How to improve your income? Jim's Training Session from New Franchisee Training

Yep. Awesome.

Alrighty, let's welcome in Jim Pedman for our afternoon session, everybody.

Okay, this afternoon we're going to close off this generic course with a single question. How do you make more money? This will bring together quite a few of the things you've learned in the past three days. Now, this session has two quite distinct parts. The first, which will apply to some of you from the beginning, you'll be short of leads, so how do we get you more leads? And the second, which will apply to some of you from the beginning and pretty well all of you before too long. You've got all the work that you want. How do we increase your hourly rate? Now, when it comes to finding more leads, there's a whole stack of different ways to do it. Point to remember is some are very easy and this is where we're talking about gyms online. To achieve this, all you need is to tick a right boxes. It's very, very simple to get the leads coming through. There's some others we'll kind of focus on at quite length and there's some hard ones. Now this is not saying you don't do these, but you don't do the hard things, so you've done the easy one. This will be things like own ads, leaflets and for most franchisees, things like door knocking. I mean you can find work with these, but they take quite a lot of effort and or expense. So we don't do the hard things till we've done the easy things first. So let's start up here. Who's been listening? Who can tell me what we need to watch for in terms of putting down for work all areas? Yes, good. Surprisingly common. I had a franchisee just last week approaching me saying, hey, the work's not as much as I, I'm not getting as much work as I should. And I said, well, the problem is most days you're not asking for all areas, you're only asking for territory or nothing at all. So ask for all areas consistently. Same day service. Same day service, yes. What else? Sorry, unserviced leads. Yes. You can put yourself down for unserviced leads, which tells you when they come in, you can even be SMS them. So if you want to lead, you can grab it. But why might you not get that job in the first place? Sorry? Well, you're not asking for all areas for a start, but even if you are asking for your all areas, why would a job come in from your region that you don't get it? It's a service type. Yes. So look at the services you offer. So, for example, when you start off, if you're a mowing person, you might not be confident in landscaping, or if you're a cleaner, you might not know how to clean an oven. Or if you're a dog waste person, your mother had to groom certain dogs. You can learn these with time and as you get more experience, you'll actually gradually take more. If you don't know how to do a job, how could you learn? Go along with someone else, out with somebody else. Ask your franchisor. YouTube manual. Lots of different ways to go. The meetings often have these kinds of things at meetings. So if you do these, you gradually learn more, expand your services. If you don't know how to do it, you can actually get some other practitioner to come and do it with you. For example, 1 and 3 works. Sorry, the 1 and 3 works for someone, for them. Voluntary. Voluntary. Voluntary. Okay, let's talk about gyms online first. Let's talk about how we set ourselves up on the system and we'll go to those kind of things later. What else do we need to look at in terms of getting more leads through the system? Through the system? The number of days? Yes. Asking for all areas specifically, even when you're not actually working, you can take leads and call them back. What were you saying there? Zoning. Zoning, yes. The actual areas that you are put down for. In other words, your suburbs or in regional centres, your towns. This can be quite important. I just before coming to this talk, I had an email from a franchisee starting on the 10th of April, had actually a mowing person only six leads. That's remarkably little, by the way. I was shocked. Now, I looked at the notes and one of the things the franchisor had suggested is that they expand their areas of work. So that's a first start. Now, this can be something that you have to think about periodically because what leaves you take depends on where you are, but also on who around you is taking work. So here's an example. Something happened some time back. We go to franchisee with a territory there. Franchisor gave them the area immediately around their territory. That's obvious. Everybody would do it. What I noticed also was that the franchisor had given a fairly big area to the west. Now, what had happened obviously, is that when the franchisee started this area over here, it might be, say, 40 minutes drive, but there would only be one job. So it's not really worth going that far because you're 40 minutes there, you've got an hour and a half, travel there and back over here. Quite clearly there'd been a lot of work. So a franchise could go there, do three or four jobs. Doesn't have to be every day of the week to go there on, say, Tuesday and Friday. Be worth traveling that far to come back. Now, since this person started six months ago, obviously things had changed because what I noticed that there were unserviced leads over here, quite a few. And what I noticed was there was new franchisees taking work here. So why is there unserviced leaves here when there wasn't six months ago? Advertising? Because the franchisees who were taking the leads have got filled up, which is very common. This was division, like mowing or dogwatch, one of those regular ones. So because of that they weren't taking work, there was work. So all we did was just change that. We just shifted it to the east a bit. Now it's worthwhile going there because there's several unserviced leads. Does that make sense? So this is not a sort of thing sit and forget. You've got to be. Gotta look at what's available and where. If there's a particular area where there is a significant shortage of amount of unserviced leads, it's worth taking that one on. Okay, what else do we have to look at in terms of the actual system? Open up your leads from 6 o' clock to 8 o'. Clock. Yes. Good man. Time of day. It's actually not uncommon to see a franchisee short of leads. And they're not taking. They're only working. They're only taking leave between nine and five, say, and you ask about, they say, well, it's because that's the hours that I work, which is reasonable. But if a call comes in in the evening, why not take the lead, phone the client, book in for the next day? So that's a not uncommon kind of signal. Maximum