The Making of a Lawn Mowing Millionaire | Jim Penman's Story of Favour, Fortune and Faith

Hey friends, and welcome to the Upside Down People podcast. Today's guest is one of Australia's most iconic entrepreneurs and the founder of the largest franchising chain in the southern hemisphere. He's known to be one of Australia's most successful businessmen and is the man behind Jim's group. I'm grateful to spend this time and have this conversation with none other than Jim Penman. Well, I'm joined here with Jim Penman. Welcome to the Upside Down People podcast. So glad to be having a conversation with you here today. How are you going?

Yeah, I'm good, I'm good. Yourself?

Yeah, I'm doing pretty, pretty well. It's a warm, it's been quite a warm week here in Perth where I'm from. And yeah, it's looking like the week's not gonna cool down by any means either. So just sweating it out and waiting for the cooler weather. But yeah, you're over in Victoria.

Yeah, that's right, in Melbourne.

From Melbourne, yeah.

We get your weather about three days afterwards. After you finish with it, you send it to us.

Yeah. So you've got some weather to look forward to then. Yep. Well, I'm keen to have a conversation with you around. You're obviously one of Australia's most iconic entrepreneurs and founder of the largest franchising chain in the southern hemisphere. I believe Jim's mowing, so I want to have a bit of a conversation around that, but obviously around how your faith has impacted that as, as well. And I believe that's a part of your story. So maybe a good place to start would be telling us, yeah, a bit, a bit about yourself, how you ended up in the mowing business and then, yeah, we can see where the conversation goes from there.

Well, I didn't start off intending to be in the lawn mowing business. I didn't start to make a living out of it. I didn't intend to be in business at all. I intended to be an academic. Right. I went to University in 1971 with the idea of doing a degree in history to try and understand the reason for the rise and fall of civilization, which is quite a long way away from cutting grass. And what I did was gardening and then lawn mowing was my part time student job. It was something that got me outside. I liked being outside. I liked spending time in the open and I liked gardening and it paid pretty well better than any normal student job. So that was my part time job. Finished off doing. I spent about 10 years at university and then finished off doing a PhD in history. And I came to the end of it and I sort of thought my ideas were pretty good and people would be interested in them and I could have a career out of it. But it turned out completely, completely wrong. People did not know what to make of this. Weird. It started off as a theory of history and then goes into cross cultural anthropology and psychology and biology and a whole lot of other things too.

Okay.

And at the end of it, they just drew up their hands. I was actually knocked back from my thesis originally, really. But there was no prospect of an academic career. But I wanted to pursue my interests which were now in the areas like neuroscience and biochemistry and so forth. That's what it extended to. So I thought, okay, the only way I'm going to be able to do this is to become rich enough to be able to employ my own, start my own research institute. So there I was, impoverished, deeply indebted ex university student, having failed my academic career doing the only thing I knew how to do, which was mow lawns for a living. So I started full time in 1982.

Wow.

Franchise in 1989. And the whole thing quite surprised me, quite frankly. I never really thought that this little mowing business would come to anything much, but it just did a bit better than expected.

Yeah, well, it's quite an empire. It's all across the state and I believe it's international as well. And you can just be driving your streets and you'll see a van or a car or a ute pop up with Jim's mowing on the side of it. And is that your face on the display?

Yeah, it is, it is. If you have a look at Jim Penman images on Google, there's a picture of me standing against the old trailer design, which is very gloomy looking. And that's the actual picture it was drawn from. They were trying to get me to smile and without much success. And one of my managers pretended to put his tongue in the photographer's ear, which is why I'm smiling.

That got you to chuckle a bit.

Yes, he did too. They used to do other things too. One other time they were doing it, one of my managers got up on a step ladder and he took down his pants and he had his big red boxes on. He used to do weird things to get me to smile at cameras. So that was funny, right?

Is it just. Is it a thing that you don't enjoy smiling at cameras or what's behind that?

I'm a pretty serious individual, you might say.

Right.

No, I'm not good at Spying at cameras. I hated being photographed, actually, for years and years. There's no photographs of me at all because I just disliked being photos. So it's quite ironical when you make your photo so famous.

Exactly. Yeah. Well, it's sort of accustomed to a household brand now, Jim's group. And yeah, you don't just do mowing, it's cleaning. And I saw like a pet cleaner van as well. And so it's quite vast. The franchisees that are going out from the group. And that all started from you trying to pay off some research, right?

Yeah. Found some research. I'm currently spending. I have a research institute run through La Trobe University in Victoria, in Melbourne, and we're currently spending just over $3 million a year. I'd like to increase if I could. Yeah, Getting some really good stuff out of it.

So you went from studying the rise and fall of civilization to starting an empire that essentially determines the rise and fall of grass.

We do too.

Yeah. So tell us a bit about then. How does your faith intertwine with that, that story?

