Jim Penman on Building Jim’s Group, Housing Policy Failures & Why He’ll Never Sell

Our government, we pay our government massive amount of taxes and they say what can we use this for? I know, let's impoverish everybody. Let's take away the assets, let's force people to pay double the price for housing. We are the government. Trust us. We had a reason, we won't tell you what it was. Oh yes, we had to do it. We had to impoverish a whole lot of people. Good to be here.

Very good. I told my family I was catching up with Jim. Today you've got that iconic brand where people certainly know it, you've obviously got your face on the logo, etc, done incredibly well. So we run a commercial real estate business, Jones Real Estate. Tim and I are directors of the firm. We like sitting down with people that have had a significant amount of success and you're certainly that. I was doing a bit of research on you. So you were born in England?

Yeah, I'm afraid to say I was, yes. But my mother's Australian so I'm not a fom.

Is your Jim in brackets? David.

David James Penman's my dual name.

There you go.

But I use my middle name.

Very good. Well my middle name is Albert so I stick with Paul. Stick with Paul. 5200 plus franchises?

Yeah, about five and a half thousand now. Yeah.

So what made you start?

Well, I started gardening in 1970. In fact I've actually done gardening jobs since I was 8 years old, like for neighbors and so forth. When I Left School in 1970 I took a gap year. I put an ad in the newsagents like the local hardware store, did some hourly rates and then a few years later I got a one buy a car. So I bought a lawnmower to help pay for that and also because I could take the lawnmower around. That was about 1975. I did it as a student job until 1982. Intended to be an academic. That completely fell apart. No possibility. So I turned my part time student job into a full time lawn mowing business.

There you go. It did did pretty well in the scheme of things.

We're taking a while though, you know, we are talking about 40, 43 years later. So how'd you get my success?

How'd you transition from I guess as you said, with one lawnmower. How did you get into that first business to first franchise? What were the steps along you took?

I started working full time 1982.

How'd you get into that first business, the first franchise? What were the steps along you took?

I started working full time 1982, very, very tough. In the beginning there was a drought and stuff. Really on the edge. I was deeply in debt at the time, so it was not a good situation. But then the drought finished and I started to get busier. And one thing I did right, I did a lot of stupid things, but I was very, very good on customer service. Yeah. So whenever I. I got a lot of regular clients, all the time I was picking up regular clients, they looked after people, did a good job, started putting subcontractors on, which was difficult because their service wasn't so good. But what I figured out, eventually there was more money in building up and selling lawn mowing rounds. So that was what I did over the next few years. And then about 1987, company called VIP came and they were franchised and I thought of franchising, but I couldn't see what the benefit to the franchisees were. I could find them the jobs, but after that, why did they need me? But VIP sort of showed that there was a model that could be used. I actually. They terrified me. They had hundreds of franchisees at that time and I thought these guys had crushed me because they're just so much better funded, so much more knowledgeable. They had this office, they were in the state, all these things. I actually rang them up and said, hey, can I just help you to join? I'll build your client base in Melbourne. And they said, no, not interested in that. So I said, all right, let's just see what they're doing. So I went into the franchising Expo, which was 1988, it was in the old exhibition buildings in Melbourne, and took up my badge that they gave you, went up to the stand and said, can you tell me about vip? How does it work? So he gave me the information, gave me this brochure. Then the state manager came in and kicked me off. That's Jim Penman, don't you.

And where are they now? Do they around still?

Yeah. At the time they had 250 franchisees. I think they probably got about the same.

There you go. It's a bit of a Blockbuster and Netflix sort of dilemma.

Yes. Yes. Surprised me actually when somebody asked me at the beginning how many times when I first started, how many franchisees I might have one day. And I said, look, I don't know really, but if it works well, one day I could have as many as 100.

And with, I guess finding those franchisees, how did you advertise? How did you find that customer base? Because I mean, back then to what it is now with social media, with advertising in general.

Well, customer in those days was very simple. First of all, I started with leaflets. That worked pretty well in the beginning. Then local papers. The trades got local papers, and then the yellow pages as we became sort of citywide. So there's your three basic methods, none of which worked, of course.

