
Sarah
So Jim, great to have you here today. We’ve spoken before over a few years, and it’s been interesting to see how your business developed. I wanted to really find out, I guess, right from the beginning, where did you get your entrepreneurial streak?
Jim
think it’s a matter of character, Sarah. You like that or you’re not. I just have it in my nature. I just love business. It’s like, you ask somebody, why do you enjoy computer games? I just, it’s the same sort of thing. It’s something that’s endlessly challenging and interesting and varied and every day a new challenge and it’s just fun. I mean, you couldn’t have a more fun job than what I’ve got.
Sarah
So it’s definitely, it’s an instinctive thing. you think business, do you think it’s something you can learn?
Jim
You can develop it for sure in the right environment. Yeah. I mean, there’s certain elements of character that go behind it. There’s that relentless willingness to want to do something better. A lot of people have the attitude that anything goes wrong, it’s kind of somebody else’s fault or…
I can’t do anything about it, I’m helpless. And some people are just saying, no, what can I do? Okay, I’ve got difficult customers, I’ve got difficult employees and stuff. What mistake did I make? What can I do in future? How can I do differently? Is that relentless desire to look at what you’re doing every day and say, how can I do it better? And that’s to a large extent innate, but we’re actually quite successful in bridging that in people. You have people who come in as franchisees, you have somebody who’s a high school dropout, who’s never achieved anything, and then they get an opportunity and they see they buy a business. And something in them, with the right coaching and support and training, that just takes fire.
People can achieve a lot more than they do. That’s something I know for sure.
Sarah
So if we look back to when you started out, mean, your history in a sense is well known, that you did a PhD and you started your lawn mowing business as a source of income. Why did you pick lawn mowing? Was there a particular reason? Was it just an easy thing to do?
Jim
Well, it was my student job, basically. And I like being outside. like grass, like trees, I like fresh air. I’d much rather mow lawns or do gardening than work indoors in any capacity, really. In fact, just today I’m going out to my farm and I’m going to be digging potatoes. To me, it’s recreation, fun. I’ve got this vast potato patch and far more potatoes than we can eat. It gives them away to everybody.
And when you go into it as a business, it actually pays pretty well. Like as a student, now this is back in the 70s, I could charge five bucks to mow so many floors, I could do two in an hour. I’m making 10 bucks an hour. There was a lot of money in those days. And I actually used to buy my first house. So it paid pretty well.
Sarah
So it’s interesting that from that you developed into franchising. So when you look back at that and started franchising, what was the decision making process for you to go down that path?
Jim
Okay, now first of all, I never thought of law mind back in those early days as something that could achieve anything very much. I intended to be an academic. I intended my research to be something people could listen to and learn from and develop. And then I completely fell in that. My thesis was too radical for anybody to even, even examiners didn’t know what to make of it. They just couldn’t comprehend this wildly unorthodox.
way of looking at society. I had no prospect of an academic career, but I wanted to continue it. So to do that would require an awful lot of money because all the implications of money theory, even though was in history, were all in areas like neuroscience and biochemistry and genetics and so forth. So I didn’t have any skills in that. So that would take lot of money.
So I thought, okay, I’m going to become rich. I have to become rich enough to be able to fund my own research institute. That was my primary aim. Now, here I am, no job, just finished my PhD, which didn’t even get initially, I did later. What do I do? Well, the only thing I know how to do is to mow lawns.
So I started doing that full time. Now I honestly didn’t think that would be the key to my future success. There was a whole lot of things I was trying, like a mower shop and a computer shop and all kinds of stuff, all of which failed. I I’ve failed far more than I’ve succeeded at. And this mowing business just pulled along and I went from mowing lawns myself to having a couple of workers to building up and selling lawn mowing grounds. So that was going. Still just a small business, really not achieving what I wanted. And then…
In the late 80s, this company called VIP came to Melbourne and they had franchised Lawnain. In my initial reaction, I was absolutely terrified. I thought they’d crush me because they had hundreds of franchisees and I had few studies.
