Meet the Coach: Sonya Kelly | The Real Franchise Episode 42

Rhiannon Hello and welcome back to another episode of 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 we have a new face with us today, Sonya, who is one of our business coaches.

Sonya, welcome to the real franchise. This is not your first rodeo. You have actually featured in a previous episode when you were chatting with Greg and Gina, business owners on the Sunshine Coast, about their experience. But today, you sit in the hot seat with a very different hat on. You are one of the business coaches for the head office team, and we’re going to talk about that a little bit later.

Sonya Yeah, well, I.

Rhiannon First want to talk about is how did you first get involved with James. And you have quite the history. How long have you been involved with James Home Services.

Sonya Sure. That is now, 15.5 years. So yes, we, we commenced with James on the 8th of February 2010. I remember the date. I remember it well.

Rhiannon Why do you remember it so well?

Sonya It was life changing. It really was life changing. Justin and I flew down to the Sunshine Coast, left our young children with someone to look after them for two weeks while we did training at at James head office with Robert James. Yeah, we were. We were farming at the time. Just beef cattle and Christmas trees.

And I was working part time with a, disability support coordination unit as a program coordinator. Justin was working with a, not for profit organization at that time, and we were looking for something to do different and something together. And, yeah, the opportunity came up with James Home Services. It was actually an opportunity that Justin was looking at to do with some business partners of ours.

And they unanimously agreed it was probably better suited to a husband, wife couple and that it would suit Justin and I. Yeah. Here we are 15 years later. We we purchased a regional franchise at that stage. So here it’s been a journey over that time. We, both worked in a capacity of, information, walking people through an information process, that whole, sales process.

And then as we built a team, we needed a business coach. So I stepped into that role purely because it’s my passion. Human behavior coaching, working with people. Most roles that I’ve had have been held. Roles? Yeah. So it’s been.

Rhiannon You. It’s part of you. At this stage, helping people is very much part of your makeup. I do want to come back to that, but first, I want to rewind. What did it feel like getting on that plane to fly to the sunny coast for two weeks of training? How nervous? Where you, on a scale of 1 to 10?

Sonya I don’t I can’t recall being nervous. I just remember being super excited about this new adventure. I certainly was nervous about how my children would go with, their babysitter. More. How was the babysitter going to survive? But no, it was it was just a really super exciting adventure. Something new. What really appealed to us was, I remember sitting, speaking to the, the guy who came and sat with us on our veranda and, and took us through the information process, just like we do now on zoom.

And I said to him, I just want a business that I can work in. I want a business that I know I can introduce someone to, and I can scale and I can grow, that can change their life. They can put staff on, their families, can be involved. I want to know this is going to be bigger than just someone going to work every day.

And on that premise, when we could see that, when we could see that we could help other people do that, that’s what really sold us with this business. I think that’s what really just keeps us going. Now, the lives that are transformed and changed through what we offer and what we do every day. So yeah, just excited actually.

Rhiannon That’s really nice to hear because so many of our new business owners you know you do eight steps now in your role which is our business management training component. And and so do I and and so many of our new business owners, they do start with an awful lot of excitement. But there’s also some nerves there as well which is very valid.

Very valid. Before I do fast forward to today and your role as a business coach, I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the other hats that you’ve worn in this network, because you’ve pretty much done it all at this point in time. You have worked and operated the Far North Queensland region of James services for that 15.5 years.

What is what’s primarily involved in operating a region just to give anybody listening, just a little bit of an idea of the depth of your experience in this network at this stage or.

Sonya Operating a region. So on the franchisee just, just like our franchisees, and as a regional, you are responsible for building the brand in your region. You’re responsible for helping people establish their service businesses, building a team within that, that region of service providers, and and then supporting them, coaching them. So it’s a little bit like a mini mini head office operation.

So your regional is. Yeah, your your regional is your, your sales consultant. Local people through an information process then are the one who then coaches the franchisees, provides the support. Yeah. And we also owned several cleaning businesses and a carpet cleaning business in that time as well. Which came about for various reasons. And we had fabulous, staff who ran those for us and eventually bought the franchises, which was really exciting and rewarding.

So we’ve sort of been involved in it all. We we’re part of the marketing. So we work with head office on marketing for brand awareness and service lead generation in the area, training franchisees, organizing the practical training if necessary, doing their practical training and many days out doing residential and business knocks.

Rhiannon Yeah.

Sonya Yeah. Back in the day, we were sent home with boxes of folders and floppy disks back. Back in 2010. Wow. Yeah.

Rhiannon I mean, if you’re listening and you don’t know what a floppy disk is, that means you’re definitely younger than 30. And you’re used as a hard drives. Before we had things like USBs

Sonya Yes, absolutely. It was quite funny. And it was off you go, off you go. You’ve done two weeks training. He’s all you manuals. Off you go. Go and sell franchises. Go and train franchises. I had a little four four page coaching guide to to ask questions and help franchisees and and go and be the experts and learn as you go with a regular sort of weekly check in with the franchise or so.

