Jim Penman: How To Run A Successful Franchise

We cost more than the independence. If you want cheap jobs, I had somebody contact me just some while back, and they said, look, I want a job done, but I want it really cheap. That's all I care. And I say, go to hy pages because we actually tell our franchisees to charge more. We said, you've got to be at least 10% above the opposition. So it's a very different way of looking at things. Our goal, it's why I say we put franchisees first. Our goal is to make our franchisees raving fans.

Welcome, everyone, to the Sevo Show. I'm your host, Sev. It has come. It has been three, four years of me doing this to a point now where I am fortunate enough to have some guests that I, when I was a kid, was going, that's really cool. And now I get to talk to those people. And we have someone via Zoom that has joined us now. You would have seen a business, a mowing business called Jim's Mowing. And then there's Jim's Fencing, and then there's all other gyms, somethings that have spawned across over the last. For what I remember three decades and beyond.

35 years, Seth.

35 years. And now we have the gym. The gym. I've been telling my friends I'm going to talk to Jim. They're like, who's Jim? I'm like the Jim. Jim Penman, the founder of Jim's Group. Thank you so much for being here, Jim. Now, first question. I ask this everyone to start off with Jim, are you living your best life?

Yeah. Well, I did what's your best. But I live a very good life.

Yeah.

Got a great business, wonderful wife, great family. Yeah. Great sense of purpose. Yeah.

How long have you been married to your wife?

23 years.

Yeah. Yeah. What's your secret? And now it's a broad question, but what's your secret in the marriage, in the successful business and having been living a great life?

Well, first of all, Sev, I've been divorced three times, so I don't know if I'm the person to be able to give you really good marriage advice. All I can say is you've got to keep on fighting until you find somebody who can put up with you. And I love my wife dearly. We are very passionately in love. Honeymooners, lots of fights, but very, very, very passionate and loving and great relationship. But it took me a while to get there. Three previous wives couldn't stand these. As to giving marital advice, I think I'd rather pass on that one.

Okay. Okay. Well, just whilst we're here, though, is business growing a business? Finding the right business model, maybe even the right business people or business partners? Is it similar to finding the right partner in a relationship that's more intimate?

What I decided to do after my third marriage failed, which was very shocking when my wife just walked out on me, couldn't stand me anymore. Lots to do with my kids from previous marriage, actually, which I used to give. I'm very devoted to them, so really made it very difficult for her. I decided to do it like a business, like a business quest. And I said, okay, I'm just going to keep on dating until I found the one I want. So I just. I treated it like a business system rather than a recreation. I just said, okay, what do I need to do? What kind of person would be. Would be. Would suit me best? So I set up a sort of a criteria and just. Dated, dated, dated, dated, dated, dated. And we were. We were sort of married seven weeks after we met.

Amazing.

Which I don't usually recommend. I wouldn't recommend to my kids either.

And what was the. What was the boxes that your wife ticked where you dated, dated, dated? What was the specific things that you wanted?

Well, actually, she said when we first met, it was like a job interview. She had never been through it. My wife is very pretty, actually, so she's got plenty of options. But our first date, I started asking her, what do you want for the future? She said, and she made some vague response. I said, do you like children? Okay. So I really asked a whole lot of questions in my first date, and if the answers hadn't come back right, that would have been the last date. So it was that. But I can't really say, actually, except that she was quite extraordinary. She's pretty, which is obvious from first sight, but she has this vitality, this sense of. You look at her. I remember sitting across the table at a first date, just looking at it. She had this incredible vivacity, this sparkling nature, that very passionate nature, which obviously suits me very well. So, yeah, I can't say I was particularly good at picking wives, but in this particular one, I hit the jackpot of all time. Yes, she's in China right now, and I'm missing her badly. She's back on Wednesday morning. We're just on the phone.

Awesome. So with you finding the right one, the. The one that you want, and that first date being an absolute thriller for you with her, what's that like with finding the right franchisee? Because I know that you don't take on anyone. How different is it or is it very similar?

Well, it's a very different process. But the point, as you say, you've got to be selective. It's one of the things that I determined right from the beginning. I knew that wasn't standard in the service franchise industry. People didn't select, I'm not denigrate them, it's just policy. I actually employed somebody who was working for a rival franchise at one time and I said, what's your. What did they tell you were your criteria for selecting franchisees? And they said, $50,000 and a pulse. I mean, literally, that's exactly how they do it. Now, I started off and I was just determined that I wasn't going to take on anybody that I thought might fail. Now, I'm sometimes wrong. Obviously we do make mistakes, but I really, really feel. I just think it's a terrible thing to do to somebody. We had a case some while back where a lady rang me about a problem with the contract. And this was done, not to admit, through another franchisor. And I asked her a few questions. She hadn't signed yet, she had problems with the contract. So I asked her a few questions and I discovered that it was buying it on behalf of her son, who was in his early 20s and he couldn't find a job, so she was buying him a job. And I said to her, I'm not going to sell you a franchise because that single early 20s, can't find a job. Mother buying the business, 100% guaranteed failure. She got very upset. She said, I wish I hadn't called you. And so I said, look, she said, what can he do? And I said, well, I've got a couple of guys in his area who are short, need workers because that's which is common with us. So I said, what if I arrange for him to go out on the road with them and see if he can find a job with them? When out on the road, he was completely, utterly hopeless. Now, when that franchisor came up for renewal the following year, I refused to renew. I said, you can sell your business. And he made a good money out of it, he made good capital gains, but that was like the final straw. To do a thing like that, to sell to a person who had no reasonable chance of success. Now, the franchise would have got the money, but that kid and his mother would have been thrown under the bus. I just don't think that's the right thing to do. Now the funny thing about it was that when I started this policy. My main rival in Those states had 250 franchisees and I never even thought I'd draw equal to them. Somebody said to me, how many you'd have? And I said, maybe if it's really successful, I might have 100 one day. And I always assumed that by knocking back people, I would never grow as big as my competition. But in actual fact, it worked out rather better than I expected. We've currently got about 5,500. And I think it actually, in the long run, even though you make a short term decision that says no to somebody wants to pay you money, in the long term, it pays off because you get better customer service, you get happier franchisees overall. They're more likely to recommend you to their friends, which is what often happens. So sometimes you just got to put the franchisee first. And that's one thing I did from the beginning. I said my first priority right at the beginning, our first priority is the welfare of franchisees. First priority. We are also passionate about customer service. We sign the new franchisees and franchisors, we are convinced we'll succeed. And you'll see that on my email that I sent you, it's in my book. It's because there, from the beginning, it's that core idea, it's about service first.

100%. I agree with you, Jim, now with the franchise model. And this is one of the questions that comes externally because I ask people, what would you ask Jim today if you were with me? And the number one question is, where do you see the franchise model going into the future? Is it at risk? Is it going to flourish? How do you see it over, over the next five to 10 years?

