Jim Penman - Building Australia’s Largest Franchising Family from the Grass Up

I asked what he did before, he said, I used to be a manager with iga, retail manager. And he used to work very, very long hours and one day I was going to just leave him for work and my 4 year old son said to me, dad, I wish you could have breakfast with us. He was crying all the way to work. His tears were streaming down his face all the way to work. And he went to work and he quit his job and he bought a Jim's mowing franchise. And it doesn't have to be Jim's mowing, it could be anything. But the point of it is, ever since then he's had a totally different relationship with his son.

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David Jim Penman is the owner of Jim's Group, Australia's largest franchising family. What started with $24 investment quickly gre into the largest and best known lawn mowing business in the world, which has now expanded into other services. And Jim's Group now has an annual revenue of 500 million. With a PhD in history, he's also passionate about his research which he believes could help the treatment of mental illness and addictive disorders. Jim, thank you so much for joining us. I'd like to start by asking you tell me about yourself because I like people introducing themselves more so than my myself. I think people introduce themselves better. So how would you introduce yourself? If you were walking into an event or a dinner or an outing with new people around you, who is Jim and what do you do?

Well, the primary goal of my life was actually not business in the first place. I went to university back in the 70s to do a PhD in history to try and understand the rise and fall of civilizations. And with the idea of having an academic career. And when that flamed out completely, I decided to launch a business to actually fund my research. So that is essentially who I am. Okay, I'm a scientist at heart more than a businessman.

So is that what you would say to people if they were out in a dita setting? And if they were like, who's Jim? Who are you? What do you do? Would you take them back to the journey of how it started? Or would you just say, yeah, I'm the founder of Jim's Group?

Well, I talk about, about how I started and why I did it for sure. But of course, people know me now as the face that launched several thousand trailers. So that's my public perception for sure.

Yeah. Interesting. And can you run through like how Jim's group started? Like, how did this happen? Because I feel like you say that you're really, you know, a scientist by heart and a lot of people that do so well, like yourself, they're not really entrepreneurs. They don't find or they don't figure out, you know, business until a later stage. So was that you, would you say that you started at a really early, early on in a job and then you found an entrepreneurial spirit in that job? Like, how did it happen for you? How did that fire start?

Well, I used to, when I was doing my PhD, I used to mow lawns. Well, first of all gardening and then lawn mowing as a way of making income to live on and also because I like being outside and I like grass and like gardens and stuff. So it was pretty obvious. And it's just that when I finished my PhD in 1982 with no possible employment, I decided to turn that into a full time business because that's the only thing I knew. And I started off with the idea that I would just do this until something better came along and I just kept on growing it and it kind of surprised me in a way. I don't know that I'm a natural entrepreneur or anything, but I guess the thing I did have which was important is that right from the beginning I always had a passion for doing things better. People often think that succeeding in business is having one great idea. It's actually not. It's thousands and thousands of little ideas. So when I was mowing a lawn, for example, I would look at how can I pick up the grass most clean, how can I empty into the grass catcher, how can I shave a half second going around a tree? How can I make that job a bit neater? How can I save time going between jobs? How can I advertise myself more effectively? And then how can I get workers to help me with this thing? And then how can I make money out of doing what I'm doing? I started selling lawn mowing rounds and then franchising just as a reaction to a competitor more than anything else. And starting off, and when I first started off franchising, somebody asked me, how many franchisees you think you might have one day? And I said, well, if it really works well, I might have 100. We've got like 4600 rising.

So it's just amazing.

But it's thousands of little decisions every day of my life. I mean, every single day, including Christmas Day, Easter Sunday, every day. I'm asking myself the question, how can you do this better? How can you improve every day?

And you know, I don't know if you want to mention this on the podcast on how old you are, but, you know, you've been in this career for quite some time and to see somebody show up every single day, day with the consistency that you do, it's extremely hard and it's extremely difficult for most. So what kept you to show up? Like why. And why are you still working when you don't need to?

Well, you probably got it the wrong way around, actually. My problem is not showing up. My problem is not showing up. The thing I find really, really difficult is holidays. And we've just finished Easter, okay. And there's like four days, there's no work on. I find that extremely hard. The worst time of the year, the hardest time is between Christmas and New Year, that few days when there's no business going on. I just find that very difficult. I'm notoriously a hater of holidays.

Yeah. Is it because you have this passion, this love for it?

Look, the other day my son, my 12 year old asked me, said, dad, if you could have any job in the world that you wanted, the best possible job in the world, that's the most fun to do, what would you do? And I say, I do exactly what I do. Right now. I could not imagine a better way to live. I just love it. I love getting up in the morning, I love the excitement. I love the new ideas, the changes. We're doing so much stuff right now. There's a whole lot of things going on. We're launching an rto, we're developing software, which is really exciting. We're about to launch Jim Coin. I mean, I mean, this, this is amazing. There's stuff going on all the time. It's just every day it's, it's incredibly interesting and I love it. You couldn't think of a more fun way to live?

