Jim’s Empire | Meet the Man Behind Australia’s Famous $500,000,000/yr Franchise (#70)

Welcome back to Self Made. I've got a very special guest today. This probably is Australia's most famous yet unrecognized man. If he passed you in the street, you probably wouldn't bat an eye. But I'm willing to bet that not a day goes by where you don't see one of his franchisees vehicles on the road. That guest is Jim Penman, founder and CEO of Jim's Group. He has over 5,000 franchisees across the globe with an annual revenue of over half a billion dollars. Wow. He's also a very educated man with a notable PhD which grants him the title of Dr. Jim Penman. And his story is an inspiring grassro roots journey that has really influenced me and I'm sure many others. So Jim, thank you so much for taking the time to come on here. How are you doing today, mate?

Yeah, great feeling, very good.

Awesome. Fantastic. Let's get straight into it. I want to ask you about the genesis of your journey. So you started the mowing business while you were completing your Ph.D. back in 84. And so how did you kind of find yourself in a mowing business? How did you decide that was the type of business for you and how did you navigate that while pursuing your academic stuff?

Well, I've actually had a gardening business since before I started university. I took a gap year in 1970 and I put an ad in the local hardware store in their window offering to do gardening work. I think I was charging like a dollar fifty an hour, something ludicrous in those days. And I got a couple of clients and just kept on going. A few years later got a lawnmower and just built it from there. So it was the part time job. Look as much as anything, it's because I like gardens. I actually enjoy being outside. I like green stuff, I just, I love it. In fact, at the weekend these days I got to my farm and I, I spend several hours digging up vegetables and this kind of thing, that's my hobby. So which, which is a good guide to what you should do. People often ask me what division should they go into and I said what do you like doing? Like one of the, the top cleaning guy in, in, in Jim's group is Haider Hassane who's multi, multi millionaire these days. He started because he was working in the bank and then as a after hours he actually got a contract cleaning the bank and he said he enjoyed the cleaning more than he enjoyed the banking. That's how he got into that. And then he bought a franchise and went from There.

Yeah, well, it's like that cliche, if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. So. Awesome. And was there a key moment when you realized that this could become a national or even a global business?

Well, quite late it was. I was, I had, I was working full time on this from 82 and I franchised in 1989, basically under competitive threat. And somebody asked me at that time how many franchisees I might have one day and I said, well, if it works for me, but I have a hundred. And it did not occur to me that we go outside Victoria. So it was only when the franchise started taking off and we started getting. It just was surprisingly successful. We started getting. People come to me interstate saying, I want to join this thing. So yeah, it was driven by them, not me.

It's pretty incredible how prolific it is. I remember even just being a kid, we would have Jim's mowing come to our house in Ellenbrook in Perth, and I would. The logo and the name was just so synonymous with home services back in the day and it still is today. And it's funny what you say, you never expected it to go out of Melbourne, but even I go live on Instagram and TikTok and I have people asking me if I sell cleaning franchises and I'm like, no, I don't. But you can maybe check out Jim's because I've read a lot about the gyms franchises, I've compared them to other ones and I have recommended people to check out a Jim's franchise because it's built on strong values and principles, which I really admire. And that's. I kind of wanted touch on that as well because you're obviously a man of strong values and principles and I think you have to be to get to this level that you're at. So what values and principles have kind of remained consistent since day one of your business?

Fundamentally, service is where it's at when you start off as a, as a lawmaker, contractor, I was very obsessive about service. I always want to do the best job. I hated letting clients down. Just as an example, in those days, in the early days, the only way to cut an edge was with a blade, with a rotating wheel blade that you line the edge, which was fine. Everybody expected that and I could do a very neat job on that one. But what I couldn't do was round the clotheslines and the retaining walls because there's no concrete edge to use in that sort of area. And it used to frustrate me. Now I can tell you, no client ever asked me. They never, ever said to me, I don't like this, can you do it? It was just too much work with a pair of shears. But it used to bug me. And one day I went into the mower shop that I had, a little mower shop in Elson, and he was fixing my mower. And while he was doing that, I was wandering around the shop looking and I saw this really weird looking gadget on the floor, the far end of the shop. And it was a long pole handle in the middle, engine on one end, and at the other end was this plastic thing with a bit of white cord sticking out. And I said, what's that? He said, it's a new idea just out from Japan. It's called a brush cutter. This is like 1970s, really early. And I said, well, what does it do? And he explained to me, he said, you pick it up here, you start this and this little nylon cord comes around. It doesn't bring about the trees, you can cut the grass. And I said, how much is it? And he told me, and I said, wow, that's a lot. That's more than a mower. I didn't have a lot of money in those days, but I bought it on the spot. And I started using it because I was frustrated by the fact I couldn't give a perfect job to the client. And that was always my thing. And when I had a brush cutter, I would brush cut. I'd mow the lawns first. I'd brush cut the nature strip, the front and the back. And then as I'm going down the driveway to go back to the car, I leave it on low grips and I zip the grass from the cracks in the driveway and I blow them off. Now, that wasn't part of the lawn. Nobody asked me, but to me it just looked better. People would say to me things like, I never knew my lawn could look this good. I was just fanatical. So that attitude to service made me surprisingly successful at doing that job. And then when I launched a franchise in 1999, I was determined that my franchisees were going to be successful. So I set the whole system up. I said, what do franchisees want? What are they after? And for example, I knew there was things about my competitors that vip, they didn't like. The fact that when a new franchise came in, VIP would go and take their regular clients and give them to the new guy. I knew they didn't like that. There was other things too, like when, if they grew, they couldn't grow past a certain point. So I thought, okay, if I was a franchisee, what would I like? So I put a whole lot of clauses into the contract that protected franchisees, gave them rights, absolute right of first refusal, jobs coming to territory. But if anywhere else, you can work wherever you like, you can put as many as employees you like, your fees don't go up, you've got a guaranteed renewal. We can't take regular clients off you without your consent. All written into the contract. And I had to argue with the lawyers because they said you're being too nice. That's the way they put it. Because franchisors are supposed to give themselves more power. And I said no. And it also was determined too. I knew from, I used to sell law mowing rounds and I knew that somebody who didn't do very well in their trial, it wasn't giving good service when they were taken on the road to be trained, tended to fail. So I said, okay, I'm not going to have anybody that I think is likely to fail. So what I used to do was my competitors would always just take anybody who had the money. I would say, I'm not going to take anybody who doesn't. So I'd actually get the trialers to take them out on the road first report back to me how good they are. If they don't pass muster, they don't get a franchise. So I was absolutely determined I was going to do everything possible to look after my franchisees. And that's kind of like, it's, in a way, it's also a Christian value. It's Jesus washing his disciples feet. It's the idea of servant leadership that I'm not there, I'm not your boss, I'm there to serve you, to help you to be successful.

Amazing. So yeah, service is, I mean I know as a service business owner that it's, we all like to be people pleasers and it can, it can really, it creates like a negative feedback loop where if you, if you can't provide a good service and then someone's unhappy, you know, it just creates this, this negative cycle. But when you can reinforce that feedback loop where you do good work, you get good feedback, your staff are happy and it keeps the flywheel turning. That's a great system. And so as the operator, when service was your main focus, providing that, that great service to the client and making sure they were happy, how did you transition into that when your customer became the franchisee? And did you, did you make sure There was a downstream effect where you would have the franchisee maintain those values and principles to the new customer, the end customer, which would then be theirs.

We do a whole lot of things about that. First of all, we screen. That's part of the process. A franchisor who doesn't screen properly can get into serious trouble, even be terminated, or at least we won't renew them. So we train very, very thoroughly. We have a three day generic training course. The first course in that is me talking about service, service to customers first, then service to franchisees. And I'm very, very fanatical about it. I talk about it. I give my direct personal email and phone number to every franchisee during training, every prospect during training, and they invited, in fact encouraged me. I say it again and again, contact me, any problems come to me. I try and speak individually, as many people as possible, so they've actually met me. So they will come to me and people do. I get probably several franchisees a day contacting about something so that they know they can talk to me. So I keep a very close eye, even though I'm not directly their main support. If something's going wrong, they contact me and I can. What's happened? What's gone wrong? How can we do this better? Who's letting fallen down in their job? Why isn't this franchisee being looked after? Why aren't they starting? Why aren't they getting the support they need? So that's that kind of ongoing, passionate concern. And I tell my franchisees too, you can contact me anytime, after hours, weekends, public holidays. I had a franchisee bring me on Christmas day just to wish me Happy Christmas, which is fine. But they do that. They know it. It's well known that I do respond. And when they contact me, I respond very, very fast.