Well, franchising isn't just one system, it's multiple systems. Thing is, there are some dreadful players in the industry and I find it's quite appalling that the government doesn't do more about that. There are some really bad riffs. You've heard of Retail Food Group, they're now under a different name. They buy up established brands and they rip the franchisees, they bleed them dry, they put every possible. They just treat them like absolute dirt. And it kills the brand and it goes down and down and down and they buy another one and do the same thing to them. So there's some absolutely shockingly bad franchise systems around. Having said that, there are some good ones around. And I have to say with ourselves, we have a constant aim to do better every day. Every day. I think I throw off the question, so do my senior Staff, My staff too. How can we improve? So, for example, one of the things we've done in recent years as we've improved our level of customer service, mostly by using systems of IT things like surveys and responses and different kinds of ways. I personally handle that. I get involved myself in all that sort of stuff. We're developing more IT systems now over the next few months, I expect to see our customers serve complaints, which we monitor very carefully. It's down to less than 5% of what it used to be. In fact, 99% better than pre franchise days. But we're still going to make it better. So by using more advanced IT system, which we spend several million dollars a year on it, we're going to drive down the level of complaints and improve the service we give franchisees. That's the goal. And if you continue to do that, doesn't matter where you start from, eventually you're going to do something pretty good.

Yeah, absolutely. It's the difference between prosperity and pain. If you continue doing the little things, you will continue to prosper. And if you stop doing the little things, you will start feeling the pain, I guess, yeah.

People are too complacent. They look at their business and they say, hey, my business is pretty good. But they don't know we have a service that we sell. One of the things that's happened in recent years, as our service has improved and our complaints have gone down, we've actually got a problem we never used to have, which is unserviced leads. So in the last year, we've knocked back about a quarter of a million leads, which is unprecedented. We're spending no more per franchisee to find work, but we're getting more work because the service, the customer service is better. People use multiple services. Now. One of the things we do is we sell these leads to independent operators. All the money goes back to the franchisees. It does things like we give them things like really cheap deals on televisions, football matches, extra advertising, all kinds of stuff. So we use this money. We're selling them. Now. The thing noticeable about that is that the independent contractors, they kind of like our system because they're the only one that gets the lead. But they do complain about it. They said, your system is too tough, it's too harsh. I give great customer service. I know I do. And yet you keep on sending me complaints. The fact of the matter is they don't know. They don't know that their service is not as good as it should be, and it isn't as good on average, these people are not as good as our franchisees. Even though we continually warn them and we knock them out, they keep on getting problems. But they don't know this. They think their service is great, but in fact, they've got no. They just don't hold themselves to a high enough standard.

So you're telling me that the overflow of leads that your franchisees cannot handle because they're booked out, those leads go to rivals or competitors that you give to them, and they. Those customers end up complaining and they blame you?

Well, no, but they. It's the franchisees who complain about the. Sorry. It's the contractors who complain about the. The service. They say our standards are too tough. It's not good for customers. No, but put this in perspective. Something like, we're saying no to a customer now. These people are screened and they are really pushed and they are coached and everything else. So on the whole, service is not as good as Jim's, but it's not bad either. So something like 80% of the French of the clients we send out to them report back that they're getting good service. So we go see, it's a normal standards in retail. If you were in a shop and somebody said, do you have X? And you don't have X, any retail guy will tell you, go down the road. Joe Blow has X. You tell people, you give people a referral. So that's. It's good for customer service because that way they're more likely to come to you next time because you're giving them a bit of help.

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. But if they go down the road and that down the road doesn't give them the service that they expect because you referred them, what happens then?

Well, we actually have a guarantee. The gyms, if a gym service goes bad, and we have actually unlimited guarantee, in other words, we will do whatever we can to fix up the problem. We spent one particular job over $100,000. Franchisees, a terrible thing with fences and stuff. So we pay back the customers. We always do. With independent contractors, we haven't got that, of course, but what we do offer is $1,000. So if a customer books through us, we will pay them up to $1,000 to fix up any issues, which is most of them that come up. Now, what happens too is that we will then cut the contractor off for work at the very least until they pay us back for what it's cost us. But normally permanently in that kind of situation. So we do get them something extra. It doesn't happen a lot actually, because they know that if they give poor service to our customers, it's not just the fact they lose the job, but that we will cut them off. They'll get no more leads from us. And our leads are better than hypages because we only send a lead to one person. Hypagers, you know, five people are competing for a job with us, only one. So it's a bitter lead.

Yeah, it's that, it's that rapport building and good relationships and just doing a good job and appreciating it. That's, that's really cool. The, the uberization of home services though. So the competition in terms of what's changing, you have on demand platforms like TaskRabbit from the States and a whole bunch of other ones. There's, there's, there's all of these services where you can find and hire local tradespeople with sophisticated, sophisticated algorithms that match supply and demand, quickly bypassing the need for a franchise network. How do you combat this?

Well, it's interesting because we're a fairly small company. We look big, but we're not the actual. We want to make about $10 million a year Jim's group profit. Okay, so, so it's more company. We're up against multi billion dollar companies that are doing these things international with vastly more expertise. The fact of the matter is we're beating them on the whole. We are growing. Something like, I'll give Hyde pages as an example, as far as I know, they never made any money and we are consistently profitable and we are growing and we are growing and we're growing. So in actual fact, we have a different attitude. Ours isn't so much. Technology is a tool, but it's not the be all and end all. The real secret of our system is that we're focusing on the person who does the work. And that is a complete imponderable. You can do TaskRabbit and you can do all kinds of metrics, but in the end it's the quantity of person turning up. Now our system is very rigorously determined to make sure that our customers get the best response. So they'll try Task Grabber and they'll try airtasker and they'll try Hype pages and then they'll try gyms. And the thing of it is, we're more expensive. We cost more than the independence. If you wanted cheap jobs, I had somebody contact me just some while back and they said, look, I want a job done, but I want it really cheap. That's all I care. And I say go to Hypages because we actually tell our franchisees to charge more. We said you've got to be at least 10% above the opposition. So it's a very different way of looking at things. Our goal, it's why I say we put franchisees first. Our goal is to make our franchisees raving fans. That's the whole concept, which means charging more than the opposition but giving really, really good service. And our franchises get upset at this too because one of the things we do say, even though we put them first, we say, but you have got to give great service to customers and if you make a mess up, do a problem, then you've got to do whatever you can to satisfy that customer. It's a very tough system, but what it does is it'll label that franchisee to make very, very good income. Our typical franchisee, we did a survey just recently mowing franchisee terms of just under $3,000 a week. Now that means they're making clearing more significantly over the median Australian wage. For a business that requires no licensing, it doesn't require a great deal of capital. We're talking about typical buyer in $25,000 flexible home based business. And we give them more than. That's the whole key to it. Because if you can offer people a great deal on the condition that they give great service, they tend to give great service.

Yeah, it's not a race to the bottom, it's a race to the top. Because one, you're good at what you do, you're passionate about it, you want to improve your sk, but not only your skills, your customer service and the experience around that. And why would you be charging less than your competition? No, exactly.

I'm not saying all our franchises are flat out. That would be completely untrue. I just before I came on the phone, there was a email from one of our window cleaning franchisees who's actually saying that they're getting less leads than they used to. So I did an analysis and I said you're right too. So I copied it back to the franchisor and he's putting franchisees on. They said, you're going to be putting some more money from your sales into advertising because this is dropping. So I responded, copied. The franchisor told them what I expected them to do. So it doesn't mean to say they're all flat out, but on the whole they are mostly busy on any given day. Most of our franchisees don't take any new leads because they don't need the work. And that's the great secret of it. We actually emphasize one of the things we say and I'm going to do Tomorrow morning at 9 o' clock I'll do what we call an ethos talk. In our training we've got about 160 people coming to a training and the first talk they'll get is me talking for two hours very passionately about customer service and about service to franchisees. And one of the things I say to them is your aim is to make at least $70 per hour. That is our base rate these days. Not initially, when you don't know what you're doing. Eventually every division that we've got, you should be able to make at least that kind of money because that's how you get great service, by attracting and keeping good people who give great service to customers.

