From Mowing Lawns to Building an Empire - The Entrepreneurial Journey of Jim Penman

In this episode of The Quest for Success Podcast, we sit down with Jim Penman, the founder of Jim’s Group, one of Australia’s most recognisable and trusted franchise networks. From his early ambitions as an academic researcher to becoming a household name in business, Jim’s story is a powerful example of resilience, vision and values-driven leadership.

Jim opens up about the unexpected transition from academia to entrepreneurship, driven not by financial ambition but by the desire to create meaningful work and strong community connections. What began as a small mowing service soon evolved into a thriving franchise empire built on trust, consistency and exceptional customer service. At the heart of Jim’s business philosophy lies a deep belief in supporting franchisees, embracing innovation and staying true to family and community values.

The conversation also explores how technology continues to shape Jim’s Group, his commitment to ongoing research and his dedication to improving lives through practical and ethical business practices. Jim’s perspective on success, where happiness, relationships and purpose outweigh profit, offers a refreshing reminder that true success lies in making a difference.

This episode is a must-listen for aspiring entrepreneurs, business leaders and anyone interested in how strong values and innovation can turn a simple idea into a lasting legacy.

Key Takeaways

• Success is not just about money; family and fulfilment come first.
• Passion and persistence can turn humble beginnings into major success.
• Franchising empowers independence through community.
• Customer service is the cornerstone of business excellence.
• Technology and research drive long-term growth and impact.
• Authenticity, family and ethics define sustainable success.

Connect with Jim Penman

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thejimpenman

Jim's Personal Website: https://jimpenman.com.au/

Resources

Website: https://www.jims.net

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Transcript

Dylan Pathirana (00:11.486)
Awesome. All right, let's kick into it. All right, welcome back to the Quest for Success podcast and thanks for tuning in once again. Today on the show, I'm really looking forward to this episode because we have Jim Penman, who is the founder and CEO of Jim's group. And any Aussie listening out there will recognize Jim because he's become an Aussie icon and really the face of entrepreneurship here in Australia. So Jim, thank you so much for joining us. Really looking forward to diving into your story.

Jim (00:41.512)
Good to be here.

Dylan Pathirana (00:43.036)
So Jim, this podcast is all about success. And so we need to understand a really fundamental question. And that is, what does success actually mean to you?

Jim (00:53.646)
First of all, says not principally about money. I have goals in life. My family is a very important goal. My new book is called No Other Success because it's short for the saying no other success can compensate for failing in the home. So that's pretty important. I never intended to become wealthy or go into business. I intended to be an academic. I had a...

I did a PhD in history back in the 70s and early 80s, trying to understand the reason for the rise and fall of civilization. I came across a project, a approach that I thought was useful, meaningful, and I wanted to fund that. So I decided because I couldn't get an academic career going that I'd actually get a business going. So that's my second goal is my research, to be able to pursue that, to be able to fund that, which is what I do with about 90 % of my income at the moment.

And the third thing is my franchisees. I have a commitment to them being successful. And my ultimate aim is to make every franchisee completely happy and successful within, in terms of achieving what they want. So those are my aims. And to the extent that I achieve any of those, then I'm successful.

Dylan Pathirana (02:04.584)
Yep. Yeah.

Dylan Pathirana (02:09.158)
Awesome. And so there's kind of three pillars that which we got to dive into throughout our conversation. But first to give our listeners some context, we need to understand a bit about you and how you were shaped. So can you take us through your kind of early years and how you think your parents and family shaped who you've become?

Jim (02:27.886)
Well, I had pretty dedicated parents, quite temperamental. My mother was a bit anxious, my father was pretty fierce, but very, very caring parents who'd sacrifice a lot for us. I had an interest from when I was very young. I was a very nerdy teenager, very awkward, nerdy, super-nerd teenager.

Dylan Pathirana (02:28.786)
Hahaha!

Jim (02:54.414)
I'm reading all the time, hardly knew anybody, very, very socially inept and so forth. I was always in head in books and I was fascinated by things like the collapse of the Roman Empire and ancient Greece and this sort of thing. I wanted to know why and I wanted to understand people, human society. That's kind of like a, like from the age of 14 onwards that I've always asked myself questions like that. And so I went to university to do that.

to find out, to find answers that would satisfy me as to what's going on. What happened in the past and what's the future for our current society?

Dylan Pathirana (03:30.878)
So was your kind of interest always in that kind of history and kind of like philosophy side of things?

Jim (03:40.046)
Yeah, well basically I was mad at Kinnon dinosaurs when I was a kid. Like a lot of kids, I was crazy about them. had little plastic dinosaurs. I even used to make out with my brother, know, into intergalactic dinosaur empires. Big fan of science fiction, so.

Dylan Pathirana (03:55.134)
Yeah, yeah. So what's this? Yeah, what's this growing up Jim like you had a big family or a small family?

Jim (04:01.998)
There were four of us. I'm the second of four children.

Dylan Pathirana (04:06.354)
And what did your parents do out of curiosity? Were they entrepreneurs or how did you?

Jim (04:11.63)
My father was an engineer, originally academic and later had a consultancy business and my mother, primary school teacher, mainly a homemaker, which was pretty common in the 50s. mean, looking after four kids was a pretty full-time job. yeah, there's no entrepreneurs in my family for generations. come from a I'm a real freak in that sense. You have to go back.

Dylan Pathirana (04:16.253)
All right.

Dylan Pathirana (04:30.758)
And-

Dylan Pathirana (04:39.633)
And what did the

Jim (04:41.003)
many generations to find anybody who was in any kind of business.

Dylan Pathirana (04:44.081)
Yeah, right. And what did Young Jim want to do? Did he want to be a historian or what did you want to do?

Jim (04:51.33)
Well, when I was a teenager, I was looking at all kinds of things. Doctor, I suppose, at one stage. Vet, more likely, because I'm more fond of animals than people. I wanted to be a science fiction writer before the end of my school career. That was my great own. Complete failure at Netlis Meet. I used to write a lot of books, trying to write stories, science fiction stories. Yes.

And then I decided when I went to go to university, decided I wanted to understand, you know, history, human society. That was my basic aim. So, yeah.

Dylan Pathirana (05:24.519)
Yeah, yeah. And then so you you ended up doing your your PhD in history. Is that correct?

Jim (05:30.114)
Yes, that's right.

Dylan Pathirana (05:31.782)
And what was your area of research at the time?

Jim (05:36.046)
Well, that's the problem of course, because when you're doing a PhD in history, you're supposed to become the world's expert in one particular field. I was interested in whole of human history. You know, was what makes everything happen? Why do Chinese dynasties rise and fall? Why does agriculture spread? I was interested in everything. And it went from that, not just from history, but I was also interested in cross-cross-rear anthropology, to understand the difference between current societies.

and then in biology and psychology. it was wildly beyond the bounds of history in terms of what I was doing. And I completely overestimated my chance of an academic career. But when I got to the end of it, it was completely obvious there was nobody in the world who was going to employ me or any kind of job in that field. Because I really knew nothing about any particular stage of history. I was the ultimate generalist. So just for an example, I looked at patterns in

Dylan Pathirana (06:29.373)
You

Jim (06:34.016)
in human history and you look at something like the Second World War and the First World War. right, now people give all kinds of reasons why the Second World War took place but one thing I noticed from a study of history is that you very often get a situation where you get a major war, unites a country, and there's a period of peace and as the children and grow up who were born at the end of the previous war you get a

explosion of violence, a new civil war. This happens again and again in Chinese history. It happened with the Qing dynasty and the Han, it happened with the Sui and the Tang, it happened with the Ming dynasty, it happened with the Qing. You can actually see the prospect with the communists. get the civil war ending in 1949, a period of peace, and then as that generation born at the end of the civil war grows up, you get the Cultural Revolution, get violence.