Yeah, and that's something I think you were kind of famous for as well, is that you went into your own call center and worked in there and you found out that they weren't even reporting on all the things that they should have been. So you just did a whole reform of your own call center and then you brought it all the way up to the top. And so to this day you still have the franchisees have that direct point of contact here.

Not only that, but also clients too. If a client rings in once, that goes to the franchisor. Now if the client rings back a second time, that goes directly to me as the CEO of the company. And when you consider that we turn over, I don't know how many millions of Jobs we do a year, that's quite extreme. But it keeps franchisors in their toes because they know that if they do with something, I'll come back. And I'm usually got a fairly tough line. I say if you don't fix this by Wednesday, 5pm the money client's going to get their money back or something like that. So it pushes that sort of level of service a lot higher. So what I actually did, we started off I had in pre franchises when I was sub service was pretty terrible. Just to give you an idea, for every hundred leads we get, we would get 100 complaints. Most people not turning up now when the franchise system came in, they owned the business, they, there was all sorts of incentives on it that dropped. So the first time we started measuring complaints properly, like by me going to the call center and getting staff to ask them, it dropped to about 5%. So we had 100 leads, five complaints. And then I started putting extra systems in place. I started monitoring complaints and then sending out letters, warning letters, breach notices, retraining systems, all kind of things like. And then it dropped further and then we started putting in surveys. So every after 10 days we survey our customer and that feeds back in. And as we've done this, the actual complaint right now from 100% to 5%, it's now a fraction of 1%. Now we've got changes taking place in the next. We're spending several millions of software and one of the main drives of that is we're going to reduce that level of complaint by at least 50% over the next few months. We're going to push it down and even then we're going to keep on pushing for better service. So it's a constant driven process. I'm the only, not only do I deal with customers directly, I'm the only person that can delete a complaint. If a franchisee fixes the problem, makes the client happy or can prove they did the right thing. Client says they didn't call. Okay, here's the call. Within two hours, here's the text you sent to the client. Okay, that's not your fault. You did everything possible. So I'm intensely involved in this process of understanding complaints, educating people on how to do it, improving the system to actually reduce them. So it's a constant crusade to bring those complaints down. Interestingly, as we've done that, something really remarkable happened way beyond what I would have expected. As complaints went down, the leads rose. In the early days, the gyms, we had people knocking on doors to Find clients. In the last year, we've knocked back something like a quarter of a million leads, even though we spend less per franchisee on advertising than we did in those days. In fact, in some divisions, we can't even spend the advertising money they give us. We have to give it back to them or run a free conference or get stickers for their trailers or whatever, because the level of response for the public has driven dramatically as the service is approved.

So do you see that as the complaint rate goes down, the word of mouth and referral business goes up? Is that what you're kind of seeing here?

Yeah, we're in the fortunate situation too, because we've got 40 plus divisions. So a person has a good experience as one division. They say they get a good experience with mowing, they want to clean, they say, oh, well, gyms was great for mowing, so I used them for cleaning or for removals or for test and tag or for pest control or for whatever they're doing.

Yeah, and that, I mean, one thing I really respect about you is that you're really outspoken against chasing profit over people. And so how do you kind of balance that growth with ethics? You say it's a lot to do with systems and service that's centered around customer feedback and satisfaction. Are there KPIs that you have? Are there systems in place that help with this? And how. How do you. And how do you advise and recommend to other business owners to stop trying to chase the dollar signs and really focus on business ethics to build a solid foundation for a business?

It's an interesting thing. Good. Chasing after the welfare of the people. You're dealing with your stakeholders, which is your clients, which is your franchisees, it's your supplier, it's your own staff. Looking after the welfare of everybody is good business. It really is. Not necessarily short term, but long term. You'll actually do a lot better. Having said that, to me, it's more of an emotional thing. I identify very strongly with my franchisees. I mean, the reason I was so furious during COVID was because my people in Victoria were shut down. They couldn't work for two months and there was no reason for it. And I felt very offended. It's like my extended family in a way. They really are. I'm very involved. I don't know any other rich people. Actually. I don't even mix with those sort of circles. But I know my franchisees. They're my tribe, they're my people. So I have a very intense attitude. I have goals in my life. I have purposes. Becoming insanely rich is absolutely not one of them. I have my family, which I love dearly, my wife and my 10 children. I have my research project, which is going to hopefully change the world in many ways. And that's where 90% of my income goes. And I have my franchisees, my extended family, and all of these are really important to me. Making money for its own sake doesn't even write in the top 10.

I remember reading something that you said. You said that wealth's purpose isn't about luxury, but to be financially secure with a sense of purpose. And your purpose is quite a profound one. A lot of your fortune goes towards funding scientific research. So how important do you think it is to business owners to have that ulterior purpose? And why, rather than just trying to chase the money?

It does come down to your personality and your inherent values. But it's interesting. I'm very interested in the science of happiness. I read a lot, actually. If you're interested, I can send you. If you go to jimpinman.com you'll see a book list there. It's a whole stack of books, my favorite books, a lot of them about happiness and health and a good life and stuff. Now, people have a very deluded idea about what makes you happy. They have the idea that if I won the lottery, I'd be happy. Okay, well, in practice, no. In fact, if you won the lottery, you'd be happy today, you'd be happy tomorrow, but in a year's time, you'd be no happier than you were if you hadn't won it. And wealth as such has barred from financial security, which is really important. If you can't pay your bills, you're not happy. But beyond the battles of average Australian income makes surprisingly little difference. One thing that doesn't help people think. If I could have a flashier car, a bigger house, more expensive holidays, more expensive food, designer handbags, jewelry, whatever, whatever women, I'd be happy. In actual fact, this is competitive. This is trying to make yourself look higher status compared with somebody else. This is a really futile thing because there's always somebody richer, unless you are Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, in which case you're battling who's the biggest out of the two of it. There's always competition. It's not going to make you happy. Now, what they find is this. And this is scientific research. This is not my values. This is just what the scientists say when they check these things out. Competitive striving doesn't make you happy. Okay, you feel a bit of a burst. And then there's the next thing to cover. Much better than that is experiences. If you spend time with friends, for example, if you have close personal relationships, you've got like, I have friends who are missionaries and stuff, and they're pretty poor, so I tend to pay for dinner when we eat together, which is not very much. You know, it's local pizza restaurant or something like that. But I mean, that kind of thing. Or my family, or family holidays. We're all going down to the beach. There's children, grand. There'll be about 25 of us in December. We're going to the beach. That's good stuff, too. That's a better way of spending money on experiences. But, you know, the number one best way, best thing you can do with your money if you want to achieve happiness, is to give it away to a cause that you're involved with. And I don't mean an anonymous check to some great charity. I mean to something that you personally believe in and you follow and you put your money into that. That is the number one way to create happiness. That could be a charity, it could be a church, it could be a local welfare group, it could be anything.

It's staggering to me the. The number of successful business owners that I know and that I see who are leagues ahead of me and, you know, making way more money than me. And just on a completely different level. It's. The majority of them tell me that they're unhappy. I was talking to my friend yesterday who he's actually. He franchises as well. You've actually spoken with him and, you know, he was kind of talking about how unhappy he is. And so I'm. I asked him, I said, you know what, what would change that for you? What would make you happy? And he said, well, I don't know, maybe if I get to the next goal, which is just another financial figure. And it's like when I started my business, my goal, and I told myself I would be happy if I could just make 70 grand a year. And then I get there, and then the goal posts get pushed further back, and then I want to make 100, and then the goalposts get pushed further back, and you just get stuck in this endless loop. But now my purpose that gets me out of bed every day is not only for my people, so my staff and my family, because I'm able to create jobs. And a byproduct of that is I've helped change lives, like for my. My manager in my business, I'VE really helped her in a lot of ways, and that's been really gratifying for me. But one day I was just in church and Compassion, they came and did a partnership with the church that I go to, and I felt really moved by the presentation they did. And so I became really connected with Compassion. And now a lot of our business is being kind of intertwined with what Compassion does because I really. I really feel moved and I feel like I'm called to this as opposed to other things. And everyone's going to have that thing that they're called to, and I'm a true believer in that. Everyone will have certain callings in their life and it's just a matter of whether or not they respond to it. And a lot of the successful people I know that aren't happy are people that haven't responded to their true calling. And they're still just chasing their tail trying to make more and more money. And so I think that's. I think that's very important. I think you said it very well. And so how do you envision the future of not only Jim's Group now, but also with your scientific research and all the other things that you do?

