The Real Franchise – Ep15 – She’ll be right mate…Or will it be? The real reason you should consider a franchise network

Watch the full episode of The Real Franchise Episode 15 – here

Rhiannon Hello and welcome back to The Real Franchise, a video series designed to deliver real information, real answers, and real insights into franchising. This series is brought to you by James Home Services Australia. I’m the CEO and Justin is one of our owners and our head of new businesses. Together, we’re going to tackle all of the big topics in this series unscripted, unplanned, and totally unfiltered.

There’s no sales. There’s no fluff. We’re just going to give you information straight up Today’s topic is all about why join a franchise. It is so easy to go out and start a business on your own. However, caveat that we so easy. There are some pretty wild stats around failure of businesses in Australia. So let’s talk about that today.

The stats are pretty insane. Justin and joining a franchise network offers a whole host of benefits. And there’s some really common ones that every franchisor will reel off to you at the drop of a hat. Things like training, support, coaching, your equipment provided, branding, reputation, yada yada yada blah blah blah. We’ve heard them all before, and probably for anybody watching this video you do when you research, you have heard it all before.

So Justin, today in this chat I wanted to go a little bit deeper. I wanted to have a conversation about why join a franchise network, but here are the reasons people don’t talk about here’s what franchisor aren’t talking about. So it’s a huge topic. It’s a big question. Let’s dive straight in. Why? Instead of going it on your own, why would you consider joining a franchise network to start your small business in this country?

Justin It’s a really good question, and it’s one that I think. I think naturally as Aussies, we have this perception that, you know, it’s the pinnacle of you’ve made it if you have your own business. And we all want to have it. And it’s I think it’s fantastic. It’s a great thing about this country is, is people are encouraged to, you know, go out on your own and, and and we have this I was thinking about this morning.

We have this innate I think as Aussies that she’ll be right mate. You know i’ll sort it out. You know how hard can it be

Rhiannon an Aussie battler mentality. I’ll just figure it out. We’ll make it work. You know. She’ll be right, mate.

Justin Yep. And you know, your family and friends and colleagues. Everyone will be patting you on the back, congratulating you, wishing you all the best. Yeah. And sadly, you know, the stats are over 80% crash and burn. Oh, but that won’t be me. You know I’ll be different. Stats are stats. You know, it’s. And. And I was thinking of, you know, we’ve just been watching the Olympics and Paralympics and it’s just fantastic.

And I’m thinking of tennis players like Roger Federer and those sorts of guys. And and they had the best of the best, you know, the absolute elite in their field. And we all accept that they all employ a coach to work with them. Right. And that’s just we accept that. Yet we turn our gaze to having a business.

And I know I can work it out on my own. And I guess what I try and encourage people is, even if you are the best of the best in your field. The best of the best still have a coach working with them, and I would say that’s why they’re the best. You know, I was watching yesterday, there’s this great young Sudanese man, Aussie, Aussie Sudanese who’s just breaking all the records.

And in the last 12 months, he’s, he’s hundred, 200 metre a time. It’s just dropped significantly. You know, he had that basic talent. But why is he getting faster and faster? Because he’s working with a coach who’s improving. And you know, his skill level is getting better. So sorry. Long is a long answer here, Rhiannon

but to me, fundamentally, without doing all this sales pitch on why our franchise is the best, why people should join a good franchise is because of those key reasons. You might think it’s easy. How hard can running a lawn business be? How hard can running a cleaning business be? Well, the reality is, most don’t make it. The vast majority don’t.

And the reason you should join a good franchise is because of all the things you mention. Yes, the support, the training and all that sort of stuff. And I think I encourage anyone to sit down and work out the cost per year of all those things that a franchise will deliver you versus the cost of potential failure

and I think it’s, that’s why you should join a franchise because you’re minimizing your risk and you’re availing yourself to help and knowledge. Because I think most of us we’re blind to where we don’t know what we don’t know, and we charge ahead and then wonder why it’s so tough.

Rhiannon Yeah, it is tough. It’s so tough out there. Starting a business is hands down one of the hardest things that you’ll do. And so many people do go out there thinking that they can do it on their own and they can figure it out, and they don’t necessarily need the support and look for for 20%. That’s true. They make it work.

The 20% that don’t fail, that make it work, they they go out and do it. But I can also guarantee that there’s a high portion of that 20% who do actually go out and get their own business coaches and who surround themselves with teams of professionals to help them on their way. You know, the ones that just go out without a plan, without branding, without a reputation, starting from scratch.