So business back in the 80s or pushing into the 90s is a little bit different than it is today. What are the biggest shifts that you've seen and. And how have you sort of changed your course over time?

Well, the Internet changes everything. It's the IT revolution that changed everything. For a start, our methods now finding work are all to do with Google and Facebook and social media of various kinds. So virtually 100% change in where jobs come from. That's for a start. The other big difference is that the development of IT allows us to do things that we couldn't do in the past. So, for example, when I first started gyms as a franchise, we had a system where you wanted to give work to the local franchisee who wanted it. You might have 20 franchisees covering a certain area. Who do you give it to? Do you give it to the territory holder? But what if they're overloaded? What other people do need work? So I developed a system which was extremely manual, that every franchisee would say what suburbs they were taking, where they wanted, whether available for work, and all the rest of it. And that was all manual was actually a blackboard. Now I had, like, the amount of money it cost to put that system in place cost me more than I was charging in franchise fees. I almost went broke in the beginning, but then I automated that. Now it's automatic. Yeah. So somebody comes in and says, I want my lawns mode in this area. Now we look up 20 people who could do it, and the system will automatically say, hey, this guy's territory writes you down for work. He gets it. Or if there's no territory holder or system, okay, there's three people who down for work. This one's had the fewest jobs in the past three days. Yeah. So it does all these kind of calculations, bang like that. So all the client knows is they give their details and. Or book them online and we say, okay, well, we'll sign so and so.

So in terms of revenue in your very first year, and, you know, in recent years, you're able to give a bit of the gulf. And just to show what.

What's what, the scale pretty much been my first year, because when I first started franchising, it Wasn't making anything at all.

Basically the very first year that you started your own business as the sole trader to what it is today. What's. What sort of growth are we talking in, you know, annual revenue?

Okay, well, you got enough inflation, but I think I was making about $600 a week back in those days. So $30,000 a year, which you could, you know, more than double in present 10 terms.

Very first year that you started your own business as the sole trader to what it is today, what sort of growth are we talking in annual revenue?

Okay, well, you got enough inflation, but I think I was making about $600 a week back in those days. So $30,000 a year, which you could, you know, more than double in present 10 terms. We make about $12 million a year right now. Yeah. Nice.

Amazing.

Too bad.

Yeah, it's not that much actually. They put me down for the BRW Rich list or they tried to. And I said that particular.

Paul paid to try. Go on it.

Yeah.

They said, no, you're not on it, unfortunately.

No, I just said that's absurd. And they said we should do it on turnover. I said, well, that doesn't reflect the value of my business, but gyms is kind of a. It's not primarily designed to make money. I went through all my fencing franchises just a couple of weeks back and I said a few weeks. I said, your fees you're paying are on the high side. I just don't think it's fair. So we actually drastically cut their fees by about three or four hundred dollars a month.

Okay, nice.

And of the franchises, Jim's Mowing's obviously the, you know, the global name. What's your. Is that your baby? Are there other ones that you along the way that are your favourites? It's probably a hard question to pay. Probably answer. They all are. But is that ones you're more proud. Is there one you're more proud of than another?

I. I'm a lawn mowing contractor by training. I don't know anything about most other businesses. I really don't. But each time my heart bleeds green because I did it for 15 years and I love it. I still actually at the weekends, my hobbies, I go out and gardening. I've got.

Do your own gardens.

Do your own gardens?

Yeah. Not. Not at home actually. I don't. I like vegetables. Yeah. I've got a massive potato patch that I grow things like pumpkin and the silver beet and everything. Okay. I love to be on a growing food. That's just to me it's fun. All right, so mowing is my heart, but now mowing's not actually. It's still our biggest division. It's got about 2200 franchisees, but cleaning is catching up fast. The cleaning division is together, coming close on 2000, 2000.

So from the start, were you driven to. Were you driven by, you know, some people driven by financial success. Some people just, you know, start a business and it grows into something huge and they keep going. Was there anything that ultimately drove you to build, know what you have created?

The desire to do scientific research.

Okay.

Because my PhD, which I did, which was in history, technically speaking, I was in the history department, came up with a theory of society and social change that indicated that the reasons for problems aside in success and failure is to do with biology.