I'm just going to keep on trying to make gyms better. I don't have particular numbers involved. Frankly, if we never reach more than 6,000, we're about five and a half thousand now. It wouldn't distress me greatly. And I don't have any figures for income, certainly that are important. If you ask me, my goals for Jim's Group is this. I have two firstly, that no franchisee would ever be unhappy with any aspect of their business experience. And secondly, that no customer would ever be unhappy with any aspect of their involvement with us. They're my goals and that's what I focus on. And if you do that, the other things do tend to kick into place, provided you're not completely stupid about money. So that's the goal. Now, I'm in extremely good health. I'm 72 years old. But I am fit, I am healthy, I exercise every day. I have a wonderful life. I'm probably going to have another 20 years active, reasonable life. That's based on life projections, so forth. I'm very, very concerned that after I'm gone, my franchisee be protected. I'm setting up. First of all, I put a clause in all of our contracts that say the majority controlling share of Jim's Group cannot be sold to anybody without the written consent of a majority of franchisees. The one Thing I fear most is that somebody will come along and look at this thing and say, I can really rip the money out of this. Which they could. There's all kinds of ways you could double or treble the profit from this company short term. And the idea that anybody would do this to my franchisees is completely outrageous. My CFO actually said to me when I put this in place, he said, this is going to really dramatically reduce the value of your business. And I said, good, because I don't intend to sell it and I want my people protected. I'm also setting up a board which is my family. My money goes into a family trust. All the value, 60% will go towards the research. The rowless is going to help my children to buy houses. Because there's so many kids that, you know, you just want to give them a bit of a hand. That's what it's for. There'll be a board of directors representing my children. They'll vote for one representing the research foundation and one elected by the franchisees in Jim's group so they can have a say. So they're not going to be controlling, but they can have an influence, a say in what happens and what decisions are made. But the company cannot be sold unless you've got to convince majority of franchisees to positively put in writing. We want this to happen. And that's a fairly tough thing to do.

That is a really interesting. There's surely not another franchise on the planet that has that in place, is there?

No, no. One thing that really gets me angry if you want to set me off and we don't want to start talking about it. People like retail food group who go.

Into a decent like Gloria Jeans and things like that. Yeah.

And they rip them off blinds and they make them pay double what you can get it for from Kohl's. And they just so unfair in what they do. They make them sell a pizza for less than the cost of the. Of the ingredients to put in a special.

Just, just on that real quick. I. My dad knew the owner of a Domino's franchise in the Perth Hills. It was like one of the best performing Domino's franchises in the country. So turning over, you know, millions. He knew the owner, she was working three jobs despite having the best performing franchise in Australia because they're selling $4 pizzas. It's just, it's just ridiculous.

It's outrageous. It makes me furious because I identify with the franchisees. I see somebody who's poured their money to this thing just like if they Bought a Jim's franchise and they get ripped off blind in so many ways. It's so unfair, the franchising regulations. The franchising code is outrageously poor at what it does. It's more and more bureaucratic, these lengthy disclosure documents. But I know for a fact that none of my French prospective entities read them. They don't read them. They're too complex and legalistic. Even lawyers can understand. So they say, okay, if anything's going wrong, let's have more and more detailed, more and more legalistic disclosure documents. Now, if they want to do something about it, which I've said year after year after year, there's a very simple way. What you do is every year you get a franchise survey done by an independent auditor to ask franchisees how happy they are with the service. You get those results, you put them on a public website and you make every franchisor pay for the survey and pay for it. You put on. And if you want to check the contract, you don't get each franchise to go and get a lawyer, because for a start, lawyer, most lawyers don't know much about franchise contracts. You get one verifiable person paid for by the franchisor, but not appointed by them, to look at the contract and give a clear statement about strengths and weaknesses. Now, do two things like that you would make a dramatic difference to franchising in Australia. But now they say, let's put an extra 100 pages on the disclosure document, knowing that nobody ever reads it. It's outrageous. It makes me very angry at the way that franchisees in this country are ripped off by the powerful interest, by unscrupulous franchisors, by international money people, by all kinds of garbage. And the government just sits back and says, yeah, go ahead, rip them off blind. Let's not do a thing to help. And they don't.

Well, it's very refreshing to see someone at the top who really does care about the people around him. And so you talked a lot about how passionate you are about the success of your franchisees. And so what measures are in place now to ensure the satisfaction and the success of your franchisees in every sector of the Jim's group?

Okay, we have a system, like I said, first of all, they have direct access to me and they're encouraged to use it frequently. Secondly, we have a system of support which we've developed as the ideal system to best kind of support. We have a system called pay for work guarantee, which means in the beginning, if they don't reach a set Margin usually anything between about $1,020 $500 a week. They can do free services and they're encouraged to do that and they get paid for them and that helps to build their business. Then we have an ongoing system franchisor. These franchisors has to be available to take calls. They have to respond within 24 hours business days if there's any kind of problem. Franchisors there. We required the franchisor to ring franchisees regular. We call it proactive call. We found that the most effective, ideally weekly, especially in the beginning, at least monthly. Now to check this has happened and also they have to run meetings, at least eight meetings a year that the franchisee can attend. We find personal meetings, especially with food, is a really good way of building that relationship and getting people to community. Now to check on this, we do some through the system, we do some checking, we look at notes and things. But the other thing we do is once a year we survey our franchisees and we survey them and we ring them and we push them until we get at least 90% response. And we ask them questions about proactive calls, calls about response to calls about how helpful they are. We ask if the franchisees income is good, satisfactory, poor, which is about 50% bit over half good, about 9% poor is average and the rest is satisfactory. So we keep an eye on that and then we judge each franchisor, franchisors who do really well. So for example, the franchisor who has virtually all the franchisees saying he rings me weekly, gets back to me straight away or takes the call is very helpful. They, they become what we call a diamond. And there's a diamond wall in our office where their pictures. It's a big point of honor, but it's not quite diamond. You're a platinum, you're a gold. If you don't do well, you get something a lot less pleasant, which is a breach notice. And then at some time in the next six months, we'll check them and if they continue to give poor service, they'll be turfed out. That's very rare, Very rare. We do a lot more diamonds than we have breaches, but still, but it's. We follow up. But then again, this is the process of feedback too. If a franchisor is difficult, we've also got things in our system too. For example, if you're not happy with your franchisor, you can actually move to a different franchisor. I got an email yesterday from one of my franchisors in one division who wasn't happy with their franchisor and is going to transfer to a different region. I said, fine, now we'll let his franchisor know. But that puts a lot of pressure on franchisors because if they don't look after the franchise well, they can move. We had one franchise, there was two cleaning regions in Sydney, and one of the franchisees was complaining to me about not getting enough leads. And I did a check and I found out that they were getting less leads per franchisee in that region than in the other region. And I said to the franchisor, if you keep this up, you're going to find your franchisees are going to change regions. So do you know what he did? He boosted the advertising until the number of leads per franchisee was the same. But not only that, but they can vote out their own franchisor. If a simple majority of franchisees in a confidential survey say not happy, once somebody else franchisors on notice, they've got three months to get the confidence back, then we'll do another survey. At the end of that time, if they still haven't got the confidence back, franchisors out. Though often in that situation, I might say the franchisors tend to sell out. We don't confiscate, we make them sell. Not only that, but we do things to franchisees. Like, for example, franchisees can veto changes to their own manuals. So can franchisors. So if you want to change the manual, we send it out in the newsletter and they ask them to vote. If they don't like it, they vote no. And we actually do get some knockbacks on manual changes. So we've just given franchises a lot of power.

Yeah, well, one of my questions was going to be about how you maintain consistency and quality and all that stuff throughout expansion on such a large scale. When a lot of small business owners, they're scared to even hire an employee because they're scared about losing brand quality and consistency and all this stuff. But I think you kind of answered that. So you've got some very ironclad systems. And I mean, it's even got the wheels in my head turning and I'm thinking about a lot of the stuff that I'm doing now, and it's really, it's really interesting to hear about that. But I want to take a few steps back and just kind of go back to the. The origins as well. And I want to know, how did you know when it was time to franchise? Did you set that Goal and then work towards it? Or did you find yourself in a place where you're like, oh, I've got a really great model here that I can repackage and sell as an opportunity to other people.