Jim
And I actually approached them and I said, can I just help to build up VIP? I’ll just work with you guys because obviously you’re too powerful for me. I can’t compete with you. And they said, no, we’re not interested in that. I said to them, well, I said, might as well try and compete. So I basically read the show The Franchise Expo in 1998. I went in, took off my badge so I wouldn’t know who was because I had no uniform in those days and said, I’m interested in VIP. Can you tell me what you guys do? So they told me.
Then the state manager came in and kicked me off the stand he said that’s Jim Penman don’t tell him anything else so I went away and I thought okay all right these guys there’s some benefits in this there’s things that in offering franchisees I can see the real reason why like for example if you break your leg on your lawn mowing lawns you lose all your customers if you have a franchise you keep them this kind of stuff there was benefits but I thought you know I reckon I can do a system that will be better for the franchisees
So that was nine months of arguing with lawyers, most of the time arguing to try and get them to give me a contract that I thought was fair because I didn’t think what they thought me they wanted basically me to have all the power and I thought no I want something I want to join. So I did a whole lot of things in the contract to give practice all these powers.
And then I approached the people I wanted to be my first franchisees. People who were my best subbies. The ones who gave great service. And people who bought lawn mowing runs from me in the past. Who I knew were good operators. And I offered to give them a franchise and just make them walk out if they didn’t like it. So I got my first dozen or so people. I got them to check out the contract too. I asked them, can you see anything wrong with this contract? And they said sort of a few things and I changed them. So then I launched and that was in June 1999. Somebody asked me at that time.
how many franchises might you have one day and I said look if it goes well I’m not sure it’s going to work but if it goes well one day I could have maybe as many as 100. That was my statement. Look how much confidence I have in this thing at the beginning and I started.
And it just was unexpectedly successful. That’s all I can say. It just started to grow. In my first year, I had about 60. People were inquiring for me to start. This is crazy. But you see, I had a magic weapon. And that’s something I didn’t realize from the beginning. I had very strict policies.
I wanted to support my franchisees but I also wasn’t going to put on anybody I thought might fail because I think that’s immoral to take money off somebody and I knew that if people had bad attitudes towards customer service they tended to fail. I knew that from selling lawn mowing rounds. So I determined from the beginning I would not choose anybody that I wasn’t confident. I’d send everybody out on the road with a trusted trainer and say, check them out.
If you don’t think they’re gonna be successful, great customer service, we won’t take them. That’s one reason I thought I wouldn’t grow so much. But the interesting thing was because I did that and because I supported people so well and it was very personal in those days, what I had is a bunch of very successful, happy franchisees. And I used to get a list, names and phone numbers of all my friends.
current franchisees, if anybody came out of franchise and they said, why should we buy from you? This is an interstate company VIP, fancy office in South Melbourne, very, very slick and organized. What have you got? You’re running it from your basement. And I said, well, there’s some differences, but I’ll tell you what, here’s a list of my franchisees. I want you to go and ring them and ask them and then go and get their list, which I knew they wouldn’t provide.
And people would ring my franchisees and they would say, Jim is great, looks after me well, is successful, best thing I ever did. I’d never have gone. Great decision. Never go anywhere else. They sold it, not me.
What else can I say? Even in the beginning I didn’t see that much potential in it. I still tried going into other things at various times and they all failed. I’m a hopeless businessman. I’ve only ever succeeded at one thing in my life. Fortunately I’ve done quite well on that.
Sarah
So when did you, so you introduced cleaning I think in 1994.
Jim
This is again an example of my lack of foresight as a business owner. I thought of cleaning because the franchise system was the same kind of idea, giving out leaves and so forth, but I used to put my picture on my leaflets when I franchised. put it on a graphical image.