And then as the kids were born at the end of that, grow up, you get the Tiananmen disturbance and so forth. So there's this pattern that goes right through human history. And I think that's a biological pattern. Somehow something that happens when you suffer a great deal of anxiety through your mother when you're very little, you grow up in time of peace, then you become more aggressive. Now this also fits into the idea that societies that are patriarchal are more warlike.

So for example, if you are a patriarchal society where your mother is under a fair degree of anxiety, that's transmitted to the infant sons and therefore they grow up to be more aggressive and more warlike than if they weren't. So you can see how you jump from, and then you look at biology, so now you test that. What we've been doing is doing things like stressing rats, for example, by restricting food in certain ways and then see what happens when they grow up.

You've got a pattern that goes from what happens to the First World the Second World War, why did that happen? And then you go back to patterns of history and then you start looking at cross-cultural comparisons and then you start looking at biology. To me it's all the same subject.

Dylan Pathirana (08:44.733)
Yeah, absolutely. Fascinating. You mentioned that you're a generalist. I want to know from your opinion, what do you think is more important, a specialist or a generalist?

Jim (08:56.078)
Well, obviously you need both. You need people. See, as a historian, I'm looking at studies that are done by people who are deeply immersed in the study of the time. That's very valuable. But you've also got people to bring together. So I think they're both important. Like you've got to have major scientific breakthroughs in terms of ideas, know, people like Kepler and Newton and Einstein and those kind of things.

But then you also go to somebody who actually sits down and do the mechanics of making them practical.

Dylan Pathirana (09:28.039)
Yeah, this is fascinating discussion, Jim, but I'm really fascinated about you from history, you moved to loan moving. What inspired you to do that?

Jim (09:40.984)
Well, basically the need to pay the rent. I've been gardening since I was eight years old. In fact, there's only about three years of my life that I've never had a gardening business of some kind. And when I was eight years old, was in Cub Scouts and we did a thing called Bob a job. And you go and knock on the doors of neighbors. So I knocked on the of a neighbor who lived diagonally back from us. Mr. Tapley was his name and offered to do it. And he gave me a job breaking his driveway. used to get two shillings. This is back in 1960s. So it's not too bad.

Dylan Pathirana (09:43.502)
Hahaha

Dylan Pathirana (09:48.294)
All right.

Jim (10:10.99)
You could buy a block of chocolate for that. So that was my first job and I did it through most of my childhood. And then when I left school in 1970, I took a gap year and I put a notice in the window of the local hardware store offering to do work. So I got some jobs there. And then I kept this up as I was a student. After a few years, I wanted to get more money, so I wanted to buy a car actually. So to pay for that,

Dylan Pathirana (10:12.774)
Yeah.

Jim (10:40.27)
I bought myself a lawn mower so instead of working by the hour, I could charge by the job. See, when you're a student, I could charge five bucks for a lawn. I could do two in an hour. So that's $10 an hour, which is pretty good as a student in the 70s. In fact, it paid pretty well. I managed to my first house as a student. House is a lot cheaper, I'd So I just basically did all through my university career. I was gardening and then mowing lawns.

Dylan Pathirana (10:59.293)
Wow.

Jim (11:07.884)
And you see, I like morning lawns because it's fun, it's outdoors. I like physically being involved in it. like green things. I like fresh air. In fact, my hobby at the moment is I'm going to go, at the weekend I got to the farm and I dig potatoes for several hours and this kind of thing. I just enjoy that kind of stuff. My student job is great for my studies.

Dylan Pathirana (11:27.335)
Yeah, your own domain.

Jim (11:31.406)
And when I got to the end of my PhD and realized that I had absolutely no prospect of a career, well the only thing I knew how to do was mow lawns for a living. So that's what I did. I started a full-time business in December 1982 and it turned out be rather more successful than I anticipated.

Dylan Pathirana (11:48.222)
Did you actually when you started the business, did you actually started as a business or it's more of a side hustle like and then you decided to do the business?

Jim (11:59.982)
course it was a site it was my student job it my student job it was the job that you know you can be a barman you can be a drinker you can deliver papers and all kinds of things I actually mowed lawns that was my part-time student job without any any thought that it would ever be something full-time because I expect to be an academic yesterday it was only towards the end when I looked at it said no way this is going to work nobody's going to employ me

Dylan Pathirana (12:02.119)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jim (12:27.406)
then I had to make it full time. Even then, even in 1982, I never had any thought that this could be anything successful. I wanted to make a lot of money so could fund my research. And I thought, well, I'll just do the lawn mowing until something comes along that's my real future. I tried all kinds of stuff. I actually tried Amway at one time. I was hopeless at that. got no skills.

Dylan Pathirana (12:50.053)
remember yeah

Jim (12:51.82)
Yeah, tried, I had one time a small computer shop, which I was pathetically bad at. I tried the mower shop. I tried to get a tourist. I did all kinds of things. I just did a lot of different sorts of stuff. All of it failed, the real mowing business just kept on going. And then...

Dylan Pathirana (13:08.443)
And why do you think that is? Why do you think the Moline business survived and thrived?

Jim (13:13.486)
Well, it's what I know. This is one great secret that I've learned from business. The thing that you know best is usually the best opportunity. Because all the other things look very entertaining. Computers were just opening up. Hey, open up a computer shop. But I don't know anything about computers. I'm not a programmer. I've got no background, no experience. I just knew one thing.

better than anybody else, which was how to mow lawns efficiently and then how to find work and then how to sell lawn mowing grounds. And I just developed skills in that area. One thing, a hard lesson, it's taken me decades to learn it, is stick to what you know, develop what you know, don't go rushing off into something that looks where you've got no expertise, no matter how entrancing and exciting it looks, it's better to stick to what you know. And fortunately, I guess I picked an area

Dylan Pathirana (13:44.381)
So yeah.

Jim (14:06.018)
where there's tremendous opportunity and not a lot of really serious competition.

Dylan Pathirana (14:12.988)
So how did you actually start with the gyms moving? when did you set up a company?

Jim (14:20.344)
Well, not so much whether you set up a company, that's just a structure. What you probably mean is when do I set up a franchise?

Dylan Pathirana (14:28.26)
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, from just you doing the mowing and how did you decide that, yeah, there's opportunity for me to grow and create this franchise model.

Jim (14:39.608)
Okay, it's not one thing, it's a whole lot of different things. For example, I started off mowing lawns. That was me, I was mowing lawns. And I actually failed my PhD. I got it knocked back. So my supervisor said to me, you spend all these years, if you do some rewrites, you might be able to get it. And even though there was no career prospects. So to do that, I needed some time.

