How Jim Penman Picks Franchise Winners: The #1 Trait That Predicts Success

So tell us about your— I loved your email signature. So the first one is your reason for existence is your franchisees. Number 2 was you're interested also customer service is important, but tell me about the third one in terms of where you say that you only back people that will win and will work for you in terms of franchisees.

Well, the actual thing is first priority is the welfare of franchisees. We're also passionate about customer service, which is not a contradiction, it's a support to the to franchisees. We sign only franchisees and franchisors we are convinced will succeed. Now, the reason that came about is because even though in retail, particularly someone like McDonald's, they do take care in who they sign, in the service industry, traditionally, they didn't. I was faced with a major competitor, 250 franchises when I first started, and they didn't have any selection process. And I wasn't going to do that. I didn't think that was fair to take money off somebody when you really had every reason to think they would fail. So I set up a policy right from the beginning. I just said, no, I'm going to try everybody. I'll interview them, I'll put them out on the road, I'll have them tested. If they don't pass that, I won't take them.

So tell me about the characteristics of those people that you look— what are the characteristics you look for in those people?

It's most, most of your kind of person that's prepared to invest money in the business is not a fool, and they're okay, and they will do okay. You talk to somebody, if you talk to somebody, there's certain real danger zones. For example, a young man, usually parents are buying the business, early 20s, that kind of thing. That's complete failure. That's a guaranteed failure because they haven't put anything into it and their parents are trying to do it. And the parents will say, I will provide the business acumen. No, you can't do that. So that's an example. Um, if somebody interviews very poorly, now one sign of that would be somebody who doesn't ask proper questions. We like people to do research. The more they've looked at us, the better. If somebody says, how much do I make, you know, what's my income, they're thinking of a job. It's just the wrong attitude. But the best way I've found to actually screen somebody is put them out on the road with an experienced person, and I say, just have a look at them. Have them work with you for a day, tell me what you think. And I used to, in the early days, I used to send them out with two different people that I trusted, and I'd say, basically the rule is, if you were putting on workers and you wanted to have a second trailer running, because it was all mowing in those days, would you choose this person to be in it? And if they said, well, I wouldn't, then I said, well, I won't trust them with my clients either. So that's the kind of rule.

And personal character, who are the people that succeed in this business? What are their attributes?

Very self-aware, self-critical. They look at all the time and they say, how can I do things better? That's the one characteristic. It doesn't matter how smart you are. It doesn't matter how much education you have. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters by comparison with you. Look at yourself and say, how can I improve? How can I do a better job faster? How can I market myself better? That's a question I ask myself every day of my life still, and I'm including Christmas Day and holidays, everything. I'm always looking and saying, what could I do better? How could we improve? And that's that relentless drive for improvement. It's not the huge decisions, it's the little tiny micro decisions that you make all the time.

And you see that in your franchisees every day as well?

Not all of them, by any means. We divide franchisees into 3 basic categories. You got your golds, your bronzes, your leads, okay? A gold franchisee is that kind of person, the person that's endlessly self-critical, looks themselves, what can I change? Okay, clients are difficult, what do I do different? Jim isn't giving me enough of what I need, leads, what can I do? Be aware of other people, but self-critical. That is the kind of person that's gonna form a successful business, probably possibly employ people, become a franchisor, whatever.

They'll go up.

The majority are what I would call bronze, people who probably wouldn't succeed without the franchise help. Because bear in mind, people who start a trade business, between about 90 and 95% will fail in their first year. With us, it's around about 12% who leave us in the first year. So if people will listen and they'll be guided and they'll be coached, and that we helped. And with that, we can help to move them to the next stage, possibly. But sometimes they just want to run a business, but they want to run it in a way that's, you know, without necessarily improving it, but they're still acceptable. Then you have your leads, and that's the people we really want to try and avoid. This is the people that basically cannot be helped because they will look at anything and say, "No, it's not. I don't need to do that because it's your fault. You should be getting more leads," or "My customers are simply bad," or whatever. They always have a reason that someone else is at fault, and they won't look at themselves.

So tell us about the next— with that, tell us about the next generation that's coming through. So every generation seems to bag out the one after them in some respects, but what are the attributes of the next generation of people buying franchises? How's their customer service? How's their focus? And how do they compare to the previous generations?

