TFS#172 - Jim Penman Building $1 Billion Dollar Franchise Business (Jim's Mowing, Dog Wash, Cleaning)

We have a contract that says if you can reach 30 franchisees within three years, it's yours. We'll give it to you. If you want to, you can sell it. Franchisees first. Why is McDonald's so successful? Because they look after their franchises well and the franchisees make money. You've got to make your franchisee successful. My research project actually trying to understand the reason for the rise and fall of civilization. The character of individual people is what determines society. I never, never, ever did any sort of sexual activity. 100% nocturnal emissions until I was 20. I'm obviously hugely financially successful. I think that's a direct result of it. Boys should stop masturbating and not have sex with girls. That would be a solution. It's impractical. It's impossible. But what if you could have a treatment that would actually achieve the same results, which would be possible. I love James Dyson. I would never buy anything but Dyson. Best, Best, Dyson everything. If I had to name one of four or five people in the whole world that I admire most, to be one of them, along with Bill Gates, Elon Musk, but still James Dyson. Fantastic guy. Hello. I say good morning, but I don't know what time of day it is there.

I'm in Sydney as well. Whereabouts are you based?

Melbourne. Ah, of course.

Are we on the same time zone? And how's the weather in Melbourne?

Too bad it's not raining for a change. Wet summer, my goodness.

Yeah. In Sydney it's been really hot the last few days. We've been hitting 40 degrees. I don't know if it's hot down there.

Oh, no, we've had a pretty mild, Mild, wet summer.

Okay, that's good to hear. Thank you so much for doing this. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you, Jim.

Okay. Pleased to be here.

How I first found out about you, Jim, was ever since I was young, I remember my mom driving me around and just seeing these sort of cars with, you know, Jim's mowing, and it would just pop up at first. I would see one here and there. And over the years it just started more and more, and all of a sudden it was everywhere. And, you know, as I've sort of gone into business and as I've had this podcast, I was like, I've always wanted to sort of have a conversation with you and sort of hear more about your.

Yeah, sure, I guess.

Jim, could you please tell the audience sort of a bit of an intro on who you are and sort of maybe the things you're sort of focusing on as of late?

Well, I started out, I did a PhD in history trying to undercover the the rules behind the rising for the civilizations. Ended up basically in 1982 without any potential for an academic career. And so I decided to turn my part time student lawnmower business into a full time job because that's the only thing I knew how to do. So that was 1982. Seven years later I franchised. Somebody asked me how many franchisees I might have one day. I said, you know, maybe if it works. Well, a hundred. We've currently got 5260 or something like that and, and growing fast. So it's been surprisingly successful.

And Jim, do you still work on the company full time as I, I.

Saw the CEO, yes, I'm full time in operation. I don't even know how many hours I work a week. I'm not workaholic, but people reach me weekends, public holidays, after hours, I'm always on, I'm always answering emails. I have my. Every one of my franchisees has my direct personal phone number, email address and invited to contact me anytime. And they do. I deal with client problems. If a client doesn't get an answer from the complaint about the service, they'll send it to me and I'll follow it up until something's done about it. I walk around the office every day, I walk into the call center, I see how they're going and I see how long it's taken them to take the calls and whether we're hitting target, which is 13 seconds on average from the end of the message. And I talk to departments, make plans and just I'm very involved. I love it. It's really, really fun.

And then I've noticed over the last few years you've been sort of dabbling into sort of educational content, creating social media content, sort of building your personal brand. What was sort of the catalyst for that move and sort of going towards education as well?

Well, social media is the, is where the world is right now. We've had phenomenal success with it. And before COVID we had like 3,800 franchisees. We've grown nearly 50% since then. And I think a lot of that can be attributable to social media. Look, we've got a great story to tell, but sometimes it's hard to get out. People have this impression, you know, that we for example, take half somebody's pay. In fact it's more like 6%. So when you, when you actually get people to talk to Hear from our franchisees direct, they give a very different story. We have a great story to tell. I mean just to give you an example we often use. If you look at the success rate of people who go into independent businesses like ours like cleaning and gardening and you can look at that on the Internet, the chance of being in business within 12 months is between 5 and 10%. With us it's not 100% but it's 88%. So we have 12% of people who probably are left on the first year. Not of course they fail, I might say a lot less than that. We actually report poor income. There's all kinds of reasons but still we're very good at that kind of stuff and getting that message out is really important. And the best way to do it is actually to do it by talking to franchisees. So we interview franchisees all the time.

That's amazing. Firstly, I want to, I just remember today is Australia Day, so thank you for doing this on Australia Day, a public holiday. And this does drum down how you are definitely an operator.

Day to day public holidays don't mean anything to me quite frankly. I'd be quite happy to work my fractals bring me on Christmas day. It doesn't worry me. I'm there for them. That's my, they're my people, they're my tribe. If they need me, I'm going to be available.

Jim, like the 88% success rate, that is like, that's amazing. How did you get the success rate so high? Because as you know, like I sort of teach people how to start their own online business and you know, it takes time, you know, making money and isn't a get rich quick scheme. It takes you know, a year to sort of get started. But six months in they start, you know, life hits them, you know, they're not getting the results as they want. How did you get franchisee owners results 88% of the time?

Okay, first of all we screen. It's something I've done right from the beginning. If we see somebody we don't think is right for being in business for themselves, we say no, I'm not saying we do it perfectly but we really try very hard to. Most people who come up with the money or appear to have got ability but there are certain percentage that don't, maybe maybe 5, 10% who just shouldn't be in business and we try and pick those. We have a very good training program. We have a three day generic plus we have divisional training and we started as soon as we did that, our actual loss rate jumped, dropped dramatically. We were losing close to 20% of our franchises in the first year. It dropped the way, way back. And then we have a system where we provide leads. And part of the strategy behind that is to a large extent, we really, really, really focused on customer service. We're fanatical about customer service. So what happens then? The better we do in terms of customer service, the less the complaints, the more the leads come in. That's been a dramatic difference over the years. As our customer service got better, the volume of leads has risen. In fact, last year we had over 200,000 unserviced leads. We had to say no to people because the demand is so big and our advertising per franchisee is less than what it used to be. And yet most of our practices are flat out. So this whole process where we pump leads and most franchisees get as much work as they can handle from the beginning. If they don't, we have a system called pay for work guarantee, which is that they go out and offer free services to friends, neighbors, relatives, franchises from other divisions, people on Facebook, anybody just do a job, get paid, will paying because that builds their business and it gives them an income. And then you have an ongoing coaching program where franchisors ring at least monthly, ideally weekly in the beginning. And so they how you go and respond quickly and run regular meetings. So there's constant mentoring, coaching and franchisees, they coach each other, help each other through, through meetings and relationships. That's basically the structure and we're always looking to improve that. When we're never good enough, it's always, we've always got to try and do better.

So when I sort of get leads for my education company and I sort of hand the leads off to my sales sort of team members to sort of manage the sales calls, you know, with each salesperson I would have spent months training getting them on par, getting them to a point where they can really understand and care and look after the client. How do you go about a similar process when it comes to handing leads off to franchisees and making sure they actually mow the lawn the whole the right way you want it to.

Okay. Most of the problems with customer service in our business is not to do with the way you mow the lawn. It's calling the client back promptly. We have an absolute maximum two hours and then making an appointment, setting it, save the two hour time allowance because you can never be exactly on time. And then they've got to turn up if they give a quote Give the right kind of quote and give it the right time. So if you say you're going to give a quote, tell the client when and then get back to them with the quote. And when you email the quote, then you text it as well. If you can't get through to a client at any time, you always must text them. So we, we just hit these simple procedures again and again and again. And if they get a get it wrong, if they phone the client back but forget to text them, tell them they phone, then they get a registered complaint which affects their record, so they learn to not do better next time. So it's a very tough system and franchisees don't always like it. But the flip side of that is that we do tend to keep them very busy, not only busy with work, but also we strongly recommend and we urge them to charge more than the competition. We say you should be working at least $60 per hour. So we charge relatively high rates, significantly higher than our competitors. But we push customers service so hard that we can get them. So it's a very rigorous, tough, ongoing process and we're still working on it. We've got technological developments in terms of our system called Jim's Jobs, which we're planning over the next year to actually add a whole layer of this to remind people to do the right thing and to give feedback and all kinds of things. We believe we can drop our complaints to less than half of what they are now within the next year, and that should dramatically affect even more the work coming through.

Jim, what made you want to go down this franchisee model? Like, why didn't you go down the route of having it all in house, having your own employees for the different services from pet cleaning to mowing lawns and put your employees through the same rigorous training and sort of own everything?

Maybe I'm not capable enough to do that. I had subbies in pre franchise days and honestly the service was terrible. I mean, I would get like 100 leads and get 100 complaints about people not turning up and so forth. With now it'd be 100 leads and fraction of one complaint. I just find franchisees easier to work with because they're motivated. They, they're in the business for themselves, they've got interest in it. If you're going to have a worker who's going to go out doing a job for you and you're taking say half their income or 40%, whatever, which you need to, to cover your overheads, it's not attractive to the top people, is it, but if you can say to a person here, you can go out and make yourself $3,000 a week, which is pretty typical. It's a bit under. According to later surveys, the average franchisee in saying mowing terms everywhere, about $2900 per week. You can show that that's, that's $100,000 plus income. That's the kind of, you know, professional type of income. And of course the top people make a lot more. Our top people are turning over would have profits in, you know, half a million dollars per annum or more. Very few jobs provide that. We probably created more millionaires than any company in the country. So it's, it's very rewarding. You, you get to work with really great people and you help them to be better and you show them the way. And even the ones that leave often go on to greater things. One of my first franchisees happen to know is a big scale property developer. Owns a whole lot of nurseries and stuff. That's very common. They build major business so you can have a kid like Dan car a lot of videos on him. This was a high school dropout. This is a failure. This is the person who's never going to go anywhere. Went to work for McDonald's, which is a pretty good move. Bought a, a lawn mowing franchise in his like early twenties. Really not sure he's doing the right thing. Turned over close to a million dollars a year within a few years and then sold that off. And now one of our top franchisors, this guy's 30 years old, he's a multi millionaire. How can you achieve that in any other form of life when you're a high school dropout?

That's amazing. And I was just trying to think of like different franchisee models. Thinking of McDonald's on how they own the land and sort of the franchisees would come in, they would buy in and run the business. But then McDonald's has massive marketing so I guess clients would come in through. So they get all their customers from that. They, they take advantage of the marketing. Yeah, there's so many different models.

Yeah. McDonald's is a very good franchisor. I have a lot of respect for them. It's the only one I really knew before we launched gyms. They, they treat people very fairly. They listen to their franchisees. It's a system that's designed to help franchisees to become wealthy. Enormous respect for them. Great training program. Really love it. I've got a 14 year old son who just can't wait to go and work for McDonald's when he's 40 years in nine months. Because. Because it's such a great. And I'd love him to lasting food. I wouldn't eat it, let my kids eat it. But as a franchise or. They're wonderful. But you have a lot of others that are absolutely appalling. Like what Retail Food Group did to so many Australian business owners. It's just, just dreadful the way they. They take over these brands and they rip them blind and they change them and they terminate their franchise on the 10 years and they do all kinds of disgusting things which. Are you really angry. We've got a new division called Jim's Legal. One of the things we'd love to do is to help some franchisees against these dreadful sharks, these horrible people. So there are great franchise systems around and there's appalling ones around. What I would say to anybody looking at getting into franchising is for him and say, do your research. Get a list of current franchisees. Is one of the few good things that you can say about the franchising code. I can't say much of it apart from that. Get the list, ring them and ask them, what's it like? What support do you get? Is it a good deal? Would you do it again? Is your income good? If you've got a problem, does somebody. Does somebody talk to you? What's it like? And if you do that, I don't know. I just can't believe people can spend a lot of money, tens of thousands of dollars. Most people who do this aren't particularly rich and they don't do just a couple of hours of fundamental research.

Yeah, Jim, tell me about. It's so cool. Like, I remember just seeing the greens that have Jim's Mowing sort of logo everywhere. But now you know, there's Jim's Pet Cleaning, legal mowing. What else? There's like jobs, Jim's Jobs. You're about to launch that, like, how do you go?

Program. But. But there's cleaning, window cleaning, carpet cleaning, pest control, handyman, pool cleaning, it, bookkeeping. You just keep on going. They try and get me to go there and I can't. There's more than 40 now. Even I can't remember them all. At least I know them all, but I can't recite them.

How do you go about picking which industries to go into? And is your main sort of focus as the franchisor just providing leads and getting customers and that's why they want to sort of come in?

Okay, there's some fairly basic principles. First of all, we don't do site based, except that people who have their own franchise, like a laundry franchise, can have their own site if they wish to, or pool care. We're good at service industries, industry where somebody calls or books online and we go out and provide service. That's the kind of thing we do. We want a service that's got scale because of the way the gyms works. It's a very small margin and my profit margin is less than 1% of our turnover. So it's not, it's not big. You have, you need numbers, need a large. So you need an industry which has got really big potential and really important. You've got to be able to make at least 60 bucks per hour. Now that's minimum. If you can't make that, you can't make the six figure income that we want our franchise to have. At least those who work full time, some of them don't want to. So there's those principles. Having said that, the way a division starts is actually not us looking at the market and saying we'd like to do X, it's somebody coming to us and saying, hey, I know this marketplace, this industry. I'd like to do this myself with your help. So for example, new division is test is scratching. We call it scratch and dent, where you fix minor and dents on cars. Now the guy who did this was actually one of my first franchisees. He became a franchisor, then later off went off and found this very successful business in the scratch and dent industry. And now he's come back to us to launch a new division which is really doing very well. And he's recruiting spray painters who. Because basically the appeal to them is we can treble your income, which is a pretty, pretty good sales pitch. And, and if they want to prove that, all they got is to ring the people who've already done it, who are often their own and say, how's it going? And they said, yeah, I'm making $5,000 a week. And they know how much they're making beforehand. So that's kind of how it's done. But you know, Jason's just, he's a good guy. He was, he's a good franchisor. And, and we're giving good support.

Yeah, I was going to ask like, let's say I go ahead and just do Andy's mowing. I'm going to have to door knock. I'm going to have to maybe go send flyers and sort of get people to sort of want to work with me. If I sort of sign up to Jim's Mowing, am I instantly just given a plethora of customers to service?

