Today's Guest

Craig Jooste is the Co-Founder and CEO of Local Handyman Group, where he developed the model, brand, and franchising systems to take the Local Handyman Group from one location to more than 20 locations across North America. Craig ran operations at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and has extensive experience across the facilities service and consumer services industries. His broad areas of expertise include franchising, franchise viability, brand development, strategic planning, operations management, business development, and business coaching. If you are considering buying a franchise, hear from Craig about how he started and scaled his business.

Resources Shared

• Handy Man
• Thryv

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:

Hey, hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street, your small business podcast, and this week we have a great franchise story. Welcome Craig Jooste.

Craig Jooste:

Thank you for having me. Excited to be on the podcast, and happy to answer some questions and hopefully share some valuable info.

Gordon Henry:

So quick intro on Craig. Craig is the founder and CEO of Local Handyman, a franchise organization in Canada in the us. Craig spent a decade at 1-800-GOT-JUNK before starting Local Handyman. His background and experience at 1-800-GOT-JUNK helped him realize he had a huge opportunity to build a brand and trustworthy service in the handyman industry. The company now has 32 locations, servicing 50 cities and towns in Canada, and they're looking for more fantastic franchise partners in the US and Canada to grow and become North America's leading and largest handyman provider.

What should you, our listeners, get out of this episode? Would you be interested in pursuing the franchise route? Maybe you can be the next Local Handyman franchisee or maybe this will inspire you to find a different path that suits you. This show is brought to you by Thryv. Small Business runs better on Thryv. So let's get into it. Craig, tell us about your background, how you went through the whole 1-800-GOT-JUNK process and what got you into this new franchise.

Craig Jooste:

Sure. Thanks for the intro. Absolutely. So 1-800-GOT-JUNK, and Brian Scudamore would attest to this, the CEO, is that a lot of us got a mini MBA there because we had an amazing opportunity to be part of many different departments. I was on the leadership team there and I was fortunate enough to launch Wow 1 Day Painting, one of the sister brands for 1-800-GOT-JUNK. So learnt a lot about culture and franchising, and then Wow 1 Day Painting, launching that from one location and having to grow it separately from 1-800-GOT-JUNK, but leveraging 1-800-GOT-JUNK's power really gave me some good insight into how to do this. Franchising is actually quite simple and linear, but it's like anything. If you're a surgeon and you know how to do open heart surgery, it's probably not that difficult. For the rest of us, it scares the heck out of us.

So really learned what to do there, and my wife and I have always been very entrepreneurial. She was on the exec team at 1-800-GOT-JUNK as well and we had a little baby. This is going to probably be your typical genesis story that most founders will tell you, but I was commuting back and forth to the office. I'm handy, but I'm don't want to do anything at six o'clock at night when you get back from a long day. And Kristen was saying, "Hey, we need this and this done." We're in a new house, well, new to us at the time and had a little one, and she called around and called 10 handyman. Eight didn't answer, one you wouldn't want in your house and the other guy that was decent was booked out for three weeks and she said, "There's something here."

And I said, "Okay." And most people in relationships have a little devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other one. Well, neither of us, we're either both angels or both devils, but we're both the same and we both jump in with both feet and said, "Okay. If there's a need, let's do this." I remember it was Canada Day 2017, we were driving by a Nissan dealership and they had 0% financing on a van before we had a brand. We drove in and I was like, "Well, it's free money." We bought a little van, drove it home. Went through the branding process, which her and I are very strong on the marketing side, branding and communication with franchisees and communication with customers, and that's was how we launched in White Rock, South Surrey, a little town of 125, 150,000 people.

My wife Kristen had no background in home improvement or handy manning, but we knew that we could provide a service where we could set expectations, set someone up for success, help customers. And we hired a fantastic handyman, launched the business. She knocked it out of the park to the point that after three months, I called our lawyer and I said, "We need to franchise this thing." And we wanted to do 604 HANDYMAN is how we started. It's the area code in the greater Vancouver area, and we thought five or six locations would be fantastic. Started getting calls from people in Saskatchewan and Alberta saying, "Love the brand, have no heck of an idea of how 604 HANDYMAN translates to me locally." I then had a light bulb go off. I went on a URL buying spree and bought about 200 URLs across Canada, anything that had an area code with handyman behind it.