Run a lot less enterprising than that. Chase it. Basically, I got terrified by a competitor. I had the idea of franchise. It was pretty obvious, but I couldn't see any advantage for the franchisee. I knew that it was they needed to get clients to start with. If you have an established run, you're much likely be successful in laundering. I'm sure cleaning is the same, but it's a lot easier. You've got clients that you go to, you've got an income, you learn on the trade. So I thought, okay, as a franchisor, I can provide clients initially, but why would a person continue pay me fees once they had an established client base? Now I know the answer to that. Now we can provide better leads, you can put more clients on, you can do what we call splits and you can get, you know, pick up 20 grand here and split your business. You can, you can get, you know, moral support, you can get better discounts. There's all kinds of reasons. But I didn't know that because then what happened is that there was a company called vip, which is in Adelaide, which was franchising, and they came to Melbourne and I really got petrified. These guys had about 250 franchisees. I had about a dozen subbies. That was my tiny job. No logos, no nothing, no office. It was all run from a basement. It was nothing. So I actually got so scared, I rang up the state manager and said, I'm Jim from Jim's Mowing. He said, yeah, I know where you are. And he said, look, what if I just work to help you to build up VIP in Melbourne because I can't compete with you. You guys are too professional. And he said, oh, no, no thanks, not interested in that. That year, in 1988, they had an expo and there was this. As I went in, took the badge off, they gave it so I wouldn't know who I was. Went up to the stand, the VIP stand, and said, could you tell me about vip? So he told me how it worked and he gave me this brochure, which was really interesting. A lot of stuff in there. I took it apart. Literally everything in it I looked at. And then the state manager came in and said, that's Jim Penman, don't tell him anything else. But they kicked me off the stand and I went away and I thought, okay, all right, I can see this. There's some benefits to what these guys are doing. I can appreciate that. Somebody breaks their leg, they get looked after. There's benefits. But you know what? I reckon I could make a system that would work better for the franchisees. That was my idea. So then I went to lawyers. I spent nine months arguing with lawyers. That was a really, really difficult process. These days, if I knew what I was doing, I'd write the contract myself and It'd take about three pages, but that's what I did. And then June 99, 99, I had my. I had my contract and I went to some of my best subbies. The ones I really liked would have been great service. And also people who bought lawnmower rounds off me offered to swap the route for a franchise. And you can go out if you want to. So I got about a dozen people to join me in that. And that started off and like I said before, somebody asked me at that time how many I might have, and I said, maybe 100. But I had a secret weapon. I didn't quite realize it at the time, that was phenomenally effective. When I was selling, I used to build up and sell lawnmowers. That's how I got started. And what I used to do was I would do everything I could to make somebody happy. If they lost a job, regular client, I'd replace it. If that job, I'd replace that. And I give them advice on the phone. I even used to run lunches for them and put lunch on this kind of stuff. If they wanted to get out, I'd help them. I'd give them advice on what to do. And I learned to sell by also giving people advice. From the beginning. If somebody came to see me about a business, I would give them a brochure, how to buy or build your own lawn main business. So I was always saying, how can I look after people really well? And also in process, too. I didn't want people to fail. So I put this system in place whereby they could walk out and go independent in the early franchise and all kinds of things. I put all these things in place and I would knock out anybody. I didn't think it was going to be successful. So I put this together. I thought that being fussy about who I took would make it harder to grow because I wasn't going to take anybody. I wasn't going to take anybody just for the sake of money. But then what I did when. When I was selling lawn mowing rounds, every time A person bought a lawn mowing round off me. I would put their name in black, text and phone number on a white card and I'd stick it behind me on a notice board. And so when somebody came to me about a lawn mowing business, I'd say, look, I've been dealing with some people in your area. Why don't you ring a few of them? So they'd write the names down, phone numbers, and they'd ring them, and they asked the guy, what do you like to do? And he said, he's fantastic. Looks after you really, really well. He always does what he says. He replaces clients. He's always helpful. Great guy. Honest, totally great guy. That's what they say about me. So when I started franchising, it was a bit hard to put it on the board. So what I used to do was to make a list and I put the name and the phone number of all my franchise on the list. Now, this is like 20 years before the code of conduct came in, which is the only thing good thing about that code is they make you do that. And then I would give that to them. And people would say to me, why would I buy it from you when you're running it from the basement? You're just getting started. And here's this guy, the interstate business with office in South Melbourne, which is very fancy and stuff. And I say, well, look, there's some differences. I wouldn't bag them, but I'd say, here's a list of my franchisees with phone numbers, all of them. I want you to go. I want you to ring as many as you can. I want you to go to VIP and get their list and ring this. Now, that was being a little bit precious because I knew they wouldn't give them the list. They wouldn't and they couldn't. So people would ring up my list and they'd ask, what's Jim's like? Why would you go with Jim's rather than vip? And then these guys would tell them all the reasons why the system was better. I say, jim is great to deal with. He's always there. It's a fair system. The contract's fair. They look after you really, really well. It's a great system. You'd be mad to go anywhere else. And that's what did it.

Yeah, well, you've achieved a lot of success, and I know there's no success without pitfalls and hurdles and failures and, you know, what kind of challenges did you face when you started franchising? Besides all the legal Paperwork and all that mumbo jumbo. But what are some of the the real world obstacles that you faced when you were trying to franchise?

Well, at the start, I didn't understand the best ways to support franchisees. That was one of my issues. One of the things I found was that the franchisees close to me were only doing very well. And the further away they got, the more likely they were to fail. And it took me quite a while to figure out the difference was meetings that when the ones were close, they used to come and meet just in my lounge room was nothing, it was just a full meeting, but very excited. And you had a ring of chairs and then you had two rings of chairs that grew and then you moved out to, to a school hall. But people didn't have that. So when I realized that, I put that in place. Then we figured out too. We tried different methods. We figured out about once every six weeks is the ideal meeting. Now that sounds a strange number, but once a month doesn't help you. But if you have less than every six weeks, they do worse. You can see the charts. And then we started looking at what's the best support. Now we did things like, for example, we put in business, like in a business audit, a franchisor would sit down for half a day with the franchisee once a year and do a business audit and go through their business. And we found the effect that that was absolutely zero, no effect at all on their business long term, but trying to work out. Because I was putting franchisors on at this stage, trying to work out why franchisors, some were so successful and they had higher sales rate, lower attrition. And one of the things I discovered is that the franchisors were actually ringing the franchisees. I didn't even thought about that, but they were ringing them regularly, not just waiting for them to call, but even if they did call, they still ring them and say, how are you going? And we put that into place and we quickly found that that was really, really effective. So rather than a long period of time, once a year, a short phone call, like three minutes, once a week actually is far more effective. Even it's more effective than going out on the road with a franchisee. So we had to figure out how to give better kinds of support. And then things like the training course, we were losing in the first year, about one in six grades, about 17% leaving us in the first year. Now that's compared with an independent business like mowing and clining, as you probably know. Between 90 and 95% of them fell in the first year, but with us it was about 17%. Then we put a dedicated training course, a three day generic training course in and immediately we did that. Our attrition rate, first year attrition rate dropped to 10 and a half percent. It simply dropped up to about 12, but it's still better than it was. So we just kept on doing more and more stuff to make franchisees happy. Yeah, I'm still doing it.

Yeah. So it seems like you're a big numbers guy, which is really important. I'm someone who loves to look at numbers, even on a micro level. I'm looking at even our hourly rate per cleaner than the gross profit per cleaner and all these different metrics in the business. What do you do when the problem is a bit more arbitrary? I want to talk about, you know, back in 2020, 2021, when we had the COVID lockdowns, which is actually when I started my business, and it proved to be a bit difficult to hand flyers out when people thought you were going to get Covid from touching a piece of paper. So that was interesting. But how did you navigate that problem when, particularly in Victoria, they had these pretty draconian lockdowns? How did you support your franchisees during those challenging times with the COVID lockdowns and stuff when it comes down to real problem solving and it can't just be a bit of math and a bit of crunching numbers?

