From humble beginnings to franchise king. Guest starring Jim Penman, founder of Jim’s Group

Ange
Ring any Bells people? So are you still asking who’s Jim?

Andy
Jim is the one and only Jim Penman, founder of the Jim’s group. Think Jim’s mowing. Jim’s cleaning. Jim’s antennas and so much more.

Ange
Yeah. So excited. Launched in Australia, Jim now has over 4,600 franchises operating in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK.

Andy
Wow!

Ange
I know. So without further ado, we’d love to introduce none other than Jim Penman.

Andy
Hi Jim, and welcome to The Tradie Show.

Jim
Good to be here.

Ange
We’re super excited to have you.

Andy
Oh, we are so excited to have you. Um, it’s so good to have you here, and I know our listeners will be super excited as well.

Ange
Absolutely. So, Jim, we are in awe of the empire that you’ve created and would love to actually go right back to the beginning of when Jim’s group began. Can you share with our audience what’s your background and how did you start out in business?

Jim
Well, I, first of all, I never intended to be in business or a trade or anything. I intended to be an academic. I went to university for 10 years, gaining myself a PhD in History, but as I often say, what do you do with a PhD in History? Well, obviously you mow lawns for a living. So yes, it was actually my, well, that’s my student job. The year before I started university, I took a gap here and I started to get a little business going. I was charging a dollar 50 an hour for gardening in those days. And last time went by, I started charging a bit more. And then about 1975, I bought myself a mower and then a brush cutter. And that was my part-time job, which was great. It was getting me outside. It was good money. I actually managed to buy my first house at university, mostly from my money earnings. So that was great.

Ange
That’s amazing.

Jim
And then I finished up in 1982 with no prospect of an academic career, so I just turned my part-time gardening business into something full-time.

Andy
Well, it’s, it’s amazing how you started out, isn’t it? You know, you started with owning a mowing business, getting, I think you said a dollar 20 an hour. Was it a dollar 20? But,

Jim
uh, dollar, dollar 50 an hour.

Andy
Oh, sorry mate. I don’t wanna talk it down.

Jim
No, don’t, don’t, don’t lower my price.

Andy
Yeah. And now you’ve become one of the largest franchises in Australia. I mean, how do you go from a single mowing business to an iconic Australian brand? It’s huge.

Jim
A lot of people think it’s about having a great genius breakthrough idea. It’s nothing like that at all. It’s thousands and thousands of little decisions every day. I say to myself from my earliest days to now, how can I do it better? Now, that might mean how to turn a mower faster, how to load grass into a grass bag the quickest and most efficient way possible. Even saving one step every time you do it makes a difference. How do I delight my customers? How do I maze them? I was one of the first contractors in Australia to have a brush cutter back in the seventies.

Andy
Wow.

Jim
When they were just coming into the country. And then how do I travel between jobs more efficiently? How do I cut my travel time down? And then when I get too much work, how do I find workers? How do I control the quality of what they do? How can I advertise more effectively? You know, thousands and thousands of micro-decisions everyday of my business career over the last half century.

Ange
I love that.

Andy
That is, that is awesome. And I know tradies are out there listening now, just thinking, God, all I focus on is trying to get through the workload. You’re not even thinking of all these little things and being better and how do we better? And we know that so many tradies do. We just get bogged down with the day-to-day running of everything. We put our head in the sand and we just keep going and we can get through the work, but it’s not making us better. So I love the fact that you are thinking about everything you do in a day and how you can just get 1% improvements, which makes a huge improvement at the end.

Ange
I think the challenge we have is in trade business. I think people have that enthusiasm when they first start their business, but over the course of time, five years, 10 years, 15 years in, they get really complacent. So instead of kind of doing what you just said, Jim, which is how do I be better? How do I improve my service? How do I lean to business? They just go, I’ve just gotta get through a day. We talk about these one percenters and that’s by the sounds of it, is exactly what you’ve just spoken about. You actually just touched on a brush cutter and um, I know that you have a little bit of a story, uh, that we watched on a video not that long ago that really formed a huge part of your business ethos. Can you share that story with our listeners?