And with that, the Local Handyman Group was born because that was the umbrella brand that would pull together these local brands so that people could have a sense of 306 Handyman in Saskatoon and Regina was very a local feel, yet they had this national backing. My wife has always said it perfectly as why do people pay Best Buy to mount your TV? Because if it falls off the wall, there's a who's to blame factor, not the local guy that may not call you back because he doesn't want to replace your TV or put the TV back up. And so we've always had that who's to blame factor in a positive way for our customers to know that they're dealing with someone local, a family that's growing a brand, but that they have the backing of a national company that is there to make sure that everyone is happy and has a good experience.

Gordon Henry:

So when you launched the business, for just a minute you didn't know it was going to be a franchise organization, right? You started this thinking it was going to be a business that you would run with an employee or multiple employees, and then you got the light bulb moment where you said, "This could be a franchise." Is that right?

Craig Jooste:

I would say 50/50. We said let's start it and if anything, we would have five or six locations for 640 Handyman in the lower mainland. So part of it, yes, when we started and then three months in it was proof of concept, let's go and make things happen. So I would say that's half and half right.

Gordon Henry:

Right. Before I go further on the franchise angle, which I'm really interested to hear more about, I'm just curious from a concept perspective, It seems finding a handyman shouldn't be so hard. You just need somebody who's a good worker, who has basic understanding of tools and how to fix things, and yet it is hard. People don't want to do the work, can't do the work, aren't reliable and so forth. Why is there such a need and why is it so hard to fill that need?

Craig Jooste:

So we obviously have a couple of national competitors, the Mr. Handymans of the world, Handyman Connection, et cetera, the Neighborlys, really big brands, but 90% of the competition is mom and pop, Craigslist, Kijiji, the $40 an hour handyman, Uncle Ed that's going to come over and help, and so they're in the self-fulfilling prophecy of staying at the same level of business year in and year out. And this is not a positive or a negative thing to anyone who's a handyman and isn't part of a bigger brand. There's fantastic people out there, but what happens is they go out and they look for a job, they get a job. They don't answer their phone, they don't answer their emails, they do the job and then once the job's done, "Heck, I need to find another job," they find another job and they do that.

And so for 20 years they can stay at the same revenue and be very happy, but then when you start looking at scaling and you start looking at do I have systems that are going to support multiple handymen? Do I have systems that are going to support my customer, so do I have an online portal? And we just actually switched over to Thryv over the last six months, It's been fantastic. Do I have the system to support that? And then do I have liability insurance and workers' compensation so that when I start speaking to the commercial side of the business, property managers or realtors who are looking out for their clients, do I have those things to give them so that I can talk to a property manager and say, "Hey, here's our clearance letter. Here's our $5 million in liability. We background check our people."

We show up branded, so if someone's in a common property it's not, "Who the heck is that guy wandering around with a hammer?" It's, "Oh, the handymen are here." And that's where I think the big difference comes in is scalability, and I think on a workforce level, we had a heck of a time during COVID just like everyone else finding people. We actually grew exponentially throughout it because everyone was at home with offices and things to fix, but we also had the challenge of finding good handymen. But now when we look on the unit economic side, what do we charge and what do we pay people, we're paying people better than on average. Our clients understand that they may be paying a premium, but that the person, if they get hurt or something happens to the home, et cetera, they get what they pay for.

And we're not the Craigslist, Kijiji clients' handyman. We have older folks, most important thing for them in their house is security. We are secure. We have the power couple who has the mom or the dad at home with a child and security, and being around a child and making sure that there aren't any sharp objects around is more important than saving a couple of bucks per hour. So I think scalability-wise, handymen being attracted to the brand because it's national. Not all of our locations do some of the smaller ones, but we do have a benefits package that everyone buys into, and so things like that that offset just the individual smaller location.

Gordon Henry:

Okay, so let's continue on this. What are the economics of the business? On your website, if I'm going to open a franchise I think this is, it says you get an exclusive territory, low monthly overhead. Territory fee is $40,000 per territory, 10% royalty, $250 per month technology fee. So just walk us through that maybe from the perspective of the franchisee. I got to put up $40,000 to get started and I pay you 10% royalty. How quickly do I make back my money and start turning a profit?