But the trouble is I was really busy mowing lawns all day, long house, six days a week, pretty lost if we do anything else. So I thought, okay, what I'm gonna do is to sell my lawn mowing rounds, sell the customers to Goodwill, which is something that you can do, you just put an ad in the paper. So I put an ad in the paper and somebody was interested in my round and they started talking to me. It took a while, but all the time they were doing this, I kept on picking up more customers. And by the time they actually had the round to pass over,

I was flat out again. So I thought, okay, I'll do it again. So I put another ad in the paper, I started talking and then somebody was interested, they kind of talking about it. And all the time I kept on building customers. So by the time this particular business was ready to go, I was still flat out. So I did it a third time. And I actually sold that business, got a bit of cash, sat down there, finished my PhD. And then I finished that.

I thought, okay, but I'm making a lot more money building up and selling lawn mowing rounds than I was actually doing the mowing myself. So why don't I make a business of that? So that's what I began to do. And then to make that possible, I started employing subcontractors.

and they would just pay me a percentage and then I would use them to park jobs and then I'd sell them off. And I developed systems of selling businesses. that was, see, it's not one big thing. It's a lot of little tiny things, like learning how to sell. I was really, really bad at selling lawnmower grounds. I have very, very bad people skills. And I was hopeless at it. I was so unconfident about selling lawnmower grounds that I actually hired a professional salesman to sell lawnmower grounds for me.

Dylan Pathirana (16:44.27)
You

Dylan Pathirana (16:52.273)
Wow.

Jim (16:53.408)
Even when he was sitting in the same little tiny back shed in my backyard where he ran my office from, I was so unconfident. And then I figured out how to sell lawn mowing grounds. And that was a really big breakthrough. Once I'd done that, know, things started to move and then everything was going well. And then in the late 80s, this company called VIP suddenly appeared in Melbourne and they were a franchise lawn mowing business and they were

250 franchisees with all this fancy stuff and logos and hair offers and everything else and I'm just basically running business in my basement and I thought these guys would crush me. I really thought that I had no chance. They're just too successful, they're too knowledgeable, they're too big, too much money. I couldn't possibly compete. I actually rang up the state manager and offered to become an adjunct to them just to build their business and he said no not just in that. So I thought I might as well try and

see if I can compete in some way. Is there a possibility? Is there any vulnerability in these guys? So I went to the expo, which is in 1988, in the old exhibition buildings in Melbourne, and I just went up to the stand and I said to the guy behind the stand, I'm very interested in VIP, please tell me about it. Now I'm a terrible liar, so if you'd have asked me what I was interested in, I'd say, I want to compete with you guys, but fortunately he didn't do that, so.

He told me 15 minutes, he spent a conversation, he gave me this brochure that they handed out and then the state manager came in and said, that's Jim Henman, don't tell him anything else. He kicked me off the stand. But I looked at it and I thought, hang on a bit, okay, I can see benefits to this system. I can see why a person would join a company like VIP as a franchise, know, why they'd pay ongoing fees. It did make a bit of sense to me. Like, for example, if you're a lawman contractor, you break your leg, you're a big trouble. But if you're part of a network, you can look after each other, that kind of thing.

Dylan Pathirana (18:25.756)
You

Wow.

Jim (18:47.662)
But I thought, tell you what, I reckon I could do something that would work better for franchisees. That was my idea. And I, so I went to some lawyers. It took me nine months arguing with lawyers. The biggest problem with that was that they kept on saying they wanted me to have more flexibility, meaning more power. And I said, no, I want a system that I want to join, that I want to be part of. That was my idea. And it really, really was difficult to get that through to them.

And then in June, 1989, I found my first franchisee, which was basically somebody who'd been interested in lawn mowing ground, but I sort of said, why don't you take a franchise instead and you can walk away if you're not happy and stuff. And I also approached the people who bought lawn mowing grounds from me in the past. There were some really good ones who were being very successful and I used them as trainers. And I also went to some of my best subcontractors and I said, I'll give you a franchise type of thing. So that was kind of how it started.

Somebody asked me at that time, how many franchisees do you think you might have one day? And I said, look, I don't know it's going to work really, but maybe, maybe if it goes really well one day, I could have as many as 100. I actually said that.

Dylan Pathirana (19:55.823)
wow so how many franchises you have now Jim?

Jim (20:00.312)
Bit over five and a half thousand.

Dylan Pathirana (20:01.954)
Wow. Blown it out of the water. Yeah.

Jim (20:04.674)
slightly more successful than I thought. even after I started, it really took me a while to figure out this thing really has legs. It just surprised me. See, I don't have this great vision. I didn't really have some great plans to take over the home service industry in Australia. It's just little tiny things. Like from the beginning, I had this slogan and it's right at the bottom of every email. You've seen it, if you've seen it in my emails.

Dylan Pathirana (20:12.028)
Amazing.

Jim (20:32.302)
Our first project is the welfare of franchisees. At first, we're all so passionate about customer service, which is an emotional attitude towards customer service. And then we sign on to franchisees and franchisors. We are convinced we'll succeed. Because one of the things I didn't like was the idea of taking somebody on who might fail, which basically VIP had no, and my competitors had no screening process.

Dylan Pathirana (20:57.318)
Yeah.

Jim (20:57.848)
But I always have a very strong sense that you cannot take somebody on that you've got any doubts about. So it's part of our culture.

Dylan Pathirana (21:07.76)
And you think that's also because you are the face of it. It is Jim's, Jim's mowing, right? You're giving that away to someone else to be kind of the face of your brand. So you really need to make sure that they're the right fit for your culture.

Jim (21:22.592)
you basically just don't think it's the right thing to do. mean going into business can be a good grape for you. It's great, it's flexible, you make a pretty good income. Our franchisees on average make well over the Australian average income and have a much better lifestyle. So it's a good business but if you fail it's terrible. You've lost money, you've had destroyed, possibly people can, marriages can break down, this kind of thing. can be awful to fail.

Dylan Pathirana (21:25.841)
Yeah.

Jim (21:51.042)
So I just think more responsibility. mean, I really, if there's anything, it's the gospel. It's Jesus washing his disciples feet, the idea of servant leadership that really would drive me, that sense of responsibility. I feel very, I'm engaged with my franchisees. I give every one of them my phone number and email address. And I respond all the time. So far today, there's been about three cases I've actually.

had some communication with franchisees about something or other. So I'm very, very open. Yeah.

Dylan Pathirana (22:24.571)
Yeah, in wall. Yeah. And, Jim, it seems like, you know, one of your, secrets, said, you know, you would get the customers and then you could sell the mowing roots. So it seems like your secret source is getting the customers. I want to understand how, how you go about that. Why, why are you so successful at getting customers in?

Jim (22:45.486)
Well, I'm fanatical about looking after people well. I just, to me, it goes back, when I was eight years old and I had that gardening job, and there was one time I used to break the driveway, and there was one time when he didn't want me to break the driveway, and he caught me just to take some rubbish to the incinerator. In those days you could burn things off. And in the way, I dropped some of the stuff on the driveway. This is a nine-year-old kid, okay?

And I remember this guy, Mr. Tapley said to me, he's very sad. He said, if you're going to do it like that, I might as well do it myself. And I felt so ashamed. I felt really ashamed. And I thought, I am not going to let him down. He was very decent, nice man. Never raised his voice, but I just thought the idea of letting him down was horrifying. So I've always had this fanatical, emotional thing about looking after customers. just, can't stand the idea of being like.