Well, I have a very unusual approach to franchising. When I was trying to start the franchise itself and I started in 1988, I went to some lawyers and they basically said that, you know, they put me a contract which gave me a lot of power, basically do whatever I wanted. And I said, I don't want that. I want a system that will serve franchisees that will be so great that franchisees will just pile to get in. You have to be mad not to join it. And the idea behind that was this notion of servant leadership, that when you're running a franchise, you're not in there to make yourself wealthy. In actual fact, in our case, you're not even primarily there to serve customers. You're there to serve franchisees. So the moral of that is Jesus washing his disciples feet. So I deliberately disempowered myself. I put all kinds of restrictions on myself in the original contract. Like things like giving franchisees absolute right to territory. If a job comes into territory, they must get it, but they're not in control. They can work wherever they like. They can grow their business as much as they like and not pay any higher fees, because our fees are basically mainly fixed fees. We guarantee they can never be asked to. We can never take their regular clients off them without their consent. There's a whole stack of things. There's automatic right of renewal as long as they're compliant. There's a whole stack of things which we put in there. The lawyer Said, this is lunatic. Nobody does this in franchising. But we actually gave them more power. We said you can change your to a different franchisor if you're happy, you're not happy with yours or even different division and your own franchisor has no say and you can even vote your franchisor out. You can veto changes to your own manual. There's a clause in the contract that says that Jim's group control cannot be sold without the written consent of majority of franchisees. So all these powers we gave franchisees to reinforce this idea that we serve franchisees, that we are the servants. It's servant leadership. And the real model of that is Jesus washing his disciples feet. Which is a very, very radical thing to do in first century Palestine. Because that was normally a job that was for the lowest of the low, the slaves. It was a very grubby, dirty job. And it was sometimes you'd get a very revered rabbi, his disciples wash his feet as a sign of their respect. But Jesus washed his disciples feet and you can see from Peter's response how shocked he was by this. It was so radical. So in a sense I'm not trying to compare myself with Jesus, but the idea is the same. I give my personal direct phone number and email address to every single franchisee training and I tell them again and again, contact me anytime about anything, after hours, holidays, I don't mind when, if I'm in church then you're not going to get me. That's the way we do things.

Yeah, that's crazy.

That attitude is very, very unusual in business, put it that way.

Yeah, yeah, it's super unusual in, in business because obviously as a franchisee you're trying to essentially build your empire and protect yourself. Right. So you're not, you're trying to set things up around yourself, not so much around the person running the, the franchisee. How does that impact like when you say you gave them like a lot of control and authority within their demographic areas. If there's like. Because Jim's mowing is huge. So there's a number of different people, franchises, how does it work when each of those franchises are competing against one another or. Yeah. Do those things resolve pretty easily?

Well, they don't see it that way. One of the interesting things that's happened in recent years is that customer service has improved, which we measure very, very rigorously is that as we get less complaints, we get more leads. In the past year we've knocked back, I can call for a million leads. We can't handle. So most franchisees are flat out. So they're not really competing for work. In fact, the general attitude is they're very cooperative, which is something we encourage. So somebody comes to a meeting, for example, which is held every six weeks. If they've got a problem, other franchises will gather around and we'll help them and we'll give them advice and not talk to them after hours. So it's not a feeling of competition. And in fact, when something goes wrong, other franchisees will really help out. Like during COVID we had a particularly bad lockdown in Victoria, which was completely ludicrous and necessary. They just shut down independent contractors. And that was very traumatising and distressing. And some of the franchisees, one lady in particular, because she was on a student visa, she had no government support. So the government was saying, you're not allowed to do your job, which was washing dogs, but we're not going to give you any money because you're not a citizen. So she was facing eviction and couldn't afford to buy food. And the wonderful thing was the other franchises gathered around and helped her. They gave her food vouchers and stuff. We actually said to her, if you get kicked out, we'll come and stay at our conference centre, because it was empty, nobody could stay there. People helped you hear that kind of thing a lot. People would ring me up and he'd lost somebody who'd said, look, I've got no income, but I'm actually fairly well off. Is there anybody else in need that I can help you kind of try and create a culture where people look after each other? It's a very Christian culture in that sense, but I think it spreads from the fact that we treat franchisees in a certain way, and whole contracts are designed to make franchisees feel cared for and looked after. Wow.

So you mentioned servant leadership is obviously a huge part of creating that culture. And that's a very biblical principle. It's something that Jesus came to serve, not to be served, and he set that example for us. What are some other things that you found instrumental in creating this culture that you formed at Jim's group?

Well, it's a matter of trying to look to the interest of the person you're dealing with rather than yourself, primarily. Let me give you an example, which is in my books, which is a powerful one. When I started off, before I franchised, I used to build up and sell lawnmower rounds. That was my business, that was trying to make some money and get ahead. And I found that was A better way of doing it. And I wasn't doing too bad at building them up. The subcontractors weren't doing a great job. But one thing I was really bad at is selling. Because I have very poor people skills. Really, Everybody could tell you that. My wife says I'm completely. She says I'm borderline Asperger's or something, because I'm blind to social clues. So here am I, this guy who's completely hopeless in a personal sense, very poor people skills, trying to sell lawmaker businesses. And I was hopeless. I was so bad at it. I actually tried everything I could think of. I got advice from everybody. How do you do this thing? You got to sell them yourself. And I can't sell. I'm terrible salesman. I even had a professional salesman briefly selling lawn mowing rounds on my behalf while I was in the same office. And he was doing the sales pitch. That was how pathetically bad I was. And then I actually learned to sell in a single minute. I figured out the single biggest lesson in my whole career. And it started I went to see somebody in my church who was in advertising. And I went to see this guy, and he's a very impressive, really well off, very successful. I was some crummy lawn mowing contractor, very timid, driving a crappiest old car, Just nothing special. And this guy, highly successful individual, took me into his office, and for half an hour he talked to me about advertising. How you advertise, where you advertise the kind of media and the message and stuff. And at the end of it, he said, you don't really need an advertising agency. You just need to go and do these things. So I walked out of his office and I thought, okay, if I ever needed an advertising agent, I would go straight back to Peter. I wouldn't even consider anybody else. Which actually did some years later when we went on television. And as I was walking back to the car, which was parked somewhere away, I was thinking about this. I was thinking, hang on a minute. What's this guy done? What's happened here? He has told me nothing about his business, nothing about his successes. I have no idea what he charges. I don't know anything about his company as such. And yet I know that if I ever need an advertising agency, I go straight back to Peter and ask him. And as I reached my car, which was parked a few streets away, I remember reaching out to take the door handle. I never used to lock it. It was a really, really bad car. Had the back seats ripped out. They Put more rubbish in. It was a terrible car. Nobody'd steal it. They might take it away and take to the tip, but they wouldn't steal it.