Craig Jooste:

Sure. So I'll answer it in a careful way just because of trade commission and making earnings claims rules. But so we have a territory fee. There's two things you connect with the brand when you're willing to part with money for a territory fee is one, you have a connection to the brand, and two, you're looking for those systems that are already built, the landmines that have been stepped on and you can now sidestep and that you can have an accelerated path to success with us versus yourself. So the exclusive territory is postal codes or zip codes that are assigned to a franchise partner that no other Local Handyman Group franchisee can work within. So there's a lot of value there because you get, we believe, value from us as the franchisor, business coaching and the tools and systems, but then the true superpower of franchising are the franchise partners.

So when you have exclusive territory, you will share best practices, you will share property managers and all that type of stuff because you're not competing with each other. You're competing on bragging rights as to how you're doing that month versus someone else, but you're not worried about someone else taking your business. So that's the $40,000 per territory fee that we have. As of this year, we have amended our royalty. So our royalty is 10%, but we have now added in a tiered royalty to I believe if someone is doing well and they start putting systems in place to support themselves as well, why do they need to pay as much as someone who has no other systems in place to support themselves? So as a business, whether you're a franchiser by yourself, as you grow, you'll add an ops manager or a admin person, et cetera, and that takes a little bit of a strain off of the franchisor.

So we now have a tiered royalty where on the first $250,000 for the year in revenue, you pay 10%. $250,000 to $500,000 you pay 9, $500,000 to $750, you pay 8, $750,000 to $1 million, you pay seven and over $1 million you're paying six. So you're almost paying half as much as the guy who does $250,000 a year if you're at $1 million dollars, so our top performers, because you have other systems in place. I had other franchisors tell me I was crazy for doing it, but I feel that we need to reward growth and we grow together as a system and it's not just a money grab. And then our technology fee covers licenses with Thryv, emails. We use G-Suite for everything, so we share everything on that and that's a pass through. We don't really make any money on a technology fee.

When you look at our all-in cost as a franchise, we're anywhere from 75 to 80% less than a bricks and mortar fast casual. So when you're looking at a home services mobile business, one, no leases or buildouts, so you're $40,000 and another $20 or other little things instead of $350 or $500,000. Then when it comes to your monthly overhead, your break even happens very quickly because when you start you have a handyman in a van and your tech fee and your royalties are proportionate to what you're earning, so the break even happens quite quickly. So we have something called the Race to 30, which is 30 jobs a month. So we want to get you to 30 jobs a month within three months, which means your first handyman is going to be going full out and it's now time to look for the next unit, the next van and handyman.

Once you get to a couple of vans, there's a little bit of quantum leaps that happens when it comes to a van and a handyman can make X amount of dollars a month or generate that as a unit, but when you have a couple events, well then you don't need a full third handyman, you add a helper. Now that helper and handyman can generate more revenue because of the work they're doing. And our revenue is very much based, it's a guiding light. So we say, "How much do you want to achieve next month?" Well, the guiding light there then means what do I need to do for lead gen this month? What are my conversions? What sort of jobs? Et cetera. And so it becomes a fun race to get to that point. But breakeven is very low, which is great because of the low overhead, and your startup, there's less risk, I believe than going into say a fast casual.

Gordon Henry:

You said earlier, I heard you say $40 an hour. What is the typical rate that the handyman is charging the customer and then how many hours is the typical job? So I'm trying to get in my head how many typical jobs do I need to do to pay, pay myself back the $40,000 upfront fee?

Craig Jooste:

Sure. So, it's a bit of a loaded question. One, our minimum is two hours and depending on a more rural location versus a high density metro, it's anywhere from $85 to $100 an hour plus a call out fee. So it's a two hour minimum plus the call out, so say just to make the math easier, $250 to go out somewhere for a couple hours. You can get quite a bit done in a couple hours. So two, three and four hour jobs are hourly. Jobs over four hours, there's more complexity, so that's when we pop out. So anything up to four hours, we can tell you over the phone, "Hey listen, you want a TV mounted, a faucet changed in the powder room and a toilet replaced or whatever, that's going to be three hours," two hours, whatever it is. Anything over four, we'll pop out and give you an estimate.

Estimates become based on piecework, so, "To take out that shower and to put a new shower in is going to be $2,500, Mrs. Smith," and it has nothing to do with X amount of hours, et cetera. We'll break it down and say maybe that's $1,200 for supplies, $1,500 for labor. It's $2,700 and within that, the customer gets a price that they know is fixed, they don't have to worry about overages on time, et cetera. The franchisee has the ability to work at a more efficient pace to increase their hourly rate if you looked at it that way, and they can easily break down then Peter's going to be there, he costs me $30 an hour. It's X amount of labor, and within our unit economics, we want to keep our labor under 35% cost of goods.

