How Jim turned $24 into $500,000,000 a year: Jim Penman, Founder of Jims Group on The Flight Path Podcast

Franchise on behalf of her son. Decisions you make, the best decisions are the ones that you make against what seem to be your own self interest. When I started doing that kind of thing, the sales went up through the roof. It was a moral decision. So often turns out to be, you got to watch your money, put your focus on the welfare of the person you're dealing with.

What's on your bucket list, man? 20 years. What do you want to do? Surely you want to do something.

Why is that important?

So you're a cheat. Your aim is to leave a legacy.

Yeah. Not just for the sake of the world, it's for the sake of themselves. Do something you believe in. Try and make the world a better place.

If I had a glass, I'd cheers to that. Okay, everybody, first of all, thanks for tuning into the Fly Path podcast. If this is your first time seeing our content, first of all, thank you. Second of all, make sure you interact with this post wherever you saw it. LinkedIn, Spotify, YouTube, whatever it is, interact. Rate the show. Comment if you feel generous. Subscribe if you feel more generous. Because we put one of these out almost all the time. So today I'm with Jim Penman. Fantastic person, great bloke and very inspirational. And honestly, wise. You're very wise man. And people especially my age are always craving, in my opinion, advice from people who have already gone through life.

Right.

Who have already gone through the hard bits and you're, you know, you're there.

Right. And, well, we've made all the mistakes.

Exactly.

And I'd make more mistakes than almost anybody I know. So, yes, you do learn something, hopefully. Yeah.

So, yeah, this. I'll tell you what, if you, if you enjoy actually using your time right, and you want to listen to a podcast that's actually going to help, listen to this one. Okay. You're listening to the Flight Path. Buckle up. Remember, comment if you're feeling generous. Thanks, guys.

Cool.

So now we're going to interview Jim and I talk about life, business, health, which is very important, and, you know, other aspects of being an entrepreneur. So welcome. First of all, good to be here and thank you for taking the time to see me. Okay, cool. So let's get straight into it. So going straight into the nitty gritty. I remember on our email you spoke about how you're 71 and, you know, you're still extremely healthy. I would love to know your daily routine.

Okay. In the morning I get up, I have a half hour run on a treadmill, so it's just under 5Ks. Then I do weightlifting. Oh yeah? Just lift weights like that. Do that about 120 times. Have a cold shower.

Yeah.

And I don't eat breakfast. I practice 16:8 fasting, so I don't eat before about 1 o' clock usually. Right. And just try and eat lots of vegetables, fruit, nuts, this kind of thing. Not too many desserts, never sweet drinks if I can avoid it. Yeah, basically that. Wonderful. And I walk a lot too. I probably walk, based on my watch, about 5,000 steps a day. Even apart from exercise, that's just wandering around the office doing things, gardening, whatever. Yeah.

So you've got a mean arm wrestle, I'm assuming, with all those weights.

Yeah. I'll give you a.

No, please, you'll crush it. You know what? Okay. Bring it. Let's do it. I had one with Chris. You remember Chris from hello. And he destroyed me. You ready? Three, two, one.

Oh, geez.

Oh God. He's stronger than he looks.

Man, you're actually pretty quick.

Oh, man. Yeah. No, but you know, strength is very important, obviously, mental and physical. So I want to know your routine. Number one, how long did it take you to figure it out? And number two, how important on a scale of 1 to 10 is an effective routine for you?

Well, I've been sort of jogging or exercising since I was 14. I actually did a test at school and they. And they tested your pulse rate and I had one of the fastest pulse rates in the class. And so I figured I'm going to become fit. Never that keen on sport, apart from things like squash, which I enjoy. But I just started exercising pretty regularly from then onwards. And of course I was mowing lawns for, you know, 15 years before that, gardening as a job. So that was always. I've always been pretty fit.

That's good.

And I just kept it up. It's not difficult to do once you get the hang of it. I quite enjoy it. One of the things I find useful, I either listen to a talking book or I watch something like the moment I'm watching a series about Catherine de Medici.

Okay.

Which is pretty good on Stan, so that's. It's very engaging. So it's actually quite easy to exercise if you're minded. The biggest problem with exercise is boredom and it's not really that hard if you get used to it. Same thing with cold showers. If you're hot from a. It sounds like an extreme thing, but if you're hot from a run and if you're used to them, it's relatively easy and becomes part of a habit. And I would very, very, very few days in the year I would not do my exercise.

Including weekends. Saturday, Sunday.

Oh, yes, absolutely.

So no off days in the life of Jim Hendon? Well, speaking of off days, one of my, you know, one of my role models, obviously opposed to you, is Ryan Sirhan and he always talks about data days, having Saturdays as a day for being a dad, you know, all the, you know, hanging out with the kid and everything like that. And on another email we had together, I remember you mentioned that you have 10 kids.

Yes.

Now you just said you don't take a day off, but do you have a data day? Do you have a done day Tuesday? I don't know.

Well, I don't, I don't work as hard at the weekends. I still do my emails and things and whatever comes up, but basically, look, I'm not a workaholic. I drive my son, I got a 13 year old son, my youngest, and I drive him to school and pick him up most days and that's about a 20 minute drive. So we get to talk. So I spend about three hours a week chatting with my son.

Well, after all, these podcasts can be hard to fight through the paparazzi.

Like, I don't think one thing I surely believe in is no other success can compensate for failure value in the home. So it doesn't matter how much money you make, if you neglect your children, if you neglect your family, then what's the point of it?

Yeah, I remember my memory is failing me at the moment, but I saw a podcast clip where you mentioned this quote. I don't remember it unfortunately, but I would love to know. Do you have a quote or a mantra that keeps you going? David Goggins says they don't know me son, stuff like that. Do you have something similar or do you just move?

Do you just go, well, the one I just told you, no other success can compensate the finding of the home. Another one I've just come across quite recently that I love, social comparison is the thief of joy. This is from Theodore Roosevelt. And it applies to all kinds of things. It applies to buying, getting more and more money so you can do things like buy an expensive car or a big house or impressing people with your, with your clothes and this kind of thing too. Social comparison. And that's a terrible way to spend money because it doesn't bring happiness because you're always competing with somebody else and there's always somebody who's richer and more successful than you.

Absolutely.

So it's a terrible way to Live. And it also applies to things like Facebook. Now I don't actually use much social media as a company we use it, but in social media you're on there competing for likes, competing to see. And people that you're looking at are always more successful and they always seem to be having more fun. They're having a great life, but they're only the highlights. So those are the kind of things that bring you misery. So I think one of the great things is you've got to have a sense of purpose, a mission in your life. And family should always be a big part of that. At least to me it should be. And don't chase success for its own sake.

I like that. And that reminds me, actually I was on Today when I was on the sky bus from the airport. I was speaking to this lady named Jenny, she's 75. And I told her that I was interviewing you and she was really excited and happy and she asked me to ask you one question and I feel like I would be doing Jenny a disservice if I didn't. Is retiring on the horizon for you?

Oh, yes. One day we're going to have a very moving retirement ceremony. A lot of people are going to be there and I'll be the guest of honor. I'll be in a box because I'll be dead. That's my retirement. Whoa.

Yeah. Geez.

Well, I don't conceive of the possibility of retirement. I am so looking forward. I looked it up. I probably got about an extra 23 years to go. I'll probably live to my 90 because in terms of health, I've got everything for longevity except I don't have particularly long lived parents. My father died at 76. If it's joking, my mother died in 93. But apart from that, everything about me, my weight, exercise, the fact that I work, interest, social activity, everything indicates long life. I probably got another good 20 years and I don't see any reason ever to stop. I don't. You know, the hardest time of year for me is actually Christmas, New Year.

Because it's all everyone's left.

Yeah. I actually spend it with my family, with as many of my kids as possible. Most of them can get away together, but it's hard because there's no business and I find that very difficult. I really don't like holidays.

Yeah, life. I'm an entrepreneur. That's why I really look up to you, my friend. Like I've been seeing your work ethic all over and like, even so, you can't see it right now, but there's a whole banner full of all the different franchises. And you have how many, how many franchises on top of it?