And obviously that’s not a cleaning image. So I decided to launch this thing called Sunlight Cleaning, which is all sprays and I registered the name and stuff. Sold a couple of franchisees but couldn’t find the work. I said, look, I’m sorry, it’s not working. Here’s your money back. Then somebody came to me and said, what about Jim’s cleaning? And I said, well, obviously that’s not going to work because Jim’s is clearly a gardening image.
But they eventually said to me, okay, we’ll do a joint venture with you. We’ll take the risk. And I said, well, okay, give it a try. And it worked. So we couldn’t find it in the sunlight. We could find Joss because people, the brand was well enough known, but when somebody went and said from Jim’s Clip, oh, you’re eating it at the moment. Oh yeah, okay, give it a go. That was kind of how it worked. And it grew from there. So wasn’t my idea at all.
Sarah
But it’s proven to be an astonishing way of building the business, hasn’t it, in terms of that joint venture? Because that’s the model that you’ve pretty much followed.
Jim
Yes, it’s very driven. People think I’m insanely rich. Even though we’ve got five and a half thousand franchisees, first of all, our fees are quite modest. On average, we probably take about 6 % of people’s turnover.
much less if you’re millions of dollars a year but that’s how works, it’s a base fee plus lead fee so it’s not a very high. Now most of that actually goes to the franchisor who looks after them locally, who supports sales franchises, supports trains and so forth. Fair chunk goes into things like
Advertising obviously, that’s about 150 bucks per month for franchisee. That’s about 20 % goes into advertising and then there’s other kinds of costs like the call centre and everything else. So in the end I do pretty well but our net is probably 1 % of the turnover of the company. So it’s not, yeah, it’s a narrow margin.
Sarah
If we just flip back to your role, first of all, how have you managed that shift to be the head of what is very large group now?
Jim
Well it’s difficult. The key is always finding the right people.
You’ve got to, for mere franchisees, usually we find what we call franchisors, regional franchisors. And we also have people who we call divisional franchisors who look after the entire division. Like a called Hader who came to us, he was actually a cleaner. He was cleaning floors. He came to us. He’s now head of an organization where he’s got about 1,700 franchisees. He’s got an office and staff and everything. So he’s just an amazing, amazing leader. So I’ve got a lot of people through the organization who’ve usually come up from the
from the ranks who proved themselves and now they the leaders themselves. that’s and then of course what I’ve got to do is to find people to help me run their head office which is extremely challenging also. The hardest thing is always finding people. I actually find you’ve got good people. Clients are easy to find. Finding the people is the hardest part at every level. I’ve made a lot of really really really bad mistakes in that too.
Sarah
Well, you’ve been reported as being very hot-headed and I know that there have been a few instances. Have you managed to manage that in any way or do you still let that kind of personality run?
Jim
Well, I don’t sort of yell at people very much, but I make decisions very fast, which is often good and sometimes pretty disastrous. I just, you know, I do something that I shouldn’t do. Go into business I don’t understand or take the wrong person on or put too much confidence in the wrong person or get rid of the right person sometimes. It’s occasionally happened.
Sarah
And how do you fix that? How do you fix those wrong decisions?
Jim
Well, you can’t avoid the consequences, you just go back to them and say, I had one case recently, I let somebody go who was, in retrospect, extraordinarily good.
was proved afterwards that they were. I actually managed to get them back. You do that kind of stuff. It’s happened a couple of times. My wife once actually, I made a very bad mistake. She was running a conference center that’s attached to our headquarters and I just took her off it and put somebody else in. And that person was a disaster and it took me, Lee was fantastically good at what she did. I mean, it took me three months to figure it out and she’s forgiven me. It was a very bad mistake.
Sarah
Right. That’s good.
Jim
I love my wife. She’s a real asset. That’s one of the things too. Sometimes people can be good and sometimes they can be lucky. I’m very, very lucky and married to a wonderful woman for 24 years. I adore her and she’s created business too.
Sarah
And your daughter is set up the furniture removal business, is that right? But it’s not a franchise as yet.