There's a mowerman's car, mowerman's car.

In extremes, people back into me and I say, don't worry about it. You see, what it is, it is. So I reached out to the handle of the car and I thought, okay, I wonder if this approach could possibly work to selling lawn mowing rounds. So the next time somebody rang me about a lawn mowing round, instead of talking about my business, I asked him a question. I said to him, tell me, do you know what the cut of a lawn mowing round means? Now, the cut is each job done once. If you have 50 clients worth $80 each on average, you've got a $4,000 cut. And anybody in the industry knows what that means and knows how you calculate the income. You know, I give you two or three weeks after extras, all the rest of it, right? You didn't know. People didn't know. I knew that from experience. So I started to explain and then I started to talk about the mowing business and how it worked, what you could charge and how to find clients and stuff. And as he came to see me, I did more of the same thing. I just told him about the business, how it worked and how to be successful and whether you should even buy a business, whether you could build it yourself, and if so, how and why, if you're part time. And then the end of it. I just gave him a bit of paper and I said, this is a lawnmower business in your area. Let me know if you're interested. Now, I had three people actually ring me in fairly quick succession who'd been to see me. And they asked me the same question. Jim, I want your advice. And I said, okay, fine. They said, I want you to tell me whether you think I've been offered a business in my area. And I want you to think which is the better business, that one or yours? Now, I'd obviously impress them with my credibility because they're asking my advice as to whether my business is the best one. So I thought, well, it's got to be real. I can't lie about it or anything. So I said to them, okay, let's ask the questions. I said, okay, how many customers? What's the cut? How far apart are they? How long has he been doing it for? What's he going to be doing next? What's he going into? You know, just obvious Questions that you'd know to work out things like attrition rates and so forth and value of jobs and so forth. So in the end of it, I said to this guy, the first guy who rang him, I said, that's a better business. Go and buy that one. And a second guy asked me the same question and I said the same advice. So I said, go buy that business. And the third one asked me and I said to him, well, it's a better business, but he's charging too much. You've got to put the price down $1,000. I'll go and offer him that. So I gave away three sales because it was just integrity, basically. I had to give him advice. And then something really completely floored me. They all bought from me, every single one of them. And then as soon as I adopted this policy of not even worrying about whether I was going to make the sale or not, just trying to help somebody else, I started to be fantastic salesmen.

Wow.

Why do they do that? Why do they give those sales away? I mean, what reasoning. It wasn't because I thought I'd make more sales. It was because I thought it was the right thing to do. And that's just.

And why do you think they came to you?

Well, because I'd shown my credibility. I showed I was more interested in their welfare than mine.

Yeah, okay.

That's just like Peter. That's like the guy from my church.

Yeah.

We have this thing in gyms, we actually call it selling by not selling. You don't sell a franchise, you grind a franchise. And one of the biggest offense any franchisor can do in gyms is to sell a franchise to somebody that they've got. Any reasonable prospect will fail. So we had one particular case where a lady rang me up from help with some doctor with a contract. And one of my franchisors had put her on, was putting her on. And I asked a few questions and I said, who's this for? She said, it's for my son. I said, how old's your son? He said, he's early 20s. And he said, why are you doing this? He said, he can't find a job. And I said, we're not going to sell your son a franchise. We're not going to sell you a franchise. No way. Because you know that's going to fail.

Right?

And she was very upset. She said to me, I wished you I hadn't run you. You've messed everything up. And I said, tell you what, let's see if we can give Your son a job. I know some franchisees in that area who are overloaded with work, which is very common with us. So why don't I arrange for your son to go out on the road with those guys and see what he can do. Now he went out on the road with them and he was completely hopeless, absolutely incapable of running, even working as an employee, much less running his own business. And if that poor lady had gone ahead, she would have blown her money and had a really bad experience, as well as demoralizing her son more than he needed to be. I was really furious. I just couldn't believe this franchisor had done this. And so when his contract came up for renewal the following year, I said, we're not renewing you. You can sell it, which is access to how a system works. You're going to sell it, you made a very good price, made good money out of it. But I was absolutely shocked. It wasn't the only thing, I must say, but it was other things. But that's just an example. You see, the point of it is taking that sale. Would have got. Would have got this guy some money, but it was wrong, ethically right. And I don't even think in the long term it's good for the business to do that kind of thing. Because if you take people that are going to fail, then every person that fails is a negative, telling everybody else, don't get a gyms franchise. Now, we do have people who fail, but we do everything we can to screen them, to train them, to support them, so they won't. And that's the essence. And so even though none of my competitors did this, every single person in the industry, everybody else in the service industry just takes whoever has the money. I actually employed this person briefly who was selling for a competitor, and I said, what is the criteria you were given for whether a franchise is good enough? And his actual words were $50,000 and a pulse, and we don't do that. And I never did that because I thought it was wrong. And I actually thought that when I started the franchise, somebody asked me how many franchises you might have one day. And I said, look, if it works well, I'm not sure if it will. If it works well, one day we might have 100. Now, my competitor at that time had 250. But my assumption was that because I wasn't going to accept anybody who I wasn't confident with as far as I could be, that they were good, I was never going to grow that much. So I deliberately made a Decision for reasons of right and wrong that I thought would really restrict my business. Now, it turned out to be an absolutely fantastic business decision, but that's not why I made it.

Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible. And so just out of a matter of interest, how many franchises are you sitting at today?