Yeah, and also those customers, they value you at that rate and want to keep you because you do a good job. Absolutely.

Exactly. And then they'll call us again because they have a good experience of mowing. So they want pest control done. So my daughter and son in law just moved house few months back and they had tried various sorts of services. This is my daughter who's actually worked in our call center. So she knows about gyms but with the kind of problems that she's had with the people she tried to get because she wanted it done cheap, because they have a lot of money. I gave her the people that we use, I recommended them to her. I said we got a conveyancer, we got a building inspector and a handyman. And she said these people are just so good. So she's kind of, she's become a convert to the gyms. It's ironic since it's my daughter, but.

Still it's not biased. It's not biased though because it still all ends up with the individual that is the franchisor. So you've got specialized micro entrepreneurs. So skilled tradespeople can now build personal reputation using social media, customer review sites and digital marketing without relying on a franchise brand. These independent micro entrepreneurs often provide more personalized service and direct communication with clients. Well, the impact on a franchise trades and here's where you come in. A core selling point of franchises is brand trust and customer acquisition. If an individual tradesperson can build a high trust profile online like dozens of glowing reviews and verified expertise, the perceived value of paying franchise fees diminishes. Yes or no, how do you feel about that?

Well, the interesting thing is the better you are the more likely you are to want to use this. And there's a simple reason for that. It's because when you talk about micro entrepreneurs, we have got quite a few franchisees who'll be clearing over a million dollars a year. That's not all that micro. No, we reckon, I mean, we call ourselves the millionaire factory. We reckon we've created more millionaires than any company in the history of this country. And that's how we do it. Because our system is such that first of all, we get you busy now, that's important. In the beginning, the typical cleaning, gardening, independent business, within one year, between 90 and 95% will have gone out of business. Okay with us. We lose 12% of our franchisees in the first year. Now, not all of them fail, but that's the numbers that would leave within that first year. So 88% versus 5, 10%. So we're successful getting off the ground. We teach you then what we have is a system where most of our fees are a base fee. There's a small leave fee, but it's mostly in the base fee. What it means is that we actually are very open to people putting on workers because there's usually a lot of work available. Like one of the things I did, this guy I was talking to before, he's a window cleaner and I sent him a list of all the unserviced leads in his area just so far this year in the last six weeks. And there's a whole stack in things like cleaning and car cleaning and stuff like that. And I said, would you want to do any of those? Because we've got unserviced leads in other divisions that you can do as well if you wish, after the guys don't, if they're not wanted. And then we have training systems, we have a training course, we have a three day business training course and we have ongoing training about how to put on workers. So if you want an ambitious, you want to put on people to work for you, we'll show you how, we'll introduce you how you can become part of networks that do this kind of thing. Or you're going to become a franchisor by the franchisor rights or build a new division. There's all sorts of ways that you can grow and we help people do this. So in actual fact, we don't make it difficult for people to go independent. It's one of the unique things about our system. You can pay a few thousand dollars and quite frankly, we often don't even chase for that. Depending on the situation. But the people that tend to go independent are either those that are very poor operators and they think that they can succeed without the fees and they usually fail, or they're people who just want to run a very small business with regular customers, don't want to change too much, just keep on going. The real benefit, most people who, once they get busy, do still stay with us. But the ones that really make the most are those who got really fierce ambition, because it's a good system. Because what happens is you want to put on a worker. The hardest thing about growing is actually workers. It's not work with us, it's workers. The great thing is you put on a worker and you open up the spigot. You say, okay, I want more leads, and you can specify where you want them. The kind of leads. I want landscaping, I want guttering, I want this, I don't want that. You can be very specific about what you take, and then you get the extra work and you build that. Now, if your worker goes off sick, you turn off the spigot, then you put another worker on, and that worker is good. Put them on a second trailer or a second van, and you can grow that way.

Yeah, just like a. Just grows, grows and grows. What about an exit out of a franchise for one of these people? Talk me through that, because that's the. A lot of the talk that I've been having recently with my friends and mentors is the art of the exit. What does it look like for someone who's been in the business for a while, has really built up a customer base? How does that exit look like?

If they've got a good customer base like regular clients, it's usually fairly easy because we have people coming all the time, and there's a person around who's got customers making $2,000 a week to start with, for example, regular clients. It's highly attractive. Where it's not so good is where you don't have regular clients. So you've got a franchisee, for example, who hasn't done very well, hasn't built much of a client base. That's a problem because there's not so much the interest. And we've had people, unbelievably so. I mean, I was talking to somebody just recently, and they'd been going for like a year, and they had no regular client. This is a cleaning franchisee, which is unheard of. And he was complaining because he was not getting enough work to keep going. But I said, your biggest problem is you're not converting your jobs into regulars. Even though a lot of your leads are regular leads, you're not. So what's going wrong here? Now for that person to try and sell their business is waste of time because they've got nothing to sell. Or you have a business that's like a handyman business that's hard one to sell because you don't have regular clients.

Talk about when you do have a really good franchise from, from. From the gyms network and you are making over a million dollars a year, but you want to sell it. How does that work?

Well, what they normally do is split. I have to say the business doesn't normally go from the kind of money you'd expect from a business of that nature. They just don't. Let me give you example. A guy called Dan, Dan Carl. He's all over the Internet. He's done so many interviews. This is a guy who was a high school dropout. Left school at 15, went to work at McDonald, did a few things in his early 20s he buys a mowing franchise. Very cautious. A lot of money to him, 25 grand. So a lot of money in that situation quickly came to be turning over close to a million dollars a year. So not one of the absolute top earners, but still very good. But a 5.0 rating. Now what he then got to that stage. He was making pretty good money but he said I want to go beyond this. So what he wanted to do is become a franchisor. So he would actually. What he actually did is he split his business into three. So he sold three different businesses to three of his actual team leaders. That's how he did it. Because you couldn't get as much enough money by selling it all together. So fancy were prepared to buy it. And he went off and bought. He's now looking after about 160 franchisees and he's looking at starting up in Florida later this year or early next year.

Amazing. Amazing. Now I want to talk about the early journey for an origins. What did your early years look like and how did they shape your entrepreneurial mindset? This one's for the kids specifically.