And it's such an interesting time. Like, I know we were going to double this, you know, during the conversation about, you know, crypto and web3 and where that's going, a lot of people don't know about it. I went to a crypto summit not long ago and they mentioned the stats were 80 million people in the world have a crypto wallet. That's how Far away we are. But if you look at the stats individually, we have four wallets, I've got five wallets. So really that's like 40 million people. It's in less than 40 million that have a wallet. That's how early we are. So it's really an interesting conversation to have. So coming, what industry would you say that you're in? Where would you fall into? Not now, but you know, let's say, I don't know, 20 years ago.

Well, basically home services Jibs is a specialist company. We look at businesses where somebody calls up particular member of the public and says I want a service done and we go out to them. That's our thing. We don't do site based. We've had a go at some of those things. They don't work for us. So we're in a sense, we're very narrowly specialized. I mean we have like 40 something divisions. We could have 400 divisions. Potentially anything where somebody says I want this done, somebody comes out, they does it. That's our.

So would you say that the industry is still home and services today?

Yeah, well we service quite a few businesses too, like Test and Tag for example. As a business, which is our third biggest division has it's mainly commercial clients. Yeah, okay, but it's still the same thing. Somebody's calling up and saying, can you come out and do this particular service?

So you said there's constant innovation, there's constant growth, there's constant, constantly things happening in the world that we live in, especially in technology world. So tell me about that. So you're about to start an RTO which is by the way a registered training organization. So is this government funded? Is it fee for service? Tell me about that. Let's start from there.

Well, government funding won't come for a few more months. We've still got to get properly, go through all the hoops and so forth. But just basically it's a commercial service in a sense. Look, it's a fairly obvious one for us because we have a big need for training. One of the problems we have is we've got, we've got far more work that we can handle. Close to half of our leads are going on service right now. Latest figures 42%. And our franchisees are desperate for workers. So we could do, we could do three times the fences we do if we could find enough workers. So one of the ideas is we run a registered training organization and we train people to do the job properly. So then we can go to our franchisees who are Desperate for people and say, okay, here's somebody, they've been trained, they know how to do the job. We've checked them out, they're good workers. Give them a go.

Interesting. So it's an RTO for people that want to open up a franchise with Jim's group.

Well, it could be all kinds of things. It could be somebody who wants to be a franchisee of ours. Obviously, that's a big possibility because we could do with a lot more franchisees. We could be helping them to go independent. We show them not only how to do the work, but we show them how to launch their own business, how to promote it, how to use social media. Or they could be a worker for one of our franchisees or for somebody else. So there's three different avenues. But we think we've got a unique advantage over a TAFE because we're actually the people who employ and we know exactly what our franchisees want and we know how to run a small business from the inside. We're not talking theory from books. We're talking about every session is taught by somebody who's done this.

Yeah, amazing. So there's like an outcome versus we're going to uni intake. There's no real guarantee job afterwards.

We think we can. We can't guarantee a job because they have to be good at what they do. But if somebody is a good worker, we'll put them into business for sure.

So you've got the RTO happening and what else? You've got the crypto stuff. So how did this come about? Because it was an interesting one. It was a joke, right?

That's right. Well, what I did, I've been sounding off on social media about crypto because I don't like it. In a sense, it's gambling. I mean, what is Bitcoin worth, seriously? To me, it's a license for gambling. And so we decided it's a spoof to put out a thing on April Fool's Day. Joke. And we actually put a website together. And if you read through the website, you'll see at the bottom of the screen, you know, april fool, this is a joke, okay?

And nobody's seen that.

It just took off. People just. We just got this incredible response. So we started to think, well, what could make crypto worthwhile? What could be valuable? So we thought, okay, the first thing we'll do is we'll make it absolutely secured against our own services. See if you want anything. There's no way anybody could not spend a Jim's voucher. For example, so we guarantee that if you have Jim Coin, you can buy our service vouchers, you can buy a franchise, you can buy all sorts of things, you can buy stuff from our shop. So we'll guarantee the value of the money at a certain base rate.

Got it.

And then the idea behind beyond that is what we can then do is to add extra value. So just as an example, when we get a franchisee going in a new area, like, let's just say we started a car cleaning person in Adelaide and we needed more work, one of the things we do is we offer free services to people. It's what we call pay for work guarantee to get a franchisee off the ground. And they typically do it maybe the first month or two or after that they don't need it because they get enough regular clients. So the idea behind that is we can actually go to anybody who's got crypto and say, Jim Coin. And say, okay, we can. You can have your car clean for a quarter price like it normally costs you $80 for a full clean and everything else, but you can pay it for $20 on Jim Coin. So we actually do all kinds of things to give extra value to Jim Coin.

So is that something that you will only dabble into when it comes to the Web three space? Have you thought about maybe starting an NFT as such?