Yeah, basically. Well, some, it depends on the division. Some divisions are a bit harder to find customers for. So the white collar ones it bookkeeping for example, mowing mostly we flat out from word go, it's one of the easiest divisions to find work for. It's got, it's got the most unserviced leads too. So generally speaking most mowing franchisees don't do, don't even need to do paperwork guarantee. I send a letter out, an email that to every franchisee one month after they start and it's all automated. But don't specifically ask them how they're going and they're doing paperwork guaranteed. And most of them reply which, which is good because I really push them to reply and most of them tell me they're making good money making what we call paperwork guarantee level. That's standard. It's just easier. The point of it is too, if a person wants to go into business for themselves, there's a few things I'd say. First of all, if you wanted to go and start your own gardening business, you know the absolute best thing you could ever do is ring up about a gym's mowing franchise. Because what we will do then is we'll put you through training which will only cost you a few hundred bucks. So we'll put you through a really intense business course. Then we'll do horticulture, sort of basic horticulture, three day course, give you all the information. Now when you've done that, then you can go out and do your own. Because we're not committing you. Coming to our trend doesn't mean to say you have to pay for the training, but you haven't paid for the franchise yet. In fact, it's very rare for people to pay for their company. So there's a way of going into business for yourself or the other alternative is you come to us, you start a business, you do well, you get your client, you learned and then you say I want to go independent. Which we allow. You just pay a small fee, four or five thousand dollars. We'll wave the trend trade, you're off. Does happen, but it doesn't, it doesn't happen very often because generally speaking the benefit of being with us is so strong. Once you've sat through the course, we're not stupid. You look at what's happening and you talk to people who've Gone through it in the past. And you say, wow, why would I struggle as an independent when I can be given so much? I mean, there's a young guy in my church that I talk to at times. He just sits just in front of us normally. And he's a great, great young guy. He's doing. And he's. And he's beaten the odds. He's one of. He's one of that 5 or 10% who's actually managed to make it work. But his turnover is like half of what our guys make. Like, he's turning over like 60 grand a year, which is okay for him because he's just. When our people are making double that, it's kind of comparison is quite strong. I had a friend, actually, who was telling me how he. Another friend had a. I think a windscreen business. And he was telling me that he was doing so well because he didn't have to pay franchise fees. And I said, what's your marketing budget? And he said, well, it's about 20% of my turnover. You see, we don't spend that much, but our total fees on average were about 6%. Total, everything. Marketing support, meetings, everything. So it's a good deal.

What's your thoughts on sort of like, doing, like, private equity? Like, with your whole setup, sort of. You could become a private equity company where you sort of get equity in all these different industries with all these independent contractors and sort of partner up with all these people versus the franchisee model.

But what would I be buying into? I mean, look, for a start, frankly, we don't particularly need money. Most of my money, actually, my surplus money goes into the research project, looking to do things like curing. I spent several million dollars a year on this. It's funded through Latrobe University. So we don't need a massive amount of capital to run this thing. I don't live a luxurious life. I don't have any private jets or anything like that. Live in the same house the last 20 years, and just bought my first car, new car ever, just over a year ago, because I wanted electric. So I don't. I don't need a lot of money. We don't need money to grow. What we actually need more than anything else is good people. That's the hardest thing to find. It's not money, it's people. To find somebody who's got the drive and the ability to be. To be able to launch a new division, even with our help, that's quite challenging. You know, we had this guy, Bill Copanoglu, is one of our. One of our stars. This is a guy who started gyms as a cleaner, all right, Cleaning houses, washing toilets, became a very successful franchisee, became a franchisor. Now, just under three years ago, he launched Jim's Laundry, which we were very confident of because we knew what sort of guy Bill is. We've got like 120 franchisees. This guy is amazing. He's part of what we call the Turkish Ma. Turks seem to be great at franchise for some reason. Cleaning and car cleaning and laundry and lot of Turks.

Jim, is there enough people applying to be a part of, you know, the, the gym's family and the gym's group, or do you need more?

Oh, we need more. We need more. We. We. Our problem is not clients. Overwhelmingly, most of our franchisees are very busy. It's not all of them, not all of them all the time. And, and certainly not some of them who aren't giving great service. But generally speaking, they're busy. Our problem, our reason, only thing slowing us down is lack of franchisees. We actually have a saying. It's about. If you've got the email from me before, you'll see a little three part. The beginning. Our first product is the welfare of franchisees. We're also passionate about customers. We sign only franchisees and franchisors. We're convinced we'll succeed. Well, that's. We really mean that. That's been there from the beginning. But that first one there. Franchisees first. You've always got it. Look, I'm fanatical about customer service, but I would spend 10 times as much time being concerned about franchisee welfare as I'm about. Even about customers. They're absolutely number one. That's successful franchising. Why is McDonald's so successful? Because they look after their franchise as well, and the franchisees make money. You know that some of Ray Kroc's first franchisees were millionaires before, and that's. That meant a lot. Back in the 60s, there were millionaires before he even drew a salary from McDonald's. He actually made his money from his Mixmaster business for a long time. That was his. That was his focus. He wanted his franchisees to become wealthy. Now he charges them good fees. But it's a great system. And that's, that's the kind of principle that we work under too. You've got to make your franchisees successful. This policy that I have of getting franchisees to contact me now, people think that's weird. How can you. The CEO of a company that's got over 5,000 people involved. How can you possibly give your phone number and your email to all of them daytime after hour? And I say, part of the DNA of our success, because I want to know, if a franchise got a problem, they can come to me directly if they haven't got it somewhere else, and I will do whatever I need to, which might actually mean giving them a free franchise and a different division. It might mean anything, but just change things. I can walk down the office and say, do this, we need to help this person. And not only that, but when somebody contacts me with a problem, so often I learn what's wrong with the system, what are we doing wrong, what mistakes are we making? And there wouldn't be a day of my life when I'm not looking at what we're doing and saying, how can we improve? And the best way to learn is from the front line. Direct involvement with clients, direct involvement with franchisees. And then you keep an eye on what's going on.

Is there sort of a time that you set aside each day to go through all your emails and SMS's or are you just going through them throughout the day?

I just, I just keep on top of them. I will, I will, I'll be away for a while, I'll come back in. There's 60 emails sitting there and I just go through them. But I'm, but I'm ultra efficient. That's the key. You've got to. I started the most recent and I do something with it. You don't just read it and go back to it. You do something with it. Now mostly often I'll just say, okay, sometimes I don't need to do anything, it's just a copy of me. Sometimes I'll need to. Might be in a request to delete a complaint. I mean, a person could delete complaints. Sometimes it's just advice they want. Just go through, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And then I clean up my email box and also check my junk mail. I don't trust, I don't trust the SPAN field in Outlook. I will check my junk mail too to make sure. And the thing is, people miss out on so much by not checking their emails. For example, when you get a new division, where does that come from? Almost always somebody contacts me, they send out an email out of the blue. I'm interested in doing so and so, so I'm here, mailed it back, typically within a few hours, could be within a few minutes. And I asked them about it and I asked some Questions, what's your background? What have you done? This kind of thing, if it looks good, I set up a zoom interview which is usually a few days later and then the next stage is they can booked into franchisor training. It's very fast because they get to the head of the company. So I don't miss out on stuff. And truly the people are so scared of spam, but it's ridiculous. I would probably just getting rid of the garbage that comes through. And there's quite a bit. It would take me less than a minute a day. When you put that minute against the chance of missing out on say a franchisee has problems. Sometimes this goes to spam or a potential new division or a great new offer for our franchisees. I mean that's a minute very well spent. So I don't trust spam footers. I'd shut it down if I could.

I love just hearing your process of going through your inbox. Like that's so freaking cool. I see all the books in the background like, you must be a ferocious reader and. Yeah. Do you still read each night?

Oh yeah, I read obsessively. I probably on average would read or listen to a couple of books a week. Plus I also read the economists, new scientists, lots of other things too. I'm a voracious reader. I read quite fast. So it's not. But it's easy. You know, I'm actually, I'm going off to my farm to the public holiday. I'm going to be doing some garden, giving gardening. It's just my recreation and strangely enough for an ex buying contractor. But when I'm doing that, I'll have bugs in and I'll be listening to a talking book. I'm listening to one right now about a lady who was with Amazon for 13 years and what she was doing her experiences with that too. So that's interesting, but not all business. I. I love evolutionary psychology, for example, and biography and politics, all kinds of things. Reading is fantastic. You're always constantly putting new ideas into your mind. You're always learning new stuff and it changes you and you, you change your attitude. I'll be a lot about health too. Health, fitness, diet, exercise. Very keen on that kind of stuff. Happiness, what makes people happy. I'm really interested in the science of happiness and why, what kinds of behaviors and what kinds of lifestyle. And people are very deluded about it. They have really wrong ideas. They think that, you know, the way to be happy is to buy a lot of expensive stuff like cars and big houses. And stuff. It's. It's almost zero. Almost nothing to do with it. Happiness is more about experiences. And the best way to be happy with money, the best way to use money to be happy is to give it away, strangely enough, to a cause that you're involved in, which is like my research project. So I'm in the process of the moment of rewriting one of my books about things I call learning cycles and how they apply to human. So we're planning a new book which is about the plunging birth rate and what can be done about it. So a lot of exciting things going on.

This. I love you. So you have this such a diverse sort of mind and like, I can see you're so happy involved with this sort of lifestyle where you have work, you have all the people messaging you, relying on you. But then you still have your farm, you probably have chores you work on, you focus on health. You have a son.

I've got 10 children, not just one.

Wow. That, that, that's amazing.

Like, I love kids. Obviously you don't have 10 if you don't really enjoy them, but I do. It's one of. It's one of the things we're talking about in this birth rate book as to why birth rate's dropping so much. People think it's economic. It's not. It's psychological. If you're the kind of person that likes children, you want to have children, even, you know, I started having kids when I was in debt working as a lawn main contractor by myself. It was not economically rational, but I never thought of anything else. I just like kids. I miss them badly, actually. I love my grandsons, but I see them as often as I like.

So, like Jim right now, like, I feel like I'm at like a decent balance. I figured things out. Like the company, my company is probably at maybe half a million a year. I'm sort of on top of the messages, I'm on top of my relationship with friends and family. And I'm getting back to all the messages and clients that need me. But in my mum, like, if I add another zero, it feels like I can't handle 10 times more than what I'm currently handling. But you've seemed to be able to do an amazing job 100 times, a thousand times.

Well, what you need is good people. That's the kiss. You've got to find people who can help you out. And that's the hardest thing of all. I tell you what. Clients, yes, important franchisees, even hard to find quality people at the Senior level. And that's probably where my biggest failing has been taking me a long time, to find very good people. And even now, I don't have enough of them. We're actually desperate looking around to try and find people with that, with that spark, with that vision of going in and loving the job and thinking about ways to improve it. It's not easy to find such people. I was playing racquetball. We've got a. Just got a new racquetball court at headquarters with a young guy called Joel. And this is. This is the bloke who came to us 10 years ago, I think about about 20 at the time, doing a very basic job. It was only one, even permanent. He was just cutting files around, stuff like that. And he got into assisting the person who does have insurance. And I used to go in and chat to them. I just wander around all the time, and I could. And he had ideas about, about how he's. How we could do things better and how we could promote the service. But I just liked him. He's now one of my top executives. He's like 30 years old. He's like quadruple what he was when he started with us. You find people anywhere, and it's quite surprising, actually. We've got a lady, Megan, now. She was a single mother in her 40s, and honestly, if you looked at her and spoke to her, you wouldn't think she was anything extraordinary. She came to work in a very basic administrative job. She did quite well. I gave her a pay rise and she had tears in her eyes because it's the first time anybody had ever given her any kind of pay rise ever. This is a woman, like, as I said, in her 40s. She is now one of my best managers, and she's a wonderful person. She's a wonderful lady. Every time I go in there, she's got ideas. I was in there yesterday and she was talking about ways we could improve the IT system and improve the efficiencies and stuff like that. Her thinking is amazing. I mean, the amount of sheer human talent is out there that's underutilized is just astonishing because the people look at, they say, oh, you got to have an MBA from this and this and this, all this kind of garbage. There are wonderful, wonderful people out there. But I tell you what, there's not a lot of them. You just got to try and find them and then give them the opportunity to grow. And I believe in that. A lot of people that succeed in us come from the grassroots. The, My, my CEO. Wonderful guy Rocky he was. He actually started work as a prison guard and he became, went through the prison service and then his wife was working in our call center and so she influenced him. He bought a into handyman and then became into the office in a very junior role and showed himself and now he's, he's brilliant, he's great guy but it's just you got to find good people and that's, that's your struggle too. Just trying to find people who've got that spark, who care about what they do and innovate and just think about the job all the time. How can I do better? And endlessly so critical. What can I improve now? Joel's improved. I was talking to him last night about this. We had a few games actually we just got to 22 warming out and I was sitting down exhausted afterwards and just talking about it. They said, well now a few years ago you weren't worth what you might now, but you've learned so much. He's so taught. He developed on Gary Vee and he's got these new systems. He's getting better and better all the time at what he does, that kind of thing. And this, this young guy is only 30 or something quite young, but he's probably running the company one day because he's, he's the next generation or maybe. I don't know.

How many sort of employees do you guys have to look after? 5,000 plus franchisees and the hundreds of thousand customers?

Well, that's because I don't look after them myself. I find good people to do the job. In fact, if you look at the day to day running of the business, I have less to do with than the people like Rocky and Joel and Megan do. They're the hands on managers. They're the ones that do the hard work and frankly they do it better than I could. Much better. I have this floating role. I just talk to a lot of people and just discuss. I'm very poor manager in a lot of ways, but I'm very fertile with ideas. People come up with something else. I said why don't we do this or why don't we do that? Just different, different, different. My whole research project, my PhD was extremely unorthodox which is why I could never find a job because it was too wildly off the normal beaten track. But in business being unorthodox is actually quite good on the whole. So I find people who can handle the administration, management side and I'm there. Ideas, changes, what's happening? Why is this happening. How can we do it better and then implement it? Honestly, I think one of my great strengths as a business owner is that I'm. I'm actually pretty pathetic at doing almost everything really. I mean, I don't know much about figures. I'm not a great manager. I'm not good on social media. I mean really, I don't know anything about it. I didn't use social media myself. I just don't know how to do this stuff. I get great people who've got these abilities. I talk to them and I work with them. Make a lot of stupid mistakes. Lots and lots and lots of dumb mistakes all the time. But just keep on learning.

And Jim, how many employees do you guys have that run everything?

Oh, directly. Not like they may be at 100.

Oh, that's a lot. Wow.

Well, yeah, but about half are in the call center. That's. But which I still, I still get to know them and stuff and try and have a relationship with them. But yeah, that's a lot. Really. Not, not for a business that turns over a billion dollars or so.

Wow. How long did it take for you guys to get to a billion dollars?

Well, started the franchise 89. You figured out what that's. It'd be 35 years now. So it's not overnight, it's just a long. It's a whole process of constantly improving what you do. Relentless self criticism. How can we do better? How can we do better? The thing that strikes me in business is that people are incredibly complacent about themselves. I don't know, they just think they're good enough. You know, we had in New Zealand in the early days, we a lot less centralized in those days in terms of things like customer service and call centers and so forth. And we're putting new systems in place in Melbourne, in Australia to control the level of complaints and drop them down. This is part of the process we've followed ever since. And we said to the New Zealanders, we want you to do the same thing. And they said, oh no, we don't need to because our customer service is so good. You know, we're fine. We don't need this. You Australians, obviously you need it because you. But we're so much better. When we actually implemented these systems and started testing, we found their service was considerably worse than ours. But they didn't know. And this is the same pattern we find all over the place. The best franchisees are the ones that are relentlessly self critical. What can I do? The ones that fail are the Ones that say, I'm doing everything right. You've got to change. I need more leads. I need better quality leads. I need lower fees. I need this. That's what I need, that. I'm doing everything right. They're the ones that tend to fail because they just won't look at. They won't look in.

That's freaking amazing. Like a billion dollars with just 5,000 franchise. What's your thoughts on the Australia and New Zealand sort of economy? It's like we're doing really well with such little population. Do you have plans to look out of sort of Oceania, or do you feel like Oceania itself is already a blue ocean?

