He’s the mowing magnate who’s built a billion-dollar business empire from the grass up.
Fifty years ago, Jim Penman was mowing lawns for $5 a pop to support himself through university.
“Honestly, there wasn’t very much to it. I was deeply in debt, I was newly married, my wife wasn’t working because she was a student,” Penman told 10 News+.
“So really, it’s the only thing I knew how to do. It wasn’t really much of a decision; it was just, do this or you don’t eat!
Now, he’s Australia’s biggest franchiser.
From humble beginnings as the bearded gardener, Jim’s Group has grown to more than 50 divisions.
He has a whopping 5500 franchisees across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Canada. But not all of the spinoffs have been a hit.
“We’ve probably succeeded more than we’ve failed, but there’s a lot of failures. One of the ones that was really embarrassing was Jim’s beauty,” he told reporter Samantha Butler.
“We got a lot of publicity about it. In the end, we couldn’t find customers! That was one of the very few cases where it was franchisees we could find, but we couldn’t find customers.”
Something else that made a splash was his controversial take on Victoria’s Covid lockdowns.
And he thinks Australia needs a Trump-style DOGE to cut down on government bureaucracy.
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