1 Tip and 1 Jim’s Story

This is a nice and short email, however, I know you will find both items interesting.’

What is your best franchise enquiry tool?

Over the years, I have tried a lot of different things to generate franchise leads. Whether, it’s Facebook, Seek, Franchise Direct etc……we have tried a lot.

However, to me, the best franchise recruitment tool is an active YouTube channel!

By that, I mean a YouTube channel that at least has one new video a week about your brand.

It can be anything, a short, testimonial, podcast, etc…….

It just has to be active.

How do I know this?

I ask our new prospects in training and it’s always the same answer, which is……

“I watched all your videos on YouTube”

People want to go at their own pace especially when spending a lot of money and it could be months before commitment and belive me, they will keep coming back to your Youtube channel for fresh content.

If you want to see how I do it, check out the Jim’s Group YouTube channel.

Lidia Thorpe and Jim Penman

I haven’t told this story before, however, it’s a great illustration of not believing what you see in the media and the tricks they play with politicians for personal gain.

I was personally involved in this story first-hand.

For context, read the story below.

I manage Jim’s Instagram and received a message from the reporter who wrote the above story at around 9:30 PM AEST seeking comment the day before this went to print.

I responded after hours as I did and denied these allegations as it was clearly fraudulent.

In a nutshell, someone had taken one of Jim’s open letters to the premier templates and posted it to the senator with some racist comments on it signed as Jim.

The senator then chose to read the letter out under parliamentary privilege so she couldn’t be sued but get a national PR push from it, which she did!

No person from her team sought to contact us about this and obviously, Jim was very upset and I was very annoyed as the ABC chose to run the story despite my telling them this was fraudulent the night before.

Jim was upset and we had to field media calls about this the next day in which Jim said we reported it to the police.

This meant, Joel reported it to the police who in turn laughed a the situation until I told them to google it which in turn led to the AFP getting involved.

Nothing came of it, however, we had to do that to keep to our word.

I was fuming when I saw this story I called the senator’s office seeking an apology and a public apology for this.

The lady I spoke to was her chief of staff who stated and I quote ‘We didn’t have any reason whatsoever to believe it wasn’t written by Jim’.

Are you kidding me?

The CEO of Australia’s largest franchise brand would send a personally signed racist letter to a senator.

I was astounded with this response and pushed back with what I have stated above only to be dismissed by her team.

Following this I put in a personal complaint to the ABC about them running and how they wrote the story which led to a torrid stream of social media abuse for us as people only read headlines.

I received as you can imagine from the ABC internal complaint process, a ‘we didn’t do anything wrong’ either.

I will put their email response into my next newsletter, just to show you how BS the complaints system is when it comes to journalists breaching the rules.

In the end, this died down after around a week and we had a bit of damage control to do for a few days.

I don’t have definitive proof that it was the senator's letter however, from talking to some people who have worked as political staffers they said there was a good possibility her team did it for a media push.

I will never know that for sure, however, as her behaviour indicates since this letter reading, it’s safe to say it’s a real possibility based on her actions.

Now what can you learn from this?

Don’t believe everything you read.

People in politics will do anything to get PR attention at the expense of innocent people.

Journalists even when provided with facts, will still run a story even when they know it to be not true.

If the ABC comes asking for a comment, don’t even bother dealing with them, they will run the angle they want to run.

The Guardian and ABC ran the story, the other outlets didn’t when we told them the information about it being a clear fraud.

Don’t bother putting a complaint in about a broadcaster, it’s a waste of time!

Hope you enjoyed that story and if you want to hear more of them, please let me know as I have plenty!