hours, Maximum days when you're starting off. Incidentally, one of the interesting things about this particular case is not only that I was able to help this guy with the problem, and I use it as an example, but one of the things I recognized after talking to him is that I knew about the unserviced leads. He didn't. And as a direct result of that conversation, I went to it and I said it. Can you set up a system so franchisees, if they wish, can be sent unserviced leads as they appear? And that happened as a direct result of that conversation. Which is one reason why when I say to you, please Contact me. It's actually very useful sometimes that you do not only for yourself, but quite often you can help me to solve other people's problems. Yes. 24 hours. Well, actually it doesn't go in the middle of the night. I mean, maybe it should, but you can't really book it in. It's from about 7 or 6 or 7 in the morning up until like 9 or 10 at night. They're basically our call center hours. Down the track a bit. There's no reason why you can't take jobs, especially if they're coming through online. Up to nine o'clock is okay, but if it's midnight, they'd be out of luck. You won't get it until the next morning even if you ask for it. Okay, so that's a good start. These are the first things we look at. Okay. We had some other good ideas. Let's go on with what else we can do. Call transfer is a way of actually increasing conversion rate. It won't give you any more leads, but it might help you convert them a bit better if you can. If you can be confident of answering your phone. In my experience, most franchisees don't answer their phones. Okay, yeah, good. Good man. Social media. You can do a great deal of good for yourself by being active on social media. We're going to set up a Google my business page for you. Try and get your clients to put reports on there. It is quite effective if you call up something like, you know, Painters Doncaster, whatever it is, if you're in, if you're Jim's Painting Doncaster or in that area, you'll appear there and your reviews will appear there. And that's a very good way to actually get leads. So social media, also Facebook, for example, keep yourself active, put views on, put comments on, get clients to put things on. That's all very powerful stuff. Good. What else? Yes, well, you put yourself down for contracts. They will tend to ask you if you're in the area and you need work, the contract department will actually contact you and say, would you want to do this? What else? Referrals. Good man. Yes, definitely. Referrals. Referrals are pretty good stuff, aren't they? Tell me why you like referrals. Free, no lead fee. Just remember, the more you earn, the less you pay in fees, the more money in your pocket. All right. What's your conversion rate on a referral? Likely to be very high. Very good clients, you just simply quote similar to the person that gave you a referral. It's a slam dump walk in and get the job. There's no messing around with referrals. So they're very, very good jobs. Okay. We love referrals, don't we? What's going to get you more referrals? What do we need to do to get more referrals? Ask for them. Sorry? Honestly, Honest? Honest, yes. Somebody said do good work. Okay? That's the first thing. Great service. If you wow your clients with great service, it's not difficult to get referrals. It really is not. So do terrific work for clients. And the other thing you need to do is ask for it. Okay, now here we come across an issue because asking for something is not easy. Not easy. Anybody here got a sales background? Been in sales? Alright, anybody here? A few of you have. Okay, you're going to do very well, most likely. It's one of the top earning professions. Why? Because you guys know that you don't get what you want. You don't get a sale unless you ask for it, do you? People just won't buy from you. You have to actually ask. So you're not scared of rejection. You probably are a bit. Nobody likes being rejected, but it can still be difficult. So most of us don't like asking for a referral because we fear rejection. Does that make sense? We also fear that the client may feel we're pushy. This is a genuine fear. It's nothing to be ashamed of. We all fear it, even people who do sales for a living. You don't like being rejected, do you? There's a wonderful film called the Founder which is about Ray Kroc who founded McDonald's as a franchise system. And you show him going around selling mix masters, which was his job. That's how he came across the McDonald's brother in Sam Bernardino. And he was selling these big Mixmaster machines. And you can see him approaching people during the day and you see a lot of knockbacks. Even though he was quite successful, he actually made a living. He was still making a living from this business while his first franchisees were millionaires and he wasn't even drawing a salary from McDonald's. So he was a good salesman, but he found it challenging. And one of the little snippets that you see is him in his motel room at night playing a record with motivational talks. So even a super salesman like Ray Kroc certainly was. We don't like being rejected. It's not easy. Now the really good thing about the service industry is that you can actually ask for a referral without any fear of Rejection without any fear of being seen as pushy. It's using the right phrase. So I want you to remember this, okay? I'm going to. I've just finished doing a job for Tina, okay? Now I'm going to give Tina my business card. Would anybody think that was strange? No. Tina is not going to object to me giving her a business card. I've just done the job for her. She's obviously happy with it. Okay, Tina, here's my business card. And here's a couple of extra in case you know anybody who needs work done. Have you got that phrase? Here's my business card and here's a couple of extra in case you need anybody who needs work done. Now, have I asked Tina a direct question? I haven't, have I? So she doesn't have to do anything. She doesn't have to say, no, I don't know anybody. Get away, you nasty man. I mean, she's not going to anyway, is she? So I run no risk of rejection. She will not feel pressured. She will simply smile. Thank you. Put the cards away. That's it. There's no way she's going to feel bad about it or you should feel bad about it. However, what have I achieved by that little statement? What have I told Tina? I'm available, I could do extra leads, I could do with some more work. She doesn't know. I mean, I've come in, I've rung back within two minutes, I've turned up on time, done a fantastic job. I must be flat out. She doesn't know I