It's probably not a fair comparison because franchisees are people who want to go in business for themselves. They usually got a bit more. Than the typical individual, not necessarily money-wise or education, but in terms of character. So they're usually a cut above the normal. We don't have a lot of very young Australians going into franchises these days. Most people would be older, middle-aged or older. We have people actually in their 60s and 70s still doing very, very well, particularly in mowing for some reason. We have a lot of immigrants, and immigrants tend to be very, very hardworking. It's a great opportunity for them because they don't have the connections and the, you know, fluency in English, but they've got great character. And children of immigrants also tend to be very, very good as well. I find young native-born Australians to be disappointing to a large extent. Now, someone like Joel is an example of a young Australian who is a fantastic guy, and there are great people around.

Yeah.

But what we find with staff in particular is that they tend to be a lot less motivated, less hardworking, less involved, engaged in their work than in the past. I find most of the best workers are actually somewhat older or immigrants or the children of immigrants.

And why is that the case?

I think we're becoming soft as a society. We're becoming decadent. Too much wealth. There is a process and we're looking at that in terms of neuroscience. I've got a research program, as you know, We're spending several million dollars a year looking at what's happening to people. And we're using rat models of mild food restriction. And when you mildly food-restrict rats, they act very differently. They're better parents, for example, better mothers in the case of rats. They are more hardworking, more exploratory. They just have a different character. If you have too much wealth for too long, it saps character. And the aim of the research is to try and work out a way to reinforce this, to actually reverse this process.

So, and you're eminently experienced in knowledge of the Roman Empire and empires in general.

Yes.

Where do you put us on the cycle in terms of Australia and Melbourne?

Well, we're going in the same way. It's exactly the same thing happening for the same reason. The biggest difference in the modern world is that the process is so much faster. Because let's face it, the Roman Empire was rich in a relative sense, But still, people still suffered from hunger. But you still got this process going on. Now we are so affluent, even the people on the dole tend to be more likely to be obese. It's a very different kind of wealth. It's extreme. And things like social media, you know, the availability of porn, all these sorts of things are very, very destructive to character, both of individuals and of society, which is why you're getting collapses in declining rates of marriage and collapsing birth rates and so forth. It's all this process of of the decline of community, of discipline, of faith, and the rise of this toxic individualism.

So have you tried to counter that with your children?

Well, the best I can. I treat them tough as much as I can. Whether we've been completely successful, I don't know, but my kids generally have pretty good character. But we've got to set limits. A lot of it's got to do with parental discipline. It's not to do with harshness. It's to do with guiding somebody, expecting a lot of them, and also not cosseting them too much, not making it too easy for them. I mean, my children, at least the younger ones, certainly know that in a theoretical sense we're quite rich, but it doesn't mean that they don't get to help with chores and, you know, all the rest of it associated and being, you know, obedient and so forth.

And what change has that in society meant for your business? So what are your customers like now compared to 20 or 30 years ago?

Well, it's easy in a way because Australians have become so soft that they don't really want to do as much as they did in the past. So it's, from the point of view of providing service, it's a very good business. The demand for our service is extraordinary. We knocked back well over 200,000 leads in the past year. We just can't cope with it even though we're putting on franchisees as fast as we can. We just can't cope with the tremendous demand. So you've got an opportunity here. A very wealthy, fairly lazy society needing a lot of things done. And massive rise in things like disability with the NDIS and stuff too adds to the demand. At the same time, you know, less and less people who are actually prepared to do the hard work to look after them. So it's, apart from not finding enough people, it's a tremendous environment.

So tell us what you think about the current political environment and what are your plans for future entry into politics potentially?

