The future of Australia with Jim's Group CEO, Jim Penman #ASKJIM replay

Hello and welcome to ask Jim AskJim. But Joel's not here this evening. We've got. My name's Emma. And we'll be kicking off our questions with our newest bunch of franchisees from our March session tonight. And I believe we've got some doozies waiting for you, I might say.

Joel is in Japan with his now fiance. He's just proposed. Marriage term being accepted, so he's coming back.

Congratulations, Joel. Alrighty. Would you like to start with our first question? We've got a good one. Yep, jump up there.

Okay. Am I good to go?

Yep, you go for it.

Jim, I have a question for you. What's your opinion on the future of Australia's economy? Will there be more differences between the have nots and. And the haves and what's your opinion on that? Yeah, yeah. Increasing inequality is something that. It's a poison and it's happening. It's getting worse. Partly government policies, partly because of the change in society. In the long term, I'm pretty pessimistic. There's a decline of character based on wealth and urbanization, which is typical of a wealthy civilization like that of ancient Rome. And we're going through the same process, but I have a research project which is aiming to actually reverse that by understanding the biology behind it. So in immediate terms, yes, I think it's going to go worse, but I think we can turn it around. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool.

All right, Wonderful. Thank you.

Nobody's actually ever asked me that one before. You'd be surprised. That's a good question.

Who's up next? Here we go, the next one.

Hi, Tony from Jim's Car Detailing question. What car do you drive and does it have a Jim's logo? No, I drive a Volvo electric and it's got no logo on it. Okay. Not a bad idea, actually. I probably should put a generic logo on. What do you reckon you could?

Absolutely, yeah.

Picture in my mind of like an old Land Rover like the Queen used to bum around in. This is the first time I've ever, in my whole life bought a new car. That was just about 18 months ago because I wanted an electric car and it's a very safe one for driving my family around. But, yeah, I should put a signage on it. Why not? We could.

Yeah.

I wear this shirt all the time. People can't. I don't hide it myself, do I? Perfect.

Thanks.

Yeah. Good, good. The previous car I had before that I gave to one of my sons. It was worth probably 10 grand. That was my typical car. I've never actually sold a car. I had to give them away or take them to wreckers.

Next question. I know we've got some more on our list here. Anybody want to jump up? Feel free. Come on, don't be shy.

Come on.

I just spoke to some of you guys. You said you have some questions. G', day, Jim. What have been your past failures in your career and what have you done to overcome them? One of my worst failures is jumping into things I don't know enough about. If you go into an area that looks interesting, looks good, it doesn't work. Examples would be a holiday resort. I tried to get going. Really stupid. I had no idea what I was doing. Trade exchange. Tried that a couple of times really badly. Gyms, health clubs, It's a different kind of franchise. We did that very badly too. So it's been a few. What I found from hard experience is that you stick to things that live to what you know, because the stuff we do, like mowing, cleaning, pest control, dog wash, they're all very similar. They're all service businesses, similar software, similar systems. So we understand that. So we can jump around a lot. Other part from that, the biggest mistake I make is choosing the wrong people. Sometimes you make really bad choices and that can cause a lot of damage. The hardest thing is to find great people. It really is. Thank you. Yeah, good question.

Alrighty. Oh, come on up. See you've got a lawn lager there. Do you want to give us a review on that?

Yeah, it's great.

No, I've heard a few good reviews this week. I.

The aftertaste is a bit weird for me, I'll be honest. Otherwise, I. Yeah, I don't mind it.

This is. This is a craft beer. This is not your. Not your Cooper's. This is not your mass market. This is quality craft ale. Never tasted it because I'm not a drinker, but they tell me it's very good. Anyway, whatever. There you go.

All right, my question is. So you said ask a bizarre question.

I said the better.

Oh, yeah.

All right.

Do you believe in aliens? And who made the pyramids?

Okay, I do believe there's aliens around, but I don't believe there are any on Earth. There must be. There's trillions and trillions of obviously, planets all across the different galaxies. There's got to be intelligent life out there, but they haven't come here so far. And the pyramids were made by the Egyptians. Okay.

