From humble beginnings to franchise king. Guest starring Jim Penman, founder of Jim’s Group.

Hi, you're listening to the Tradie Show Together in Trade Business, the podcast for trade business and contracting bosses like you and your partner who want to lead with confidence, make more profit and create a better lifestyle. Are you ready to fast track your freedom and have some fun with your hosts, fellow trade business owners and husband and wife team, Andy and Angela Smith?

Hell yeah.

And welcome back to another episode of the Tradie Show. I'm Andy and as usual, I'm joined by my co host and business business partner and wife, Angela Smith.

Hey there, everyone. Good to be here.

This week's episode is something I'm super excited about. Our guest today is someone that is iconic in the trades industry in Australia and even the world.

Yeah, it's true. It's going to be pretty rare that you won't know who we're talking about when we mention his name. You literally see his face everywhere.

We're going to be joined by the one, the only Jim.

Ring any bells, people? So are you still asking who's Jim?

Jim is the one and only Jim Penman, founder of the Jim's Group. Think Jim's mowing, Jim's cleaning, Jim's antennas, and so much more. Yeah.

So excited. Launched in Australia, Jim now has over 4,600 franchises operating in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK.

Wow.

I know. So, without further ado, we'd love to introduce none other than Jim Penman.

Hi, Jim, and welcome to the Tradie Show.

Good to be here.

We're super excited to have you.

We are so excited to have you. It's so good to have you here and I know our listeners will be super excited as well.

Absolutely. So, Jim, we are in awe of the empire that you've created and would love to actually go right back to the beginning of when Jim's Group began. Can you share with our audience what's your background and how did you start out in business?

Well, I, first of all, I never intended to be in business or trading or anything. I. I intended to be an academic. I went to University for 10 years, gaining myself a PhD in history. But as I often say, what do you do with a PhD in history? Well, obviously you mow lawns for a living. That's my student job. The year before I started university, I took a gap year and I started to get a little business going. I was charging $1.50 an hour for gardening in those days, and as time went by, I started charging a bit more. And then about 1975, I bought myself a mower and Then a brush cutter and that was my part time job, which was great. It was getting me outside, it was good money. I actually managed to buy my first house at university mostly from my earnings. So that was great.

That's amazing.

And then I finished up in 1982 with no prospect of an academic career. So I just turned my part time gardening business into something full time.

Well, it's amazing how you started out, isn't it? You know, you started with owning a mowing business, getting I think you said $1.20 an hour. Was it a dollar twenty, fifty an hour? Oh, sorry mate, I don't want to talk it down.

Don't lower my prices. Yeah.

And now you've become one of the largest franchises in Australia. I mean how do you go from a single mowing business to an iconic Australian brand?

It's huge. It's a lot of people think it's about having a great genius breakthrough idea. It's nothing like that at all. It's thousands and thousands of little decisions every day. I say to myself from my earliest days to now, how can I do it better? Now that might mean how to turn a mower faster, how to load grass into a grass bag. Most quick and efficient way as possible. Even saving one step every time you do it makes a difference. How do I delight my customer? How do I amaze them? I was one of the first contractors in Australia to have a brush cutter back in the 70s when they were just coming into the country. And then how do I travel between jobs more efficiently? How do I cut my travel time down? And then when I get too much work, how do I find workers? How do I control the quality of what they do? How can I advertise more effectively? You know, thousands and thousands of micro decisions every day of my business career over the last half century.

That is awesome. And I know tradies are out there listening now, just thinking, God, all I focus on is trying to get through the workload. You're not even thinking of all these little things and being better and how do we better and we know that so many tradies do. We just get bogged down with the day to day running of everything. We put our head in the sand and we just keep going and we.

Can get through the work but.

But it's not making us better. So I love the fact you're thinking about everything you do in a day and how you can just get 1% improvement, which makes a huge improvement at the end.

I think the challenge we have is in trade business, I Think people have that enthusiasm when they very first start their business, but over the course of time, five years, 10 years, 15 years in, they get really complacent. So instead of kind of doing what you just said, Jim, which is how do I be better, how do I improve my service, how do I lean to business excellence? They just go, I've just got to get through a day. We talk about these 1 percenters, and that's, by the sounds of it, is exactly what you've just spoken about. You actually just touched on a brush cutter. And I know that you have a little bit of a story that we watched on a video not that long ago that really formed a huge part of your business ethos. Can you share that story with our listeners?