Jim
Well, what, what used to happen in the early days is that I used a wheel edger to cut the edges. Yeah, and for the mower’s trip edge, you could do a pretty good job. You cut it along there, and then you used the mow itself. Put the left hand wheel onto the concrete edge because the mowers cut clockwise and that sucks from the left. So I could do a very neat edge, but what used to frustrate me, I couldn’t do round the clothes lines. I couldn’t round the trees, the retaining walls. No customer ever, ever said to me they weren’t happy with that, but I didn’t like it cuz it wasn’t a perfect job. And you couldn’t do it. It was commercially impossible to get a pair of shoes and go around. We’d take you longer than the lawn. That was the sad fact about it. So one day I happened to be in the mamo shop, which was in Elson at that time. And there was a guy who’d been, actually decades in the business. Tom was his name, actually, as he said to me once, he said, Jim, you know, you look after your customers better and your equipment worse than any contractor I know. Cause I was always in there with something stupid happening. In one case, I actually managed to flux this guy. I brought in a problem with a mower he’d never seen in his whole life, and the, the, the wheel of the mow was stad in. He just looked at me in, in, in amazement. He said, Jimmy, how could you do that to a mower? I mean, how could you do that? Mowing a lawn? And I said, well, it wasn’t actually mowing a lawn. I actually was driving on the road and I neglected to put the tailgate of the mow property and it fell out on the road and it bounced. Oh, and the second time it happened, he actually looked at me really seriously and said, Jim, remind me never to drive behind you on the road. So anyway,

Andy
well there goes the lawn mower.

Jim
I was in this mower shop one day and he was putting my mower on his thing cuz he looked after me, it was one of his best costumes. Yeah, for obvious reasons. Yeah, and I just started wandering around the shop and in the corner there was this funny looking gadget, long pole handling the middle little engine on one end, on the other end with this plasticy thing with a bit of white cord sticking out. And I said, Tom, what’s that? He said, it’s a braco. I said, what is it? What? He says a new idea just came out from Japan, one of the first in the country. And he showed me how it worked and how you can cut the grass without rim bucking the trees. And I said, Tom, I’ve gotta have that. I had very little money in those days and I was shocked. It was more than the mower, but I had to have that gadget. And then I went out and started using it. And then I could do the job that people could not do for themselves. I could make the job perfect.

Ange
Amazing.

Andy
And that’s the trick too, isn’t it mate? You weren’t the normal mowing guy. You had the next level up and you are doing something that no one else was doing. So people in the neighborhood start talking and they go, Hey, you’ve gotta use this Jim bloke. His lunatic damages his lawn mower all the time, but God, he’s got this whipper snipper up brush gutter and he does an incredible job.

Ange
I would notice if I was your customer though, if you are not being a perfectionist, which is what I am, although I would go, you’re really lovely. You know you’re friendly when you’re here. You do a great job. But if you go that extra mile, I totally would be telling my friends about you and recommending you to my peeps.

Jim
Well, that’s what happened. People used to say things to me like, I never knew my lawn could look this good. They’d never seen it done. I’d go to a place where the nature strip overgrown and I cut it back to the concrete. People didn’t even know there was a straight line under there cuz they’d never seen it. But I gave it to me and when I finished the brush cutting, I go down the driveway and I’d get the grass and the cracks and blow it up afterwards. Look at it, it wasn’t a rational thing. That’s what I say to people. It wasn’t because I said if I do a better job, clients would like me. I just couldn’t stand the idea of not doing the best possible job. I couldn’t stand being late to a customer and letting them down. It was just a real emotional driver. And I have done the most stupid things in my business life you would not believe. I am so reckless at times. I’ve made so many bad decisions. But that absolute emotional passion, yes, for customer service is really what drove me. And then later on, of course, my passion for franchisees being successful, which is even stronger.

Andy
Yeah, mate, I know that, you know, systems are another huge part of setting up any business for success, but potentially this is even more so when you’ve got a franchise and because you need to guarantee the quality and the consistency across all your franchises. Can you tell us a little bit of how you implemented systems with the original gyms mowing business and, and then built and maintained these for all your franchise guys out there? Guys and girls.

Jim
I had to admit that when I had subbies in franchised days, most services were not very good. We used to get about, for every new job, I gave it one complaint, mostly cuz of lateness. So it was not good service. And honestly, I only really franchise in self-defense cuz a company called V I P came from Adelaide and they terrified me. I thought they would crush me dead. They had 250 franchisees. I had maybe, you know, a dozen subbies. And I actually tried to get together with them and try to help them to grow. It’s only when they said no, that I decided to try and compete with them. And even when I started, I really didn’t think that I would even catch these guys. I just wanted to survive. But look, I had one vision about that. I wanted to make a system that was so great. You had to be mad not to join it. That was just one idea. And I made really dumb mistakes. For example, these were far too low in the beginning. I actually go back to my franchisees after a while and beg them to increase their fees. Because I couldn’t survive with what I was doing. I was doing things like allowing them to decide what jobs they wanted, what suburbs, what kinds of services they were prepared to offer. And it was all very, very labor intensive. So it was, it was really quite tough, but I just wanted to make them crazy about it.