Well, it depends on what level. If you're asking me federally, I think it's shocking what's happening. I think the fact that we are in a time of prosperity and we are spending more and more and more money and we're borrowing to do it in a time of wealth, in times of sky-high mining revenues, it's just ludicrous that we can't balance the budget and pay off the debt. That was done back by John Howard, Peter Costello. And that was a magnificent achievement. We're just plunging further and further in time of prosperity. It's crazy. But when a real emergency comes, what are we going to do for it? And we can't even defend ourselves. We've got defense at 2% of GDP. It should be 3.5% like the Americans do. It's crazy to be so undefended and to be so indebted. So we've got this incredible lack of discipline and a lack of willingness to sacrifice. I've been reading again a biography of Bob Hawke too. A leader I greatly admire and the way that they actually led Australians to take steps that were good for the economy, you know, balanced the budget. A lot of things they did which were fantastic, but also how government followed. So we had good government for a while and people supported that. They don't anymore. Now, the other issue that I'm really, really concerned about is the cost of housing. We have dreadful zoning laws which make it more and more difficult to build. We have a government policy that says, bring in 500,000 new migrants a year and let's use the iron hand of government to actually forbid people from building enough houses to put them in. What could possibly go wrong? Zoning is crazy. If we had the same zoning regulations in Sydney and in Melbourne as they do in Houston, Texas, for example, which isn't perfect, but it's getting there, our house prices would be half what they are. Our rents would be lower. Our homes would come off the street and be able to be properly. Young people would be able to afford to buy a house without having millionaire fathers. I mean, I— when my children want to get married and have a child, I help them with housing. I have to. I've got 10 kids, so it's quite expensive. But they just can't buy houses these days. It's so unfair. It's so wrong. One of my daughters went with her partner to rent an apartment building. 40 people turned up. 40 people to try and rent this one apartment. And I actually wrote to the agents and said, listen, I want my daughter to have— I will personally 'Well, I'll personally pay a year's rent in advance if they can have this place.' You know what? Not good enough. How crazy is that? How ridiculous? We have these regulations which say you have to have quarter-acre lots. You can't put more. Even in the inner suburbs, it's just lunatic. You live next to a station. I don't need to want to have a car. No, you must have a house. Your cabin must have ability to housing, even if you don't want it. If you don't have a car, even if you want to walk to the station, you have to have it. We have these crazy regulations which massively force up the price of housing and rent. To me personally, that is the one issue we probably possibly could do something about.

So tell us about what you think and what you would like to do at the state and the local level. You talked about the federal level.

Well, state government, I think there's great opportunities. I'm a Yimby, I'm a passionate Yimby, okay? Yes in my backyard. I have a 5-acre property next door. I am very happy for the government to come in and say, okay, you can put units up there. You can have 30 units. We're 5 minutes from the station, 5 minutes from shops, from everything, from transport. What a brilliant place. Why can't you put people to live where they want to live? Why do you make it so difficult for them? We should relax these absurd, fantastically stupid zoning laws. Let people build with only minor constraints where they want, make it really easy, have a clear code across the whole state, the whole city. If you want I build something, he's going to go in there, here's my application, here you go, bang, done, okay, next. That, 2 minutes, that's how long it should take. And if the government can't do it, the local government can't do it, then you get the, then you license people like architects or town planners to do it for you and you pay them a small fee and it's all done. It is ludicrous. We had this place here, we wanted to build a complex, the sporting complex, to get people exercising. Who's against that? Okay, what the council—

your council would be—

for years and years to get permission. And they would do things like they would say, yes, you need to get rid of these trees, they're a fire hazard, but you can't get rid of the trees because they're native wildlife. So you must get rid of the trees, you can't— so we spent months trying to get people to talk together when you had these two insanely different requirements. Looking at putting up paddle courts, okay, now we've got tennis courts. Paddle courts just means basically you have sort of Perspex fences around them. I mean, we're not talking about a massive change to the environment. You know what? A year it would take, a year to do that because of stupid planning permits. Why? What reason is there possibly for doing that? Why do people have to live on blocks? Why can't you have terrace houses in the suburbs? Why can't you have multi-story developments near railway stations? Why can't you do things, let people live where they want to live? And travel less.

At an effective cost. So you've got Jim's local expert, your local expert. Will there be your state government expert at the next election?

I am looking seriously at standing for the Upper House in the Victorian State Parliament. I think that's the possibility to my mind. Interesting thing about zoning, it's not particularly a left versus right issue. If anything, the Labor Party is slightly better than the Liberals, but they're both stuck there. Now, if we had a network of people in the upper house of the state parliament, and that's the place to go because that's where you've got the proportional voting, and say, okay, you want your legislation passed, just let's start unwrapping some of these stupid zoning laws. And then we'll get whatever, whoever you are, we don't care, we'll pass everything else. You do something about zoning, you allow people to afford to be able to buy a house.

So you've got very clear messaging in the Jim's business in terms of what your value proposition is. What's your clear messaging to voters at the next state election?

Look for people, look for parties that are prepared to say YIMBY, that vote YIMBY, who don't want these insane regulations. I think there's community support behind it. We get— I make a lot of very controversial statements, okay, like over the COVID lockdowns, and I got a lot of flak from that, and people hate me. A lot of people don't really like me at all. I tell you what, in this particular issue, when we talked about housing zoning housing reform, we get like 96% say, yes, yes, let's do it. Let's have more affordable housing. Let's have affordable rents. Let's get the Home Loan— yeah, I'm in favour of that. That's overwhelming community support. We've just got to have the team to get it together and say, vote for that. And the great opportunity of the Upper House is that you can actually vote for whoever you want in terms of your Labor, Liberal, Greens, whatever, whatever you go for. But you can actually make a real difference by casting a vote for YIMBY parties. Libertarians is one example, but there's a number of others that believe in the same thing. If they don't favour strict zoning reform, don't vote for them, or at least give your first preference to those who do.