Okay. All right. I was going to say I've made more mistakes than most people have in 10 different lifetimes. I did a lot of stupid things. I started mowing lawn gardening as a student job because I basically liked it outdoor work and it paid pretty well and this kind of thing. And I got to the stage where I was getting. I did a PhD in history of all things. I spent about 10 years at university and towards the end I started to think about putting this thing full time. And then I got very stupid and arrogant and I thought I'll be a manager and I won't do the jobs and I'll get somebody else to do it. And what happened is I got completely ripped off and went deeply into debt. So this was before Christmas 1992. I was actually flat broke, deeply in debt, in a really bad situation. But I got married at that time, which was a very positive thing. And I just knew I had to work hard. So I just started pushing the lawnmower around and putting leaflets in letterboxes. I started from scratch. Well, I had some crappy old equipment and I just built from there. And as I got bigger I shifted to putting subcontractors on, building up and selling lawn mowing rounds. And then faced with a threat of a rival franchise network, I franchised in 1999. But it was a very, very bootstrapped operation and I made very, very dumb mistakes. And along the way too, I did a lot of side things. I didn't really think this lawmakers would ever turn out to be anything. So I tried all kinds of stuff. I tried a computer shop, a mower shop, trying to get a holiday resort which sent me broke again. But they're all stupid things and I still keep on doing them. In years since then I've tried other things like trading exchanges and a factory to make fiberglass trailers and try to start. I got started the Psychology Institute and this kind of thing. I did a lot of dumb things going outside my field of expertise. So. But it's just whatever I do, I just keep on trying to improve it. That's all I can say. So even if you, even if you're completely idiotic and you make all these mistakes, you've got to keep on working at what you're doing and learning.

Well, I mean a lot of your mistakes and your learnings and your. Just give it a go. All of those skills that you would have acquired over that time got to where you are today. You mentioned your academic career. 10 years to acquire a PhD to earn a PhD in history. How old were you when you began that journey?

Well, I went to university when I would have been about 18. So I took a gap year, went off and actually I started my gardening business. In that gap year I got a couple of clients from putting a notice in there. So what I've got now is a continuation of that little gardening business I started.

This is exactly what I'm looking for. I Believe that gap years are non negotiable. Get out of the school system, finish off and go give things a go. If you want to go to uni, awesome. If you want to give a trade job a go, hospitality, God forbid, retail, give it a go. You know, I've done it all as well. But you had a gap here and you gave the lawn mowing business a go.

But it wasn't lawn, it was only gardening. I was charging gardening. Yeah. Do 50 an hour in those days. Even in 1970, that wasn't a lot of money.

And you're still gardening today. Like before this phone call, you were telling me about how you're weeding up.

On the farm, doing. Pulling weeds out of the gold.

Still on the tools. Still on the tools. Amazing.

And this is for fun though. I'm not actually ignoring anybody's lawns for this is my entertainment.

Okay.

Okay. It's a bit sunburned too.

Why did you decide to do commit to that PhD though? And the next question after is, what was the specifics of the PhD?

Okay, well, the reason I wanted to do a PhD is because I wanted to figure out the reason for the rise and fall of civilizations. All right. Just, just the biggest question there is.

I could talk about that all day.

Okay, well, you're. The reasons that I'll give you are totally different from anything you've ever seen in your whole life.

I'm excited.

All right. Okay. So I started out studying history, trying to understand what's going on. I was very impressed by Thucydides, the Peloponnesian wars, and I was interested in the kind of Roman Empire, this kind of stuff too. But as I did my PhD, I sort of came to the conclusion that it really wasn't anything. It was a biological pattern that we were looking at. There's something about human biology that makes cellizations work and it's human biology that makes them come unstuck. So I came to the end of my PhD. I thought I'd have an academic career. Actually, that was my intention. But I came to the end of this thing and I had this wildly unorthodox theory which wasn't even properly history anymore. It was all cross cultural anthropology and psychology and a bit of biology and all kinds of stuff. And so I realized I had no prospect of a job. But I did want to continue with my studies. But also because all the implications of my theory were in terms of biology, I knew I had to set up a research institute in the sciences, in the biological sciences. So I had to Become rich. So that's kind of the basis I did gyms for. So sometime later after I started the franchise, I started putting some money and I found an academic at La Trobe University who was in this area and I started funding it. Originally it's quarter million dollars a year. We're now spending about $3 million a year still with La Trobe actually. And I've got a research team which is really getting some very exciting results.

Amazing. So the whole, this is fascinating. The specific, the specific part of this and where I am in my career in navigating through entrepreneurship, building a studio, building a company myself, I started all of this and having employees, hiring employees because eventually I want this company to be self sufficient so I can go back to my personal brand and then just grow that. Because the sustainable company that is just going on its own and giving me directors fees, which is just to supply my, I guess, lifestyle, which isn't, which is quite frugal. And to be able to become my own client of my own company, I feel like there's similarities there and wanting to go right, I need to become rich so I can continue doing my personal brand without having to compromise and sell out by collaborating with some crappy brands that I don't believe in. So it's really inspiring. Jim.

Well, let me tell you though, trying to get a passive income from the business is a lot harder than you might think. I'm involved very deeply with my business. I give my direct phone number, personal phone number and email address to every one of my franchisees and they contact me anytime, daytime, evenings, weekends, holidays, anytime at all.

And what's your phone like during the day?

It's not a lot. I might get a few calls a day, a few emails, calls a day. One of the problems is actually it's not so much that they overload me as they don't call me often enough. Sometimes I have a problem. I'll give you an example. This just happened last week. One of my franchisees, we have a system called pay for work guarantee where a new franchisee hasn't got enough work, can do paid services. And this guy contacted me and he complained that his franchisor was making it, was putting obstacles in the way of doing it, said he had to travel more than 100k. I said that's just not true. So I told him what he could do. Not only that, but I found the contract actually didn't allow enough services to make it sensible because I hadn't had claims for this company before. So I actually spoke to the franchisor, spoke to the head of the division, got them to basically change the contract so that he could do a whole lot more services so he could make this thing achievable. And also, and that's going to be all future contracts as well. So Retrospective changed the contract. And I also told the franchisor in somewhat polite terms than this, that if he ever tried to stiff any of my franchises, not paying franchise fees, I'd breach and terminate him because this pay for work guarantee, he wasn't honoring it properly, in my view. That's an example of one particular person who rang me last week and brought up a problem. Not only could it help him, but there was a problem with our system. Now, if people don't contact me, how do I know that things are going on? Someone could just fail. I also rang up two of the other franchisees in the region who'd recently signed. I didn't ring them actually. I emailed them and asked how they were going. And they're both actually doing well. They're doing fine. So there's not a wider problem than that, but I would check on it. So I do this kind of stuff all the time.

There's a problem solving, the continuous problem.

Solving, because basically our franchisees are the most important people. That doesn't mean to say we're not passionate about clients. We are. But I want to know what's going wrong? Why should somebody fail? See, people often ask me, they say, what's your goal for business? How many franchises you want to have? How much money you like to have? I say, that's never a goal. You know what my goals are? I've got two of them. No franchisee is ever going to be unhappy in any way with the service they got from us, the business. And no client is going to be unhappy with the service. That's my goals. There's two all right. Now, I'll never achieve either of them, but I will never, ever be satisfied.

It's an ongoing process. I love that because it's resonating so much. It's so the systems are never perfect. It's always room for improvement. And every chance you get from either a customer or a franchisee that rings you up, you are there to fix it, which will then fix it for everyone else. And that problem becomes redundant because it's been dealt with. And that open communication is super important. Why do a lot of other business owners, company directors, why do they miss this part?