45 divisions and you just hit, you.

Just hit 5,000 franchises. Yeah, exactly. Crazy, right? So, so you just said, you know, you think you have another 20 something years left and you know, you've got your health in order, you've got everything else in order but stress. Do you have stress? Do you manage it?

No.

How, how do you do it?

I enjoy my life enormously. I don't think there's a happier man on the face of the earth than I am. What I do, I love. If things go wrong, okay, there's a problem here. What do you do? How do you solve it? I just don't get stressed by it. I'm very thankful. Attitude of thankfulness we talk about as Christians. We always, we thank God for good fortune. We do that regularly. And that's that whole point. And if something happens, well, okay, what do I do? What should I done in the past that I won't do in the future? So you just simply learn to get around it. And honestly, I don't. No, I don't get stressed at all. I just enjoy my life enormously.

Wow. Well, you know, let's talk to the audience really quick. Let's. I'm going to ask you a question. I'm going to ask you a very quick question. If you had three steps, I know it's hard to distill down to three on how to manage the stress when you start out. I know you're not stressed now, but I imagine at the start there was quite a bit of maybe not stress, but panic, maybe. So if you had three methods to manage that panic and manage that stress.

What would you advise our audience if something goes wrong? The saying I used to have as a mowing contractor, which is still the same now, is one step at a time. What's the next thing that they got to do? Like, it's something I talk about in my book about a situation which is very early days, when I just started full time, was very broke and my car broke down and I felt just terrible despair. I just felt really bad. And this is about, we're talking about 1983. This is way back in the early days, okay? Deeply in debt, struggling to pay off loans and things. I was in a bad situation, My car breaks down, another thing I can't afford to fix. I look at it and I just feel so bad. And I think, okay, what's the next Step. What do I need to do? So I called the recv, called a friend to help me with the trailer, which was full of a load. I just did the necessary things, sat there, listened to some music, which is Keith Green, Christian singer that I really love. And as I was listening to that, I felt not so bad. And then I realised that if this situation couldn't beat me, then nothing ever would. One at a time, because I would never give up. I love that. And I felt quite joyful about that. Even though the situation was bad, I knew that I couldn't be defeated. People fail because they get defeated, because they lose, because they give up. It doesn't mean what you're doing right now is the right thing to do. But if you keep on trying something else and you keep on doing it, every effort to do it well, eventually it will work. There are good techniques too. I mean, you've probably heard of. What do you call it? You simply focus on your breathing, for example. So if you have a bad thought or you're feeling really bad about something, something came up that upset me quite a lot. So I think, okay, you just. You just like. Like meditate. What do they call it? Presence or something like that.

I know what you're talking about.

Yeah, you just. You just concentrate.

Micro meditation, let's call it that.

You just concentrate on your breathing. You just listen to your breathing, you're aware of your bodily sensations, you just focus on that and you bring your mind back to. To that grounding ground. Yeah. And you just. My mind wanders all the time, of course, like anybody else's, but you come back to the back of that. And then when you do that for a while, it actually tends to take the bad emotion out of it. I don't need to do that very often, but that's the kind of thing that I would do. So I find that quite effective. But a lot of it's got to do with a sense of purpose. What are you doing with your life? What's your reason for living? And I have a very strong sense of purpose. I have my family, and family is very important to me. I have my wife, whom I really love. I'm really crazy about my wife. 22 years of marriage. She's one.

22 years. Congratulations.

Yes, that's right. So my family is very important to me. My franchisees are very important to me. I'm very involved with my franchisees. I talk to them all the time. Every day I have people contacting me about this and that, how many they're going and they've got this issue and this problem and stuff. To me, that's a calling that's very important. My greatest joy, actually reaching milestones is nice, but the biggest joy is actually seeing somebody succeed, like having somebody whose life's turned around because they bought a franchise, because they see their kids crying out this kind of thing, that is the biggest success. And the other thing is my research foundation.

The reason that I started to become tutoring training.

Is that it or no? No, actually, I did a PhD in history back in the 70s. Wow. Trying to understand the reason for the rise and fall of civilization. Came to the conclusion that basically. Basically to do with changes in character.

Right.

And that includes things like whether countries become wealthy, democratic, whatever, or whether they lose that. It's a change in character and it's got biological roots. In recent years, obviously, it's epigenetic. So I had this theory which was very radical. Yes. This is in this book here.

Is this a new publication or.

It's fairly new. It's about a year old.

This particular camera, take a look at that. Yes, that looks really nice, actually. Feels nice too. Actually. There was a book that I read recently called Sense, which talks about sensations that you have. And the book was a really smooth feeling. And in the text, he actually spoke about how the COVID of a book, for example, should be made out of certain materials. This feels the exact same. So it's sensations like that. But let's go back to.

But what's inside, what matters, of course, and what you've got is. My theory suggested that it should be possible to make dramatic changes to the good, not only in society, but in individuals, in things controlling things like drug addiction and so forth. So what I've got now is a research project which is spending about $3 million a year on, which is looking to the epigenetics of behavior and so forth. And we're doing experiments with rats, which has come some very interesting results.

Yeah. So you're not just growing the Jim's Empire, you're also growing. You're trying to leave a mark on civilization now, you know, when it comes to that mark and when it comes to the research you're doing, I'm going to ask you a really deep question. You might have to think about this one, but I saw it on another podcast, and this is a hard question to ask, but if you had to ask your family or your wife or, you know, one of your closest co workers or your closest friend to write a book about you, what would the title be? It's a hard question, isn't it? I'm always afraid to ask that one, so.

Well, I don't know. I could always do better. I have a very strong sense of how many things I fail at, how many things I'm bad at. I'm a highly imperfect person. I'm actually not very good at most things in terms of business. I have great staff, people like Joel that you've met, people like Rocky, people like my finance director. I have people around me who can do these things that I'm not very good at. But when I look at myself, quite frankly, I'm often astonished if I succeed at anything at all, because there's so many things I do badly. But I guess if you do just a few things well and you don't give up, it's possible to do very surprising things. I mean, this whole business having 5,000 franchisees. You know, when I started this, somebody asked me how many might I have one day? And I said, maybe. Look, I don't know.

Maybe 100.

Maybe 100. Yeah, that's right. So it was remarkable, unexpected. I just didn't think it would work so well. I had a certain vision. I wanted a system that would look after customers, but most of them will look after franchisees, make them successful. That was the kind of idea, and I really didn't know how to do that. We didn't even understand things like the value of meetings and so forth and best forms of contact. And there were so many things I did wrong. But the basic principle that you look after your franchisees first and then look after customers so that you'll get lots and lots of good paying work for your franchisees because the two work together. That hasn't changed, but everything else has.

Remarkable. Well, I'm sure I want to circle back to that question about the book. Any idea for a title or. It's a hard one to think about, isn't it? How about we circle back to that at the end? Yeah, yeah.

About getting your message out. I think personal mission is something maybe.

Have you touched on a lot? Look, there's certain kinds of things that I talk about a lot. I talk a lot about health and happiness. That's a very big concern of mine because I think people mistake. They think that if you have more and more money to buy more and more stuff, you'll be happy. It's a complete illusion. There are principles behind it. There are ways of things you should do, the way you should lead your life. And I can go through a lot more. This thing, not smoking Drinking all kinds of things. Not drinking coffee. There's many things I could talk about.

You don't drink coffee?

No, don't drink coffee or tea. Because their dopamine. You understand how addiction works?

Yeah, of course.

It's a dopamine surge. Okay. Which does bad things to you. It actually imbalances the brain. The brain adjusts by actually lowering your overall level of satisfaction. So you take on. Keep on surging dopamine. Whether it's coffee or whether it's alcohol or whether it's drugs or whether it's a sweet drink, there's some kind of effect. Surgery of dopamine depresses your actual level of brain satisfaction. So the more you have of it, the more. Until eventually you have to keep on having these dopamine surges to make it work. If you do the opposite, if you do things like fasting, restraint, personal restraint, exercise, cold showers, those kind of things. Has the opposite effect. By giving yourself a bit of a surge of discomfort, you actually raise your level of satisfaction. How much you want to go into that, I don't know. But. But there's a certain philosophy behind what I do.