Ange
So you needed to come back to everyone offering the same or similar services. So no matter who that customer was, that rang Jim’s mowing, you knew that regardless of their geographic area, that person could service them, whereas some you were saying, were saying no, they don’t wanna do that.

Jim
Getting the level of service right was really hard and it’s been a gradual process and it’s still ongoing today. For example, when I first started off, franchisees were better than, um, my subbies for two reasons. First of all, because franchises own their own business and they have an interest in the good world. But secondly, and very important, I used to be selective. I would actually send out a potential franchisee on the road with a couple of my drives I trusted and say, are they good enough? Apart from anything else I knew if they didn’t have great customer service, they’re not likely to succeed. So I did that, and that actually immediately dropped the level of complaints quite dramatically. It’s probably about 95%. But then over time I did different things, for example, we brought training back to a single office. We had local training in the beginning. Then I bought that back in. And then the first episode of training, which I gave, we had just had one this week actually, and I got a two hour talk. Most of it’s really, really passionate, specific about customer service, and they get really drilled, indoctrinated. And we know that works during lockdown. We had a situation where we couldn’t give ’em that training. They actually had to do it on video. A lot of them didn’t. And you could tell because the levels of customer service in so many guys were so terrible, we actually had to bring them back to retrain to show them how to do it properly.

Andy
Wow. And I think one of the things you don’t know, Jim, we haven’t talked about this yet, but my brother-in-law, he owns a Jim’s mowing franchise, um, up here in Sydney. And he raves about you, raves about the company, and raves about everything about the franchise, which I know a lot of the times you hear franchise people that are, are doing a franchise and there’s normally complaints, but he’s dead set a raving fan and financially doing really, really well.

Ange
I wanna ask you a question specifically on that. What’s the type of person that chooses to join a Jim’s franchise?

Jim
It’s wildly variant. We’ve got people from very top level corporate jobs, and we’ve got people who’ve got very pedestrian backgrounds. They’ve been, you know, working behind the countering shops and so forth. It’s all over. Salespeople tend to do particularly well. What you tend to find is the level of income tends to reflect the previous job. There’s somebody from a corporate or a sales background who’s been used to being fairly high driving. They tend to do really, really well. Somebody from a normal background will do. Okay. Um, the great majority in our survey, something like 97% reported good or satisfactory income. There was, um, I’m sorry, 93%, 7% poor. So not everybody does, but most of them do. I would love to say that they all make a heap more money, and quite sometimes they do. But in fact, what tends to happen with time, They tend to actually wanna make the same money as in their previous job, but work a lot less hours.

Andy
Get the lifestyle back.

Jim
Yeah. Same time with their kids. It’s the biggest single thing they say. The great thing about the franchise, I don’t make any more money than I used to in my corporate gig, but when I used to go, I did a long commute to the city. I was away. I hardly slot in my kids except on weekends. And then I was too tired. These days, I see my kids growing up. I have breakfast with them. I pick ’em up from school. I go to their sporting events. And don’t make any more money, but that’s the big, big benefit.

Ange
So I’d say quite a lot of trade business owners out there have actually thought about maybe franchising at some stage, but most wouldn’t actually know where to start. So that being said, what would you recommend the average trade business owner do or look to perhaps implement if maybe they wanted to franchise down the track?

Jim
Well, look,

Ange
let out your secrets, Jim.

Jim
To be honest, I don’t suggest that you try and compete with me in the core area that we do because we are very good at what we do. Just to give you some idea, we spend something like $5 million a year on software development. Yeah. We have characteristics. I would not be one to compete with myself in the area that we operate. Where the opportunity comes is where you want to do something a little bit different that we don’t cover, and there are plenty of opportunities out there for that. People are starting all the time. In fact, we actually have an opening. People who wanna come to us and who wanna start a business in an area we don’t cover. Can just start with us, very little cost up front. We provide all the training, everything they want. And by the way, they go through all the training, the franchisee training, the franchisor training, and they decide not to go with this. They can take the lunch and do it themselves. And it does happen. Just not too long ago, somebody who had been in franchise or training just rang me up and said, Jim, I just wanted to tell you, um, I just signed my first franchise. And I said, oh, that’s great, I didn’t think you started with us. He said, no, I started independent, but wow. Thanks for all you told me. It was going great. So one of the things I’d say to be sneaky is if you wanna start your own business, pretend you wanna start a Jim’s franchise, do all that training and then go do it yourself.