I think it's a psychological thing. I'm very, very self critical. I'm looking at myself all the time, say, how can I do better? People don't. I think people find that uncomfortable. They want to feel that they're giving great service, they're doing things right and if anything goes wrong, they want to blame somebody else. They blame the clients, the economy, competitors, whatever. I would like to blame myself. I'm working on this book about what's called birth rate crisis actually, which will come out later this year and with an editor who's in America. And she comes back. One of the surprising things about me is she makes a comment and I just say, yes, great, thank you. Great comment. I change things, he said. Never had anybody who's so willing to take criticism. I just have that kind of attitude. I know that I've done. It's a bit of something of a Christian attitude. It's something we say. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins to God, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. It's that sense of humility, that sense that we can always, we're never ever as good as we should be. We can always do better. That is the essence in the essence of a Christian walk, or a walk in any faith for that matter. It's also the essence of good business.

Now you mentioned the birthrate thing, and this is going to be a question later, but it's a perfect segue. Based on current understanding of historical demographics. It is generally accepted that no major civilization has significantly recovered from a sustained severe decline in birth rate without substantial migration to replenish the population. You're the best person to ask this question because you're writing a book about it. What do we do as human beings to turn this around? Sorry to interrupt one last time. This is actually a sponsored post. If you need to run ads for your service based business and you don't know how, there is one agency I would trust in the entire country and the world probably where you spelt W H E R E and then the letter U. They literally teach you how to run Facebook ads, Instagram ads and create a whole funnel for you to get more business. And I use them myself. They've taught me how to do it and I get all of the business which is fantastic. If you want to learn how to run ads properly and dominate your industry and win all of the clients, hit up where you back to the episode.

The problem is it's got to do with dopamine receptors. That sounds pretty wild. But what happens when you have a great deal of prosperity and things like drugs and individualism? What that does is it's like a bit of a lack of drugs like cocaine. If you take cocaine or a drug, it actually gives you this burst of dopamine, but it dampens down your dopamine receptors. And that causes all sorts of problems in the long term, including the fact that you don't find children and family as rewarding, not as hard working and so forth. So that's your problem. We've got an overly prosperous civilization that's overly. It's decadent, okay? That's what's happened. Now as individuals, what we do is we try and live a more austere lifestyle. And there's various ways to do that. Like you don't drink, you don't take drugs, you don't try not to overeat. You focus on. Join a church. Religious community is a great way of doing it. You try and subject yourself to the will of a community, will of God, this kind of thing. So you try and make yourself less of a focus on status. So as individuals we can do that, but it won't be enough. So what you've really got to do is to develop a treatment that actually resets your dopamine receptors in a way that will change character, that will make these kinds of behaviors more attractive. So that should. What you need is something that's an epigenetic factor. And that's what we're working on in the research project. We are trialing thousands of different substances. We're doing it vigilantly on brain cells in small sort of chambers. It's a robotic situation. So you troll kinds of dogs. Because we're looking for the epigenetic pattern that's associated with this food restriction thing. And we have to work out a way to reproduce that.

Fascinating. That's.

Not the normal solution.

No.

The reason that we're changing is because our character is changing. People are different to what they used to be. Young people is particularly different. And the people are less interested in family, less interested in children, less interested in marriage, less interested in work for its own sake. Very focused on short term pleasures, indulgence, whatever, excitement, fun. There's a change in character. It's very visible in every generation. It's going down very fast. And as that happens, the birth rate keeps on plunging and it will keep on plunging. The only way out of this is to reverse the process. And you have to turn to science.

Now the science of this, which you're researching, and another rabbit hole we can go down the antidote to this. Is it a drug, is it a mindset from that drug that changes? How does that actually unfold? Talk about the best case scenario where it happens tomorrow.

The treatment would actually cause a change in mindset. You just think differently. You take a person who's like a drug addict, for example, that's a perfect example of somebody who's really the wrong way down this thing. They've got a very inactive dopamine receptors. So they need lots and lots of dopamine from more and more drugs to try and do it, which makes it worse because that makes your dopamine receptors less active. If you had a treatment that actually basically reset the dopamine drugs, it undo it, it'd be like an antidrug. And this person would then find their character changed. They'd no longer be thinking short term. They'd find work more appealing. They'd find stabilizations more appealing. They'd find a family life more appealing. They'd find religious involvement, community involvement more appealing. So it's a drug that changes character, changes attitude, and it would be actually very. If you developed it, it would be quite easy to have it spread because one thing it would do very obviously is it would make people happier. There is a rising level of happiness, of misery, of depression, of anxiety. The death of despair thing. It's going worse and worse and worse and worse all the time. It's even causing our people are dying younger than they used to, especially in America. So this is a problem. This particular treatment would actually reset people in a way that would make them more interested in community, in friends, in family, the kind of things that make life worth living.

I didn't think talking to Jim Penman about psychedelics was going to be on my psychedelics.

Not exactly.

No, no, no, no, no, no. I know you're not talking about psychedelics. I'm about to talk about psychedelics. I've been researching, reading some stuff about it, saying. Saying psychedelic therapy has been shown to help achieve significant improvements in mental health in a relatively short period. Has there been much exploration in that department from your research at all?

Look, there's a lot of things you can do at the fringes that may or may not help certain kinds of people. But these are very trivial by comparison with what we really need. You're starting trying to stop an avalanche and you're chucking pebbles at it. I mean, it just doesn't have any meaningful impact on this disaster that we're facing this is something that's happening. It's a result of our prosperity. Our very success is destroying us. Happened before in the past, but never as badly as strongly as this. You have to have something more fundamental and basic. We have to be able to do this. It only really is. It's not even that big to actually develop this thing wouldn't be. My research head reckons a couple of hundred million dollars would do it. So we're making whatever start we had hopefully will produce treatments that can be actually because when you want to develop treatments you can't. I couldn't afford to do it myself. You have to find drug companies and stuff to actually take that on and do the trials and so forth. They cost massive amount of money but it's quite achievable. The researcher like Gatsby is a professor with. He's got a. He's a very, very capable researcher. He was running a research program into looking at drugs, cancer. Employ about 100 people. So that's his previous job. So he's a very high level academic and he's now focusing on this and he thinks it's quite achievable.

That is quite achievable. I believe we are super close. But also there's the topic of big pharma. There's the topic of all these industries that profit from people being sick and doing the research that destroys that industry, which is a good thing because nobody's sick anymore. Why, why do you feel like. Do you feel like we're really turning the tide here as a, as a civilization or do we still have a lot of work to do?

Oh no, we could. We're going downhill fast. So we're really in big trouble. It's far worse than people think. People worried about the fertility crisis now you wait 10, 20 years, it's going to be so much worse than it has been. And that's obvious. If you look at the attitudes the youngest generation, there's only one possible solution and that's the scientific one. We've got to understand the epigenetics. But the interesting thing about it is for the first time in human history it is possible to do something about it. Because basically you're talking about do you understand what epigenetics is?

Yeah. It's a study of how your environment and behaviors change and how your genes work so effectively.

What epigenetics does, if you think about a genome, is a whole series of little tiny taps spitting out proteins. That's how they work. What epigenetics does is it turns the taps on or off, it changes the way your genes function. If we could, the greatest possible solution to this would be direct epigenetic manipulation. And one particular way to do this would be through crispr, which is the new system where you actually have targeted methods. You actually say, I want to change that particular gene here in this way. If you understand the epigenetics enough, and we have pretty got a pretty good understanding of what the epigenetic changes we want are, then you've got to work out a way of getting into the cell and making those precise changes. Now if you could do that, the effects would be absolutely phenomenal. As far as profit is going is concerned, you know what the success, people like Wegovy and those kinds of things, all the new weight loss drugs, this would dwarf that. The actual market for this would be in the billions of people because it will be so effective.