To me that's appalling or not turning up or not letting somebody know. And when I did the job, I was always trying to figure out to do it quickly but also how can I do it really, really well? You know, when you do an edge, because the hardest thing in lawn mowing is actually the edges, doing the edges right. Okay? So I used to have a wheel which would go along the edge and then I would cut the grass very clean on the mower strip. And then I would use the mower to suck the grass from the left. If you put the left wheel on the mower strip.

your suck film to make it a clean edge. And that used to make a really good edge. the, I couldn't do the edges that were around the trees and the retaining walls and the clotheslines, this kind of stuff. It used to bug me. Nobody ever complained, but it used to annoy me. It wasn't perfect. I remember going in one day to my mower shop, which was in Eltham, and when he was fixing my mower, because I always used to wreck my mowers, I was really bad at maintaining them.

I was wandering around the shop and I looked at this, there was this funny looking thing in the corner, it's a long pole with a handle in the middle, it'll end you on one end and the other end with this funny looking plastic thing with a bit of white cord sticking out. This is in the 70s, I've never seen anything like it. I said to the guy in charge, I said, what is that? And he said, Jim, it's a brush cutter. I said, what? He said, it's a new idea just out from Japan, one of the first in the country. And what happens is you start,

Dylan Pathirana (24:48.389)
you

Jim (25:07.63)
you hold this thing here, you start the engine and that nylon core comes out, snips the edges without re- embarking the trees. And I said, how much is it? He gave me a price. Wow, that's a lot of money. That's more than a mower. He said, well, that's all that, they're the only company that makes them. It was Shiketani in those days. So I bought one on the spot, on the spot, bought it. And then it took me a while to practice it I could do a perfect edge everywhere. And I would mow the lawn and I would, and I would.

Dylan Pathirana (25:21.196)
You

Dylan Pathirana (25:33.477)
Wow.

Jim (25:37.432)
do the edges of the nature strip and the front and then the back and then as I'm walking down the driveway I used it on low revs and I'd zip the grass from the cracks in the driveway and then I'd blow them off. And if the nature strip was overgrown, sometimes people don't even know there's a straight inch under there but I knew there was because I knew how it worked so I would cut them back with a spade and people would... and then when I would mow the grass it had to be absolutely perfect. I worked out techniques of cutting long grass and making it clean and if there was a little tiny

ball of grass that was left over. When I was walking out, I'd look at it and I'd go and pick it up and throw it in the garden. It had to be perfect. Straight lines, every blade, move the hose, cord it on the garden, cut to the edge. Absolutely perfect job. And people would look at the stuff I'd done and say, wow, I never knew my lawn could look this good. So it was easy, easy to find clients when you're so fanatical about service.

Dylan Pathirana (26:33.559)
Yeah amazing. So over the years, Jim, you build an amazing brand. So your brand is all about you, your face, your name. Why did you come up with that in the first place? Any reason?

Jim (26:47.598)
You're looking for this great genius. I'm sad and disappointing you in all these things. was no... Let me assure you, no vision at all. What used to happen is that used to do a lot of leaflets. This is back in the 70s and 80s and leafletting was a big thing. And I found that if I put my picture on the leaflet, which is me with the beard and the hat, I got a better response because it was more personal.

Dylan Pathirana (26:54.139)
I can see a Jim there. Yeah

Dylan Pathirana (27:16.399)
Yep, yep.

Jim (27:17.922)
So it was called, because it was Jim Mowing, that's why it's called Jim's Mowing. was me mowing the lawn. No one thought about this at all, seriously. And then when I wanted to franchise, I thought, well, you can't put a photo on a uniform. So I went to a graphic designer and he drew a sketch of it and that was okay. then I went, and then I just tried a few different scripts. And the way I did it was I put them up around the office. I would put different scripts around and I'd show it to my staff who were,

Dylan Pathirana (27:27.385)
Yeah, yeah.

Jim (27:47.222)
answering phone calls and say, know, which is easiest to read, which do you like? So I came out of that. So I think probably it was about an hour and a half worth of effort went into making my first logo.

Dylan Pathirana (27:58.769)
And it's stuck around and it's honestly it's

Jim (28:01.09)
But I mean, you don't understand these things. mean, it was so funny. But like the idea using the gym's logo for cleaning, for example, you see, that didn't make any sense. I mean, it's a mowing image. If you think about it, guy with the beard and the hat, that's me. That's me. But I look like mowing lawns. So why would a woman want that on her uniform? So when we first decided to try cleaning, I actually used a different logo, a thing called Sunlight.

Dylan Pathirana (28:05.104)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim (28:29.612)
and I had sprays and stuff, and I sold a couple of franchise, couldn't find the work, getting the money back. And somebody came to me and said, hey, what about Jim's cleaning? And I said, no, don't be ridiculous. This is a mowing brand. They said, we think it'll work. I said, absolutely cannot work. You cannot ask a woman to go in with a guy with a beard on a hat on a uniform. It's not gonna work. And he said, well, I think it will work. I said, I'll do it myself. I'll go into partnership. I'll...

drive it myself and I said okay well I don't think it's going to work but give it a go and it worked. So then again.

Dylan Pathirana (29:04.825)
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. We saw a LinkedIn post that you post recently today or yesterday or a few weeks back saying the marketing experts asking you to relook at your logo and you're refusing to do that.

Jim (29:24.395)
I didn't know what that was.

Dylan Pathirana (29:25.442)
okay. Maybe your marketing team.

Jim (29:28.588)
No, at one stage they did actually come to me. This was a few years into the franchise. they said that the, it wasn't the marketing people, it was some of my staff. And she said to me, the old Jim's is pretty grim looking. Can we do a better picture? So they got me, they got me taking pictures. I'm very, bad at smiling at cameras. I really am. terrible at it. So they were trying to get me to smile. And one of my managers pretended to put his

his tongue in the photographer's ear, which is why I'm smiling in that logo. And they took a picture of me against the old logo. If you actually look up Jim Pem and images, you can see the picture it was taken from. And it was a bit more of a friendlier look, so we used that. So that's the only change we've ever made. The script is still the same.

Dylan Pathirana (30:16.015)
Yeah, well, it's working. I want to understand, you know, is there anything you've taken from your academic background into entrepreneurship that like, has there been any crossover in that way of thinking?

Jim (30:28.182)
No, no. If you look at studying a PhD as a way of training for lawn mowing, I would say pathetically little. Look, the only thing they got in common is this. I am a wildly unorthodox thinker and that completely destroyed my academic career. There's nowhere in the world that somebody could get a job in history who doesn't doesn't follow any of the same principles and ideas that historians are interested in.

But when you're in business, it doesn't particularly matter how wildly unorthodox you are. What matters is that you do something that works. And the marketer's a very good teacher. And that's basically what happened. I had some really wildly radical ideas. I mean, just to give you an example, mean, Jim's is a very strange company if you understand comparative franchising. For example, as far as I know,

We're the only franchise system in the world that allows franchisees to change to different franchisor, even a different division if they're not happy. Their own franchisor has no say. They can vote out their franchisors, they can veto changes to their own manual, they absolutely own ownership rights to their clients, they can be sold but they cannot be taken off them. They can build a business to whatever extent they wish, with as many employees as they wish.