Yeah, well, we want to do that too. See, one of the ideas behind it is this. Okay, there's a lot of things about new Jim's division. So what if we actually started a division called Jim Space Travel as an example?

Yeah.

So what a person could do, they could buy an NFT to give them right to be Jim's Space Travel, you know, Lunar Branch, for example. And with that we can wrap their car, we can give them a uniform all nicely made up, and that becomes something that's, you know, like boasting. And then every year we run a conference at our conference center and we actually bring them in and they can all get together with all their different uniforms and cars and everything else. So it becomes a kind of a just a thing. And people can buy and sell these NFTs, including the right to be called Jim's Space Travel or Jim's whatever you want to be called.

Yeah. And I think you're like almost creating a stronger community when you're creating an nft. Because it's all about the community. Yes, it's all about the people that are getting involved and the things that you're running and things that you're doing. Within that art, community is very important.

Actually, it's a big theme of ours, because the thing about franchising is this. We have people in gyms who haven't taken a job for years and they still are really happy to stay with us. Why? It's a lot of that's got to do with community. It's the fact of having a group, having a franchisor who's in support is having regular meetings, being part of something, being part of an extended family. And there's a very strong feeling within gyms, so we understand that kind of aspect. People are very atomized in the modern world. They're very separated. So a lot of what we do is try and bring them together. We found that, for example, in franchising, meetings are incredibly important, far more important than you could possibly imagine, to the extent that people who don't have the potential to attend meetings are far, far more likely to fail than those who can come to meetings regularly.

Do you mean face to face or do you mean online?

Ideally, face to face, yeah.

Yeah.

What we'd like to do, if possible, it's been hard during the last couple of years, but what we'd like to do, if possible, is to bring them and have a meal together. We find that the communal meal thing is really, really powerful.

It's a culture thing as well. People like connecting with people and then.

When they come and they. And they. They might listen to a talk and then they eat together and then they chat around a coffee and afterwards and they build relationships and then they talk to. And they meet up at the tip and so forth. And that sense of community has become very, very important to us. It's far more important than we ever thought in the beginning.

Yeah. I think this is what people don't realize. It's the people that create the business, not the actual founders or the CEO. It's the people within the business that are making it great. So just on that, there was something that you mentioned, which I'm going to read out, so it's your words. So, as Australia's largest franchise franchising family, you've said there's nothing particularly clever about what we do. It's more how we do it that matters. It's the way we treat our franchisees, how we maintain quality, how we make sure that they're looked after and that they're happy. That's the innovative part of the system. So talk to me about how did you set up the system? How did you even think about this system, first of all, and set up such a system for success because you've had such a great success in the franchisee space. So tell me about that.

Okay. There's one thing that people don't understand about gyms, which makes us very, very different. We are fanatical about customer service. I am personally fanatical about customer service. I read through every poor survey that comes from every client. Australia wide, New Zealand, everywhere. But that's not our number one priority. Our number one priority is our franchisees. And the thing I set out to do in the beginning is to set up a system that would make franchisees really, really, really happy. Customer service is part of that. Because if you give great customer service, then first of all, your franchisees tend to be more successful. And we know that franchisees who give great service tend to make far more money and be happier with their job than those who don't. But it also means if you give great service, then the customers come in. And that's why we've got so much work, is because we've got a reputation for service. We don't actually advertise a lot by comparison. In fact, our advertising has dropped in recent years as we've got busier and busier. But we put franchisees first. And what we've been doing is trying to figure out ways to do more for our franchisees. So, for example, in the beginning, we understood that it was important to answer phone calls if a franchise had a problem. But then we realized pretty quickly that we also had to run meetings regularly. And we figured out how many meetings too, that every six weeks, that's the optimum. Beyond that doesn't help less than that really hurts. And then we started looking at different kinds of support, and we realized that franchisees who were being phoned at least every month and ideally every week, were a lot happier than just doing occasional business reviews. We figured that out, and we're still doing more things right now. One of the things we're about to set up is a system where we're going to bring back our top people, people who are veterans, people who've got great customer service, people who want to build great business and bring them back to this conference center for a weekend, all expenses paid, including air flights from interstate transport, food, everything. It's a really nice place to stay at and give them a really wonderful weekend for them and their partners and then give them more, just provide more for people.

It's caring more. You know, you actually care.

Yeah.

And you're there and recognizing and thanking them.