No real experience in business management, business operation. It’s such a hard slog. And unless you’re prepared to surround yourself with a team of experts to help you along the way, it is impossible. And you slide into that 80% that within the first couple of years, fail in their business, cost of failure is significant. I would be interested to see some stats in Australia on the cost of small business failure.

The other thing about the analogy back to, elite athletes, you know, identifying that they are the best in their field, but they have a coach, they also have an entire team around them. You know, the coach is one person and they’re one person in an entire team, you know, and the team, you know, it could be the Australian swimming team, right?

They have a team of support. So yeah, they might have their individual coach. They also have a plethora of other supporting individuals, all professionals in their field designed to support these individuals to get to their peak. Maybe an analogy that might even be more relevant is, is like a football team or a soccer team.

You have you lead coach, but you also you have business managers in that environment. You have, you have individuals that are skilled in supporting you in mental health, in physical health, you have doctors on board. You have people who can help with massage and injury. You have people who help you with diet scheduling, people who help you with your basic life admin with your finances, that your your sports person.

You’re an elite athlete, but you have a team of people tens and tens and tens of people around you every single day supporting you to be the best that you can be. And joining a franchise network is that it’s being an elite athlete. It’s knowing that this is what you want to do, and you bring the determination to the table.

You bring the skills, you bring the mindset, you bring the passion, and then you allow the team of people around you to support you and enable you to take that, to take what you bring to the table and elevate it to the best possible version of yourself that you can be. That is the reason why you would join a franchise network over going it alone.

Because if you’re alone, you got no one. You got no team. Yeah, and if you are alone and you’re smart enough to realize that you need a team, you’ve then got to go and put your own team together. I once had somebody explain to me that in business as, as a business leader, we’ve probably all heard the saying, it’s it’s lonely at the top, you know.

And that’s referring to senior and executive level, executive level management positions. You know, CEO say senior management saying it’s lonely at the top. You know, it’s a hard slog and it’s lonely. And you don’t necessarily have someone to bounce off because everybody is coming to you. You’re responsible for solving the problems. And I once had someone explain to me that in those positions, what you need to do is you need to put together your own board of directors.

You need to have a team of people around you, not necessarily in your organization. In fact, outside of your organization, people who you can go and talk to about what’s happening in your professional career and you can get their guidance and support. You’re surrounding yourself with a team of people more knowledgeable than you that you can lean on for support a franchise network is the same, you surrounding yourself with a team of people more knowledgeable than you that you can lean on for support.

Justin That’s such a good point. So I just want to jump in there because you’ve just hit on a really good point. So if you’re watching this and you think, yes, I’m one of the 20%, I’m in that group that will succeed right? I would say the only way you will succeed is by doing exactly what you said. Going and finding experts to support you.

Coaches, accountants, good people like that, the challenges is you’re going to be working in a specific field, right. And you have to work hard and it takes a while to find people can actually give you really good, sound advice, like I have. Over the years, I have had so many people get advice from people in another industry who are really good in their field, and giving people advice that is irrelevant or not wise for what they actually doing, and you have to risk then trying to find.

So one of the other answers of why do you want a franchise if it’s a good franchise? They have quality support, knowledgeable in the industry. You’re looking at, and if you take that guidance and if you work with their system, you’ve got that. Like you said, those individuals you have source people who are experts. And it’s worth that’s and that’s the reason to join rather than having to do the hard work and maybe find a group of experts to support you to succeed.

You’ve already got that in a good franchise.

Rhiannon Yeah. Look, in my professional career, I’ve built my board of directors, right? I’ve got people that I can go to and that I chat to about different elements of my life, both professionally and personally. I think that’s really important as a very, you know, as any high functioning individual and anyone looking at being a business owner, you need to be or you need to become a high functioning individual.

I’m not now just simply talking about you CEOs and your senior execs. If you want to be a business owner, you need to be or become a high functioning individual. And it’s taken me the best part of a decade to build my own personal board of directors, because I was doing it on my own. You join a franchised network and we’ve done the hard work for you.

We found all those people. They’re part of our head office team, and we found all those people in our own network. You know, we’ve we we’ve we have curated for you your coaching team. And they are experts in their field. They’re experts in this industry. They come with each each of our business coaches has minimum one decade of experience in in their roles.