So no coffee, no tea, no sweet drinks, just water.

And very rarely do you drink? I wouldn't say I never.

No alcohol either, as you said.

Wow. I might have a sweet drink every fortnight or so. Very, very.

But not like a Coca Cola or something like.

Surely doesn't matter what it is.

Doesn't matter. Right.

They're very, very similar. Whether you have a Coke or a Diet Coke or a fruit juice. They're all. They're all bad for you. It's not good to eat, to drink sweet drinks.

So moderation.

Yeah, well, as little as possible. If you're going to have sweets, then have it as a food. Better to have an apple pie, for example, than to have a Coke. Because even if the sugar is the same, when you have the apple pie, you have the dessert, it's actually absorbed into your body more slowly and naturally you don't get this surge, which is so damaging. That's why people get health problems too, because they have like a surge of sweetness. Then your insulin ramps up and in a hurry, and that causes a problem because then when it. When the sugar rush dies down, you've got high insulin. It causes all sorts of issues, and that's. People get diabetes and so forth.

That advice is going to help a lot of people. That's really cool. All right, now we're in. So three, one. All right. So I'm not even going to try and pronounce this. How do you pronounce that?

Epigenetics.

Epigenetics and Character, the Science of Human History by Jim Penman.

That's it.

Right? So I'm gonna read the blurb very quickly, and if anything jumps out. If anything jumps out at you, just interrupt me. Okay, so, Epigenetics and Character by Jim Penman. Dr. Jim. Doctor, Ph.D. in history, correct?

Yes.

Beautiful. Dr. Jim Penman details a revolutionary new theory about why societies prosper and why they decline. He shows that history is driven by changes in the character of ordinary people rather than by economic and political forces or by the actions of leaders. So this is all about history, right? And this is about actually, you know, integrating your knowledge that you had for the PhD and stuff like that. So, yeah, it seems very interesting. The key to all this is epigenetics, the study of how the environment affects our genes. Want to go into further detail about that? How does that work? How does epigenetics work? Let's go on a quick summary.

Basically, everything is carried right, okay. Society, where people are industrious, where they're hard working, tends to be. And enterprising, tends to be prosperous. If people are aggressive, it tends to be warlike. If people are have strong impersonal loyalties and orientations, you tend to have support for democracy, for example. They have a high standard of honesty and so forth. So societies reflect individual character, and the basis of character is epigenetic. It's biological. It's the way we make up. It's the basics, emotions of the way we deal with the world. Now, I'm looking at certain aspects of character which have biological route. One of them is a system I call C, which is to do basically with food restriction in animals. But in humans, it's driven by things like chastity and so forth and other kinds of practices often tied up in religions. I see religions as actually the driving force behind human civilization. Okay. Because they affect character in a very fundamental way. And so the beliefs we have, the environment we're in, affects the epigenetics. And that means that if you understand epigenetics, it's the way that genes function. Human beings are very, very similar genetically. We are extremely similar species, far more genetically uniform than, say, chimpanzees are. But the differences in epigenetics are quite profound. And epigenetics is the way that certain genes are turned on or off because you understand the way a gene works. Basically, it pumps out a protein. That's how it does. But there's a little tap on it, you can just turn it off, turn it on. And so epigenetics is what actually does that. Okay, so we're using animal models with rats at the moment we're looking at food restriction, we're looking at what happens in different stages of life, what happens pre conception. And we're also having a look at mild, mild stresses, what we call eustress, positive stresses. And these have changes in character. So we're actually looking at them in rats, trying to work out what the effects of these things are, what the effects on proteins, what the effect on the microbes, on microrna messenger rna, on the methylation systems, the overall structure in different parts of the brain of what genes are turned on or off. And we're trying to reverse engineer these processes because if you could work out a way to mimic these natural effects like food restriction and so forth, you could actually change character in a very, very profound way. It would be particularly helpful initially with people think things like drug addiction or alcoholism, where people take very short term viewpoints instead of a long term one. And most success in life is actually saying I'll do what I don't necessarily feel like right now because of what I really want to happen in the future. Exercise is an example of that. You know, you don't necessarily want to get up and exercise, but you know, if you do, you'll be healthier and happier and more vigorous and all the rest of it. And the same thing with diet, you might feel like having that sweet drink or whatever it is, but you know that in the future that you'll have problems with it, not only health wise, but also in terms of mood and.

So forth, requires discipline.

Discipline, yeah.

Interesting.

And if we can help people to be more long term orientated, which is what these studies will do, that will actually have a dramatic effect on, well, being. Right.

Wonderful man. So you have a very broad understanding, right? So it's not just, you know, obviously you have all the understanding of all these different franchises and everything, but you've also got history, as you said. Now I want to ask you a question that could help, you know, say people going into high school, right? In high school you have electives, you have like economics, English advanced in Australia, stuff like that. I'd love to know if you had a range of, for example, you have modern history, ancient history, let's just branch it as history. If you had history, economics, language, mathematics and what's the other one? No, I already said English. That's language. Well, let's just Call it language for now. You know what I'm talking about. One of those electives. Out of all of those, including history, by the way, which would be the most important for an entrepreneur to select. And business studies in there as well.

Well, academic studies aren't particularly relevant anyway. Now, one of my most successful franchisees actually dropped out of high school in year 10, went to work for McDonald's, learned a lot of things came in, bought a franchise, now a franchisor and a trainer and so forth. I think academics is grossly overrated. Actually. There's a wonderful book called the Case Against Education which actually points out that people who go through education system beyond primary school and perhaps early high school, learning how to read and write and add up and so forth, don't get a lot of value from it to a large extent. What education does is it's a parchment effect. It actually means that you've got something that says to an employer, hey, I'm hard working enough and capable enough to get through this fairly meaningless course.

Exactly.

So I would say that if you're interested in learning to be an entrepreneur, the best thing is probably just to read a lot. And I read an enormous amount or read or listen to talking books.

You read and write?

Well, yes, I probably would read two or three books a week. Damn, we all listen to. So whenever I'm exercising or I'm gardening or I'm driving without somebody in my family with me, I will listen to talking books all the time. And I'm always getting new ideas and there's a lot of brilliant stuff around. It's a lot of biographies around and just stories about life, about science, psychology, about those kind of things. Books like Atomic Habits Taught me how to become.

Love that book. James Clear.

Yeah, love it. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Another great book. Brilliant book. Talking about character. I'd suggest if you want to be an entrepreneur, forget about studying in a formal sense, but keep on learning. See, one of the wonderful things these days, unlike in that people say somebody's mowing the lawns, you can have an electric mower which is quiet and you've got talking books. So while you're actually mowing the lawns, you can be listening and learning all the time. Wonderful.

James Clear. Atomic Habits. The other one, Seven Habits of Affected Highly Effective People. There's another book that everyone should read called how to Invent Everything. How to Invent Anything. I forgot the author, unfortunately. But I want to ask you a fun question. So if I, you know, dropped you in a time travel machine and you went back to the Industrial Revolution, what would you bring me the day you could invent? Because I don't know, I don't know how a battery works.

Right.

I don't know how a phone works. If you went back with nothing and you said, this is what's in the future. We've got phones, we've got cars that are powered by gas. You know, we've got all these different things. We've got electric cars, we got Teslas. And then you go back and they're like, okay, build it. What could you make? What could you actually build?

Virtually nothing. Because I don't know anything about machines.

Exactly.

You look at someone like James Watt, for example, who developed the first victive steam machine. I mean, he's certainly one of the most important people in, in all of human history, but I don't have his kind of knowledge.

Isn't that astounding? Like we've got all this, like this. Isn't this crazy? A whole computer in your phone. And back in the day when they were putting a man on the moon, they had computers the size of this building. This room. This room, sorry.

We are ultra specialised. And it's an issue too. I mean, I wish I was more handy. I'm not. I'm pretty good at mowing a lawn. I can dig over a garden bed.

Can you build a lawnmower?