started three weeks ago. Okay, so it's told her that I need more work and what's it done? It's jogged her mind. Who do I know who would like a fantastic mowing, guide dog, wash cleaner, window cleaner, car mobile mechanic, laundry, whatever. So it's jogging her mind about who she might know. That's all you need to achieve. You do not need to ask the direct question. Now, if you want to ask the direct question, you can, but you don't need to. It's just as effective to use that phrase. Here's my business card and here's a couple of extra in case you know anybody. All right? Got that? It's really worth memorising using these phrases. Just be disciplined. Hopefully your franchisor will coach you and remind you about these things, but don't forget it. Good, we're going. Well, what else? Community groups. Community groups? Yes. Okay, community groups. Anybody you know, any group that you're a part of, and that could be A community group. It could be a local school, sporting club, it could be your local mosque or temple or church. It could be your local cfa, it could be any group that you are a part of already. It could be a school that you go to, your kids go to a school and you turn up when you go into these places, what do you wear? Uniform. It's quite respectable. But if you go in uniform, you will find an element of curiosity. Most of you have got a picture of me with you during training. Those who haven't come down afterwards and get it, keep it on your phone. People will often the curious question, you know, whose gym? Is there really a gym? You know, people still ask that. Not as much as they used to, actually do. You know, I was asked that question myself once. I was at an airport in Mackay in Queensland, and the girl behind the counter said to me, hey, you know, you're from Jims, are you? I said, yes. Is there really a gym? I said, yes, there is. She said, have you met him? So there's that element of curiosity. You go out there with a uniform, with business cards, go to wherever you mix with other people and people will ask you, they'll be curious about it. What's it like? All kinds of things. You're in like Flynn. So being out in the community is very, very helpful. The more people you know, the better. The easiest way to start a business is when you go, network. We're doing well. What else? Business. Why do you like a chamber of commerce? Chambers of commerce? Yes. That could be another community group that you belong to. Anybody that you belong to. There are groups like bni, but you need to pay for that and it's expensive. Most general community groups, you don't need to pay anything at all. You just need to be seen around the place. What else? Family and friends? Yes. Community. Sorry, Franchisee meeting. Well, your own franchisee meeting won't help you a lot, but going to another division's franchise meeting will. So that sometimes you go to a mowing meeting, you'll see a tree, skies there, something like that. So you can ask permission. In fact, I sometimes do. If a franchisee is new in an area, I actually put them in touch with the franchisor from another division and say, would you mind if somebody came to the meeting? Which they never do. They're always happy to have you come along. So, other divisions, it's worth getting to know. What else? I can give you a list of all the franchisees from other divisions in your area. I can give it to you in Like a minute. It's a really simple list and it gives them all full contact details. You can contact them, you can go and get to know them. What else? Business like real estate agents, property managers, things like that. You can. It's a good thing to do. It does take a fair bit of nous. Some, like yourself, with a sales background probably find that easier than most, but it does take a bit of courage. I'd certainly encourage it. Property managers in particular. And there's some really nice gifts like this. Now, if you've got a really good property manager in your area, this is about bypass about 26 bucks or something. It's not. Not much. Or a pack of cards, especially if you're mowing. $2. So a little gift to give to the property manager and introduce yourself with a business card. It's really worth thinking about that kind of approach. What else? You haven't even thought of the two biggest ones yet. Real estate. Real estate, yes. We're talking about that. Pay for work guarantee. Good man. Thank you. I'm glad somebody brought that up. Pay for work guarantee. All right. You are short of leads. This franchisee just called me before email before this meeting, going since the 10th, very short of leads. Had remarkably few. What am I suggesting? Pay for work guarantee. And I said to you, you need to start offering free services now in capitals like that, starting with friends, neighbours, relatives. Who else can we offer? Pay for work guarantee freebies to people in need. People in need, yes. That's actually a very good one. Now, they may not be ongoing service, but if you can find out something like a Facebook group, tell me anybody in the community who really needs whatever I'm doing, house clean, whatever, and you go out and you do it for them. Now, they're probably not going to become a regular client, but post on your Facebook page. Really happy. You know, Simone was so wonderful, gave me a great service. I'm so happy with it. So forth. Did a fantastic job. She's such a lovely lady. Put that. That's gold. So you put that on your Facebook group. So it's a really good. We had one guy who did that, actually got a story in the local paper about helping out the community and the franchise all paid to do this. So your local Facebook group, I think they're called Buy, Swap, Sell, those kinds of groups, that sort of thing. Anything that's local, make an offer. Who do you know who's in need? Who can you help? It's a nice thing to do. It's a good thing to do for Somebody, but it's actually helping your business. What other groups? Franchisees from other divisions, community groups, everything at all. All of those. You can use those to give away your free services. It's not incredibly easy. It's not as easy as you might think. You don't just knock on a door and find somebody who says, yes, I'll have whatever it is you have to knock on a few doors to get it. So it's easy to start with personal contacts, if you can, friends of friends, people in need, franchisees from other divisions. Sometimes we have groups from franchisee from each division meet together. There was one around here that used to meet at the McDonald's in Moorrabach every second week. They met for breakfast. But these groups never last long. You know why?

They get too busy.