Andy
Yeah, yeah. Well, I have to say, Jim, you’ve definitely helped thousands and thousands of tradies out there with your knowledge, and yes, you’ve been very open and free with that.

Ange
Get a good start in life, right?

Andy
Yeah, exactly. And just to steer the conversation just a little bit away from business, I noticed that the Jim’s group are massive advocates for mental health. I just think this is so important for everyone these days in the trade industry and you know, the old school way of just sucking it up and drinking a cup of concrete, mate. You know, it’s all changed, but can you give us a bit of a rundown of what the Jim’s group does to advocate mental health awareness?

Jim
Yeah. Look, first of all, it is a really, really huge issue with us for all kinds of reasons. Let me give you something too. We’ve just, just last year we had a really dreadful accident. One of our guys actually died on the job. It was from improper use of a chainsaw because the mowing guy had a chainsaw holding it one hand. It came back smash ink. He killed, he died, and that’s tragic. It’s awful for him. It’s awful for his family. But do you know, we work with chainsaws, we work with mowers, we work with machinery, we work at heights. That’s the first fatality we’ve had in 33 years. But do you know how many franchisees have committed suicide

Andy
Within your group?

Jim
Within your group? We’ve had franchisees, even front franchise or committed suicide. I dunno how many, but I do hear about this from time to time. And I also know the kinds of problems people have with metal in us because it’s one of the main reasons people failed. They actually have mental problems. So we are fanatical about that and we are doing more and more with time. So for example, one of the biggest things, and I would say this to any tradie at all, be part of a group. Go to meetings. If you’re an independent, join your local group. There is always, like an independent noise association. Join them. If you’re a franchise, of course, come to meetings, regular meetings. We’ve actually figured out that there’s an optimum number of meetings, which is one every six weeks. If you have more than that, it doesn’t help. Less than that, you don’t do so well. Meetings are a great opportunity to build relationships with other franchisees who are in the same situation. You go along, you’ve got a problem. You, you’re downcast, and you talk to somebody who’s a five year veteran who’s making, you know, quarter, a million dollars a year. And he says, I have had the problem in the past and, and this is what I did, and that’s how I got through it. You’ll do well. And they, they encourage each other and they, and they meet up at the tip for mowing guys especially. And they get to be friends. They go to barbecues, each other’s place. We actually try and have meals at, uh, meetings too. These days. So that’s very, very important. Be part of a group who actually are sharing your situation. Other things too, obviously what we have is a mentoring program. Our franchise laws are required to ring franchisees at least once a month, and ideally more often, even weekly, especially for new guys. Ring them up. Don’t just be ready to take their calls, but to ring them proactively. What else do we do? We had a terrible situation that just happened about three years ago in Perth. One of our guys killed his three little girls and his wife, and then his mother-in-law. He killed them. And that wasn’t to do with his business. He had some personal demons. I went across there to speak to the franchisees in Perth and they were really, really distraught, unhappy. Most of ’em, didn’t notice the guy directly, but he, it’s kind of like it’s in the family with us.

Ange
Association.

Jim
That they were there and we had a meeting in this golf club and, and it was really emotional and I just said to them, guys, what can we do to reduce the chances of this happening again? And they come up with all kinds of ideas. One of them was that we give out franchisees a list of emergency numbers in a fridge magnet. Now things like fire and stuff like that too, but then different mental health numbers, we give it to them. We did that as a result. We still do that. That’s been great. They suggested that we needed to have more training. So all my franchisors now go through mental health training, including myself. I’ve done it myself. We’re actually shown how to look for these problems and then what to do with them. We’ve also, one of the suggestions that came up at the time, this really moved me. I mean, it was a terrible experience, but this was very moving. One of the people said there, What if we set up a program of volunteer mentors that’s franchisees who are not paid, but are ready to talk to any franchisee who wants someone to talk, to a friendly ear. And I said to them, that’s a lot to ask. Would anybody be interested in doing such a thing? And most of the people in that room put up their hands, most of them. I was very, very, very moved by that. I thought, isn’t that wonderful? Giving up their time. Such things. Since then, we’ve also employed a psychologist who’s paid for by Jim’s group. Anybody wants to talk to a professional psychologist without charge. It’s all by phone of course, cuz they’re all over the country. But you can, you can do that. So a whole stack of things that we do.

