World’s Largest Home Service Franchise
I was driving back from a nice Sushi lunch today and traveling behind a new Jim’s Cleaning van. I hadn’t noticed Jim’s cleaning before in my town, but this pricked my memory to check on how Jim’s is performing in general.
Jim’s is performing pretty well by the look of things; it is celebrating 25 years in business and is now the World’s largest home service franchise, operating in 4 countries, with a total of 2635 Jim’s Franchisees.
The Jim’s story begins with Jim Penman, who started mowing lawns to pay his way through University. What is interesting is that Jim has literally stumbled his way into the business he now commands. He appears ot have never had any direct plan or goal for a long time, but still the business grew all around him.
Jim’s dream of being an Academic was knocked on the head when his thesis was rejected. With no job, all he had to fall back on was his lawn mowing.
“I was basically broke, I owed $30,000 and had crappy equipment,” he recalls. “So I got hold of $24 and had some leaflets printed and I shoved them into letter boxes.”
That was Christmas 1982.
“For a long time I never saw it was something with great potential, even when I started franchising, I was thinking about selling the business,” he admits. “I tried a whole lot of other things I thought would be more promising such as a computer shop and a lawn mower shop but it was mowing that I knew really.”
“And gradually after a decade I eventually said wow there is some potential in this.”
The real push came when VIP Home Services moved into his areas. It gave him the impetus he needed to concentrate on expanding the business.
As with the Jim’s mowing, the move into more diversified areas was not carefully planned. He could see the fit between mowing and cleaning, but thought the logo gave the wrong impression. He set up a new franchising company called Sunlite and sold a couple of franchises. The business failed; it had no brand.
Eventually, someone came along and convinced Penman that Jim’s cleaning could work and it did. Jim was proved wrong, but this lead to the expansion into other areas. Jim insists that the driving force for the expansion is the people who come to him wanting to use the Jim’s brand in a new area.
JIm says he has very poor business skills and is a poor salesman. His story would seem to indicate that he lacks planning and is an accidental entrepreneur, but this tag would be deceptive; you simply cannot build a business of this size and maintain growth over 25 years without having some ability.
Jim Penman comes across as an honest person who has a good rapport with his Franchisees and has a knack for surrounding himself with the type of people who make both their and his business successful.
Any the final question, is he making a lot of money?
the Jim’s Group has mowed 30 million lawns for one in five Australian households, cleaned 2.5 million houses, built 200,000 fences, installed 300,000 antennas, washed 100,000 dogs and more. 4000 people worldwide work in the franchise group which now has an annual turnover of around $200 million, but the margins are terrible.
Penman has further expansion plans, particularly in South Africa and is looking at selling up to a quarter of the business to the right business partner to fund the endeavor. That doesn’t sound too accidental to me. [Source]
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I was on Yahoo and found your blog. Read a few of your other posts. Good work. I am looking forward to reading more from you in the future.
Tom Stanley