Jim Penman built Jim's Group from lawn-mowing gigs at $5 each into a franchise empire with 5,500 franchisees across four countries. The 73-year-old funds millions into epigenetics research and is grooming his 23-year-old daughter Sylvia to take over, after a PhD rejection in 1982 pushed him toward business full-time.
Questions this video answers
73 years old.
$5 per lawn.
More than 50 divisions.
About 5,500 franchisees across Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Canada.
1982.
Chapters
He's the recognisable bearded face we all know from his mowing empire and the many other businesses that bear his name. But there's a lot more to Jim Penman than just Lawrence.
The 73 year old is pretty cranky about government red tape. He reckons he's close to curing mental illness and he's stubborn about his succession plans. Although, as Samantha Butler discovered, Jim still knows his way around a mower.
He's the mowing magnate who's built a billion dollar business empire from the grass.
Up come down the edge, first straight, pick up every speck of grass and cut the edges. Very, very clean and perfect. Got to be totally immaculate.
Fifty years ago, Jim Penman was mowing lawns for $5 a pop to support himself through university.
Well, I had to pay the rent, didn't I?
Honestly, there wasn't very much to it.
I was deeply in debt, I was.
Newly married, my wife wasn't working because.
She was a student. So really it was the only thing I knew how to do. It wasn't really much of a decision. It, you know, do this or you don't eat.
Now he's Australia's biggest franchisor. If you could go back and speak to 18 year old Jim, what would you say to him?
There's a lot more money in gardening than you could possibly imagine. I had no idea that I could ever make a living out of actually pushing your lawnmower. And I do think that's something that people don't recognise. There's this obsession with tertiary education which I think if you're going to be a doctor or something, probably not a bad idea. But if you're not academic, I tell you what, there's so much opportunity, opportunity in business and particularly in the trades.
He would know. From humble beginnings as the bearded gardener, Jim's group has grown to more than 50 divisions. Any more in the works?
Currently we're looking at Jim's Towing is one Jim's Epoxy Floors. We're hoping to do that one.
We're trying to get Jim's personal training going.
He has a whopping five and a half thousand franchisees across Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Canada. But not all of the spin offs have been a hit.
We've probably succeeded, more than failed, but there's a lot of failures we tried. Actually. One of the ones that was really embarrassing was Jim's beauty. We got a lot of publicity about that. In the end we couldn't find customers. That was one of the very few cases where it was franchisees we could find, we couldn't find customers.
Something else that made us splash his controversial take on Victoria's COVID lockdowns. He thinks Australia needs a Trump style doge to cut down on government bureaucracy.
I find it so frustrating at every level.
I see the problems with excessive government regulation across. If you look at the median house price in Texas, where you don't have a lot of regulations, particularly like Houston, the average house price in Australian terms is about half a million dollars a year. That's about half what we're paying in Melbourne and Sydney. So we, by government regulations, we are doubling the cost of housing and the.
Actual cost individuals is horrifying. The people cannot afford, young people cannot afford to buy a house, they cannot afford to rent. There's people dying, homeless in the streets because of the housing crisis. This is government regulations. This is the iron hand of government saying we're going to bring half a million new people into this country every.
Year and they're going to use the.
Iron head of government to actually forbid anybody making enough houses to house them. What could possibly go wrong?
It's an appalling problem.
We waste hundreds of billions of dollars a year paying government bureaucrats to do nothing but impoverish us. And it makes me furious.
The government says, I want to buy.
Popularity, so let's tax people more, borrow more money and subsidise heating bills.
Well, I tell you what, we could.
Do 20 times more for people's welfare if we simply took the iron hand.
Of government, took off. Useless regulations.
The 73 year old says he never set out to make big money. When his PhD thesis was rejected in 1982, he threw himself into Jim's mowing full throttle, in the hope one day he'd be able to fund research to prove the naysayers wrong.
When I get up in the morning, I have a purpose in life. My purpose is to do with my research, but it's also to do with my franchisee welfare.
Each year he funnels millions of dollars into the field of epigenetics, exploring how our environment can influence gene activity and its effect on human behaviour.
Now what we've been doing is looking at the effects of mild food restriction, particularly on rats, trying to understand what changes it causes to their body. And it does interesting things. It makes them much better parents, they're more hard working in rat terms, which is more exploratory. What we're doing is trying to reproduce that. We think we can produce treatments that will be enormously helpful, particularly for instances like, like depression, like drug addiction, like alcohol dependence, those kinds of issues, we think we can help a lot.
And speaking of genetics, Jim's entrepreneurial streak runs in the family. His 23 year old daughter Sylvia has followed in his footsteps. She's the driving force behind Jim's removals.
Having two parents in business since before I can even remember, it was always business. But just what kind of business? Removals is an industry where you have to trust the people that you're moving with. And who would you trust more? Who could you trust more than literally the biggest service brand in Australia? It's satisfying work. It's an industry where I think people, you know, there's a lot of cowboys around. So a lot of customers that you know, came to us. I found that they were really disappointed with their previous experiences. Yeah just in moving so I kind of saw a gap in the market.
Suez mother and I got a bet as to how many trucks they're going to have by Christmas. They just got their second one. I reckon they're going to have four by Christmas. Re reckons three. So we've got.
He's always got high expectations like he always does that, you know, he's always putting his expectations super high and then you know, I don't think he thinks we can reach it but it's like if you, you know, think so.
A strategy that seems to have served him well.
I often say what, what matters in business is in is what you think about in the shower. If you're thinking about your business all the time and saying how can I improve? You'll tend to do well. If you're just doing it because you want to make money so you can do things that are more important you're not likely to do as well.
Isn't that what you're doing with research though? I'm just kidding. He's giving me the look.
But while he may have a whip smart successor in waiting, the man with the mower isn't ready to hand over the reins of his empire just yet.
On my retirement I've got the ceremony planned. It'll be in a church and I'll be the guest of honor and I'll be in a box.
That's pretty funny. I've never heard you say it like that before.
And my life expectancy based on Google because I have extremely good health and everything else is probably. I'll live to my obvies about another 20 years. So I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for me to retire.
No one is. No one is.
No unimaginable. Good onion.
Back behind the mower. I'm not sure about Jim's beauty salon.