Well, you've got multiple things that you can cover. You've got aging, cloning, even cancer, obviously the health and diet and giving you all kinds of stuff. And for me, I've spoken about this briefly to maybe one or two others in the last 10 years. So I'm excited to talk to you about it. I have a science degree and I really, really enjoyed the biology part of it. Learning about plants and animals was really exciting for me. And the bit that I was really interested in is the designer baby talk. It's like, okay, how do we design a baby? Why do we want to do it? Well, you know, make it blonde, blue eyed. People talk about the Aryan race from the, from history, but we're talking about survival in general.

I don't think genetics is the point, Seb. I really don't think it did look. People are astonishingly uniform genetically. Now you look at a chimpanzees in a few kilometers of square kilometers of rainforest, Gabon rainforest, say yes, there is more genetic diversion in those few animals than there is in the human race. Humans are very, very, very similar genetically. We don't need to change genetics. What we need to do is to change the epigenetics. We need to change the environment. People are quite capable of the most extraordinary things. I don't think we need to change genetically at all. I do not believe in eugenics. I absolutely do not believe in it. I believe in the ability to change individuals, that every individual has the capacity, including myself, of being much better than we are. That's the goal.

Now, how much of the AI stuff have you looked at to help accelerate this potentially?

AI is not particularly relevant. To the work we're on. It may have relevance down the track of it, but our particular research program, we're just looking at all kinds of different things. But AI is not relevant to stage. We use it quite a lot in Jim's group, actually. It's very handy, but not yet relevant to the research program that we're doing. You just have to do the hard science. It's very, very detailed. It's looking at. It's looking at. It's measuring the epigenome. I mean, the computers are incredibly important too. The fact that you can now do a genome scan, you can. What you call. You can scan the whole epigenome and you can look at the changes, and the changes are different, the tissues that they're in. So we can actually check these things now. So it's highly advanced, but not AI. No.

Let's go back to Jim's group with AI because that's the other topic I wanted to talk about. What has been the biggest impact in your group when you have started, since you have started implementing AI?

Joel, probably the best person to talk to about that. It's more in the area of social media and those kind of things like that that we're learning to do things better. We have a lot of changes we need to do in our IT systems, but they don't really require AI because they're just. They're fairly achievable with existing technology. So it's more in things like social media and those kinds of areas that we're working with AI at the present time, I haven't seen. Yeah, it's difficult. The kind of stuff that I do is so, like, I've tried to get used AI to do various things to do with finding literature and stuff. And it's pretty anodyne, actually, because what we do is so far away from the mainstream, even of mainstream science, it's wildly different. The idea, what I'm talking about, with dopamine receptors and stuff that's not particularly radical, people understand how that system works.

There's a new movie out called Subservience with Megan Fox in it, and it's about AI hiring an AI person to help you with, you know, your housemaid. And Megan Fox is the housemaid. But there's. The story is about this guy who has a sick wife. She's in hospital, she needs a heart transplant, and he's a construction worker and he's like the leading hand there. Everybody else in his work gets made redundant, gets sacked, because they have implemented AI trades robots that pretty Much look like humans, but they're AI based. They call them sparks. And with overnight they've just come in and have started doing their thing and significantly better and more efficient. Now we're not there for a while, but where do you see that coming in? Have you, have you thought about that before?

I would say that when you're talking about the trades, it's one of the last areas conceivable that you'd ever get into. AI taking us over. I can see it in accounting, in the law, in education, in so many different areas, AI could be mind blowing, particularly white collar professions. But in terms of thinking about what we do as say, get your lawns mowed. Okay, it's not that simple. Somebody's got to come through. You've got to have somebody who's got to contact the client. I can't do that. Somebody's got to go and have a look at the job. I can't do that. Even if you have a robotic lawnmower and we're trying these kinds of things too. Someone's got to put it there, relate to the client, provide ongoing service. It's more than just. It's not like a thing you can put in the factory bench. I would say the service industry is probably the safest place you could possibly be to resist the flood of AI.

Absolutely. I mean the back end stuff like admin and social media definitely will help it. But yeah, you're right. There's another series, South Park. You've heard of South Park? They had a. They actually had an episode about this where all of these white collar jobs, they were out of the job and then all the tradies would be going around in their flashy cars because they'd be making so much money now. They're all just like, yeah, yeah, cool.

It's a good place to be. I've been doing a thing, we did a media release. I've been talking a lot of places about the fact that young people should not be considering that going to university is the only thing in life. Get a trade. Unless you're brilliantly academic and you want to be a doctor or a lawyer or something, go for it. But if you're not that academic, why not consider being a plumber or a carpenter or an electrician? Because these jobs pay pretty well. Got great prospects of having your own business and it's not going to be. I cannot conceive any way that it could be hit by AI. I think you could just about lose every job in the world before you lose those ones.

A couple more specific questions I have for you, Jim. You failed so many times and you've come up and you've built your resilience over this period. And resilience is one of my favorite topics to talk about. What did failure teach you about resilience and adaptability in business?

I'm naturally very resilient. I just have that kind of character. My wife says I'm like one of those, you know, those plastic things that weights in the bottom and you knock it over, it just springs back. I'm just like that. I just naturally very, very tough minded. And if something goes wrong, I just say, okay, you're a fool, don't do that again. I probably will do it again, but still I just, I just. But I do look after myself fairly well. Okay. It's a lot of having a decent lifestyle. For example, exercise now I go for a run, I do weightlifting and I run for a half hour every day. And plus gardening, other kinds of things too. I keep my weight under control. All right. I have very strong emphasis on relationships. I have strong involvement with my church, obviously. I'm very devoted to my wife and my kids and so forth. So I don't take, I don't drink, I don't take drugs. I don't do things that, you know, that mess up your mind. So there's a lot of mental health things in the background. To be resilient, you're going to live a good life and according to pretty traditional principles, really. You can't just do what you feel like doing right now and think it's going to be. You've got to be prepared to look at your life and say, okay, what should I be doing? Let's do the things that are not so easy right now for the sake of living a better and more meaningful life. And also having a sense of purpose is very important to me. My purpose is I'm very driven by purpose. My franchisees, that's a purpose in my life. I get up in the morning, I want to look after my franchisees better. My research, my family, my children. My idea of life is very driven by what I got to do. And I'm 72 years old and I've got about another 20 years. I've got a lot to do in that 20 years. I've got so much to do. That's how I see my life. And given that kind of sense of meaning and purpose and looking after yourself, being resilient is a lot easier.

If you could go back to and mentor your younger self at that point where you first started all of this, what would you say?