What used to happen in the early days is that I used a wheel edger to cut the edges. And for a mower strip edge, you could do a pretty good job. You cut it along there and you use the mower itself, put the left hand wheel onto the concrete edge because the mower is cut clockwise and that sucks from the left. So I could do a very neat edge. But what used to frustrate me, I couldn't do round the clotheslines, I couldn't run the trees, the retaining walls. No customer ever, ever said to me they weren't happy with that. But I didn't like it because it wasn't a perfect job and you couldn't do it. It was commercially impossible to get a pair of shoes and go around would take you longer than the lawn. The sad fact about it. So one day I happened to be in the Momoa shop, which was in Elsam at that time, and there was a guy who'd been actually decades in the business, Tom was his name actually, as he said to me once, he said, jim, you know, you look after your customers better and your equipment worse than any contractor I know because I was always in there with something stupid happening. In one case, I actually managed to flubbox this guy. I brought in a problem with a mower he'd never seen in his whole life. And the wheel of the mower was staved in. He just looked at me in, in amazement. He said, jimmy, how could you do that to a mower? I mean, how could you do that mowing a lawn? And I said, well, it wasn't actually mowing a lawn. I actually was driving along the road and I neglected, put the tailgate of the mower properly and it fell out on the road and it bounced. And the second time that happened he actually looked at me really seriously and said, jim, remind me never to drive behind you on the road.

So anyway, well, there goes the lawnmower.

I was in this mower shop one day and he was putting my mower on his thing because he looked after me, was one of his best customers for obvious reason. Yeah. And I just started wandering around the shop and in the corner there was this funny looking gadget, long pole handle in the middle, little engine on one end and the other end was this plasticky thing with a bit of white cord sticking out. And I said, tom, what's that? He said, it's a brush cot. I said, what is it? What? He said, it's a new idea, just out from Japan, one of the first in the country.

Wow.

And he showed me how it worked and how you can cut the grass without rimbucking the trees. And I said, tom, I've got to have that. I had very little money in those days and I was shocked. It was more than the mower, but I had to have that gadget. And then I went out and started using it and then I could do the job that people could not do for themselves. I could make the job perfect.

Amazing.

And that's the trick too, isn't it, mate? You weren't the normal mowing guy. You had the next level up and you're doing something that no one else was doing. So people in the neighborhood starts talking and they go, hey, you've got to use this gym bloke, he's a lunatic and he damages his lawnmower all the time. But God, he's got this whipper snipper brush cutter and he does an incredible job.

I would notice if I was your customer though, if you're not being a perfectionist, which is what I am. Although I would go, you're really lovely, you know, you're friendly when you're here, you do a great job. But if you go that extra mile, I totally would be telling my friends about you and recommending you to my peeps.

Well, that's what happened. People used to say things to me like, I never knew my lawn could look this good. They'd never seen it done. I go to a place where the nature ship overgrown and I cut it back to the concrete. People didn't even know there was a straight line under there because they'd never seen it, but I gave it to them. And when I finished the brush cutting, I go down the driveway and I get the grass from the cracks and blow it off afterwards. Look, it wasn't a rational thing. That's what I say to people. It wasn't because I said if I do a better job, clients will like me. I just couldn't stand the idea of not doing the best possible job. I couldn't stand being late to a customer and letting them down. It was just a real emotional driver. And I have done the most stupid things in my business life. You would not believe I am so reckless at times. I've made so many bad decisions. But that absolute emotional passion, the customer service, is really what drove me. And then later on, of course, my passion for franchisees being successful, which is even stronger.

Yeah, mate, I know that, you know, systems are another huge part of setting up any business for success. But potentially this is even more so when you got a franchise and because you need to guarantee the quality and the consistency across all your franchises. Can you tell us a little bit of how you implemented systems with the original Jim's Mowing business and then built and maintained these for all your franchise guys out there? Guys and girls.