Yes.

And an area I have no qualifications in. So I wanted to continue that, but I had no possibility of an academic post anyway. I had no training or background. So my fundamental desire. Until that time, I never had any desire to make money. I thought I'd be an academic. I'd just work on research. I work on books. And it's kind of. That was my aim. Money. I lived very simply, did then, still do. But when I got to that stage and I realized my academic career wasn't going anywhere, I said the only thing I can do is, is to develop this, is to set up a research institute. And I've now got a research institute. In the last year, we spent about $3 million and I hope to have that increase dramatically.

What are you researching?

What's basically what we're doing is looking at the effects of mild food restriction and how to get the benefits, psychological benefits. A lot of problems going on in society right now. You've got problems of collapsing birth rates, you've got rising rates of mental illness. The work ethic is in decline. Demoralization. There's a lot of really bad things going on in the world right now. And I believe these things have neurological roots. That's to do with the epigenetics, to do with the way the environment affects on our genes, switches genes on or off. Now we're working on ways to reverse that to help people to have, to be happier, to have a stronger sense of community, to return to faith, to sense of meaning and purpose in life.

And you sort of touched on being an author of books. You've got one coming out this year. I've read as well. But how many have you done leading up to that one? I can obviously see one of the ones there You've got one coming out. Is it later this year?

Yes, that's right. This is no Other Success.

Yeah, no Other Success. Yeah, that's.

That's my main. What I've done is a series of business books.

Yes.

Which actually get changed. Mostly what we do with those is give them out to prospect because it's a way of talking about the values of the company. You want to attract people who've got Jim's values, which are very service oriented, service to franchisees. So these books are designed to do that.

So like a marketing method or.

It tends to attract the people we want, people who really believe in service. There's this latest version called no Other Success that's coming out shortly and that's going to be released to the public. I've had a professional editor look at it and copy with it. And it's going to be reduced in the state. In the States too. Overseas. There's another book coming out towards the end this year or early next year, which is called Birth Rate Crisis.

Yes.

Which is about my research and the problems that are going on in society, why these changes are happening and what we're going to do to reverse them. And we're actually developing treatments, for example. We're at the moment testing about 61 different drugs which have similar epigenetic effects.

Yes.

We've been actually identifying them for using nerve cells in a sort of a. You put this on a container, you put these nerve cells in and then you check epigenetically to see whether you get proposed changes. So we tested about a thousand drugs. We got 61 that look promising.

Yes.

We're going to start testing those. We're also starting a process where we're looking at the crispr, which is directly going into the. Into the cells and changing the epigenetic settings, looking at the ones you want to change and saying, okay, turn that one off, turn that one on. That's very exciting. That'll probably take. So we're running. The only reason for delay, the book is largely written is that we're waiting for the results of experiments. We're looking at particularly the dopamine reaction system. In a sense. Yeah. What's happening in society right now is that we're flooding ourselves. It's similar to a drug. When you take a drug like cocaine, what actually happens is.

Have you taken cocaine before?

No, neither have I. I don't drink alcohol or anything like that at all. I don't even drink coffee. Okay, so what happens when you flood your system with something like cocaine? It produces a surge of dopamine. Now, what the system the brain does, because it likes to be in balance, it sort of desensitizes the dopamine reaction system.

Yes.

And the more cocaine you take, the more desensitivity. So it doesn't work. They need more and more doses just to feel normal. And what we're doing is the opposite. We're actually working out ways to make the dopamine system more sensitive, and that will tend to make people a lot happier. So when you have traditional religions tend to do this kind of thing too, they make the dopamine system. So you find things like family, children, community, church, work more meaningful, more enjoyable, and therefore you're encouraged to do those kinds. That's what we're trying to do, trying to change, help people, to change character, to get away from this cycle of misery which is driven by affluence and things like that, return to a healthier psychological state.

I was looking at one of your books or the Decline of the West.

Yes.

What are your thoughts on Mr. Donald Trump?

Well, it's a sign of the same thing. What actually happens when a society, when a solution starts to decline, is you get a change from impersonal to personal loyalties.