Good question.

That is different.

I don't know. I've heard a pyramid question.

Before. I've never had a pyramid question. Actually, that's what I was saying at dinner time. I said you could ask a question nobody's ever asked and you did.

Well done.

You're in four different countries now.

And.

What'S the next step and how are you going to go about the business with say from 10 years from now? Will it be on the share market?

I don't intend to be a public company if I can avoid it. Because when you're a public company, you're chasing the next quarter's earnings. You become a slave to the financials of the company. We don't think that way in gyms. We always think long term. What's the benefit of our franchisees, the benefit of the people, staff. So I don't have to consider anybody else but my own interests. And fundamentally we reinvest and just keep on growing. Not particularly ambitious to go in different countries. The thing of it is, it's actually a lot more difficult to put any division into something like the United States than it is to launch a new division in Australia. So we've got great new divisions coming up just shortly, like home care, driving school, coaching, life coaching. There's three that probably launch in the next couple of months. They're all really good. And you've got the advantage of the brand awareness in Australia and New Zealand. It makes it very easy. So not particularly. If I had the right person come to me and the right proposal, we probably would go into the States or somewhere else. But I'm not particularly pushed on that. But I think we just keep on doing more and more divisions and just keep on doing better than we're doing. The biggest aim that I have is not so much in terms of expansion or countries, it's to do what we do better. I really hate customers being let down and I hate franchisees failing. So we always looking at ways that we can improve on those sort of metrics and then when you do that, the growth tends to follow.

So with your expansion from in the UK and Canada, you have New Zealand, Australia down, right down the south. Where else are you going to and how long before that happens?

Well, geographically you mean expanding? It'll depend on somebody. There could be somebody in this room here who takes it into Ireland or the UK or who knows. It's not really something that we will do as a company Gyms grows because somebody comes to us. We don't launch a new division because we think it's a good division. We launch a division because somebody comes up and they've got the right sort of person, often a franchisee or franchisor in gyms. And they say, this is industry. It's good. I've done some research, or I've got a background in it. I'd like to drive it. And if they're the right person, that's how a new division gets going. And the same thing with the country we didn't launch. Choose to launch anywhere. It all came. Every country we've been into, somebody came up and said, I want to do that.

Thank you. Good question.

Yeah.

Coming up.

Of all the questions I have, the one I can pick for today is if you were to go back and restart with all the success you have right now, if you were given a chance, would you do things differently? And would you rather take upon the success that you already have, or would you want to go back in time and give it a new start? And what would you do differently?

Okay, I'd never go back in time. There's a film called About Time. You've seen that one. It's an English film. What? They have this power. They can go back. They go into a darkened space and they clench their fists and they can go back to a time in the past. Anybody has seen that film. I really like it. It's one of my favorite films. And it works really well to take care of certain things. But at one time, he had his sister in a bad, toxic relationship, and he went back and he had a little girl at the time with his wife. And he went back in time to stop his sister getting into this toxic relationship. And then when he came back to the present, his little girl had gone.

So let's say you're the protagonist of that movie now. You're the hero.

Well, I wouldn't tell you. See, I wouldn't. The Long Way and Punishment. I would never go back more than 14 years because I would never undo any of my children. All right, so that's the first question. If I can go back in time, say, 14 years, I dearly would love to. And I do a lot of things different. A lot of things different. When I started gyms, if I knew what I know now, I didn't understand franchising. I didn't understand what kind of support. I didn't understand the value of meetings. I didn't understand how important proactive calls were. I didn't understand how crucial software was. I shouldn't have spent nine months talking to lawyers. I should have spent nine months planning the software. We should have gotten to a whole lot of things earlier we should have kept up to date more. There are so many things, there's so many people that very hard to find the right. But I made a lot of mistakes. There are so many things I would do differently. I would reckon if I could go back in time, if I could go forget about my kids of course, because you have to go past that. But if I could go back to 90 when I started off franchising and attend the training session we've got here now and sit in the back as this time traveling person. I get here in half the time because there's so many mistakes I've made. Actually if you read my book, you'll see that in it. I really talk about that quite a.