Well, for a start, we didn't charge them fees. In New Zealand. One of our competitors, their Green Acres, actually continued to charge fees even when they were forbidden to work, which caused a bit of outrage. But if anybody in gym suggested that you get your head, you know, insane or something, they're not and it can't work. You're not going to charge them any fees. But not only that, what happened is that even though we weren't charging them fees, franchisors and me, myself and everybody else was still providing full support. We were still calling them regularly and talking to them and counseling them and showing them. In fact, franchisors worked harder at the time when they weren't making any income than they did in normal times because it was very, very stressful. People would ring me up and say, Franchise would ring me up and say, what? When's this going to end? And I said, look, I really don't know. I'm sorry, I can't help you. It's outrageous, but I can't help you. But a lot of things went on I think actually it was the worst time in some ways, but it was also in some ways the best time because the way that people looked after each other. We had one girl who was in dogwash and she was a student. She had no income at all and the government forbade her to work and we weren't charging her fees, but you know, how do you live? So she was being faced. She couldn't pay her grocery bills, she couldn't, she couldn't. She was threatened being evicted, but the other franchisees actually rallied around her and they actually gave her things like meal vouchers. We told her, if you get, if you get evicted, you can come stay at our conference center here because it's empty with COVID So we did everything we could and we lent her a bit of money or gave us the money or something like that to help it through. So. But just the way I remember a franchisee from Test and Tag in Melbourne just ringing me up and saying, jim, I haven't gotten the income myself, but I'm in a pretty good situation. Are there other franchisees who really in need, I'd love to help them. That was happening a lot. And you often to see that kind of thing. I think the culture. Look, in all due modesty, it does start with me. I have a certain attitude towards service. But what you tend to find is that it spreads, really spreads. Franchisors in gyms tend to think it the same way. We had a conference in Queensland years ago and a guy called Brian Duckett came out from the UK and he'd been involved in franchising for decades and he'd been in every system and he said, I've never seen anything like your culture. Franchisors really care about franchisees. It's totally different to anywhere else. And they really do. The actual fact, they're often a bit too lenient. They don't take a tough enough line on things like customer service because they're so. They're so concerned about their franchisees well being and welfare that they can be a bit soft at times. That's the problem. We have more than the other, more than being too harsh. But the other thing too, I find is really good too. That actually goes to franchisees as well. And you will find I filled so many stories about franchisee. A new franchisee goes into a region and goes to meetings and other franchisees are so willing to help them. They really look after them well. And the trainers will spend like even a half an hour, an hour on the phone with a new Franchisee guiding them, and they're not paid to do that, they just do it. So there's this culture of helpfulness of service that goes all the way through. And we talk about it too and we encourage it and it's wonderful. You know, one of the worst things that ever happened, the single worst event that ever happened in the whole history of Jim's group was in Western Australia with one of our moan franchisees. He went berserk. He killed his little girls and his wife. He killed them and then he killed his mother in law the next day. Now, it wasn't his business, I hesitate to say, but it was really, really traumatic and upsetting. Now, I flew across to Perth, I'm not brief on the flying. I flew across to Perth to talk to the franchisees there about what happened. We had a meeting in the Gulf War and you know that there was quite a few hundred franchisees in West Australia. Most of them turned up to that meeting. Most of them, they didn't know this guy, most of them, but they heard of what happened and they were really upset. And we had this very emotional meeting. And I said to them, people, what can we do? What can we do to try and reduce the chance of this horrific thing ever happening again? And they come up with suggestions. One of them was that every franchisee gets a fridge ticket with all the emergency numbers, which we did immediately. We made that happen. We put franchisor training, we put every franchisor, including myself, gets trained in how to deal with mental health issues. It's part of our process now. We set up a free counseling service all franchises can access, no charge at all to these professional counselors. They talk on the phone to anybody, any reason, anytime, all our cost, they don't pay a cent for it. Another suggestion they came up with at that time in that meeting was they say, what if some of us franchisees were to volunteer to be unpaid mentors to help franchisees who feel they can't talk to somebody else? And I said, well, that'd be really good, but that would be. That's a lot to ask of anybody. Would anybody be prepared to put themselves up for such a demanding and unpaid task? And you know what? Most of the people in that meeting, most people put up their hands and said, yes, we'll help. Now what does that say about a bunch of people so concerned about something happened to a family of a guy that most of them had ever met, but they're prepared to go to that degree of trouble? And that. Is culture that memory is terrible. But the response by people was magnificent. I'm so proud of them.

Even as someone on the outside looking in that had no part in that. That, that is really touching to me to hear. And that's. That type of culture isn't something that just happens. That is, that is an intentional set of actions and principles over a long period of time that has brought your, your franchisees and franchise or so close together. Any other corporation, they would sweep that under the rug. They would go straight into damage control. Franchisees franchise ors either wouldn't hear about it or they wouldn't care for whatever reason because everyone so disconnected and decentralized. But I just, I think that's, I think that's incredible. I'm always chasing building a better culture. And I, I don't have all the answers for it. Culture is one of the biggest challenges for me. I, I don't consider myself a good people person, but I think, and maybe you can agree with this, but just deciding that you want to create better culture and really care for people is the most important part. And it's the catalyst that will build that culture. And so what would you say? How do you spot a great franchisee versus someone who's not really cut out for it or someone who's not going to make it? And I guess there'd be a good parallel there with just business owners in general.

Look, I have a rough system that I have for franchisees. We divide them into gold, silver, lead, gold. Franchisees are great franchisees. They're the people that would succeed, probably business for themselves. Most people that go to business fail. But there's 5 or 10%, including someone like yourself who can succeed. You're unusual without franchise, without support of a system, without the leads, without the training, without the meetings and all the stuff we do. You've succeeded. You put a business, you're a gold. In my terms, if gold people who are in the business come and buy a Jim's franchise, their 10 income tends to rocket. It'll go up two or three times over. They grow very fast because they're, they're thinking. They're always trying to work out better ways to do things. I'm sure you recognize that. How can I be better? How can I do the job better? How can I do it quicker? How can I be more efficient? How can I get better service? How can I make my, how can I market all these things? You're always thinking that's a goal, that's maybe 10%. All right, then you have the great majority. We call Them bronze. And these are people that probably would not succeed without us. But with training, with support, with mentoring, they can succeed. And it's not easy because they have to do things that are hard and have to be reminded and challenged and then talked about and coached about complaints and helped to do better. That's what we're good at. Then you've got a minority called leads, which is maybe 5%, maybe 5, 10% at the most, who just won't listen or just don't have the potential. Now, we really try hard not to put them there in the first place. We really try hard, but sometimes you've got people through who just won't listen. And you'll say to them again and again, you must ring clients back, you must do this, please do this. You're going to be in trouble if you don't. And they just can't pick it up. Or they've got severe emotional problems, which we try and pick up. So it's hard, but I mean, it's also difficult because it's secondhand. You've got to rely on your trust, your franchisors to do this. We had a case some while back where a lady rang me about a problem with a franchise contract. She had my phone number because she was training, she was talking about problems with the contract. And I started asking a question and I found out that she was buying the business on behalf of her son, who is in his early 20s. And I said, why are you doing that? She said, because he can't find a job. And I immediately said to her, we're not going to sell you off site of franchise. We're not going to do it. She said, why not? She said, because she's going to fail. That is absolute, guaranteed failure. She was quite upset. She said to me, I wish I hadn't called you. And I said, it's really fortunate that you did. But she said, what am I going to do? He's got no job. And I said, I know there's a couple of franchisees in his area who got plentiful work and would need a helper. Why don't you go out on the road with them? And he did. And he was terrible. He was really bad, completely incapable, couldn't even finish the day. In either case, totally hopeless. Now, when that franchisor came up for renewal the following year, I said to him, we are not renewing your original franchise you sell. Which he did, because what he did in putting that young man through and his mother was outrageous. So you've got to have that. If you'd like to. If you, if you remember my email, if you got my email, there's a signature at the bottom. It said, our first project, the welfare of franchisees. And that absolutely. I mean that we are also passionate about customer service, the emotional side. We sign only franchisees and franchisors. We are convinced we'll succeed. That's just basic ethics. And when I do franchisor training, the first session I take myself, I would Google myself. The first session I talk about selection, why we select, how we select and the whole thing behind it. What's the main reason why we. I give you all the financial reasons why selection is good. There are good reasons for it in terms of having, you know, better references for the self, all kinds of reasons. There's good reasons for doing it, but what's the main reason? And I keep on going until they tell me the main reason you select a franchise and you say no to somebody not suitable is for their sake. And that has to be your top motivation. If you don't really care about the people you're dealing with, you are not worthy of being a Jim's franchisor. And I'm not saying we haven't had some bad ones. We have at times people do do the wrong thing. But as far as we can propagandize them, as far as we can check them, as far as we can terminate them if necessary, we really try hard to make sure that every franchisor cares about the people they deal with.

And what do you think small business owners waste too much time or energy on? Personally, I think that. And just from what I've seen, the anecdotal evidence when I look in Facebook groups and talking to other people is that they just spend too much try too much time looking for an excuse as to why it's not working or why they can't do it and comparing themselves to others and saying why they'll never be able to do what other people have done and blaming market saturation and market conditions and whatever else. What would you say?