They get too busy. Anybody who does that kind of stuff gets busy. And they used to do work for each other so they could recommend each other, which is very, very powerful. Strongly suggest you approach your fellow franchisees from other divisions. For example, we have got Zoe, Tina, you're cleaning, are you? All right? Now, everybody here, you don't know it, but you all live 20 minutes drive from Tina's place, all right? Now I want you to go home and I'm going to be incredibly sexist here, guys. I'm going to guess that you don't actually clean your house, all right? If you do, well, good luck to you, that's great. But let's assume you don't. I want you to go home and I want you to talk to your significant other who most likely does do the cleaning. And I want you to tell her, look, next week Tina is going to come and clean our house immaculately for no charge. And you know what they're going to say, don't you? You do know what they're going to say. No possible way. I work hard all week and the one thing I really look forward to on Saturday morning is cleaning the toilet. All right? Can you see the power of that? Can you see that? Why, that might work, but the point of it is, who's say, who's in mowing? Some of you around here in mowing. All right, Co. What's your name? Sorry. Rob. Okay, Rob. Rob, Tina's come and cleaned your place and you're. Are you married? Get a partner. Okay, Your wife is now saying she's done such a great job and you're making so much money now with children's mind that we can afford to have her come regularly. That may work, probably won't, but you Know what's good about it is that you're actually out there and mowing somebody's lawn and somebody says, I love the way you look after my place. I wish I could find a cleaner. And you say, well, Tina came and did our place last week and she was fantastic. She's a lovely lady. My wife is absolutely delighted with her. Can I get her to give you a call? You ring, ring tina, not ring 131546. Ring Tina and pass it on. I use that a couple of times. And what's Tina going to do? She's going to start finding work for you and you create that relationship. So, strange as it may seem, each other is a great place to do free work for them. It's a nice little bonus, isn't it? You know, you want your dog wash, just find somebody who's a new dog wash franchisee and then you build that network of connections. So strongly recommend you do that. Very important. Never known a franchisee. A Apart from two divisions which we've really had trouble with, one of them is Pet Patrol, the other is Beauty and there's nobody here today. We have never had a situation where we couldn't find enough work for somebody who's prepared to do pay for work guarantee. Nobody here needs to be short of leads. As long as you're prepared to do pay for work guarantee will work. See, why does it work so well? Why do you think pay for work guarantee is so good? Give me all the reasons why it's good. Yeah, because they can actually generate more work for you. If you go out and do somebody's paperwork guarantee, you're going to get potential referrals, aren't you? You're going to get social media, you're going to get other things we haven't even talked about yet. So it's a great way you're out in the community, you can be seen. Like one of the things I haven't talked about is exposure, in the best sense of this word. You're out here, out there in the street. Not the bad one because it's wearing a uniform. You're out in the streets, you're being seen. You're also building confidence, you're building experience. It's so much better to be out there doing work. When you're in business, presumably you're all full time, you should have a name to work 40 hours a week. That's very simple, isn't it? To start off with, anyway, later on, when you're making a lot of money, you might choose to work Less hours. But in general guideline is 40 hours a week. If you've got 20 hours a week, you've got 20 hours to go out there doing things that can find you more work. And one of the most cost effective best ways to do that is pay for work guarantee. Doing free services. It will very quickly build your business. And we find that franchisees who do this consistently never need to do it for long because they get so much work. Very important. When I write you in one month and I really do want you to respond to my letter, I'll be really offended if you don't. I will specifically ask how you're going. And I specifically ask about pay for work guarantee, as I did with this franchisee who just contacted me just a little while ago. Okay. We're doing well. What else? Business groups. Business network. Business networks. Yeah, we got that there. Registered ndis. Yes. You can go there for ndis, but you've got to actually have the contacts to do it. But you can actually make yourself register for ndis. Yep. What else? Word of mouth, like referrals. Yeah. There's a big one we haven't actually mentioned. In fact, it's one of the biggest. Along with pay for work guarantee. Sorry, Signage. Exposure is important. The more you're out in the world, you'll get it. But there's something you haven't talked about every franchisee. The top earning franchisees do this and they do it in spades. What do they do? Well, your equipment's got to look good. Yes. What haven't we mentioned? Upsell. Who said that? Well done. Thank you. Upsell. Upsell is one of the biggies. Upsell is very powerful. Tell me why you like upsell jobs. What's good about them? You're already on site. You're already on site. Minimal travel. Travel is a very major cost in whatever we do. So you're there. Okay. What else is good about it? More money? Higher hourly rate. You know what Dan said just now? Your charge on an upsold job is more specialized. Tends to be a higher hourly rate. What else is good about it actually locks customers in. If you do more than one job for a customer, there's all the more reason why they want you to continue doing it because you do so much for them. It doesn't have to be from your own division either. You can be a mower, you can wash windows, you can be a cleaner and you can clean carpets too. If you get hold of a machine. It doesn't have to be specifically for your division. You can Actually offer to bang people's fence posts back on or change their light clothes, which is often a problem for elderly customers. Sometimes they only see us all week. They don't have anybody else to help them with some such a task. I know franchises have gone shopping for their customers. There's lots of things we can do. We just find out what they need. All right, so upsell is great. Extra income, no more fees, less travel, higher hourly rate. What do we got to do? We've got to ask for it. All right? And here again, we have the same problem, is that we don't like to ask, because why? Fear of rejection. Fear of being seen as pushy by the client. Does that make sense? Can you understand that? It's not easy because we don't like being rejected. When I left school, I actually had a job for a while called a job. I didn't get paid anything for it. Knocking on doors, trying to sell encyclopedias. And that was a brutal experience. Two weeks was enough for me. It really was. Now nobody actually slammed the door in my face. But people saying no hundreds of times is very, very difficult. Difficult, it's hard to take. The wonderful thing about the service industry and about what you're learning now is that you can ask without any fear of rejection, without any fear of being seen as pushy. And I'll pick on