We've tried. The US failed. We tried. The UK basically failed too. We've got about 90 in Canada, in British Columbia. Never gone beyond that. It's. Look, it's. It's very difficult to. Jim's has a very peculiar culture. It's very. What do you want to say? Very egalitarian, very franchisee. First, we're the only franchise system in the world that allows franchisees to move to a different franchisor. If they're not happy with them, which you can. In a mobile, they can vote out their franchisor. They can veto changes to their own manual. It's extremely egalitarian, very Australian, New Zealand culture, which is very different from, say, North America or Europe. So it's very hard to get that kind of culture strong. And one of the ways we do that is through our training program. But of course, when you go overseas and you have a different people running the training program, they tend to water things down and say, oh, well, you don't need to do that. We, we can do it our way. You know, local conditions and they water down the system. That's what tends to happen. So the reality of it is it's actually 100 times easier to start a new division in Australia and New Zealand than to try and launch our existing businesses overseas. Because here we've got the infrastructure, we've got the brand name, like Jim's Beauty is a perfect example. Now, this was something that started for me just a few months back when one of my franchisors in laundry actually wrote to me and said, what about Jim's Beauty? Looked at him, asked what he did in industry background, very successful franchisor. I said, okay, let's do it now. We launched Jim's Beauty, like, we announced it, like in November last year. We. Something like that. We've had stories, national stories about it. We've had hundreds of people Asking to get jobs done, you know, services done. We haven't even got the first franchisee. We've got, I think, four or eight or something franchisees now. It's just the point of it is it's so easy because the brand is so strong and the structure and the training, it's already there. And I'm pretty confident that Beauty will have 100 franchisees within a few years, just like Laundrie did. Great leader, great concept. So this is easy. Try and get 100 million franchisees in California and that'll be orders of magnitude harder. So we probably will go overseas. But again, it's not so much a matter of what we want to do. It's finding the right people. Like, divisions don't start because I get some brainwave. There's very few divisions we've started ourselves. Division start because somebody comes to us, a great person comes to us and says, I want to do this. That's how it's done.

Interesting. Yeah, because I was going to ask, like, how do you guys go about creating Jim's Beauty and having it knock out all the other beauty salons that's been there for tens of years, and you guys just come in new into the market and infiltrate it with ease? I guess the answer is finding good people.

Well, okay, let me give you an example, an analogy. Many years ago, we did a survey on glazing companies in Adelaide, and we actually gave them four different options. There was a couple of local glazes, one of the bigger ones. Local ones. There was o', Brien's, which is by far the biggest in the country. Big company. Then there's Jim's Glass. And so we asked people, we did a survey to say, which would you choose to do your glazing work? Now, not surprisingly, o' Brien's actually got a better rating than the local glaziers. Significantly better. But you know what? The absolute number one was by far? Jim's Glass. More people by far said they would use Jim's Glass than a Brian's, which has been going for decades. It's biggest in the country. And the interesting thing about that is there was no such thing as Jim's Glass. It didn't even exist. So before we even started, we had the best brand for glazing in. How can you beat that? It's so powerful. And then when you go in and what you do is you focus like mad on making sure clients are happy. You focus on customer experience, being great, getting a callback, and they use one service and they want another. So that kind of. That's kind of a formula. Even then, though, it depends on having the right person in charge. If you've got the right leader like a Bill Coburn ugly or someone like that. Yeah, they're the ones that will do great work and have great divisions.

For the last six to seven years, I've always been a fan of, you know, direct marketing, conversion marketing. I never understood sort of brand marketing, reach advertising. But now I'm starting to slowly shift. Like branding is so important. Like Nike can sell a shoe for $100 because of that tick. Like, tell me your approach to branding because that's something that you guys have crushed it in.

Well, we didn't even think the brand would apply. Past mowing. In the beginning, when we first started cleaning, we actually had a different brand logo. We had sunlight with sprays. What's this guy with a beard and a hat? It's a gardening image. That was me actually mowing lawns. That's what I used to look like. And a beard and you can wear the hat because I get pretty fair skin. And we didn't think it would apply, but when we actually, somebody came to us and said, we think we should do gyms cleaning. Because we actually tried so much, fail getting the money back, just couldn't find the work. And somebody come to me and said, what about Jim's Cleaning? That's not going to work. It's a gardening image. I said, well, you know, we think it will. I said, no one. I said, okay, look, what if we go in joint partnership, we give it a try? So we tried it and it worked. People, the brand spread and yeah, just the more you focus on the thing that people get too hung up on, on things like advertising and branding and stuff. There's nothing special about this brand. You know how long it took us to work out this logo? It was probably like a couple of hours. It was a graphical representation of me, what I looked like. Plus, we spent most of the time was getting the script right. And then a few years later, we made a slightly friendlier image for stuff. But it was a really simple thing. And this is a gardener, for heaven's sake. I mean, what's, what's special about gyms? But what you then do is you go out and you give your franchisees first of all, and you give your customers a really good experience, and that's what makes the difference. You call them back and you're relentless in doing it. See, we get a bad survey on a custom on a franchisee for any Reason surveys can be very, very, very important in all kinds of levels. If they get bad results, they can be breached and letters warning and terminated and all kinds of things. You do not want bad surveys. So what is then enormous pressure on a franchisee to get that lifted? And the only way you can lift bad survey or a bad complaint is to satisfy the customer. So they'll do anything they can, they'll go back, they'll often do it for free, they'll fix the job, they'll. They'll discount, they'll do whatever they need to. So there's this enormous desire and those who have great rankings, like 4.8, 4.9, 5.0, which is really hard to get because it means you've got to have like 99% of your customers delighted with you. They really want to preserve that. So they give fantastic service. And I used quite a few gym people myself and I tell you what, they really try hard. I had a mobile tires, I need mobile tires because my. Had a puncture, tire got wrecked and I called up the office because I didn't really know anybody. And they, and somebody rang back in 15 minutes and they went and got the tire and they. And they brought it to me and they fitted it and they fixed a few things because there was something to do with the way that the electronics were working in the car, which is brilliant. They were just great. Frank was his name. I'll tell you what, I would use Frank again. And, and honestly, I wanted my car moved. I wasn't concerned about the cost. I'm very stingy about things like buying stuff in supermarkets. But if I want service, I want good service. So it's kind of experience. I've got another guy, Matt, who does all my WI FI from Jim's antennas. And he's just an incredibly great guy. He's so good at what he does. If I've got any sort of problem, he gives me advice like if I can't get to tb, to just tell me on the phone, he'll fix it up for me. He comes, he hangs the TVs he set up at my farm as well. He does all the electronics and stuff. He's just a great guy. He always rings me, you know, when he's coming, takes his shoes off in the house, even though he doesn't need to. He's just amazing guy to deal with. That kind of experience is so powerful. And honestly, if it wasn't Jim, I'd still use gyms because. Because we're good. I had some people come and do some work on my gym spine. People just work on my, on my garden here, you know, do some spraying and some planting and stuff. It's a brilliant job. They're all flourishing. You just, just know what they're doing.

How do you get all these franchisees to love and care for customers? Because, you know, I'm a big fan of Sam Walton, Amazon. Jeff Bezos like 99% of businesses aren't consumer customer centric. How do you get all your sort of franchisee to have that 1% mindset of caring about the customers and focusing on them?

Look, there's a certain process of selection that goes on. The way we present ourselves is like if I'm giving a talk to a franchising expert, which I have done in the past, they give me free, a free booth because I give the talk because they want me to come and get people in. I don't actually talk about, I talk about, I talk about customer service. I don't even, I do talk a little bit about how much money you can make, but I talk about why it's so important to look after customers. I'm always talking about customers in my book, which you've probably seen a copy of, of every customer friend, this kind of stuff too. It's really, really customer focused. So we, we tend to attract people who are very customer service minded. That's from the start of it. And we push it from the beginning. The first thing they get when they come to our three day generic training course is myself talking for two hours, mostly about customer service. So we push it really hard and they, and they give a copy of the book and they get that too. So there's a lot of, first of all, try to find people who already have that attitude. And secondly, really, it's like, it's like brainwashing in a way. And then, and then they're talking with their franchisor and then when problems come up, there's this process of going through. Why did it happen? What did you do? What could you have done different? So it's constant on and going training. When you get people into a culture like that and there's other franchisees, don't forget telling them. Also the same thing about how you delight customers, amaze customers. You want wow from customers. It becomes a kind of a, it's a bit like in, in China or something where they doctorate you in Marxism. Well, we, we indoctrinate people in customer service and at the franchisor level in terms of franchise services, there's, there's A very powerful culture which is very hard to do anywhere else. And as I said before, that's one reason we don't succeed so well outside Australia and New Zealand.

How do people usually find out about, say, Jim's Satellite, Jim's Wi Fi, Jim Tiling? Do people. Is it mainly Google SEO and do you guys have a massive team that does SEO really well?

Okay, it's not one team because our system is quite decentralized. Divisions do their own SEO and so forth. We guide them and we help them and do a lot of stuff, but basically do it themselves. SEO is dramatically important, of course. That's having the right kind of content. And the social media stuff really helps that because it makes our sites very attractive. You have a lot of stuff on them, useful things that get people to go on and they say, and Google likes it, that they like. They like sites that are sticky. So you work to make it very attractive to the public. Lots of really good information, lots of videos, lots of really good stuff on the sites. So SEO absolutely, yes, we work on that. We use Google AdWords to some extent too, which of course you need to. And we use a lot of other social media, particularly Facebook. Facebook is great because it, because it. These things are great because they got what people are looking for. We don't tend to do much in terms of generic advertising like, like TV and radio and stuff because you're not hitting the audience you want. You've got to go for the person who actually needs what you want and see one of their benefits to being franchised. We're not just one company, we are thousands of individual businesses. And so you put Google my business in there and then you, you put the entry, we do it for them. And then you actually show them how to get their own reviews, on which on the whole, pretty good, mostly are very good. So that also boosts them that way. And we also show them how to get their own customers from referrals and so forth. There's ways of doing it, for example, which we teach them things like, for example, when you've been to see a customer, you say, here's my business card. And here's a couple of extra. In case you know anybody who needs work done. So you don't ask a direct question. You actually show them that you're interested. You give them free business cards. So you teach them ways of approaching customers. So all these things are. And then even just in the street chatting to people, it's a good idea if you can you see somebody's wave, hey, nice Weather, whatever. If you're going shopping on a Saturday, for example, you're not working, wear a uniform, drive your gym's vehicle. People are curious about gyms. Is there really a gym, you know, and they say, yeah, I met him. Here's a picture of him and me at training, which they mostly tend to get these days. So you help people to market themselves. A lot of franchisees, most franchisees take very little work because they get boot up so quickly and then because they give great service and because they promote themselves in these kinds of ways, they don't need to take a lot of work. And then some who want to do really major businesses employ lots of staff and stuff. Well, they're the ones that take a lot of leads on going, which is great too, because as I said, unserviced leads are a big problem for us. One of the things we do, actually one of our most strongest policies is we don't charge any extra, depending on turnover. So your average fee is probably about 750amonth. For someone like cleaning or mowing. We've got franchisees turning over in the million dollars plus their average fee is probably not much different because. Because they get charged a base fee and then what we call a lead fee, there's no percentage.

Oh, I see. Yeah. I was going to ask, like, I was surprised that you guys run localized Facebook ads, Adwords. Like, how do you know the value of each lead so that you can run the ads? Because the value of each lead would have to then equate to the 6% franchisee fee that you have. And within that, a small section of that is marketing.

We don't charge percentage. There's a fixed fee for advertising, like about 150 bucks a month. Most divisions, some it's higher, but Most it's about 150. And that has to go. But one of the problems we've had in recent years is because the. And I believe because the customer service has improved so much, we actually, we actually, in some divisions, particularly fencing and mowing, they've got so many. So much work in that we've had to pull back on the advertising, so we end up with unspendable money. So then we have to go back to the. Because you can't just pocket the money as a franchisor, you've got to spend it. So we have to go back to the franchise because what do you want to do? So the fences decided to have a really nice conference of the water world in the Gold Coast. That was last year. So that's what they wanted to spend the money on. Sometimes they want new stickers and suddenly we just give them the cash back. Okay, you're gonna pay no fees for the next three months or whatever. It's, it's kind of something. Their money, we can't, we can't spend any other way.

Yeah, you're like so customer, franchisee focused. You don't care about the money and you look happy. Like that must be the secret to your happiness. You're so happy, you're so stress free and, and that must be it.

Maybe I don't think I'm a happier man in the face of the earth, but this, I mean, my business is great, my research is great. I also have great kids and I have a wonderful, gorgeous wife. We're madly in love after 23 years. I mean, stormy at times, I can tell you that, but she's just great. Just adore Lee. So I'm just very fortunate. I've got a great church, I've got people. My friends got to be coming out to play games, board games on Saturday night, which I'm looking forward to. So I have got to see my kids and spend time with them. I've had a wonderful life.

Like, I remember hearing Bill Gates talk about how he has a year worth of salary in cash, that if everything goes to zero, he can keep everything afloat in cash and that helps him sleep at night. Do you do a similar thing or are you just sort of day by day?

Well, financially we're very strong. I mean our total debt as a business, it'd be like six months profits, it's trivial and that's actually secured on property anyway, so it's not. Yeah, our cash flow situation is very strong. I mean, you don't need to spend money. Actually the thing that makes the biggest difference in, in the only big spin we have is it software development. That's the biggest strength. But honestly, franchising funds itself, you charge enough to get a person off the ground. So when they, when they come in, they pay some money and that's enough to get extra advertising and paperwork, guarantee and extra help and stuff. So that more than covers that. So it's pretty well self funding. But the point of it is too. And one of the things I believe people make a mistake is they focus too much on money. Now money has got to be there. You've got to have your. In the end, if you're not profitable, you're nowhere. But it should never be a first consideration. If you, if you're looking on how I Can get my customers amazing, delighted, my franchisees, in our case delighted, or my employees delighted, which is always the case. How can you make them happy and you have reasonable sense of finances in the background, well then you'll tend to make money, not necessarily a lot of money, quickly. But it's not what I believe in, it's not what I want. To me, I don't know, I just find people that focus money first. It's horrible. It's like this, this idea from the Chicago school the of economics that the only obligation of a company is towards the shareholders. That's just rubbish. I mean, that's just awful. You've got an obligation to your customers, you've got obligation to your employees. Got an obligation to, in our case, franchise obviously obligations to the community in various ways. You've got lots of obligations. Yeah, shareholders matter, but they're not the only thing that matter. And I think that's actually a bankrupt way of looking at life. I don't think it even works. Long time. Now if you look at someone like Jack Welch, now he was one of the most admired business leaders of the 20th century. Last 20 year, 20 century. He was the, Jack Walsh was the God. He was the person who got GE's earnings, share price and he made an absolute fortune, like hundreds of millions of dollars for himself. But you look at what happened to GE since then, since he left, the share price has gone right through the floor. It's just been absolute disaster. People being laid off and all kinds of things. It's a shadow of itself. Now if you look at the reasons for that, they're all kinds of things that Welch put into place. He under invested in people. He had a ruthless attitude towards people, ruthless attitude towards the employees. It was just, it was horrible what he did. And the share price in the long. Now he, he got fabulously wealthy in the short term, lot wealthier than I am, for example. But he did so much damage. Now what is the point of that? I mean, I mean how much money can you, can you usefully spend? I mean, what is, what is the point? Whether you've got solid gold taps on your yacht or any place difference does it make? What is the point of having a whole lot of money? It doesn't make you happy. Having a great business, having a meaningful life is, is happiness. And that's what I think. If you, if you run a business that really, you really care about what you're doing and you really feel you're making an impact on the world and you're helping people, you Know one of the things I really love is when I get a email from a franchise, which I do get a lot of just saying especially after first month, how happy they are, how much has changed their life, how great their franchise law is. That is you can't buy that with money. That is something beyond it or one thing I do every Sunday evening I ring my veterans on their major anniversary. 10, 20, 30 years, not many 30 yet. So 10 and 20 basically and just. And talk about. And one of the questions I asked him is what difference has it made? What were you doing beforehand and why do you change and what difference is made? And you know that the strongest story I ever get, it's about not about money. Sometimes they have done really well, but mostly it's about family. There's one particular guy and I love this story so much I'm actually putting in the front of the new version of my book. This is a guy who worked for one of the iga. He was a supermarket manager. So quite successful, quite well paid, but working really, really long hours. And he had a four year old son and he used to leave really early in the morning. He hardly saw this kid and just one morning he was about to leave for work really early and this little four year old son said to him, daddy, I wish you could have breakfast with us. He said he drove to work and he was hit, the tears streaming down his face because he realized how much he was missing out on. Quit his job, bought a mowing franchise. Now I don't think he made any more money as a mowing franchisee than as a manager, but he had breakfast with his son every day. And he's seen that little boy grow up. And I said, you have to thank him for what he said that day. And he said every day, you can't beat that in terms of meaning. And I think people who just think money is all that matters, they're so wrong. It's not good, it's not good for you, it's not good for anybody else. It's not good for your family. There's a saying, a wonderful saying that says no other success can compensate for value in the home keepers. I really believe that and that's what it's about more than anything. And I think a person who's a billionaire but who's got a lousy family is a failure. I really do. Some of the best people I know have never made a lot of money. I, I talked to some of my franchisees and they're wonderful people. There's a guy In Adelaide I was talking to last year, he only works about three hours a week. He's a mowing guy. He makes enough money for his needs. You know what he does with the rest of his time? He's out there. He works with the homeless. He said people don't listen to them, they don't talk. He goes out there, he talks to me, finds their needs and he helps them. That's his, that's his life. It's an amazing life. And you look at this guy, he's not going to win straight in the year. There's nothing, nothing huge what he's doing, but what a magnificent life this guy leads. And I'm so proud that we made that possible for him because you can't normally make a decent living with three hours a week. He probably doesn't make a lot. Maybe he makes 80 grand a year, something like that. Profit. What a life.