I can do basic. No, absolutely not. Isn't that astounding? It is too. You know, my father, for example, was a far more competent person than I am in a lot of ways. He used to make his own furniture, for example, and did quite well, quite a good job. He was far more handy. And that was more the case in previous generations. These days, if you want something done, you get gyms to do. I mean, that's basically what I do too. I don't.

I don't get gyms exactly.

Yeah, if something, something goes wrong with my car, I'm completely lost.

Yeah. So is that the next project? You know, thinking back, back to the future style building. Doctor, doctor, what's his name? What's the crazy head guy in Back to the Future? Isn't it just Doc? Doc.

You know something, if I went back in time, the one thing that I would do, I could do, which I. Which I know about, is I'd look at matters of hygiene. Matters of hygiene and health and infection. People had no idea what the causes of disease were. I said building somewhere like a steam engine, I couldn't do. But I do understand that if you have human feces driving, running down the streets of your city, you're going to have a lot of problem with death. So if you could actually work out a way of helping me to understand the germ theory of disease, for example, that would be very, very powerful. Or there's things like development of things like lime juice and lemons to get rid of scurvy. So certain basic to do with nutrition. There are areas or sewage systems, as you said. Sewage systems, yes. And that's a difficult thing to do. But if you can do it even in a very, very small way, it's like that. Like the study they did where they found that in a maternity hospital that the mothers who were helped to give birth by the doctors were mainly dying, and the ones that were helped by the midwives were surviving. And they found out that what was happening was the doctors were going to the mortuary room, they were dissecting corpses and stuff. And then without washing their hands, because they didn't understand germs, they go and help the women to give birth and they were killing them. Now, even little things like that, and then vaccinations, for example, these are things that they discovered in the 18th century. But in a sense, it's so obvious that's the kind of thing you could do.

But the reason you know this is because you have such a complex understanding of history, so you're already one step ahead. Because if you go, you know, time.

Traveled back to the day in that sense, I think medicine, health, vaccination is something that you could have done. Interesting thing is if you look at somewhere like Europe until very recently, until like the 19th century was. Was incredibly unhealthy. You know, they used to take chamber pots and you do your poos and stuff and you say gardiloo and throw them out the window and they go into the streets, so people are passing by, they'd have to watch this stuff coming down, and then a big rain would come in and wash it away. It was the most appalling environment. Now, in Tokugawa Japan, for example, similar time, they were very, very meticulously clean and that all the night soil was taken out to put on the farms and so forth. They did something so much better, but little things of that germ theory of disease, vaccinations, There's. There's so many things that we've learned in that area that we could apply. If I had a time machine, that's what I'd change.

Well, there's a time machine on the agenda. Jim's time machines. There we go.

If you did have a time machine. Actually, what you do is you create an alternative reality. Because I think the multi the universe idea, the universe is always splitting, that kind of idea.

Oh, God, here we go. Ah, this is gonna end this. This is gonna blow my brain off.

I always love, I love time travel stories. I have great science fiction media when I was younger.

Let's hear one.

Oh, just basically the idea that you go back, but as soon as you have time travel, you have a problem, you go back and kill your own grandfather. So therefore you or you do something that stops yourself being born, which means that of course that's a time loop, which is impossible because if you killed your own grandfather or if you stopped your grandfather giving birth to your father, for example, well, then you would never have been born. So you couldn't go back and change. So it's a paradox. But if you accept the multi universe hypothesis that the universe is always branching, you simply go back and you create a new branch.

So it's very interesting. Man, Jim, that's, that's incredible. Oh, I'm going to be thinking about that, the whole podcast. Remarkable, my friend. Okay, cool. So we've covered that. That's one. Let me think of another hard hitter I can ask you what's a big issue that business owners nowadays have? So everyone's going into the Internet phase. For example, me, I'm in advertising. You know, there's e commerce businesses, there's the new fads of, you know, really anything. Like you go online, you go on TikTok and you look up a business and it's always going to be an online business. Now, you weren't always online, obviously, but when you did go online, what was the biggest issue when you were transitioning from physical business to online business?

We weren't transitioning so much as using it as a, as a tool. So, for example, to do a better service to franchisees, my, my whole focus in business is not on the big changes, but the miniscule changes, the tiny little things. For example, when I set up gyms in the first place, what we used to do, we wanted to give work to franchisees who needed it and not those who didn't. So we got each franchisee to let us know how much work they needed for the day. We need to know which suburbs they were down for so that when a job comes in, we would actually take it. We would try to work out who the franchisee should do it and then we send it out to them. That was very labor intensive.

That's a tough Job as well.

That's right. So you'd give somebody be taking the call, be writing it down, somebody look up on the system to see. Then we put it into somebody's box. Then when. Then we page it out to the person concerned, the franchisee, and then we type it up into the computer. There's a whole stack of things going on. Only one person has taken the call. Now what we do is we automated that whole process to a stage. Now you actually have a call come in. We do it online. It tells us exactly who can take the job, and it decides there might be 50 people in the area. Only one's able to take it. So we know who that is, and there's all kinds of ways and that can be determined. And then we send it direct to them and it comes through. Now that whole process is technology. So you've actually cut your labor costs down from that to that. If we actually had to do what we were doing, we couldn't afford to because the franchise fees wouldn't cover the actual work involved in doing it. That's just one tiny example. Another example, we talk about customer service being a big passion of mine. Customer service is the key to business. If you can amaze clients, if you can delight them, you'll do well. That's fundamentally the idea behind everything we do. Now, what have we done? When we started off pre franchise days, for every hundred leads, we had about 100 complaints. Really bad subcontractors, very poor service. Franchise system comes in, people own their own business. There's various kinds of incentives. Things like lead fees and so forth. Dropped down to about 100 leads, five complaints. And then we started doing other things. We started recording complaints and then sending out warning letters and stuff and even breach notices. And then about 12 years ago, we started doing customer surveys. This was revolutionary. We actually text a client. We generally emailed. Then we texted them asking a very simple question about whether they're happy with the service. And then a comment feed that back into the system. And the complaints went down and down and down to now they're a fraction of 1%. So we've had more than 100% decline in the level of complaints since pre franchise days. That wouldn't be possible without technology. It's all automated.

Incredible.

And about one in three clients will respond. But that's absolutely magic because there's a huge incentive. Now. Franchises can feel very pressured by it, but they know they have to give good service. And if it's a problem, they have to go back and try and work out how you help the client do the job again, give them a rebate, do whatever you need to make that client happy, because they don't want that. That bad record. And they really chase their star ratings, which can be up to about. Up to 5.0.

Remarkable stuff. And the reason. The reason I'm smiling at it is because, as I said, with the online boom that's happening right now, every single business owner online and core seller and guru is talking about, you need to send out a thousand cold emails a day. You need four domains to send emails. You need more customers, more sales. I haven't seen one ad online that talks about perfecting service delivery. And to you, service delivery is the most important thing. Correct?

We've had the most astonishing difference over the years. When we started off gyms in the early days, and bear in mind, this was this 5% level of complaints. I had teams of campuses knocking on doors. Last year, we knocked back nearly 300,000 leads, 32% of all leads coming into the system, we knocked back. And, you know, we spend less on advertising per franchisee by far than we used to. In fact, we've given back more than a million dollars to franchisees because we have a certain amount of money coming from their fees. We must spend advertising, and there's often situations we cannot spend it. So we actually ask the franchisees, we say, look, we've got all this money. What do you want to do with it? Do you want to give it back to you? Do you want all expenses paid? You know, convention, holiday on the Gold Coast? You decide. Do you all want free stickers? Do you want whatever, what do you want? We have to spend. That's the problem. Because as our customer service has got better, as our complaints have dropped, the number of leads has soared.

Incredible. Yeah, that's remarkable. And you know, what you said before about lowered costs of advertising, everything like that, You've got the one thing that other people don't have, and that's gyms, the branding. Because. And the reason I say that is because I spoke to a lot of people before I spoke to you today, including the people on the plane and grandma and other friends and franchises that are called and everything. And they all, you know, they're all cohesive and everyone knows Jim's right. You know, you say gyms, and before I even start on mowing or anything, they're like, oh, Jim's asbestos, Jim's bookkeeping, stuff like that, all the other stuff. And that's really impressive, but incredibly difficult to do. So I would Love to know, how did you actually build that, man? Like, the franchising, I would assume, really helped you with that.

