Tulip Talks with Jim Penman - Founder of Jim’s Mowing & The Jim’s Group 🎙️🌷

Hello, Paul Tulip here, I'm your host for today. This is Tulip Talks. Haven't done one of these for a while. Yeah, it's been a while, hasn't it? But it's been a good bit of a break between my last interviews that I was doing with CEOs within the retail landscape and a good opportunity to speak to somebody a little bit different. And I saw Jim out there on LinkedIn talking about how he has got a very open door policy and he's proud that he has his number given to every member of staff and he's always open to any communication from anyone. So I thought, okay, I'll test you there, Jim. And I sent him a message on LinkedIn and lo and behold, I got a very sharp response. I don't mean sharp as in brutal, I mean quick. And yeah, he said, yeah, let's do it, let's have a conversation. So that was great. So I, I went out and had a chat to Jim and the podcast, the recording that we did there will be coming up after my little intro here. And I know that you're all dying to know how it went, I know you are. Did a 72 hour fast. Anybody that knows me will know I love a fad. Stopped drinking three years ago and since then I think I've been searching just for, you know, new things and innovation around, you know, health and well being and I'll try anything once, you know. This 72 hour fast was put to me by a friend and said, do you fancy doing it? I was like, yep, why not? I'd been doing the 16:8 fasting since the turn of the year with quite a bit of success, really enjoying that. And actually in this podcast Jim talked about doing the same thing and it took everything I had to bite my lip and not rave about it because I hadn't been doing it that long and he's been doing it for a while, so it was interesting that he brought it up. But no, the 72 hour fast was fantastic. Only water. So my last feed was on Sunday night and then I started again on Wednesday night and it was great. First 12, 14 hours were fine because I was mostly asleep. And then getting up the next day, not too dissimilar to my normal fasting. And then, yeah, the Monday night the headache kicked in, probably a bit of caffeine withdrawal and lack of electrolytes, but pushed through. And by Tuesday and Wednesday I was feeling mint. Went to the gym a couple of times, did lots of walks, had loads of energy, all that clarity that mental clarity that people talk about with this. So I can highly recommend it. I'm no expert on it. I did run it past my GP first and foremost, and she sent me an email just going, oh, my God, here we go again. But yeah, go for it. You've been doing a bit of fasting so far, so you should be right. And yeah, it was brilliant, I loved it. So have a look online. I'm sure you can find your own research. But for me, worked really, really well and now I'm back to me normal. 16, 8. Anyway, there you go. A little bit of a health start on this podcast because Jim's massively into his health. He's a lot. He's a really interesting character. The more I dig on the Internet, the more I've seen what he's been up to. And yeah, he's not, not, not shy and he speaks his mind, which I like. And he's a very good, down to earth, honest guy that deserves everything that he's got. He doesn't like anything fancy. I think we touch on that in the podcast. He's very down to earth guy and got a great business. So if anybody out there is half thinking about contacting Jim, do it. You won't be disappointed. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Thanks for listening so far. And here we go. Jim, welcome to the podcast.

Good to be here.

I'm really excited to have this conversation with you today and I've come out and made the effort to come and see you and I'm so pleased. I have done. A lot of people these days, I think, hide behind zoom and if there's an opportunity to do things the easier way, they take it. But I'm pretty old school, I'm a good Yorkshireman from the UK and I like to do things face to face and I'm so pleased I've come out here today because I was not expecting what I've seen. Can you please explain to us what is going on here with this compound that you've built?

Well, it's 20 acres, it's got offices which are quite spread out, plus we've got a conference centre which we use for training and so forth. So, so beautiful bush environment, lot of native trees. I used to live next door, across the road. Not a keen commuter.

Unbelievable. So what was the vision when you bought this place and what was it before it's all these buildings now?

Well, it was Swinburne. It was Swinburne Murrabah Campus and they were out of it. They ran out of room they couldn't expand. So it sat vacant for a while. Council told us about. We moved in here and we just basically kept from the beginning because there was so many buildings that were. We couldn't use. But we've grown into it and expand and we built the conference center. It's a combination for 96 rooms.

Yeah, I saw it. Yeah, I thought I saw rooms on the way in. So that's for when your franchisees come down and learn the ropes.

It's also run as a commercial venture. We did all non profits and stuff like that, but basically built for a franchise so you could stay on site, be part of the group, get the culture.

Amazing. Right. Okay, so we have to go back to the start now. I need you to tell me how it all happened. Talk to me about your childhood. I want to start from the start. Tell me everything, Jim, I'm all ears. You're from England originally, I believe.

No way. It said on Google I was born in England. My mother was an Australian. Lived in Australia since the 1830s. My family has. I'm not a Pom. Sorry, I find that insulting.

I have got an Australian passport now.

Australian accent as well.

Well as Australian passport very much. Well, you need to change. You need to go and see Wikipedia because they're saying that you were born.

Well, I was. I was. I was born. I was born in. In Stourbridge. My family lived in Hale's Own, which is in Worcestershire, just for three years though after that I. My family saw since moved here.

And what was your childhood like growing up? What kind of school did you go to? Did you go to a normal school? Public school? Private school.

Private school. My father was an engineer.

Okay.

And so obviously paid.

All right.

But yeah, I don't know what you said about my childhood. My parents are pretty tough, especially my father. Wasn't a sweet natured man, you might say. So we had a few fights over time, a few arguments. But he's a good dad and we got on pretty well, especially later in life. Mum was great.

Any brothers or sisters?

Yeah, well, I had two sisters. Got one left now. Ones died. And smoker. And they got a brother. Yep. So just four.

Right. Okay. And what were you into when you were a kid? Were you into any sports? Anything at an early age where you.