Just under five and a half thousand.

That's incredible. So from a dream of 100-5-2-2000 because of this idea of integrity and wanting to make sure that you're looking after those coming on, on board is just.

It's a relentless focus.

Yeah.

You've got to always keep the top of mind. My franchisees are like my. It's like my extended family. I really don't mind them contacting me. It's one of the hardest things to get through. People often contact me, say, oh, I know you're busy, I didn't want to trouble you. I said, you should have run me two weeks ago. Why didn't you when you first had this problem? But sometimes they'll often bring me. Can't get rid of their franchise or at the weekend or something to do something for them because I'm there. But that's important to me.

Yeah, that's. Obviously it's. It's been working for you. It's an incredible, incredible feat just to make yourself available to five and a half thousand people who. It's not just people, but there's complexities going on in their lives and their businesses and. Yeah, that's. That's pretty crazy. I've got a bit of a must.

Say one thing, Callum, about this. I'm not nearly as rich as people think I am. Take a very small percentage and we provide very good support. They tried to get me to go down for the BRW rich.250. And I said, don't be ridiculous. I'm not even remotely in that front. I'm very famous, but I'm. I'm pretty well off. I mean, you're not going to spend $3 million on a research project if you haven't got some money behind you. But I basically also give away about 90% of my income, so it's not. I could be a lot richer if I really wanted to, but it's not my aim, really.

Right. So a bit of a tongue in queet, tongue in cheek question for you, Jim. You say you're a man of integrity, but I read recently somewhere on the Internet that your name's David. David. Jim Penman. Tell us the story about what's behind Jim.

Well, James is my Middle name.

Right.

My legal name is David James and James is my maternal grandfather who's apparently a very good man too. He was a shy clerk in the Depression in New South Wales, so I was named after him. So I think it's a pretty good name anyway. Yeah, really what happened was that, strange as it may sound, when I left school I took a gap year and I went to work at a farm in Western Australia and there was a young guy there about my age called David and we used to sort of. So I just said, I'll call me Jim. He was my middle name. So that was kind of how it started.

Awesome.

I don't know, it's kind of like a bit of a, I think when a break from your childhood and it was a bit more. Bit more Aussie, a bit more. A bit more, you know. You know, Jim's a very. Like a roustabout or a. Or a stockman or something like that, or a worker or a tradie, that kind of name. David is more like an indoorsy, you know, lawyer or a social worker or something. I don't know.

You could have had Davos Mowing or something like that. But I feel like you're right.

Daddy Daves mowing or something. I don't know. But I could have.

Jim's does have a great ring to it. So that's because you're used to it.

Caleb, if you didn't. If it was Daggy Dave's mowing, it probably would be used to that one too.

I know, but I probably wouldn't appreciate it as. As much as it drove past my house or something like that. So, Jim, you, I believe when I was doing some research on you, I believe you haven't always been a Christian and you came to faith from a place of atheism, is that correct?

Yeah, I came from anti Christianity, you might say. I remember when I was at school we had to go out and watch these football matches to support the school, which I thought was a complete waste of time because I didn't want to watch football. I used to go around and argue about religion. I would get people to tell me whether they believed in God and if they did, I'd tell them why they were wrong. That was me. We got into a bit of trouble too. We had a speaker come to us, Christian speaker come to the school. And my best friend and I just started approaching him with certain kinds of questions which didn't go down very well. We were considered to be quite disrespectful. I wasn't swearing or anything. I was just questioning his beliefs.

Right.

He was actually suspended, my friend from school, and told to stay away from me as a bad influence. So we weren't.

Oh, wow.

I used to put things on notice boards at the school which they'd take down because they were inappropriate. So I was a bit of a.

Bit of a rascal, a menace.

Yes, that's right. And I remember going to see a Billy Graham crusade and I'm not proud of this, but, yeah, I was with a friend and we were just making fun of people going down to the front. We were just saying, hey, what are you doing this for? This is just rubbish. So I was known as being very militant in that sense, but I was sort of interested. I was sort of drawn in a way. The funny thing is, of my relatives, my mother's family, quite a big family in Sydney, and the ones I got on best with were the Christian ones, even though I wasn't. So there's something about them that attracted me.

And.

I was 28 years old and I was wandering through, you know, after being at university for, you know, close to a decade, and I was wandering through the union in the, you know, in the O week, in the orientation week.

Yeah.

And there were some kids standing behind the. The Christian unit stands. And I just got talking to them and I just liked them and they invited me to go on this retreat, which is just in the beginning of the year. And I. Yeah, I said, okay, I'll go on. These are nice people. So. And in the first morning of their retreat, they had this exercise where you had this quiet time. You just sat quietly by yourself and prayed and meditate and stuff. Well, I don't know. I can't pray. There's no God, for heaven's sake. So I got this exercise book, had a red pen, and I thought, I'll just write down what's going through my mind, just my thoughts. I had this vivid sense that God was calling me just in this. Written with a red pen and exercise book, calling me. So I sat down, atheist, got up, a Christian, which was kind of shocked people a lot.

Yeah.

There was one person who actually knew me quite well, and somebody said to him, you know, Jim Penman's become a Christian. And he just stared at them and he said, jim Penman, a Christian? That guy, you know, a Christian could not believe it. And I became very fervent. I'd like, you know, like Paul on the road to Damascus, that kind of stuff too. So being anti, I went pro and I was going on evangelistic coffee shops and, you know, kids. At the Belgrave Height, we had a convention. We used to entertain the kids and stuff, which was great fun. And became very active in the union, became part of the committee and stuff and just took to it. It was amazing, amazing, wonderful experience. It was absolutely transformative. So joyful. I felt like I'd been in the desert, grey, arid wasteland, and suddenly in the promised land, and it's green and it's growing and there's pools of water and it's just so happy. Remember the first Christmas I was listening to Christmas carols. It's hard to speak about these things, but suddenly I knew what they meant.