They don't pay any higher fees. The base fee is exactly the same. These are really weird, unusual ways of looking at things. And it's all aimed at this idea, how can you make your franchisees amazing and delighted? And the lawyers actually said, was really, this isn't going to work. You're giving yourself, you're giving too much power to franchisees, but I actually gave them more power with

Dylan Pathirana (32:18.36)
Yeah. I want to understand you. You mentioned that you've expanded to now over 5,500 franchises, which is incredible. How do you still maintain quality at that scale?

Jim (32:33.422)
Well, I train for a start. We have a training session. Like last week, for example, we had about 100 people into our headquarters in Melbourne, in Murrabah, to train them. And the first talk I give is me. So for the first hour and a half, I talk about customer service and service to franchisees. And I'm very, I'm not particularly good at most things. For example, I'm terrible at things like figures and administration and all this kind of stuff. I'm really bad, but I'm a reasonable talker. I'm very passionate.

So I get this, and then I talk to them, talk, and I give them my phone number, email address, right up on the board, I say, you contact me, and I hit it again and again, contact me, ask me, I want to know what you're doing, I want to know how you're doing, and I'm send you a email in a month's time to ask you, and I want you to respond, you're gonna respond to me. I'll be really hurt and insulted if you don't. So I really push this business of, you've got to be in contact with me, and then I talk, and I talk, and I talk, and I run the last session in training two, which is about income.

I say the same kind of things and I try and greet as many people as possible during that time and let them know I'm really never think I'm too busy. I've always got time for you. You can meet me anytime, know daytime, evenings, weekends, public holidays, Christmas day, anytime until you contact me because you're part of my family. That's I kind of push that. So I'm always communicating and I'm in touch with Crate-Shies and Fract-Shies all the time about what they should be doing and why it isn't working.

what we need to do here and how we look after customers better and what we need to do for franchisees. I'm just always, always communicating with everybody all the time.

Dylan Pathirana (34:09.156)
So what were some of your challenges that you had when you scaling your business,

Jim (34:17.934)
Well, the hardest thing for me has been to find people to help me out because I'm not a good administrator. I'm not good at those kinds of back-end stuff and I've tried a lot of different people and had some fairly bad experiences. Strangely enough, the person who's proved most helpful in the back-end is my wife and it took us 20...

sort of 23 years of marriage to figure it out, but she's actually very good in this kind of area and I've come to rely on her very heavily. So she's actually very much of, she's a very good on the menu type. She's very good with finance and understanding how people work and operate and so forth. And we've got a wonderful in-house lawyer, lady called Harpreet, who is fantastic. so I've got some, I have some wonderful people.

I mean, I really do. You know, something like Joel you've had contact with, who's my social media guy. He is amazing. He's just an incredible guy who's come up through the ranks. He came up from a very basic job in his early 20s, know, unskilled, like minimum wage. He's now one of my top managers. He's just, he's just phenomenal. So I've got some really amazing, wonderful people, but that's the hardest part, finding good people.

Dylan Pathirana (35:24.004)
Amazing. Yeah.

Dylan Pathirana (35:30.798)
Yeah. And you mentioned there about your wife and I want to understand as, you're growing and scaling this, you know, what has now become an empire, how did you balance between work and time at home?

Jim (35:43.214)
I never let my work...

Jim (35:49.198)
inhibit my family life. I've always, always got time for my family, always got time for my kids. Look, I work, I mean people can say I'm a workaholic because I, you know, I'll send emails at two in the morning if I'm awake. But I do work funny hours at times, but I also, so I drive my son to school, my 16 year old, my youngest son, I've got 10 children, I've got my youngest son, I drive him to school, I pick him up. Now that time, I communicate with him, I keep in contact with him.

Dylan Pathirana (36:10.362)
Amazing.

Jim (36:19.578)
I love my family, I just always got time for them. I just don't think that... It's like what your priorities are, okay? If you put money and financial success as your first priority, then you got really screwed up. Because it's not something that... You come to end of your life and you say, okay, well, you know, this is my life and I have a whole lot of money in the bank and I was very prestigious and stuff. What the hell does that matter? In the end, what matters is who you affected, whose life you're out of.

What are your kids like? What are your grandchildren like? How was the world a better place when you're being in it? So I've never felt tempted to, if anything, I'm so fanatical about my children. I got divorced, unfortunately. I'm not the easiest person to live with. I actually got married, had two successive divorces fairly quickly. And one of the main reasons is because when my kids came to stay with me, I was so obsessively focused on them. I was so desperate to see them that I neglected my wife, which is...

I don't blame them, I'm a difficult person.

People are, I would say if you want to have Jim's marriage advice, I'd be the perfect person because I'll tell you all the things to do wrong.

Dylan Pathirana (37:29.754)
I'm surprised you actually haven't started Jim's marriage life or business you know. Yeah marriage counseling. So that's the question I want to ask you actually from Mowing you pivot your business into multiple other ventures and what made you decide to go that path?

Jim (37:37.41)
Married California.

Jim (37:53.56)
Well, I'm going to be disappointed in you in this. No great vision at all. It was just basically pretty ad hoc. It's like I said, we tried cleaning, failed. It's a different brand. Then somebody came to me and said, what about Jim's cleaning? So eventually I agreed and we did it. It's now got second after mowing. It's a fast growing division. fact, most other things the same way. Someone will come to me with an idea for a new division and end.

Like last year, one of my franchisees, a mowing franchise, guy called Lance in South Australia, came up with the idea of Jim's driving school. it's an obvious business. It suits our model quite well. But the thing of it is, Lance is actually a very good franchisee, making very good money. He's got a tremendous customer service rating. He's 5.0 on our scale, which is really good. He's also a really nice guy. He's helpful. He's a trainer. So I said, OK, you run it, Lance.

So he's now setting up and he's making a pretty good go of Jim's Ritings Corps. So mostly it's just the right person comes to me and suggests what about this new division and you know we try and do bit of screening and we've worked out with the division of work, if it doesn't conflict with something else and you know then we give them some training and say hey go to it.

Dylan Pathirana (39:12.332)
it a crack and see what comes of it. And I want to know, is that reflective of your leadership style? Like are you very much a servant leader? It sounds like it.

Jim (39:21.774)
Well, I try to, but yes, yeah. Basically, I don't think that a business should serve the ego of the leader. Basically, we should have called somebody else. I have a very ambiguous, this is funny, you're talking about success. I have a very mixed attitude towards success. Jesus said, it's harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a camel to go through the eye of a needle. I'm aware of that.

Dylan Pathirana (39:32.206)
Absolutely. Yeah.

Jim (39:51.468)
Wealth can be very corrupting. Success can be driving your ego and that's a big danger. One of the nicest compliments somebody ever said to me was somebody who actually knows a lot of quite wealthy people and he said, Jim, you're nothing like any rich person I've ever met. It's beautiful.

Dylan Pathirana (40:08.409)
And honestly, on that point, I think that's potentially why your brand, the Jim's Group has become so successful is because to be frank, you're a regular Aussie guy who has just put in hard work and it's grown to what it is today. And people like to see that concept of just the regular guy could be your neighbor who's gone out and done well for himself. I think, you

I think that's why it becomes synonymous with Australian entrepreneurship.