No, that was the worst nerd you'd imagine. I just loved the dinosaurs. History. I used to make up huge games on the floor of my room, you know, with. With dice and ancient Greece and stuff. Crazy about Greek history. So.

Right.

Read a lot about biology and stuff too. I just. Very, very super nerd.

Yeah.

Totally introverted. Had almost no social with anybody. I was super nerd.

Right. So not many mates growing up?

I had a few friends at school, but not a lot.

Do you have any friends nowadays that are from back in the day or are you friends?

No, no, I don't. I'm in a different environment now through the work. I have friends through work and from my church, but yeah.

So you're a religious man or a Christian? Yeah. Okay.

I was actually a fairly doctrinaire agnostic. I used to go around arguing with Christians and telling them why they were wrong. At the age of 28, I had a sort of, you know, pull on the road to Damascus experience and switched sides, which I have ever since.

Right, okay. And do you put that out there in the, in the business world? Do you just keep that to yourself or do you look for that sort of quality in a person or that sort of background?

I look at people with ethics.

Yeah.

Which isn't always the same as being religious. Some religious people can be extremely unethical and a lot of non religious people are of course extremely good people. I look for qualities of character regardless of belief.

Yeah. So you touched on the biology thing there. I know that is a big passion of yours and that. Was that the reason that you got into the gyms business and that started, was it to fund something or a virus?

Yes. What happened is I was keen, even as an adolescent, I was keen to understand why civilizations rise and fall. The big question, why the Roman Empire collapsed. A lot of books about that kind of stuff. Went to university to try and work out what was going on. Did a undergraduate degree and then did a PhD on that subject. Come up with what I thought was a good explanation but it was all to do with biology, to do with physiology. So I come to the end of it. I'm at the age of say 30. I spent like 11 years at university developing this theory that needed to be tested in the biology, in terms of genes, in terms of those kinds of things, in terms of physiology. I had no experience and I had no money. In fact, I was deeply in debt. What I did have was a part time lawn mowing business which I'd done as a student.

Yeah.

In fact, apart from a very few years, I've actually had garden business. I was eight years old.

Yeah.

I've always done it. I've always loved being outside. Yeah. So when I got to the end of my PhD, I found myself with no prospect of an academic Career. That's what I always expected. I expected to be an academic, yeah, but there was no possible way that anybody would employ me. I was a PhD in history, but I wasn't a specialist in any period of history. There was just nothing. So I decided I had somehow to become rich enough to fund my own research institute. And the only thing I knew at that time was mowing lawn. Now, I didn't think mowing lawns would be it. I have to say that it was just the only thing I knew how to do. I had some crappy old equipment. I was $30,000 in debt. I started off pushing along by putting leaflets in letterboxes. That's how I started. And I built from there. And then I got. It was very big struggle in the beginning, but I started to do a bit better, put on some subbies. And then in 1987 or thereabouts, a company called VIP came to Melbourne and they were already established in Adelaide and they had 250 franchisees. And I thought these guys would crush me. I had this little business that was built on, based on having subcontractors building up and selling lawn mowing around. So a very small business, enough to get out of debt, buy my first house, but nothing much. I thought these guys would crush me. I actually approached them and said to them, I would just like to work with you and help you to build Vip. And they said no. So I thought I should try and compete with something. So I went to the Expo, which was 1988, in the old exhibition buildings in Exhibition street, took off the badge they gave you, wanted to know who I was, went up to the stand, said, please explain to me, are you interested in vip? Tell me. Luckily he didn't ask why, because I'm very bad at lying. I would have told him, but he didn't ask why, gave me all this information. And then the state manager came in and said, that's Jim Penman, don't tell him anything else. They chucked me off the stand. But I went away and I thought, wow, okay, this is a good idea. What they're doing makes sense. There's advantages for why you should buy a franchise, why you should be a franchisee. But I reckon I can make a deal that would work better for franchisees. So I went to a lawyer and tried to get a contract done. And I had enormous troubles with that because I wanted a vision. I had a vision of a system that would be very favorable to franchisees. And the lawyers kept on arguing with me. They said, you can't do this. Nobody does this stuff. And I said, I want something that I want to join. I had to get two lots of lawyers. It took me nine months to get a contract I was happy with. I took it to people I knew, some of my best subbies, the good ones, and people who bought lawn mowing rounds off me in the past that I used to keep in contact with, and I showed them the contract, said, what do you think? They said, what about this and this and this? And I changed things. So I got the best contract that I could possibly do and I launched. And that was in June 1999. Somebody asked me at that time, if it works out, how many franchisees might you expect to have one day? And I said, look, I don't know if it will, but if it really works well, one day I could have as many as 100 franchisees. I actually said that when I first started.

And how many you got now?

Just, well, 5250 on.

Wow.

It worked out a little better than I expected.

And how different is the contract today than it was back then? And how often do you address that?

Strangely enough, the lawyers actually said to me at the time, you will want to adjust this. You want to give yourself more power, because nobody does this. In franchising, I put in things like, for example, you could. You had an absolute right of refusal to any job in your territory, but you could work wherever you like, you could employ as many people as you like and not pay any extra fees. Fees are basically fixed in place. You could do extra services if you wanted to, you could offer extra things. You had an automatic right of renewal when you contract in, as long as you're compliant, which always happens, of course, we don't lose franchisees. So there's all this stuff in the contract that was very odd and not normal in the industry, but I wanted this stuff in now. With time. I actually put extra benefits in. For example, having experience, I started off doing it myself. Then I discovered I needed to have regional franchisors because they get better service locally. Most of them were good, some of them weren't so good. So I put some, just a few. So I put clauses in the contract in the new contract that said if you're not happy with your franchisor, you can move to a different franchisor. And there were several in the same cities that was quite possible. So if a franchisor doesn't look after franchisewell, you can go. And this does happen. It still happens now, usually because there's more Work or because they want to change house or something. But it happens quite a lot. We also put a clause in that gave franchisees the right to vote out their franchisor. So if a majority of franchisees in a region are not happy with the franchise, we send a confidential anonymous. They don't have to reveal how they vote into the franchisor. Do you want your franchisor to stay? If the franchisor loses the vote, he's got three months to win their support back. If he doesn't get it because we'll do another vote, then he has to sell and we remove him from management. The only contractor in the world that does that. And just recently, only a couple of years back, we gave our franchisees the right to veto any changes to their manual. By simple majority vote they can veto any changes and they have done to a couple of occasions. Not usually. We have to convince them. This is very, very unusual by franchising standards. As far as I know, there's no franchise system in the world that gives franchisees this kind of protection.