Jim
No, well she basically, she’s running the whole thing with she and her partner. She’s amazing, Sylvia. She’s just got, she’s got the entrepreneurial ability from both parents. I think she’s just on fire. She’s like 21 years old or something and she’s going to be very successful. She’s just got it.
Sarah
So what is your role now? Because you’ve got all these franchisers, you’ve got the divisional franchisers, you’ve got a head office team, you’ve got Joel in marketing doing amazing work, as a lot of your other team are. And there’s you, and you’re still very much hands-on in the sense that I understand you still train, you still go to training sessions, but how would you describe your role at the gyms group?
Jim
Well, I’m sort of ultimately the decision maker. I have pretty good managers and I work with them. I do a sort of wander around the office every day and I just talk to people about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it and this kind of thing. special. It might be just casual conversation. Sometimes something comes up and we chat about it and say, why don’t we try this? Or that they said, I’d like to do this. And I say, yeah, sure, it’s okay, go ahead. So I do that kind of stuff. I…
I am in very close touch with my franchisees. That’s one thing that’s unusual. I give all my franchisees my phone number, my email address, and I urge them again and again during training to contact me if they need to. In fact, I make a point of trying to speak personally to everybody I can, which is difficult. There’s about 130 in this week’s training. So I try and talk to everybody, get to know them, chat to them so that if they have an issue, they’ll call me. And then after one month, I send them an email saying, how are you going?
asking about being called the pay for work guarantee and I respond to that. So I try really hard to keep in touch with my franchises and I probably would have some sort of contact with at least six or eight franchises a day for some reason or another and multiple franchisers as well. So I keep in contact. What that does is help me to…
I can often help people. Like a franchisee is lacking leads for example and I would have a whole blizzard of suggestion about how they can get more work and I’ll contact the franchise or I’ll do all kinds of things. Okay I can do that kind of stuff. But also what’s really important is it helps me to understand what’s going wrong. So if a franchisee approaches me with a problem
Sometimes it’s their fault and they’re just not following instructions and I’ll tell them that and I’ll support. Sometimes there’s things they can do, the franchise or might not be looking after them properly in some way and I can make that happen. Sometimes there’s a problem with their system and then I look at it say, okay, what can we do to make it better? How can we improve it? How can we make it less likely that this problem will arise? It just happens all the time. There’s things come up.
Jim
Like, I’ll just give you an example. This is something that came up yesterday. You’ve got a situation where there’s different levels of leads being given out to…
franchisees and some of them are very good quality in my particular division others are very low quality the trouble is if a franchisee takes the low quality leads they’re less likely to get the good ones because of the way our system works it tries to spread around so one of the things I’m talking to IT about is how we can actually use a different assessment of the value of those jobs so that somebody’s had a low quality lead isn’t necessarily going to be less chance of getting a high quality one
I just mentioned that it’s a problem I discussed with IT yesterday and it came up because of a conversation with the franchisee. You also have an idea of changing lead systems and stuff which I discussed with the franchisees and we’re not going to do it but keeping in contact is really important. They’re my most important people. They’re my first produce, the welfare of franchisees. It’s on the bottom of my email I sent you. It’s also in my book. That’s always the top thing. What’s in the interest of franchisees. Now great customer service is in their interest because that makes them more likely to succeed and they help everybody else. But you’ve got to keep them first.
And they also keep a very close eye on customer service. I actually am the only person in the business that can delete a complaint or a bad survey. So there’s a system people put forward and they’ll use that to train people and teach them. And then if a customer doesn’t get looked after, I will get…
after the first complaint, second complaint comes through, I will personally deal with it and make sure it’s properly looked after and follow it up and put pressure on in those days. And we’re devising a system we’ll call Jim’s Jobs, which is actually designed to reduce the level of complaints and miscommunication. That’s going to be reduced over the next few months. So I’m very intensely involved in missions of service, service to franchisees, service to clients.