So I would say our average job size is probably $1,500, but what I think differentiates us is the ability for people to book online a two, three, four hour job that they don't feel silly for having us go in and replace curtain rods or rods in the closet that they just hung 500 pounds worth of clothes on that's ripped off the wall. So I think that the mix there is good, and then our mix on resi and commercial is now 50/50. So half the work we do is with property managers, realtors, interior designers where it's still in the residence, but we class it as commercial because of where the lead comes from.

Gordon Henry:

Are most of your franchisees owner-operators like, "I paid the $40,000 and now I'm doing the work," or is it more business people who are saying, "I'll pay the $40,000, get the franchise location or multiple franchise locations and I'll hire the labor or the handyman to do the work"? Which is it?

Craig Jooste:

I'd say right now it's probably 50/50. Now, we're an emerging brand, so we're a younger brand, so some may be in a smaller market that takes them a little longer to get their next guy. Some are in a small market that we've matched with that small market that have said to me, "Craig, I never want to have an employee. I hate people when it comes to managing them." And so we have one guy, we matched him to a territory of about 60,000 people and he has his truck, he swings the hammer and he's very happy growing his brand and he's the boss of himself doing this thing. I saw this at 1-800-GOT-JUNK as we grow, we're finding a lot more empire builders. "Hey, I want this territory that's 500,000 or 1 million in population."

Maybe it's four territories. "I'm willing to invest $160,000 versus $40,000 and I want to build this thing out to have 15 or 20 vans." So we're starting to see more of that, but I would say the general model is if you're a little bit handy and you can do overflow, fantastic, but you don't have to be. We want a good business person, just like Kristen when she started. We had a handyman, she got the leads, dealt with customers, did the backend, managed our handyman and it worked out great. So that's the ideal model, but we do have that owner-operator, manager, empire builder, three models within. I would not sell Toronto to an owner-operator because we'd be losing in that market.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah. Is it hard to find qualified handymen? Everything I read about small businesses today and here is difficult finding qualified labor. There's generally a labor shortage out there, but particularly kids are less and less doing the vocational, get my hands dirty and more of the white collar. Is it hard to find the people you need to do the work?

Craig Jooste:

We have found very good people and depending on the market, sometimes you have to kiss a frog or two to find a prince. So we have certainly had some markets where... and it is amazing. We launched in one market, they hired the wrong handyman. It was a couple of months of, "Geez." Got rid of that guy, brought in the right handyman and it was 3X on revenue within 30 days. So it is all about people. I would not BS anyone to say, "It's so easy to find people." It's not.

I think we have a pretty good job description and tactics to help our franchise partners find them, and in general, people do find them. Sometimes it takes a couple of weeks longer in one market versus the other, but I think the appeal is there with the brand and can work for us because of this, this and this and competitive pay and all that type of stuff. In any business, it's hard to find the right people. We have, but it's not a cakewalk in this market since the pandemic to just go out and say, "I need someone and have 30 strong applicants," that you have to have a challenge interviewing through.

Gordon Henry:

Right, right. We discussed earlier you're now in Canada and you're moving down to the US. Are you going to continue this marketing by area code? Is that the plan, that you'll have Local Handyman in the US with all the area codes? Is that the marketing plan?

Craig Jooste:

Fantastic question. So when we entered the Ontario market, which can be similar to the states, Ontario has about the same population as all the western provinces of Canada, so they have a ton of area codes because of the amount of people with phones. And when we went in there, we looked at all the area codes that bumped up against each other, how confusing would it be branding play-wise, we went through a whole branding exercise and we came up with Ontario Handyman. It was a premium URL, so we had to find who owned it and buy it.

And so now it's Ontario Handyman Ottawa, Ontario Handyman Niagara, Ontario Handyman Toronto. Going into the states, our overarching brand is going to be Local Handyman Group, so it'll be the Local Handyman Group of Atlanta, the Local Handyman Group of Tampa, the Local Handyman Group of Chicago. So we're going to keep our trademark as Handyman Group in the US and in Canada, so the Local Handyman Group will be the brand in the US. That'll just be localized by region or city or town.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, yeah. No, because I could see particularly in the bigger cities, especially with cell phones, you now have many, many, many area codes. I remember I was from New York here, it used to be all 212 and 718 in Queens, and now there's 646 and 917. There's so many all one block over, it's different. Makes sense. I noticed you went into business with your wife. You said earlier, I don't know if you met at 1-800-GUT-JUNK, but you both worked there. Tell us about the husband-wife business partnership thing.