Do you think that's why you've been so successful? Because it's a no brainer for people wanting to take a franchisee franchise on?

It's a genuinely good system. It really is. Not only that, but I actually give every franchisee a training. They get my direct phone number and email address and I tell them again and again you contact me anytime about anything I had a franchisee bring up this morning just to chat to me. I've had a couple of franchises on emails. They can contact me about any issue, anything they want to the CEO of the company. That's part of the whole system. Yes, I do believe that's why it's been successful. But the other thing to bear in mind about this too is that we don't make as much money as you would think. We probably turn over in the nature of a billion dollars a year as a company, our actual profit is less than 1%. So it's a very generous system. It does a lot and there are people like franchisors who get supported and paid and obviously it goes into advertising and so forth, but it's not. I remember talking to a guy who was an area manager for Johnny King, which is an American commercial cleaning franchise and he was actually doing sales for a while, but he knew what they made and he, and he said, do you realize your hold of Jim Script at this particular stage makes less money than our WA office did because they take 15% off the top? So it's a much, much bigger chunk and it goes directly to them. So now we've grown a lot since then and we still are growing and look, we're profitable. I'm not poor, that's for sure, but I'm not nothing like as wealthy as you would think from you know, five and a half thousand franchisees.

And how much money and time have you spent on your research then going back to the original reason for the business? Do you still invest in that?

Oh yes, yes. I can't give you a figure for the past, but this year we'll probably spend about 4 million. We've got a whole lot of projects going at La Trobe University, mainly that we're looking at other options. Because of the sheer size of the project, we're doing some really exciting things. What we're doing is looking at the effects of food restriction on rats and possibly we'll look at mice too and looking at physiology effect on epigenetics, the methylation of the genome. Do you understand epigenetics?

No. Talk to me.

You can imagine a gene, a stretch of DNA as kind of like a series of taps and they spit out proteins. That's what it, that's what I did. And these proteins do everything, they're like messengers and they tell you make this compound, do this, turn that on. That's what they are. What the epigenetics does, it's an environmental influence either on you or your ancestors in some way that changes the activity of a gene. They're like turning off the tap or turning on the tap. That's how it works. So the key to very much including things like economic success, poverty, wealth, drug addiction, all kinds of problems is in epigenetics. If you can understand the epigenetics and you could change it in a way you could enormously improve human welfare. Apart from anything else, it should be an absolute mind blowing way of curing things like drug addiction because it helps people to look long term. So we're using animal models based on food restriction, trying to work out what causes it, what exactly it does and then do something to reverse engineer it so you produce treatments.

So when you say food restriction you mean like fasting and you mean like or taking out certain groups of food.

And well, in what we do with rats that is 25%.

Yeah.

So you have a rat that gets, would like to have that much food and we give them 25% less. So they're, they're healthy, in fact extremely healthy. They tend to live longer but they little bit hungry. So Sort of what I do too, I do, I practice 16 night fasting for example. I don't normally eat, I haven't eaten since last night. I'll have lunch at 1. So I don't normally eat for 16 hours a day and I do go a little bit hungry at times. It's that kind of thing.

Yeah.

Help promoting.

I'm massively into that. How long have you been doing it for.

A few years now.

How did you get onto that? Just heard about it or you discovered that yourself?

I read everything I can about health.

Yeah.

I'm an avid reader.

Yeah.

And basically it's got to do with autophagy. It's the idea that your cells kind of collect junk, mess up and if you don't eat for a certain period of time then it'll be able to clean out the mess in your cells. That's kind of the basic idea. It's also a little bit easier to keep your calories under control because you're not eating quite so well.

You do get hungry a bit. So have you ever done a, a bigger fast? Have you ever done this like three day fast, this water fast people are talking about? Or would you have any thoughts on that?

Look, whatever works for you. Yeah, there's different kinds. I know Rishi Sunak, the British pm. He does a, he starts every, every week with I think a 36 hour fast and the rest. So the rest of the week he can indulge himself on the sweet stuff he loves. Wow, that's pretty extreme.

That is extreme. Yeah. That's full on.

But I look, there's different ways of doing it. Some of them, some people do it so they, for two days a week they just have like 500 calories and yeah, they full. I just find 16, eight suits me.

Yeah.

And I do it that way. I don't eat breakfast because evenings, often a social meal, family, friends and so forth.

It's easy to skip that one.

It's easier to skip it.

And do you have anything, is it just water? Do you have a black coffee or anything?

Oh, I have, I have, I don't drink coffee. I have what I call wham. Hot water and milk.

Yeah.

Soy milk.

Yeah.

So you know, I don't fast water. It's nothing like as strict as the Muslim fast, the Ramadan fast. They don't have anything.

No.

In daylight hours, not even, not even water. I would find that extraordinary. I admire it but I couldn't do it.

How much water do you reckon you drink a day?

Quite a lot.

Yeah.

But I Drink when I'm thirsty. I would have a cup of Wham, which is hot water and milk, but soy milk. That much water. I probably have about eight or 10 of those a day.