Lot yet to go through it. I'm looking forward to it.

Yes, thank you man. Thank you.

Good question. We've got a few online. I've got Abdullah here, I've got cleaning experience and I'd like to get a job from your company. Where could they find a job from us? Seek. Jump on seek, see what's available.

I think there's a place on the website they can actually put down. They just email the company and say they're interested. There's a place. Sometimes we have workers. A lot of our franchisees need workers.

They do, yes.

Sometimes they'll go and seek and so forth. But the biggest problem people have is finding good workers.

Jims.net jump onto jims.net and see if it's on there.

Yeah, I don't know where it is actually, but there is a site that we have set up.

Abdul, if you call 131-546-1 of our call centre staff members will certainly be able to help you there. We've got another one down here. Another one. Jim, what is your opinion on giving rough prices over the phone when contacting clients?

Very dangerous. Because what happens is you'll ask a person say about their lawn, about rough price. What's it like? Oh, it's in really good condition, you know, not a big yard. It's just. Okay. Your price would be Approximately whatever say 70, 80 bucks and stuff. And you turn that the grass is that high and it's like a half acre. I mean people just. And then you say oh no, but you told me on the phone it was going to be so and so. So it's, it's pretty dicey. We'd rather not do it.

All right, has anybody else got a question?

Do you jump up?

Yeah, come on.

I have a question now, Jim.

Yes.

I wasn't going to Ask Jim a question, because I thought that I've been here before, so. But my question is.

Wendy's. How long you been with us? 10 years now.

Over 10 years. So, yeah, in another division. So my question is, what do you see the Jim's group look like? How do you think that might look like in 10 years from now?

Well, like I said, what I hope to see is improvements. I hope we can do what we do better. I want to, with software. With the Jim's job software, I believe used properly, we can cut our complaint rate in half and that will dramatically increase the flow of leads and also increase the prices that we can charge. That's one of the major things. And I just like to look at different ways that we can make it more attractive to franchisees. One of the things we've got now is a system called Biza. I don't know if you've heard about it, but we actually sell the surplus leads that our franchise can't handle. This year we'll probably make close to a million bucks. Now all that money is going to. All the profit is going to go back to the franchisees. So we're actually looking at all the things we're going to be able to do, you know, give franchisees really cheap holidays, big screen TVs, all kinds of stuff. We've got these plans to use this money. So we just want to do more and more to try and make it attractive. We want to make our software better so you can run your business more smoothly. There's a lot of changes in software. Software's got the biggest potential. Like, one of the things we intend to do is to have a system which will allow people to book a job straight into your diary, if you so wish. So instead of somebody ringing up and saying, we'll say somebody will call you. They say, bird will be there between 2 and 4 this afternoon because we'll know from the diary where you are and how much time you've got available, which will really cut short the process and I think improve the conversion rate. So things of that nature, the ability to be able to put regular clients on the market and just sell a half dozen as a group and then other people can get in together and you can do it joining. That way you can sort of, you know, pay off your franchise fees by selling surplus clients and then take more close to home. There's a whole stack of things that we can do that are going to really, really improve things. That's my biggest plan, something that I.

See a big difference in the last 10 years is with this. It's about everyone networking together. That has been. Because when I came it was more. Everyone was like your competitor. That's how it felt. Where what I've got a big feeling from this last couple of days is everyone's encouraged to network between yourselves across divisions to be able to cross market and pick up work from each other, like be each other's allies rather than thinking that someone's your opposition, even if they're working in the next territory.

One of the things I very often do is when a franchisee is starting, if they're a bit quiet for work, they want to do pay for work guarantee, which is offering free services and getting franchise or pay for it. One of the things I do is give them a list of all the franchisees from other divisions in their service area. So for example, there was a cleaner today and was a bit short of his paperwork guarantee. So I said, look, there's 280 franchisees from other divisions in your service area. Here's the details. Contact them and see who needs a free service. Because once you do that, if you do a free service with somebody, first of all, they might become a regular, but they can also recommend you to somebody else and refer you to somebody else. So you're right, Wendy.