80 grand a year in profit, working three days. That is amazing.

Yeah, well, yeah, it's. See when I'm talking about 60 bucks an hour, that's kind of like base, a lot of it. Make a lot more than that. You do things like. I remember speaking to one guy who was working in Queensland and he now you think of the Queensland he'd like to heat but doesn't like the heat very much. So one of his rules, he's knocks off at one o' clock every day. It will not work. Okay. I don't know why you kind of pay for a decent climate like Melbourne or Hobart or somewhere. But anyway, he does that, only works four days a week, makes a very good income. Well, how does he do it? It's because this is one of my 10 year talks course, because he's got a really well established run and what he's done, which is what all franchises should do, is as he gets enough work in a wider area, he keeps on taking new jobs just in his territory and then gradually sells or drops off the outline clients who pass on to somebody else and he gets more and more compact. So now what happens is he turns up to a street, he's got a team of guys, they hop out, there's four houses in the street and they go out. Then they mow the lawn, they do the garden, hold other stuff, moves to the next street. So it's hugely, hugely cost effective in terms of time and they're well priced jobs. So he makes a very good living working extremely limited hours.

When you're sort of telling that story of that IGA sort of manager that got time to spend with his kids. I was just thinking of my dad. So my dad, you know he's sort of in his mid-60s. My parents split up when I was young because he was always in business. He was always trying to figure things out and he's been trying to figure things out for the last 10 years. You know, starting restaurants. He used to fix computers, doing changing light bulbs for the government. You know he would bring me into these, these multi level marketing talks and, and, and he would give that a try and like all these things like it feels like the path you guys are offering is a strong solution for a lot of Australians.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the biggest problems people have is they have a, they have a. It's not as bad in Australia, New Zealand as it is in North America or Europe but people have a dislike of manual work. The idea that somehow if you work with your hands you're a lesser person than if you sit in front of a computer. I just think that's so wrong headed. Trades are a great place to be involved in service industry is fantastic. And, and you know when I was nine months I still enjoy it. As I said I do it as a hobby. Now I've got calloused hands. I like having calloused hands because it just feels right, feels natural. I like the fitness and the health and stuff but I, I got a lot of satisfaction as a lawn mowing contractor. It's just a great to do the job, to do it well, to, to make turn a jungle of a garden and something that's really neat and clean and to see happy customers. I think you take pride in what you do and you're doing a job that you make pride in that people, people appreciate people. Thank you. Your customers tend to become friends after a lot of them too. It's just great. I mean why should you have to sit and there you have to have a white collar job to deliver worthwhile life. Why do we have such content for people who work physically I think less in Australia. In fact one that's one of the big differences is if you're say a bank manager Australian you go out and start knowing Lawrence Jim's franchise. People will often say things like oh jeepers, I wish I had your courage to have my own be my own boss, that kind of thing. But I think in Texas when the cyber launched people would that we have what? My lord, that's. But that's for Mexicans and blacks. It's like obviously not. It's beneath me. Yeah.

I think I was like I had.

There's a wonderful book called the Millionaire Next Door. It's a bit old now, but it's been around for a while. It actually looks at the typical American millionaire. And they're not actually tech gurus and people like that. They actually tend to be service people run service businesses like ours, firstly because they can make very good money, but secondly because in that environment you don't need to dress for success. You don't need the flashiest cars and expensive suits and being a top restaurant. So you can be a lawyer or something like that, or finance person, but you're spending your money like mad to give the impression of success and to prove you're successful. Whereas if you're a trader, you don't have to worry about such things. You just have to, you know, I mean, I drive crappy old cars. I said my first car ever new car was just over a year ago. I've never actually sold a car ever. I either junk them or give them away to one of my kids, my sister or someone because they, I was very. Actually before I. My last car was, was probably worth that 10 grand. I gave it to one of my sons who just had a. Just had a baby. So it's good, but not a fancy car.

One thing that you sort of brought up about, sort of, you, you go to church each weekend. Tell me about that. Super cool. Like seeing someone that is really well read, you're sort of into research into all different types of topics and then you're sort of also like really religious. That's sort of something I've been, you know, I sort of grew up, my parents are Buddhists, then sort of had a uncle that was, you know, a mathematician. So I got really atheistic. And over the Last sort of six to 12 months, I've been really trying to listen to, you know, the universe. I always did believe in the universe. Tell me about your sort of like what? I guess. Who is God?

Well, I'm. I'm a Christian. It's not complicated. I go to a Baptist church, so I'm not particularly theologically. I've been a Seventh Day Adventist, Mormon, all kinds of things. I'm not, I don't think God is very particular about the details of theology, but Christian principles is kind of fundamental to my life. And it's also very fundamental to how the business works. For example, if you look at Jesus, Parable of the Talents, for example, the idea that God means this. Do you know the story? This is a man who has three servants and he has to go on a journey and he trusts them with his wealth basically. And one he gives five talents to talents, a big sum of money and necessity, go out and use it. And another one he gives two talents to, obviously less capable, but he says go ahead and use that. And then the third one he gives one talent to and he says okay. Then he goes away and he comes back and he calls the service. He says okay, report. And the guy with the five talents said look, I've been out there, I traded in the marketplace, this is Jesus talking and I've actually made five talents more. Here it is. He said well done. Goes to go with the two talents. He says okay, what have you done? He said okay, not as capable as the first guy, but I managed to do the same thing. Got two talents more. Here it is. Well done. Third talent. We've got the one talent, obviously he's capable. And he, and, and he says, and he's, and he's what did you do? And he said well actually I was too scared to do anything with it, so I just buried it in the ground. And here it is back. The master gets very angry and he said you should have at least put it in the bank and got some interest. The point of it is that story, it's a wonderful story, is that God gives us different levels of ability. I'm not, I'm not a Bill Gates or a Dion Musk, I'm not a five talent person. Maybe I'm a two talent for a one, who knows. The point of it is whatever God gave me, I'm responsible for using in the best possible way doing the things that he wants me to do with my life and money is trust. That's the way I see it. And the other story that's most relevant to Jim so I operate is Jesus washing his disciples feet which you see in John's gospel. And in those days washing feet was very demeaning. It was a sort of thing a slave did. It was really grubby demeaning work. Occasionally if you had a really revered rabbi, which he was a rabbi, of course, in cultural terms the disciples would wash the rabbi's feet as a sign of deep respect for somebody of enormous prestige. Jesus, on the night before he was betrayed, he offers to wash his disciples feet which they find outrageous. Really, really didn't want. Peter protest like man, this is outrageous, this is terrible. But Jesus did it. He showed it's servant leadership, the idea that people that you work for, you serve them. That is a fundamental concept behind what we do at gyms. We are not the bosses of the franchisees. We serve them, we're there to make them successful, to make them happy, to do what we can. And that may mean at times being quite hard on them, but that's ultimately always the game aim that we have. That is a very Christian way of looking at things. And it's very different from. From the common idea of the world in which, if you're powerful, people are there to serve you. So Christianity, Christian thinking, obligations, use of your time and resources, servants, servant leadership. These are Christian principles which are fundamental to Jim's and I think a large part of why we're successful.

Yeah, and you talked about, you know, your business, it's a strong business. You know, your cash flow is strong. How did you create moats within your business and create such strong retention with your franchisees? And do you have a flywheel effect where once the flywheel keeps going, now you can sleep easy at night, or is it constant work to keep it going?

It all, it all reinforces each other. I mean, they're all, they're all working together. It's the customer service, getting great work for the franchisees and then, you know, franchisees then helping friends. It's all a flywheel. But the idea, somehow it's not true. You're always, always, always working on it. I never, ever, ever stop thinking about it. We're very obsessive about retention. The biggest statistic is what proportion of franchisees you're losing in a year, because that tells you so much. I mean, sales is one thing, but you've got to keep the people. That is the most important statistic of all. That's why I say this thing. About 12% in the first year. That's what we watch that figure. Why isn't it better? What. Why are we losing them? Why are they going? We talk to people when they're leaving and what happened? What went wrong? Did we choose the wrong person? Did we not support you in the way? What's the issue? What's the problem? I mean, one of the things we're looking at right now, we have a system called Biza because we've got 200,000 plus on service leads a year. So what? We set up a system to actually, when we can't service the job, we basically sell it to somebody, independent contractor, and it's fairly rigorously done and we monitor the results. If they don't do a good service, we cut them off. And so most time we actually manage to get service done. And it's, you know, they're not as good as franchisees. Their franchisees are really, really good. They're not on average quite as good as that, but they're still great. Majority 90% jobs get done well. But it's a system that is very attractive to independence because we give them a quality. It's not like a high pages lead where you've got five people quoting. You're the only person that quotes. But you've got to give fantastic basic service. So we do this now. We're doing this for some while. This is one thing that Megan, I told you about. Lady, lady before is running does such a fantastic job. We're now making really good money out of that. We're making probably the current rate. We're going to make a million dollars a year out of that. Now I have promised my franchisees that I'm not going to take any of that money. We'll cover our costs, but it's yours. Now we're looking at what we can do with a million bucks a year to help franchisees. And one of the things we're actually looking for right now is we're looking for like really nice holiday resorts where we can actually have our franchisees go and say, you've been a great franchisee. Here's, here's your whole family, meals, everything provided. It's going to cost you 100 bucks for the week, something like that, to give them reasons for wanting to stay with it. So. Which has a. Has a great benefit too. I mean, I like that in particular too, because it means that they get to meet other franchisees. It becomes a social occasion as well. So you get extra benefits. So that's, that's just an example of something we're looking at right now. We're actually in the market. We're looking for really nice resorts that we can give free or extremely discounted holidays to our franchisees. And the nice thing about that too is because if you can do it during the off season, when a lot of them take holidays, like mowing guys in the middle of winter, you can actually still get some income from the general public, but there's very little cost involved in getting people filling up empty rooms, for example. I just use that as an example. We're always trying to work out ways to do things better, give more benefits. It's constant process. You never, ever can slacken off. If you slacken off, you go backwards.

Yeah. I was just going to ask, like, how do you sort of set it up in a way where franchisee owners can take time off, can go on holiday can do things with their family. Because you know, as a business owner, when you take time off, you feel like you take five steps back.

Well, because the system is quite lucrative because your hourly rates are good. And you know, on average when people, and this is just from interviews and so forth, on average, people make about the same level of income as a franchisee as they did in their previous job. The better income they had. So you get somebody who comes from a really good sales background. Management, they'll tend to do really well. Somebody who's had a more average job will tend to do so. The income is maybe slightly better, but not that different. The biggest difference we find is that is the time. The great thing about having your own business is you've got, it's flexible. So for example, women is a classic example. Our fastest growing divisions like dog wash, cleaning and laundry tend to be female oriented. And there's a really strong reason for that, is because women have a problem with childcare much more than men do. Because they've got to. You know, when you want to drop your kid off from school, you want to be there. When they come home from school, you want to be able to take a day off when the child is sick. These are really big issues for a lot of women. The great thing about a business like a dog wash or a cleaning business is they can do exactly that because they're totally in control of their time. And they can even arrange to work Saturdays and stuff if they wish to. They can, they can be flexible. They can, they can work with their husband. That's kind of what the business is about. And that's actually in terms of being in your own business. I would say for most franchisees it is the number one example. It's not the fact that you can make a lot of money though. You can. And there's lots of stories, people who become quite wealthy through gyms. But a much more common story is I make enough money, do what I need to to live. I meet my expenses, I don't have financial worries. I can pay my mortgage, I can pay off my house, I can do what I need to. But I've also got time for things that matter, like my family and my friends and my hobbies and sometimes my altruistic interests and all kinds of things. Like one person who was a one things he loved to do was he foster kids. That's a big passion for him and his wife. He had a place outside of Brisbane. That's what he wants to do with his life. And to me, I just Think it's a mistake to be so ambitious that you, that you sacrifice other things. I really do. I don't see the point of it now. Maybe if you, you're hitting some altruistic concern because I don't know if it's even good for you if you're so obsessed and you're spending all your time and money on the business and you haven't got any time for people that really matter in your life. Well, are you even, are you the best person? Are you even doing the best job? Sometimes you can work too hard. My Rocky, my singer, he's an amazing guy. I remember running, I emailed him at 2 in the morning. I just got up because I gotta get, you know, go to toilet. And I sent him an email and I said, and he answered straight away and I said, rocky, what are you doing answering emails at 2 in the morning? He said, what are you doing sending it to me? It's like that. But I tell him, because his wife also works for us, she runs the call center. I tell him, you're gonna stop working, go away, go home, look after your kids, whatever. He's got a young family, so I don't know. But, but flexibility is, it isn't. I mean, really, what is the point of massing money? I think it's stupid. I really think it's, it's, it's not. This worship of money is just too much and I think it's corrupting. I think when you start putting money ahead of people, it's wrong and it's corrupting to individuals, it's corrupting their families, corrupting to society. But you're not believing that. Jim.

One of the things that I thought of as he was talking about how, you know, people can work on weekends or two days a week, such as a single mothers or mothers raising kids. The thing that popped into mind, it reminds me of companies like Uber or Airtasker. What are your thoughts on those companies and what are the differences with what you're doing with Jim's group?