Yeah.

Don't lack fluid.

What time do you get up in the morning?

Well, it kind of depends.

Typically on a work day or is everyday a work day for you?

Well, normally I take my son to school, so I have to get up by eight at the very latest.

Yeah.

Not usually much later than that. Sometimes I get up at 6 and just do work and stuff. Stuff. It just depends on what I got on. I'm not as regular as all that at the moment. I'm rewriting my basic research book. So I'm sort of getting up and doing that, which is fun.

So how much of your time is spent doing that stuff as opposed to in the business of gyms?

Not a lot, really. Basically, I meet up with the head of my research team every second Wednesday for lunch. So we spent a couple of hours talking about it and then I just. Various things, but, you know, probably only just a few hours a week. The great majority of gyms.

Yeah. So gyms. When we're just going back to the. It was lawn mowing originally. And then what was the second one that you added to that?

Cleaning.

Cleaning.

Cleaning, yeah. What actually happened was that we had this system that worked quite well for mowing. We probably had a few hundred franchises at that time. And I thought, okay, same basic contractual work for cleaning. But this logo of mine, it's a guy with a beard and a hat. That's a gardening image. I was a gardener and the reason I wore a hat was because Burmese, I got fairly fair skin. So you wear a hat and you can't be a big hat because you get knocked off going into branches. So that's why I was wearing a. And I used to have a beard. So that's me. And there was no great thought in the logo. It was just a graphic of me as I used to look like it when I was mowing. Lawrence and so we thought, okay, we want to do cleaning, but this is a gardening image. You wouldn't want a gardening image to a cleaning. So you need something more relevant to women. Say, for example, how could you have a woman cleaning with a guy with a beard in his hat? So we set up this thing called Sunlight S U N L I T with little sprays and stuff and sold a couple of franchises and tried to find work and we couldn't get work for them. Failed, gave them the money back Said, sorry, it's not working, but here's your money back. Somebody came to me later and said, what about Jim's Cleaning? I said, no, obviously not, because Jim's is a gardening image. This is a guy with a beard and a hat who mows lawns. And they said, we think it'll work for gyms cleaning. And I said, no, won't. And they said, yes, it won't. I said, no, it won't. They said, okay, what if we try it ourselves? We'll take responsibility. We just go in partnership with you. I said, all right, give it a go. Don't think it'll work, but we'll worth trying. Give it a try. It worked. They would go into a place and they say, we're from Jim's Cleaning and look at it and they say, oh, Jim's clean. I'm like, oh, all right. Okay. So it worked. Yeah, very surprising. And now we do Jim's Beauty, which is about as far away from me mowing lawns as you could possibly imagine.

So what does that involve? Is that like nails and makeup?

That kind of stuff too? I mean, the sort of thing that I would never go within a thousand miles on, but still.

How many different businesses have you got now in the gyms?

A bit over 40, I think.

What's. And how many come to you each year with an idea like, where'd you get your ideas from? Does anyone ever come up, I want to do this as a gyms. And you go, nah, I'm not doing that. Oh, yes.

Quite often we often get asked about retail type franchises. We won't do that. We don't understand that kind of stuff. We tried health clubs once, it was a disaster. Just didn't understand the people. People lost a lot of money. That's very sad. Look, people come all the time with ideas. I would probably at least once a fortnight have somebody come up with some kind of proposal for a new division. Most of them don't go anywhere. Two things. First of all, you've got to have a business that would fit our model, which means you've got to have scale, because we don't get a lot of money per franchisee. The actual franchisee is quite minor. He might make about 3, 300 bucks a month, something like that. Clear out of, you know, which is less than 10% of what they typically make. So you've got to have it scales. You've got to be able to have good numbers. You've got to be ahead of an income of at least 60 bucks per hour from an average operator, not the top ones. The average operator should be able to make $60 per hour if we can't see those two. And it's got to be a service industry where basically you provide a service to somebody. They say, I want this done. Will you go and do it in some way? So there's your basic criteria. Now, apart from that, the real problem is finding the right person to drive it. Because everything depends on the leader. You have a great leader, things will go bringing in. Like for example, dog wash. Now, we started dogwash a long time ago and it really, really did badly. We had, we had. We grew to about 60 at one stage, franchisees. And we were at leader right the beginning and then we just lost the plot. Bad leadership. We had a guy who was wonderful human being. He was, you know, Priscilla Queen of the desert, that kind of thing. He used to dress like that. He used to come to national conferences with his color. So he's a really, really lovely guy. Terrible leader. He ended up, I know you told me one franchise, he owed him $30,000. And I said, you've got to terminate him. He said, but Jim, if I terminate him, he'll never pay me. And I said, what do you think he's going to pay you? $30,000 of fees. Lovely guy, Hopeless leader. Dropped down. We had about 30 franchisees left at that stage. He just hadn't anywhere. And competitors shrieked past us, took it back, basically bought it back off him, built it up to about 60. Then a lady called Sharon Cottle was there. Now Sharon was a cleaning franchisee who became a franchisor in cleaning. Really great person. Great, great leader. Great, lovely person. Just really nice, engaging. She was fantastically good at selling. And I went to her and I said, sharon, I'm going to give you the dog wash division. Basically on this deal. There was finances involved. You just run it and make it work. So she took that on and it's now got like 200. See, it's the leadership.

Yeah.

And then another guy, Bill Coburnoglou. Now Bill's originally a franchisee in Clooney, became a franchisor. Very successful, Good at that. Just under three years ago, he came to me with the idea of Jim's Laundry. Now, he didn't know laundry, but I. But I know Bill. Bill's a great guy. So he launched Jim's Laundry. Currently less than 3. He's got 120 franchisees. Brilliant development, vision, brilliant leader.