Tina again because she's in the front row. I can see her. I've just finished. Let's just say I mowed Tina's lawn. I say, tina, how does the lawn look? You happy with that? Happy with the way it looks? Sure. I'm sure she is. I do a great job. If there's anything else you ever want done, if you want gardening done or gutters cleared, rubbish removed, happy to help. Got that? Now, those are not random choices. I happen to notice that there's weeds in the flower beds. I happen to notice leaves coming out of the edge of gutters or I've just finished cleaning the house. Anything else you want done? If you'd like the oven cleaned or the windows done, I could even change your bedding for you, put through the laundry if you like, or whatever. Happy to help. So just mention something that you could do that you see might need doing and say you're happy to help. Now, what does that sound like? Does that sound pushy? No, it just sounds helpful. Doesn't sounds nice. Now, the client's smart enough to know that you will be charging for it. At the same time, I haven't asked him the direct question. I Can't put her on the spot or make her feel uncomfortable. So I've achieved everything that I want to achieve without the risk of a rejection. Does that make sense? Don't be afraid to admit that you fear rejection. We all have this. Even people who've been in sales don't like being rejected, do you? But the great thing about the service center is you can achieve what you want without that fear. Now, if you even feel that too uncomfortable, let me give you the same example. Tina. Look, I'm sorry, I'm a bit grubby. I've just been cleaning out some gutters for my last client or. Look, I'm off. It's been so nice seeing you. I've got an oven to clean from the next client. All right. Story about something you have done or will do, which is really, really, really low key. But bringing up the subject of the topic, the service that you might want to mention, if you use that thing, you will get extras. In fact, most regular clients will give you some extras with time if you simply ask the question and make a few suggestions about what they might do. And that dramatically improves your income. It builds your business fast and it builds your LE rate even faster. Does that make sense? So upselling is very, very powerful stuff. What else could we do? I think we've covered most of it, actually. Okay, but really, really look at this, by the way. If you do pay for work guarantee, what are you getting? More exposure and opportunity to upsell and become regular clients. So this is really core. This person who just contacted me before, it's an alarming start, but I know that if he does pay for work guarantee, he will do okay. But it's got to be done. Just remember, it's not an income guarantee. It's a work pay for work guarantee. But don't think if you can knock on doors up into strangers, it's good. But people are suspicious. Okay, what's the catch? But if you do it through this way, using your networks, using those types of systems, then it will work and you will definitely build your business faster. Okay, now we've started off, we are doing well, we are busy. In fact, most people who respond to me with the one month letter will tell me they've actually overpaid for work guarantee level. But definitely not all. Now I want to look at how we increase our hourly rate. How do we do that? Get better at the service. Yeah, good efficiency, speed up, work out a way to do the job quality job faster. And I can. As a mowing contractor, I was mowing lawns 15 years, from about 1975 to 1989. Before 15 years, I can still vividly remember. Right at the end of my mowing career, I was still working out in my mind how to save a half second going around a tree. I had a system for removing grass bags. I had a plastic rubbish bin with woven poly sacks in the bottom of them. I'd have one up over the lip. I put the grass in. I'd fill it up, take it out, lean it against a tree or something where it already mowed, pull up the next one. If I'd finished a lawn at the back, I would have maybe three heavy, wet loads of grass. And grass can weigh a lot. Okay, one's already in the bucket on my mower. Second goes on top of that. Third over my shoulder. Walk out with three bags of heavy grass and my mower. Just quick ways of thinking about it. Time yourself. Work out how long a job should take you, and you'll work out how to do it better and better and better. The difference between the best people, the most efficient and the least efficient, is like a multiple. It's not just 10% better, it's like two or three times more efficient. So learn that. Find out how long people take you in your meetings. Find out how long somebody takes to wash a Labrador, for example, or to put down a series of baits for pest control. Whatever you're doing, find out what time it takes. And then you work out how to achieve that time without any effort. It's not usually about a rushing. It's a matter of being efficient and not wasting a step. I had a guy actually many years ago when I was pre franchised, who actually said to me, jim, be honest, you cannot make a good living mowing lawns. And I said, well, you can and I do. But he said, no, Jim, it's impossible. You can't mow more than four lawns a day. That is the maximum. You can't make living out of it. I was doing routinely about 12. So I said this I got to see. Come out with me on the job and show me what you can do. And he said, no, I am the best. I run behind the mower. You could not be faster than me. So I took him out on the job and I got in there and I said, just show him what you do. So he went and he got the mower off the trailer and he wheeled it to the end of the nature strip like this, like that, and then went back, picked up the catcher, walked over to the Catcher like this. Put the catcher on. Then he walked back again the front of the trailer, picked up the jerry can. The petrol goes over here, empties the, fills it up. Now, he was running behind the mob, but what he was doing was this. Okay, can you see? Instead of doing what anybody would do normally, it's like this. Just turn like that. Just efficiency. Little things, small things. Be disciplined. Figure out your shortcuts. You can do it without sacrificing any degree of quality. Sorry to be unsung you to mowing, but you know, I used to cut long grass, very long grass often because clean up jobs. I could cut grass that high, first time clean. There's a video on the website about how I do that. It's going in, coming back, overlapping, emptying your catcher. So work on your efficiency. Good start. What else? Upsell. Upsell, yes. So one thing belongs on both sides. Absolutely. Top earners always upsell. You go in, you do the basic job of your bread and butter, and then you upsell to the stuff where you make your real money. What else? Upskill. Sorry, Upskill. Upskill, yes. So you can do. Learn more so you can upsell to better jobs. Yep, absolutely. Sorry. Price increase. Price increase. Good man. Yes, exactly. Never forget the fundamental. We look after clients really, really well. That's part of our core ethos. But the reason we do that is so you can maximize your income. We have a brand, a great brand, by far the best in the industry, and you can get a higher price. We used to have, many years ago, a guy who ran a security door system. He had a factory and he made security doors and he put them on. And he used to do security doors under his own brand and under the Jimmy's brand. And the same security door made in the same factory