Ange
That’s amazing.

Jim
You’ve gotta be better.

Ange
Where this all comes down to for me is that at the end of the day, we’re all just humans and humans actually need connectivity. That’s what we are here for, is to ensure that we make connections with other people and encourage to actually talk about what’s actually going on inside your life. So, Just to add to that, just to change tact just a little bit, I know that you definitely have a passion for living a really happy and healthy life, just in general. And we often hear tradies that are chasing this dream of success, but not really living that healthy life, which is one of the reasons why they actually became a tradie in the first place. They give us excuses like, I just don’t have time, or I’m just too busy. And I think you are a great example of having the best of both worlds. So what do you think is the key to living a long and healthy life whilst still being successful in trade?

Jim
One of the best, there’s a book I’ve just finished called Happy Money and I, a number of things I’ve read are the same way it talks about what brings happiness. And a very crucial thing is it’s not what people think. People have the idea, if I had more money, I had a better house, a better car, better clothes, better holidays, I’d be better off. In actual fact, things like having a better car or a bigger house has a zero relationship to happiness. It has no effect at all. You might think it will, but it doesn’t. Mostly because it’s competitive. You compete against somebody else and there’s always somebody richer. I mean even, even Bill Gates has Jeff Bezos maybe now, been shot at.

Andy
Yeah, that’s right.

Jim
But what actually works is experiences. Experiences are better than things. And experiences are things like having a holiday with your family, going out to a restaurant with friends, those kinds of things. Things that you do. But you know the number one thing they’ve found this, people might find this very strange. The number one thing they’ve found that brings happiness in spending money is to give it away to a cause that you are personally involved in. These are scientists who actually look at how you spend money. I’ll just give you an example. There’s one particular guy in Adelaide who works fairly limited hours. I think he works about three days a week. He’s a mowing franchisee, but he makes all the money he needs, and do you know what he does with the rest of his time? He goes out and works with the homeless. He says, I’m somebody who goes out and they listen to them and find out what they want and what they need, and then get them help. Isn’t that an amazing life?

Ange
What an amazing human.

Jim
What a great man. What a great life.

Andy
Yeah, it’s amazing and, and I know when we talk about charities for us that’s something we wanted to give a lot back. And we’ve just joined with Gus Worland, with Gotcha4Life, which is all about mental fitness and we’re doing a lot of stuff with him. With our Lifestyle Tradie group as well. But yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. I would say when you look at all the tradies out there at the moment, majority of the ones that I, that are so bogged down, they’re so mentally drained and they’re not giving them their chance to have the lifestyle and as you said, go on these holidays, hang out with friends, do a bit of exercise, get to the gym, push some weights, do that stuff cuz the ones that are doing that, are the ones that I see that are, are getting that success. So I agree with everything you say there.

Ange
And I think burnout, which is a common conversation that we have with trade business owners, you only end up there because you’ve not given yourself even just 20 minutes in a day just to take a breath. You know, go and see the sky, move your body. Just constantly have some sort of movement and do something for yourself that, you know, isn’t like trying to do something better with the business or being entrenched with your kids or whatever. Whatever that looks like. So some sort of routine, I suppose, every single day to ensure that you do something for yourself is important.

Jim
And also very important to break every single week.It’s really a bad idea to work seven days a week. I was talking to a guy once who chopped firewood. Now firewood is a job where you can exactly identify how much work you’ve done today. Because it’s done by weight. And he said, look, there are some weeks where I worked six days and some weeks where I worked seven days, and he said, there’s a 15% difference in the earnings between those two kinds of weeks. Which of course you think logically speaking, seven days, he bakes 15% more. But he said, no, it’s the other way around the weeks that I worked six days, I actually got 15% more done than I did seven days.

Ange
Interesting.

Jim
So taking time off is really, really important.

Ange
Not just for your body, but for your mind.

Jim
Yes.

Ange
It’s both, isn’t it?

Jim
It’s so important. Look, one of the greatest stories I did, and this is what I was talking to, if somebody’s a 10 year veteran, when my people get to 10, 15, 20, 25 years, I give him a call just to see him. One of the things I asked him, what were you doing beforehand? What it’s like, and this guy told me he was a supermarket manager. And he used to work very long hours and he had a four year old son. One morning, this little boy said to him, daddy, I wish you could have breakfast with us. And he said he drove to work that day and his tears were streaming down his face and he got to work and he quit and he bought a Jim’s Mowing franchise. And he said the difference made in the last 10 years has been phenomenal. I said, have you ever thanked your son for that comment? And he said so often, again and again, it changed my life. You see, his income is no better, but he’s seen this little boy grow up and there’s nothing that could actually make up for that.