So Jim's Laundry, is that a pickup service and drop off?

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

But some of them, some of them actually do have laundry. Some of the fractals that are actually laundromats themselves, but they. But they feed. They basically act their laundry as a feeder. Yeah. So something you actually, sometimes you may see Jim's laundry there.

Yeah, I get you. So what's the largest of the. Of the divisions at the moment? What has the most franchisees?

Still mowing.

Still mowing.

It's got 2200, so it's a bit under half. Cleaning's catching up quite fast, though.

Yeah.

If you put all the clean divisions together, which is general cleaning, window, carpet, car, it's probably got about. It's got more than half and it's growing fast. Very, very successful.

So if I engage Jim's Mowing to come and do a job for me, and I say they charge me 100 bucks for whatever I got off them, what you're saying is that you as a business would get less than 10 bucks of that?

No, not even close. The fees would average about 6% of turnover. But it doesn't work that way. What we do is we charge a base fee, which is typically something about 700 bucks a month, including advertising, call center, everything. Okay, okay. And on top of that, we put up what's called a lead fee, which is a small fee for every lead provider. So franchisees who don't take leads, which is most of them, after a while, pay just the base. Those who have big businesses put a lot of workers on, take a lot of leads, they pay a lot more. So the average fees would be around about 6%.

Yeah. Right. That's good then. So that's. You're essentially giving them all them leads if they need them. But after a while that you're saying they've got their word of mouth.

Yeah. Just get it. Well, they can do if they wish to, which especially regular clients is. They can do what's called a split.

Yeah.

So, for example, let's say they've got 65 clients, most of the cost to go to work, or someone like that. So they've got 65 clients in established business, give it away, then they're going to pocket, say, $20,000, which pays their fees for the next three years.

Yeah, nice.

And then they go back to them, then they start asking for work and they build it up again, and then they split again. We've had people do three splits in a year, so it's very lucrative.

How did you go through Covid? Talk to me about that? What was the impact of the business?

Well, the lockdown was awful. It was traumatic in the extreme because I'm not sitting in some office in Spring Street, I'm talking to my guys every day. And the hurt that they felt and the uncertainty and government money was something. But there were some franchisees who were like students, had no government money at all. We had one young lady, lovely girl, who was in Dog Wash and she was being threatened with eviction. She had no income. She was forbidden by law to work. She had no income at all. We actually said to her, if you get evicted, you can come and stay here at the conference center. But there was franchisees who were out of work too, mind you, who were giving her menu log vouchers and stuff so she could afford to eat. So it was very hard and it was very upsetting. And I know two franchisees who personally know who lost their marriages, their homes, their family, because direct result of the lockdown. It was awful. We had a young kid here who was working in IT during a lockdown. He committed suicide. That was clearly what pushed him over the edge. So it was a really traumatic experience. And I was hearing this all the time. I got very upset, very angry. It was so unnecessary. It was so clear that there was no health reason why our franchisees cannot work by themselves mowing lawns, especially since you had council workers doing the same job in groups. It was just ludicrous. It was no health advice and it's been proven. We took the state government to court to say, what was your health reasons for shutting us down? They said, we don't have to tell you. And the court basically said, that's all right, you don't have to tell them. That's what it is. So it's clear there was no health reason at all for the misery. Over 100,000 Victorians out of work.

Shocking.

But as. As a business, as myself, maybe it cost me 100 grand, I don't know. But it's trivial because my potential position is so much different, so much better.

Yeah. What were your thoughts? You don't have to answer this if you don't want to, but is Covid in general, as that sort of whole, the disease itself? Because obviously you've got a lot of knowledge on things like that. What do you think about the vaccinations and all of those things?

And I always support them strongly. I was always in favour of sensible things. Like I didn't like not being able to go to church for a couple of years. That was hard. Didn't like knocking out in restaurants. That was also something I Liked doing so, you know, but I accepted that it was reasonable, you know, sporting grounds, those kind of things. Yes, let's avoid the direct spreaders, let's be sensible. We supported vaccination very actively. We had this program, Jim's Jabs. You could actually get tickets and like coats and T shirts with Jim's Jabs on them. So we really, we really got a lot of flak from the anti vaxxers. They didn't like me much. But we really pushed public health and I believe in public health and I think in a lot of ways Australia did very well. I think shutting the gates. If Daniel Andrew hadn't stuffed the quarantine, we'd have been a lot better off. But shutting the door to. We did pretty well during COVID and then we rolled out the vaccine, that was well done. So I think overall most of the country actually acted in a very sensible fashion. The kind of lockdowns they had in places like Sydney, New South Wales and West Australia, all very sensible, very well calculated, just Victoria stuffed it and had the worst, worst rate of death from COVID of any state or territory in the country. Proportionally speaking, we had more people die and we had the worst lockdown.

It's crazy, isn't it?

It really infuriates me and it still does because the fact of the matter is it was purely politics. There was never any health reasons for what he did. Never. He just thought, what do I care about this rubbish? You know what he said in that interview? He said, you can't get your lawn smoked or your houses clean. Now who is he speaking to? Affluent, in a suburban greeny. Professionals, academics, politicians, civil servants, the elitist. That's his people. The hundred thousand plus Victorians who do that kind of work. I'll stuff them. I hope. I care about them. They're just human garbage. That's the way he thought. And if I can get a political advantage by throwing 100,000 plus people out of work, hey, what am I here for?

Yeah, it was shocking.

I'm still upset now. The reason that I push it still, I might say it's not because of the past, it's because there will be another pandemic one day. It's absolutely certain in my view. Next time let's look at public health first, politics second.

Yeah, I agree. Excellent, thanks for sharing that, that's good insight. So now everyone's back, is business better than it was pre Covid?