And let's assume you get balance of power in the Upper House per se. What sort of politics would you support?

Oh, I'm more on the liberal side, conservative side. I mean, I'm in small business, for heaven's sake. I mean, who's going to vote Labor if they're in small business? You'd have to be an extreme masochist to do that. Yep.

Politics is all about principles and values, and so is business. Tell us about your principles and values. Tell us where they were formed, how they were formed, and how they've changed over time.

I don't think they have changed very much. I have a passion about business, my business, which is it's a service business. It's service to franchisees. If you look at a founding document for Jim's Group, you actually find it best from the Bible. It's Jesus washing his disciples' feet, the idea of servant leadership. That is the way we look at it. All of our system is designed for one thing, basically, to make our franchisees successful. And everything else, including great customer service, works towards that. Because great customer service means more work, better work for franchisees. And that— so it's all there. So that's my, that's my consuming passion. And that's why I say to my franchisees at training, I say, here's my email Here's my phone number. You contact me anytime— daytime, evenings, weekends, public holidays. Franchisee rang me on Christmas Day. I don't mind that, okay? You have the right because you are my priority in terms of business. Money comes very distinctly second. I took a decision last year, um, to actually being concerned about the future of gyms, what's going to happen if I'm no longer around to protect my franchisees, that some vulture capitalist like a retail food group comes in, buys the business, and then rips off my franchisees blind. I'm so horrified. I put a clause in my contracts, all the new contracts, that say majority share of Jim's Group cannot be sold, controlling share, without the written consent of a majority of franchisees. And my CFO looked at that and he said, you are going to dramatically reduce the value of your business. And I said, good. That's what I want. I don't want this business to become just a vehicle for making somebody a lot of money.

Thank you for your time.

You're welcome.

Any questions for me or anything else you'd like to discuss? That was a wonderful—

Marcus, I could talk for hours.

No, no, I am. On your political side, I think there's certainly a gap for it and you've obviously got the right strategy in terms of the upper house component.

I think it's possible. I don't think I can do anything very personally about getting the governments to stop borrowing so much and spend more on defence and also government regulation in general. But I think one thing, housing is possible. They did it in New Zealand. In 2017, they put changes in place in Auckland about relaxing the zoning laws, not as much as I would like, but a lot. For the rest of New Zealand, they reckon house prices and rents are 40% below what they would have been. They haven't done that. So it's possible to do it. They did it in Minneapolis in America. They had a coalition from all sides of politics got together and said, listen, we all disagree on a lot of different things, but we all agree housing should be affordable. People should be able to afford to rent a place. They should be able to afford to buy their own home. Let's do something. And they made it happen.

But you're dealing with the consequences of a bureaucracy of people who were educated thinking we're going to run out of food. We're overpopulated and we've maximized resources. If you fly Melbourne to Sydney, you look down, this country is empty. It's vastly empty, right? There's no issues with overpopulation or lack of space in this country. It's regulation and closed mindset.

Yeah, you're right. Regulation. The point of it is too, I am in favor of the environment. I really am. Everything. If you come in here, you notice there's solar panels everywhere. I allow free charging for my my staff because we've got surplus power. On my house, I've got a farm, everything's solar panels. I drive an electric car. I'm developing a property. I'm planting thousands and thousands of trees. I believe in preserving the environment. The fact of the matter is zoning reform is the best thing you can do for the environment because what you want is dense, livable cities so people don't have to drive cars. It's crazy to say, like in San Francisco, perfect example, you've got a city which is so expensive that ordinary people cannot afford to live there unless you're a millionaire tech So people live 2 hours' drive. They go 2 hours to work and 2 hours to home. Now that completely stuffs up their personal life. It's not a good thing. They never see their kids. But you're also pumping billions and billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air unnecessarily because then you won't let people live where they want to live. Now that to me is one of the worst crimes against the environment. Anybody who calls themselves a greenie or environmentalist who supports restrictive zoning to force people out Well, announce the thing.