Ange
You only get one life, right? So make sure you live it well.

Jim
Chasing money for its own sake is not a life. And I can tell you too, as far as I’m concerned, I know I’m successful, I’m wealthy in people’s terms, but we live a very ordinary life. My kids have this sort of period to understand that we are rich. Where’s the mansion? Where’s the luxury car? I drive a $10,000 car. And I dress chaley and you can see what I dress. This is me. We don’t have expensive holidays. We don’t go to chalets. We don’t live the high life. We’d have a very new life. What I do is contribute to the research foundation, which is based on my PhD research, which is looking for cures for things like mental illness, particularly things like drug addiction and so forth. That’s my purpose in life.

Andy
Mate, that’s unreal.

Ange
I love that.

Andy
Love it. Amazing.

Jim
And I’m a happy man. I really am very happy because my life is full of meaning. And it’s full of relationships, and I see my kids. I drive my kids to school. I actually had to drive just before I got to this thing. I had to drive to go to school to get my son his bathing costume, which a little brat forgot. How could I do that if I was working a corporate job in the city?

Andy
I will have to say, Jim, that I know a lot of people that know you and everyone says the exact same thing. What an absolute superstar you are. So, we are looking at you now and you are a very happy man. So I love the fact that, you know, there’s money there, but you don’t have to necessarily show it.

Ange
I love that you are grounded.

Andy
Yeah. Amazing things. So what I’m gonna do, Jim, is we play this game, we do it with all our guests. I’m gonna fire off three rapid fire questions. You’re gonna have between 15 and 30 seconds to answer them, aren’t you ready?

Jim
Yep.

Andy
Mate, so we know you are a history lover. If you could have dinner with anyone dead or alive, who would that be and why?

Jim
I’d have dinner with Yo Acidities or some from somebody from classical Athens. I love Athens’ history. And I’m talking, I wanna hear their music. They were so creative anyway. What was their music like? But we have no record of that. I have to think ancient Greek, which I don’t currently, but I’d learn it.

Andy
Beautiful. Number two, what is the best piece of advice, business related or not that you personally have ever received?

Jim
Put God first.

Andy
Put God first.

Jim
Yeah, that’s right.

Andy
Very good.

Jim
I’m sorry that’s not relevant to everybody, but it’s relevant to me.

Andy
No, that’s it. And the questions are asked directly to you and, and, and that’s exactly it. So mate, we love that. We love that. So the Jim’s logo, most people know it out there, don’t they? It’s a picture of yourself. You are not necessarily sporting a beard anymore. Is there any chance of a comeback?

Jim
No.

Andy
Why?

Jim
The reason that I shaved my beard off is because I was 40 years old. I was single. Not my desire. I’m not a used person to live with and the beard was starting to go great. At that age, you do not look any older than you do. If I grew a beard now, I’d be like Santa Claus, wouldn’t I logo at all?

Andy
Uh, that is absolutely amazing. Jim, thank you very much for entering those.

Ange
We’re so honored to have you on our show today. And no doubt there are plenty of trade business owners that are so excited to have heard you speak about your journey. And truthfully, what’s important from the beginning of Jim’s mowing to the creation of Jim’s group. And how humble you are despite your success. Thank you so much for sharing your story.

Andy
Yeah, and I just wanna say you are an absolute superstar, mate. I know I’ve banged on a bit about that through this episode, but, um, what a lovely guy, anyone that gets a chance to meet Jim, make sure you do, uh, a real big thank you from all of us, mate.

Jim
Yeah, you’re welcome, anytime.

Andy
That was absolutely awesome. You know what? He’s such a great guy and it’s such an iconic business. I’m sure if any of our listeners were thinking about franchising, they’ve definitely got some ripper tips out of that.

Ange
Yeah, I agree. Even if franchising doesn’t seem like your gig or you are just looking to scale up or sell up, you can still apply a lot of the learnings that Jim spoke about today. Because it’s all about setting up the right foundation so that you do have that freedom to choose the end outcome.

Andy
For sure. Well, you know what? That’s it from us. So, Ange and I will catch you all next week.

Ange
See you then.