You know, I thought about this the other day, actually, I was reflecting on the experience of our head office team. I was writing a blog post, and I was writing out about everybody’s experience. There’s no one with less than a decade of experience in their role. In fact, the least qualified person in this organization is me. I have, I don’t have, I have, I have 10 years experience in senior management, but I don’t have ten years experience in being CEO.

So the least qualified person is me, which is quite hilarious. But I think, you know, means that we can be agile and bring different perspectives. And you know, so that’s really healthy. But for our franchisees, they can be absolutely certain that the person giving them guidance and support and being their cheerleader and their gentle nudge in the right direction and their coaching and support team, they are so experienced and we’ve curated that for you.

I was chatting the other day to a friend. She is, she’s a vendor in the wedding industry, and that’s a really hard slog. And she’s gone out on her own and she’s a new business owner, and she’s quite young, and I really take my hat off to her because she has got so much initiative. She’s one of the 20% who said, you know what I’m going to do this and I’m going to do it on my own, and I’m going to figure this out and I’m going to make it work.

However, a couple of months in, she realized it was really hard, and she went and she found herself a business coach. She’s now paying a business coach to give her guidance and advice. However, the real kicker is that when I caught up with her last, she’s moved on from her original business coach and she’s now selected, and she’s working with a new business coach because the first business coach wasn’t working.

You know, they weren’t giving her what she needed. They weren’t on call to her and she really wanted. She’s brand new in this industry, and she really wanted somebody who could be on call. You know, if she has a situation, she wanted to be able to pick up the phone and get some advice pretty much instantly. You know, she wanted to be she’s progressive.

She wants to see things moving in her business. If she’s got a question, she wants it answered so she can deal with it, move through that get that customer, lock that job down and keep moving. And she just found that the business coach she was originally working with just wasn’t giving her that level of responsiveness that she needed.

And so she’s moved to another one because the original one wasn’t doing what she wanted. And I just thought, oh, this is what we do in our network. We give you someone at your disposal who is an expert, who is responsive. It’s their job to be responsive. It’s their job to train you, to coach you, to guide, to support you, to be your cheerleader, to be your everything that you need, but to tailor what you need to your actual needs.

Because the other thing that I was sort of thinking when I was chatting with her was she was sort of telling me where some of her pinch points and challenges were in a business, and I was just thinking from what she was talking about with a business coach, it didn’t sound like they were really addressing those things because they’re a business coach and they have set services that they deliver.

Yes. And they weren’t fully tailoring that to what she needed. They weren’t actually listening to her. And I just thought, oh my goodness, tick again to us, because in my head I’m just going we do this way tailor to what our business owners need. No. It’s another really key point is that when you join a franchised network and a good one and there’s a difference, there’s lots of average ones.

There’s also lots of really good ones. You want to make sure you’re doing your due diligence and you’re joining a good franchise network that a good franchise network will tailor their support to what you need, and you often don’t know what you need. And it’s sometimes confronting, but really healthy to be challenged in a constructive way. And a good franchise network will do that.

They will encourage you to step outside of that comfort zone. I want to talk a little bit about mindset. It’s so much a part of being a business owner. What role do you think mindset plays and what do you think a good franchise network should do? That going out on your own just doesn’t do. When it comes to getting in the right mindset for being a business owner,

Justin I think mindset, attitude, discipline, however you want to talk about it is the key. It is the single biggest thing to being successful in business. You know, people go, oh, it depends on the economic climate or, you know, the customer or demand or no if you have the right mindset, all those things are secondary issues. And that’s where a good business coach comes in.

You know, I think the breakthroughs that I know I’ve had in working with people and my own personal breakthroughs haven’t been something magical breakthrough in a business sense. It’s been getting a better mindset, you know, getting more discipline for argument’s sake or getting the mindset that, wait a second, I’m responsible for my success. So if things aren’t working, it’s up.

It’s me. Right? And unless I think I’m a business owner, is prepared to have that attitude, they’re never really going to make it because there’s always a or it’s some, some other fault. It’s because of this or because of that. I hear that every day. We call it in our network. We call that rationalization. You know, the reality is if it’s not working, it’s my fault.

What have I got to do to make it work? That’s a winning mindset in business and in your business coach. Any good business coach, that should be the first thing. That will be the first thing a good business coach is working on. Where’s your head at.

Rhiannon And then helping you with strategies to get into that correct mindset. It’s also about making sure that your mindset switches if you’ve been an employee all your life. This is what people don’t tell you, right? We should rename this series The stuff People Don’t Actually Tell You about starting a damn business. Here’s another one. The mindset of someone who’s been an employee all their life is I show up at 9 a.m. in the morning, I do my work, I answer to my boss, I fulfill my pd.