Yes.

So, for example, in the end of the Roman Republic, Roman Republic stood for, you know, 500 years. It was very successful, in fact. And they had this Senate, they had laws, they. I mean, it was imperfect in a lot of conflicts and stuff, but people had norms of behavior. And then around the end of the second century bc, early first century, you get these people like Marius and Sulla and then Pompey and Caesar arising. And the loyalty of the troops is to them personally, and therefore that makes the state unstable.

Yes.

Now, the same thing happens with Trump. You've got people who are now loyal to Trump more than they are to the electoral system. So Trump says the election was stolen. Okay, I'm in favour of Trump. That's a very dangerous phenomenon. And that is the beginning of the same decline which, in the end, in Western societies, if we don't do something about it, will lead to the end of democracy as well as to economic stagnation and the rest.

What do you think of the woke capitalism that's happening across the globe at the moment?

Woke capitalism. What's woke capitalism?

Well, you know, I guess more of the woke politics. So you've got trumpet that's on one side, and then you've got, you know, probably more of the left that influencing decision making from, you know, childhood through to business.

Woke is part of the generation of the society. Yeah, it's, it's this. There's lots of really ridiculous idea like, you know, all white people are by definition racist, for example. All men are by definition, you know, patriarchs. And it's, and it also, what it does is it blames society and these things for what goes wrong with the world, whereas it's in the individual that makes a difference. I believe in character, a certain kind of character. A character that is disciplined, that has strong values, that is part of tradition as society, that believes in honesty and these kind of things.

Be like our friend Tim here.

Thank you, Jim. Now, as we're a commercial real estate podcast and we're a commercial real estate agents, maybe we'll go to maybe the property side of things. Obviously you've got the franchises there. What sort of property are you involved in? Are you involved in development, owning property? I mean, I'm sure viewers would like to know what some, some of Jim spends his money on, whether it's property or lavish boats. Lifestyle, science.

Now, as far as property is concerned, I don't own property except for personal use. I own my house or it's in my wife's name, actually I own this property here.

Nice.

Which is a nice one. I've got a small farm, so that's kind of personal use property.

No commercial real estate.

No commercial real estate at all. My wife's a property developer, so she's involved in that kind of thing. She goes in and, you know, buys it, buys a house and knocks it down and puts three units in place. That's that kind of stuff too. So she's in that area. I frankly, real estate's not my thing, so it's not much good for your public research.

And what was the cocaine? That's probably not our thing either.

Dopamine. Let me give you an example, okay? Let's just say you buy an investment property. What sort of return can you expect to get out of it? Depends what it is. Maybe 4 or 5% if you're lucky. Okay. Now I could do something like buy a regional franchise bag repurchase a regional franchise that returns about 25%. Plus it tends to grow with time. I mean, property doesn't me have much attraction for me.

All man's got the same sort of concept as that. He doesn't hold on to assets. He buys and flips, he runs service stations, but he'll never hold because it's just too much money locked in something with not much return.

I would say the, the personal investment market Is private investment market is also private. Housing is a very poor one. The only thing that justifies the returns is the tax benefits. Our properties are grossly overvalued. If you look at the median house price in an area like say, Houston, Texas, where they've got relatively lenient zoning, the typical house, the media house, is a bit over half a million dollars in Australian terms, which is about half what people are paying in Sydney and Melbourne. That's driven up by government regulation. So we've got a vastly too strong regulation system which stops people building houses. So the government has this policy that says, okay, let's arrange an immigration policy that we get a half million new immigrants every year and let's use the iron hand of government to stop people building enough house to put them in. What could possibly go wrong?

Yeah, that's the science. Yeah, we see that every day with developers. You want us to build homes but you don't help us doing it.

Yeah, well, just like the fact that it takes so long, one of the things they've done in Texas as an example is if you apply for a permit to do something and you can't get it in the reason with like a month, you can go to some private, say, architecture or some license to actually put it through.

Yeah.