Wow.

It was just astonishingly joyful experience.

Wow.

That's.

That's amazing. It's incredible how God can shift and transform a heart from someone who is so against him to someone who's so in love with him.

Well, I think I was fighting against him, you know, in a way, I was feeling the call and I was fighting against it. There was something that drew me in, that something. I'd always talk to anybody about it, you know, if the mourn mishmis came to the door or the J dub to anybody.

There's a curiosity there.

Yes, something drew me. And it's hard, though, because in a sense, faith is attractive, but you have to have somebody. You have to believe that somebody's there. And I know that. Talk to people about it and they say, well, we'd like to have it. I said, you just have to expose yourself. You just have to be in an environment where God can reach through to you, which is usually through other people.

Yeah. So tell us about that. Like, what you're saying you're experiencing, like, life and joy. And what. What did you notice within yourself changing and shifting? You mentioned the carols and how. How they just had. They took on a new meaning for you. What. What in your life could you see differently?

Well, it gave me a sense of moral purpose, you might say. It just made decisions easy. Because there's a clear answer. Give me an example. When I just started the mowing business, I was very poor. I was deeply in debt. I had virtually nothing. I had very crappy old equipment. Just before Christmas, 1982, and the worst drought in Melbourne history started about a week later. All the lawns died. You couldn't water them. So that was a pretty bad situation to be in. So I was starting a business with no capital, deeply in debt, drought year. So I'm not in a great financial situation. And then to make this really interesting. Both my mowing equipment broke down my mower and my brush cutter. It was from my old part time job. So I had no business if I don't have that. So I actually went to. There was only one shop open which is quite a long way away, which was selling, which was open during Christmas and New Year. So I went there and got some equipment. It's really hard to afford this. And then the guy basically put a price on each bit of equipment and then add them up and gave me that. And I took it to the cashier and I paid it. And as I walked out of the shop I realized that he'd added it up wrong. He'd added it up and he charged $100 too little. Now that's a lot of money in those days. We're talking 1982. So that's a lot of money, a lot of money for me in those days. So I thought, okay, this is my good luck, gotta accept it. So I put the mowers in the mower in the trailer, I drove to the next job which is quite a long way away and I got the mower out and I put in the next sheet ready to start mowing. And I thought, alright, God does not want me to do this. This is wrong. Okay, I know I can't afford it, I don't know how I'm going to get the money, but I cannot do this. So I packed up the mower, drove back to the shop, went to the guy and I said, look, you added it up wrong and here's a hundred dollars. And I had no idea how I was going to survive. I really didn't in those days. But what was really fascinating to me was that that afternoon I was mowing somebody's lawn, I got talking to the guy who did it and I was talking about vicious things. Now I didn't ask him anything, I didn't make any suggestions, I didn't tell him about the plan, I said nothing. He said, look, I tell you what, I'll do some leaflets for you. Now he suggested it. He not only told me because leaflets how I was not only told me that he would do it, but he actually told me how many he would do for me. And the value of that offer was exactly $100. And I'm talking about five or six hours later. Now it wasn't really the money so much that flabbergasted me in that it was the fact that somehow God was in control. And I knew that if I was faithful, somehow I'd get out of this appalling situation I was in. I just knew that it was that demonstration of power, of divine power that made so much. And I have never had anything like that happen to me ever since. Never. I've never been in such desperate situation. But I just had the sense that God was in control and that somehow I'd succeed, even though it really didn't seem likely at the time.

Yeah.

That meant so much.

That's incredible. And what an amazing testimony as well to, like you said, to the sovereignty of God, to his goodness and knowing what your exact need was and meeting you in that place of desperation as well. So, yeah, it's so, so amazing.

Prayer really works. Caleb, I can tell you I had a terrible, terrible crisis that happened two months ago. And I was in absolute despair about something that was going badly wrong. And I could not say any way out. I was absolutely grief stricken. I was horrified. I was appalled. I saw no way out of this dreadful, dreadful trap. And I just knelt down by the bed and I cried out, God help me, God help me, God help me, God help me. Crying, Calling up to God like that. No. No understanding of what could happen. And it was solved just a few hours later in a way that I could not believe was possible. It was the most amazing thing ever. It just solved. And I still don't quite understand what happened or how, but it was solved. I've never in my life prayed so fervently for anything.

Wow.

Without any clear expectations that God could help me. And yet it was solved.

Wow. What. Do you mind me asking what, what happened or what was that?

I don't want to go into it, but it was just basically an agreement.

Yeah.

It wasn't. It was, it was a. It was a. It was a issue.

Yeah.

It wasn't business.

It was more personal, relational. Yeah, that's. I mean, that's incredible that, like you're saying it again. Testimony to God is so involved in, in our lives. Right. There's not. He's not distant or aloof. He's more near than we can imagine. And I think that there's that desire from, from him for us to cry out because he wants to be involved. He wants us to involve him and participate in, in what's happening. And yeah, we see that through. He sent his son Jesus, and he experienced the human condition that we experience pain and suffering and struggles and doubts and confusions and different anxieties. And that's something he knows and he didn't shy away from, but entered into. And I think what Incredible testimony, Jim, those are amazing. And how much of your faith, it's obviously impacted your business quite a bit, because from the start of the conversation, you're talking about how you've structured the framework of franchisees around the Kingdom of God, essentially that servant leadership. And you've structured couches on how you treat people in your business around principles of the gospel. How important is that to you?