Look, the basic structure is you look after your franchisees well and you look after your customers really well so that you can get lots of good paying work to your franchisees. One of the things I'm saying about, not only are franchisees busy, but we actively encourage them to raise their prices. We constantly push them, charge more, charge more. As soon as you stop taking work, raise your prices 20% at least on new jobs, and then look at your existing clients. So you're always looking to improve what they can do. As to other divisions, look, I didn't think it was going to work in the beginning. The first time I started doing cleaning, which is way back in the early 90s, I thought, this is a mowing image. This is a guy with the beard in hat. That's me. That's what I look like. You can actually look it up. Jim Penman Images. You'll see the original picture that's taken from. So I thought, this is a gardening guy. It doesn't apply to women. It doesn't apply to cleaning. So I tried cleaning with a similar franchising model, but with this different logo called Sunlight S U N L I T with little stars and stuff. So we tried that, sold a couple of franchises, couldn't find work, shut it down, get the money back. Then somebody came to me and said, what about Gyms Cleaning? I said, no, gyms is a gardening image. It's not going to apply to cleaning. They said, we think it will. I said, no, it won't. They said, we think it will and we'll give it a go and we'll do it ourselves, kind of in partnership with you. I said, okay, give it a try. So they tried it and it did work, and people liked the brand. So in a sense, most of the time, when we start a new division, it's not because we started. If somebody comes to us, he says, what about Jim's Test and Tech? What about Jim's Handyman? What about Jim's Pool Care? What about Jim's it? What about Jim's Laundry? Somebody comes to us with an idea, if it's a good idea, and they seem to be the kind of person that could drive it, then we start a new division. It's very rarely we start divisions ourselves.

Yeah, that's truly inspiring and truly ambitious.

But the systems are very similar, right? Whether you're mowing, dog wash, cleaning, laundry, very, very similar contracts are very, very similar systems Operation, franchisee, support systems, very similar. Customer service control, very similar. So in a sense, we are very, very narrowly specialized. Even though it looks like we do a lot of things, they're really all very much the same thing. See, we don't do siteback. I would not try and compete with McDonald's.

No.

Because they're too good at what they do. And it's a totally different business. But a new division like gymnast physios or gymnas, doctors or anything like we can do with these.

It's a tried and tested model.

Right.

And that brings me up to another question. Now, this is another heavy hitter. You ready for this one? Okay, cool. So, you know, before, earlier today, we spoke about how, you know, there's, if you went back in the, in the past, there's some things you could do, some things you couldn't do. And when I was just thinking about a title for that book that we were talking about, I was thinking Jim Penman all in One as a title. Let's just imagine that for argument's sake. But what I feel like could be something that you'd be dealing with is that everyone, when they hear Jim Penman, especially now that your personal brand is growing, they're going to think, Jim Penman, oh, he could do anything because he's got all these different franchises. How far away from that is the truth? Can you do anything when it comes to these services? Or have you got a can do attitude, as in you can do anything if you put your mind to it?

I can do very little. I actually, I'm a. I'm a decent. I can mow a lawn clean, I can cut edges clean, I can dig over a garden bed very quickly. I've got good systems for that. I can go into grass that's that long and I can cut it in a way that it's clean, perfectly clean. I have a video which actually, when my French get in trouble because they don't do it well, I say use my system. It's a way of doing it. Okay, so I'm good at that as far as most things. Handyman. Look around the house. My wife's more handy. She's a builder. She's far better than me. So the services that we do, I can't do. And even within the office, I'm not particularly good at doing most things. I'm not good at finance, I'm not good at management, managing staff, for example, I'm not good at it. My system is simply to find people who can do those things better than me. Give them a lot of leeway and then expect them to result, achieve results. If they don't, well, then I've got the wrong person.

I just want touched on that because as my, as my close friend and previous podcast guest Michael Abdul said before, he said, you know, while he was building his business, he had to work through the Internet age, Great Depression, Y2K, stuff like that. You've had to deal with all these different changes over the year, even the recent AI boom, Like all this stuff, all the new tech, new stuff that's coming up. I completely understand that there's things that, you know, you're not as fluent in. But the problem is, and what I find quite upsetting personally, is that, like grandparents, for example, when they have an issue with their tv, with their foxtail, with their phone, younger children like younger people, like my age and under 21.

And under, much better at doing it.

Exactly. But they have no patience. But really, if you asked me to build a franchise, I would have no idea what to do, you know, so.

But if you're smart, you wouldn't try?

I try to be.

No, if you're smart. If you're smart, you want to build a franchise of your own, come to us, say, I'm interested in starting a new division. Say, come and do our training. We actually make it quite available. There was a lady who came last year.

Well, let's talk through the exact steps to start a franchise.

She actually had her own franchise that she was running and she wanted to do it better. So I said, come to us, learn from us, do our full franchisee franchisor course. It just cost you about one and a half grand to do it, and then go and do your business better. Now, the interesting thing is he's just come back to us and said, my franchising system isn't working particularly well, but she's got a passion for children's education. So we talked about it. I said, okay, what about Jim's tutoring? So we're actually looking at this lady. Oh, training. So, yeah, starting Jim's tutoring.

Okay.

Now that, that was because in a sense, I just said, come and learn from us. And when she, when she learned what we did and how we did it, she actually recognized that what we do is so powerful and the brand is so powerful, there's a good chance there'll be a new division. So actually, one of the things we do, we give out our IP to anybody who asks, if you want to know how to run a business, come to us and we'll Teach you how to do it, and then you can go off and be our competitor if you like. But more likely you'll come back to us and say, hey, how about I work with you?

So you encourage intrapreneurship, you encourage entrepreneurship within the Jim's brand as well as outside?

Yes. Well, actually, most of our new divisions actually start from insiders. See, Jim's Laundry, for example, was started just over two years ago. It's got like six, 70 franchisees, great success story. Started by a guy called Bill Cobanoglu, who's one of our top cleaning franchisors. Right. Sharon Connell, who runs Dog Wash, and she's absolutely brilliant at that. She started as a cleaning franchise, he became a franchisor, and then I poached her across to run Dog Wash. Right. And she owns the divisional rights now.

Remarkable.

So we people are coming up all the time with ideas. They want a new division, become a franchisor, put them to the system.

I'll tell you what all my alarm bells are ringing for, like, software and how you've actually linked everything together. I won't ask you, obviously, because that would be crazy, but hopefully we can do a part two and I can ask the people in the office how they do it, because some of this stuff, like me alone, I'm thinking if you had to put like, a big, big, big piece of paper out and write down every, like, tree of gyms, it would be ridiculous to pen down, right?

So. But you know what's important, though? Let's hear it, Tom. It's people get so hung up on things like the form of contracts and so forth and the actual structures. But you know what's the most important thing? It's the culture. It's the belief system. Jim's people are quite different from those in other franchise systems. We had a guy from the uk, guy called Brian Duckett, who'd been involved in dozens of different franchises over the years. He came to one of our conferences in Queensland, Franchisor conference, and he said, jim's this like, nothing I've ever seen. And you know what was different is that the franchisors as a group, I'm not saying every single one of them as a group had a genuine care for franchisees. They really cared about their franchisees. I get requests from my franchisors, they want to cut the fees of franchisees. This is their own income. And I say, no, you can't do that, because so and so and so I give you the reasons. They've actually come back to me just this week, said, in some areas, they want to freeze the fees and not give them the CPI because times are hard. I said, guys, this is a bad idea. So you've actually got a system where your franchisors who depend on income care so much about their franchisees that they actually want to cut their own income. You would not find that anywhere else. You know, when we had the lockdown, people weren't allowed to work. Not only did we not charge fees, but my franchisors who were not getting paid worked harder than they normally did just to give support to franchisees who were distressed, who weren't allowed to work, especially in Victoria. That's the kind of people they have. That's culture. And that's basically my attitude, my feeling, my passion for customer service, but most of all for franchisee success, which is spread throughout. And you show that in various ways. You show that by talking about it a lot. I do my talks, my ethos talk. I talk to franchise, do a lot of training. But also by my example, every single franchisee in Jim's group, as they sign, as they do their training, they get my direct phone number, direct email address. Now, my email is easy to. But phone numbers only for my people. That's an example. If they contact me, I will get back to them very fast. I will help them, I will advise them. I'll do whatever is necessary to help them out. That kind of example, that kind of culture, that's the hardest thing to get right.