The support back then certainly was very different to what it is now. And, yeah, we’ve we’ve evolved, but the system and the processes, very similar. They’ve just evolved. I think we’ve learned a lot on the way.

Rhiannon Yeah. That is the perfect segue to what my next question was really going to be. And that is fast forwarding us now to today and talking a little bit more about your role as a business coach. And for anybody listening at a high level, a business coach is somebody that if you come into our network as a business owner, you will be working with, a business coach and that person will help you grow your business.

How what are the sorts of ways that you think we have evolved, given that you’ve got this the benefit of 15 years of perspective on the James network, what are some of the key stand out ways that we support today that’s different to what you were doing 15 years ago?

Sonya There are a number of ways. First one I think is availability of resources for franchisees. It we we just have so many resources available this morning. I’ve been sending resources to franchisees. I’ve been sitting in a meeting, working through resources with someone who needed help with a resource that could change their

Rhiannon Yeah. And when you say resources, what do you mean specifically?

Sonya Okay. So, for example, we have a resource called the Minimum charge app calculator. And that’s in of course, the franchisee file library, which is a library of business resources. And as a coach, I tend to work closely with franchisees on those resources because when we meet, it’s that time to work on the business rather than in the business.

So we use that time to go through those resources. And so that’s looking at for this particular franchisee, exactly what does their business have to pay their household every week so that they can live the lifestyle that they want. Exactly. What are their business costs? How many billable hours do they need every week in their business to do that?

How much do they need to be charging every hour billable hour to get that? What are their staff really costing them? What’s it going to look like if they scale to two staff, three staff, that sort of thing? So that’s what I’m working with for this particular franchisee at the moment. The other thing we did was Google Business profile and doing updates, loading photos.

Because this is a husband wife team and the wife has been stepping in starting to take on some responsibilities in the business because her husband is far too busy with other things in the business at the moment. So yeah, that’s great.

Rhiannon So resources is one area that you feel we have really improved in, in those in that last decade? Are there some other standout areas that you think that we just we really do quite well in now from a support perspective?

Sonya I think marketing as well.

Rhiannon Yep.

Sonya Yeah, marketing is great. So we’ve worked a lot over, particularly the last two years, on marketing for new franchisees and getting new franchisees off the ground. Lead generation, not only from James Time Services Australia point of view, with marketing campaigns specific to new franchisees and that ongoing marketing. But the change in resources and equipping of the individual business owner to generate leads themselves.

So they’re not sitting back going, oh, I wish James Home Services would send me more leads. They’re actually empowered to go, right. I need some more clients. And I hear this from a number of my franchisees. It’s like particularly long guys coming into the slow season. Are things so flat out I haven’t been able to do my marketing, but things are slowing down.

I need some more work. And so I need to do this, this, this and this, and it’s all things that we’ve taught them right from the beginning. I will sometimes get a franchisee go, oh my goodness, I’ve got a lot of aged care clients and I’ve just had three go into an aged care facility. I made some more clients.

I’m going to do all these things. They know what to do because we’ve trained them with, equipped them, and they have access to the resources in the File library so that is a real strength that I’ve seen as well. And I think the third area is metrics. Know your numbers. We said all the time, know your numbers and there is power in knowledge.

So someone can make an educated, informed decision. Because we’ve got metrics. We know what the conversion rate is from receiving a lead to that lead, becoming a job or a regular client. We know what the average turnover is. We know what their costs are. We know where their leads are coming from. So there’s so much information that we can pull out of the system to empower them in knowing what marketing is working.

Yeah. What skills do I need to develop? So, for example, as you’re aware, I’ve had to work with some of our franchisees on our sales skills and building rapport, because when they’ve come in, we’ve just identified it’s a skill deficit. And in coaching we’ve been able to work on that. We look at the metrics and we measure every four weeks to go, what’s happening?

Oh, look at this. The skills you’re learning are working. And that’s really exciting because we can measure.

Rhiannon Yeah. Yeah. The the metrics have really been game changing in the last couple of years as we’ve, we’ve well, four years ago we transitioned to using Salesforce as our software that runs both the head office business as well as our business owners, businesses. And it’s taken us a couple of years to have enough data, collected using that software that we’ve now got really true benchmarks for where business owners should sit on each of those metrics.

And for anybody listening, thinking, oh my goodness, it sounds like they’re tracking my every breath. This sounds more like Big Brother than my own business. It might sound like that, but there’s a very good reason why we’re following all this data. And so you already touched on quite a few of the more practical reasons why we do it, because we’re able to identify exactly where you’re seeing and experiencing roadblocks in your business’s growth and development.