Jim (40:41.26)
Yeah, well, I mean, people come, people talk to me, if I get the impression, this guy is so heroic and great and smart, that I could never be like him, I fail completely. What I want to tell people is, listen, I'm a complete idiot in most things. I have terrible people skills, I lose my temper, I am rash, I jump into things I shouldn't do, I don't pay attention to these, I know nothing about finance. I am completely hopeless at just about everything. Now, if somebody is really decrepitly...

pathetic as me can be successful to some extent, then surely you can do better. I mean that's kind of the impression I would like to give.

Dylan Pathirana (41:17.849)
Amazing. So all the years, Jim, have you implemented any new innovations like technology into your business?

Jim (41:27.822)
Technology is huge. Technology is absolutely... When I started off, I had this idea. I wanted the job... When it comes in, I wanted to go to the franchisee who needs it and wants it. That's very complicated if you don't automate. So I had like, I'd have a whole stack of people in the staff doing all kinds of taking calls, talking to franchisee, putting their actual requirements on a blackboard, allocating them, sending them through...

It actually cost me so much that in the beginning it was costing me more than the fees I was charging. But it's only when I started to automate it that it started to become profitable and worthwhile. We currently spend several million dollars a year on software development. We are just investing massive. The cost of our software will be tens upon tens of millions of dollars. It's a massive, massive ongoing investment.

systems to drive what we call franchise management system, FMS, to drive the whole way jobs are allocated and the financing done and everything else and also the franchisees program that we run to help venture run a more effective business and how they coordinate. So invest massively in technology, yes.

Dylan Pathirana (42:37.433)
Yeah, so I know you started your business around 80s and if you started the business today would you do it in different way?

Jim (42:49.666)
Well, so first of all, you've got to say, if I was starting a business today, would I be faced with someone like Jim's, which is already established in the field. Very difficult for anybody to compete with us now because that technology is so advanced. We can do things, we can provide work that other systems just cannot match. Even system quality control, customer feedback.

Surveys this kind of stuff too and the way we respond to them. It's all highly automated warning notices, breach notices, all kinds of things. It's really really difficult. I would say if I'm starting today, like if I started today, even if I went back to 1989 and knew what I know now, I'd get there a lot quicker because you made so many really bad mistakes. I just did so many things wrong. But certainly automation is something I should have done right from the beginning. Just somehow you've got to automate.

Dylan Pathirana (43:43.309)
Yeah. Yeah. And we've spoken a lot about your business, but I also want to kind of turn to your, reason you started business was to fund the research that you wanted to do. Can you tell us a little bit about the research that you're, funding now?

Jim (43:54.883)
Yes.

Jim (43:59.406)
Okay, basically what I've come to the conclusion of is that there's a change in character. That civilization doesn't so much depend on politics, it depends on the character of individual people. If you have people who are hardworking, entrepreneurial, disciplined, you'll tend to have a wealthy society. If you have a society where people are honest, where they obey the law, where they follow democratic principles, you'll tend to have a democratic society. So that's the principle. Now what's happening in the world today,

is you're getting a decay of character. This is quite obvious. it's one of the most obvious ways it's suitable is the plunging birth rate. People are no longer as interested in having children. They're no longer interested in getting married, having a stable relationship. Their attitude towards work is a lot, lot worse than it was. If you ask people a few decades back, you what was their main keys in life, key games in life, they will tend to say things like marriage, family, engaging job.

If you ask the same question to young people today, they will say lots of leisure, money, status, easy life, know, totally different, totally different values. Now what's happening basically is our character is decaying, it's changing under the impact of wealth and commercialization. It's been very, very negative. It's also making us very cut off from each other, very miserable.

Dylan Pathirana (45:07.777)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jim (45:24.898)
rates of death of despair are rising, suicide rates going up, drug addiction, alcohol poisoning, loneliness, all in a terrible state. And what's this got to do? The reason for this is the way that the wealth and the commercial nature of our society is affecting the way our dopamine system works. It's the reaction to dopamine that's gone badly, badly wrong. Similar to what happens when people get addicted to drugs. It's the same kind of process. What we're looking at

is looking at ways to reverse this, mostly by studying the effect of mild food restriction on rats and seeing the differences it makes to their character and the way they behave. For example, if you restrict a rat or any animal mildly in terms of food, they become better parents, better mothers. That's just one example. They become more disciplined, more hardworking in rat terms. So we're studying that and we're developing treatments that can reverse the whole process.

Dylan Pathirana (46:21.465)
And what impact do you think social media has on that? Because I can see it in my own life. Like it is degrading, you know, our attention spans, our ability to want to achieve things and do things.

Jim (46:25.678)
It's bad.

Jim (46:34.658)
Social media is one of the most negative.

factors that are driving this change in society. Wealth, commercialism. What social media does is it takes away from real human relationships. It's quite the opposite. The more social media you use, more lonely and miserable you tend to be. So it's a very, very negative, bad sort of thing. What social media does is give you a dopamine hit. So if you get a like and you chase the dopamine hit and you're going for prestige and you're going for...

Status. That kind of behaviour is very, very negative and it actually affects you at the most basic level of your brain, the way your limbic system works. It has a really bad negative effect. Whereas if you do positive things like you go for a walk in nature or you talk with friends or you go to church or some faith community or you get involved in helping others and doing things for others, all the positive things actually have the opposite effect. And we're going in a very bad... Social media is one of the worst, worst...

aspects. I think that they should be banned from schools. It's quite appalling that they don't. I have a rule actually, if my son picks up, when I drive him home from school, he picks up his phone and wants to look at it and I say, if you do that, I'm taking it off for 24 hours. You're not allowed! The only way you can use it is, we're talking about, he's a very bright kid and we talk about ideas and you can look it up, you can look up Wikipedia and check on something, but that's all. You can't use social media in my presence and you can't text either.

Dylan Pathirana (47:53.817)
Yeah.

Dylan Pathirana (48:08.075)
Yeah, yeah. So what are you trying to achieve with this research, Jim?

Jim (48:14.36)
Well, basically developing treatments. We're looking at the epigenetics. You know what epigenetics is? It's the way that the environment affects the way your brains operate, so your genes operate. So for example, if you think of a gene code as a series of tiny little taps, that's how it works. It spits out proteins. Epigenetics is the effect of the environment, which could be from your parents and your early life as well as the present. It sort of turns the taps on or off.

Dylan Pathirana (48:16.889)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (48:43.522)
That's what we're looking at. We're looking at the epigenetic changes that cause the character to change and we're looking at duplicating those in a sense to try and duplicate the effect of food restriction. The actual benefits would be, it would be very helpful if you could, it'll help to do things like do with drug addiction and depression because so much of that is to do with very short term thinking.

and this breakdown of community and human connections. If we can actually change character in a way that will help people live better and happier lives, in the process we'll actually turn society around. But it starts with the individual.

Dylan Pathirana (49:20.569)
And how is that research going?