Yeah.

If you've got people who believe in doing things the right way, it's not hard to be successful. And one of the problems we've got in gyms, it's very difficult to spread that overseas. We've tried in the uk, in Canada. Where is it?

Just in Australia.

Correct. Australia. New Zealand.

Australia. New Zealand.

Okay, cool.

When did the New Zealand change happen?

Oh, it's been for decades.

Oh, it has, yeah.

We've got three or four hundred franchises.

I must have skipped over that in my research. I apologize. But yeah, you can't have it all figured out.

Australia and New Zealand are very similar countries, though. Yeah. We're both relatively egalitarian. So Gyms is a very egalitarian system. Like, for example, in our contract, our franchisees have absolute of right refusal to jobs coming into the territory, but they're not limited. They can actually take work whenever they wish. They can grow without limit. They can. They own the rights to Goodwill. We cannot take Dosso, really into their own business. They can veto changes to their own manuals. They can vote out their franchisors, including me, if they feel like it's. They can change to a different regional franchise or it's unique in the world. It gives franchisees a God of power. That fits so well with the kind of Australia, New Zealand. Very egalitarian culture. And I think we fit well.

Sorry, can you define that egalitarian, in other words?

We have the attitude as franchisors. We serve franchisees. They're our clients. I tell them again and again, I'm not your boss, you're my client. I'm there to help you to be successful. That's my job.

That's a brilliant way to do it.

And it works very well. But you've got to have people who believe in the same thing. So there's a kind of a process of indoctrination, in a way. We call it being gymnified. You come to gyms and you learn the system. But this is very widely spread. Franchisees are very much the same. A new franchisee goes into a region and the other franchisees will really try and help them. They'll do everything possible. They'll actually spend hours on the evening with them.

It's a real familial culture.

Yes. We look at it being extended family. It's very moving. During the lockdown, it was really hard for us. That was back in 2020. But what was. I was. Was very distressful, especially in Victoria. They couldn't work for two months. And there was no good reason for that, as you probably know. But what really impressed me was the way that franchises looked after each other. We had people who had no income, who were shut off from work and they were helping others who were in a worse situation. We had one young lady who was actually, because she was student, she had no money from the government, she was forbidden to work. She was going by being faced with being. Couldn't afford to buy food, was being threatened with eviction. Other franchisees also shut off from work, were giving him, like, menu log vouchers. We said, if you get kicked out, evicted, come and stay at the conference center and we lend a bit of money. But the point of it is, that's the kind of attitude that you find amongst franchisees in general. They really do care about each other.

Yeah.

So there's a cultural thing right throughout gyms which is very powerful. Very different from anything I've ever seen anywhere else. Incredible.

You're really getting me inspired, man.

Wow.

That's. That's moving. That's really unique as well. To be honest. And yeah, no, I'm just shocked by that. It's incredible. I'm stumped. I need it. I need a second. That was really cool. I'll just pause for a minute. You got me, like, you know, I'm like, now the entrepreneur wheels are turning and I want to start doing that in my own business.

It's a very different way of looking at things, Tom. They, they. People worry too much about money. If you, if you do, if you amaze your clients and in franchising, your major clients are your franchisees, your first, most important clients. Franchisees. If you amaze your clients, all you got to do is to watch the back end to some extent, just keep an eye on what's going on, expenses. But if you focus on the front end, focus, focus on giving great service, you tend to do better. The franchisees that are most successful are not the ones that are most hungry for money. They're the ones that have such a passion for customers that they just cannot stand to let a customer down, which is very much the way I was as a lawn mowing contractor. I just want to do an absolutely perfect job beyond what anybody ever asked me.

Would you call yourself a perfectionist in.

Terms of mowing a lawn? Yes. Right. But I mean, when you're mowing a lawn, you do an edge. If you have one blade of grass that looks terrible, it's like a beautiful, beautiful woman with a red spot on her face. It's awful. So, of course, in that sense, perfect. Everything has to be picked up clean. Every blade of grass got picked up clean. When you dig a garden bed, every bit of green's got a shot. You have to red the brown earth. It's not very good ecologically. I know, but that's what people want. So that's what you do. Yeah, you satisfy the client. People would look at the job that I did and say, I never knew my lawn could look that good. And it wasn't primarily driven by money. It was driven by just this desire to do a fantastic job, to delight the person I'm dealing with. It's an emotional driver. If you keep on doing that, it's surprising how often other things fall into place. As long as you're not stupid about money, you've got to know, just like with my franchisors, they don't want to give them the CPI increase with fees. And I said, come on, guys, we're still 25% unserviced leads. These are not that bad. I know you care about and it's a credit to you, but let's be sensible about it. Better still, rather than focusing on dropping the fees, which make how can we improve service to our franchisees? What extra we can give them, what can we do for them? Because honestly speaking, if they don't pay an extra 30 bucks a month, it doesn't register. But if you can do something to help them make an extra $3,000 a month, that really, really make the difference.

And that's focus on your purpose. And your purpose was helping people. You said something about, let's go with helping people.

Well, the same thing with customers. Yeah. Basically, don't focus on being the cheapest. Focus on being the best. Because in reality, that's far more important.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Okay, cool. All right, so I want to ask you some rapid fire questions. How about we do it standing up? You want to standing up, sitting down, rapid fire here, and then we'll do some on the way out. Jim has been fantastic. I'm like, are you getting tired with these? These every time? Yeah.

This is why I tell you don't eat breakfast.

No, well, Yeah, I, I, I 68.

I recommend it. I really do.

I'm gonna start doing it now.

Since I was, what, 17.

Wow. Okay.

Yeah, I used to read a lot of the popular articles.

I do, I feel amazingly good health. I just cannot.

No one ever believes you. Sounds like, oh, don't you feel terrible.

You get, you get used to it, don't you? But when I went away with my kids at Christmas New Year, I had breakfast and it was nice to have a meal with them. But you felt very laden down and leaden.

As soon as I eat now, like as soon as I get the insulin.

Spike now I've got more energy than most people half my age. You know, if I'm walking somewhere, I just run for the sake of it. I love you go to supermarket. I love lifting things. I like the feeling of using my body like this. I just enjoy it.

Don't they say like, muscle, not the atrophy is just because people don't use that muscle?

I see people who are tired all the time. They, they, they just seem so slow. Even people who are half my age or less.

Can you take that?

You can take it. It's just, no, that's, that's just a warning. Okay. That's just a warning about.

I think good questions. We could. A good one obviously would be what are your core beliefs and values? Three secrets to aging.

Three secrets to aging.

Three secrets to, like, how do you age?

Longevity to avoid aging.

Yes, I like that longevity. Cool.

There's actually more than three. There's a whole stack of them. You go through the Harvard study and stuff, which is a good way to start on that kind of stuff. Look at the things that make people. The difference between people eight decade study. What makes people healthy and happy in old age versus sad and sick. There's a series of things you go through. I can talk about that.

Have you. Sorry to distract. Have you seen Brian Johnson the. He's like the entrepreneur in the US that's putting a couple million dollars every year to anti aging himself as a. He's his own clinical trial. You can find it real.

Is he the guy that's trying to be 18 again?

Yeah, he's trying to get. He's trying to do epigenetic. He's done. He's the world record for epigenetic age reversal. And he talks about diet and, and he makes everything public. Every single piece of research.

Look into this.

Yeah, you know the diet.