Look, I have to admit that when I had subbies in pre franchise days, my services were not very good. We used to get about for every new job. I gave it one complaint, mostly because of lateness. So it was not good service. And honestly, I only really franchise in self defense because a company called Vip came from Adelaide and they terrified me. I thought they would crush me dead. They had 250 franchisees, I had maybe, you know, a dozen subbies. And I actually tried to get together with them and try to help them to grow. It's only when they said no that I decided to try and compete with them. And even when I started, I really didn't think that I would even catch these guys. I just wanted to survive. But look, I had one vision about that. I wanted to make a system that be so great you had to be mad not to join it. That was just one idea. And I made really dumb mistakes. For example, fees were far too low in the beginning. I actually go back to my franchisees after a while and begged them to increase their fees because I couldn't survive with what I was doing. I was doing things like allowing them to decide what jobs they wanted, what suburbs, what kinds of services they prepared to offer. And it was all very, very labor intensive. So it was really quite tough. But I just wanted to make them crazy about it.

So you needed to come back to everyone offering the same or similar services. So no matter who that customer was that rang Jim's Mowing, you knew that Regardless of their geographic area, that person could service them. Whereas some you were saying, were saying, no, they don't want to do that.

Getting the level of service right was really hard and it's been a gradual process and it's still keeping on going. Today, for example, when I first started off, franchisees were better than my sub years for two reasons. First of all, because franchises own their own business and have an interest in the goodwill. But secondly, and very important, I used to be selective. I would actually send out a potential franchisee on the road with a couple of my guys I trusted and say, are they good enough? Apart from anything else, I knew if they didn't have great customer service, they're not likely to succeed. So I did that and that was actually immediately dropped the level of complaints quite dramatically, probably about 95%.

Wow.

But then over time I did different things. For example, we brought training back to a single office. We had local training beginning. Then I brought that back in and then the first episode of training which I give, we had just had one this week actually and I gave a two hour talk. Most of it's really, really passionate, specific about customer service and they get really drilled, indoctrinated and we know that works during lockdown. We had a situation where we couldn't give them that training. They actually had to do it on video. A lot of them didn't. And you could tell because the levels of customer service in so many guys were so terrible. We actually had to bring them back to retrain to show them how to do it properly.

Wow. And I think one of the things you don't know, Jim, we haven't talked about this as yet, but my brother in law, he owns a Jim's Mowing franchise up here in Sydney and he raves about you, raves about the company and raves about everything about the franchise, which I know a lot. A lot of the times you hear franchise people that are doing a franchise and there's normally complaints, but he's dead set, a raving fan and financially doing really, really well.

I want to ask you a question specifically on that. What's the type of person that chooses to join Jim's franchise?

Well, it's wildly variant. We've got people from very top level corporate jobs and we've got people who've got very pedestrian background. They've been, you know, they're working behind the counter in shops and so forth. It's all over. Salespeople tend to do particularly well. What you tend to find is the level of income tends to reflect the previous job. There's somebody from a corporate or a sales background who's been used to being fairly high driving. They tend to do really, really well. Somebody from a normal background will do okay. The great majority in our survey, something like 97% reported good or satisfactory income. There was, sorry, 93%, 7% poor. So not everybody does, but most of them do.

Yeah.

I would love to say that they all make a heap more money and quite sometimes they do. But in fact, what tends to happen with time is they tend to actually want to make the same money as their previous job but work a lot.

Less hours, get the lifestyle back.

Yeah. Same time with their kids. It's the biggest single thing they say. The great thing about the franchise, I don't make any more money than I used to in my corporate gig. But then I used to go. I did a long commute to the city, I was away. I hardly saw my kids except at weekends and then I was too tired. These days I see my kids growing up. I have breakfast with them, I pick them up from school, I go to their sporting events. I don't make any more money. But that's the big, big benefit. Yeah.

So I'd say quite a lot of trade business owners out there have actually thought about maybe franchising at some stage, but most wouldn't actually know where to start. So that being said, what would you recommend the average trade business owner do or look to perhaps implement if maybe they wanted to franchise down the track? Let out your secrets, Jim.