Well, obviously, you know, the gig economy's got value. And I do think the way governments are trying to sort of shut it down by making everybody pay wages and stuff is not going to be helpful because the flexibility is part of it. It's the ability to earn extra money when you want to, when you need to. At the same time, just don't know. I mean, I mean, we're talking about Uber. They, they're overheads are ridiculous. The amount they charge is just insane. They take like 40% of their earnings. I can't see how it's justified. I would love to work out an Uber clone or something like that where we actually didn't and charge typical gyms rate like 6% or whatever. Not that we don't charge it though. And it's. Someone averages out it. I just don't understand how they can take so much money. What do they spend it on? How can they use. Please spend it. See, we had a situation many years ago. There was a company called Mr. Antennas that had a model where they found work for their and their franchise. They paid $50,000 for a franchise and they finally work but they took something over half their money. Okay. One of the people got sick of this guy called Andrew came to us, basically started Gyms Antennas. Now the Gyms Antennas fees, because the leave fees were higher are actually higher than most divisions but it's about average, about 12% of turnover. So you've got one company that's taking over 50%, another company us taking 12%. What do you think happened? We killed them. We actually slaughtered them. Who on earth is going to be stupid enough to go to a company that takes most of your earnings when you can come to us now? We demanded a bit more. They had to do the contact themselves. We didn't lay it up for them. So you need a bit more ability. But we basically killed them in the marketplace. We're like four times their size. Ironically, the guy who Andrew started it and sold out the business for just under $3 million is a multimillionaire now. Went back and he bought the rights to Mr. Antennas and a few other things too. So he's now running that again himself. But the point of it is by looking to the interests of the person that you're dealing with, I think you'll do a lot better. And if I ever got the thing right, I'd love to do something like an Uber and work out a way to make sure that most of the money went to the drivers and somehow he supported them other than that. Because if you do that you'll kill everybody else. Because the best people will want to come to you.

Yeah, because I'm just trying to think because like right now our business model is we sort of teach people how to build online e commerce stores and on average if a client works with us over a 12 month period, they'll create a business that makes 100k a year and then they can go ahead and rinse and repeat that sort of process themselves and we charge a set fee up front. Which is 25,000 and, and people maybe do payment plans over the year, but then they sort of get that knowledge and now they can just continue running that business by themselves for the rest of their sort of lifetime. And I'm thinking, is there a way to incorporate a similar sort of franchisee model? It might not work because it's a completely different business model, but now I'm.

Sort of thinking, I don't know, there's many different things we could do. A lot of it's just having the right person around the place. I don't have many business contacts, actually. I don't really know anybody on my own level. I don't. But my, my whole life, my orientation is towards my own people, my staff and my franchisees and to a certain extent, my customers. So I'm very much focused on their interests and, and what they want. So I just think in those terms and I don't know, I think you can, I think if you treat people well at every level, somehow it'll, it'll. It comes. Right. But, but I mean, I'm not a billionaire and I probably never will be one. I mean, it's just. But then what would be the point of that? People have become wealthy and doing all kinds. You can become wealthy doing something like crypto, for example, or some people have. I, I find that a morally bankrupt sort of endeavor because basically in something like crypto, you're basically gambling someone that's going to pay more than you pay. You're not, you're not producing anything of any value. I couldn't be involved in anything like that. I have to see the value. What am I creating for somebody? So that's a fundamental difference in philosophy. It's again, it's a matter of not putting the money first.

Jim, given the fact that you have, you're probably the most the best person to ask, what's your thoughts on the, the economy? Like, do you think we're going to go into a recession? And the fact that you have your fingerprint on a bunch of different industry, you probably can feel the pulse much better than anyone else.

Well, we're doing very well. 2023 was a bit below 2022. There was more issues with work in certain areas than there had been the previous year. January has been amazing. I don't know why. It's been boosting incredibly. A lot of rain making the grass grow. We're still almost half mowing. We find it very good. There's very, very few of our franchisees reporting poor income these days. And Those that do, usually the customer service issue, that's, that's behind it. So from our point of view, the economy is very good. We can't sign franchisees fast enough to cope with the demand is the, is the biggest problem. We get a lot of new immigrants actually who tend to do very well even if with English, not 100%. They have great work ethic. And the other advantage they've got too is that they, because they've got contacts in their ethnic community, they can employ people from the same ethnic background which gives them a big advantage over native born Australians. But I think the economy is, from our point of view it's very, very strong, very good. And look, honestly we, I mean look, I wouldn't want there to be a recession because it's not good for my fellow Australians and it's very painful to many people losing their jobs. I would definitely not want that. But at the same time, if there was a recession it'd be actually very good for us because we're in a situation where we've got lots and lots and lots of surplus work and we could find more if we needed to. What we lack is franchisees. So if there's a recession, unlike a very tight labor market like now, the recession, people get thrown out of work. We did very well. There was a time back in the 90s we grew from a thousand to 1400 franchisees in a single year. Why? Columbine recession. That was our best proportional last year we grew about 9%. So that's comparison isn't too bad. But not 40%. But get us another recession, we probably would grow 40% because we'll have the work. Where else can you go? You've lost your job. Here's a redundancy. Go away, we don't need you anymore. Hey, come to us, we'll find you work.

Yeah, now I'm just trying to think like have you seen Chick Fil A's franchisee model on how they're sort of getting like hundreds of applicants and every year they pick maybe 1 to 2% that they give franchise. So they have the opposite problem. They're getting a lot of applicants and they're having to filter it down how.

Yes, well, yeah, Chick Fil A is a wonderful business. Actually it's Christian run too. As you know, it's got really, really sound principles when they hire behind them for life. I just read the story about the, from the founder of that or one of the, one of the guys involved with it. So it's an amazing business and it's again the same sort of thing. It's a very gyms type business, super Christian welfare of franchisees. And they look after them so well. So they get so many applicants. They could grow a lot faster. They don't I totally in mind. But it's the same idea, isn't it really? They work so hard to make sure these franchisees are successful that they get lots and lots of applicants. But they. But you know, let's face it, it's. Owning a successful restaurant is likely to attract people rather more easily than somebody go and build fences for a living, which is a great living but it's still hard physical work outside. So. And we need so many. We can sign a thousand franchisees a year but of course we need 2,000 a year or 3,000 a year. We could probably do with. It's just the numbers are just totally different.

When I think of, you know, getting a franchisee for a McDonald's store chick fil a, you know, in my mind I. I see myself then being the manager and hiring employees and employees sort of frying the chicken making the burgers. Is that same sort of vision for sort of gym sort of franchisees where they can sort of see themselves hiring sort of labor and getting. Is that a vision that you sort of paint for them?

We encourage it, we make it clear as possible. We actually. One of the people who gives a talk at our induction training was Dan Cull. The guy won't give up. Before the high school dropout he went to McDonald's and he had a very successful business. One of the impressive things about his business is not just the fact that he was turning over close to a million dollars a year. It's his actual customer Service rating was 5.0. That is really difficult to get because if you get 50, 50 surveys and 49 are good and one's bad, you don't get 5.0. So he was amazingly good at providing great customer service as well. But we do run this, he and others. We did a seminar year before last where we actually got people who want to do these major businesses and help them to do that and show them what to do and how to hire people and so forth. And we've got all the videos we can show them anybody who wants because we videoed the course. But having said that, I think don't understand is we're in business to help a person to do what they want. Now we would like you to be in a business where you constantly improve and grow and get better and your hourly rates keep on rising and rising and rising. But the fact of the matter is, if you don't want that, if what you want is a business where you do exactly the same thing every day and never improve, if that's what you want, that's what we're going to give you. That's we're going to help you to have and enjoy that as best we can and do everything we can for you. It's not our desire, it's your desire that matters. So if you want to build a major business, you want to become wealthy and employ a lot of staff members and become a franchisor, yes, we want to make that possible. But if you want a great lifestyle, if you want to work 30 hours a week, if you want to pick your kids up from school, if you want to have time for the things that matter, then that's what we're going to help you to do too. Not a decision, we want to help you do what you want.

How does a franchisor help create franchisors?

How's the franchisor? Great. I think the most striking thing is attitude towards franchisees. We had a conference in Queensland some time back and this is franchise also across the country, different divisions. And we had a guy called Brian Duckett, came from the UK who was talking. This guy had been in, involved with franchising for decades, so he knew the industry really well for a whole lot of things. And he's. And he said, I have never in all my career seen a business like Jim's. And the most characteristic, strongest thing is that culture. Franchisees. First franchisors were so focused on their franchisees welfare, that's what they talked about. It was so different to anything he'd ever seen in the past. Now that is not universal. We've had franchisors who really haven't been that way, you know, and sometimes we've actually terminated them or made themselves, which is what we normally do in that case. But generally speaking, they do genuinely care. So you've got a very powerful culture. But also the same thing too. Like you know, classic case is, is a lady called Sharon Connell. Sharon Connell was an administrator in a hospital which is a, you know, middle level white collar job. And she was thinking about going into business about buying a cleaning franchise. And then she thought, well hang on a bit, I'm an administrator now in the hospital cleaning houses like beneath me. That was her, she was pulling back, she got hold of a copy of my book, she looked at it, looked at the culture, the philosophy, look at the idea behind it. She said, I really like that culture. I like that viewpoint. This whole franchisees matter kind of thing. Rigorous, high standards. She loved it. She bought herself a cleaning franchise. She was very good at that. She bought the regional rights for cleaning the cleaning region and then she bought other wines. And she turned out to be the most successful franchisor in the history because she's the kind of person that really cares about people. She's a very warm person. And then a few years later, I did a really nasty thing to the clean division. I actually went to her and Sharon, I'm going to give you the dogwash division to run. We'll be the franchise or you be the new handle the sales and stuff. She's now built that from that 60 franchise now to about 240. She's an amazing person. The thing about Sharon you notice, I mean she's a very, very volatile sort of person. We have arguments at times. She gets quite upset at me, but she cares a lot. She really cares about the people she deals with. She, she, she loves them. She really does. And they love her. You can actually see her with people. She, she just sparks whenever she's around. Like prospects with pro. It's noisy, it's volatile. She's just that kind of person. And the point of it is she was drawn to Jinx because of the book, because of the culture. And she's the kind of person that really. We used to, in the old days we used to say bleed breen when we were all marlin. But she actually really, really, really gets and really believes in what we do and why we do it. And of course that whole thing is re emphasized that aspect of her character. So we tend to attract people like that. And once they're in again, as with franchise using customer service, we tend to strengthen them. So I get franchise all the franchises all the time coming to me and they wanted. I don't I had a franchise or yesterday coming to me and saying I want to not charge my franchisees CPI increase. This is a franchisor coming permission to charge his franchisees less because he said they're going through hard times and stuff now. I actually said no, I'm not going to accept that because you've got to show your people how to make more money. There's plenty of work. Get them to raise their prices, ration 6%, raise their prices 10%. There's plenty of work. I know your guys are busy, work with them to show them how to make it. But I don't want to Drop these, because everybody deserves a good living, okay? But that assistant does that. You know, you had the French coming to bed to have their income reduced. No, I'm proud of it, I really am. I think it's a great attitude. Like, we had the lockdown 2020, which was particularly bad in Victoria. It was awful. And I know in New Zealand, Winnock is our major competitor there, we're licking the dust right now. But they actually insisted they had the whole of New Zealand cut down for two months. Shut down. You couldn't do any work outside. They insisted that their franchisees pay fees when they weren't allowed by the government to work. Now, if anybody had suggested that in gyms, you'd order a straight jacket for them, but even think about such a thing, how could you possibly charge a franchisees for fees? In fact, they were actually coming to me and saying, hey, we've got all these restrictions here. I'd like to suspend their fees so we don't charge them. They're trying to get me to agree to more reduction in fees than I was prepared to think was reasonable because I'd say, well, hang on, but they can still work. I was always taking tough online, but isn't that amazing? Isn't that a powerful sense when you've got your franchise? One of the problems with franchisors too, is they're so franchisee focused that when customers complain that they can be too soft. That's why only I can take complaints off, because they. Because they said, look, I know you want to make your franchise happy, but this is hurting their business. They're not doing the right things, they're not texting clients when they can't get through, they're not sending text to support Closer. You've got to encourage them and help them because it's not really helping them when you're too soft. But that's a very common problem in gyms, is because franchisors are so concerned to do what their franchisees want. Sometimes they do things that they don't do what the franchise really need, which is take a tougher line. So that's one of our major issues, actually. But that's the culture and I am really proud of it. I really am. Even though I don't always agree with everything they want. I'm so proud of the fact that they're so focused on their people, Jim, that's so amazing.

So I can better visualize. So let's say you're sort of the gyms group and then I come in as sort of a gym's mower. And I just want to do a walk, one man ban. I just want consistency, just me on my own. And someone like Dan comes in. He does a great job with the mowing. And now he wants to get other franchisees and he creates then other gyms mowing sort of underneath him. And then how does the triangle work?

Okay, it's a different role. What actually happened was that he was successful. Now this guy had no money to start with. Obviously he had struggled to buy the business, but he was very successful, making a lot of money. And then the rights, he was in Melbourne, but the rights to Jim's Mowing Brisbane came up for sale because Ron Zadowski had been running it since, for 30 years, wanted to retire. He's like, he's older than me. So he actually put up his hands that I like to buy the rights now because he's a great franchisee, because he's great customer service, making great money. He's a very good candidate to be a franchisor. He actually didn't have enough money to buy the region. So he came to me and said, what can I do? And I said, okay, what I'll do is I'll go house with you. You, you manage it, you sell, you look after them, you support them, you manage it. So we did that, we provided a, you know, we had a partnership arrangement which was. And it was very successful. It started to grow because he's such a. He's a great sales, he's great at support. He's just a lot of people. He actually, he actually mentors have actually made very good money themselves. Much, much above the average even for, you know, a thousand in their first year, this kind of stuff. And then he said to me, I want to, I want to buy you out. They said, no, not nearly. I like this partnership because we're doing well out of it. Why don't we, why don't we buy more regions? So we've actually bought a whole lot more regions which he's now running for us. And he's hugely successful. But it basically funds itself because if you're successful in what you do, it makes a lot of money. Regional franchises are very good investments. That's one reason we actually tend to. We're actually buying some that again. And we put managers in place, but they return like 25, 30 per annum. It's a great investment.

Wow. So that means if I become a Jim's mower, I'm either talking to the Sydney franchisor or maybe you guys Directly if you guys own that region.

Yep. Or the other option is you can start your own division. Now that costs you Nothing except about 25 grand for the first six months. Fees in advance. That's it. Let's set up a website and stuff. That's what people like Bill have done. That cost you nothing. We actually, what we do is we have a contract that says if you can reach 30 franchisees within three years, it's yours. We'll give it to you. And then if you want to, you can sell it. But then obviously what you want you to do is keep on growing it. So it's kind of like a. It's a rental, but you turn into a grant if you are successful, if you're a great franchisor, which most of the. That's been the model for most of them. And they're mostly hitting targets pretty well the new ones.

Oh wow, that makes more sense now. So that means you guys have sort of areas throughout the whole country and you sort of sell them off the rights to sort of franchise or stores and the remaining you guys own and individuals would work directly with you guys as a.