That's a lead attitude. That's a classic LED attitude. You blame somebody else. If you look at someone like one, best book that this has ever written is Stephen Covey 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And if you read it, it's brilliant. I just finished listening to it for a second time through. First thing he says is about you're being proactive, you take responsibility. You are the master of what goes on. As you say, the problem with people is they blame others. I, I had a early in money early but my first office was in a string of, you know, like in a strip shopping center and the anchor tenant was this milk bar and I used to go quite often because I just lived around the corner. I used to buy a milk and stuff like that all the time. And this guy was always complaining about how bad business was and he blamed the supermarkets and he blamed the fact that our staff didn't buy lunches from him. Stuff. He's always. All the reasons why. I tell you what, I would notice things like the fact that I did mention to her one time, I said when your staff came down to buy lunches and you won't open the letters for them. No, no, I can't do that because it's not worth it. Just one sandwich and why don't you go up and ask them? Because he hadn't bought somebody else in the shop. Go up and ask them for orders. Oh no, no, I can't do that. And I would notice, I'd come into the shop and he'd be having a long conversation with one of his mates, certain ethnic group. And I'd have to wait there trying to buy my milk while he had this conversation. I could see all the stuff that he was doing wrong but to him he was running a perfect business. It was all the fault of our fault the staff, it was the fault of the supermarkets, fault everybody else, not him at all. He couldn't see it. And you're completely right, people are blind, they blame everybody else. There's only one person who can really affect your business that you have control over and that's you. And by jeepers you can make a difference if you have a different attitude.

Yeah. And another question I wanted to ask and a topic I wanted to go into was just about technology and AI and these sort of things. You've obviously been in business for 40 odd years at this point. And I remember a story my old mentor Mal Emery told me about. He went into a meeting with Jerry Harvey of Harvey Norman and he was pitching Jerry on new marketing systems for Harvey Norman and he was saying, you know, you need to be using SMS marketing. This is years ago, back when SMS marketing was first emerging and Jerry Harvey just flat out said, no, I don't want to do it because he's, you know, he's got a system and he's got a proven model that was working and he didn't really want to change it or alter it. He's kind of, he's doing it now. Harvey Norman does Obviously SMS marketing today, because everyone does. But have you ever, have you always embraced the technological changes in your business? I know you have a lot of systems and softwares now but, but have there been things where you've been apprehensive or reluctant to introduce them or are you always open to new ideas like that?

I have a singular advantage in business, Jason. I am peculiarly incompetent at most things. I'm really very poor with technology, with social media, with finance, you name it. There's not much I'm really good at. So what I tend to do is I tend to hire people that I believe are competent and give them a fair degree of control over their own areas so I don't end up. My social media marketing guru is a guy called Joel who's brilliant, he's like early 30s. He's been working for me for more than a decade and he's risen from a very basic entry position to one of my top managers. He's just brilliant. He's right up with it. I go in all the time, he's always talking about AI and stuff and he's right on top of it. And I meet with my technology team, I had a meeting with our software development people this morning and they're going and quite frankly I was just sitting there trying to look as if I was smart. But half that I couldn't even understand what they were talking about. So I have to trust people to know their stuff. So you find good people and trust and they get on with it. And I make some pretty bad mistakes too, I can tell you that. That's just my nature. I can't comprehend this stuff, honestly, I really can't. It's too complicated. I'm an old guffer. I mean this is way out my league.

Well with, with AI, automation and you know, like changing customer expectations and just the whole landscape of business evolving. Now how do you see service businesses evolving over the next decade or so?

Well, the biggest advantage we've got is, is the fact that we've got enough money that we can afford to spend $7 million, several million dollars a year on software development. So for example, we, we're developing a system called Jim's Jobs which is some independents are used to using but it's being finalized now that for example, one of the things that does the new version will do is remind people that they haven't called the client back. We have a two hour limit so they get the reminder. But actually it had my voice in it. So if you don't call the contact, within half an hour, my voice will come on your app saying, call the client and if you get to two hours, I'll yell at you, basically. So we put that in place. That's one of the things. And then also there's a message goes back to us, so we know not to send any more leads until they explain why they're not returning phone calls. And then things like one of the things we plan to do by the end of the year, it'll have a system where a customer can actually ring up the office or book a line and be given an appointment if the franchisee wishes it. So instead of saying franchise will ring you back. So he'll be there between 2 and 4 this afternoon, because we look in the franchisee's diary. So there's a whole stack of things like that that we're actually developing. So even within the next six months, you'll see dramatic changes in our systems of operation to improve the level of service. So we are very driven by technology. The kind of stuff we do would be completely impractically impossible without technology. To give you an example, when a lead comes in to the office, say it's a mowing lead in Doncaster, for example, just in a suburb, the system then looks at all the franchisees who. Who could cover Doncaster from mowing, who's available for that specific service. Bear in mind, if it's something like landscaping, it might be a lot less than if it was something like mowing. Who's available today to do work in that particular suburb, another France, or maybe working, but only taking work from territory. And then we look within that, we'll look at who's had the fewest leads in the past few days and then who's closest and then who's got the best. There's a whole very intricate system designed to make sure that There might be 20 people down for leads, but only one wants to work and we give it to them and we know who it was. So that's. In the beginning, we tried to do this manually and it actually cost more than the franchise fees we charged. So only automating makes it possible to do what we do.

And you've got a great platform called Bizza as well. I've actually so Bizza, from my understanding, it's all excess leads that the Gyms Group just can't service. And so you pretty much put them out there for bidding. What I noticed is you have, again, a very, very strict screening process for contractors outside of the Gyms Group to go on there. And one Thing you talked about it briefly just then. But if, if you're going to contact as a contractor, if I were to contact a lead off of Bizza, you're very strict in saying that they have to be called within a couple of hours, which I think is very important because the usually the first business to call the customer back, that's the business they go with. And so it's interesting, I helped a business owner in Perth, she just started a cleaning business and she was like, I can't get leads, what should I do? And I was like, just go and sign up for this website called Bizza. There's a bunch of leads on there. It's the gyms group. They've got too many and they need people to help out with servicing them. So she signed up for Bizza and she built her entire cleaning business just off getting leads off Bizza. And she was like, yeah, it's, I've signed up, I make sure I call people back immediately. Everyone's been happy so far and she's building up her profile on there. So when did the bizarre.

If they don't bring back consistently or give good service, then we actually will terminate from the system. We knock them out quite quickly. You know, if you look after 80% of your clients well and 20% badly, you cannot, you won't get any more leads. You really have to do a lot better than that. And if you have done the wrong thing, you have to prove you've done the right thing or go back and satisfy the clients. And now with all of that, the service from Independence is not as good as that from Jim's franchisees because our guys are really, our field are really indoctrinated, really hard and coached and everything else. So their service is higher but still on the average out of five stars, whereas a gyms person on average is about three, one and five stars. Our average is about 4.7 or 4.8, the independence about 4.4. So it's not as good, but we're working on it. The new software we're developing will actually help with that too. Because the biggest complaint is not calling back, not just to call within two hours. What you want to do is call within two minutes. We've done surveys on this. The quicker you call back, the better your chance of converting that leads into a job. But look, your friend is great. If she's built a business on that, that's a real credit to her. I admire people deeply who develop their business as an independent. I think they're great. I have Nothing but respect for somebody who does that.

Yeah, well, she raves about the platform and from my, from what I've seen of Bizzer, it's really good. Has Bizza been a success? Did you have visions for it when you started, or was it really just a way to help leads that came through the gyms group get serviced to a high standard?

It's a better service to clients because as any retailer know, if you can't produce something, you direct them to somebody else. So if we can direct some to a quality service, it means they're more likely to ring us next time. But also, frankly, it makes money for the. For the. We put it into franchisees. For example, we're running a campaign in 3aw in Melbourne paid for by Bizza. In other words, the money we get from the independent contractors actually is paying to get more work for our franchisees. Or we've done things like we provide them with free football tickets or they were able to buy, you know, big screen TVs worth over $1,000. They can get through Bizza for 250. So we do stuff like that for them. So the benefits come back to the franchisees.

That's interesting. So Bizza basically subsidizes Jim's group's marketing and lead generation. So does that mean at a point Bizza will just eat itself and it will basically kill itself if the system becomes as efficient as proposed?

Well, the trouble is the time we're getting more and more in service leads. Actually, it's not quite as bad as last year because the economy is not quite so hot. But no, it's a virtuous circle if you think about it. If we get more leaves. We're just trying to work out whether this 3 AW radio advertising is actually having an effect. It does seem to have boosted leaves a little bit, but that's more work for franchisees. But it's also more work for independence too. The more we get, the more we can't handle, the more we need independence to help us.

How do you track and measure these advertising campaigns? Like with radio? Do you have numbers that you look for? Do you run them for a certain period of time?