To be honest, I don't suggest that you try and compete with me in the core area that we do because we're very good at what we do. Just to give you some idea, we spend something like $5 million a year on software development. We have characteristics. I would not be one to compete with myself. In the area that we operate, where the opportunity comes is where you want to do something a little bit different that we don't cover. And there are plenty of opportunities out there for that. People are starting all the time. In fact, we actually have an opening. People who want to come to us and they want to start a business in an area we don't cover can just start with us. Very little cost up front. We provide all the training, everything they want. And by the way, they go through all the training, the franchisee training, the franchisor training, and they decide not to go with this. They can take the knowledge and do it themselves. And it does happen just not too long ago, somebody who had been franchise or Training just rang me up to say, jim, I just wanted to tell you I've just signed my first franchisee. And I said, that's great, but I didn't think you started with us. He said, no, I started independent, but thanks for all. You told me it was going great. So one of the things I'd say to be sneaky is if you want to start your own business, pretend you want to start a Jim's franchise, do all that money and then go do it yourself.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I have to say, Jim, you've definitely helped thousands and thousands of tradies out there with your knowledge and you've been very open and free with that.

Get a good start in life, right?

Yeah, exactly. And just to steer the conversation just a little bit away from business, I noticed that the Jim's Group are massive advocates for mental health. I just think this is so important for everyone these days in the trade industry and, you know, the old school way of just suck it up and drink a cup of concrete, mate. You know, it's all changed. But can you give us a bit of a rundown of what the Jim's Group does to advocate mental health awareness?

Yeah, look, first of all, it is really, really huge issue with us for all kinds of reasons. Let me give you something too. We've just. Last year we had a really dreadful accident. One of our guys actually died on the job. It was from improper use of a chainsaw because the mowing guy had a chainsaw holding it, one hand. It came back, he killed, he died. And that's tragic. It's awful for him, it's all for his family. But do you know, we work with chainsaws, we work with mowers, we work with machinery, work at heights. That's the first fatality we've had in 33 years. But do you know how many franchisees have committed suicide within your group? Within your group? We've had franchisees. Even one franchisor committed suicide. I don't know how many, but I do hear about this from time to time. And I also know know the kinds of problems people have with mental illness because it's one of the main reasons people fail. They actually have mental problems. So we are fanatical about that and we're doing more and more with time. So, for example, one of the biggest things, and I would say this to any trading at all, be part of a group, go to meetings. If you're an independent, join your local group. There's always. There's like an independent moist association. Join Them. If you're a franchise, of course, come to meetings regularly. Meetings. We've actually figured out that there's an optimum number of meetings, which is one every six weeks. If you have more than that, it doesn't help. Less than that, you don't do so well. Meetings is a great opportunity to build relationships with other franchisees who are in the same situation. You go along, you've got a problem, you're downcast and you talk to somebody who's a five year veteran who's making quarter million dollars a year and he says, I have had the problem in the past and this is what I did and that's how I got through it. You'll do well. And they encourage each other and they meet up at the tip promoting guys especially, and they get to be friends, they go to barbecues at each other's place. We actually try to have meals at meetings too these days. So that's very, very important. Be part of a group who actually are sharing your situation. Other things too, obviously. What we have is a mentoring program. Our franchisors are required to ring franchisees at least once a month and ideally more often, even weekly, especially for new guys. Ring them up, don't just be ready to take their calls, but to ring them proactively. What else do we do? We had a terrible situation just happened about three years ago in Perth where one of our guys killed his three little girls and his wife and then his mother in law. He killed them. And that wasn't to do with his business. He had some personal demons. I went across there to speak to the franchisees in Perth and they were really, really distraught, unhappy. Most of them didn't know this guy directly, but it's kind of like it's.

In the family with U.S. association.

They were there and we had a meeting in this golf club and it was really emotional. And I just said to them, guys, what can we do to reduce the chance of this happening again? And they come up with all kinds of ideas. One of them was that we give out franchisees a list of emergency numbers in a fridge magnet, things like fire and stuff like that too. But then different mental health numbers. We give it to them. We did that. As a result, we still do that. That's been great. They suggested that we needed to have more training. So all my franchisors now go through mental health training, including myself. I've done it myself. We're actually shown how to look for these problems and then what to do with them. We've also one of the suggestions that came up at the time, this really moved me. I mean, it was a terrible experience, but this was very moving. One of the people said there, what if we set up a program of volunteer mentors that's franchisees who are not paid but are ready to talk to any franchisee who wants someone to talk to a friendly Earth? And I said to them, that's a lot to ask. Would anybody be interested in doing such a thing? And most of the people in that room put up their hand. Most of them. I was very, very, very moved by that. I thought, isn't that wonderful? Giving up their time, such things. Since then, we've also employed a psychologist who's paid for by Jim's group. Anybody who wants to talk to professional psychologists without charge. It's all by phone, of course, because they're all over the country, but you can. You can do that. So a whole stack of things that we do try to be better at this.