from the same materials, installed by the same workman, was $850 with his own brand and $1,000 with ours. And you simply cannot get. He could not get the Jim's price with his own brand. So the very fact that you have the Jim's brand means you can pretty well automatically charge an extra 10, 15% over anybody else. Your hourly rates can be higher, for a start. And the other thing that's got you going for you is on the whole, once you've got past your early stage, most of you are going to be flat out. And what I'd say to you, if you're asking for territory or even worth nothing at all, for heaven's sake, put your prices up. And then when you've done that, if People object, which they very rarely do, surprisingly seldom. If you give your clients a 10% price increase, does anybody cancel. And if they do, then you pick up two more jobs next week and probably closer to home than the ones you already had. So definitely be confident. Look, there are occasions where we may suggest a franchisee moderate their pricing, particularly when you've got a new franchisee struggling for work, getting a lot of knockbacks and statements about this was three times the price of anybody else. That kind of thing. You can see that kind of pattern in that case. And that may happen once every two or three months. I might say to a franchisee, hey, think about your pricing. Moderate a little bit. But in general, it's far, far, far more likely that franchisees undercharge. Do not be scared of putting your prices up, people. It's not as hard as that. You just go in, you're very apologetic, you say, Look, Mrs. Jones, very sorry, I love doing your place, but, you know, price of petrol's gone up. You used to blame the price of petrol and I'm going to have to charge you an extra so and so and so and so. See, if you're charging an extra six bucks every three weeks, for example, when you talk about two bucks a week, what can you buy for two bucks a week? It's not a lot of money for them, but an extra 10% is an extra $15,000 a year for you. That's the difference. So take advantage of what we offer. Don't just get to the stage where you do the same jobs in the same time, in the same way for the same price indefinitely. I know franchisees don't even increase their prices with inflation. It just really, it frustrates me because we aim to give you a great living. We have the benefit. We had over 200,000 unserviced leads last year. Every single one of your divisions, with the exception of, say, something like bookkeeping, I will say there's exceptions or it. But apart from that, every single one of you just knocks back work. At times, you will be knocking back work. So charge more. You're worth it. You will, on the whole, great majority will give great service and you actually have. You wear a great brand. Does that make sense? Yeah. Pricing is really crucial. Do not underrate your value. And again, it's a matter of having a bit of courage to do it. Even if you're not confident you think these prices will be too much. Get a new job or two and then try that. Just put your prices up by an extra 10, 15 20% more on these new jobs and see what the reaction is. You'll be very surprised how little objection that you actually get. We do lose jobs on pricing. In fact, if you're getting all your quotes, you're too cheap. But at least try once you get busy immediately, as soon as you're getting busy immediately, at least for your new jobs, put the prices up a bit and then as your time goes by, raise your prices to existing clients. If people don't want to pay, it's okay, they don't have to come to you. Bear in mind this business is really aimed at making you money. It's not customer service for its own sake. It's customer service so that you can make a great living. Because fundamentally, we're not short of clients. We need you to make more money so you'll be happy. Stay with us for longer. Tell your friends what a great deal you're getting. That's what we want. All right, so charge more. What else? Customer list management. Yes. You're talking about the backlist. Yes. Yeah, exactly right. If you've got customers that are bad, if you've got customers that are bad payers, that are difficult to deal with anything wrong with them, you can drop them if they complain, it's a perfectly valid. You might want to get your franchisor, put a note against the job, but it's a perfectly valid reason for wiping out any complaint if you simply don't wish to service a client anymore. If you have a particularly bad client, you can ask your franchisor to do what we call red list them, which means to say we don't give them service to anybody. So if you've got somebody who's a bad payer or who's rude or who's racist or anything like that, you let us know and we'll stop them from booking again. Yes. Some clients are just nightmares. We've had clients that actually will use three or four different franchisees and complain about every single one of them, including those that we know are great operators. In that case, we drop them off. So get rid of poor clients. Let them go. If they're too far out and you're traveling too far because you want to get jobs closer to home, then find somebody else who wants them down the track a bit, probably another year or two, we'll have a system where you can actually systematically sell your outlying clients. I'm looking forward to it. Not there yet, but Jim's jobs will do it for you eventually. And then you can do that process of pruning selling off outline jobs, taking more close to home and getting a better and better and better run. I did mention the backlist. In a general sense, this is a source of leads. Once you've been going, most of your clients that you get, even for regular type divisions like mowing, cleaning, dog wash, you're going to have a lot of once off jobs so you can contact them. So for example, if it's a carpet cleaning, for example, you keep a list and you contact people after whatever time they normally have their carpets done, maybe six months or whatever. You could ask them, you put a note to call them back. You can keep in contact with them if you've got a quiet day or. One franchisee I know said, I think he was a handyman actually. He said he never has a quiet day. I said, how do you do it? He said, if I've got a gap in the next day coming up, I go to other clients in that area and I contact them and I ring up and I say, hi, this is Bill. Did some work for you back in March. I'm going to be in your area in the next day or two, which is literally true. Is there anything I can do for you while I'm there? He said, five phone calls, one job. That's on the average. So he never, ever, ever had a quiet day because he used his back list. Your back list is quite valuable actually. If you buy someone else's business, you're not just buying regular clients, you're also buying the backlist, which belongs to you because you purchased the right for it. It means any job, the backlist comes to you, the client rings the office, it comes back to you automatically and you don't pay lead fees on them because they're your clients. But they're also resource. What else? Upgrading your equipment. Yeah, great equipment. Yes, great equipment. Your time is far more valuable than your equipment. So have the best equipment in very good order. It's one of the things I didn't do very well as a contractor, I must say. I tended to rubbish my machines. I was always not cleaning them properly and stuff. So don't do that, don't follow my bad example. But great equipment, properly maintained, it's