So I'm not here to talk about me, I'm here to talk about you, but I was the mayor of the inner city council in Port Phillip where it was a dirty little secret. So I got elected in 2016 with a population target. Population at the time was 118,000. The population target by this year, 2025, was 145,000. It's gone down by 5,000. So how can inner city Melbourne, Port Melbourne, South Melbourne, Albert Park be dropping in population when the state is bursting bursting at the seams, right? It's appalling. Like, you can't do anything from a planning point in those areas at all.

We have this obsession with these separate family houses. Look, I don't mind if people want to live in that. No worries, let them live in that. There's nothing wrong with that. But why stop people living in the places they want? Like, my grandparents, when I went to— we went to the UK in about 1960, and they had this terrace house, okay? And it wasn't big, it was a two-story house, it was next to the neighbours, but you had a little front yard and a backyard with a bit of grass and trees and stuff. So nothing wrong with it. It was a nice enough place. That kind of residence in a city is a very, very good compromise. You have a garden, you have access, you've got neighbours. Now, we never heard the neighbours. You have soundproofing. It's not a bad thing. My daughter has a sort of split house too. She's got one and you never hear the neighbours. You just can't hear them. So what's wrong with that kind of place?

100 years ago, that's, that's what it was all about, particularly for middle-class families. That's what it was all about.

People will naturally build livable cities if they want to. I love the idea of 15-minute city. You should be able to walk to everything. You should be able to walk to the shops. You should be able to walk to transport. You should be able to walk around. It's good for you. It's good for society. If you had denser cities, public transport would become more economical, more reasonable. The buses go there all the time. You don't need a car. You can just get on a bus and go somewhere. If you spread yourself out too much, public transport is too expensive. It's just terrible from every point of view. And it's just because you have some people— look, we bought our property for $750,000 21 years ago. It's now worth $2 million. Okay, that's nice for me, but what did I do to create that increase in value? Even if you allow for inflation, it shouldn't be worth more than, you know, less than a million. Yeah. Why is it worth so much? I didn't do anything. And it shouldn't happen. People shouldn't be able to get wealthy just from buying and speculating on property. And then you have people like the land bankers, like the big Woolies and Coles and so forth, who buy up land and they do it to stop the small people coming in, the oldies and so forth, competing with them. So they keep their monopolistic pricing structures and they use the zoning system to do that. So It forces people to have, you know, dearer groceries, for example, because they don't want competition. I mean, they use the government to actually do that. When you get government involved, there's two things too. And this is to do with— when you get government involved, it does two things. It pushes up the price. It pushes down the quality.

Yes. So let me ask you this question then. Do you think governments are a mirror of society? So in terms of—

yes, I absolutely do think that people think about governments in terms of they're the ones that make all the decisions. Governments can only do what people will let them do. And as I heard it said, so we all know what we need to do, we just don't— this is what politicians say— we don't know how to get ourselves reelected after we've done it. Now, if you have a society as a whole that is so selfish and individualistic, they say what I want is more services and less taxes, and that's what I demand, and if you don't give me that, I'll vote for the other guy. That's what the people, the politicians get. I don't think the politicians are that bad. I think there's a lot of very decent people in politics who'd love to do the right thing, but they just can't. They know quite well what we're doing is disastrous, and we need better people. And this is where I think that the kind of character is so important, that we used to have a better character in this country. We used to be a lot more egalitarian. You go back to the '50s and '60s, it was a far more equal society. The differences in wealth are obscene right now, and they're getting worse. And government is a large part to blame for that. Government is— overregulation is impoverishing, and particularly impoverishing the people who are weaker. Look, let me give you an example too, another example. Now, government regulation— let's talk about housing. Let's talk about franchising. There's a franchising code that's come in, okay? What they do is that you have to do a massively detailed, legalistic, bureaucratic disclosure document, okay? Takes pages and pages. Now I know for a fact that most lawyers can't even comprehend it, it's so insanely complicated. I also know for a fact I've never come across any one of my franchisees who's ever read it. But it puts a tremendous burden on franchisors to fill in these meaningless things and do more and more stuff, all, basically, by the month. It keeps on increasing. Now, when they started talking this, I said, there's one simple thing you want to do would really fix things. Every year you run a survey by an independent polling and talk to the franchisee saying, what's happening? Are you happy? Are you getting supported? Has it lived up to the promise? Just a few questions, do that and publish it and make every franchise— or now, if you did that one thing, that one thing, that would do 1,000 times more than all these disclosure documents. But you wouldn't be a feeding frenzy for lawyers and bureaucrats and the rest. It would just simply improve service. That's what they would do. I told them that every time they did it, and they said, no, no, what you need, Jim, is more bureaucracy, more regulations, more checks and balances, and a longer and longer and more complex and legalistic disclosure, and that will solve it. Well, it solved nothing. It's, it's absolute rubbish. And that's, that goes on right through the economy. You know, in America, they've done studies on occupational licensing. It's different in every state. So you've got a perfect example, a plan as to what occupational licensing does. Everything— cosmetologist, hair braider, all kinds— it's regulated in some states, not in others. They found two distinct differences when you have occupational licensing. First thing in, prices go up. Second thing, competition service goes down. That's the effect. When Israel was importing people from the Soviet Union, there was a time when they used to say, okay, anybody with a medical degree from the Soviet Union can come in and you don't have to pass any exams. Other times they couldn't. The big difference they found is that when they did that, when they allowed them in, you got better doctors. Better doctors, better service. Government regulations actually force out the private. Taxi industry, perfect example. The people like Didi and Uber come in and they basically bypass the government-forced monopoly. What happens? Prices go down, service goes up. So instead of paying massive amount of money, the individual drivers having to pay to the medallion owners, which is a government-enforced monopoly, they actually can work more for themselves. Now it took a multi-billion-dollar corporation to do this. It shouldn't have taken it. All you need to do is to say, Get out of my way. Stop messing things up. Governments have no ability to run these things effectively. Stop. Get out of your monopolies. Get rid of your bureaucracy. You know, in Argentina, Javier Milei, I don't know if you know much about it, but he's a very interesting man. Cut the civil service by a third, taken away thousands of regulations, and it's starting to work. The inflation is coming down, poverty rates going down, growth is speeding up. All he's doing is getting getting the government off people's backs and letting people do the things they're good at.