Where this all comes down to for me is that at the end of the day, we're all just humans, and humans actually need connectivity. That's what we're here for, is to ensure that we make connections with other people and encouraged to actually talk about what's actually going on inside your life. So just to add to that, just to change tact just a little bit, I know that you definitely have a passion for living a really happy and healthy life, just in general.

Yes.

And we often hear tradies that are chasing this dream of success not really living that healthy life, which is one of the reasons why they actually became a tradie in the first place. They give us excuses like, I just don't have time or I'm just too busy. And I think you're a great example of having the best of both worlds. So what do you think is the key to living a long and healthy life while still being successful in trade?

One of the best.

There's a book I've just finished called Happy Money, and a number of things I've read are the same way. It talks about what brings happiness. And a very crucial thing is it's not what people think. People have the idea, if I had more money, I had a better house, a better car, better clothes, better holidays, I'd be better off. In actual fact, things like having a better car or a bigger house has a zero relationship to happiness. It has no effect at all. You might think it will, but it doesn't. Mostly because it's competitive. You're competing at somebody else and there's always somebody's richer. I mean, even Bill Gates has Jeff Bezos.

That's right.

But what actually works is experiences. Experiences are better than things. And experiences are things like having a holiday with your family, going out to a restaurant with friends, those kinds of things. Things that you do. But, you know, the number one thing they found. People might find this very strange. The number one thing they've found that brings happiness in spending money is to give it away to a cause that you're personally involved in. This is scientists who actually look at how you spend money. I'll just give you an example. There's one particular guy in Adelaide who works fairly limited hours. I think he works about three days a week. He's a mowing franchisee, but he makes all the money he needs. And do you know what he does with the rest of his time? He goes out and works with the homeless. He says, I'm somebody who goes out and they listen to them and find out what they want and what they need and then get them help. Now, isn't that an amazing life?

What an amazing human.

What a great man. What a great life.

Yeah, it's amazing. And I know when we talk about charities, for us that's something we wanted to give a lot back. And we've just joined with Gus Wooland with Gotcha for Life, which is all around mental fitness. And we're doing a lot of stuff with him with our lifestyle tradie group as well. But, yeah, it's interesting, I would say, when you look at all the tradies out there at the moment, majority of the ones that I. That are so bogged down, they're so mentally drained and they're not giving them their chance to have the lifestyle. And as you said, go on these holidays, hang out with friends, do, do a bit of exercise, get to the gym, push some weights, do that stuff. Because the ones that are doing that are the ones that I see that are getting that success. So I agree with everything you say there.

And I think burnout, which is a common conversation that we have with trade business owners, you only end up there because you've not given yourself even just 20 minutes in a day just to take a breath, you know, go and see the sky, move your body, just constantly have some sort of movement and do something for yourself that, you know, isn't like trying to do something better with the business or being entrenched with your kids or whatever, whatever that looks like. So some sort of routine, I suppose, every single day to ensure that you do something for yourself is important and.

Also very important to break every single week. It's really a bad idea to work seven days a week. I was talking to a guy once who chopped firewood. Now, firewood is the job where you can exactly identify how much work you've done today because it's done by weight. And he said, look, there are some weeks where I worked six days and some weeks where I worked seven days. And he said there's a 15% difference in the earnings between those two kinds of weeks, which of course you think logically speaking, seven days he makes 15% more. But he said, no, it's the other way around. The weeks that I worked six days, I actually got 15% more done than I did seven days. So taking time off is really, really.

Important, not just for your body, but for your mind. It's both, isn't it?