Yes, well, yes, I must say, before COVID we had 3,3800 franchisees. We've grown all through Covid, and we've grown since COVID Not even exactly sure why. The problem with our business is not actual clients. We have over 200,000 unserviced leads last year. It's franchisees. So we struggle to find enough franchisees to cope with the enormous demand that we have.

And where do you go looking for them typically?

How do you.

What's your PR campaign for recruitment?

Well, basically, it's a lot of just things like seek, like social media, like all kinds of things. We just advertise all over the place. Obviously this kind of stuff is helpful too.

Yeah, absolutely.

So we do a lot of. Lot of social media, which is actually very effective. In fact, I would say the major reason that we've grown so much in recent years has probably got to do with social media. We've always. Because you get this idea, people think we take 40% of their income. They don't understand how little it is actually. Now, if you actually. One of the things any sensible person will do if they're investigating a franchise, they'll go and get a list of the franchisees in the area, which is the one good thing about the franchising code, and they will ring them. And if they ring them and ask them, they'll see that these ideas are ridiculous. But people don't know that. So social media is a way of getting the word out. People are quite surprised, too. Things like the fact that I give my phone number or email address, people don't. This is a business with thousands of people involved. People don't understand that. They think it's weird, but the point of it is, once you get that kind of stuff known and they know that I really care about my people, which I do. No, it's obvious you do, because they can contact anytime. We're not talking about business hours, evenings, weekends, I practically, on Christmas Day, I answer the phone. They're my people, they're my tribe. So the hardest thing is actually to convince them that they can contact me, because sometimes they don't. I make a point during training of actually trying to greet every single person and talk to them personally, at least at some level. I walk, wander around the lunch room and chat to them. So that from my experience, if you do that, if they have a problem, they'll get in contact with me. And it's actually, it's strange and I don't know why more CEOs don't do it, but I find that's one of the best things I ever did to improve the business. Because first of all people know they can contact me if they've got a problem and I can fix it. And I do that again and again. There's so many things. There's some guidelines. It doesn't make any sense. Why are we doing this? Why? Why does it happen? What's this process in place for? How is it working in this case? So I can come to it, Just to give you an example. Okay. This is just something that come up quite recently. You have a system where a franchisee is ready to sign and then they need to change the entity because legally speaking, they need to, under a company or something like that, they're ready to start. Sorry, they're ready to sign and to start working now, by law. And I don't object to this. Every time you give them a new contract, you've got to wait two weeks. So here's somebody who's quit their jobs has to wait two weeks to be able to get an income. And that's a big thing for a family because these people aren't usually rich. So came to me and I said, okay, they clearly want to join. Let's put them on the system. They can hold the contract for two weeks, which means that they can decide not to decide if they wish to. We put them on the system, we start giving them leads, we treat them exactly like they're a franchisee, and then in two weeks, they sign the contract if they want to. And the worst that happens is we give them a few free leads. It hardly matters, does it? But somebody's working two weeks. So this is a system where the law and the system would say, you've got to wait two weeks. And I say, stop it. I want them to start working now because in two weeks time they're probably going to earn, you know, $3,000. That's a lot of difference.

Yeah.

So what you actually do too, is you change the system. So there's not a day go by I don't think, how can I change? How can I do it better? And the strongest vision, the strongest principle behind Gyms is what's the head of the email I sent you? When some little email. Our first pro is the welfare of franchisees. We're also passionate about customer service. We sign the new franchisees and franchisors we're convinced will succeed. That is our credo, that is our DNA, that's our belief system. So every day I'm saying, how can we make that work better? What can we do to help our franchisees? What more benefits can we give them what more attraction? It's not altruism only of course, because if my franchises have a fantastic time, they're going to want to stay. One of the things I do, I was doing it last night is I ring my veterans. I was ringing one guy who was 30 years. 30 years. He was the second longest serving franchisee. Wonderful guy. I'm arranging Joel to interview with him so he hit his stories. They often asked what they were doing beforehand. And then you learn, what are we doing? How can we work for people? What else can we do? We've got a program now actually we call busy because we've got so much unserviced leads. We're actually selling the leads to independence and we get money now at the moment, this year will probably make about a million bucks. But I've made a promise, I've said that we are not going to keep this money. This is money paid for by franchisee advertising. It belongs to them. So after we pay the cost, this probably million dollars, the next year has got to be spent on franchisee welfare. So we're now thinking, what on earth can we do to spend a million bucks to make franchisees happy? So we're planning things like possibly buying a resort and letting them stay there for free or giving them a flat screen TV for 100 bucks or this kind of stuff, working out the best deals possible. It's all exciting stuff we've just been talking about in the past few days.

So your motivation personally has never been money, really. I mean I know it was a catalyst to do your, your research, but you're not there, you know, sat counting it every night.

You keep an eye on the bottom line. You've got to, yeah, you can be as altruistic as you like, but if you go bust, you won't do anything. We're financial, we've actually just paid off most of our debt so we're very solid financial company. But, but money is never the top thing and you make decisions all the time. All the time. When where you make less money, if it's the right thing to do, then you do it.

What do you spend your personal money on?

I try and live simply. I believe that money is a gift from God, that it's to be used for some benefit. I would feel very bad to live the millionaire lifestyle. I bought my first new car ever just over a year ago because I wanted an electric car. I've never ever in my whole life bought a, bought a new car before that because I want to. I think electric's good because I think it's good for the environment. And we power off the solar panels and stuff, so there's no oil. There's no coal burning and there's no oil. So I like that. So I did buy a new car, but otherwise my previous car was worth 20 grand. Gave to one of my sons. We just had a baby. I dress simply, basically. My clothes are from Kmart. My wife buys me shirts because she doesn't want me to look too scruffy sometimes. I accept that.

And you've had a few wives, I believe. Yes.

