a good joke in him. So he's got a Rolodex of jokes with Jim. So if you ask him to tell a joke, he can go down there and pull a few good dad jokes out. He's got some good jokes in him actually, he does, Jim. So that's probably the friendship part of it.

What's your best joke that you've got?

Best joke, best joke. I don't know about best joke. But let me tell you this one. There's a woman speaking to her husband. And she says, if I died, do you think you would date again? And he said, yes, look, I probably would eventually, you know, I mean, obviously I'd be devastated for the time being but I think eventually I would start to date again, yeah. And she said, well, do you think you'd get married again? He said, well, yeah, I guess so, I mean, if things were going well after a certain period of time, if things were going really well and, you know, I— we really felt for each other, I think I would. She said, would you live in our house? And I said, well, I guess so, yeah, it's a pretty good house. I guess we've lived here, it's very comfortable, it's a great house, so we would. Would you let her wear my clothes? And he said, well, yeah, I mean, she's got some pretty nice clothes there. If they suited her, yeah, I'd probably consider that, yeah, sure. Would you let her sleep in our bed? And he said, well, I suppose so, yes. I mean, it's a good bed, yeah, I suppose it'd be silly to throw it out for that reason. She said, would you let her play with my golf clubs? He said, oh no, no, no. She said, why not? Oh, she's left-handed. There you go.

He's got a lot of those jokes. There you go, you might not know that about him. He's got a heap of those. There you go, good question.

G'day there, Jim. I'm Tiawhi, I've come all the way from New Zealand. I just got 2 questions. I want to give them both to you at the same time. My first one is, what's the quickest way for me to turn this franchise into a money-making machine and the quickest way to turn it into an expensive hobby? And my second question is, if I turned up to a job and the car looks like it's been used as a rubbish bin for 6 years, can I charge them an emotional fee?

Which division are you doing?

Sorry.

Car cleaning.

Car cleaning.

Car cleaning, obviously. You should charge, you should charge whatever the job is worth, my friend. If it's going to cost you 4 hours to get it cleaned up, then you're going to be charging them $300 or $400, aren't you? To get your hourly rate. So yes, and if they say that's exorbitant, well, you know, that's okay, that's my price. You're polite about it, but you use your car as a rubbish tip. You'll come across some pretty gross cars, I can tell you, in your time. Sometimes you might get a car so bad you really can't fix it, in which case you've got to walk away.

Okay.

Don't take on a vehicle. That you don't take on a vehicle that you know that you can't get to look good because otherwise they'll complain bitterly no matter how badly they've done it. So if necessary, look at it and say, look, I'm sorry, I can't quote on this. I don't care if they give you a bad survey or complaint about it. We will wipe it off if you walk away for that reason.

Okay.

Now, quickest way to make money, probably quite the wrong question. I think what you've got to be doing is to focus fanatically on your job. It's not quick, it's a process of looking at everything that you do. I am very suspicious of get-rich-quick ideas. Look, you often— that leads to things like speculation, speculation in crypto, speculation in stocks, any kind of gambling. Very bad. Get-rich-quick is really a recipe for get-poor-quick. Honestly, it is. People who do that kind of attitude. So your attitude is not, how can I get rich quick? It's how can I get— build a brilliant business and how can I be more efficient? And you focus, focus, focus all the time. How can I do it better? How can I do a better job? How can I do a better job faster? How can I cut my costs? How can I get such happy clients that I can raise my prices? Listen, learn, talk to successful franchisees, talk to your franchisor. Always be immensely self-critical. If you do that, it's not get rich quick, but you'll be absolutely very, very surprised how much money you make. And if I can also say something too, I don't— I think getting rich is probably overstated as an aim for anybody. I think what we should be able to offer you is a business that gives you a very good and hopefully increasing standard of living but never takes away from your family, which is more important. It's like the gentleman down behind there asking about getting married. That's what's crucial in life. You make a fortune of life and you come to the end of your life and you haven't got relationships around you because you spent your time making money, that's not a good life. And this is why the copy of my book that you've got is called No Other Success, which is short for no other success can compensate for failure in the home.

Beautiful.

Me?

Yeah, so it's very good. Well done.

Cheers, bro.

Good question. Thanks for that one.

Go for it.

Next one up.

Hi, I'm Jill from Central Coast, New South Wales. I actually used to live around here for 5 years, so—

Did you?

Yes, just down at—

Well, Central Coast's very nice from what I heard.

Yeah, it is nice. My one question is, if I could grant you one wish, what would it be?

Eternal youth. Go back to being 25 and stay there forever, okay? Seriously. I'm very happy, I'm very fit, but I know in another 20 years or so it's all over. I would very much like to go back to 25 and stay there and have my wife come with me too. So that'd be my perfect wish, alright? Not very practical, but still.

That's good.

How would you feel about that one?

I'd agree with you.

Yes, there you are.

And I'd probably do things differently. And, you know, but, but the one thing is, I'd—

by—

at 25, I already had 3 children, so I'd never change that.