There's a lot of stuff going on about engaging a lot of the. These tech people. The two are very interested in that. Look, I've got 20 years or so, 20, 25 years to live. I don't intend to see that as the end of it. If is anything going to be around within that time, I'm going to be first in the line. I'm telling you, could live a thousand years. Who knows?

Who knows.

It's like that whole trend of entrepreneurs taking like metformin, you know, the insulin drug and stuff to do anti aging and stuff. But anyways, get to the thing.

Well, yeah, no, I'll.

I'll.

And with that fasting thing I need to learn a little bit more about that. But I just eat breakfast like a king and then lunch like a gift and then dinner like a beggar. So I guess I have to flip it around now.

Well, you can actually. I would probably do the same thing except that social life is very, very important. So breakfast is not particularly social. So I can miss that. Dinner is when I have a date with my wife, I go out with friends. That's the reason why I do it that way. But what you do is fine. But actually not having anything at all would probably be even better.

And I didn't ask you what time you wake up usually.

I know, usually about 8 in the morning.

Well, not bad.

Yeah, well, I drive my son to school, so I had to get up for that.

Yeah, exactly.

Sometimes I get up at 7 and go for my run early, but it's usually about Eight. No, no, I don't, I don't, I don't kill myself with overwork. Yeah, I, I work very efficiently. When I work, I have a system of going through my emails, start at the top, deal with them, do something bang, bang, very fast, very fast responses. I, I'm very efficient in the way that I work. I work on the things that I can work out that I can do. If somebody else can handle it better, I give it to them. So I'm easy to contact.

You just use like Outlook, I'm assuming, for emails.

Yeah.

Something simple. Yeah. So the app you're using doesn't really.

Matter, but what's important is I actually prefer Gmail. It's a better system. But there's always problems with using a dedicated email.

Yeah, I'll show you. It might be a bit too much, but I'll show you an app off of this amazing foot email. Jim. Three beliefs. What are the three primary beliefs that fuel you to get out of that bed in the morning?

I have a sense of mission. I have a sense of purpose in what I do. And my purpose is threefold. My purpose is my family, my children. My purpose is my franchisees, my tribe, my extended family. My purpose is my research. There's a reason for everything that I do. I'm looking forward tremendously to the next 20 years. I've got so much to do at every level.

You keep bringing up the 20 year thing and what keeps flashing through my mind is that steel bucket that everyone doesn't want to look into that's full of the things you wish you did. Now let's call it a bucket list. What's on your bucket list, man? 20 years. What do you want to do? Surely you want to do something like.

I want to do more of what I'm doing now. I want to work on a system to develop my research.

Nothing crazy like climb Everest.

No, why should I? What's the point?

Yeah, exactly. Well, 20 years left, man.

I want to make the world a better place.

You got longer in you than 20 years. I'm just going to say that.

No, it's about 23. I'm 71. Yeah. Basically mid-90s is probably about what I get under given my state of health and everything else. No, no. Why would I want to climb Everest? For what we. The purpose. No, but why? What am I achieving? How's the world a better place? Because I've climbed.

You've got, you've got one life, one existence, you know.

Exactly.

It's so rare.

So why throw it Away by climbing Everest.

That is true, yeah.

What are you achieving? Okay. Status. Yes. Why is that important?

So your aim is to leave a legacy.

Yeah. Is that it? If I can develop my research and millions of people can live better lives, that to me is a lot more important than somebody looking, oh, Jim's so great. He climbed Everest. Who do I care? I haven't done anything of any value by doing something. If I go and visit someplace and I have an exotic holiday, so what, what have I achieved? What have I done? How is that a sense of purpose? My bucket list is what I'm doing right now. I want my franchisees to be successful. If I can work out a way of doing that, making them better, I can influence thousands of families for the better. You know the reason why franchising what I do is so valuable? Let me give you a simple statistic, please. If you go into business like cleaning or gardening, typical the kind of things we do, what is your chance that you'll still be in business in 12 months? You know what it is, between 5 and 10%. These are figures on the Internet. But you know what the chance, if you buy Jim's franchise, you'll be in business in 12 months. 88%.

That's remarkable.

Now, I'd like it to be better. And some of those 12% that we lose go independent, so they're not all lost to business. But the overwhelming majority of people who come to us actually end up with successful, lucrative business and a great lifestyle.

And even if they leave and fail, they've given it a shot.

Even if they leave and they succeed. Well, yeah, the point of it is they're far more likely to see. Now what I've achieved for thousands of thousands of people is something of enormous value. I've made the world a better place. And my family, I've got 10 kids, and they are, by and large, wonderful kids. And I think probably more success. You know, mothers and so forth have got a environment and people they know and so forth, but that's part of what I've achieved in life. So, bucket list. No, I don't believe in that stuff. Because you look at what people want in life, okay? And they say, if I had more money, I could have a better car and a bigger house. And people admire me. I can go on holidays and they can say, oh, you've climbed Everest, you've done all this stuff. I mean. I mean, what rubbish. You know, what makes people happy? Buying stuff. Very little effect, if any. Just comparison makes you feel worse. You always compete with Somebody else experiences time with friends, social life experiences, friendships, people that you love and support and care about and interact with and get interest from and so forth. That's important. Number one, best thing you can do with money. And this is not my personal opinion, is my opinion, but it's backed by a whole swathe of scientific research. Give your money away to a cause that you're involved with. That is the number one best way to spend your money to achieve happiness. So forget about the flashy new car. What is something you really believe in? And I've got franchises. I've got a guy in South Australia I spoke to last year. You know what he does? He's a mowing franchisee. He makes a good living working very limited hours. And he goes out and works with the homeless. How fantastic is that? And he goes out, he says no, listens to them. What do they want? What can I do for you? How can I help? Isn't that an amazing life? Now, that guy's never going to be featured in the front of a magazine. He's not going to say, oh, he's the youngest person ever climbed Everest. I don't care about that kind of stuff. What he's doing is fantastic. Another franchisee who actually, he has a practice of fostering kids from terrible environments. And he and his wife do that. And they've got a sort of farm outside of Brisbane. And that's part of what their mission in life is. To me, these are great people.

Absolutely.

And I think that's what people should be focusing on. It's not just for the sake of the world, it's for the sake of themselves. Do something you believe in. Try and make the world a better place.

I had a glass of cheers to that.

You know what there's so many studies on. I love reading things about health and happiness. One of the studies I'd really like to bring to you is there's one that's been done for eight decades. Basically started with Harvard students, but also with poorer kids. They've looked at what makes people happy and healthy in old age versus sad and sick. And there's some very clear features behind that. Okay, don't smoke, don't drink. Beyond a very modest amount, alcohol is one of the worst factors. Exercise, keep proper weight, don't get overweight. Cope well with misfortune. In other words, when things go wrong, be positive. React to them in a positive way. Keep your mind active, keep on learning, learning new things, new ideas. Change the way you think. And seventh most important of all, strong social Relations, family, friends, strong bonds with other people, face to face. Bonds, not through social media, direct communication. Bond with our fellow human beings. That's number one. That is the key to a great life. And I put on top of that my own things, which is sense of mission, sense of purpose in what you do. And don't get stuck with social comparison. Don't compare yourself with others. Say, what does God want me to do? I mean, that's a Christian. I see it that way. Parallel to talents. One of my key passages in my life is Jesus story about talents. We don't all have the same level ability. We don't have the same resources. But what we're asked to do is to use them the best we can to achieve meaningful change and meaningful benefit.

Remarkable. I'm gonna ask you another question about faith. Well, I won't go too far into it, but it's been a long time since I studied Christian studies. I'm spiritual. I'm not religious, unfortunately, but I believe everyone. I'm not like atheist or. I believe everyone. I'm spiritual. Right. So there was a passage in the Bible, Ramses or something, I'm not sure. Long hair guy. Do you know which one that was where he cut his hair? He loses his strength.

Samson.

Samson, Cool. So Samson. So he. You cut his hair off, he loses his strength. Right. I want to know if you lost something, not a physical part, but if you lost something of your character, like your efficiency, your time management, for example, what would be the one thing that. If I took it away today, if I went into your soul and took away this. This feature of yourself, what would be the most impactful feature that would. That would be like the cutting of the head of Samson to you?