Well, lawmaker a lot better business than you think. I'd say law, definitely, definitely there's money in that, you know, believe it now, young men. But you definitely should do more of that. I would know how to run a lot better. I'd say forget about lawyers and stuff, just wind up any old form of contract, but get it developing from the beginning. Really focus much more on that. That's going to be the key to what makes you work. And I've been given specific advice about things like, okay, this is the way you look after franchises. Because I didn't know how to look after franchisees in the beginning. I had very strange ideas on like doing business reviews and stuff. We found that doesn't work. What works is regular meetings about every six weeks and ringing franchisee regularly, ideally weekly or at least monthly. Even short conversations, short, frequent, regular get togethers, this kind of thing. Have a meeting, provide a meal, there's a lot of things. And then just develop the IT side of it and just, I don't know. And don't go on wild goose chase. All these other things that you think are going to work, they're not going to work. Just stick to your service industry. That's what you're good at.

Stick to what you know, what's a business failure or mistake. That turned out to be like the biggest blessing for you.

Well, the one, the one that I told you about back in 1982 when I, when I went by my stupidity and laziness and arrogance, I went broke and I learned a lesson. You got to start working hard, mate. So that was good. And I never forgot that. I never forgot it.

Was there ever at that time. Was there someone else that helped you articulate that and build that mindset or was it all you?

Well, I was influenced by people too. One of the greatest things that happened to me was way before I was franchising, when I was trying to. I was trying to sell lawn mowing rounds. I was building up and selling lawn mowing rounds. And I'm a terrible salesperson because I got no people skills. My wife says I've got Asperger's or something because I'm so ignorant about that kind of thing. So I was finding it impossible to sell these lawn mowing rounds. And I went to see the guy in my church who was running an advertising agency to ask him about advertising. And I went into his office and he was much more successful than me in those days. And he just Spent a half an hour telling me about advertising and how to do it, where to do it, and then he ended the conversation. He said, you don't need an advertising agency at this stage. Just go and do that. So I walked out of the brain. And I knew that if I ever wanted an advertising agency, I would go straight back to Peter. I would use him. I wouldn't even think about anybody else. And when I was walking back to the car, we just parked, I was thinking, why am I. What's he done? Why is this guy so impressed me? Because he told me nothing about his business. He hadn't told me his clients. He hadn't told me about his charges. I didn't know what he charged. I just knew that I'd use him. And I thought, really? Okay, what's happened is this. I've been to see him, and the only concern he had was the welfare of my business. My welfare, welfare of my business. And because of that, he sold me on his business. So the next time somebody approached me about a lawn mowing business, because I used to advertise them in the paper instead of trying to sell my business, I said, I asked him a question. I said, tommy, do you know what the Carthava lawn mowing round means? That's his job done once. And for that, you work out the value people. I knew, people didn't know this. And I started talking about the business, not my business sell, but how you're successful, what you do, how you advertise, how you promote it. And when it came to see me, the same thing. And I just did the same approach. And then at the end of the conversation, I would just say, I've got some business in your area. This is it. Clients in your area. That's it. Okay, that was my sales pitch. Little while later, somebody rang me up, one of these guys, he said, okay, Jim, I want some advice. I said, sure. He said, I've been offered another business in my area, and I want you to advise me which is better, that one or yours? And I asked. So I said, okay, let me help you. So I asked him the questions. I said, okay, how long has he been doing it for? How many customers? What's the average size? How far apart are they? What's the guy doing? All the obvious things that anybody would know who's in the industry. And the end of the conversation, I said, that's a better business. You should buy that one. Now, I had three conversations of that nature in quick succession. Three people. And each time I told them to buy the other business. And each one of them came back and bought from me. And from the minute I started doing that, I never had any trouble selling lawn mowing rounds. And it's the same principle as selling a franchise. You're looking to the interest of the person. Which is why if a person is not suited to be a franchisee, you must say no because you're interested in their welfare.

Yeah, it's the same, it's the same with service based businesses, franchise or not. With my wedding photography, I turned it around. It wasn't really on the way down ever, but I really started to exponentially grow. When I said to my clients or my couples who were saying the first meeting we had and I hadn't closed them on the wedding yet, I said to them, you're going to be shopping around for other photographers. Fair enough. Here are the five things that I would ask them to ensure that they're the best fit for you. And then I would go on my rant and then say, okay, let me know if you have any other questions and let me know if you have any other problems that you need help with right now. I will help guide. I had no expectations. I was super, super stoked to just help and just get more experience, more repetitions to, to then maybe six months later, even if they didn't book me, saying, hey Sev, that advice you gave us, even though we didn't book you as a wedding photographer was really good. Thank you so much by the way. We wish we hired you as our wedding photographer because the other guy was shit. It's just like, hey, you gotta do the numbers though. It's a numbers game. It's purely a numbers game.

We call that approach selling by not selling.

Yeah, exactly. Selling by not selling. But, but also if you are getting into a business, whether it's a trade or a product or selling or something on online, My biggest thing, and I want you to expand on this because you have more, is are you, do you really like doing it? Do you really enjoy doing it? And if you need to make money right now and you can do a good job with it, even if you don't like it, go for it, but ultimately do what you love doing. What do you think?

Oh no, totally, totally agree with that. That's why I was a one main contractor, because I love gardening. I still do it for fun. Yes, absolutely. People often ask me that question. They say, where can I make the most money? I said, wrong question. What do you want to do? Do you like cars? Car cleaning? Do you like dogs, Dog wash. Do you like electronics and stuff or something like test and tag or antennas? Those kind of things too. Security. Okay, so find what you love doing because in the end you'll make more money doing that than you will anything else. But also, even without that, you'll have a better life.

You just enjoy it. Absolutely.

Money should never be the number one criterion. It really is a pretty poor aim. It should come out of other things that you do. You do something worthwhile, you do something that you love, you do it as well as you can, the money will flow in somehow.

What's the most unconventional but powerful piece of business advice you can give?

All the best decisions I made in life were made against what I thought was my own self interest. Really. I just. You do think. Because you say think it's right and it turns out to work better, even very surprising. Like giving away those three through buyers. I thought I'd lost them. I had no concept in fact. But I was right. Based on what they told me, that was a better business. So that's the most unusual thing. Just don't just do what's right. Look at the interest of the person you're dealing with somehow and it'll come out good. Look, I'm pretty tough too. It makes me sound like a bit of a marshmallow, doesn't it? But I take a very hard liner with people too. If you've got a franchisor who's not looking after one of my franchisees, that can be quite brutal. I mean really very, very upset. Or a client that has been let down very badly by somebody, you know, there's consequences to that. So I can be very tough about it. But you've always got to do what's right and just keep that in mind.

Yeah, absolutely. I want to go back to your book, the declining birth rate. Your. I speak about Elon in a way that he started, he built PayPal and sold it and then took that money and built the next companies like Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company and also the one where you put a chip in.

The head which is destroyed.

But yes, okay, now his literally aiming to occupy Mars. I call that the Mars landing. Now, all of us earthlings who are not aiming to get to Mars, we have our own version of our Mars landing. Yours is epigenetics. How does someone go for their Mars landing? How does someone set their Mars landing? Where most young entrepreneurs right now just wanting to start a business or make some money, I guess you can call that their moon landing. For now.