And if we didn’t have these metrics, then we’re just kind of taking a bit of a stab in the dark and showing you as to why your business isn’t performing the way that maybe you wanted it to. So having all these metrics is really powerful for our business owners, because it’s not just the business coaches saying, hey, I think that maybe we should be working on this, so we should be working on that.

We know with absolute certainty, based on what the data is telling us, where those areas for potential improvements lie. And I think that that’s a really important thing for us to be able to do from a support perspective. There was also a bit of a theme in the three things that you mentioned. And it really did come back to empowering our business owners rather than doing it for them.

Yeah. Which feeds straight into our whole philosophy, which is around building skilled business owners in our country. It’s not about spoon feeding people, it’s not about doing it for you. It’s not about a silver platter. And it’s not about just sending you leads and hoping for the best. It is about giving you, teaching you the skills, walking alongside you while you have this business journey with us and what we actually hope is that at the other end, when you and James decide to separate in the future, you take with you skills that you’ve learned from having a business with us, and it creates a better life for you.

Even after James. So, Sonya, that leads me to my next question. Why do you do what you do? It is you work long hours. There are really high highs, but there can be some very tough days in the mix as well. What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Sonya I just really do enjoy what I do. I really enjoy I enjoy working with people. I really, I enjoy helping people. I enjoy working with people. Many years ago, when we had the Christmas tree farm, I took a year off my normal work, to build a market for our Christmas trees. And at the end of that year, working on my own on the farm, pruning.

And, you know, I’ve met with nursery owners and, you know, building markets, but it wasn’t working closely with people. Trees were not great conversationalists, you know, I desperately needed to get back to working with people. And it really highlighted to me how much I enjoy and need that interaction. I’ve always been a help person. I’ve always been towards human behavior.

Teaching, coaching, that sort of thing. And so for me, I really enjoy I get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing people, in quite nervous be excited and learn new skills. And, you know, those high fives moments of, oh, wow, look, you’re doing it. You know, seeing people after 12 months in successful businesses, kicking goals, meeting with people and celebrating, oh, wow, you couldn’t do this six months ago, and now you can or.

Yeah, I just really enjoy that. And so many different people from so many different walks of life. Everyone has a different story. Everyone has a reason why they’re wanting to build their business. It’s just right. Celebrating the wins with people. Yes, it can be frustrating. Yes. Sometimes it can be really disappointing. But there’s a challenge in helping someone to learn new skills and develop different mindsets.

I think working as a coach, it’s a little bit like problem solving and having a puzzle on how best to help someone, how best to unlock their skills. Where where are they skills? Where are the deficits, what do they need to learn and how do they learn? And then how do you how do you do that with them?

So I think for me that’s the challenge that I really enjoy. And I love hearing people’s stories. We laugh together about the crazy clients. We don’t cry together, but we commiserate together.

Rhiannon And on the hard days, we have a hashtag. Business owners, don’t we? We feel it, too. Yeah, I really do. And we feel it just as much as I do sometimes.

Sonya Absolutely, yeah. There are nights where I’ll wake up again, thank goodness. I really hope that that person can make it work. Yeah.

Rhiannon I do the,

Sonya Yeah, exactly. It’s it’s more than just a 9 to 4.

Rhiannon Yeah. It is. So, I want to just go back to you mentioned before that coaching is sometimes about skills, sometimes about mindset.

I think probably when most people think about starting a business, they think, do I have the right skills for starting a business? In James, we look at this a little bit differently, maybe to what you might think that we look at it. We actually look at skills alongside mindset. And in fact, we pay a much higher attention rate to what somebody’s mindset.

So what are the sorts of things that we’re looking for in somebody? And what are the sorts of things that, well, what what do I mean when I say mindset is important?

Sonya I think someone who is really genuinely wanting to help others to genuinely, be willing to get out of their comfort zone and try new things. Someone who’s willing to take a risk, but also being teachable that it really is a big one because you as I as a business owner, you’re not only learning from your coach, you’re learning from your clients.

You’re learning from every experience that you have. You’re learning from your teammates. You have to be willing to go, maybe I need to think about this differently. Maybe I need to change my approach. You have to be willing to ask for help. Yeah. So I think a bit of humility. Yeah. Assertiveness as well.

Rhiannon Do we expect people just to magically have the right composition of attitudinal characteristics, or is this something that we help people with once they’re in our network?

Sonya They’re there is a certain element of these characteristics that we’re looking at before people start. Definitely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You can teach skill. But if someone is teachable, if someone already has humility, if someone already genuinely is a caring person then you can teach skill. It is easier to teach a skill than an attitude. We can challenge attitudes and we have a coaching program to build.

I think a foundation of what are the core attitudes and philosophies that we need to adopt to be successful in our businesses, in life in general.

