touring the LARGEST Lawn Care company in the country

Thank you.

Just in case I need to know.

This book is that Ozzy Slang dictionary.

Oh yes. Well, that'll start you, start you on your life path of learning how to speak English properly.

By the end of this tour I'm just gonna have this like stack of.

Books to go home.

Today is day three of training and today I'm actually gonna get Jim, the founder of Jim's Mowing, to give me a tour of the whole facility and their headquarters. So looking forward to it.

They said this was like 21 acres, this whole place.

20 ac acres.

20 acres.

Nice.

How is the impact of the interest rates going up? Is that substantial in real estate yet or not? Really a whole lot.

Yeah, it's starting to have an impact. Some of the prices are going down. I think it will, I think it'll crash the industry a bit.

Yeah.

This is the nerve center over here. That's the call centre.

Cool.

We actually have, you can see there, this tells you the average wait time, which is 10, 10 seconds, which is the limit. 92% on target, 3% abandoned calls. These are very important statistics because this is the lifeblood. That's the time.

Yep, average wait time.

You cannot wait. And it's very difficult because our system needs to be trained. It takes person 6 months to learn how to answer calls properly in our call center.

Yeah. How do you deal with training? Because I know we're the same thing. You train people so long. But then even the past couple years, the churn is so much. How do you deal with that?

You just keep on training them. Yeah, it's just constant process. You're constantly hiring, constantly training. We're trying to actually reward them more. That's a large part of the thing. Like for example, we've got a. We had a trivia night last night. We said, anybody from the staff want to come in, join the trivia night, have dinner on us tonight? We've got a games night going. Same thing. We'll come and play games and you know, cheat and you know, card games and Jim's Monopoly. We're going to be playing out and chess. We give them lunches once a week and we just gave them a pay rise. And we also give them a way to go because a lot of the ladies in here actually, including Steph, actually started off in the call centre and they actually went to the call centre, became leaders and managers and then we bribed them to come across here. There's a real career path so you can actually rise from working in a call centre into management in Jim's group. So that's a big plus for us. But you've got to look after your staff. You've got to make sure it's a great environment to them and treat them well. And I wander around and say hello to people and so forth and just.

I wanted to ask about the software. I know you talked about how much you spend on the software and trying to make it better and everything that's been our big struggle too is just the software side trying to build what we need. But the cost of it is.

Well we're spending something like $5 million a year on software development alone. And that's not including sort of support and networking and stuff. It's a big, big project. But it does actually create a competitive advantage because no competitor can come anywhere close to what we do. They just can't possibly compete with how we do it. The bigger we get, the more we can afford to spend on it and the bigger the advantage we are to book jobs directly into their diaries. We'll be able to buy and sell regular clients. We'll be able to have a reminders of jobs not done. Letting clients know what's happening. A dedicated client habit. They can actually check what's going on. They can ring, they can get a service just by pressing a button. There's just so much we can do. We haven't even put our small toe in the water with what it will do over the next few years.

What are all changes that they're having to make to kind of change from just taking the leads to actually booking the jobs now?

Yes, that's why they do it.

So is it mostly just the training side or the technology side that really you're working on for that?

Well this is the training, the staff to take the calls. The technology is different.

Got it.

We're constantly upgrading the systems and trying to make them better in terms of it as Joel says, a long way to go. But this is the nerve center. This is where the leads come in. It's open basically about 7am till about 9pm okay. But we're looking at going to a 24 hour model soon.

Going. It's still all housed here.

The after hours stuff would have to come some of the Philippines. It's too expensive here.

Right, right, right.

So we answer calls preferentially locally because people local accents, people understand you. People prefer local people. But yeah a lot of the back office work's now done in the Philippines.

Yeah. That's awesome.

How's it going? Good to go.

Ya.

Originally Jim's was A one room officer and I had people answering the calls. But I pick up the phone myself quite often, which I haven't done for a while now because it's a really industrial process. But yeah, it's good to do things yourself I find, because it helps you understand the struggles people go through. So as far as possible, I keep in touch with all my franchisees, as you know, got my phone number and email address and I will probably have contact with at least dozen 50 franchisees a day in one way or another, often about complaints or queries or just questions. They will contact me and they know they can.

Everyone talked about 50, 60% of small businesses failing. But what they forget to realize is that that includes basically any entity under 50 employees. That includes a Taco Bell and a McDonald's or whatever.

The failure rate of cleaning and gardening business worldwide from the best stats on the scene from the States and everywhere else is about 90 to 95% in the first year. Because obviously if you buy a shop you're a lot more committed, but if you go into your own cleaning business or something, it's very easy to fail.

Most of them fail and they're deeper pockets. If they have a million dollars to spend on their build out, they're probably.