Well, we do God's work. We've got to have a purpose for living, Caleb. It can't just be about happiness or material success or anything. There's got to be a reason for it. I'm a very happy person, but it's not a primary aim. God puts us here to do a job, and I have various jobs. Being a husband and a father is a very important job. Looking after my franchisees is a very important job to me. People often actually come to me. We have a session called Ask Gym, which we do every third Tuesday night. And one of the things people ask more than once is, can I be adopted by you? Because you talk about family and I say, well, in a sense, when you sign that contract, you are part of my family. And that's how I see it. Franchise, even on Christmas Day. Then I'm happy to take the call because it's my extended family. But then there's my research project, which has immense implications for the future of humanity and also why we're suffering this terrible decline of faith in a society. I think there's epigenetic reasons, biological reasons, to do with people becoming too wealthy and selfish and individualistic and so forth, and why the birth rate's dropping so much, this kind of thing. So you've got to have a purpose to get up and I think a truly meaningful life. And in the end, a happy life is one that's not just about yourself. It's about something bigger than yourself. It's about saying, God, what do you want me to do with my life? And then doing your best to do that. Even though we're feeble and I. I fail all the time, I always feel I should do better. Terrible sense of unworthiness, I suppose, and what you call sinfulness, this kind of thing. But you've got to do what God wants. That's what life is about. Yeah.

You've built an incredible business that so many people look to as an example, to run their own businesses, not just in the industry, but outside the industry as well. And then you. You've mentioned research. I'd love to get into that a bit as well. The research that you're doing what, what's the, like if you come to the end of your life and you're looking back, what's the legacy that, that you're wanting to leave?

Well, in those areas, they're my three major concerns. My kids, I've got 10 children and I love them dearly. And I want them to be successful, by which I don't necessarily mean financially successful, I mean successful as individuals, human beings, as parents, as spouses, this kind of thing. I want my. As far as possible, I want my legacy with Jim's to go ahead. I'm very concerned. We're doing a whole lot of stuff now to try and protect franchisees from somebody coming in and ripping them off. By taking over Jim's group and using it as a money making machine. Look, I could double or triple trouble my income reasonably easily if I did certain things. It's quite possible and I don't want that to happen because it would hurt too many people. That's part of my legacy. And then there's the research project which if I'm successful, will actually change the world in a way that you would probably think wildly delusional. But the implications are that, if you could, we're going through a real decay of character which is driven by affluence and individualism and competition, selfishness, all the things that Christ taught us not to do. And this change of character is disastrous. It's causing the population, the fertility to drop, it's causing a rise in mental illness, it's causing terrible problems. In the end, it's going to be absolutely disaster for society. And my aim, principle, aim is to try and turn that around by developing a treatment that will help people to overcome this misery that we're putting ourselves into. Because everything that people want, what makes them immediately happy, they want the sex, they want the junk food, they want the cocaine or the drugs or the marijuana or the alcohol or the competition or the video games or the social media getting all the likes and, and stuff and the bigger car and the bigger success. That's what people want. They go for that. They think, I have that, I'll be happy. But it doesn't work that way. Our minds don't work that way, actually. In fact, what really happens is when you do things that immediately feel good, what you do is you get a surge of dopamine into the brain. And your brain doesn't like having too much dopamine. It likes to balance itself, because dopamine is the wanting chemical. So what it does is it actually Dampens down these things called dopamine receptors and they become less and less sensitive. And when you do that, your character changes where you need more and more and more of these dopamine surges to be and you dampen the dopamine receptors down. It's the same reason that drug addiction doesn't work. You take something like cocaine, people feel great. Next time not quite so good. Less and less your dopamine receptors are being dampened down. So what's happening is that people are doing things that make them feel good in the short term, but they're making us miserable and frustrated and ineffective in the long term. And it's like we're subjecting ourselves to this cocaine addiction. But it's their whole lifestyle, it's everything, social media, video games, TVs, the whole culture is pushing us in direction that's making us miserable. It's destroying society. You think people don't want to have children, they don't want to have a family because it's boring. I'd much rather be going out to parties, I'd much rather be having fun or being successful, career, success, all the rest of it. And that's what we're going to try and do, is to help people to develop a way of strengthening receptors so that we can become more spiritual, more unselfish, more community minded, more helpful, and in the end a lot happier.

Right, so I've got so many questions just there. But so you, you mentioning a way to strengthen receptors. Is what is that a particular treatment or what does that look like for yourself?

Well, it's basically a treatment of some kind. It had to be medical, right? We're working on it. Just for example. Okay. I don't know if you know much about epigenetics. Do you understand how that works?

Give me a crash course.

Okay? Think about a genome as being a whole lot of little taps, because genes work. DNA works by spitting out a protein. That's fundamentally what it is, right? So you've got these massive numbers of taps spitting out proteins. Okay? Now what epigenetics does is based on experience, which can be in your life, particularly in your life, and also inherited from your parents. It has things that actually turn these taps on or off. Mostly they're things called methyl groups. And basically you stick a little methyl group and it stops. A genome might have 20 different taps, but you stick methyl groups on these places, one more of them, and that can happen very easily. If you have a junkie meal, for example, you'll actually change something. Epigenetically so what we know pretty much we're using a model from using rats mainly, which is to do with food restriction, which has the same kind of effect. So what we do is we study the epigenetics, we look at the effect of food restriction. That's fundamentally because you look at the whole epigenome. The modern technology is amazing. You can spot it there. Then what you do, for example, one of the things we're doing now is you get human brain cells and you put them into these little cups and they put these drugs in automatically and they test the epigenetics of what happens. So what you're doing is you're testing thousands of little drugs. Now we have an idea of which ones we're looking for the ones that seem to be affecting the right metabolic pathways and so forth. And then we look for the epigenic change we're interested in. Now if we can find substances, and there are hundreds of thousands of these, you can try. If you find a substance that has the right epigenetic effect, then you test it in rats or mice or something like that to see if it has the right behavioral effects. Because we know what it should do behaviorally, are there any side effects that are concerned? And then you go to human trials and so forth. That's basically a process, right? That's one way of doing it.