Sarah
In the past, there have been some divisions that have kind of come and gone. They haven’t worked for whatever reason. And there’s also been criticism which quite often makes the headlines that a particular system isn’t financially viable or they have problems. The gym’s dog wash was one earlier this year. How do you handle those kind of issues?
because they do seem to kind of crop up. So what’s your approach to those?
Jim
Of course. Look, we’ve got… Let me give you some figures, okay? And you can look this up online. If you go into a business like a cleaning or a gardening business, which is pretty typical, your chance of being in business within 12 months is between 5 and 10 percent. These are widely available things. We’re not talking about retail. That’s a different issue because it’s a larger investment. But for service business like ours, between 5 and 10 percent. Now…
If you buy a gym’s franchise on average across every division, your chance of being in business at the end of 12 months is 88%. So it’s significantly higher and it’s actually improved with time as we’ve got better systems and better training. used to about, we used to lose about 83 % on average. Now it’s 80%. So we’ve improved with time.
Recognize this is not everybody succeeds in business. Not everybody has the capacity. Now if you are a journalist and you want to find people who failed in any division, you will find them. You will absolutely find them. There’s 200 franchisees in Dogwash. Now out of those, okay, you probably find an average something of a half would be reporting good income. This is based on our surveys. But about 9 % will report poor income. They definitely will. And the rest is okay satisfactory. Now if you want to make a story,
say 9 % that’s 18 people you can find 18 people will tell you Jim’s dog watch is terrible it’s a real failure it’s a shocking there’s no money to make nobody can make money and they’ll make this big blast and these sob stories about how my life’s been ruined by it the fact of the matter is of course business means some people will fail now if I had people ask me if I had a superpower
superpower, you know, like a fly like Superman or see through walls. What would I want? And I’d say what I want is to be able look at somebody and know whether they were going to be successful. Because with all the screening we do and we really try hard to screen, we fail, we make mistakes. Or sometimes people are actually great in the start and they come into emotional problems, which is a huge issue with us.
and something goes wrong and they fail or marriage breakdown is a really bad one. So people will fail. So what can I say? If you ask me, people ask me what’s my ultimate goal? What’s my biggest ambition? How many franchises would I like to have? Would I like to have 10,000, 100,000? How many? And I say that’s not my goal.
If I had a goal, it would be that every single franchisee in gyms would be successful. That is my goal. That is the one thing I want more than anything else. But I tell you what, I’m never going to achieve it. Because that’s a bit like going out into the night sky and seeing the Southern Cross and seeing where it points to. That’s south. That’s the direction I’m going to. I didn’t expect to reach that because that’s up in the sky. But that’s how I see it. Yes?
And you look at it and you say, why did that person fail? What went wrong? What could we have done? Was our selection system not good enough? Was our training not good enough? Was our support not good enough? What should we do to be better? Can we give them better software? We’ve got this amazing software that’s coming through now. We’ve been developing it. It’s costing us millions of dollars a year to do this, which has all kinds of features that will help people to be more successful. It will measure things. They’ll look at the rates they’re charging and look at the time it’s
taking, give them all, if this is only if they want it, all sorts of goals to help them. It’ll be able to do things like take jobs instead of having them call that client, which is an issue, it’ll book jobs into their diary directly. So all the problems go, how can we solve it? How can we do it better? But let me tell you, we’re gonna put all this in place and I would expect over the next 12 months, we’re gonna see our failure rates drop and I’m gonna see more franchisees reporting good income.
and a customer service is going to improve, I’m confident we’re going to achieve that, but we’re still going to have failures. And that’s pretty sad to say, but that’s the nature of business. On the other hand, Sarah, there are, we call ourselves the millionaire factory because I am confident we’ve created more millionaires than any company in the history of Australia, because the opportunity.
Sarah
Okay. Opportunity. And transparency and trust is something that comes up a lot in your current marketing and messaging and it’s certainly something that is shown through the interviews that you do. Would you say that’s of core to the business, the transparency and trust?