very important. What else? Uniform. Uniform? Yeah. Okay. Make sure you've got uniform in good size so you can. Well, it means you can charge more, doesn't it? What can we do to improve our hourly rates? One offs. Sorry? Selling clients. Yes, products. Oh, yeah, products. Okay. And that comes down to upselling and products. Absolutely. Some divisions are particularly Strong in that one. Dog watch is one. They often sell extra stuff. They can sell dog food too. This kind of thing. Same day service. Well, that's. It's more about finding more leads. But yeah, employees, employees, Staff, yes, very good staff. Now, if you want to build a very major business, it's actually a gyms franchise is a great way to do it because the vast majority of you will be knocking back leads. As I said, a few exceptions like bookkeeping and so forth, but generally speaking, most you'll be knocking back leads. It's a great opportunity to put staff on because you've got flexibility. If you're not taking any work, you put a staff member on, you can open up the floodgates and say, start giving these leads and you know they're available. Because you watch the unserviced leads coming through, suddenly you got a whole lot of extra work you can put a staff member on, keep them busy, justify them. If you get to the stage where that person's off sick or something, you just shut it down again, which you can do anytime. So it's actually as a franchisee with gyms, you're going to be in a very favorable situation for building a very major business. Not forgetting that you can also take jobs cross divisionally too, not just from your own division. So you can actually have quite a wide range of people working for you. The biggest problem with staff on the whole is not finding enough leads to keep them busy. It's finding good staff. Does that make sense? It's really quite a challenge. Please don't get discouraged if you put somebody on and they turn to be no good. Most of the people you try out, for a start, won't be particularly good. What you've got to do is to be persistent, keep on trying, follow your contacts. If you're from an ethnic community, which some of you are, that's a great place to go. Particularly people in your community who don't speak particularly good English. There's a lady, Poppy, who's wonderful. She's a cleaning franchisee out of Silva and she does work for me from time to time, like looks after my farmhouse at Don Valley. Lovely lady, she's got. Last time I spoke, she's got 12 employees, all Filipinos, because she is Filipino. So any way you have of finding stuff, we might find people who are on the spectrum or autistic or get other. Certain issues like that are often very good to work with, not easy to explain, but once they understand what to do, can be very helpful. Just be persistent about it keep on trying. Don't give up. If you have a few bad experiences, just. And if you eventually keep on going and if you're a good boss and you look after people well, you will find somebody good. And that makes it so much better. Because like as an example, I think I told you on Monday I had Jim's mounting at my place next door. Charged me 75 bucks an hour, but it was $300 in two hours because there was two of them, which I was happy with. You can actually see the plants that he planted. They're mostly doing very well. But he was making even. He was paying his employee 30 bucks an hour. He ended up with, what did I say, 300. He would end up with $240 from two hours work. That's not a bad sort of hourly rate. That's $120 per hour. So employees is good. And you can build a very major businesses. I often like to say, and I think it's true, we've created more millionaires than any company in this country because you can buy in for a fairly small amount of money. Just a few, usually no more than about 25, $30,000 for most franchises. But there's no upper limit. There's no limit to the size. We've had franchisees. Dan has actually been successful, but he isn't even the top earner. At least one franchisee I know of returning over more than $2 million in a single year. Some of them make an absolute fortune. You can go there if you have that interest. If you want to employ people, we will help you. There's some great stuff online. We did a seminar, I think it was two years back. Dan and some other speakers spoke a whole day seminar. We can show you the videos. Sometimes we will actually put them on. We'll probably make another one this year. So you can come and you can learn and you can see more videos and we'll put you in touch with people who are good at this kind of stuff and show you how to do it. We're very interested in you doing that. From our point of view, we don't make any more money out of you. But you become a very good story. Like a franchisee who, when he started off, Joel was telling me yesterday, I think he started off 10 years ago, he had nothing. He now owns two houses, mostly paid off just from his franchise business. So you can do very, very well. The staff is worth looking at. What else can you do? If you've got regular clients, You can do splits. Do splits, sell off regular clients. That'll be a lot easier down the track a bit when you can sell small groups. But even now you can do partial splits. And it's a great way of doing it. Typically, if you do a split every two or three years, you don't pay any fees at all. And you compact your business because you sell off the outlying jobs. Not the poorest jobs paying. They shouldn't have any. You just get rid of the ones that are furthest away, sell them off, you keep your dense ones and you build up again, you split again. I know one guy did three splits in their first year, but one split a year is not uncommon at all. It's a very good thing to do to build your business, to make a lump sum of cash and to improve reduced travel. And the last thing I want to talk about, I think is. The last thing is. No, it's not the last thing. Actually. Let's talk about reducing travel because traveling is a huge cost. Yes. Sorry. Could you explain how the script works? Well, you put what you said about taking customers that are further off. Yes. How do you price them? Because you price them as what value they add to your business. Currently, you just talk to the franchisor about what price they'll come for you. It depends on the region. It depends on what's available. Yes, but typically, what division are you in? Mowing. Okay. So if you. For example, if a brand new mowing franchise is going to cost you, what are you paying for it? 25,000. Okay. If you've got a split with a whole stack of regular clients, you might charge 30 or even $35,000 for that. Because you're starting with a stuff. Is anybody he bong a split? Yeah. There's quite a few of you. That's right. It's actually a very good thing too. You're paying a bit extra for it, but you're getting a whole lot of good regular clients for a start, and you're halfway along to doing your own split. So they'll tell you a price, but it's usually more. Now you will lose 20%, which is a fee. And sometimes the franchisor may. If you don't want to split your own territory, they may charge you something for a territory, but that's up to the individual franchisor. If it's in my regions, I don't charge for that. I just give in on the territory. Territory. But that's a lot of money. So you can pocket from that sort of sale. You'll be pocketing, you know, $30,000 sale, you're pocketing what, $24,000. That's a nice lump sum. You are responsible though for fixing the climbs. If the clients drop out, you have to replace them or they'll take money off you. That's part of the contract. 