Yeah. Fascinating. So taking that way of doing it, if someone like, let's just use, because it's applicable to my generation, social media screens that side of things, because that's very much the way it's designed, is to get you hooked and addicted and keep you scrolling essentially like the Instagram feed. So if someone has this dampering of their dopamine receptors or the need to have more and more to try and get that that dopamine hit, and you're talking about a treatment that essentially enhances that how? What's to say that people won't get more addicted or more involved in bad habits or drugs or sex or whatever these negative habit forming things are, because.

They become less attractive. The thing is, if your dopamine receptors are very active, there's certain things that you will find very, very appealing that will give you a surge of dopamine, but actually will strengthen your dopamine receptors. One of them is exercise. Another is spending time with children. Another is spending time with your intimate partner. And I don't mean promiscuous sexual partners. That's the opposite effect. You're close, love, permanent partner, and things like going to church, for example, praying all These things would become a lot more attractive and interesting and they will actually strengthen your dopamine receptors. It's interesting. Even though you get dopamine, it actually, I'm not even quite sure we're still looking at how this actually works, but certain kinds of activities seem to strengthen the reactors as well as feeling great, but only works if your dopamine receptors are pretty active in the first place. Otherwise you find this kind of stuff boring. You say, why would I want to stay home and look after my kids? But I'd much rather be out there, you know, playing, playing a video game or, or going out, you know, drinking with friends or pursuing my career or whatever's more interesting, exciting, or going to a noisy party or, or having alcohol or taking a hit of cocaine. All these, they're interested and exciting. Whereas the things that are worthwhile doing, like praying, spending time with your family, working with people in the community, having close, intimate, close friendships. If your dopamine receptors are too weak, that's boring. But if they're not, if they're strong enough, they become really great. And it's a wonderful feeling. And you go through and you think, wow, I've had such an amazing week. I've been to church and it's been such an uplifting experience and I've spent time really deeply sharing with my wife or close friends or, or I've been helping other people and I just feel so good and so happy. Why would you want that other stuff? It's poor by comparison. I do not, I didn't. I don't have any taste for any of those things. I have a naturally. Because of my early life, I have a very naturally active dopamine receptors, clearly.

Yeah.

So I find I've never liked alcohol. I had a marijuana once with some friends and like, no, no effect at all. But I've never wanted alcohol. I've never want to smoke. I never wanted. I don't even like coffee, which is a dopamine booster. And I just don't enjoy that kind of stuff. Whereas I do love being outside in nature. I just love spending it and I love spending time with my kids. I just adored being with my kids, especially when they were little and now my grandchildren. I love spending time with my wife and I love going to church with her. And I love our life group that we have. These are all really joyful, happy experiences if your mind is set right in the first place. And in a sense what we're doing is trying to give you a spiritual boost. And that's what it would do, actually. If people did this, they would become much, much more spiritual because they'd find these kinds of really wonderful activities so rewarding. Not boring, but fascinating, interesting, enjoyable, pleasant in the extreme degree. And it kind of surprised me in a way. But I have a very. I'm an extraordinarily happy man. I don't think there's a happier man than the face of the earth, honestly. And I think when you've got this kind of lifestyle now, I'm very blessed. I've got the most wonderful wife you could possibly imagine. The two greatest days in my whole life when I became a Christian and when I met lee, which was 23 years ago. So I'm very, very blessed. But all the same, if you've got a life that's dedicated to purpose and meaning and community and faith, it's a very happy life. Why would you want anything different?

Yeah, exactly. And they say that worthwhile things take time as well. It's like you said, it's counter cultural in terms of it opposes instant gratification. And that mindset of I need it now.

Always got to look at what do I do now? What does God want me to do? What is best. And then you do that. Not what I feel like. I don't feel like getting up. Okay. I feel like stacking around. I feel like playing a computer game now. What do I need to do? Do what's the best thing. And even though immediately you don't want to do it, you know quite well, then in the not very distant future you'll be so pleased that's what you did. It's like this book I'm working on, which is very hard. It really is hard. I've been writing it for, you know, long time and it's really difficult to get to and I don't want to get to it. The only way I've actually got down to it in the end is my life. Hold me accountable.

Great.

I have to do some work every day and they ask me. And then as soon as I get down to it, then I get into it and it's easier and I have actually done great things, but it's hard.

Well, right there you sort of hit the nail on the head as well in terms of just that community aspect, why it's so important. Community can be very difficult, but they encourage you in good things and they keep you accountable to good things as well, which are difficult things. But the reward is beautiful as well. It's like, like you mentioned as well, if you doing exercise or Going for a run, often the experience of that's very difficult. But then you get what they call the. The run is high. I run. I've never got the run is high, but I totally get the, the feelings of like you feel your endorphins going and that, that kick of dopamine, but it didn't come from sitting on a, on a couch and looking at my phone.

I don't get the run as high either, Caleb. But I do know that if I have my exercise, I do every day weightlifting and half an hour on the treadmill or I play squash, one of the two. And I know that if I've done it, I'm going to feel better. It just isn't when I say what I want to do right now. Yes, I know. I'd rather sit down and do something stupid and irresponsible, which I do too much of anyway. I mean, goodness, I'm not. I wish any people have got a natural work ethic. We just work for the sake of it. I just can't beat. I don't. I'm a lazy Slavic heart. I have to push myself. Get going, Jim, you stupid so and so. Kick up the backside. This is not. What are you doing? Wasting your life. You're a pathetic weakling.