Jim
Well, people are going to trust you, yes, of course. But they trust you because you’re real, because you do what you say you’ll do. Trust isn’t something abstract. Trust is when I say to a franchisee in training, you contact me at any time about anything, and they contact me, and I answer them, and I give them every possible help. That’s where trust comes from. I know one of the things that worries franchisees the most is what happens to me, because I am…
so much at the core of it making sure my franchisees are successful. You know look somebody could come in and take over gyms and they could and they could double the profits. I tell you what it wouldn’t be difficult there is number of things that could be done you could double profits pretty well within a year or two just by changing a few things which we could do.
I won’t do it because it’s wrong. In fact, I’ve just gone through in two divisions, dogwash and fencing, where I’ve just put their fees down because I think they’re paying too much. So I put a system into place which is a sort of family trust arrangement where most of my money will go towards my research foundation and there’s some to help my kids buy houses and so forth and there’s going to be a directors panel which my kids are going to, my family is going to choose people to be on it. There’s also going to be representative from the mowing, from the franchisees. They will elect somebody who goes on the directors and we’ll also have somebody from my research foundation and they will run it but I’ve also put a clause in all my franchise contracts starting last year that majority control of Jim’s Group cannot be sold to anybody without the written consent of a majority of franchisees.
Now my CFO said to me that’s you’re gonna dramatically cut the value of your business it’ll make it unsaleable. I said good! It’s a matter of what’s important.
I had an interview with four weeks ago and that’s a business, that’s magazine dedicated to wealth, creation of wealth. And I said, you’re talking to the wrong person. I wouldn’t even say becoming wealthy is in my top 10 of my purposes in life.
Sarah
So that’s the succession plan. What keeps you motivated? Are you looking to step back? Because you seem very engaged in the whole business, what motivates you on a daily basis?
Jim
I’ve had my retirement ceremony. been planned for some time now. We’re going to have it in a really nice church with a lot of people in attendance. And I’m going to be the guest of honor and I’ll be in a box because I’ll be dead. That’s my retirement plan.
I am having a time of my life, Sarah. I am enjoying myself dramatically. There are things that I don’t enjoy doing, particularly letting staff go, but I am having a great time. I’m full of energy. I’ve just come back. I’ve had a half hour run on the treadmill and done weightlifting, and I’ll be off gardening this afternoon. I have a wonderful life. I enjoy myself. I have very strong sense of purpose, and my purpose is threefold. It’s my family.
I’ve got 10 kids and a wife that I adore as I’ve already said. I love my kids and I’ve got grandchildren that coming along. I have my research foundation which is really the central focus of my life in a sense and I’m now putting multiple million dollars a year into making some great projects and some fantastic products that will really change people’s lives and my purpose as my franchisee is making them successful. These are reasons for getting out of bed in the morning and I enjoy it.
Sarah
What’s the toughest lesson that you’ve learned in business?
Jim
Don’t go into things that I don’t understand. I always have a tendency to look at a business that looks like it’s a moneymaker but not knowing it. I just name it, tourist venture, mower shop, computer shop, what do call them, business exchange, trade exchange businesses, factory.
I keep on going. I’ve so many stupid things because I jump into businesses and they look as though they’re so easy and tempting and they turn out to be bad, bad ideas.
Sarah
What advice would you offer to young entrepreneurs who, you know, wanting to start out, maybe they don’t know exactly what they want to do, maybe they do, what words of advice would you have?
Jim
Well, you’ve got to learn how to do something. You’ve got to actually become skilled at something. Now, Sylvia is a good example of that. Now, Sylvia and neither Sylvia nor her partner have any business background or experience. They’ve done various jobs and things, but what they’re doing is they started the removals company.
Now, Sylvia has worked for a removalist. actually worked in the office, so she has some understanding of that business, which is a beginning. But they started out, they’re actually removing. One day neither Sylvie nor Danny, that’s a partner, will come and will be on the road at all. But by that time they’ll know that business from the inside.