I think that has been one of the biggest changes that I've seen is it's like it's more. We're working as a team together. Yes, we are all in different divisions, but let's network and let's leverage off each other.

We have had a system in the past where local franchises can get together, one from each division. We had a group just around here and they used to meet at McDonald's every fortnight for breakfast. But they never last because when people start doing that kind of stuff, they get busy very, very quickly. Good notion.

Question. Anybody else want to jump up? Yep.

Can you remember your first day on the job and what you charged for the mo. Okay, well, first you've got to define job. Do you mean in my business as like a gardening business? Yeah. Okay. My first day on the job was when I was 8 years old and I was doing work for a neighbour. I've actually did gardening work most of my childhood. Then I. My first day. I don't remember my first day moving lawns, but when I. I wanted to buy a car, actually that was what started my. I was gardening and I was charging about three bucks an hour, which even back in the early 70s wasn't very much money. I could have charged A lot more. I didn't realize it. And then I thought, how about if I wanted to buy a car? And the reason I wanted to buy a car because I thought it might impress girls, which was complete failure. It had no. I'm completely driven by my interest in the opposite sex. I can tell you. Even now I'm trying to keep my wife happy. All right. People ask why I grew a beard because my fiance liked it. Why take it off? Because I was single and it was making me look too old to meet somebody. All these women. Anyway, I wanted to buy a car so I could impress girls and to pay for the car, I needed to make more money. And then I was mobile, so I decided to buy a mower and I bought an orange mower called a Pope. And then I had a slogan. I used to do leaflets in those days. Most lawns $5, and I could mow a lawn in half an hour. So I could make 10 bucks an hour, which when I was used to charging three, was pretty good money. That's what I made so much money when I was a lawnmower part time student that I actually bought my first house. That was a lot cheaper in those days to buy houses. Much cheaper. But that's. I can't remember my first day on the job, but I can remember my first mile. Thank you. Jeez.

Good question. Another one?

Yeah, just interesting. Our journey through Covid Victoria had the harshest lockdowns in the world. And how much did that impact the franchisees and the group itself?

It was really hard. It was very distressing of Halfburn. There are some franchisees suffered severe difficulties. There was one girl who's in dogwash, actually, because she was a student, she had no government support. So the government said, you're not allowed to work, we're not going to pay you anything. So, hey, you can starve. I mean, that's basically. But what was. What was very moving, I think I mentioned this on Monday morning, was the other franchisees looked after her. They actually gave her meal vouchers and stuff. We said, if you get evicted, you can come and stay here in the conference center. So it was very, very distressing. I wasn't sitting in some office in Spring Street. I was talking to franchisees every day and they kept on saying, when's it going to finish? When's it over? And I said, I don't know. Not. Not empowered.

Because that sort of. It was interesting how you could get your dog's hair cut but you couldn't get your own hair cut. And Those sort of rules and that. And same with the.

I was lunatic. The whole thing was lunatic. It was so ridiculously wrong. The. The. You could. You could have council workers working in groups, doing the same jobs as our people do as individuals, and somehow that's safe when we're not. It was crazy. Later on, in the following thing, they had a lockdown which said, yes, if you want to take your dog to a salon full of people, get your dog, it's okay, no changer at all. But if you want to have somebody come to your house, never go anywhere near you to wash your. Oh, that's too dangerous. You can't do that. It was just stupid.

You'd go to a brothel, but you couldn't see your mother. It was quite weird.