If you're a divisional, you can do that. Yes, I know that. With beauty. He's actually got a couple of different regional franchises already sold. It's only been launched about two months. But because it's such a great, great concept, they just did another one this last week. The thing about that it's possible to pump somebody with that much money. I mean to start a new division in gyms costs no more money than probably less money than a typical mine franchise, for example. But there's a fair process that goes through. We get a lot of interest, but relatively few that actually start. But we've got the moment. We've got Jim's medial massage about to start. Jim's tutoring, Jim's life coaching. They all look like they're going ahead fairly soon. Jim's home care, that's about to launch I think first of April. There lots of things going on that's crazy.

Like for example, Jim's life coaching. Let's say someone opens up a gym life coach coaching would. Then they get leads straight away. Like how do you start the process.

Of getting life coaching is going to be one of. It's going to be a typical white collarbone. It's going to be a lot hard to find leads gonna more like it or bookkeeping. And honestly we don't quite know how it'll work. The lady who's doing it is actually she's with a US company that has this life, this manual that they take people through. The only problem is that the US company charges absolute fortune and as a result of that, the courses, the services they offer are not very affordable. So she can't actually make a living and nor can virtually anybody else who's doing it. So a lot of interest in doing it. So what we're going to do is she's actually preparing her own manual, which is what it's taken a few months and we're going to get a manual which, which can help people. Not copied from their menu but inspired by same sort of ideas to help person to run coaching. And then we're going to work out ways of making it cost effective for people who want to use it. So you have different levels of service. But life coaching is a fantastic concept. I've actually done a training for it in relation to my local church, which is something that we, we do as a social outlet. You basically get to know somebody, you build a relationship and then you ask what they, what your goals are and then you. And you encourage them, help them to, to achieve it. So that, that's the kind of process. I think it's fantastic. I think it's a great, great system. I've done the training and stuff and it's, it's wonderful to help people to be happy and to be healthy. And to me it's perfect. I love the division, actually. I've always wanted something like this, so. But finding leads is going to be the challenge. But again, the way it's successful, it's got to be successful is you start off doing it and it's something you could start part time. You give people a great experience and you work out how you can do other things. Then you can sort of book them in for, you know, you know, health seminars and things and stays and stuff. And then you can do group sessions where you can help people as a group. I mean, I mean, there's different ways of doing making it affordable. But we just got to work with her on the making it affordable and working at how to promote it as best we can. In effect, it's very different from other divisions because there's no actual business model to start with. Nobody's ever done it in this way, which is what we normally ask for. But I think it's just a great concept. I think it's great. It'd be worth working for. I think if it can be successful, it'd be very, it'd be very, very successful because it's enormously attractive as a business model. You can actually make yourself a good living. You can work for home, completely flexible hours, child friendly, all the rest. Good stuff about it really make a difference to people, people's lives. This stuff can be absolutely transformative and you can still make a living. I mean, how good is that? So I think it's going to be very attractive as a franchise. We just got to work out how to make sure we get enough work. That's going to be the challenge.

Yeah. And Jim, is there like a clone of you within the company that can help these new divisions such as life coaching, massage therapy and give them ideas such as maybe give people free experience, put in seminars like that all comes from you. Are you sort of doing that for every new industry that comes through or do you have business coaches or people in your team that can help as well?

Not actually for me at all. We have a, for our division, especially the new ones, we have a program which is every six. Every six months we have a, like a conference, a one day conference, usually on a nice resort. We had the last one we stopped in the Yarra ranges of Runnast Yarravelli and we also have monthly meetings where people talk together and they share ideas and they get coaching and so forth. Plus if anybody has any kinds of issues they can always contact me or Rocky or anybody or anybody in support. But different people too. It depends what you, what you concern are if you're some. If it's something to do with social and advertising, you talk to someone like Joel. If it's to do with it, then you talk to Eugene or somebody or Mark or somebody in it about or Nick. So there's different people that can do different things. Or if it's finance, you can do the finance or if it's to do with documents, you go to documents. So there's different departments that can help. I'm kind of a go to person. People will often contact me and then I'll steer them towards the right department.

Jim, what do you think has been your strongest strengths? You know you mentioned earlier that you'd like to hand things off, hire people to do a lot of the things and you know you don't have that many strengths but what is your core strength that has helped you build this amazing business?

There's two things I think I can't think of anything else. One of them is that I am very innovative. I have a kind of mind that just sparks ideas and even the age of 71, I just constantly. It happens all the time. I Just think, why don't we do this, why don't we do that? People just don't think about it like you've got a. I don't know. Just, just. I'll give you an example. A few months ago, we had a problem with a franchisor who was providing dreadful support. Really, really dreadful support. He was very good at selling franchises, very poor at supporting them. Now, we warned him, we breached him, and then we terminated him. Now, normal situation for that would be that we would find a buyer for the business. If you terminate somebody in gyms, you always try and find a buyer to buy their business, especially a regional franchise, because they're quite valuable and this business worth like a million bucks, that he didn't like this whole thing very much. But then I was thinking about afterwards and I said, well, hang on a bit. This guy's great at selling, but terrible at support. We need people to sell. So why don't we offer him a deal which we're trying to negotiate right now, where we handle the support, we appoint local managers, charge a certain amount of money, and he does the selling. And not only that, but let him sell for the other regions in the country. So that was just an idea that I came up with as an example, and hopefully we'll have that sign of deadline fairly soon. Use this guy for the skills that he has while getting around the problems that he's not so good in that risk. I'm very, very innovative. And the other thing I think is important is that I actually am the best person to communicate. The culture and the pride I have in Jim, as much as anything else, is the values we talk about, that you see in my franchisees and franchisors, the obsession with customers, obsession with franchisee welfare, then that's me. That's my idea. And I can express that very well. First of all, the induction training I give the first talk to generic training. Also first talk to franchisor training, which is all about selection mainly, and interesting in everyday conversations. In the people who approach me with an issue, I always come up with these same principles. And you mention them again and again. I have this extreme passion, and I'm reasonably fluent at expressing it, where I'm always saying the same thing in the same way. Different format, different context, but the same culture. So that's probably the one thing I'm most proud of. Anything else is that these values, which are my values, my peculiar way of understanding business and the way things should work, have become so widely. People do listen when you're a Sort of prestigious figure. People will tend to listen to you and they come at it and the other people reinforce it and they were successful. You get people like Sharon Connelly and you've got Bill. Bill's a great guy. As a divisional, he's fantastic. He's not only good because he's a great divisional himself, but he's also the person you can send somebody to who wants to be divisional and they can talk to him. And Bill will give endless time to him. He's just that. He's just a wonderful human being. He's a real Jim's guy. He absolutely is. So I think that they're my skills. Not much else, unfortunately. The great thing about the modern world is that you can find people to do almost anything. But those innovative passion, culture things are actually quite important and useful.

One thing talking to you, you really remind me of James Dyson. I recently watched this YouTube video of James and he showed off his environmental farm and sort of had this whole secular farming set up. And then he's also into research a lot. Jim, tell me a bit about the research that you sort of do and all these other different side philanthropic projects.

Well, actually first of all, I have to say to you, I love James Dyson. I've read everything he's ever written. He's just an amazing guy. I love his attitudes of engineering, you know, like a thousand different trib to get his. And we use his stuff too. I would never buy anything but Dyson. I've got possibly the best best Dyson everything. Got my wife a hair thing for Christmas. And you read about why it's so good. You know, it's just amazing guy loving me. If I had to name, you know, one of four or five people in the whole world that I admire most to be one of them. Along with Bill Gates, Elon Musk, but still James Dyson. Fantastic guy. My research project actually, if you're talking about that, it arises out of my PhD. Okay, I did his PhD. Trying to understand the reason for the rise and fall of civilization. This is biggest, biggest topic. Why did Rome collapse? What happened? As I studied this and I took a long time doing was like 11 years from the beginning of my undergraduate to vastly extended PhD. I came to the conclusion that the differences depend on character. The character of individual people is what determines society. You have people who are hard working, productive, innovative and have wealth. If you have people who are accepting powerful, brutal authority, you'll tend to have tyrants. That's the way it works. What I also determined is that this had a biological root. This is not to do with culture as such, it's to do with the biology. Because certain kinds of practices cause people to behave in different ways. For example, if you have an annual fast, it actually has, like in Ramadan is a perfect example or the old lens in the fast of traditional Christianity, you get an effect which is actually similar biologically to that of an occasional famine, which in animals actually makes them more bold, more confident, more cooperative. That's an example of this whole thing. So basically you have a culture which defines things like chastity, like fasting, which actually have a biological effect. And so what you're doing is you're hooking into biological pathways that have to do with adjusting animals to different food environments. So classic example. The main thing is what makes Western civilization great is what I call the C system, which is to do with mild food restriction, which is also driven by things like restriction of sexual activity and so forth. And that causes people to become hard working from larger states, this kind of thing. All right, so this was the conclusion I came to. Now the interesting thing about that is if it's correct, what you can do, if you understand the pathways and you can reverse engineer them, you could actually change people's character in a way that would be immensely beneficial. One of the most greatest targets will be drug addiction. Because drug addiction depends on a very short term view. I'll take a drug now, even though I must know that I'll feel worse down the track of it. But it's very short term. If you can give people reverse engineer this food restriction mechanism, you can actually get them to think more long term. So a person would just naturally not want to do drugs and they want to go out and get a job and work hard and be responsible and study and marry and have a family and look after kids and do all these kinds of useful stuff. Stuff that that's kind of like the idea. So potentially you could dramatically change society and human welfare for the better. It have affect billions of lives. Okay, now problem I had back in 1982 is that this was such weird stuff that I couldn't get anybody to really buy into it. I had three comments on my original PhD thesis, a couple of one paragraph. Basically nothing which is unheard of. They're normal, multi page. They didn't know what to make it distinct. The third guy basically said if this was the Magnum opposite at the end of a distinguished career. Maybe we listen to this guy, but what is this bro? He basically overturned everything we think about history, you know, who is he? Actually I actually failed my PhD and I went back and rewrote some of it and they accepted it. But I was in that situation in that time I had this theory that could change the world would require huge amount of money and not just an expertise in areas like biology, genetics, which I have no experience, no knowledge of. And so here's this guy, completely failed PhD, deeply in debt, no useful skills, apart from his gardening business. How do I become a multi millionaire so I can fund this research program? So that's what I decided to do. So I built the business. I didn't even think mine was the way to go at the beginning, but it turned out to be the most successful one. About 10 years ago I started to get a bit of money, so I approached a academic at the Trobe University and said, could you run a research program for me? So we started that. I've now got a full time research program which is spending about, about $4 million this year. And we've got a program that's actually working on this. We've a fairly good idea about what happens when food is restricted. For example, there's epigenetic changes, there's changes in methyl, what's called the methylome. You know, you know what you don't understand epigenetics, the way your genes function is not just fixed, it can be turned on or off by the environment, which includes what your experiences of your parents, grandparents, even great grandparents. So what actually happens is that you, you, you change the activity. It's like if you can think of a DNA as being a whole series of taps spitting out proteins, that's basically what it is. What you can do is you can turn the tap off or turn it on. And the most common thing is called the methyl group, but there's other things like histones and stuff. There's many different ways of doing it. If you can change the methylation, if you can change the epigenetics, you could actually change character in a way that would be enormously helpful as a treatment for all kinds of issues and problems. So that's kind of like the idea that's amazing.

Right now I've been sort of doing a thing, intimate fasting, eating one meal a day. So I eat at 6pm, I eat a big meal and then I don't eat for the next 23 hours. And that helps me sort of stay alert throughout the day and not crash after lunch. Is that good? Or what biological sort of breakthroughs did you find out?

If you want, if you talked about the Influence on look, the advice I'd give you would be similar to what you get from anybody else. Intermittent fasting is certainly good at good thing. I tend to, I do 16:8 fasting. I won't eat before 1. Also try and eat modestly. Avoid sweet drinks in particular but, but only lots of vegetables. So fruit exercises kind of things too. Yeah, so it's basically I'd also say avoid substances that boost dopamine, serotonin in the short term. So alcohol for example. Obviously sweet drinks with another example, sexual activity beyond what you need to maintain a relationship is, is to be limited as far as possible and, and a little bit of hunger doesn't hurt too. So those kinds of things also if you regularize your environment, if you, if you, if you work steadily, if you, if you have a disciplined habit of living, it tends to improve these things too. That's the self hack that you can use and which I obviously do and find quite effective. But yeah, intermittent fasting is a good, good start. It really is. It's also look, it's good psychologically and what I focused on but it's also good for your body because your cells need recovery time. It's the things called autophagy. I'm sure you know about all this kind of stuff. If you give yourselves a rest from. They clear the garbage and it's like a vacuum cleaner themselves. They get rid of the garbage and helps you to be healthy and stuff. So that's all beneficial.

One of the things you talked about was sort of addictions and helping people with addictions like I'm a pretty disciplined person but, but man the phone, social media, there's so much serotonin, so much dopamine. Like usually what happens is if there's a difficult task, I might want to jump to my phone and get some dopamine relief or say after this interview I'm going to be a bit tired and I'm going to want to go on my phone and all of a sudden I'm scrolling for the next half an hour like that. Relief is so addictive and the phone is right there.

Well, we all have these things, don't we? I mean I'm not, I'm not immune to them. I have a silly little game called Conquest which is an old DOS based thing which I like to play. Good thing about him takes about 15 minutes to play so it doesn't distract me. But, but I'll do something serious and then go have a game of Conquest to do something else. I'm not. I also love Chocolate too. I mean goodness, I'm notorious for. I, I gave it a talk to people who were in an addiction recovery thing and I've got a confession to make. My addiction is, is Nutella straight from the jar. I dip the spoon in and go for it pretty bad. Don't worry. We all have our weaknesses, don't we? Different ones. Alcohol doesn't appeal to me. No drink but nor does having affairs or pornography or any of those kind of things too. I like my wife too much but everybody has witnesses. I'm just amazed. I've got a friend who I meet pretty regularly and we catch up for dinner and stuff and he's, he really struggles with. Actually he's losing weight too. Partly mindful. So I think he's lost about 15 kites. They've done pretty well. But. But he finds it very difficult whereas. Which I don't but at the same time he is an amazing worker. I mean he's far more hardworking than me. I don't know how this guy manages it. He just, he just works and works and works. So he's got strength in that area.

Jim, you talked about sort of diet and I remember you talking about McDonald's, how the food is really bad. As I'm sort of getting to this space I'm sort of slowly getting surrounded by people that talk about the fluoride. I include chlorine in, in tap water. I hear stuff about vaccines. I hear stuff about just the food we eat from Woolworths and, and if it's non organic then it's going to really be bad on your health. Are all these things big problems or is it over exaggerated?