One of the things I do every week is I ring my veterans, people who've reached major anniversaries like 10, 15, 20, 25 years, and just ring them up and just thank them and say, look, I really appreciate what you've done and just show them how much they matter to us. You know, every franchisee in Gyms has my direct phone number and email address and I don't give my phone number to outsiders at all. Certain media people, yes, but otherwise I don't. But every single franchisee has my. And people contact me multiple times a day because if there's any problem, if there's anything going wrong, I want to know, are you not being treated right? Like for example, just last week we had a situation where a franchisee approached me. He'd had a pool cleaning business and he was running short of work. And we have this thing I mentioned called pay for work guarantee, which is, which gets you going. Now what I discovered at that time is that normally it would stop at 250 leads because that's as much as you could possibly be. He'd only had 100, but on his contract they'd only put down 100. So I spoke to the franchisor. This isn't enough. This person needs more ability to do free services to promote their business. So I changed it to 215 for all future contracts for that reason. And that's just because somebody rang me. Somebody contacted me and said, jim, I've got some problems. Can you help? And I do this all the time. I look at the system every day. What franchisees are saying, what do you need? How can we look after you better? How are people falling through the cracks? And every franchisee can reach the head of the company.

So you're almost like hearing out people's problems and then creating a solution within. And I think that's the most successful companies, that's what they do, they create solutions.

It's quite startling actually, because you have somebody who comes from an organization where there was maybe a thousand people employed and they've never even seen the CEO. Whereas every Gyms person has contact with me. Most of them I meet at training, but anybody who wants to can contact me as often as they like, any way they like. And that means weekends, after hours, anytime. I'm always available to talk to my franchisees.

And you know, Jim, like, it's, it's so refreshing to see, you know, an Aussie company doing so well. I look, there's a lot of Aussie companies out there doing extremely well, but I guess a lot of the unicorns that have, you know, started from, you know, nothing and became something and then became a unicorn and then listed, you don't really see a lot of that happening in Australia versus America or Europe. And we were talking about this earlier off the podcast, so it's just so refreshing to see. And not only that you've stuck it out the whole way through. What do you think? I guess the top three things you could say to a business owner or an entrepreneur, you know, first of all, you had to attract the talent and then you had to retain it. So you created this amazing brand. What would be the three things that you would say to create such a brand and retain that over a period of years that you have?

The first thing you've got to do is to focus on your customers first. Now, to us, our primary customers are actually franchisees, but it's customer focused above. Everything else mistake people make is they focus on the money first. Now, obviously, you can't focus so much on your customers that you go broke. Yeah, but money should never be the first thing. You should always be thinking, what's going to make my customers happy? In our case, our franchisees, our customers out there. And if they're happy, then the money will come in eventually. And quite surprisingly so. As I said in the beginning, I never expected to have so many franchisees. I just wanted my franchisees to be raving fans. And the second thing is you can never be complacent. Every day, every day of my working life, I'm saying, how can we do better now when we look at people in the field like franchisees, because one of the things we do, of course, is we're always looking at different people, franchisees, franchisors, and saying, why is this person successful? Why is this person not successful? And the biggest single factor, the difference is a person who's not successful. We have a word for them. It's a bit rude. In gym, we call them leads.

All right, what are they called?

Lead. Because we have this thing called gold and silver. Bronze. Lead. Okay.

Lead. Okay.

Gold and silver is somebody who's fantastic at what they do. Bronze is somebody who can be helped to be very successful, but they need coaching. Lead is somebody who won't listen. And the characteristic of a gold and a silver is somebody who's constantly doing, like, what we do, saying, how can I improve? How can I improve? And you actually find that the best people do an incredibly good job, but they're always aware they can do better on the other. The lead is the person who Says no matter what goes wrong, it's not my fault. So it's a franchisee who says, these customers complaining because you're sending me bum customers, they're bad customers. Or your system of complaints or surveys is unfair or I'm being treated badly or I'm not getting proper support. Now hang on a bit. Not getting proper support means they might not be getting proper support. But it's typical of a lead is that they're always blaming somebody else because their view is I am perfect, I'm doing everything right, anything that goes wrong is someone else's fault. And because they think that way, they never look at themselves. So that attitude more than anything else matters. And it's a strange word to use in a business context, but I like humility, I think is great. And one of the greatest things about some of our top people, like I mentioned Haydar Hussain who runs the clean division or someone like Sharon Connell who runs dogwash, there are people who are amazingly self critical. They're always looking how they can do better, how can they improve? I'm not, you know, I'm not good enough here. What can I do about that? How can I improve myself? How can I find somebody else?

But do you, do you find that those could be the people also never really content and they're constantly, always chasing for more and more and it's like, when does it actually stop?

But you should never be content in business if you, if you, I agree.

I agree with that. If you're content, I'm that person, you know. But the problem, not necessarily a problem, I would say from the external side, people are like b, it's an enough is enough, you know, now it's time to focus on your personal life, have more holiday time, you know, find your husband, build a family, do all those things. Stop focusing on your career and always wanting more and more and more because it's never going to be enough for you. So do you think it's, it's actually a really interesting topic on this because you're, you're married. You, you got married at 24. Is it 24?

No, I was married at 29, I think. 29. 30.

29. Okay, I've got 20.

Quite late.

Okay, so, so it's, it's interesting but I think it's different from a woman versus a male. So what do you say about those people that would say, Jim, enough is enough, stop chasing. When are you ever going to be content?