Just numbers? We looked at the comparison between April when we started the campaign in March, and also between April and April last year. And we also looked at different states. So, for example, Victoria actually had a bigger boost than most states except Queensland. Queensland did even better. I don't know why, but. So we try and check it, but really it's almost like a ripple on a Wave because the leads coming are so massive you don't even notice a campaign like that. To a great extent.

Interesting. And what's been your biggest marketing win and your biggest marketing failure or just something that didn't go the way you expected?

Well, when you say biggest win, you mean division or.

I mean like a campaign. Like for me, when I started my business, I tried a lot of things, but I, I ran a free cleaning campaign which was like, you could win a month of free cleaning. I collected about a thousand leads and I converted them into $100,000 a year worth of work. So that was my biggest win. Do you have any campaigns that really. You hit it out of the park?

Marketing campaigns. What we found doesn't work particularly well is broadcast like radio, tv, this kind of stuff too. It just doesn't. You've got to specifically go to the social media, the Goog AdWords that, websites, GMB and those kind of things. You've got to, you've got to hear people are actually looking for your service rather than, rather than generic. I can't think of any particular campaign that works except social media works extremely well. I can talk on a podcast, which is nothing much. I'm a big blackmouth, as you can tell, so there's nothing much for me to chat to somebody for an hour. But I can do a podcast and I can talk to somebody about Jim's group and you can get tens of thousands of people listening to it and you can take segments of that and spread them out there. That sort of stuff is hugely effective. Yeah, because, because they're not costing anything. I'm not paying you to talk to you today. So. But, but you know, you've got a thousand people listening and you never know. Some people who are listening might well decide, hey, well, you know, I want to get my pest control on, my building maintenance or conveyancing done. I'll get Jim's group to do it because they obviously give great service and because this guy fought for us over Covid or something like that. I don't know. It doesn't hurt, does it? So this kind of stuff is by far the most cost effective because it doesn't cost anything. And the message gets out there. We find selling franchises phenomenally successful in that because you get. I regularly engage with social media, not directly, but through Joel, my social media guru. And you know, you get people with the weirdest idea, things like the fact that I actually give my phone number and email address to five and a half thousand franchisees. You know, we had like 150,000 people watching something like that, looking at it. And that's, that's, that's. How could you, how could you buy that kind of publicity? You just couldn't, couldn't afford it. If I had a million bucks a year to spend on tv, you couldn't even begin to reach that sort of exposure. So social media is really powerful and that's the thing I would suggest to anybody is in business. Get into social media, get your Google my business rate done, get reviews on it. And there's ways of doing that. We've got some good videos on Jim's group too actually. If you look at that, we'll show you how to do that. There's some really good advice on how to do that kind of stuff. Go to your local Facebook group and promote it, promote yourself there. Get good comments on that, get feedback. Social media is the one thing I would suggest to anybody.

It's funny tv. Even if, because I've been on TV a few times, I was interviewed on the project, the Today show, I was on Channel nine News, all sorts of media stuff. I maybe got five clients from all of that TV exposure, whereas I can post a video on tick tock, get 2 million views and get like 30 clients from that. So it's just crazy. Even if it wasn't, every time I was on tv, it wasn't even positioned as an ad, which is supposed to be more effective. And so yeah, and it's really expensive as well. And I see a lot of like small local businesses that are advertising in TV and radio. I'm like, first of all, you're probably not even measuring the results, so you have no idea how much money you're wasting right now. And second of all, just do something like Google Ads, spend a tenth of that money on, on Google AdWords and do that. But I also want to talk about.

Use the Google my business system as well and put views on it. See if you, if you've got Google my business, which will appear if anybody looks in your area and you've got a whole stack of really good reviews, that's magical stuff. To be honest. I don't know how valuable they are really because unlike our own system, I trust because it's based on actual leads. If I want to recommend a Jim's franchisee to anybody, I'll look at their rating and if I don't get 4.7, 4.8, I wouldn't even bother recommending them. But Google reviews can actually be managed and you can see this quite a lot Too. If you look at something like Hypagous, for example, if you actually look at their ratings, you'll see some absolutely garbage rating and there's others that are very, very good, but they're all suspiciously similar. Have a look at it. And that's because basically, as far as I can see, my suspicion is that they game it. They get a whole lot of people putting in reviews against themselves. Actually, the people who deal with these are hate hype pages. They say there's five people bidding and it's a race to the bottom with us. Only one person gets the lead.

Yeah, I always tell people to stay away from things like high pages because they, they do just auction it off to the highest bidder. And the, the quality of the lead is quite low as well. Whereas I've noticed on Bizzer, the, the quality of the lead is very high. They've already been vetted and they've been, they've gone through the, the gyms funnel. So.

Yeah, and usually too, if they're calling gyms because they, they're not necessarily the cheapest price. I had somebody approach me the other day, they want a real cheap price and I said, look, go to hy pages. We don't compete in that area. In fact, I tell franchisees quite emphatically we are not cheap as chips. We are the quality service. Brilliant service, amaze your customers, make them passionate about you, but don't cut your prices. Start off, charge what you need to get going and as soon as you establish, you start putting your prices up. Ultimately, my concern is with you, my franchisees, the clients, yes, we'll look after them well, but we're not there to give the cheapest price. I've never in my life given it in a pension discount, never. I always want charge a good hourly rate. We try and encourage our franchisees to charge at least 70 bucks an hour. Not always possible in the beginning, especially with cleaning, because you need to get regular clients. But with time, 70 bucks an hour, where you should be. And that means if you've got a worker, you're charging 140, you're paying them 30, you're making 110. That's how you do it.

Yeah, well, it's like Dan Kennedy, the famous Internet marketer, said. He said there's no strategic benefit to being the second cheapest in the marketplace, but there is an intrinsic benefit in being the most expensive. So if you're going to, if you're going to be cheap, you've got to be the cheapest and most People can't be the cheapest, they can't compete with the massive corporations because they just simply don't have the margin and the subsidy from other areas. So if you can't be the cheapest, you just got to be the most expensive or you've got to position yourself as premium. So agree 100% we don't have problems.

With competing with anybody. Actually nobody can do it as well as us. I would hate to go in to get business, get McDonald's or something because they're so good at what they do. But you know, Garden Care, which is a very experienced public listed company, decided to go into franchising, the lawnmower gardening business some while back and they actually pinched two people from us, one of whom was about to be let go because he wasn't any good. So they didn't quite know who they were getting. But the end result was they lost so much money this share price tanked at the same time as we were serenely profitable and growing. You have to know what you're doing. That's why the service industry is so good, Jason. It honestly is because you can start it anywhere, you can start with nothing and there's no upper limit. And you don't on the whole have strongly imprent competitors. I suppose we are to some extent, but we're only a fraction of the market. It's wide open. There's a wonderful book called the Millionaire Next Door which is about American millionaires. And they're not actually don't typically, they're not tech gurus, people like that. They're actually people like you and me often in the service business.

Yeah, well a lot of the time it's the most unsexy businesses that make the most amount of money.

Everybody wants to be a YouTube influencer or someone like that, but the reality is there's very, very few make it. But if you're going into cleaning or gardening or something, opportunities are phenomenal. We actually call ourselves the Millionaire Factory because I believe we've converted more millionaires and multimillionaires than any company in the history of Australia. Now I can't prove it, but I can't see anybody else who'd even come close because so many people have been successful starting with nothing. Like Dan Kael who started. He was a high school dropout, worked for McDonald's, bought a franchise in his early 20s with great trepidation to find that kind of money. He's now multi millionaire and about to launch in the us. That's the service industry. Where else could you start off now?

What about today? You touched on it briefly just then. But a lot of young people, especially my generation, they want to do like the cool, they want to do drop shipping, they want to do E commerce, they want to do AI, they want social media marketing, they don't want to do the dirty work, they don't want to do real service businesses where there's real value. You're changing real lives and you're providing real value to the marketplace with your franchisees. Are you seeing a lot of young people around, you know, early 20s, late 20s, early 30s that are coming into the the system or what's your experience been been like with Gen Z and and that sort of age demographic?