So why can't we do the same thing here? Fire all the buddy bureaucrats, put a very simple system in place that allows people to build in any reasonable way, you know, near stations and stuff and inner city. Build more dense housing. Don't put things like ridiculous requirements to put, you know, somebody's looking for a station, you've got to buy a unit, it's got to have a allowance for a car. Why you don't want to own a car? Why can't you? Why do you have to pay for a car spot? Why can't you? Why do you have to have single housing units? Why can't you have terrace houses like they do in so many cities in the world? Why can't you have proper dense housing that makes housing affordable, allows people to live near where they work or near public transport. It is so much better.

So you'd rather privatise. So you'd say privatise it. Almost.

Yeah.

Speed it up.

They did the thing in Auckland and Auckland prices, they reckon about 40% below what they would have been. This has been going for the last. Since 2017, so they've been going about eight years. And property prices in Auckland are way below what they would be if they hadn't done it. So that's an example. They do it better. Places like Minneapolis in the US Obviously, Texas is a good example. The house prices in San Francisco are like three times what they are in similar size city to somewhere like Houston or Dallas, one of those. So zoning is a terrible problem. Our government, we pay our government massive amount of taxes and they say what can we use this for? I know, let's impoverish everybody. Let's take away the assets, let's force people to pay double the price for housing. They would if we didn't get involved. Let's. I just read an article in Australia this morning about medical implants. You know, the government forces private hospitals to pay way over the odds. They're not allowed to negotiate. Look, it costs Australian health system like a billion dollars a year because the government forces them to pay too much. Or you look at something like, look at taxis. Okay, government enforced monopoly. Now people like Uber and Lyft come along and break the monopoly. What happens? Okay, prices go down, service goes up dramatically. As soon as you take the iron hand of government governments, where we pay billions and billions and billions of dollars to government and say make us poor.

Yeah, you're certainly right. You're certainly right. Maybe.

I think you're alone on that one for a lot of our clients.

Well, we should do something about it too. And I know perfectly well if you looked at the way government runs, governments are incredibly inefficient. They do far too much of the wrong things. They tolerate the wrong things and they do them extreme inefficiency. Look, I worked briefly for the federal government for six months back in 1970. The job I had took barely half my time. And they wanted to give me a job that only took about one day a week. There was no efficiency at all. So if you take up that we would have enough if we cut back government to do the things that it needs to do and made it efficient and took that money and then took away the ridiculous zoning regulations. Save enough money, you give enough money back to ordinary citizens to money will pay for their rent.

What you're saying, I believe someone like you recently did that in the US by the name of Elon Musk and his Doge department. Is that Jim's Doge coming next?

But look, I almost did my Musk. This is a great man, one of the greatest technologists of that time. If you look at SpaceX in particular, and I've read everything there is to know about Musk, what he did is fabulous. He's reduced the cost of space launch by 90% this guy is an amazing. I have to say, when it comes to Doge, he's an absolute klutz. How could they possibly. Elon.

Elon watches. Elon's one of our partners.

He's actually on.

He's our number one subscriber.

All right. I love Elon Musk, the technologist. I admire him as much as any person on the face of the earth. But look, they go in to do things like they fire air traffic controllers, they fire the people doing the most basic job in the society. You need a scalpel. He went in with a blowtorch. I mean, it's absurd. There's so much waste. I was so hopeful, actually, to be honest, when the election was around, I was hoping that Trump would win because his influence. Because of musk. I thought, you get musk in you, do something about this bloated public service and take it back and do it properly. Who could do that better than Musk? This is the guy. This is the guy that goes on an assembly line and he looks at what they do and he says, why are you using this here? When you get one that's useful, an aviation, you can get one for a car for 1% of the cost. Why don't you use that? Give it a try. Cut this back, do this, do this. Kept on reducing costs, he goes right on the assembly. This is an absolutely brilliant man. I also admire him, too. I'm very much in support of him because of his system, of his application of fertility. We're right on the same side. So in many ways, I enormously admire him. But what he did in government was terrible and it really gave a bad name. You so badly need efficiency. Governments that do what they're supposed to do to make people more prosperous. And I believe in government, we need governments to do things like, you know, so we've got clean air and clean water and safe food. Governments do a lot of really good stuff, but they do a lot of stupid things. Example, franchising, okay? The franchising code, okay? This is burying us deeper and deeper in layer through layer after layer. There is this disclosure document that everybody has to have now, let me tell you, this is a legalistic document that lawyers couldn't understand, that most lawyers could not comprehend it. So dense. I asked a question. At least in training, we have 100 plus in training. I said, has anybody read the disc document? Not one person had read it. And yet we have this massive. We got the employee lawyers just to try and cope with the ever increasing demand. That is a very simple Way to get franchise drawers to be ethical and do things properly. And what you do is you have a public body, you have a private body. Screen interviewing, surveying franchisees across the country once a year. Franchisor has no say in this and you post the results. Now you do that one thing, which we do all the time. We do it with clients, we, we do it with franchisees to get better service. There's one thing which would cost the government nothing and you would have a massive, massive effect. The whole thing about this disclosure document, it's a gift. It's a really gift to lawyers. They love it. It's a feeding frenzy for lawyers. And the other thing that really helps is the most unscrupulous rip off merchants possible. Because if you want to do something bad to your franchise, really bad, you bury it in the script because nobody ever reads.