I would Never be in a business I couldn't see the value of. Give me, give you an example. Cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is pure speculation. I don't think anybody should. I think it's a terrible business to be in. Even if you can speculate successfully, and most people who try to speculate lose, you shouldn't do it. You should not do anything that's simply based on making money. Find something worthwhile to do with your efforts. Find a real need out there. Don't put the money first. I don't care how brilliant the financial potential is. Don't do it unless you can actually see real value. You can make people's lives better off. That's a moral decision. But in the end, it's also good business advice. Find something that's worthwhile. What strikes you? What can you see as a need? Who's been let down? Where's the hole in the marketplace? Where's the need? Where are people suffering? What can I do to make other people's lives better? That's the question I'd ask. Find your purpose, but find it not money. Money is a terrible purpose. If you go for money, you're most likely going to make very little. You may. But if you go for purpose, whether you make money or not, you've suddenly done something worthwhile with your life.

If there was one, if you could create one major policy change, what would it be?

Relax. Residential zoning. It's a curse. Government regulation of zoning, of stopping people building what they want, where they want it, is forcing up the price of housing. It's pushing people into ridiculous mortgages. It's forcing up the rentals. It's just a terrible blight on society. It's increasing homelessness. People are dying in the streets because they can't afford to have houses. It's an absolute curse. What's happened? They pushed the price of housing beyond all reasonable limits. You should be able to buy a house with like three years income. That's what used to be the case in the past. Government policy has done this. I'm actually so angry about the whole thing. I'm looking at possibly standing for state parliament in Victoria in the next state election to try and do something about it. That really, really is a big passion of mine.

That is a domino effect to the next part. You get a house, you have a nest, you start a family. Without that, the family part becomes increasingly harder.

Well, you don't actually need to have a house before you have a family. I started having kids when I was still Mowing lawns and in debt. I was renting for several years before I actually bought a house. So, no, I just think to me kids are the priority. Absolutely. I love my children. I've got 10 children. I love my children. It's the greatest thing.

How many grandkids?

Hang on, a bit of count. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Yeah, and one more one on the way.

Amazing. Congratulations. I'm having. I'm about to have my first child with my wife in June. Exciting times.

Have a few more.

I will for sure. Of course. Absolutely. Jim told me to have more kids. Let's do it now. Finally, I want to just talk a bit, a little bit more about your personal philosophy. I've gathered a lot already. What's a belief or principle you've once held that you've changed your mindset about?

Well, I don't know. When I was young I loved Ayn Rand. I adore books like Atlas Shrugged. I still think it's a great novel, but I think it's about the most obnoxious and evil philosopher you could possibly have. So I'm quite different in that way. I think the virtue of community and caring selfishness is the opposite to what we need. So that's one thing. Other things too. Look, I've got strongly traditional values and principles, but I was very strongly against same sex marriage for that reason. I think differently now. I think people should stay with an intimate partner and they shouldn't sleep around and stuff. But if people are really minded that way, I think the same sex hookup is a lot better than just being out there being promiscuous. Those are examples. I change my mind a lot about a lot of things. Actually. I've changed my mind more in the last five years than I haven't any time in my whole life. I'm just always changing my mind about things I read. I probably read two or three books a week or listen to. I'm obviously always hearing new things.

It's one of my last questions. What is the book that you recommend? Any young entrepreneur read.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which is Stephen Covey. I love that one. Recommended one of my daughters, actually. That's brilliant. It talks about character. I don't like the Dal Carnegie thing, which is all many people. 7 Habits is about being the right kind of person. Actually, I read a couple times. I'm going to listen to it again fairly shortly. That's number one. Also read my book. That's good. It's a practical story. But there's so many good books Actually, if anybody's interested, they can email me and I'll send them a list of all my favorite books. There's about 50 of them in all kinds of different areas.

I'm down first. I'll put my hand up straight away.

Yeah, I'll send it to you. Just send me an email. I'll send you absolutely.

All right, quick fire round. So short answers only. This is, the topic is entrepreneurs. How do you deal with difficult business related news that directly affects you?

Well, you're talking about in the public sphere. It doesn't affect us very much. Actually we're not too affected by government policies because we're sort of at a different level. If anything, I think government should be more active in terms of shutting down or do something about very poor franchisors in a sense surveying franchisees every year and publishing the results, that kind of stuff too. But I've always talked about it. I think what they do is pathetic. They get very angry and upset at the way people get ripped off by people like retail food group. Yeah, but, but how, how things affect me, I don't know. I mean, I mean the thing that affects me is I suddenly finally got a million dollar tax bill. I didn't expect. That's not very nice. But I have to say if I get a million dollar tax bill and I didn't expect to pay and one of my franchisees is failing, the franchisee upsets me more. I'll just pay the tax bill. I got to do it. But yeah, I can never get accustomed to anybody failing. It just upsets me and it happens. It'll keep on happening.

Do you miss anything about being an employee?

I've never been an employee. Actually. I think the last time I had a job When I was 18, I worked at the barman drink waiter for a while and I wasn't very good at it.

All right, last one for budgeting for finance. How do you keep your spending targeted and on track?

Well, I'm incredibly scungy. I mean I really am. I'm really a miser. So I just naturally don't like spending money. If I go to the supermarket, I'll always look at the bottom shelf. Where's the cheap? Where's the no name brand? Come on. My wife objects. She says it's not so good. I said it's good enough. Get the Coles brand, that's good enough. So I'm just a naturally tight one. So. But like I said, if I go in the house, I'll switch lights off. This kind of Thing too. I just do that.

Oh, I'm the same. My mum. My mum brought me up. She's just like, seb, come here. And it'd be across the room, our house, and I'd get there. Yes, Mum, what is it? Turn the light off. It's the habits.

That's a good habit. You count the cents and the dollars come. Yeah, that's it. Bit ambiguous now. A bit out of date now, but yeah, you've gotta. You just don't spend money at all. I just think it's. I just think it's immoral to spend money on. On things that are not necessary. I mean, I've got. I just don't spend like. Like my. These. These shoes that I'm wearing. This thing here. Okay, there we go. That's from. That's the 20 bucks from Kmart. Do you get recognized holes in them? Because I wear them until they just got too many holes. I chuck them out. So I just naturally. I just naturally. I'm a tight wad.

Do you get recognized when you walk around? All right, Jim, thank you so much for your time and great chats for everybody listening. There's a whole discussion about entrepreneurship, business, franchising, epigenetics. Got that one right. Bit of artificial intelligence and a whole bunch of awesome stories. Jim, it's a pleasure to talk to you and have you here and I look forward to seeing what's next. If there's one gym, something that you could open next, what would it be?

We'd like to get into the medical space. Doctors and stuff like that and, you know, hearing specialists and stuff. Yeah, Home provision of medical services. Health is a good one. We're about to start Health Services, which is looking after people in their homes. I like interviews with health interests me. We're actually about to launch Jim's Healthy. That's actually coming. I'm getting packaged food made, which has got like 4.5 rating and 2 and a half serves of veg. It's the kind of stuff that you eat if you really want to live a long, long healthy life. So that's coming up very shortly. So I'm pretty excited about that one.

And for someone that has a research center and living the good stuff and the good shit, that's awesome. I'm excited. You're gonna. Are you gonna put that. When you go to the shops, you'll see that.

You'll see it in the supermarkets. They're gonna call it supermarkets. And also we're going to be providing it directly to the public. That's the idea. Health is good.

Healthy is good. Healthy is great. Healthy is essential, necessary. All right, guys, thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. And, yeah, check it. Check out the, the episode. Leave a comment, all that stuff, and I'll see you soon.