Jim (49:22.734)
go well. It's very exciting actually. What we've done, we've got to begin testing about a hundred thousand different drugs and basically you put them in little tiny capsules and you test them against human brain cells and you look for the required epigenetic changes and then out of that we investigated 61 different drugs that seem to have some effect and we're just in the process of starting to test nine of them, the most promising candidates and we'll test them on animals.

and just see what the effects are. Some of the weight loss drugs like Wegovia seem to have similar effects. It hasn't been shown, but they do seem to relate to things like people who take it less likely to drink alcohol and smoke and stuff, which is all part of this negative behavior. So we think existing drugs, tweaking them, it's probably not going to be that difficult. We've also engaged one of the top CRISPR people in Australia. CRISPR is a system where you directly go in and change the genes, or in our case, the epigenome.

Dylan Pathirana (50:07.116)
Yeah, Well.

Jim (50:22.936)
So we've engaged someone to actually look at ways of going directly to the source and saying turn this gene on, turn it off, this kind of thing.

Dylan Pathirana (50:31.128)
That's fascinating. So I just want to go back to your family. So you have 10 kids. What kind of discussions do have in your dinner table?

Jim (50:38.115)
Yes.

Jim (50:43.832)
Well, there's only one of them still at home and even he's only sort of part-time-ish, but very lively actually. My kids have a big range of views. Some of are very interested in business. Got some potential heirs out there. So we talk a lot about that. Sometimes we talk about politics. We have a bit of a go. Some of my younger daughters are very woke, so that leads to interesting discussions.

They say I'm very right-wing when it comes to social conservative sort of thing, but extremely left-wing when it comes to redistribution of wealth and that kind of stuff. I'm like a socialist, but also very conservative. So we have interesting discussions on that side. And we talk about politics and Donald Trump and what's wrong with the government and zoning laws and all kinds of things. Very interesting, my kids.

Dylan Pathirana (51:21.037)
Yeah, yeah.

Dylan Pathirana (51:33.144)
And are there any particular values that you're trying to impart on them, leave to them?

Jim (51:40.204)
Well, obviously, obviously the importance of family. Like my oldest daughter, for example, is a psychiatrist and married to school teacher. And she's chosen to take a year off to have a kid. My little daughter, Cassie, who's just coming out to one year's old, she's a beautiful, beautiful little girl. And she's working now part time. And Marcus, her husband, is working four days a week. So they've got plenty of time for their family. To me, that's a pretty good success. I think that...

kind of thing. don't, it'd be nice if your children are successful in terms of finance and stuff but the thing I'm mostly one that they'd be is good citizens, good parents. And Sarah's a wonderful mother, she just adores her little girl, she says it's the happiest year she's ever spent in her whole life being with her and she just loves her to pieces. Mind you, Cassie is an extremely adorable kid even by the standards of other kids.

Dylan Pathirana (52:34.552)
Yeah.

Jim (52:36.29)
I just, they're up at the farm on Saturday and I was spending some time with them and she's such a gorgeous little girl. She's giving you flowers and things.

Dylan Pathirana (52:41.976)
You're enjoying your grandfather being a grandfather?

Jim (52:48.352)
Yes, I don't see enough of them, my oldest boy has three kids, but they're in Taiwan. They're coming out at Christmas. We're really looking forward to that.

Dylan Pathirana (52:57.368)
Amazing. So, Jim, what advice would you give to a young Aussie guy starting a business in Australia?

Jim (53:08.918)
Okay, I'd say first of all, the fact that you're interested in starting a business is a very good step. I think that too many people want to just be employed by somebody and do some sort of a white collar type job and manage you and sitting in front of a computer. think, look, I know I'm biased, but service industry has been very, very good to me and it's got tremendous advantages. First of all, because if you're going into things like sales or

real estate, all those kind of things to these white collar type jobs. They're very, very competitive. Now, to be pretty blunt, the standard of service in the home service industry is on the whole pretty pathetic. It's not that we are brilliant, but we are just better than almost anybody else. I know that sounds immodest, but I know how much we need to improve. And I'm always driven to that. I'm very discontented with that. I'm always trying to get us to do better. But the fact is, the standard of service is not that great.

Dylan Pathirana (53:53.176)
It's a low bar.

Jim (54:05.248)
I know at least 20 franchisees in gyms who are turning over at least a million dollars a year. That's just the ones I know about. And some of them multiple millions. This is somebody doing things like gardening and cleaning. You know, there's a lovely lady called Poppy who's a Filipina and she actually does some cleaning work for me. She cleans the house of my farm and she's just got a wonderful, positive, warm...

lady and she's got these great employees mostly they're all Filipinas of course um she's just just a great person you look at somebody who is one of our top people one of our top franchisors a guy called Dan Cale if you look at him he's all over the place he's got so many things but this is this is a high school dropout this is the kind of kid that people say no you're never going to do much of anything in life you are you are garbage you are human garbage you are useless went to work for McDonald's which i think is a pretty good idea my younger son's got a job there so i think that's great too

learned some skills in his early 20s he bought a lawn mowing franchise very nervously okay he's and he did amazingly well towards the end of his moment his career he was turning over just under a million dollars and he had had a 5.0 rating and then he came to me and said I'd to be a franchise owner so I went in partnership with him to buy out a regional franchise he's now one of the top franchisers in the country about to take over the

mowing division entire as of 1st of October actually and this is a great he's in his early 30s you know what's one of the most wonderful things about it he's married lovely lovely wife they've just had two more kids they've got four in total and the middle names of the kids are David and James named after me as the inspiration

Dylan Pathirana (55:51.224)
Amazing, wonderful. That's an inspiration.

Jim (55:54.914)
This is a guy who does not need to neglect his family. I think that's one of the great things about being in business, particularly in the service industry, it doesn't have to be against your family. It doesn't have to be at the expense. You can do things like you can pick your kid up from school. You can spend time with them. The new book I've got just come out called No Other Success, starts with an anecdote about a guy who was a manager in a supermarket.

And he used to work very long hours and he was about to leave very early in the morning and his four year old son said to him, daddy, I wish you could have breakfast with us. I wish you could have breakfast with us. One statement. He said he drove to work, tears streaming down his face, quit his job, bought a mowing franchise. And ever since then, the last 10 years, I spoke to him in his 10 year, I rang him about 10 year, congratulations. And ever since then, he's been able to actually see his son growing up.

And I said, you ever thank your son for that comedy? He said, Jim, every day. It changed his life. Now, I don't think he's making any more money than he was as a real estate manager, but the point of his lifestyle is so much better. And it just doesn't matter. People have this obsession with wealth, with status, with financial success. It's not the thing that matters. It doesn't make us happy. Past a certain level of income, wealth has almost nothing to do

Dylan Pathirana (57:20.244)
Yeah.

Jim (57:20.642)
with happiness. In fact, the one thing that you shouldn't do with money is to buy status stuff. I just finished reading a book called From Barista to Billionaire which talks about that and this is a guy who knew all these super rich people and he said they're all the same. They've got this giant luxury yacht and then parked next to it is a bigger yacht. They're sitting there with envy and it's meaningless to them. What does it matter whether your yacht has gold taps or gold plated? mean, what in the hell

What's wrong with you if you think that's the thing that matters? Family matters, community matters, sense of purpose matters, doing a job that's meaningful, that's useful. You know one thing, basic principle, I would never ever want to be in a business or invest in a business that I couldn't see real value. I would never invest in something like crypto and I say investment because that's gambling. Anything like that, anything that's just destructive is not something I could ever be involved with no matter how much money I could see in it.