There's a wonderful saying that I totally believe in. No other success can compensate for failure in the home. I don't believe sacrificing your no other success can compensate for failure in the home. There's no other success. Being successful in business is not an excuse for not focusing on the home. Look, some of the most wonderful stories that I hear in gyms, and I particularly do this when I ring people, my veterans, and I ask them about what they were doing before. Now sometimes they're making a lot more money than they were, which is great, but you know, often they're not. Often their income is very similar. But I asked them what's the difference? And they say, I've seen my kids growing up. There's one particular case of a franchisee who asked what he did before. He said, I used to be a manager with iga, retail manager and he used to work very, very long hours and one day I was going to just leave him for work and my 4 year old son said to me, dad, I wish you could have breakfast with us. And he said he, he was crying all the way to work. His tears were streaming down his face all the way to work. And he went to work and he quit his job and he bought a Jim's Mountain franchise. And it doesn't have to be Jim's mowing, it could be anything. But the point of it is ever since then he's had a totally different relationship with his son. And his son's now 14 years old. And I said, do you ever thank your son? And he says so often I thank him for that comment. It changed my life. You see, his income hasn't actually any more than it was working for iga, but he's able to see this little boy become, turn into a man. And he said there's nothing that could compensate for that. And look, I can't speak without any man. I've been divorced three times, but it's not from overwork. I'm just impossible to live with. I'm very, very, very difficult person.

I love that you're self aware.

Yes, well, my current wife, we just had our 21st year, 21st anniversary last night, went out for dinner. 21 years since we met and that's an absolute miracle. But she found me very difficult to cope with because I'm so obsessive. But at the same time I have seen my children growing up, I've always had time for them. You know, I drive my son, my 12 year old, to school and I pick him up and I'll have lunch with him today so I have time and we're very close he's an amazing kid and he knows all about science and things. He's weird, but he's a bit like me, I guess. But points. I have that kind of relationship with him. So my business, even though I love my business, it doesn't take over my life. And, you know, when you talk about enough is enough, too, it's a matter of what you're doing it for. I have a moral purpose in what I do. The purpose is to drive my research project, which I think can change the world in all kinds of ways. And it's also to look after my franchisees. But to do that, I don't necessarily have to work incredible hours. I probably only work 40 hours a week, really. But what I try and do is be really, really effective in what I do. So everything I do is work. How can I get the maximum benefit from the least time? And I have to say, one of my greatest assets in business is that I'm really, really terrible doing just about everything. So I find good people. People like Cynthia, my wonderful finance head, or my wife Lee, who looks after marketing, or Rocky, who's like the general manager of the company of all these great people around me who do things far better than I can. And I just focus on the relatively few things I can do well.

Wow, that was so inspiring. Just how you mentioned the whole thing of him leaving and taking a career that's less, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's less for him because success is different for everybody.

I think his income is at least as good as what it was.

Yeah. But I think people always have, you know, a monetary, like, reasoning on something. I think it's, you know, success can be spending more time with my family. Success could be, you know, doing two hours in the gym instead of one hour in the gym. Success could be, you know, working one day a week instead of five. But it's so true of what you said about you don't work a lot of hours, you work 40. And there was a quote that Naval Ravikant. I don't know if you know this person, but he mentioned something that was really similar. He said, I don't work with my time. I work with my mind because time is more valuable to me. And he also has a family. He talks about that a lot. So it's just interesting to see people's perspective on that.

There's a thing called the 8020 principle is that 80% of your effort comes from 20% of your time.

Yeah.

So it's not a matter of working ridiculous hours it's figuring out what you can do with your time. Look, one of the things I'm most interested in is happiness. What makes people happy.

Yeah.

And people have this idea that the way to become happy is to buy more and more stuff. A better car, bigger house, better holidays, better clothes, you know, fancier meals. It's actually not true. There's no correlation at all between stuff and happiness. Now, what does create happiness is actually, if you want to spend money, it's.

Happiness probably for like the first five minutes, and then it goes away.

It is, but one of the problems with that is it's competitive. Because what you're trying to do when you have a fancier car is saying, I'm richer than you. I'm more successful than you. But there's always somebody out there who's more successful than you, unless you're Bill Gates or Adam Bezos or someone like that. And even they're competitive about space travel and stuff. So there's always somebody who's going to be richer and more successful. So that's a really bad way to spend money. And I. And I am. I'm not. Look, I drive a $10,000 car, which is a really crap. When I met my wife 21 years ago, she actually thought I was the poorest person you'd ever gone out with because I had this crappy old car. I was dressed in shabby clothes. I had the worst haircut because I used to chop my hair. She'd never been out with anybody so poor as me ever. But actually, I was a bit richer than that, but I didn't use it. So buying status stuff is a really bad way to spend money. Happiness is more from experiences like going out with your family, those kind of things. You know, the number one thing that scientists have found to do with money that makes you happy? Give it away to a cause that you're involved in. Have a sense of purpose behind it, as I do with my research project. That is the number one thing that creates happiness. And there's so much more happen. Actually, income as such has only a very limited relationship to happiness. Other things matter a great deal, like health, for example. Like, I would spend about an hour a day exercising, minimum half an hour.