Unfortunately, I'm not the easiest person to live with, that's for sure.

So you're on fourth and final at the moment.

Fourth, definitely final. 23 years. Very happy honeymoon. I mean. I mean, we fight all the time. We're both stormy characters. But she is gorgeous. I love her dearly. Lee is wonderful.

Oh, that's nice. And how many children have you got with her?

Got four with her. That's Lee.

Oh, beautiful.

She's gorgeous, isn't she? You wouldn't think she's. You think she's 30. She's not. She's a bit older than that.

Good on you.

I got four kids. One that she brought, but she's my daughter. And three that we've had ourselves. And I've got seven others. Yeah.

Seven others. Do you still keep in touch with all your. All your kids?

Most of them, yeah. Yeah. There's one or two I'm constantly out of contact with, but most of you, yeah. Wow.

And how would you like to be remembered? I mean, I'm not trying to sign.

You off here, but, you know, well, research is my. Is my central goal. If I remembered in the future, if I'm successful in what we do with this research project, I'll be pretty well remembered. It'll be a scientific breakthrough of the first order because I believe I understand what's happening in society, why things change, all kinds of things. But, I mean, Jim's is a legacy, too.

Absolutely.

I have a sense of mission. I think I'm a great believer in mission. I don't think that. I've done a lot of research on the science of happiness, and people have this idea, if I have more money, I can buy a better car, a bigger house and stuff, and I've lived in the same house for 20 years. And you'll be happy. But actually, it's not. Theodore Rosemont actually said, very well. He said, social comparison is a thief of joy. If you spend your money trying to look better than somebody else, that's a pathetic way to live and it doesn't actually work very well. If you're going to spend money, there's better ways than buying stuff. It's experiences like spending time with family, going out to dinners kind of thing. Quite a lot. Mostly not spending a lot, but just going out. But the number one best thing that you can do with money to achieve happiness is give it away to a cause that you're personally involved in. And that's not me. This is research that's been done on what creates happiness and that's it. And that's basically what I do. The vast majority of my income I actually give away to something that I believe in passionately and I believe in gymnasium greatly. I feel a sense of purpose. I write to my franchises. After one month it's an automatic and they mostly respond now if there's any problems I can jump on it straight away because that's something that's very helpful. Most of that sound doing well. This is great. Love the change. That's an enormous boost to me. That's a surge. Or when I talk to my 10 year, my 20 and my 30 year veterans, when I ring them up and they tell me how much their lives have changed and how they've seen their kids growing up, you really can't put a price on that, can you?

Absolutely not. Tell you why Jim's is such a. It means a lot to me and I'm not just saying this. So I moved to Australia into Melbourne probably 15 years ago and arriving in Melbourne, knowing nobody, never been here before, arrived here and that was it. And when you don't have that little black book of a network of where to go to for certain things. I remember needing a service and somebody recommending, oh, just search gyms, you know, gardening. It was, you know, whatever it was. And I just remember thinking that gave me that sort of, that reassurance that that was not just any Tom, Dick and Harry. That was an actual person that's been through a process that they were, they belonged to a family. So then that gave me that sort of brand assurity that obviously anything that had gyms on it was going to be good.

But you, and, but you are dealing with an individual, you're dealing with a person, somebody who is your direct service provider but with the assurance of the system behind it. The biggest struggle I have with my franchisee is always about. It's about customer service. I push customer service very, very hard. I personally deal with any complaint that isn't settled by the franchisor promptly if the client rings back twice, I will get involved. I personally read through every poor survey. We have hundreds of thousands of it. Every single poor survey. I look at it, I market, I'm involved. I'm the only person that can delete complaints. We have a process deleting. So I'm really involved. Take a very tough line on customer service. Franchisees quite often don't like that degree of pressure. So there is a sense. And sometimes they'll say to me, jim, you're a hypocrite. You say, you put us first, franchise first, which I do. So therefore, you shouldn't be pushing me on this. You should be understanding. I'm upset about his complaints and you should back off. You should ease down. Because I'm a franchisee and that's what I want. And I say, yes, I could do that. The problem with that, if I do that, if we drop the standards of customer service, we're going to have less work for our franchisees. We're going to have less income for our franchisees. You can't charge the same hourly rate as you can now. Right now we charge more than the competition. I tell them to work out the opposition, charge 10% more. The reason I can do it is because our customer service is great. So, yes, I will continue to push you even if you don't like it. Even in some cases, we'll terminate somebody because continue complaints will do everything possible. We'll retrain them, coach them. In the end, if they don't look after customers, they can't stay with us. They can go independent. They can't stay with gyms. That causes tension at times.

Do you ever have anyone that comes to you and says, I want to take on a Jim's franchise, but I actually have never done the actual trade before. So could somebody come to you and say, I'd like a Jim's mowing round. But I've never mown, I've never mowed a lawn, so that's normal. So you don't have these people that are really passionate about something and go, I just need a bit.

There are very few divisions that require prior experience. Building inspections is one hard to think things like scratch and dent. Yes, it bookkeeping. There are some divisions that you handyman, you need background in it. But everything else we just teach from scratch. Look, the hardest thing about running a service business is not the actual technical side of it. People don't fail because they don't know how to prune a rose bush or they don't know how to clean A carpet. We can show them how to do that. They fail because their business is. Is poor, because they don't follow up. They don't. They don't return phone calls, they don't turn up and they say they do. Yeah, they don't. They don't do a proper job. It's not that how they just don't do it. They don't have an eye for quality. They leave blades of grass instead of cutting them at the edge.

This kind of stuff. What's your thoughts on technology? You big on the technology?

Oh, yes.

You're into the AI or anything like that? You're looking at how that can help your business?