Yeah.

So it's a typical example of government doing something, putting vast costs on the people who own businesses while actually making it worse for the franchisees they're supposed to protect. Because they only think, how can I enrich lawyers? How can I make more money for financial consultants? These people are not, they're deserving poor. Let's pour billions of dollars into their pockets. That's what government does. It's so stupid. It's so insane. It's so inefficient. It takes no account of the costs.

Definitely.

Well, they should almost do a round table when you came in here.

Another example. This is government stupidity. You've seen this sporting complex on the right as you walk in. Okay. It took us years to get that done. And the kind of things that the local government was getting us to do was saying, okay, first of all, you're going to put this up. There's a fire hazard. Take these trees down. All right, don't say, okay, but if you took the trees down, that's the damn time. Don't take the trees down. So that's the result. You want to build this thing, you take the trees down. You don't take the trees down. Completely contradictory. They force us to do something and then tell them you can't do it. So you've got to negotiate months trying to bring these. Council doesn't care. What do they care? They get paid salaries regardless. So all these parasites, you could wipe billions of dollars of costs and you could have real growth and real change in society.

I'm scared to ask you what you. How did you go with COVID with the government during that sort of process? Yeah, yeah, you went well.

Examp. What is the one we're on your side. What is one country in the world that had the least Covid restrictions? One OECD Sweden. Okay, now tell me the one country in the world that had the lowest excess deaths from COVID Sweden. Same country. What they did was insane. There was no medical reason for the stuff they did. The curfew that Dan Andrews put in Victoria. There was no advice, There was no health advice. Why were sole alone contractors not allowed to work? Why were we cut off for two months? No income, Vast amount of money taken from borrowed and to try and keep them in some sort of money. Why was that done? Okay, where's the health advice? Do you know what? There was no health advice at all because we went to court to sue the government on behalf of one of the people effective franchisees as to. There's a law that says in Victoria you can't take away somebody's life without good reason. So we went, we went to the government, we sued them, we said on this guy's behalf, we said, what was their reason? And they said, yes, we had a really good reason. What was the reason? We can't tell you. They went to court against telling us there was a reason. In other words, they had no reason.

They fought against not telling you.

They actually went to court and the court said, yes, we agree with you. You can take away a person's life without good reason, but you don't have to explain what the reason is. You don't have to present it. You just have to say, we are the government. Trust us. We had a reason. But we won't tell you what it was. Oh, yes, we had to do it. We had to impoverish a whole lot of people. We had good reason. But we don't have to tell you. I mean, what is, how's that different from a dictatorship? I mean, crumbs, what was it? Did you guys win or China or Russia? In that sense, did the franchisee win or no? No, because the government. Because the court basically said the government doesn't have to tell you the reason, but they're right. Yeah.

Sounds like my arguments.

Yeah.

Anyway, I can definitely feel. And no doubt Tim can too. You know, if I was going to summarize, what was my chat with Jim like? And passion.

Passion was my. A lot of the same time I said passion.

So being successful in business, what are the key, you know, key traits or attributes that you think it takes for someone to do well? Because there's a lot of people out there, but, you know, only a few reach the Pinnacles of fundamental based.