And what do you do to exercise? Do you walk? Do you gym?

I run and I lift weights and I row, mostly. Okay, so I'm halfway on the treadmill, and then I rode for about 15 minutes this morning, and then I was lifting weights and push ups.

So gym, essentially. Like the gym gym? No, like the gym the actual gym?

The actual gym, yes.

But not you.

That's right. We're actually putting a gym on site because I like my staff to be healthy too. That'll be ready in a couple of months.

So health.

Yeah, health is very important. Health has, you know, fitness has a huge effect on mental well being. It's better than any antidepressant ever. It keeps you vigorous and healthy and your mind going. It's a wonderful thing. I'm a huge believer in exercise. And on the weekends I go and work on my farm too. Just doing manual work. I'm actually digging in bunya nuts at the moment, just planting them onto creek beds and stuff, which is great fun. I enjoy it. So that's important too. Social relations are important too. Having strong family. I'm very lucky to have a wonderful, happy marriage. 21 years honeymoon, you really can't beat that. But I've also got great kids that I get on with. I've also got great work colleagues. I've got. I work on other friendships too. I've got a friend I play chess with. We have a wonderful time playing chess.

I've seen the big chess thing outside.

I love chess. There's a version called 960 where you quasi randomly change the back. That's really, really fun. Chess is great. I also play it with Keren, my IT manager. It's fun. He's pretty terrible. He's getting better.

You can teach him, I'm sure. So when you say 21 years of marriage. Because I want to touch on the personal side, even though I don't have this written down. But I'm very curious myself because, you know, I struggle with this a lot in, in my personal life. So how did you, like. I know you were very difficult to live with, as you mentioned before earlier, which, you know, we all are in some way. But how did you manage to, I guess, keep such a healthy relationship? Let's talk about your current one. You know, when you guys met, it's a lot of, you know, work and, and time and growing together and being better and, you know, building together. How. I wouldn't say how. What advice could you give? You know, because a lot of entrepreneurs struggle this gym. Lots, vast majority. It's one of the number one things. Yes, it's a huge topic.

Work, life, balance and relationship.

Yeah, work, life, balance. I don't believe in balance. I believe in compromise. So if I'm not doing something, I'm compromising something else. So I don't believe there's balance. But it's A number one thing entrepreneurs struggle with. And we're seeing more women now not wanting to have families, not wanting to have children. They're just focusing on their career more. So it is sad. It is sad, you know, And I think a lot of women that are in their career are very masculine, more so than feminine. So what would you say, you know, from your side, what tips could you give me and whoever's listening to keep such a healthy relationship and want to be in that relationship?

I wouldn't like to claim too much credit for myself. My own marital history suggests I'm a total disaster on that sense of look. To a large extent, I would say you've got to look a lot. You've got to do a lot of dating.

How to find the person, Define the number.

Well, I went out with about 15 women before I met my current wife.

So 15 dates prior to. Okay, so you have to taste.

I have to. Have to go around.

I agree.

And in earlier times, one of the things I did because I'm very introverted, I didn't get enough out there, didn't see enough people, and I made bad choices. And that's bad for me and bad for them, too. We didn't suit with Lee. I went out with enough people that when I, When I met her, I was. She was. She was incredible. She was amazing. Look, a lot of it is. Is. I'm sorry to say this, a lot of it's just meeting the right person. I often. Why we. Why this April 20th is such an incredible date for us because it changed everything. Because I just happened to meet somebody. To me, it's like winning the lottery. It was better than if I'd have won a billion dollars lottery. It was an incredible thing to meet the right person. And the thing about Leah is this. She is a very successful entrepreneur in her own right. She's actually a successful builder. She's a really, really good builder. She's also running the marketing for Jim's group. She's also set up our finance department. She also runs our conference center. She's an amazingly capable woman. At the same time, she's a wife and a mother first, and that's her priority. And she looks after me and looks after her family and looks after her kids. And. There's women, like her friends who come to our house and they see they've lived with us for a while, like some of her female friends, and they're so envious. You've got this, you've got a great business, you've got, you know, your Children love you, your husband, crazy about you. You know, you've got this wonderful lifestyle. But what she had to do to get this, the kind of way she serviced it. Like, when we were first married, I had five, seven children visiting, can you imagine that? Every week, descending on the house. This is really, really difficult for her to handle. And it was the thing that wrecked my last two marriages, be quite honest, more than anything. And it was so hard for her. And I wasn't always the best husband. I wasn't thinking about her all the time because I was so obsessed with my children. I love my children. And she just served. She just looked after everybody. She gave so much. And I guess because she gave so much, in the end I just so completely love her and adore her that I will do anything for her. Like, if I go into the kitchen, I will clean up and wash. I know she'll do it all herself if I don't, but I will clean up the sink and put things away because I love her. I just don't want to. I want to come to a nice clean kitchen. I'll pick things off the floor or I make the bed, or I'll do things for her, anything I can to make her happy. Because she's given so much to me and so much to my children that I love her in return. So, you know, what is Lee, Is she the greatest feminist in the world or is she the most anti feminist person you can possibly imagine? Because she doesn't put herself first and she never has.