Um, the, the rise of the bureaucracy is one thing, but what people perhaps don't necessarily realize, which I'll be interested to get your thoughts on in terms of the power of the regulators— so the legislative, the politicians, it's so difficult to get legislation passed now. The bureaucracy is a very different mindset compared to what it was 25 years ago. And their ability to put regulations in place that increase the burden to the economy is something that's only been really felt now. How, if you get into the state political realm, will you be able to fix that?

We'd simply cut down on the regulators. Look, I say this with full recognition there are some very decent people in local government who really do try and help There are some, and I have to say, though, a minority. But if you could have a clear enough system that you could actually let go every single regulator in local government who had to do with zoning, and you would see a dramatic rise in the welfare and prosperity population. These people actually hold things back. So many of our bureaucrats are simply unnecessary. They do work that's not just useless, but it's negative. The trouble is people put in regulations without any consideration for the actual cost. They just just have no idea as to what the cost is on the user. And if they do, they don't care. They simply say, well, the, the business will pay it. Well, let me tell you something, businesses just don't pay these costs. They put them into their pricing. And I'd have to say too, like, you look at franchising, for example, in some senses that's actually good for us. Why? Because I got 5,500 franchisees. I've got in-house legal, so we can do these things. It's a pain, but we can do them. But if you're trying to start up a smaller franchise to try and compete with us, how much difficult is it for you? And that's what government typically do by forcing up the regulations. They drive down competition.

Final question. You mentioned before about the email signature, the 3 things. The word welfare came up as opposed to— where did you get the word welfare from? Because that's a much more holistic word than just than just having your franchisees succeed or become wealthy or independent. Welfare is quite an encompassing word. Tell me about that.

I haven't even thought about it, Marcus, but to me, welfare is a lot more than just money. I'm very interested in the science of happiness and how money relates to it. People's idea that the more money you have, the happier you are is very inaccurate, actually. Up to a certain stage, about the level of the average Australian income, which is below what most of my franchisees make, incidentally, money doesn't matter. If you can't afford to feed your family and you can't afford the rent, you're in trouble. But past that makes very little difference. And one of the things they've found is this, that there's other things that matter a lot, lot more. And these are things like community, like family, like sense of purpose, like health, like those kinds of things too. So when I'm looking after my franchisees, yes, I'm trying to help them make a decent income, but I'm also very concerned that they have a great life overall, which means family time. And one of the common stories that I hear from franchisees is the reason they bought a franchise so they could have a life and they could see their kids growing up. Now, that's part of it too. Mental health is a big thing, sense of community, sense of sharing, sense of being looked after. All these things matter a lot. Money is part of it, but it's not the major part. You need it, you need a certain level, but given that, other things matter a lot more.

Thank you. That's great. Good luck with your political endeavors.