Brilliant. So would you say that the treatment, do you envision it coming alongside putting in practices or putting in frameworks and disciplines that contribute to a healthy lifestyle? Like you said, getting up and doing things is hard, but if you've got, if you're living within a framework, it sort of feeds into that positive feedback loop. Or would you say the treatments more to get you to that place and then sustain you in that place?

Oh, you have to sustain yourself. It's not natural for us to do these things. It just makes it easier, that's all. And the rewards are going to be clearer. You'll get a boost out of spending time with your children, which is like to make yourself do it if you don't necessarily want to. If that's a concern. I never had problem, actually. I loved my kids so much. Spending time with them was never an issue with me. But other things, other things. I definitely have to push myself and still do. It's a never ending struggle. I mean, I mean, life wasn't meant to be easy. We had a Prime minister back in the 1970s, Malcolm Fraser. He wasn't very popular with my generation in those days, but he said that life wasn't meant to be easy. And I always thought that was a great saying. It's not meant to be easy. Yeah, meant to be. It's meant to be tough, it's meant to be challenging, it's meant to be, it's meant to be meaningful, it's meant to be happy in the end. Yeah, but it's not meant to be easy.

Yeah, there's. I read a book by Jonathan Haidt called the Anxious Generation and. Oh yes, brilliant book, brilliant book. Absolutely brilliant. But there's a part in it where he talks about how like people are made. Like, so he talks about fragility, culture, then he talks about like anti fragility and then I can't think of the word now, it's gonna kill me. But I can describe what it is. But he basically says humans haven't been created as fragile and they haven't been created as anti fragile. And he uses the example of like a glass cup is fragile so if you drop it, it breaks. Plastic cup is anti fragile. If you drop it, it won't break, it keeps its form. But humans are in this like third category where they need resistance, they need to be shaped and formed and that's healthy. It's. It's good for, for them to, to go through this. I can't think of the word. It's frustrating me. It's going to come to me as soon as we finish this conversation, I guarantee you.

But it's to do with intermittent stress is making you resilient. It's something we're looking at in the restoration.

Resilient, yeah. And basically he describes that as humans we need to actually go through and push into things that are difficult because it does something good to us and if we can come through it, we're.

Bringing our children up in shocking ways. They're really so bad. We've got this excessive safetyism and also this pressure to achieve at every younger ages, especially professional people and total helicopter parenting control every minute of the kid's life. That does not create a great character, it makes people weak. Children actually need to go out there and play, need to bear free play and get bruised a bit and get into problems and work things out. The Israelis are much better at this than we are. And they've got a much better birth rate too. They're well above the only wealthy country which has got above, well above replacement level fertility. You need to get away from cosseting your children and protecting them from all harm and saying get out there and do stuff. Get that with the kids all the time. My son, my 15 year old, when he was younger, he was very scared of doing things and he wanted to go and see his sisters. So I said, you're going to have to go to public transport. I said, oh, no, Dad, I can't do that. I said, okay. So I drove him down to the station and they stood there while he worked the machine and then he went off and did it. Now he's, now he's done it. So we actually push them out. You've got to let them run free and not. They've got to have a sense of limits, of what you want for them. There's got to be the encouragement, there's got to be this, this is the way you behave, this is the way we do it in our family. There's got to be control. But you don't micromanage them, you want to develop values in them. You can't control it. You can't protect them from everything. We protect them from too much, they're too fragile.

Yeah, yeah, so, so true, Jim, I'm just aware of the time. I don't want to consume more of your time than I've promised, but I'd love to, honestly, I'd love to have another conversation with you just around the research that you're doing. I feel like we just sort of touched on it in the last 15, 20 minutes, but there's so much there to it that I'd love to. Yeah, just pick your brains on. And I think you provide a beautiful insight into looking at that research from a gospel perspective as well. So if that's something you're interested doing, I'd love to have another conversation with you sometime.

Great, happy to do it. I love talking about anything. If I can talk about faith, it's very attractive to me. It's not always what people want to hear about.

No, it's not always what people want to hear. Hear about. But that's essentially what I, I want to hear about. And what people listening and watching this are essentially trying to, Trying to grapple with, like their faith, how it integrates into their everyday life as well. And we've covered quite a, quite a lot of bases here.

There's a lot of good science behind Christianity. If you look at it, if you understand why the gospel asks us to do certain things, live in a certain way, if you go into understanding human psychology and the way we evolved, you understand why this is really good advice. It's like the way I regarded as this. If you had a problem with your washing machine, you wouldn't go out to the car and get the manual for your Toyota and bring it in and say, okay, now how to fix my washing machine, would you?

Brilliant.

What you would do is you've got an LG washing machine, you go and get the LG manual. Now, I wouldn't do that because I'm hopeless with machines. But just as an analogy, the point of it is when you want to fix something, you go to the whoever made it, you get the maker's manual. All right. Well, this is what, in a sense, the Bible is, isn't it? It's the maker's manual. It's the guide on how to live to make the human psyche to make us work properly.

Brilliant.

And that's how I view Christianity in the way. Now, I have to say it works pretty well for other faiths too. It's not. Not exclusive to us. Judaism works all fine, just different requirements.

Yeah.

But still make his manual.

Awesome. Well, I love that. And yeah, it's been absolutely fantastic chatting with you, Jim. Thanks so much for, for your thoughts and insights and your vulnerability as well. And I look forward to having another conversation with you again sometime soon.

Okay, thanks, guys.

Sa.