Which it's interesting because she does both. But what's most interesting is that she puts her family first and then second you and then third, her job or her career, which is interesting.

Well, I would say so. I mean, I do complain about it because she's on the computer late at night. I actually come and physically drag her away. I said come to bed because I like to spend time with. I like to cuddle with her, I.

Like to watch tv.

So, you know, I put pressure on it, but.

But there's also an alignment there. You know, you guys want to do the same thing. You guys have the same entrepreneur, entrepreneurial spirit. You guys are driven to do great things and inspire the masses. So I think it's the alignment thing also. It's not just the love and the caring, I think, I really think, because you guys have a lot in common.

Yeah, we suit each other a great deal. We're very similar too. Neither of us are big spenders. Like, she doesn't. She doesn't need the luxury Goods, the fancy handbags, all the rest of the stuff. She's not into that kind of stuff. She just likes to spend on things that are worthwhile. She likes security. She likes to feel secure. It's very important. One of the things I did fairly early on is I put some property into her name and just paid it off so that she could feel secure and happy no matter what happened. Yeah, so she has her needs, too.

That's the number one thing for women, is security and all of that.

But I think. I think it's very important to control your spending too. And we didn't talk about this before in business terms. When you're talking about success in business, one of the most important things, obviously, is to control your spending. And I think a lot of people waste too much money on trying to impress others rather than provide the substance. I mean, I've always lived in a pretty shabby sort of fashion. You know, people talk about the kind of offices we've had and so forth. And, you know, I like my staff to be comfortable, but at the same time, they've never been. They've never been fancy looking. You wouldn't come into our office and think, hey, this is a really impressive rich company because it's very pedestrian. But we do try and spend money on the things that.

You're frugal.

Yes.

You're lean.

Yeah, well, people would say I'm extremely stingy.

Well, I think those people are the most successful people as far as I've seen. You know, like there's people that I've met, like Gabby Leibovich, you know, the founder of Catch of the Day.

Oh, he's an amazing guy. I spoke to him, actually. I had a talk with him.

He's an incredible guy. Wrote the book Catch of the Decade. Great book.

I bought several copies and gave them my staff to talk about what he done.

It's an incredible book. And, you know, he. He's quite the same. He doesn't drive an expensive car. He doesn't, you know, show up in a certain way. He's continuing to work. He's exited multiple times. He's got a lot of capital. He doesn't need to work, but he wants to. Wants to. So I think, you know, those are the, the people that do really well because they truly want. Want it versus just doing it for the money.

There are different kinds of affiliation people can have. People can have. Be motivated by power over others. Yeah, they can be motivated by affiliation that I make friends or they're motivated by the, the desire to Achieve and, and, and Lee and I are both very much achievement minded people. We like to produce things, to do really great things to make them happen. We don't in a sense worry about status or anything else or being liked. In the end, you've got to do what's right, what's best for the company, what's best for your family, what's best for everybody.

There's a lot of questions that I want to speak, I guess have a conversation about. You know, there's so much that we could touch on. But I'm also cautious of time. There's a couple things that I want to ask you before we end the show. So with your family and I guess your morals and values in Life, you've got 11 children total. Yeah. Which is huge. Family. You've built this amazing business. 11 children, three divorces. And yet you're still here showing up every day, giving you, giving you all to the team and what you guys are doing in the future for I just for me that's really mind boggling and I think for most. But you do it because you love it. I guess my question is to you now, what's next for Jim, personally and professionally?

More of the same. I just want to keep on getting better and better and better. I want to keep on improving. I want to keep on achieving more. I want to be able to fund my research institute. We're spending a couple of million dollars a year on it right now. Like you're spending 5 million a year. We're going to achieve some exciting things. There's things to do with drug addiction and treatment, drug addiction and those kinds of issues in particular that really concern me. I think we've got a very good handle on ways to impact on the world. Look, you've got to have a life. You've got to live a life of some purpose. Amassing money is a pathetic sort of purpose. It really is just amassing money and possessions for its own sake is garbage. I don't intend to leave my children a whole lot of money. They all know that. They get a little bit help with housing, but that's all. But I want to achieve something. I want to achieve something worthwhile in my business. I want to achieve worthwhile with my research program and basically that sense. And I also want to achieve something by having great children. You don't achieve great children too by spoiling them or making life too easy for them.