Not particularly, not, not skewed to any particular generation at all. I, I wish more young people would see the opportunity. There's this whole thing you've got to go to university and get yourself a degree and get a white collar job and stuff. But the fact of the matter is our franchisees turn over the average. The median Australian income is only about $70,000 a year. Now our franchisees last survey mining franchise, I can't say for cleaning, but my franchisees turn over just under $50,000 a year, just a bit under $3,000 a week. Okay, now taking out your costs and so forth, you're talking about a net income of $100,000 a year, well above average Australian income for doing something basic which you can be trained to do in a week. I mean, come on, what's the opportunities? And I say to young people too, why don't you consider not going to university, getting some useless art degree which will only qualify you to maybe work in an office. Why don't you become a plumber or a carpenter or an electrician or do something with your hands. This is this snobbery about, about you have to do something white collar and computerish and stuff. But really there's so many opportunities. An interesting thing we find too is that people who come from that kind of corporate background or where they are skilled or educated actually tend to do very very well because they're naturally fairly hard working people in the beginning. So even if you look at the say university graduates make more. Well why do they make more? Because they're university graduates or because they actually tend to be a bit more hardworking and smarter and therefore they're pushed into that sort of area. But when they eventually see the light and start and start doing a manual job then they tend to be very good at frustrates me that Young people don't see the opportunities in the service industry and you have to not mind it. I don't find it degrading, actually. I love having calloused hands. I do because of all my gardening. To me that's a source of pride. I don't feel bad about being a manual worker. I never did. I was proud of what I did as a mine contractor. I really was. I enjoyed it and I was good at it and I gave great service to my clients and I love doing it and I love being fit, I love working outside. It was a great job. What I've got now is even more interesting, but that's different.

Yeah, well, I see you talking a lot about topics like this on your, your TikTok and your Instagram and things like that. How long have you been building your personal brand? And is that a strategic, Are you doing that strategically to bring people closer to you, to learn more about your values and your interests and you as a person to then, to then bring people into the gyms group? Because obviously from the outside looking in, if you look at the gyms group you might think you'll have your preconceived notions about the business itself, but without knowing the person at the top or the person behind it yourself, without knowing the values and all the other things that make you you, the. The gyms group will just be like any other franchise group. So is that, is that strategically what you're doing with your personal brand? You're trying, you're trying to sell you. Which is really what the Jim's group is about. All of your values and principles and your systems and your ethos.

Well, look, as in most things that we do, Jason, it wasn't really me, it was Joel. So Joel was actually started off in a very basic short term position just doing, carrying files around, nothing job. Went into insurance, helping the insurance guy run things and he came. I used to, I wander around the office all the time, always chat. Who. I'm a nosy parker. I just wrote how you going, what's happened and so forth. So Joel was often talking about the websites and stuff and how to improve it and he had great ideas. So we kind of got into that. And then he started showing initiative to get into social media. That was his initiative. And that happened, you know, about five, six years ago and he was, he was learning, he was going into things like Gary, there's a social media guy in us. I forget his name. But anyway, he was reading all that stuff and doing it and then he started doing this kind of thing. And then Covid hit and that was the big change. And then I suddenly became a public figure in a very negative sense. In the beginning, two of my daughters wouldn't even speak to me for some months after I. After I had a go at Daniel Andrews over the lockdown. But that really boosted my public profile. And. And what was interesting was that we have. We were static before COVID We had about 3,800 franchisees, and we've been static for about two or three years. I mean, it hadn't grown. We were getting that we were losing them. And then Covid came and it started to lift and we started to grow. And I thought, oh, this is fantastic. But that's Covid, because people are out of work and we've got work. And so that was good. But the interesting thing is that after Covid, we kept growing. We're looking to say, why are we still growing? The economy's back to normal. And the only thing we could see was that people were seeing the stuff that Joel did. So my personal brand is helpful because I'm the face behind. Even though I haven't got the beard or anything and wearing a hat. I haven't got much hair anyway these days. But it's helpful to the business. I. I'm not sure I particularly like it for its own sake. I mean, people are always very nice. I get approached in public reasonably often, but. But I went to. I went to a wedding of a friend of mine. There was somebody there who was obviously not very clued in because he said, you know, what do you do? You a lawyer too? Like the, like the bridegroom's father? And. And I said, no, no, I mean business. He said. I said I organized cleaning and gardening services. He had no idea who I was, which. It's good. And I didn't tell him.

Yeah, it's funny. And I mean, you've become somewhat of like a pop culture icon in Australia with the Jim's brand. It's often being parodied and, and turned into memes. And I guess you, you must be on board with it in some. In some way shape form because I've seen on the Jim's website there's actually a gyms meme generator where people can make their own. And you ran like a competition on that. And I want to read some of the funny ones I've seen. So I found a few online. I've seen Jim's Private Militia. That's a funny one. We've got a gym flicks original series, Jim's married at franchise Jim's Gym Craft Jim's Gyms. Jim's, Jim's again. But it's just 9 of your face next to it. Jim's compo claims Jim's mullets, Jim's hairdressing salon, Jim's Half price Rice. Jim's only fans and my personal favorite, Jim's. Proud of you. That's, that's a very wholesome one. So when did you start to see the, the, all of these starting to become popular online and you started to find yourself becoming like a pop culture thing in Australia where all these memes were starting to spread up?

Yeah, our peak demographic is actually about 15 to 25, particularly female. It makes no sense. It's just social media. But it's good stuff. It's a bit of fun. We like to make a joke every now and then. We do an April Fool's joke every year with some of which you may have seen in the past. The most successful one in one sense was when we set up gyms. We announced that the gyms group head office, which is about 8 hectares in Murrabah, was seceding from the state of Victoria and applying to join Tasmania, which people took seriously. We got a lot of flak back about, oh, negative stuff. It's just a joke for heaven's sake. But we're still selling memberships actually, you know, you can become a citizen of gym Gym land. It cost you 20 bucks and you get, you get a certificate signed by myself and the money goes to the men's sheds, which is a great cause that helps men with, you know, communication. So we do stuff like that. But it's good to have fun with it.

That's good. I mean if you can't, if you can't laugh at it, then you'll just hate it. And there's nothing good about that. But I think it's hilarious. Over the years I've seen some funny things come up and you know you see like Jim's pole dancing, Jim's tax evasion, all these memes, it's just, it's just funny and I mean it's, it's all circling back to you and it just promotes the brand image even more.

Once you where we actually had a competition as to as a new Jim's division and the winner was Jim's hit men. They had like white polars with a little black gun.

That's a good one. All right, well, we'll start wrapping things up now. I just want to ask you a couple questions. In summary, is There anything you're still chasing or building at this stage in your career, or are you very much focused on just what you're doing now? You just have tunnel vision on the Jim's group?

Actually, we're doing a lot of work with Jim's group to improve things. But my main focus now is on the book that I'm writing called the Baby Birth Rate Crisis, which is about the plunging birth rate around the world. And I'm actually pretty clear what's causing it, which is a fundamental change in character which has deep biological roots and where my research team is actually developing treatments to actually turn this around, to actually turn around the whole birthright crisis across the world, plunging birth rates. So that's my major focus of interest at the present. And I'm spending several million dollars a year on this. We've done an essay. We're actually looking at the effect of food restriction on mild food restriction on rats. And we're looking at the effect this has and we're trying to have treatments that duplicate that. So we've actually been doing things like putting a thousand different drugs into human nerve cells in little capsules and then we're checking for the epigenetic changes we're interested in. And then we've actually lighted on 61 different drugs that have potential. So we're going to be narrowing that down and then testing them on animals and so forth. So that's my major focus.

Well, a lot of that went over my head, but it sounds amazing. That's why you're the man with the Ph.D. and not me.

Well, my Ph.D. is in history, I have to say, not neuroscience.

Oh, it's in history.

I have, I have wonderful people working for me, neuroscientists who've got that expertise and they can do things that I couldn't even dream of.

Amazing. Well, finally I'll ask you the age old cliche, if you could go back and give yourself or your younger self one piece of advice before you started jims, what would it be?

Lawnmower's a Billion business. My biggest mistake, Jason, is that I tend to jump into things I don't really know. And every time I've done that, I've lost money. I've done so many different things. Tourist venture, computer shop, trade exchanges, factories, everything you could possibly think of, and they've all lost money. Tried to start a psychology institute, which worked, but it cost me. I stick to what you know. Lawn mowing is a fantastic business. Home services is a great business focus. That laser focus just built that don't do anything else.

Awesome. Well, look, you've been very, very generous with your time today and I really appreciate it. And I think everyone listening to this and watching it on the socials is going to be really appreciative too. This has been a great episode. Is how can people find you online? You're starting to get big on social media, so where can people find your personal TikTok, Instagram, all that stuff? What's your username?

Jimpinman.com? just look at the website. It's all in there.

Awesome. Well, Jim, thank you very much. It's been an honor hosting you on here. I've, I've known who you were since I was a kid, basically. So it's interesting that I'm here talking to you today. But I very much appreciate the opportunity and I greatly appreciate your time. So thanks for coming on, mate.

You are welcome.