A pinnacle is not how I describe myself. I am not one of the rich people because it's never been my aim.

I'm not necessarily saying success and rich is the same, but you have created a significant brand.

There is very different forms of business, okay? There are people who are in business and they aim to make money at any cost. They are just ruthless rip off merchants, vultures, nasty evil people. Can I give an example which I'm very familiar to, it's people like Retail Food Group and others with these multinational companies. They come in, they buy up a brand, okay? And then they rip off the franchisees blind.

Like a super cheap order.

Yeah, it's absolutely shocking. And what you've got is people. And I relate to franchisees because that's my constituent. That's my main world, really, my franchise. I hardly know anybody outside of gyms. These people who save for years to buy, to put half a million dollars into a business, these are just ordinary people. And then these rip off companies come and say, I'm going to rip you blind.

Sell the dream, I guess.

And they make them buy stuff for half for double what you can buy for in Coles. They make them sell a pizza for less than the cost of the ingredients. They don't care because they get a percentage of turnover. They make them do ridiculous changes. They rip off their business from them after they've got to the end of their term and they take it back. They do the most appalling, shoddy things. Now there's a lot of companies these days, more and more that do this kind of garbage. And if you look at someone like Jack Welsh as an example, this is a guy who was so admired at the end of the 20th century. But what he did to GE was he destroyed largely a great long term company. He did things like focused on short term profits where he got massive, you know, he got bonuses. He became insanely rich by doing this. He laid off tens of thousands of people with expertise and then he moved to other areas where people were cheaper but less experienced. And the reason that Boeing had so much trouble is one of his, one of his acolytes went and took over Boeing and did the same thing. Manipulated the financial results, just changed them. He had this ridiculously smooth thing because he used the Jim DG financial capital to do it. Yes, there's people who go into, okay, they buy a local newspaper and they fire most of the staff and they just do almost nothing. But because there's these subscriptions going and they milk it for money in the short term. So there's a lot of these vulture capitalists around and these people are evil. I really hate them like poison.

So will you never sell gyms for that reason?

No. In fact, there's a clause in my contract, all our new contracts says that the majority share of Jim's group cannot be sold to anybody without the written consent of a majority of franchisees. Not only that, but our family trustee actually has directors, which are my children, representing the research, but also elected by Juden's franchisees. Because after I. While I'm alive, it will never happen. I'll never ever want to sell it anyway and I want to protect my franchise. After I'm gone, I'll put in another 20 years. I'm in good health. Yeah, that's my aim.

And do your family members work within the business?

You've got 10 children.

I've got 10 children, yeah. I've got some great kids. One of them actually is running a.

Couple of Pauls, not so good kids.

A highly successful franchise, and they're going to become quite wealthy. My daughter is doing gym removals, but I'm very concerned that it happened. So I'm really getting off the point here. What I'm saying is there's a lot of people around in business who are evil. You can make money by doing really nasty things, by hurting people, and you can make money at least short term.

What would the market value of gyms be worth? What have you been offered in the past?

Oh, I don't know. Nobody's offered. I just go away on literally.

So round number six, say a billion dollars.

Oh, no, no, no.

For the purpose of an example, say if I offered you a billion dollars for gyms.

Yeah.

Wouldn't you then be able to use that money to fund scientific research to better the.

I'm not going to. I'm not going to. I'm not going to betray my franchisees, okay? I'm just not going to. There's no money that can make me do it. Honestly speaking, it just wouldn't be worth it. I've seen what happens. These franchises are built up by the founders who cared about their franchisees. Taken over by these vultures. I couldn't do it. To me, life has got to have a purpose. And my purpose is my research. My purpose is my family. My purpose is my franchisees who are like my extended family. You know, every one of my franchisees has my direct phone number, email address, and they can call me anytime. Wow. One of them even rang me on Christmas Day just, just to wish you happy Christmas.

What sort of conferences do you do for the teams, for the all the franchisees? Do you. What sort of events throughout the year? Are there any sort of big sort of ones you do?