They'll keep going for a while. It's a. So our first year attrition rate is around 12% which is much too high. But it's a heck of a lot better than 90% or 95%.

You said at the beginning before you did the training it was 75.

17% or 17. 17. Not 17.

I'm still learning the accent.

Come on now, 17.

Look, don't worry. If you spend enough time in Australia, you'll learn to speak properly as well.

Hey, my mom's from Australia. Western Australia.

Really?

She is.

Didn't catch.

Oh no, I haven't picked up any of it.

Yeah, for your joke I was gonna say last time I could help you.

I cannot do a.

Well then you can't get me for a. No Aussie accent. Come on now.

But I speak properly already, Mike. I need to learn how.

You've got to stoop down to our level.

I can do certain accent. I'll do a German accent. They have ways of making you talk. I can do. I can speak like an Irish accent.

Irish accent, Yeah, I can do that one.

If I could learn to speak like a Texan, I would.

The TikTok views would go from 100,000 to 200,000 just like that.

That's the next career move, is Comedian.

I think. I think I'll stick to my day job franchising.

Epigenetics.

Comedian.

That looks good in a bio.

I do probably at least a podcast once a week. I just talk to anybody or anything, including kids and teenagers and everybody. And they just record it and they can use it. It's all good. For social media, that's such a big thing these days. It's been really impressive. I do think the reason we've grown so much post Covid has been because of the social media has been so good. Most franchisees have actually. Most prospects have actually seen.

Well, yesterday they asked who here watched YouTube videos before coming? Every single person raised their hand.

They do.

We want this. We want to get everyone together. This is the goal. Right. Because right now we have five different offices all across the county. So we're trying to build something not this nice or this big, but something that we can bring everyone together. It's just nice to have that camaraderie and not be traveling between. I'm just like Jim, I hate traveling commuting. So driving between offices is annoying. The three, like the call center, another office and a training facility. Just trying to bring out one house that everyone can be together and have that team.

It's good. It's a great feeling, actually. If you've seen what's happened, the impression of training. People get what we call gymnified.

Yeah.

They pick up the culture we find having in person training where they're there and they meet people like myself and Dan and everybody else, and they get to know each other. It builds a culture which is very. Quite powerful.

Yeah.

Very strong sense of community. In our franchisees, which you often hear about. They like each other, they meet together, they help each other a lot. And we try and encourage that kind of feeling.

Yeah. When they come for training, it's nice to be able to see this happening, see the calls and see the staff and the conference center. And that's what we need to do because otherwise it just seems so fragmented. Training them here and then offices over here and call center over here. And then it's very, very impressive.

Day four of training got a little bit of a late start because they're doing first aid this morning. Obviously I can't get certified in Australia. I don't have any id, so not a long run in the rain. It was great.

You've got to get the quality right, so you've got to get your lines spot on and you've got to get your speed. Once you've got your quality, the Speed will follow. So you've got to concentrate on getting the quality first. Now I'm going to use a term here that I'm going to use a bit today. First three months you will be necessarily inefficient. Everything we need to do most jobs is there and here.

We overloaded a trailer one time, probably had like 10,000 kilos in it when it shouldn't have had that much. Or backing it up down a driveway on a, like on a cliffside. Yeah, it just, it was overloaded and.

So we were backing up.

There was this grade down and so everything was locked up but we just.

Kept sliding and went over the edge. Fortunately it detached correctly and we lost.

The trailer, but no one died.

Clean sits on the tow ball and.

It clicks into place.

Behind here is a little catch and if that catch is not caught under.

The tow ball, it'll pop off.

Got a very fine leaf structure again. The rhizome is very, it grows, creeps along the ground.

This morning was not great. I'm in Australia. So then we came about 3:34 o' clock a.m. our time. That's already like halfway through the day in Washington state over in the US so they're already halfway through their day. Tons of emails have already been in my inbox. So unfortunately this morning I got the news that one of our team members out in the field that work at.

One of the locations that I own.

Took their own life last night. So the managers are handling it and having a meeting with the entire team and things but just stinks. It's not something you want to wake up to in the morning. I probably only spent a minute or two talking to this individual. They'd worked for several months and they were solid, honestly and probably had a really good future inside the company. But obviously these personal things happen and I know it's probably not politically correct.

For me to talk about this, but.

I've always, in my mind, I've always just told myself and one thing I think about when it comes to suicide and things is.

It'S what seems like a long term solution to a very short term problem. And if you fast forward two or three years, you'd probably not even remember the things you were going through or what was making you mad or unhappy. And it's not the route you should go. So reach out to somebody and why it's so important for us as business owners to have support, have a community that we reach out to and we feel low. I feel like there's no option or hope. So yeah, tough morning.