Oh, it was. It was. It was evil, what they did. It really was. You know, we had the worst lockdown in Victoria. I know I've said this in the past, everybody's sick of it, but we had the worst lockdown in Victoria of any city in the world. We had the highest death rate from COVID of any state in the country. In Victoria. We also had the worst debt of any. And then Victorians go and elect the premier again. I cannot believe they did that, except that our opposition is so pathetic. But anyway, yeah, it was awful. It was really bad. Look, we made a big stink about it. And we continue to, actually, because it won't be the last epidemic. I'm quite sure that it'll happen again. And if we do, we better react promptly. The most interesting thing that I found from the whole epidemic was what they did in Sweden. They had no government lockdowns at all. Now there's a measure of how much damage Covid does. It's called excess deaths. It's how many more deaths do you have than you would expect to have in the same year? You know what country in the world did best? Sweden. The only country that had no limits. It just said, be sensible. But the point of it is, we suffered so much. People who had heart contacts, they had cancer, they weren't getting checkups. There's all kinds of things. People were dying because of reasons. We had a young kid who worked in the IT department here. He committed suicide, basically. He had problems, obviously, but that just pushed him over the edge. It was awful. The degree of suffering it caused. It was so stupid. It was so senseless. And we took the state government to court with a test case to say, what was your reason for locking down sole contracts? You know what their answer is? We don't have to give you a reason. We're not going to give you a reason. Yes, we had extremely good reasons and health advice, but we're not going to tell you what they were. In other words, they had no reason at all. It was pure politics. Daniel Andrews got up there saying, what can make me seem strong and secure and safe and maybe get re elected? I know. Let's shut down all the independent contractors. Yes, who cares about them? And you know what he said? He said you can't get your lawns mowed and your houses clean. You know what that means, you affluent, inner suburban, intellectual elite supporters, the greenies, all those people. You can't. I'm concerned about you, the poor saps who go out there day after day mowing lawns, cleaning houses. You're beneath contempt. This is a labor government. How evil was that? It still makes me mad. Anyway.

One more quick question. AI or artificial intelligence or intelligence, as far as software and things like that. And then you've got robotics in lawnmowers and things like that. And how do you think that will involve and impact us?

Well, we don't really need AI because there's so much that ordinary computers could do. If we. If our computers could do everything we want them to do, and we're putting millions of dollars a year into developing software, we could do amazingly better than we're doing right now. The things I was mentioning before. So AI may have a role down the track a bit, but in terms of robot mowers, I actually think that probably our kind of business is the last one in the world that you could do something with. It's not just a matter when you're running a mowing business. It's not just a matter of pushing the lawnmower around, it's a matter of contacting the client and arranging the price and all the personal details and stuff. It's incredibly difficult to automate that. It really is. I can see taxis going completely automated. I can see that kind of stuff. I can see a lot of things could be automated, but I think the kind of work we do, you couldn't. Now we might have systems where you can actually drop off and mow it, and it can mow some. There are systems around already and they're getting better. So for big properties you can just leave it there and does its work, but you still gotta, you still gotta maintain it, you still gotta supervise it, you've still gotta do the edges, which you can't do without. So there's. I don't see any threat to us at all. What I can see is it can make things so much better. And we've done very well. We could not have had the development we've had without advanced it. The systems of quality control, the surveys that we do, the complaint systems and so forth. A lot of things that we do are really the ability to direct the franchisee to the right place, direct the job to the right franchisee. I mean, all these kind of things, too, that depended on technology. And it gets better and better. There's things that I can do now, like, for example, just making a list of local franchises. I only got that, let's say, six months ago. So I can give you a list of all the franchises from other divisions in your area. I couldn't do that in the past. I can do it now, or I can give you a list of all the unserviced leads in your service area. So what I do quite often a franchise is quiet for work. They email me and I have a look at them and I say, okay, these are some jobs that you might be interested in. Okay, I know you're a window cleaner, but there's cleaning, there's gardening, there's handyman. Would any of these jobs interest you? And quite often it does. No, I can do that because the system will tell me exactly what leads are available in their area. So this kind of stuff is magic. It just does so much for us. Very good.

Thank you.

Good question.

And what's wonderful, too, actually, we've got a competitive advantage because nobody in the service industry can do anything like what we do because they don't have the money, but we can't afford to.

Got a question online here, Jim. It's Adrian here from A and M Dog Poo Cleaning Services asking how our dog poo cleaning business is going. So I'm guessing he means poo patrol.