Well, you can worry too much about these things. Oh look, I actually, I'm going to go to my farm shortly and I'm going to cook up a vegetable stew which will last me for a few days and about half of that's going to be stuff from my own garden which is super organic. Hadn't been any pesticides or anything like that place for. So I think it's good if you can. The main principles is simply just eating the right kind of stuff. I don't think it matters quite so much whether it's organic but if you have lots of vegetables and fruits and healthy stuff, trying to have too much focus, concentrated carbohydrates, keep carbohydrates down, a bit of protein, it doesn't matter what's egg or fish is better. Don't, don't eat too much red meat. I mean basic stuff what they always say Is pick from the. From the outer shelves of the supermarket. There's a book called Super Processed People or something like that to. It's doing a very little while back which gives that case very strongly. You know the test they did where they. Where they got some. One of the rare cases of controlled experiments where they got these volunteers and they were in a controlled environment and they had two choices of food. One of them was super processed food and the other was naturally prepared food. Both identical in terms of their calories and overall nutrients. And they found that the. In a short period of time the people on the super processed food gained a kilo or just close to and the others lost a kilo. And it was partly because they were. They had access to snacks. So the super processed food make them eat more calories otherwise. So just the calorie counting has its limits. Basically. You should try and eat healthy. I find if I have lots and lots of vegetables and fruits, my weight tends to be static without too much, too much of a struggle. So that's the main thing. I would say just avoid alcohol beyond a very limited amount and just avoid processed food. Just try and eat healthy stuff. They're quite nice too. Actually. I have. I have a dish that I make which is. I'm not saying anybody, I'm not saying you'd like or anybody else. I dare to fit it to my wife, but who's quite good cook. But I have just. I have onions, fried olive oil and then I have vegetables, a big variety, as much as I can from my own garden. And then I put a flavoring like a Thai flavoring, something like that and. And just cook that up in a big mess and you know, eat some, put it away. It's pretty nice actually. I like it and it's super healthy. And then I have a bit of Nutella or something. Otherwise it doesn't too much. I love that goodness. I often think though if I had one thing it would be if I. If I had a work ethic, if I could really work hard all the time. I waste too much time. I really do.

Jim, you talked about your research PhD about being the rise and falls of civilization. I've been a big fan of Ray Dalio. I don't know if you sort of read his stuff and he talks about how based on the cyclic sort of natures, we're at the end of a civil of a powerhouse thousand and there is a uprising like China and the U.S. what's your thoughts on. On that cyclic rise and fall of civilizations?

Well, I think it's just. I don't think it's correct. Look what happens, basically, if you look at someone like Ibn Khaldun, who's a great Muslim thinker and writer, he noticed this happened in North Africa, where you get this. These desert tribes come in. They come into the more settled coastal areas and they conquer them and they become the rulers. And after they become soft and then a new group comes in. You notice this cyclical pattern. It's not cyclical in the sense any other sense, except that the character that makes for martial vigor and for energy and a high birth rate is to do with this famine reaction. If you're in a desert tribe, you're periodically. You go very hungry. And it's harsh environment that creates this. I call it V, Vigor, Visa vigor, high V character. You come into the lands, you become wealthy and you lose it over the generations. That's what happens. And the other one I call C, which has to do with food restriction, chastity and so forth. Again, what undermines that is wealth and urbanization. So society becomes successful because it. Because they work hard, because of this high C. They work really hard and they're really enterprising. They create wealth, they fall into cities, urbanization, wealth, excess food all the time, lack of exercise, it collapses this character. That's what actually happens. And it's actually a biological process. Because in a sense, the V system, the famine, is designed to help animals that live in very unstable environments or dangerous environments, like baboons, for example, in Africa, where they need to get together in small groups and be able to fight off leopards, which they can do. It's a very dangerous life. But they also migrate. They're very bold, they're very fierce, they defend each other, this kind of thing. So that's a character that's designed to cope with that environment. Now, if you've got a very stable environment, like say in a tropical rainforest, and gibbons would be a perfect example, you don't want that kind of character at all. What happens is a different social structure entirely, which is one where they form territories. They don't breed until they have a territory, and then they guard that territory. And then they spend a lot of time looking after their young, protecting them and so forth, to make sure they can grow. So it's a really competitive environment. That's a sea culture. The point of it is, if you restrict food in an episodic fashion, you'll tend to get more of a V character, which is typically Islam. If you restrict it in more like a given way, Mild food restriction. Casually, you get the C character. So that's basically what happens. In a sense, the collapsing birth rate is a peculiarity of people. Because in animal population, if you've got a plentiful food, there's lots and lots and lots of food around. What's going to happen is that you lose the C character. People start having sex very early. Early. Well, animals do that. Of course, that's what happens. If you put animals and you put them in a food environment, there's plenty of food. They reach puberty very early. They have lots and lots of sex. They have lots and lots of offspring, okay? And because the food environment is so easy, the offspring survive and flourish. Then they breed themselves. So you get a rapid population explosion. The point of it is, psychologically, they're not that interested in the offspring. What they're liking is sex. So plentiful food for an animal means lots and lots of offspring, high population growth. But. But if you do it for people, and we control rationally our behavior, we can have contraception, we can have abortion in other cultures, we can have infanticide, and we control our birth rate. And because we're not interested in children the way that gibbons are, populations start to plummet. So it's kind of a mismatch between something that's evolved to actually cause populations to expand with plentiful food. But when you put the human mind in there, you get an environment where the population collapses.

So when you fast people, you said they had the V characteristics. Does that make them stronger? Does it make them conquerors? Because it seems like all the Africans, Middle Eastern countries that fast, they are more aggressive people. They're not conquering the world, sort of. America is a very docile country, and America is the powerhouse.

Well, it will happen, of course, as the advanced, wealthy Western countries go through this whole process. Unless something stops them, which of course is what I'm about to. Then eventually what will happen is they'll become weak and the. And the more vigorous peoples of the Middle east and Africa will sort of move in, which is already starting to happen anyway. I mean, where's the population growth in the world now? Africa, some parts of the Middle East, Afghanistan, for example, they're the ones that are. In the end, they'll take over. That's what's going to happen. I didn't.

I never thought of one thing. You talked about your book about sort of declining birth rates, something I've been recently brought light to. And I was like, this can't be real, like a depopulation scheme. Like people talking about reducing the population. You know, Bill Gates talks about how there's an overpopulation and I was like this can't be real. There can't be people wanting to reduce the population. But apparently that's a real thing.

Yeah, of course it is, but that's part of the culture, you know. So in a sense what we have children. We have children because we like children. I have 10 children because I love children. It's as simple as that. And I would tend to adjust my ideology in a sense to fit in with my personal crime. But if you're a person that doesn't want to have children anyway because you're not particularly keen on them and why should you suffer the, you know, the costs and the crying babies and the dirty nappies and the private school fees and all the rest of the stuff. So if you don't want to have children yourself, it's very easy. Well, I'm, I'm a virtuous person because I don't. I think there's too many people in the world. So I'm going to really help the environment by not having any kids myself. So that shows how good I am. I mean I'll say the opposite way around, you know, I think it's good to have kids and I'm proud of my kids and they're going to contribute to the world. So my own psychology says I like kids. So I'll adjust my ideology in a sense to say it's good to have kids. People are self interested, myself included of course.

I definitely want to ask you this question. What has been your philosophy when it comes to raising kids? You've had 10 kids. Does any of them want to sort of take over their father's business? You know I look at Bernard Anault sort of set up with his kids and how each one of his kids are taking over Tiffany & Co. And like he basically created this of secession arc. What's your philosophy on sort of raising kids?

I haven't had much success in that area. I'm afraid none of my kids are particularly in line for that. I've got a couple of sons, potential sons in law that very well could probably. My daughters are going out with wonderful guys so they're probably the best prospect. It's difficult. My business probably isn't big enough. You know, it's not one that has multi million dollar salaries and stuff on tax that. So it's not the scale. But look, I don't know as a father I, I love my kids a lot but I'M a reasonably tough sort of dad, you know. I had a rule, for example, if they said a bad word, they, they get what you call yucky mouse stuff, you know, thing you paint against fingernails to, to stop them biting. Well, I don't have it bite my nails. I have this stuff lying around. So if anybody said a bad word, you'd get painted on their, their lips as this coming through. They just do what I said. When they were little, they just got used to it, you know, you have to say thank you. We had, one of our rules was that if you were given something and you forgot to say thank you for it, it got taken back. So one time my mother who was having a dinner with us, she was given this raisin butter, something like that. She didn't say thank you. So I just took a bite out of it in front of the kids. So my kids tend to be very well behaved. I love them, but I'm a pretty tough sort of dad. I was having a party with the kids when they were little, my latest batch, and I was chasing them the front lawn, but pretend to be a monster, you know, like this kind of thing. So which is what I tend to do. Then later on they were talking with their friends at school and then they mentioned the thing we called the 11 to 3 rule, which is that you can't have any electronic stuff between 11 and 3. And this other kid looked at them aghast and they said, I thought your daddy was nice. Yes, I certainly believe in setting limits, but the kids have turned out pretty well on the whole. They really have. You know, I've got a, a couple of programmers and doctor and a lawyer and kids doing very well.

Did they sort of naturally find their passion towards being law doctors, engineers, or were they just you. You sort of made them really well read, you sort of got them to read each night. Or was it all just like nature, nurture? I guess like nature in that case.

Well, I guess you influence them because of just. I'm not making them read every night, but I mean we, we obviously put limits on electronic stuff. Stuff not all that strict, I might say, but, but just they were there and a lot of encouragement, you know, like my, my 14 year, my youngest is. He's quite a remarkable kid actually. If you go through basic questions of scientific knowledge, he's better than about 98 of adults in terms of understanding. You know, it's a difference between a virus and a bacterium and, you know, how space works and stuff like that. And he'll read up on YouTube particularly here. So he's amazingly knowledgeable. He's a real nerdy kid in that sense, but very likable at the same time. Very sweet, very charming. But you know, what's behind that? Well, you know, I drive him to school and pick him up most days and we talk, it's about a 20 minute drive and, and you know, what does his father talk about? Anything. So we're always talking about science and stuff and politics and current affairs and anything. So I guess I have an influence on my kids that way. When I, when my older kids were youngest, younger, I used to, I only had them for, mostly for one day a week because of divorce. But I would tell them a story and, and it was the story that was based in ancient Egypt where they became immortal, these five kids became mortal and they never died, never got old. And so that I would take them through different periods of history and then into the future in space and everything else always changing because as soon as they didn't get old, they had to, they had to disappear, start again. So this whole process, so it was a kind of like a story based on, it's been on for years. Always a matter of effort, of achievement because they always have to start from nothing and then grow and learn. But also it's kind of historical lesson too, you know, the kind of thing. So that sort of stuff I guess does, does have an impact.

Jim, what's your thoughts on artificial intelligence? AI that's something that's been big over the last 12 months. Any thoughts there?

It's interesting. I, I, I'm, I'm not a, a doomsday about it. I must say. I think the biggest danger to us is each other, not, not some artificial intelligence. I mean I could do a lot of damage because people use it for malicious purposes. But that's the same thing as anything. I don't think it's the number one problem facing us. I think things like biological warfare is far bigger or an EMP electromagnetic pulse that will wipe out the electricity grid and computers. The general decline of civilization, which is obviously happening if we don't reverse it. Those are all major concerns. I'd put AI pretty low down on the list of priorities. Maybe it'll help us to solve some other things.

Yeah, and as you sort of grow older and older, a lot of business owners, they look into philanthropy and I forgot the exact word where it's like a way to, to make sure that your dollars help the most amount of people.

Yes.

What the exact term. But tell me about sort of your Thoughts on that? And are you going to start early? Are you going to create a fund where the interest of each year that would use to create a perpetual sort of fund. What's your thoughts on that?

Well, yeah. And look, effective altruism is great. If you ask me, the one person I admire most in all the world would be Bill Gates because of what he's done. Not only the fact that he's devoting his fortune to that purpose, but he's invented. People like Warren Buffet do the same thing. He's been a tremendous force for good. So I totally believe in that. Apart from what goes back into the business and a little bit help my kids with housing and stuff because it's so difficult to get a house these days. My service money goes into this research project or really now I've got a family trust deed set up which means that after I'm gone the BI History foundation will basically inherit the business. There'll be a certain allowance for helping children with things like babies and so forth, but quite limited. Nothing like a trust fund. But basically the research foundation will get everything. That's the idea because that's what I think is the best thing I can do. I get lots of appeals to for charity. I just say no, don't support anything except I tie the course, which is Christian obligation. But apart from that, my research and that's the same thing, it's the same thing as Bill Gates does. Where can you do the most good? Potentially this particular project that I've got and I believe in it could affect billions of people for the better. It could change, change the face of the world. It could be the clue towards going into space and succeeding. Becoming a multi planetary species, maybe going to other star systems. I, I believe in that sort of stuff and I think this is the best way I can, I can help it to achieve.

Jim, tell me about that. Like you're studying sort of how diet can change biology. What's the end goal? Is it, is it like a secret diet that would make humans much higher performers?

Not a diet as such. It's just simply, it's. It's simply reverse engineering the effects of things like mild food restriction. It would make people more long term thinking more hard working, more productive, more effective, better parents, better citizens. Citizens less likely to be pulled apart by drugs, by crime, by anything. Okay. It just, just help people to be better kinds of people. I mean if we could develop a special effective treatment, it would spread very rapidly because anybody who took it would tend to become far more successful. I mean like practical education, for example, costs huge amount of money. If you could achieve far, far more effectively the same thing that you're trying to achieve with that for the cost of a vaccination shot, wouldn't you do it? It. Especially when other people around you are doing it and becoming hugely successful and they're the ones that are booming ahead and coming leaders in their professions and stuff, you'd be, you'd want it so we can develop a treatment. It would spread very, very rapidly. And the people who did this would also have more kids too, because that's part of the whole process.

Interesting. So, like, let's say the research ends up showing you that, hey, intimate fasting is really good. Eating low carbs is really good. This could then allow you to extend your lifespan by another 10 years. Aren't these facts already known today?

Yes, of course. Look, put it this way. If this treatment becomes available, I would take it myself because I could become more disciplined, I could become more effective. I become better in control of my temper, for example, which I can get irritated people. I could become a better and more effective person. I could, I could overcome some of my addiction to Nutella. I mean, it's. I take this stuff. You really can't have too much of a good thing. Thing. Well, I mean, actually you might. If you had too much of it, you might become like autistic or something like that to some extent. But generally speaking, it's an immensely positive thing. And no, you can't, you can't do it without self discipline. You just can't. I mean, look, let me give you an example. All right? This is a touchy subject, but one of the biggest impacts on a boy's career is likely to be what happens during adolescence in terms of their sexual behavior. And this is something that Alfred Kinsey came back with, you know, 60, oh, 80 years ago, that the boys who have higher levels of nocturnal emissions are far more likely to be successful, make more income, go into higher education, those kind of things too. Very powerful correlation. It's all in. In the biohistory books. And that's obviously in terms of our history, that's obviously understandable because what you're doing with this is creating a very high, powerful C promoting effect. It's on steroids because it's in that crucial first few years after puberty. So the solution to that is, okay, boys should stop masturbating and not have sex with girls. All right, well, other boys, for that matter, that would be a solution. It's impractical. It's impossible. You can't make it happen. So. But what if you could have a treatment that would actually achieve the same results, which would be possible. Wow. Same thing. People know they should eat less, but it's very difficult to avoid the lure of the sweet drink, the fatty stuff, the nice desserts. It's very hard to avoid that. We can help them to do it. This substance would be the dieting tool to beat all tools because it makes saltisplant easier. You know what, you know what the women say, you know, a minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. I mean, you know, it's pet for you. But it's so good to eat, it tastes so good. So you want it. If you can think long term, be able to avoid this, we all benefit from it. You, me, everybody and Jim.

Is it going to be similar to, you know, the movie Limitless where Bradley Cooper takes the drug and now he's switched on? Is that the goal?