Oh, good girl. Thank you. Well done. Give her a round of applause. Thank you very much.

I've actually got 5 in total.

5. There you go.

Wow.

Somebody's got your priorities right. I, I— you're, you're a, you're a lady after my own heart. Well, my wife is most after my own heart, but you're a Hey, I've got 6.

Really?

Who's got 6? Oh, well done. That's great. Yes.

Go for the next one then.

Hi, Jim. My name is Rosedeep. I'm from Adelaide. You just spoke about politics. Why don't you run for the Prime Minister?

Oh, I'd be a lousy politician. You heard me today.

I think you'd be a good one.

Now come on, you heard what I just said.

What did I do?

I spouted out with the most stream of vitriol. I don't have any filter. I say exactly what I think. You cannot get elected in politics by saying what you think. It doesn't work that way.

He's doing the state, so he's running for the state one.

I'm running for state, but I don't expect to win. In fact, I've chosen almost an impossible— I said, what's the hardest? I shouldn't say this, should I?

Probably not, no.

I won't say it. I'll say it after the election. But there's a reason I stood for Northcote, which I can't really tell you, but I'll tell you after the election.

Yeah, we do get Jim for PM a bit though, but I think he's probably too honest to be a legit politician.

I don't think I'd be a good politician. Also doesn't pay very well, quite frankly. I make a lot more money than the Prime Minister does.

If not politics, but what, Jim's entertainment? Like sign up artists and stuff?

Jim's entertainment? Like as a booking agent or something?

Everyone just takes a flight, go to US and Hollywood. What about Jim's Wood?

Jim's Wood?

Turn this into Jim's Wood, Jim.

You're gonna make me choke if you say things like that. I don't think I have mentioned the way I've been skilled in that area. I have a very narrow range of skills. Frankly, I am, I am, I'm quite persistent. I'm quite creative. I'm a good communicator at a certain level but I'm not good at most things, I'm really not. These kinds of things, these kind of knowledges I don't have. Actually look at something like social media, this guy's orders of magnitude better than I am.

Are you better?

You look at people in legal, you look at people in other parts of the company, you look at my franchisees and my franchisors and divisionals, everybody is better at so many things than I am. I just have a certain narrow range of things that I can do okay.

Maybe you can just help the franchisees who likes to play drums and stuff, because I think a lot of people here, they do side hustling for music and stuff.

Well, if somebody, if I got the right person to come up with a new division, I'm okay with it. But I'd look at it and say, okay, how much money can you make out of this? And what do you know about it? What sort of business have you run? Is that your background? You're a muso or?

Yeah, I do. I did a music course. I do write music. and write rap, like in English, Punjabi, Hindi and stuff. Well, I do it on the side, like, because I do need to pay the bills and stuff.

Yes, okay.

Artists and money, they don't go together.

You're not Bollywood yet, are you?

I'm from Hollywood, man.

You are from Hollywood? Well, there you are, you've got the background.

I don't know, I'm just, I don't know where I'm from now, because I've been here for 10 years, and even back home they tell me, I'm from overseas. And here I'm from overseas as well.

Rather you go back, you'll pick up a proper Australian accent and you go back and go, how you going, mate? And they won't understand you at all. You'll even speak Australian-accented Punjabi. What do you speak? Hindi? Punjabi?

Now I speak only English, but I do speak Punjabi with my Punjabi people.

Yeah, we'll give you an Australian accent before too long. You see that?

Yeah, good question. That's a unique one as well. We've got time for one more question, guys. Someone got one more question to finish it off tonight?

One more?

If not, what we can do then, Jim, is we can— you can pick your— so what we're going to do now is Jim will pick his 3 favourite questions and they can get the first pick of the prize. Everyone who asked Jim a question as well, all this loot here is for you as well. So you can come and take anything you like as well after Jim picks his 3 favourites. So which one stood out to you, Jim, as my favourite?

Well, there were so many great questions here. There was a lot. But the one about my favourite quote, nobody's ever asked me that one too.

Favourite quote.

You gave me the opportunity to spout, Who asked the favourite quote? That was fantastic.

Yep, come up. What's the next one there, Jim? You can take anything you like here.

Should I have kids? Who said that?

The young man down the middle. Yeah, come up and grab anything you like.

Nobody's ever asked that question. It's a perfect question. Well done.

Jim will hold you to it though.

I will hold you to it. And you're gonna tell me when the book comes out, I'm gonna send the book to your wife.

What's the next one there, Jim?

Look, there's so many others, but I thought the one about consistency was good. Who said that?

For your fitness stuff?

Yeah, how do you beat the system? The young fella there. That is a very, very good question.

And everyone else that asks a question, you get a prize as well. So don't worry about that. You can come up and grab what you like.

Just pick anything you like. If you ask 2 questions, 3 questions, you grab 2, 3 prizes.

All right, guys. So thank you very much for your attention tonight as well. We appreciate it. If you want to have a photo or anything with Jim as well, feel free to do so. We'll hang around a bit too as well. So appreciate your time, guys, and good luck for the rest of your training experience. Thank you.