I go home at 5 p.m. and every Tuesday that business transfers make X amount of dollars for my time. You know, it’s not a great deal of stress in that from a financial sense, because you know, you know what your cash flow is, you know what money’s coming to you and you just kind of kick back. You do your role and the money comes into your account.

There’s a really massive shift when you become your own business owner, because now the person responsible for making sure that money goes into your account is not your boss, it’s you. And there’s a mindset shift, the most powerful mindset shift that needs to occur in most people is identifying that. And then once they’ve identified the fact that they they can’t just show up at not from 9 to 5 anymore.

If you just show up, it’s not enough. You have to actually take control of what’s happening during those hours, and you’ve got to sway your activities to ensure that you’re collecting revenue in your business. You’re responsible for that once someone identifies it and then just accepts that responsibility wholeheartedly and says, righto, it’s up to me and it’s so powerful.

We’ve watched this time and time again people making that switch, and it is like a light bulb and it’s almost instant that, you know, their their business and their revenue increases, that that shift in mindset from, oh, oh, this is my responsibility. Okay. Well, if this is my responsibility, then I’m going to go out there and I’m going to get it.

Justin Yeah.

Rhiannon It’s the most powerful thing that we witness occur. I want to just touch on for a second something that’s taboo in franchising. We don’t talk about the fact that if you join a franchise, success isn’t guaranteed. No one’s out there talking about it. There are failures in every franchise network. There are failures. And any franchise or who tells you that they have 100% success rates lying to you.

We don’t. We have failures and the failures, they’re the ones that don’t accept the responsibility and the ownership. They’re the ones that don’t garner that. This has got to be me, aren’t they? That you know that

Justin absolutely. Yes. Yes. Every single time. And it’s. You and I were talking about this before we started recording. It’s so frustrating. Each. You just want to be honest. You want to shake people sometimes it’s like, for goodness sake. But it’s their business. It’s their life. That’s the beauty of having your own business. It’s your decision. And and sadly, it is up to us to make that shift, that employee mentality.

You nailed it. That is so much Monday. I had a lady called really keen to join us and she was really switched on, grilled me with questions, really good questions. I wanted to know this, this, this, this. And we’re working through those. But it came to the point of the training and the fact she was all love the training.

And then the question was, so how do I get paid for that? And I was like, what do you mean? And she’s going, well, I’m going to be working for four days and learning skills and all that well, and you’re not going to pay me.

And that there became for her what not this isn’t for me.

Rhiannon wow Justin I’m going, but wait a second. This is your business. You’re getting training for your business and and the mentality you just. She had a dead set employee mentality.

Rhiannon Yeah, that’s absolutely an employee mentality isn’t it. So if I spend time doing something for X company then I’m to be reimbursed for that. Whereas what we’re saying and what we’re talking about is you’ve got to flip that. You’ve got to either have already flipped that in your head, or you’ve got to be prepared for us to challenge you and and help you to flip that mindset, because you’ve now got to see it as I’m making an investment in my future revenue, that’s what it is.

Her time, that training portion that we would do, you know, it’s three days of intense, intense business management training. It’s been then four days of intense practical training. And then it’s a 12 week ongoing training, a coaching program that time. That’s really interesting. I’ve it’s such an interesting way to look at it, isn’t it? Gosh, it just highlights the point that we’re talking about.

Justin Absolutely. Absolutely

Rhiannon Yes. Well goodness. You know, you’ve been we’ve been doing this so long and we we still come across, really interesting cases where, people have got certain thought processes about something. And that’s fascinating because really, what you’d love to be able to help that individual to understand is that that time is an investment in you. It’s an investment in your business and your success.

Can we help you to change that perspective that you’ve got? Because this is really critical. If you can’t move your mindset from employee to business owner, then you’re just never going to take ownership in the way that you need to take ownership. I want to sort of bring this back full circle. We’ve we’ve sort of deviated down a few different paths.

And it’s been it’s been really interesting. But just to remind our listeners that really what we’re talking about is the stuff franchisors don’t actually identify as the reasons why you would join a franchise network instead of going out on your own. And to summarize, you know, we launched that stat at the beginning of the chat, which was and I’m sure most people have heard it, you know, if you’re thinking about going into business, you’ve done your research, you’ve probably heard 80% of small businesses in this country fail in the first 3 to 5 years.