It's so important. But one of the greatest stories I did, and this is when I was talking to somebody who's a 10 year veteran. When my people get to 10, 15, 20, 25 years, I give them a call just to see. And one of the things I asked them, what were you doing beforehand, what it's like. And this guy told me he was a supermarket manager and he used to work very long hours and he's had a four year old son. One morning this little boy said to him, daddy, I wish you could have breakfast with us. And he said he drove to work that day and his tears were streaming down his face and he got to work and he quit and he bought a Jim's Mine franchise. And he said, the difference it's made in the last 10 years has been phenomenal. I said, have you ever thanked your son for that comment? And he said so often, again and again, it changed my life. You see, his income is no better, but he's seen this little boy grow up and there's nothing that could actually make up for that.

You only get one life, right? So make sure you live it well.

Chasing money for its own sake is not a life. And I can tell you too, as far as I'm concerned, I know I'm successful, I'm wealthy in people's terms, but we live a very ordinary life. My kids have this sort of theoretical understanding that we're rich. Where's the mansions, where's the luxury car? I drive a $10,000 car and I dress shabbily. And you can see what I dress. This is me. We don't have expensive holidays, we don't go to chalets, we don't leave the high life. We live a very ordinary life. What I do is contribute to research foundation which is based on my PhD research which is looking for cures for things like mental illness, particularly things like drug addiction and so forth. That's my purpose in life.

Mate. That's unreal.

I love that.

And I'm a happy man. I really am very happy because my life is full of meaning and it's full of relationship and I see my kids, I drive my kids to school. I actually had to drive just before I got to this thing. I had to drive to go to school to get my son his bathing costume which a little brat forgot. How could I do that if I was working a corporate job in the city?

I will have to say, Jim, that I know a lot of people that know you and everyone says the exact same thing. What an absolute superstar you are. So. And we're looking at you now and you are a very happy man. So I love the fact that, you know there's money there but you don't have to necessarily show it. And I love being a lot grounded. Yeah, amazing things. So what I'm going to do, Jim, is we play this game. We do it with all our guests. I'm going to fire off three rapid fire questions. You're going to have between 15 and 30 seconds to answer them. Are you ready? Yep, mate. So we know you're a history lover. If you could have dinner with anyone dead or alive, who would that be and why?

I'd have dinner with Thucydides or somebody from classical Athens. I love Athenian history and I talk and I want to hear their music. They were so creative. Anyway, what was their music like? But we have no record of that. I have to think ancient Greeks, which I don't currently, but I'd learn it.

Beautiful. Number two, what is the best piece of advice, business related or not, that you personally have ever received?

Put God first.

Put God first in your life.

Yeah, that's right. Very good. I'm sorry that's not relevant to everybody, but it's relevant to me.

No, that's it. And the questions are asked directly to you. And that's exactly it. So mate, we love that. We love that. So the gyms logo, most people know it out there, don't they? It's a picture of yourself. You're not, not necessarily sporting a beard anymore. Is there any chance of a comeback?

No. Why? The reason that I shaved my beard off is because I was 40 years old, I was single. Not my desire. I'm not his person to live with. And the beard was starting to go gray. At that age, you do not need to look any older than you do. If I grew a beard now, I'd be like Santa Claus. It wouldn't look like my logo at all.

That is absolutely amazing. Jim, thank you very much for answering those.

We're so honored to have you on our show today. And no doubt there are plenty of trade business owners that are so excited to have heard you speak about your journey and truthfully, what's important from the beginning of Jim's mowing to the creation of Jim's group and how humble you are despite your success. Thank you so much for sharing your story.

Yeah, and I just want to say, you are an absolute superstar, mate. I know I've banged on a bit about that through this episode, but what a lovely guy. Anyone that gets a chance to meet Jim, make sure you do a real big thank you from all of us, mate.

Yeah, you're welcome anytime.

That was absolutely awesome. You know what, he's such a great guy and it's such an iconic business. I'm sure if any of our listeners were thinking about franchising, they've definitely got some ripper tips out of that.

Yeah, I agree. Even if franchising doesn't seem like your gig or you're just looking to scale up or sell up, you can still apply a lot of the learnings that Jim spoke about today because it's all about setting up the right foundation so that you do have that freedom to choose the end outcome for sure.

Well, you know what? That's it from us. So Ange and I will catch you all next week.

See you then.

Subscribe to the Tradie show together in trade business now, wherever you get your favourite podcasts, rate and write us a review or check out the show notes@lifestyletrady.com podcast. Thank you for listening. Until next time. Hell yeah.