Not well. Not well at all. Tell him to. So what's his name?

Adrian.

Adrian, just get in touch with us. We may have some jobs that we can't handle. We have a system called Biza. We can give you some surplus. At the moment, we're really struggling, quite frankly. Much, much better to get yourself a hydropath Washdogs. It's very. That's packed out months in advance, most of our people.

Another one here from Beelix. Can you buy a gym's mowing franchise with zero upfront fees, zero upfront cost?

No, unfortunately, no.

No.

You need some money. We can often arrange finance for you, but you do need to have some money at all. Yeah. Because even not just the territory. It's also things like you've got to have a trailer, you've got to have your equipment, you've got to have your training, which is, you know, $1,500. You've got those things, and you have to do that. And there's usually a price for the territory. Sometimes we do vendor terms if we've got a really good applicant who's a bit short. But generally speaking, we do find too, that people who put a little bit of money in are usually better. They're more committed. If you don't put anything up front, people tend to be a little bit more likely to go. And that's bad in so many levels.

There we go. Is anybody else here got a question? Do you want to jump on it?

Yep.

Come.

Yep.

Hey, Jim. I'm Richie.

First of all, I wanted to know.

So over this week of training, everyone here is some. Some way met you. You've taken the time to go up and fist bump people, you've sat down, you had dinner with a lot of us. A lot of CEOs and directors would never give that time to people like us. And I was just wondering why you give all the trainings that time and service.

It's actually one of the reasons, pretty bluntly, is I'm not very good at doing very much. Honestly speaking, if you look at the jobs that people have around me, like people like Rocky and Emma and Joel, and they're all better at doing their jobs by far than I could ever be. There's limited things that I'm good at, so I actually have more time than you might think. But it's actually incredibly useful because I'm in contact with franchisees all the time, and I can help people, which is a really joyful thing to be able to. Like I was mentioning before about somebody who's failing in business, and I can actually make some decisions that's going to give them a successful business by helping them to move divisions, for example. But also, I'm finding out what's going on. I know what's happening. Why are people failing? Why are they struggles? What can we do about it? How can we change it? And we're always changing things. You don't know that if you don't be in contact. So actually, in fact, the biggest problem I have, and I said that to you on yesterday morning, is people don't contact me enough. Sometimes I get people who contact me. And why on earth didn't you contact me weeks ago? Because there's things we could have Done. We had one particular guy who was complaining that 18 months ago he is an ex franchisee that he got a bad deal on selling his business. I said why didn't you contact me at the time? Why don't you leave it now when the franchisor who's involved has left the system? So what am I supposed to do? Why didn't you contact me at the time? So actually the hardest thing is to try and persuade you. And one of the reasons I do go around and do fist bumps and stuff is because when you've actually met me, I. I'm not so scary. Is that right? So you sort of have a feeling that you matter and that you can contact me if you need to. People do. I find for example in Canada where I don't meet people, they're less likely to contact me. Sometimes they do, but much, much less often because they haven't met me. Yeah.

Okay, another question. So when you obviously over your time of doing all your mowing, have you had any customers like ask for any strange requests like you know, I hear people maybe trying to hit on you or asking you to mow their lawns with a shirt off for extra costs?

Not personally, no. I have heard some very strange, I have some very strange tales in my franchisees. One particular lady came up to the door to a lawmaker contractor, a franchisee of mine and she said I'm lonely and she was topless.

That's pretty funny. Thanks for your time.

But he was happily married. I might say he didn't take advantage. So thanks Jim.

Alright, I've got a quick one here online from Luke o'. Neill. What advice would you give to someone who has had a great business in the past but due to personal circumstances has to virtually start all over again?

Well, get a gyms franchise, Luke.

Come on Bob, we'll see you at the next training.