Nah, but that's, that's more to do with ability. I, I love that film. I think, think it's, it's fantastic film. I love that, that scene where he looks at the book in his landlady's country. It's a fantastic film. I've seen it but three times. No, no, this would just be character. It just be. Look, you just think of yourself when you're in a frame of mind, when you get a lot done where you're particularly hard working and clear thinking and you just find it easy to, to exercise and easy to do what you want. That's the kind of effect you tend to have. It's not, it's not intelligence, it's character. People are becoming stupid. I mean, you look at levels of productivity, they're going down across the Western world. World. And despite the fact that technology continues to advance, we're not getting any richer.

Why?

Because character is going down. And you can see that so clearly. Younger generation China's got a massive problem in that area because they destroyed all the traditional culture that supports cnv, these traditional characters and they just become worshipping of wealth and nobody believes in communism. They're going to be in terrible trouble. Far worse than most Western countries because the effect of communism has been so destructive. One thing my wife says here, Chinese. But the people who come from, the young people who come from the Chinese diaspora in, in Southeast Asia, for example, a much better character than those who come from China because that, because there's more traditional culture that supports traditional cultures. I call the religions cultural technologies. Now, even though I'M a Christian. I mean, in a sense, but Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Confucianism, all these kinds of things too. They're all cultural technologies which help people to live in a way that, that molds their character in a way that's productive and helps them to succeed.

Jim, so, like, based on the last 10 years of research so far, are there any sort of discoveries or hints that you guys have sort of came to yet? And what is the treatment? Is it. How do you change someone's character? Is it like. Yeah, where do you start? Is it going to be something they, they consume? Is it something they read?

No, no, not reading. It'd be, it'd be a biochemistry. It'd be a pill or an injection of some kind. Have to be. You can't change people because what you read can have an effect on the way you behave, but it doesn't directly change your body. You've got to hack the biology. So most likely an injection of some kind, like these new weight loss jobs, we go to those things. There's some kind of idea, but just focusing on what you need to happen. In principle too, if you could work out the right tools, you could use crispr, you'd go straight to the DNA. So, you know, there are things with CRISPR where you can actually go in and you can cut a gene because it targets the area. In principle, you can do the same thing with epigenetics. You can actually, it's harder, but you can go in. Instead of cutting a gene or inserting something else, you actually turn off a certain gene or turn it on. The problem with that is that technology is fairly new at the moment. Also, the targeting isn't very precise. And the problem you have is you can get off target effects. So you can, you have a gene over here that you want to turn on and you turn on one over there that has other bad effects. So you've got to target it correctly and you get the effect that you want. So potentially, CRISPR could do it. At the moment, the technology is quite not there. What we're actually doing is we're testing hundreds of thousands of drugs to look at the epigenetic effect. And we do it through mass cell systems. It's quite an amazing technology. You just do thousands of cells each with the culture, and then you introduce different drugs. All these drugs you might take, and then you, and you check for the results that have got the epigenetic signature that you're after. And then when you've got something like that, you look at it and you Test it on, say, rats or whatever to see where they have the right effect.

And where did you get the epigenetic.

That you're looking after?

How do you know what to model after? Is there like the most disciplined person.

We can get their DNA? No, no, it's all based on rats. You basically, you do treatments of rats that mild food restriction either in the rat itself or in their parents. So if you actually food restrict a male rat and impregnate a female rat, the young to some extent seem to act as if they're food restricted, even though the male has no connection with them after, you know, copulation. That's it. So yes, you look to the animal models because basically humans and rats are pretty much the same as far as when it comes to the, these mechanisms, it's all to do with the limbic system, the amygdala, the hippocampus, nucleus accumbens, that area, it's in the midbrain, not the neocortex, not the rational thinking part. So rats, mammals are all the same or very similar. I mean, there are little differences. For example, main stress hormone in humans is cortisol, in rats is corticosteroids. So. But the function is very similar.

Huh. So is the goal to sort of when someone's food restricted, they're more focused, they're more sort of aggressive, they sort of have that vague character. Is the goal to create a injection or tablet that people can take where they can get to that state without needing to be food restricted?

Yes, that's the point. Well, because, because you can't. If, look, theoretically speaking, you could produce this effect. You simply say, okay, stop having sex and eat a very limited discipline diet. But how practical is that? It's not. You can't get people to do these things.

Tell me about like, the correlation with like, masturbation, sex with like, is it dangerous? Is once a day healthy? Is there a balance?

Or should it be zero when you're talking sex? Look, the important thing to bear in mind by any of these things is that social relations are really, really important. Important. And family relations. The trouble with not having sex, for example, within your marriage is that your marriage tends to get a bit cold after a while. And that can cause all sorts of problems. So I'd say from the point of view of social health, being interested. I mean, I'm 71, my libido isn't what it was, but I still find my wife extremely interesting and attractive. So it's, it helps. It helps a lot. So you don't Want to avoid having sex. I mean Paul says the same thing in his letters and St. Paul, it's okay to stay in for a while but don't do it for too long otherwise you'll, you'll burn with passion type of thing. It's sensible advice. So yeah, I, I don't think zero sex is a particularly good idea except. Except ideally be great for teenagers but again quite impractical. But if you're talking about as an individual what you can do, limit your sex, limit it to a happy monogamous relationship and don't ever do it even there. My yoga teacher at university said, said similar thing he said about sex. He said and talking to married people. He said don't do it too often but enjoy it a hell of a lot. Which I think is good, good advice in general. Just enjoy it when you, when you do it and have a lot of fun and build the bond between you and stuff. Well, the same thing with eating too. You know one, one of the. I leave a. Try to reasonably discipline sort of diet but when I'm with friends. Yeah, you have your desserts and stuff. It's just part, it strengthens the social occasion.

Then what about like masturbation? Is that bad? And that should be off the table because I know that's a big problem at the moment.

That's possible, yes. Obviously any sort of pornography is really bad. Pornography, masturbation, anything. But I mean it's what's possible. Again, it's very difficult these things. Men have very strong desires. You just, it's not easy. Look at the efforts the churches have taken over the years. You know, like the Catholic teaching. You're burning hell for eternity if you do it. This kind of stuff where you go blind or you go insane. I mean they do everything possible and still couldn't stop them. It might have limited it and in that sense it was probably beneficial. I guess that's a very difficult thing to do and damaging in some ways too as well, I would think. It's just not practical. Theoretically yes, you could change this if you could change people's behavior enough, but you can't, you just can't do it.

What's the consequences of pornography and masturbation?

Yeah, well, it's to do with this fact to be called C, which is to do with food, mild food restriction disciplines, long term thinking, hard work, productivity, being good parent, those kind of things too. Basically masturbation, pornography, those kind of things, they, they diminish that, they reduce it. So for example, you look at myself, okay, as A teenager because of some peculiarity of being very social. I never, never ever did any, any sort of sexual activity. It was all 100% nocturnal emissions until I was 20. Okay, that was it. That's really bizarre. Now you have a look at me. I'm very unusual by the standards of my family. I have 10 kids. I love kids. My siblings got three between them. Three of them, you know, one. One's had two ones had one. She wasn't particularly maternal. Nine of the maternal and one's had none. I'm obviously hugely financially successful. I think that's a direct result of it. I'm the only one who's a practicing Christian. I think that's a result of that. He said all these things are. I was just, in my terms, I was just blindly lucky. Really, really, really fortunate that I didn't work out how to do what basically almost any adolescent boy can do very easily. I just didn't know how, didn't do it, couldn't get to it. Just really lucky and everything too. My research, the innovative, creative nature of Nunjo is the same thing too. The fascinating thing about that is if you could work out a way of achieving the same thing, which you could, could, there's no reason why it couldn't be done. You'd have a generation of kids who are. And girls as well as boys, of course, who are amazingly productive and creative. And the birth rate would explode economically would have a massively beneficial effect. You'd have new industries starting up, brilliant engineers, brilliant scientists, great educators. It would transform society in a way that would be beyond anything imaginable. You'd probably have some kind of religious revival too. Which religion? I can't say. But that would be kind of the effect you expect to have if you could do this thing effectively.

I think Elon Musk talks about how he doesn't sort of masturbate. He thinks recreation is sort of, you know, a waste of time unless you're, you know, making a baby or sort of having a healthy social relationship. And so that confirms exactly what you've shared. And Elon Musk has done crazy things, I guess. I remember I did this experiment on myself where I went for 30, 30 days with zero masturbation. And within the first week, you know, I have all this pent up energy and drive and I'm looking for an outlet to put it into. But sort of after 30 days it sort of normalized and I was sort of back to normal. Do you think there was an actual normalization or was I able to actually Maintain that state. And I was just like now used to it.

It should be good for you. That's all I could say. It should. It should permanently, if you were able to do it, which is incredibly difficult, it would permanently improve your productivity. It just changes the attitude. I know too, when I. I had experiences when my wives were giving birth. By the nature of things, you didn't have any sex for a while. I actually tend to become very much more spiritual, more religious at those such times. It was quite noticeable. Yes.

And no diminishing returns.

Yeah. It'd be positive if you could do it, but it's. It's very difficult. That's the problem. It is really difficult.

Interesting. Okay. And I think you're. It's so fascinating that the research you've done. Jim, I've had a blast talking to you today. You like answered. I wrote down tons of questions and we talked about so many different topics. So this is such, going to be such a great episode, I guess. The two questions I usually wrap up the podcast with is 1. Any recent discoveries that you have implemented into your day to day life?

Day to day life? No, I don't think so. In particular, I mean I'm using the principles that I've been following for some while. I'm making progress in ideas. I'm rewriting my book at the moment by history book. We figured out this thing called lemming cycles which you can read about chapter eight of the book. If you look at it, it's about these regular cycles which is to do with what lemmings do, but also do with Chinese dynasties and things like that too. We figured out basically the mechanism behind them. That's really exciting. That's been a huge advance and I'm rewriting the book to try and take advantage of that. So recent changes. That's probably the most exciting one.

What's a lemon cycle? Just for the audience context. Sorry, what is a lemon cycle or what is that about?

Well, you know, lemmings are animals that have these population booms and crashes over the over decades. They last three or four years. A lot of animals do it. Muskrats bearing hairs, particularly in northern areas. And the more northerly, the more they do. Do they have these. And they go through these periods of immense growth and they become very fertile, have lots of kids and they become very aggressive and they migrate and then they have a population collapse where they become very susceptible to disease. The population plummets and to my mind it's a way of coping with predators that you in an unstable Environment. The radical thing about what I've done is I've investigated this and I found the same pattern in human societies universally. So, for example, you know, something like the First World War as an example, that's a typical learning cycle, difficult pattern where you get to the peak of growth, the generation born at them, which was in the 1890s in Russia and Germany. When they, when they become military age, you get this war breaking out. France did it first in the 19th century, and then you get the polemic war. So it's a pattern that you find throughout human history anywhere you look. It's a demographic pattern of population growth and then population decline or static. It's very characteristic of Chinese dynasties to meet. And there's a, a characteristic pattern where you get a slow decline into a period of chaos and then a rapid rise into, into, you know, powerful states. So that's, as I said, I noticed this patterns. You look at them, you look at this amazing similarities, but I didn't understand what they were. And then in discussions with Terry, who runs my research team, he actually, we worked out what was it, what's going on, basically. And we're actually in contact with people who are doing studies in this area to try and get the, the physiology from the animals that reflect the samples. Because we're looking for certain kinds of things. It's a cascading epigenetic effect, it seems.

And is that something we want to break out of or lean into? Because, you know, people talk about the great Reset, which seems to be like, hey, we want to go down so it can go back up.

But yeah, well, actually, if you develop the biohistory ideas, it would, it would make all that irrelevant. It'd stop it. Because basically what it is, it's a cycle of the V thing to a large extent, to a certain extent associated with C at the other end. So it's a, it's a high V period and a low V period. It's just inbuilt. It's determined by a lot of things in the broader society, like the, the intensity of it depends on how harsh the environment is and so forth. So if you worked out a way of effective VNC promoters, you would change society in a totally different way. It would, it would basically stop them.

Just keep going up, up, up.

Well, in a sense, in, in some sense, yes. But there are certain periods, like, for example, in the. Certain periods are a lot more creative, others just before the peak, you get, you get all the great pewds of philosophy and so forth are in that period. It's very innovative, very energetic, very attractive, that then you might have more of that kind of character.

The last thing I do want to add, I was talking, I had this person named Jericho Robbins on my podcast, Tony Robbins Son. And I was asking him, I was like, hey, like, how do I increase my sort of retention? Because, like, after, you know, three, six months in, people start giving up or they start losing motivational hope because they're not getting the instant result they're looking for. And it was like, if you had to get a client result and if you couldn't get them the result they were looking for, you would die. What would you do? And all of a sudden I was like, you know, I'd fly to their house, I would, I'd knock on their door, I'd guide them through the process, I would motivate them to. I'll message them every day, I'll hold their hand and get them to build their online website and I'll be them, I'll sleep on their couch until they get the result they're looking for. And I was like, huh? Now you just have to find a scale, valuable way to get people results. And your conversation today really helps solidify that. Talking about, like, how much care you put towards your customers and sort of franchisees, I was like, okay, I need to start thinking out of the box and sort of. Yeah, so thank you.

Well, the question is how you keep on providing value. We got that in the franchise system too. We've just got to keep on finding out more things you can do for somebody that are cost effective. Yeah, fly to the house, knocking their door. Not possible. So what can you do? Things like, like videos, for example. They're a fantastic tool. Programs, retreats, there's all sorts of things that you can do that really doesn't cost you very much, which are very, very cost effective in terms of value. That's like, like what we spend on social media too is it's only a tiny fraction of even our income, but. But it's massively effective in terms of how it helps people. Interviews, talk to people you do, you know, you've got people who you've been teaching. I'll get them to teach, do interviews with them and, and make them available. So you get ongoing benefit every, every month or so you get this useful video that talks about somebody else, how they're successful, they've been. Which is. And which you can also use to promote your business, of course too. I mean, those are the kind of.

Things I would think of that's Amazing. Last question, Jim. I guess you probably already shared it, but what's your goal and focus for the next next six months?

Well, same as normal. I'm trying to improve my business. Very exciting things happening in the technology front. I want to push those forward as far as possible. If I can drop our customer service complaint levels have dramatic effects. My fraction is more successful. And working on books, rewriting my bio history book which I'm in the process of doing, which is tough because I don't understand it. And also hopefully working towards the launch of this birth rate book. That's kind of a major focus focuses.

I love that Jim, where can people find more about you? Get more of Jim, get all your books. Where's the best place for them to get more of Jim?

Www.jims.net or www.byhistory.org which you'll also see a connection from Jims.net. there's a section in Jim's.net that says meet Jim or something like that. If you go in there, you'll find far more than you want to know about me. There's so much of me on video these days that they're talking about doing a. A virtual gym so he can. After I'm gone, I can still continue to spout how and this and that.

So current aigm. But we'll link all your socials, all your website in the description.

This will be a good impact because this is the longest talk I've ever. The longest podcast ever done. This is only three hours. Yeah.

Thank you so much, Jim. I really appreciate time. I just love how passionate and caring you are. You're so generous of your time. Like it just it awesome how you know all your franchisees have access to you. It's such an amazing like family you've built with the gyms group and yeah, you just have this wealth of knowledge and like not only that, you have this hunger for life and I could feel it through the screen. So thank you.

All right, it's good to talk to you.

Thank you, Jim. Guys, if you made it this far, hopefully this is worth your time. You guys learn a ton. Please send me a message. I'd love to get feedback on this episode and I'll see you guys next week on another episode. Peace.