They’ll know exactly what it takes. They’ll know how long a move should take. They’ll know how to train somebody. They’ll know what to look for, because they’re working with staff and so forth. How to choose the right people. How to talk to clients. How to do all the basic simple things. The same way I learned my lawns. And when they’ve done that, they will be very, very, very successful. But that’s the difference.
I spent 15 years mowing lawns as a lawn mowing contractor. So I know that business very, very well. And when you understand lawn mowing, it’s not too much of a stretch to understand how cleaning works or dog wash or anything else. It’s the same principle. The technical is different but the service aspects are the same. So that’s my advice to anybody is the advantages of a university education unless you’re going to be a doctor or someone like that are exaggerated.
the best opportunities are actually in the service industry because you can start with nothing. You can start part-time as I did, as a student job. You can work with somebody else. You learn that if you’ve got a good attitude towards customer service and this attitude of constant self-improvement, you can be really, really, really successful. And the great secret is that most people in these kind of businesses aren’t particularly good at what they do. They really are not good.
So if you go in and you are really fanatical about customer service, always looking to improve, it explodes. And then you’ve got to be good at staff and you’ve got to be good at those things. And it takes skill. But I think I just reckon the service industry, and I’m not saying buy a franchise, though that natural, statistically speaking, you find a way to succeed. And a lot of people actually start with us and they go independent. We don’t stop them. It’s very easy with us just to pay a few thousand dollars to waive return of trade.
Why not go into an industry? And also, it’s never going to be automated. You’re never going to have AI take over lawn mowing or cleaning or washing dogs. It’s never going to happen because it can’t happen. Anything else can be automated. But these are jobs that will not be automated and they pay very, very well. Our guidance for franchisees is 70 bucks an hour. That’s working by yourself. And that ignores the fact that if you’ve got two people charging 70 bucks an hour, you’re paying your off-sider 30 bucks, you’re making $110 an hour. And then you have that person trained and you start up a team and you build it and you have, there’s no upper limit.
And then when you start making money, can invest it in property and all kinds of other things too. It’s an incredible opportunity. The world is, it’s actually easier now than it’s ever been in the past because we are such a rich society. And I hate to say it, but we are increasingly lazy. People are not.
working hard and especially people are not prepared to work hard in an area where you get your hands dirty. You actually do a physical job. There is golden opportunities beyond anything in human history.
Sarah
I think that’s a great place to leave it. So Jim, thank you very much. It’s been great to have a chat.
The Jim’s Group has grown from humble beginnings to a network of more than 5000 franchisees – and it all started as a part-time lawn mowing business. Today the group encompasses 50 different service divisions, from antennas to cleaning, from dog wash to pool care, from security doors to uniforms.
With it’s tag line ‘Need it done? Jim’s the one’ this uniquely-structured franchise group continues to evolve.
In this podcast, founder Jim Penman shares his journey from Phd student to franchisor, admitting to plenty of errors along the way.
“I’ve made more mistakes than I’ve had successes,” he says. “I’m a hopeless businessman. I’ve only ever succeeded at one thing in my life. Fortunately I’ve done quite well on that.”
Jim shares what keeps him motivated, reveals the magic weapon that helped him scale the business, talks about how to pick the right business, and offers some tips for young entrepreneurs.
“The best opportunities are actually in the service industry because you can start with nothing. You can start part-time as I did, as a student job. You can work with somebody else. You learn that if you’ve got a good attitude towards customer service and this attitude of constant self-improvement, you can be really, really, really successful,” he says.
Show notes
Jim Penman established Jim’s Mowing in 1982, launching franchising seven years later. He launched the cleaning division in 1994. Today there are more than 50 divisions in the group.
Jim’s research project centres on biohistory.
Sylvia Penman, Jim’s daughter, is heading up the removals and storage business, which is not yet franchised.
In the podcast we mention Joel Kleber, Jim’s chief marketing officer, who has had his own journey from law student to award-winning marketer. You can listen to his story, and find out how he took the brand viral here.