45 days. 45 days, yes. Okay. Travel. We can reduce travel. There's different ways to reduce travel. One of them is by planning your day. So you don't just go, you don't want to go like that all through the day. You want to go like that. Just travel as little as possible. So plan your day. But five minutes planning can save a lot of time. You plan your week if you've got regular clients. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. If you get a Friday job, when you're down there, you do it the first day on the day that they ask for and then you slot them in. And with time, what you should do, and this is the longest term one, but really valuable with time, you try and take local jobs, especially territory, indefinitely. The temptation will be, when you get very busy, to start taking nothing to go zero and there's too many franchisees go zero. I don't like to see it. I think it's a waste of the system. You might not only pick up a job in territory once every month, but if you keep on doing that time after time after time, you'll end up with a phenomenally great business. And as you get more jobs in territory, you get referrals. People are coming across the road next door and you build a better and better business. There's a franchisee of one of my 10 year veterans I was speaking to in Queensland. Now this guy lives in Queensland, but get it, he doesn't like the Queensland heat a lot. So what does he do? He knocks off at work, one o' clock every day. And not only that, but he only works Monday to Thursday. So this guy clearly is not making much money, is he? Well, actually he's making very good money because what he does is he rocks up to a street with a team of operators and he's got a whole stack of houses in the street. Jobs plus extras, he does them, they've made several hundred dollars, move to the next street. So he makes a very good living. But that's 10 years of work, of development. You can do the same thing. You just got to keep on taking local jobs and then gradually sell off or let go of the outlying ones and your job becomes better. Look, you can go into business with the idea, as I said on Monday morning, that I'M just going to earn the same amount of money forever and ever and ever do the same jobs in the same way. That's your prerogative, it's your choice, it's your business. We're not going to tell you what you should do, but how much better, how much more interesting, how much more exciting to actually keep on changing and improving and just getting improving and improving and improving and improving and to get to the stage where you're saying, wow, I'm making double the money I was two years ago and I'm making less hours or having a lot more fun. We want to encourage you in that. We want to help you. We want to keep on. Your franchisor will coach you. You can contact me. I'm always happy to talk and give advice. You know, somebody just emailed me this morning and they say can you act as a personal mentor? I believe in mentoring non gyms person. And I said sorry, I don't do that. If I did, I literally would be charging thousands of dollars an hour. But if you want to contact me, it costs you nothing. All right. What a great deal is that And I do give good advice. With all due modesty, I know what to do so I can help you. So somebody from the outside couldn't get my attention even for thousands of bucks an hour, you get it for nothing or you just got to contact me. Usually email is the best. Any sort of issue, any advice, anything at all, happy to give it to you. Really Am I as I said on Monday, biggest problem with people contacting me is not people often ask me don't you get flooded? I said the biggest problem is my franchisees don't contact me enough because I love to be able to help and I so often learn things too. All right. The only other thing I have not mentioned is we have a really great buying group. You've seen some of it. People like jb, hi Fi, like Bunnings, cars like you can get brush cutter, cord and blades and things for the mowing guys, cleaning supplies, paint. There's a whole lot of really cars, new cars for heaven's sake. Don't buy a new car without checking on the gym's deals. There are so many different things we can do for you to cut your costs down and we constantly looking for better ones. We also have some very exciting deals coming up. I don't know if you know about the system called Bizza where we sell surplus leads to independent contractors. The ones we can't handle this year we'll probably make a million Bucks out of that $1 million selling leads that you can't handle and you know where the profit goes straight back to you. And that's been a promise from the beginning. So we offer fantastic deals. So when you get your newsletter, look at it and see what's in it. Don't ignore it. I'll give you an example. This month coming up, I think it's this month coming up. We have big screen TV, 55 inches retail value, just over a thousand dollars. For you, 250 bucks. You probably won't get it because you won't be signed up in time, but if you are and you last month accor membership worth 600 bucks, you get free accommodation, you can have a night, you can have a weekend away with with your partner, you get discounts on meals, 50% really good discounts and stuff, I think. What are we charging for Emma? 50 bucks worth $600 retail. You get it? 50 bucks. So keep an eye on this. And this is just the beginning of what we're going to be offering you. We've got a million bucks to give away. Get your share because it's your money, it's your advertising that did it all. It's pretty exciting actually. I'm interested to see what goes with the TVs. They probably won't last long. Now, to be honest. We make a good deal. It doesn't cost us a thousand bucks to buy them. We actually make a bulk deal because we say we're going to buy x hundred of them and they, they start drooling a bit and they say okay, we can do a deal for you. That's how it works. There's some really fantastic deals coming up. We constantly. By the way, this is quite a new idea. It's only this year that we've had this surplus money to play around with. We've been asking what can we do with it. Holidays away, we're looking at that kind of thing too. Just go away for a weekend with your family and stuff and cost you 20 bucks or something that's that kind you won't be able to offer. All right, enough from me. Now we hand over to the lovely Emma who will find out whether you've been listening to me.

Our last cahoot of the day.

If you haven't got a Monopoly set, now's the time to grab one. It.

Now after the recruit I'm going to run through some information with you for franchisees. Same tomorrow and then we're going to invite you all to get a group.

Photo.

To celebrate the end of the day and then if anyone yet, Charles and I will be here to assist.

With that as well. Okay.

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Proving income. First of seven. It's multi select, so there's multiple answers. Which of these gyms online settings will help me get more leads? Being down all areas offering same day service, asking to be notified. Unserviced leads in my region. Take me all the services I can handle excepting Leeds evening and weekend to contact Jim about work I can do from other divisions. So you've got a bit of time to think about the answer for this question. We've still got 40 seconds. So which of these Jim's online settings will help you get more leads?