I’ve personally been involved in, government funded programs that small business support and I have co run a program delivered across northern Australia to support small businesses in the tourism industry. So one industry covering just northern Australia. And I was across the budget, we controlled the budget. I’m not going to share numbers because it’s not appropriate, but we’re talking we’re talking hundreds of millions of investment in just three years alone.

for half of Australia in just one industry to support small businesses because it’s so hard and because without that support there, they don’t have their coaching team around them. You know, our role, our role was to identify where they were having challenges and then to link them up with a particular coach in our network and then help them to work with that coach in a way that increased their business.

When you joined a franchise network, that’s what we do. That’s what we offer. That’s part and parcel of what you get. Anyone out there going franchise fees are a ripoff anyone out there feeling skeptical as to why franchise fees are charged in the first place? This is why. Because we curate a team of professionals to support you to be the best version of yourself and the best business owner that you can possibly be.

That’s why a franchise network is such a great decision. Alongside going it on your own.

Justin Yeah, and can I just add on to that then to be successful as a franchisee, you have to have the mindset to accept that help.

Rhiannon Yeah. Yeah you do.

Justin Yeah.Because the ones that I see in our network and other networks that struggle and fail have not been prepared to accept that help. It’s, if this is my business. Leave me alone. I know what I’m doing. And it’s like, well, why do you want to franchise? And, you know, you need help. We all need help.

I need help, yeah. You know, we both still meet with coaches and things like that to help us and improve our skills. Yeah.

Rhiannon That’s exactly right. I mean, just a couple of weeks ago, we engaged, professional coach to come in and to actually coach our business coaches and you and I, you know, our senior management team on how to be effective coaches with our franchisees. So we’re still getting advice and guidance, and we’re paying heaftily for it because that’s what you gotta do.

You’ve got to continually challenge yourself to develop your skills and have that open mindset to I can always learn more. I can always be better. I can always do better. You know, we always we do the best. We can at the time with the information that we have to hand. Everyone is doing the best I can with the information they have at the time.

The people who succeed in life are the ones that say, yeah, but I can always improve on that and I’m going to take responsibility for making sure that that happens in my world and joining a franchise network is one of the decisions that you can make when starting a business that demonstrates that willingness, that that accountability, that yeah, I want the support, but I want someone to help hold me accountable.

I want someone to guide me. I want to be able to bounce ideas. If I have a crisis in my business, I want someone at the other end of the phone to help me immediately on what my concerns are. A franchise network like ours curate a team of professionals. Very well skilled to help you across all aspects of your business.

That’s the value. That’s the value of a franchise network. You don’t get that going out on your own. You’re on your own. You don’t have that support unless you curate that team for yourself. And frankly, building a business, it’s hard enough without also having to go about curating yourself a support team. You got enough on your plate just getting customers, figuring out conversion, sorting out marketing, building a brand and a reputation.

You got enough on your plate without having to go and build your own team of experts and professionals to help you along the way. The franchise network takes care of that side of it for you.

Justin Yeah. That’s excellent.

Rhiannon Yeah. Let’s wrap the discussion. Let’s leave it here. I think that has been such an interesting chat to have had. And I hope if you’ve been listening, you’ve got some really interesting ideas out of it. And I hope that actually what we’ve done is not just giving you the same old boring reasons why you join a franchise. You know, if you Google, why should I join a franchise?

You guys can get all the videos, all the blog posts, and all they going to say is brand reputation, marketing, training, equipment support. You’re going to get that. So I’m sure you’ve done enough research. You know that already. So I really hope that this chat has just brought a different perspective. And I hope that what you take away is that we don’t do things by the norm.

We’re not going to just give you the boring information. We’re actually going to challenge you thinking we go there, we’re going to be innovative, we’re going to be agile, and we’re going to challenge you thinking, and we’re going to challenge your skills. And we do things a little bit differently. We don’t just do same same over here at James.

Having said that, if you would like some more information on the same same and like detailed information about some figures, we did some really interesting calculations about six months ago on the value, the dollar figure value you get as a new business owner when you join our network in the first 12 months. And Justin, I think the very next, episode of the real franchise should be us breaking down, to a dollar figure how much value.

And spoiler alert, it’s over $100,000 worth of value you get when you join James in that first 12 months alone. So I’ll leave this episode here. If you have questions, throw them in the comments. If the episode’s been helpful, give us a like because that really helps support what we’re doing, and it helps give us an indication that what we’re doing is helpful.

And hopefully you join us in the next episode of The Real franchise.

Justin Thank you.