Well, not this present stage because AI is huge. We spend. We probably spend $5 million a year this year just on software development alone. So we invest massively in that. Basically. A lot of our customer service is driven by technology because we do things like automated surveys and so forth, monitoring complaints. There's a whole lot of processes involved making sure franchisees. We have a system where franchisee puts down for what work they want, where they want it. So we might have like 50 franchisees covering a certain suburb, but today only two of them need leads. They get the leads. So all that's technology. What we do will be not possible without technology. The thing of it is, the problem is getting the things we can envisage being done which just requires normal programming. It's such a big process. There's so much potential in that area that AI is really something we don't even have to consider this to. Unless it could help us to do programming faster, which there are some indications that you can.

So what would you say to anybody out there that's listening that would like to explore an opportunity with gyms? How would they. Is that your lunch alarm? I think we got about five minutes. We all right? Yeah. If somebody wanted to get involved with the gyms franchise, what's the step? How do they do it?

I go to double www.jims.net. just follow the prompts there. Or you can win the number 131546 or go online. One thing I would say about it is this. Do your research, do your homework. Now, Jim's Franchise Awards on the whole are pretty good. They are because we watch them and we surveyed the franchisees, we know that, but they're not always good. Some people you might get on with. So it's very important that you. You get to know the franchisor. Usually the person you talk to is the one who'll be looking after you, that you like them, you get on with them. It's also very important you do your homework. Get hold of a list of all the franchisees in the region, which you must get by law, contact them. It's also vital that you go out on the road and you work a few days in the business to get a feel for it. They're also going to have a look at you and they're going to see whether you're good enough. You can get knocked out in these things. So spend some time doing some research and I would say quite genuinely go and talk to any opposition out there, talk to anybody else, any other service. Now, I'm very confident if you do that, if you actually do the research, you'll choose us, because there's no company around that does the same sort of things we do. But you still should do your research. And in fact, it's actually one of the best signs of a good franchisee. The more homework somebody's done. Have they checked out the competition? Have they rung people? Have they been out on the road? Have they done their proper due diligence? If they've done that, they're probably pretty good. Yeah. And they're likely to succeed.

Well, it's a great opportunity for anybody who wants to be a part of such an amazing group and obviously you're super passionate about it. It's been fantastic to talk to you. Is there anything else that you want to say before we sign off? You're going for a team lunch now. We first food of the day.

Yes.

What will it be? Have you got a canteen here? I imagine. How many people work here?

About 100.

Yeah. Right. So what do you do for lunch? Where's lunch?

Just up there. You can see the winding up. No great hurry. There's always a queue at lunchtime. It's fun, actually. We do a sort of a mixing activity and we try and get staff to talk to each other across divisional boundaries. Look, the only thing I would like to say that I haven't mentioned so far is that the value of health, I'm a very strong unhealth. I would have at least half hour of really vigorous exercise every day. My weight is under control. I've got a BMI of 22, which I stay to. I think physical health, looking after your body is really, really important. And if I had any advice to anybody is stay fit. Now, somebody who's a lawnmower contractor, to a certain extent, cleaners, can actually do that by nature.

Yeah.

Actually, staying fit, working outside contact with green Actually, it's a well known recipe for happiness. But I'll say anybody, if you want to have a great business, your mind to be sharp, your body's got to be in good order.

Yeah.

So diet, exercise and then good social relations and stuff. I don't believe in just living for work. I think that's. Nobody should be asked to do that.

No.

Look after yourself.

No, I like that. Great, great advice. Listen, I really appreciate your time. It's been an amazing experience. And next time I see a Jim's logo, which I'm sure will be soon, I'll think of you. All right. Cheers.

You're welcome.

Take care. Well, there you go. I hope you enjoyed it. I certainly did. It was great to speak to Jim. Such a different character and a dying breed, I reckon. Not many people have that sort of story these days. I just think he's got a great tale to tell and he tells it well. There's lots of different angles, there's lots of dimensions to him. 11 kids should have started gym sewing, shouldn't he? Anyway, there you go. Please let me know what your thoughts are like and share with your network. If you think there's anybody out there that would benefit from listening to this podcast, then please share it on your social media or, you know, privately, whatever you want to do. If you're sat there thinking, how can Paul Tulip help me create a podcast to attract people to come and want to work for my business, then give me a call. 0429-581-200. That's my tulip talks business. You can look@tuliptalks.com you can also look at my executive search business. I do a lot of work in that recruitment space, have done for 20 years. Please look up my website, yorkshirebridge.com au or send me an email, paulorkshirebridge.com Be lovely to hear from you out there. Even just with some feedback, what you thought of the podcast would always be good. Like I said, if you've got anybody out there that you think would be a great guest. Did I say that? I don't even know if I mentioned it. Well, there you go. It's an exclusive. If there's anyone that you're sat now thinking, I'd love to hear their story told and I think Paul Chulip would bring it out of them in such an amazing way, then please let me know. Always looking for new guests. I think Jim's gonna take some beating, though. What a legend. Loved it. All right, well, thanks for listening. I appreciate all of you doing so and I look forward to putting out another episode soon. I'm going to gather quite a bit momentum now with these podcasts and if this is the first time you ever listen to me, do yourself a favor and look at Tulip talks on Spotify or Google podcasts or Apple podcasts. There's a whole back catalog there. There's my CEO series that I did last year and there's also my podcast that I did during lockdown when you know it's probably going a little bit crazy, but that's how it started this whole journey of how, how do I combine loving talking and no one answering back. And the podcast was perfect. And you know, there wasn't enough middle aged men out there putting podcasts out during COVID was there? So here you go. Anyway, lovely to see you all and actually not see you all. Lovely. And I mean I might see you all again. Lovely to hear from you all even though you've said nothing. Anyway, I'm off. See ya. Bye.