Well, they, they have. Basically we have multiple divisions and regions so that it's more organized, that we don't do a lot ourselves. We act as a sort of the support system for the entire group. Yes, so we do that. But look, anyway, I got ranting before. The point of it is my view of business is this what you do? First of all, you focus on service. You serve the people you do with, you're focused on them. It's not just the profit, it's the service, it's the people. And good. Great long term companies have that kind of orientation. So we look after. Our first priority in gyms is our franchisees. They're actually our number one customers. That's number one. Obviously we've got to look at our clients because if you're looking after clients really well and giving them great service, that means more work, more income for franchisees. And then you've got a responsibility to staff, you've also got responsibility to suppliers. There's a whole lot of. I object strongly to the Chicago School idea that the only people you're going to be concerned with is your shareholders. No, you've got responsibility. Everybody and a good long term company has this. You've got to think long term, you cannot be chasing the next thing. So service is key. And then what you do is you incrementally improve. You look at what you do every day and say, how can I do this better? How can I improve? This is a mistake. How can I avoid that? How can I improve efficiency? How can I improve service? And it is one of the greatest helps for that too. And AI things like we use everything possible. There is not a day goes by and I'm talking Christmas Day holidays where I'm not thinking how can we improve? And I make a lot of really bad mistakes.

What's the biggest mistake you've made in business?

Wrong staff member. I won't say who, but somebody who just came in basically did a lot of really bad damage. I've made some appalling choices.

The good seem to outweigh the bad ones at this from where I'm sitting.

Well, yes, of course, that's the point. Look, I've got some brilliant people. You've talked to Joel for example.

Yes.

I mean Joel's fantastic. He's a young man who actually came in to do a casual, unskilled job 12 years ago. Very junior. He's now one of my top managers, executives, and he is incredible. The work that he's done in social media and stuff is just amazing. He's great. I've got so many other people, too. I've got Megan, who runs what we call Biza, which is selling jobs to other franchisees. I've got some great IT people, like, people like Eugene and Dave and Safi, who are developing systems and maintain them. I've got really good people. Charlene, who runs the call center, she does a really efficient job. She's just a great lady. So I've got a lot of really people around. Great people. But I've made some terrible mistakes, too, definitely.

When did you decide to shave the beard? Was it a tough call?

Well, no, not really. The reason I grew a beard was way back. It was about 1982, because I had a fiance at the time who liked beards. And I thought, well, if she likes the beard and I don't have to shave every day, why not grow beard? So I grew a beard. So that's why I had one. In 2000, I found myself, not from my own choice, I might say, single. My beard at that stage was starting to go gray, and I thought, I do not need to look any older. Off it comes.

There you go.

Totally to do with women. Nothing to do with anything else. We men live to please women, don't we?

Yeah, unfortunately.

I've been married to my wife now for 24 years, and I adored her. I'm crazy about her. And yes, if she wanted to go up here, I would.

Is there a but coming? But. No, but.

No, no, no. The two greatest things that ever happened in my entire life were the age of 28 when I became a Christian, and the age of 48 when I met Lee.

How old are you today?

73.

And 73 when you did our podcast. Yeah, that's the third thing.

Sorry.

That's the third greatest thing that's happened.

You delude yourself. My wife is amazing. She has been brilliant in the business, but she's produced four beautiful children for me, really great children. And I just crazy, crazy in love with her. I'm just. I adore my wife so much. There's nothing in business that can equal that.

You need to refer us to her because she's the property contact.

By all means.

Very good. Well, thanks a lot for your time today, Jim. It's been an absolute pleasure. We're very privileged to be with you and spend a bit of your time. So we look forward to seeing what happens in the future of Jim's. And, you know, maybe one day you can buy Jones real estate, too.

So change character to get away from this cycle of misery which is driven by affluence and things like that. Return to a healthier psychological state.

I was looking at one of your books is the Decline of the West.

Yes.

What are your thoughts on Mr. Donald Trump?

Well, it's a sign of the same thing. What actually happens when a society, when a solution starts to decline is you get a change from impersonal.

Franchise that out for us.

Sounds good. Thanks, Jim.

No, thank you, Jim.

No worries. Thank you.