Well, sense of mission, obviously. Because if that goes, there's nothing left.

So if I took away your mission and your purpose.

Yeah. Why would I do anything?

Exactly.

If I have a purpose in my life, what could I possibly.

Well, let's expand on that. If someone doesn't feel like they have a mission or a purpose, how do they find their mission and their purpose?

There's mission and purpose all around you. There's people who need your help around you. Just look around, you'll find it. There's so many wonderful causes, there's so many great things to be involved with. Go out and look. Find out something like men's sheds. Find out some charity, some overseas, to help people in the world who are less fortunate than you will find needs all over the place. I went once with World Vision to Yunnan in China, and I went to look at the poverty people there and what was happening in that environment. This was a long time ago. Probably vast lot since then. But when you see the kinds of issues that people face in those kinds of environment, to be part of that, that's an amazing, wonderful thing. There are so many. There's so much need. If you simply expose yourself and you look around you, there are so many wonderful causes to be involved in. And if you do that, you'll find something that you've got a passion for, because everybody's. I think everybody has an element of decency in them. And there are so many things that could be done. There's so many people that need your help and support. Get involved. Join the cfa, Country Fire Authority.

Just, just Country Fire. I thought, okay, cool.

I didn't hear. Or, you know, as a church member, obviously we do various services within the church. There's. There's always areas where somebody's in need.

So just do something.

Do something. Yeah. And get off your backside and do something. And you'll be. You'll be happier for it. Yeah.

Because the reason I ask is so many people, not just in the younger demographic, but so many people are so deeply. I don't want to use this word, but depressed.

Right.

Because I would say they haven't found that purpose or admission and. And that's to retract.

But again, the point of it is the last thing you ever should do in life is to go out there. My prime goal is to be happy. That's a terrible way of looking at life. Your prime goal in life should be to do something worthwhile with your life. Don't focus, don't worry about being happy about it. Work out something that's worthwhile to do, and the happiness will come as you stop focusing on the wrong thing. People had too much turned in on themselves. I didn't even believe happiness was possible when I was younger, actually. I thought that there was a. You were sad or you were down. You're up and down. It balanced out. I now know it's possible, but I've never. I've never. I never fought for that as the primary goal. I don't believe you should. Like, I don't. You know. You know, the alcoholics, actually, that's what they tend to say. It's one of the most characteristic. My purpose in life is to be happy. Drug addicts to be happy.

What's the chase that dopamine hit?

As you said, take the drug, take the alcohol, take the anonymous, meaningful, meaningless sex. Take do the pornography, whatever the nasty habit that you have. You know, stuff with the junk food, all the stuff you got because you want to enjoy it, because you want to do it, because you think, how can I be happy? Don't forget about that. That's not the way to think about life at all. Think about what's my purpose, what's my meaning in life. And to do that, I need health and so forth. I'll do this and this and this. Even though it's harder in the short term because it's more meaningful, people are getting it backwards. They're thinking, I want more money, therefore I'll do this. No, I'll do this. And therefore, the money will come just.

Like the happiness I'll give you.

Give me a perfect example. When I started off my franchise back in 1989, the common practice within was that you took anybody. We used to call it a mirror test. It was a joke in the industry. If you want to know whether to sign somebody, you hold a mirror to their face, you sign it. Or $50,000 on a pulse, which is, somebody told me who'd been selling for another franchise. That was the common attitude. And I said at that time, no way am I going to do that, because I care about these people. I'm not going to put anybody on that I've got really. I've got serious doubts about. And I would put them out on the road with people that I trusted. And I say, check them out. If they don't do well, we won't take them. But I knock people back. Now, I thought at the time that decision would stop me ever building a major business. I seriously did, because I would knock back people who might otherwise work out. I'd lose income. In fact, it was one of the bestest business decisions I ever made. Because in practice, knocking people back, having high standards actually means you grow faster. Because people are happier, there's less negativity. They spread the word that they're doing well. You show that you care about them and not just making money. All those things went together. I didn't understand at the time. I just knew it was wrong to put on a person who's likely to fail. So when I had a franchise, I was approached by this woman who was buying a franchise on behalf of her son. And she had problem with the contract. It was put on by one of my franchisors. And I asked her a few questions. I said, well, you're buying the business, not your son. You're putting the money. And she said, yes, I Am. I said, why are you doing that? And he said, well, he's in his early 20s, he can't find a job. And I said, I will not sell your son a franchise. You, you cannot. Because that is a recipe for failure. And anybody knows that in gyms. Now he actually, she got very upset at me. She said, I wish I never called you. I said, it's a really good thing you did. But she said, what do I do with him now? I said, okay, I've got guys in that area who need workers. So I introduce him to the franchisees. So I introduced him the two franchisees. He was hopeless, completely incapable of running a business. This poor woman would have. And she wasn't obviously rich, she would have blown everything. Now the point about that, it was I was absolutely furious with the franchisor. I said, how could you put somebody on when you must have known they couldn't succeed? So when these come up for renewal, I said, you sell, we're not renewing because that was completely unconscionable behavior. That is the moral side of it. But it wasn't originally a business decision. It was based on the fact I'd make less money, but I'd do the right thing. In fact, it was a great business. Simple. I didn't know that. And so many times in my life that's come across that way. Decisions you make, the best decisions are the ones that you make against what seem to be your own self interest because you're doing the right thing. And time and time again, it turns out to be a great business decision. Like, I used to sell lawn mowing grounds, okay?

Lawn mowing grounds.

Lawn mowing grounds. Before the franchise you saw lawn mowing grounds. Now, I used to guarantee the jobs that would be regular client. They dropped out, replaced, and that was my deal. One particular guy, actually some of the replacement jobs dropped out and he. So he came back to me and said, it doesn't seem very fair. And I said, well, that's the contract that you signed. You know, I agreed to replace it. I wouldn't agree to place the replacement. And then I thought about it afterwards. So. Well, regardless of the contract, look at his point of view. He's paid to get a certain number of customers. I haven't provided them. So I had a thought about it. I rang him back and I said, tim, okay, I'll replace all your replacement clients too, and if any of those gone, I'll replace them, 100% guarantee. Now again, I did that because to me it seemed the right thing to do. But you know what, when I started doing that kind of thing and really focusing on the interest that people did buying from me, the sales went up through the roof and I had a board behind me. This is pre franchise where I had everybody who bought a lawnmower for me had a white card with a name and a phone number. If anybody was interested, ring any of those guys, ring anybody. That particular decision and others like it made my business again. It was a moral decision. You do what's right and somehow amazingly, it so often turns out to be the best decision. Yeah, you don't, don't focus on money. First you've got to watch your money, you've got to make sure that you are covering your costs, but put your focus on the welfare of the person you're dealing with.

You've really. I'm going to be honest with you, you've changed my mentality because at the start of the year, for the last three years that Bohemian's been running, I've been focusing on the service delivery and perfecting it and like automations and stuff. And now this year I've been really only focusing on money to try and bring up the cash flow. Now I realize, I think mix of both.

Yeah, My dad always used to say to me when I was saying it was the guy who follows get nowhere, the guy who follows passion.

You've seen it all over the place too. I'll give you an example. Cryptocurrency. Now, to me, to be in business I've got to be doing something that's got redeeming value. And you can clearly tell what I tell about franchising. We do enormous good in the world. Enormous good. Look at the difference between the 5% success or 10% success and the 88% success. That's a huge bit of difference in good people do with things like cryptocurrency. What are they doing? They're not putting their money into anything that's got any value. They're putting it in on the expectation, the hope that it'll raise a lot of it'll get higher and I'll be able to sell. Who are you helping? Nobody. And you know the interesting thing about that is people do it because they say I just want to get money. Most of the end up losing because the people who gain are the ones who are smart operators who actually the.

People that go like, yeah, but if.

You go into anything with the idea that you'll make more money than somebody else and you'll make money at somebody else's expense, which basically all forms of gambling are, then you're likely to lose money. There's a very simple principle. Do things that have got redeeming value in themselves.