Rhiannon Yeah, yeah.

Sonya So yeah, I from from my perspective, when I am interviewing someone before they’re approved as a franchisee, I am looking for attitude attributes as well as a level of skill.

Rhiannon Yeah.

Sonya Yeah.

Rhiannon Yeah, we do a bit of both really don’t we. That. Yeah. Yeah. That when you go through our information process, it’s a two way street in our network. We are learning about you as much as you are learning about us. And the goal is that at the end of that process, both of us genuinely feel like we are a good fit for the.

Yes. And so one of the things that we are looking for to say, hey, yes, we think that you would be a good fit for our network is some high level attitudinal traits around accountability and around being able to step outside of comfort zone, challenge themselves, take on risk, learn new things, all of those things you’ve just mentioned.

But there is also elements of our, coaching that really does focus on refining how somebody looks at different things that might happen in their life. You know, we talk so much about rationalizations and comfort zones and laws of exchange and, and all those, concepts that help us to better understand ourselves and the sort of roadblocks that could be standing in our way whilst we’re trying to grow a business.

So your role as a coach is so varied, because some days you’re meeting with franchisees and you’re working on skills, you really working on how to handle an objection, you know, in a door knock situation or how to negotiate a quote with a tricky client or, you know, some days you’re gutting on exactly what kind of product to use to clean the bathroom.

Yeah. And some days you’re talking to people about accountability, comfort zones and taking responsibility for their own actions and the outcomes in that business. It’s a tough gig. Yeah, yeah. You mentioned something before that I want to go back to and you mentioned it in passing, but I think it’s really worth a couple of minutes of conversation around it.

What it was was you were talking about a minimum charge out rate calculator, and you said that one of the things that we do is we look at how much the business needs to be paying the household so that someone can make their lifestyle expenses.

Why do we care whether the business is profitable enough to actually meet someone’s lifestyle goals? Because. If we’re looking at this in a black and white sense, we should really just be concerned that the business itself is profitable to a degree. Happy days. Right? You and I both know we go a lot of steps further than that in our network.

Why do we care what someone’s personal goals are and whether the business is actually getting them towards them?

Sonya Because we care about people, we care about their families and the business is the vehicle for them to achieve their personal goals, whether that is buying a new home, whether that’s getting the car that they want, whether it’s so often we hear, I want more time with my family because that’s what matters. So the business is the vehicle for them to have more time as a family.

The business is the vehicle for the holidays, the the profitable business making enough money for them to live the lifestyle that they need to to live, want to live, aspire to live. That’s that’s what it’s all about. Yeah, really. And that’s why we care. Because we’re not just in the business of selling someone a business. We’re really in the business of providing someone an opportunity and a vehicle to achieve the life that they are wanting to live.

That’s what it’s all about.

Rhiannon It really is, isn’t it? And I think that probably it’s very real to say that the reason you and I get out of bed every morning and do what we do, the reason why Greg and Ian do what they do, the reason why Justin does what he does, is exactly that we really, genuinely care about the people and the families that make up our network.

They are James Home Services. It’s not you, it’s not me, it’s not Justin. It’s not any of our head office name. It’s our business owners and it’s their families. And they give us so much motivation to do what we do every day and to keep pushing ourselves to be better at support and better at marketing, and even better at helping them with the challenges that they face.

Because seeing them get the kind of outcomes that they came to us for in the first place is so incredibly rewarding. And that’s why we get out of bed even on the hard days.

Sonya Yeah, it really is. It’s fantastic. You know, when you receive a, a photo of someone on Christmas Day having a beer? Yeah. Because that’s the first Christmas that they’ve had at home in 20 years, you know, or you get a text from someone because they’re at their kids sporting event, or they’re going camping for the weekend as a family because they haven’t been able to do it before.

And now this is just part of what their business has enabled them to do. You know, all those sort of things, just having a conversation with someone and they go, I now have time for catching up with friends. I didn’t have that before. Yeah. It’s just it’s really lovely to just share the joy in that. That. Yeah, it’s really grand.

Rhiannon It is. It’s an absolute privilege really, isn’t it? You know, and that that’s our platform that is giving them this opportunity is amazing. But it’s a privilege to have people trust a platform and use it and then say those outcomes. So thank you so much for spending some time with us today. I think that that’s a really perfect place to leave this episode of The Real franchise.

And thank you so much for what you do, the impact that you have had on, frankly, countless number of families at this point over your 15 years. It couldn’t be understated what you do every single day in supporting our business owners. It’s so seen, it so valued, and there are so many more business owners in our future who will absolutely benefit from your experience and your guidance.

And we absolutely adore you as part of our Head Office team. Thank you for being you and for doing what you do and truly thank you for listening to another episode of The Real Franchise. We hope that you join us again for another one very soon.