Yes, in actual fact, look, as we often say, the great majority, 90 to 95% of people who start service businesses fail and a lot of the time it's not their fault. It's just so difficult. Our success rate, first year survival rate, 88% on average depending on the division. Some divisions somewhat lower. Say mo individual has like 4%. So if you're part of an organized structure which helps you to get going, you can actually go independent after a while. Some people do, not most but yeah, it doesn't hurt to fail. What only hurts if you don't learn from your failures. The frustrating thing I find is not people who make mistakes, people who won't Learn from their mistakes. They keep on doing the same thing or they won't recognize it. It's somebody who's getting bad complaint after complaint and they ask point, says, oh, it's not my fault. It's the client's fault. It's the system's fault. It's the system. Your complaint system is bad. It's not fair. It's not. So they get and they won't change. And when I see that reaction, that makes me feel really bad because I know they're going to fail because they just can't learn. That's the hardest thing. The difference between great people and failures is the great people are always, endlessly soul critical, always learning to do better. The failures are the ones that will not learn. They will not listen. So if you fail once. I failed many times. I've failed a lot of things. I've done so many stupid things, made so many mistakes in my life, really have. But you keep on learning and you never give up.

Next question in the room. Anyone want to come up? Don't be afraid.

I know some of you told me you have some questions. I can see you out there. Come on.

You coming?

He's a man with a good Jim's beard, little more hair than I used to have.

I see tons and tons of support early on, like obviously starting out from nothing. It's going to be hard for the next 12 months, but it's obvious there's support everywhere for that. Moving into the future. When you say 3, 4, 10 years, time down the track, when you've got a successful franchise going, what supports are there to. For growth and basically for growth.

See that's. Yeah, it's interesting, very interesting question because in actual fact, it's kind of the idea behind that is you learn your business until you know how to do it properly, but that's actually not what happens. What you do is you keep on learning. It doesn't matter how. Whether you're starting off on your first day or you've been going 10 years, you, you're constantly learning. I have been in business full time since 1982 and part time for many years before that. Now that is a long time. That is like half a century. I'm still learning every day I'm looking at what I do and saying, how can I do it better? And again, it's one of the reasons I love to talk to franchisees because I hear things that are happening and there's virtually not a day go by I don't think about it. Not a week Goes by. We don't change something. Some small thing to say, how can we improve what we do? Like, I'll just give you an example. This is today. This is today. It's not about franchise, it's about staff. Now, staff are really important. Staff are just as important as franchisees. They're all part of your network, the people that make things work. I've got really brilliant staff. We're thinking, how do you get staff to spend more time to communicate with each other across departments? So one of the things I did is I look, we've got a room up there which we. In our complex, which is potential lunchroom. So I said, okay, what can we do to encourage the staff to go and have lunch in the lunchroom? So I went to all the departments today and said, what would encourage you to come and have lunch there? And people said things like more couches, standing tables, air fryers, different kinds of facilities, have some biscuits there, have a nice coffee maker. The girls loved the idea of massages and stuff, bringing somebody in to do it. They were really keen on that. So they come up with all these different ideas. That's just today. And then I'm going to write a pose and then we're going to look at turning it into. So even today, just today, that's the thing that came up this morning I was chatting about with it, how do you make staff more motivated, get them involved, get them talking to each other and we come up with these kinds of ideas and then we talk about it. Let's just not unusual. We're always doing things to improve. So when you've been going for five or six years and you've got a successful business and you're making 100 bucks an hour, what's your next step? What are you going to do? You're going to make $120 an hour, you're going to put people on. Are you going to do a split? How can we help you to go even further? Because there's no, there's no upper limit. This is the thing. When you're in your own business, you don't have any boss telling you, hey, you go so far and no further. Not when you're in your own business. There is no upper limit to what you can do. Your franchise can be any size, or you could be launching a different business or newer division, or becoming a franchisor, all kinds of different things. Or even leaving gyms and doing something totally different. People often start with gym service business and they go on to do really major things. There's one guy owns a whole stack of. One of my early franchisees. He owns a whole stack of nurseries and he's also got a building business and stuff. Started off pushing a lawnmower around, so the potential is massive. That's the exciting thing about business, isn't it? There's nobody saying so far, there's nobody saying to Dan, Carle, hey, you're a high school dropout. You're obviously useless. I'll never give you a job because you haven't got even your high school degree. You're human garbage, basically. Nobody tells Dan that he's, he's in his own business and he can show what a brilliant guy he is. You've heard him this morning, didn't you, yesterday.