Dylan Pathirana (57:51.778)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dylan Pathirana (58:18.104)
I agree.

Jim (58:18.83)
They just don't do it. Mostly you lose money because you're depending on somebody else being prepared to pay more than you. Terrible, terrible idea. Do something that's worthwhile. I know my job is worthwhile because I've got five and a half thousand franchisees. And I know, for example, simple statistic. If you go into business as an independent cleaning, gardening, something like that, your chance of being in business after 12 months is between five and 10%. You've got a very high. Our success rate.

chance is about 88%. Now it's not 100%, but that statistic matters an enormous amount because going into business and failing is a bad thing. And most of my French RZs, the great majority would report good and satisfactory income. And I know because we ask them every year, we run a survey, the support they're getting and how they feel about it, how they rate their income, not how much they're making, just is it good? Is it satisfactory? Is it poor? That kind of metric is what matters.

Dylan Pathirana (58:49.912)
Wow.

Jim (59:15.554)
And that's the purpose, that's the reason for getting up in the morning.

Dylan Pathirana (59:18.7)
Yeah. Yeah. And Jim, I want to know what, what legacy are you trying to leave behind? What would you like someone to say at your eulogy?

Jim (59:27.83)
It comes to the three areas that I was talking about. My family, what matters. The fact that it's good. I have contact with all my children. They've got varying degrees. Most of them are doing quite well, but I get on with them. That's really important. And they're good people. I'm really proud of what they're doing. I'm proud of how they're being as parents. I'm proud of what they're doing in terms of their jobs. My franchisees, that is something that's really important to me.

the fact that we've changed thousands of lives for the better. Now we fail a lot. We fail far too often and I always find that painful but I do know that we are hugely successful in comparison with anything else you could possibly think of in terms of getting the business. We're better than being independent and we're better than our rival franchises which is why we're doing so much better. And the third thing, obviously the biggest thing of all is my research program. If it's successful this will change the world.

This will make people's lives better and happier and more meaningful. This will change the future of society. This will help poorer people to become successful. This will help to uplift entire communities. This could have a massive effect. I know that sounds delusional and grand. What I'm saying is that that's what I'm aiming to do. And my theory suggests that it's possible to do that, to make incredible changes to the world. Now, whether I'm personally remembered or not is not the point.

Have I lived a life that's meaningful and worthwhile? And money isn't. I know I keep on looking at this as this is all about success, but I think that people narrowly, narrowly talk about money success. They don't measure it that way. I made a change last year. I put a clause in my, all my new contracts that basically said the majority share control of Jim's Group cannot be sold without the written consent of a majority of franchisees. And I've done that.

Dylan Pathirana (01:01:04.641)
Absolutely.

Jim (01:01:22.734)
Because when I'm gone, and I don't intend to retire, but when I'm no longer around, just... The thing that would be most horrifying if some grasping, greedy, vulture capitalist comes in, takes control of the gyms and rips off my franchisees. I would find that appalling. So I put this clause in to give my franchisees the veto power, and I'm also setting up a control calling board where they would elect somebody to go onto it. So I'm trying to protect them. Now when I put that clause in my contract,

My CFO at the time said to me, Jim, you know that will dramatically cut the value of your business. And I said, good, because that's what I want. Because money, personal wealth is a pathetically bad measure of success. I believe in real success.

Dylan Pathirana (01:02:00.439)
You

Dylan Pathirana (01:02:10.945)
Yeah. And on that, point of success, Jim, looking back on your journey, given your definition being about, you know, having impact on your family, your research and your franchisees. Do you feel successful?

Jim (01:02:24.974)
I'm heading in the right direction. Success is a journey, not a destination. You ever think of something as being, I'm going to get there, I'm going to achieve a certain thing, that's meaningless because you can always do better. No matter how good our service is, can always do better. I told you, 12 % of our franchisees live in the first year and about the same proportion, about 9 % would report poor income. You know what? That figure should be zero. And instead of 51 % it would

Dylan Pathirana (01:02:28.649)
Yeah, absolutely.

Dylan Pathirana (01:02:36.085)
Mm. Mm.

Jim (01:02:52.29)
Francis reporting good income, that should be 100%. Now I'll never achieve that, but what I will want to do is to get better and to improve no matter what I've done. I always want to do better and that's the journey, not the destination.

Dylan Pathirana (01:03:05.385)
Absolutely. Couldn't agree more, Jim. And it's been a fantastic conversation. We've definitely learned a lot about your journey and your kind of philosophy as well, which I really respect. But throughout our conversation, I've been trying to jot down some of the key traits, which I think build a successful life by your definition. And the first one is, think you're always curious. You've got that learning mindset. You're always learning about new things. I'll be honest with you. I never thought I would be learning about genome sequencing from

Jim's mowing, but you you are so curious and you clearly have a lot of knowledge in a lot of different areas. And I think that's an important factor. The next is you take risks and try a lot of things. You you were talking about, you tried your hand at computer stores, you tried your hand at way, like all these different opportunities. You just get in there, give things a crack and see how they go. I think that's really important and probably a differentiating factor between

you and most business owners is you're you're getting in and giving it a crack. The next one.

Jim (01:04:05.102)
But that's also where my worst failings started. Because I don't understand and I've failed at them.

Dylan Pathirana (01:04:11.327)
Yep. You learn things along the way though. And then the next one is you're very much people first, whether that's your family, your franchisees, your customers, you're always putting people and people first. And you even mentioned that, you know, a lot of the gyms group wouldn't have existed if the right people didn't come along to help set up those, those different divisions. The next one is quality driven.

I think that's a really important one. And you've got a quote which says, if you chase money first, it won't work. I'm very passionate about service to customers. And I think that's a great line. You're really pushing quality and that's why you get those customers in the first place. And to add to that list, I can't ignore this, your authenticity. You are the gym, know, like the gym that we know and that your passion to what you're doing and it's

Confessions, like infectious. it's really, I mean, we know, we see your face all the time, everywhere, right? But this is a great privilege to get to know you and understand you. That passion, like, you know, pretty much drives your business. So Jim's, like, know, authenticity again is one of the key factors of your success. And yeah, thank you, Jim. It's really, really wonderful conversation. It's like fascinating conversation.

This is more than what we expected. We were aiming to talk about the mowing, but I think we learned so much having this discussion with you.

Jim (01:05:45.934)
Very hard to get me to stick to one topic.

Dylan Pathirana (01:05:47.863)
No, but really enjoyed it. Yeah. And Jim, where can people find out a bit more information about the books that you've published?

Jim (01:05:56.782)
Jimpenman.com.au is my personal website. I send out a newsletter every month too which talks about the different things I'm learning and doing and books I'm in reading and the progress in business and my research and everything like that. Or Jims.net and then you can find the link there.

Dylan Pathirana (01:06:12.491)
Okay. All right. We'll leave a link down to that in the show notes below. Jim, thank you so much for your time. It's been a wonderful conversation.

Jim (01:06:21.294)
Good to be here.

Dylan Pathirana (01:06:22.665)
And if you guys have gotten something out of today's episode, it would mean the world if you could like and subscribe and so that we can share this message with more and more listeners. And if you want to see more of our inspirational content, you can do that over at our website, thequestforsuccesspodcast.com. And with that, we'll catch you guys in the next episode. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Jim. Thank you, wonderful.