That's interesting. That was one of the questions that I had on your, I guess your experience as a father that's a really interesting thing you just said because Bill Gates mentions that over and over again about not giving his children money. Did you grow up with money? Did your family?

No.

Okay, so do you. Where did this come from of you not giving your children? So if your child came to you and said, dad, I've got this amazing idea. I really want to, you know, scale this, would you be their investor?

Oh, yes. I thought it was a great idea.

Okay.

I've actually got one daughter who's, Who's. I talk a lot about this kind of thing, too, but I know that she's got an entrepreneurial spirit because where she's working, she keeps on coming out with ideas. They should do this, they should do that, and they're good ideas. And I said, if you can find a suitable thing, I will back you, Suhi.

So you would back them in something that they were passionate about. But you're not here to give handouts from the work that you've done.

Not trust fund kids. Not that we're quite that rich anyway. But no, my children. Look what Bill Gates said. I hugely admire Bill Gates. He's. And he's a guy who used to drive his kids to school, too, even though he was in a different direction. He spent time with his family. Not the best husband, obviously, but still, he's an engaged father. But I think more than anything, what I admire about him is that his money is going to his foundation and he's developing. He's an extraordinary, capable man. He's devoting the rest of his life to spend all these billions in the way that can have the biggest possible benefit for humanity. You know, he's saved millions of lives, particularly children, through his work with immunizations and so forth. He's an. That, to me, is an amazing guy, a guy driven by purpose. And that is. That is what makes for joy in life. I mean, I really. I couldn't think there's a man on the face of the earth who's happier than I am right now. But so much of that is just having a sense that your life means something. It's not just a matter of amassing money. It's not just a matter of having enjoyment and pleasure. It's doing something worthwhile with your life, achieving something that the world's a better place. And look, I'll probably live for another 20 or so years. I'm in very, very good health, so I'll probably live into my 90s. And I'm not giving up on that. They may come with rejuvenation treatments. And if they're available, I'll be in there, I'll be first in the queue. But in the next, in whatever time I've got left, God has given me a mission to achieve something worthwhile, to make a difference, and that's what I want to do.

So, going back on the question, what's next? The foundation, building that and being on your purpose.

Everything. Yes.

And everything that you do, the business.

To keep on building. We have immensely exciting ideas for business. Technology has opened up incredible areas. I think we've seen about a 99% reduction in client complaints from free franchise days. I think we can. Next 12 months or so, we're going to drop that by at least half. More we're going to using. Using technology that actually reminds franchisees the right thing, sends warning signals back, all kinds of stuff. There's fantastic ideas. We've got the RTO starting, which is potentially huge. We could be training tens of thousands of Australians in how to go into lucrative careers. Because people think that you've got to go to university. Not everybody's suited to that. We've got a guy who's a. Who's a high school dropout. He went to work for McDonald's and Stuff, and he's now making like half a million dollars a year. This is. This is, you know, in the mowing business, for example, there are incredible careers out that we can help people to move into. And as I said, my research foundation could have this huge difference. So I just want to keep on going. I've got. I'm in great health. I turn 70 next month. You asked about my age.

He said it on the podcast.

I'm turning 70, but I'm in fantastic spirits. My mind is full of ideas, full of enthusiasm, of energy, of joy. You know, I read two or three books a week, so I've got constant ideas coming to my mind about things that I can do and how can we improve it. I'm always changing my view on things. I'm changing my ideas politically, but all kinds of things, all the time. That sense of dynamism, of growth is really. Is really wonderful. And I think. Doesn't matter how old you are. I think age is just a state of mind.

I agree. You have so much energy still at this age.

I love it. Oh, yes. I find it frustrating. I'm going through shopping centers. Everybody is so slow because I walk so fast. Everybody complains about me, including my wife and my son. I just love being, moving. I love to.

You were born to do this. Everybody's born with something, and I think you were definitely born with this. What would you leave last on the podcast before we wrap it up? Anything that you want to say to people that are listening? It could be directed to a father, an entrepreneur in general, what do you want to leave the audience with?

What matters to me is not whether you're working or you're playing or whatever. It's is what you're doing worthwhile now, regardless whether it makes money or not? If you spent energy and effort in thinking about your business to improve it and make a better product, a better service, help other people to succeed, that's wonderful. But if you spend more time with your children, no other success can compensate for your family at home. That's important too. It's also important to keep fit, to control your weight, to exercise enough to keep your mind. It's also important to have friends, to have relationships, to have a good social environment. All these things matter as well. It's not just one thing. The question is, we've only got a certain amount of minutes or hours or days or weeks in our life. That's what God gives us. Okay? How can we make the best use of those to achieve the most good?

Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And lastly, before we do go, if people want to find you online, where can people reach out to you? Is there like an Instagram handle? LinkedIn? An email you want to leave?

Www.jims.net is in general jims.netjims.net One of the things I do is I control my inbox and I never ignore an email.

All right, perfect. Cool. Thank you so much Jim.

Good to talk to you.

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