His business has evolved through, like looking, getting, stepping out of his business, looking back into it to see what he could do differently, to streamline it. And like he's found his niche where he's doing. Like, he's generally like mainly mowing, not just doing all the hard work jobs like the one offs and things like that to improve it, and then bringing his people up to do that and just keep evolving.

And if you were talking to Dan, I bet you he just said the same thing. He's always learning. Yeah, he's a phenomenally successful guy. He's still learning. And that's what I hope for you too, which is why coming to meetings matters so much. Talking to your franchisor, talking to other franchisees, going to conferences if they're available, just keep on learning. Those eight meetings evenings a year when the meetings that are always here, your best learning time. Then you go and you talk to somebody, say, I'm making 100 bucks an hour. How much are you making? I'm making 150. What are you doing? How are you doing that? What kind of jobs are you doing? What are you charging for them? What skills do you have? How do you approach your clients? How do you get these quotes across? How do you get the better prices? How do you make the job really clean and neat? What equipment are you using? There's all kinds of stuff you keep on learning. And there's a lot of really brilliant people in this company at every level. And you've got so many people can give you advice. Look, people come to me and they want me to act as a mentor. I often get this, you know, now if I was going to, I would charge thousands of dollars an hour, but I don't even do that. But you can contact me at any time. Daytime, evenings, Weekends and you've got a problem. I will do everything possible I can to help you. And that doesn't cost you anything extra. That's the difference. And you've got people like Dan around who can help you. You contact Dan anybody and just Dan, I want some advice. He'll give it to you. I know he's that kind of guy. Thank you very much. Great question.

Thank you. I've got Taryn on here, on with a question, but I feel like it probably just got answered. With many other mowing companies around, what makes Jim stand out in the market?

We are just better. Our service is so much better than anyone else because I know that we have a system, this business system I'm telling you about where we pass jobs to independence. I tell you what, the struggle to get people to give the same level of service as Jim's franchisees do is very difficult. They're just not used to it and so many pass the test. So when you use one gym as service and you have a good experience, you want to use others and price doesn't become so important. It gives us fantastic advantage. And the more we can reduce those complaints, the bigger the advantage there will be. I am quite confident within a couple of years we're going to be in a much stronger position.

All right, we've got a comment from Willie. You should run for office.

Thanks, Willie. I often get gym for PM, but if I was 20 years younger, I might think about. Actually, there's things I'm passionate about. I think a lot of the public policy, especially at state government level, is awful. I think it's terrible that young people can't afford to buy a house, but you're endlessly bidding out the price of houses. They don't build enough. There's too much restrictive zoning. It's very unfair. And people are stuck with mortgages. And you have this growing gap between wealthy people, including myself, who own stacks of property and people who can't afford to buy. I help my kids to get houses, so they're okay. I got 10 of them, so they need a bit of help. But it's so unfair. I would really love to get involved in politics, but honestly speaking, I wouldn't make a very good politician. Oh, we do. We do help you buy a house by giving you a good business, that's for sure. We reckon we've created more millionaires than any company in this country by far because it's not uncommon. I often talk. One of the things, one of my favorite jobs is I ring up my 10 year veterans, and 10, 20 years on these big anniversaries. And I often ask them what they were doing beforehand, their situation. And you get stories like, somebody who came in, like, he was, you know, 50 years old, was broke, had nothing. He's now got a house. He's now got a boat. His life has changed dramatically. I hear this a lot.

I just touched on that, because we came in and we had our own financial crisis. And I'm. And I talk about that and share this with people. So we lost over $700,000 overnight.

Okay.

And we came into the business, and everyone was like, oh, my God, that's terrible. I said, it's only money at the end of the day. But we had our mowing franchise, and in a five.