Craig Jooste:

So my wife and I, we're the same age, so we're both going to be 49 this year, so next year is the big 50 for both of us. We actually met in 1998, so we've been together for 25 years. We waited a long time to have a child. We have a 10-year-old, Charlie, and we actually met... in 1998 I was 23, I didn't know what I wanted to do. My mom had a contact at an airline who said, "Why don't you become a flight attendant and travel the world?" And I thought okay, so I talked to my mom's friend and ended up going for an interview and went to the airline and became a flight attendant. Now, at the time someone said, "Flight attendant, that's kind of a weird job for you," et cetera, and I was like, "Well, I get to fly all over the world, I get tickets for $25. I work with fantastic people."

And my wife joined the airline about six months after me. We didn't know each other. I was in Edmonton, she was in Vancouver. And we met at the London Gatwick Airport in a pub, both on a layover, and got to travel the world for a couple of years. 9/11 happened, airline went bankrupt. We found out two days after we came back from our honeymoon. We had paid for our entire wedding and honeymoon in cash to not go into debt. We had $67 in the bank. We were getting paid on Friday, the airline went broke on Thursday, we never got paid. We had to as a newlywed couple move out, move in with my in-laws. The only thing I kept was my gym membership so I could go cry in the shower and work out, and luckily we had the support.

My wife went and waitered, called the restaurant she used to work for. I had a friend at UPS and I went and loaded trucks from midnight until 8:00 and then delivered packages from 8:00 until 5:00. Went home, cried my soup, went back and did that. And it took us three months to kind of get back to normal three, four months. Ended up because I was at UPS, I had a friend who said, "What the hell are you doing here? There's a management role at this bottled water company." Went to the bottled water company over four years. They had a bunch of layoffs and I climbed the ranks super fast, which put me in a position to then go and apply for a job at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. My wife ended up going over to 1-800-GOT-JUNK as well.

So over the past 25 years except for five years, we've worked together. We are both bullheaded. I usually work upstairs in a 400 square foot office, my wife will usually be working at the dining room table because I pace around and I'm on calls all day. But we have this thing where we have another franchise that she runs that has three locations right now, but we know that we did this job to be able to I don't do calls between 8:00 and 9:00 or 2:00 and 3:00 because we pick up our son and we take him to activities, and until he's sick of us, that's what we're going to do. That's the benefit, regardless of growing the business or money or whatever, is that time. But we work very well together, we give each other space. She knows if I'm on calls for six hours upstairs or she's on calls downstairs, that there's space and respect, and we both have the same take on business drive, risk-taking, so I feel very fortunate.

Gordon Henry:

Sounds like it's worked great for you. You said something in there that really caught my attention. Obviously you're a very smart and very driven person, but career-wise, the airline job, the UPS job you, if you will, bounced around a little bit and then you found 1-800-GOT-JUNK and it sounds like it was a rocket ship. Would you agree, it sounds like getting into a company that was well-run, that had a mission, that really had a purpose, 1-800-GOT-JUNK really made a big difference in your and I would assume your wife's career as well. Would you agree with that?

Craig Jooste:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think one thing is people tie into a clear vision and mission, which was always very clear. Good culture, having fun. And the one thing is not to take yourself too seriously, which I think once you start believing your own BS, it's not good. We learnt a ton there and I think yes, it absolutely equipped us to do what we're doing today. I think you still need to have the fortitude to have two people with a mortgage and a baby both quit their jobs, second mortgage their house and say, "This has to work," but yes, we learnt a ton there. And to be fair, we learnt a lot of what to do and also some of what not to do, and that was part of the learning for 1-800-GOT-JUNK growing as well. But that's really translated into us having a very clear mission and vision for the business of working with good people, doing some good, making some money.

If you can tie some of those three together, money's not evil, working with good people is fantastic and doing some good is good. So we're very clear on what we want to achieve and how we want to achieve it, and then the same, it ties into the whole business coaching that we do with our franchise partners runs very parallel to how Kristen and I work in our lives as well, is we have what's your mission and vision? What's your what and your why? Revenue is a guiding light, so whether you're running a household, a business, a massive corp, what do I want to achieve this year? Break that down by quarter, break that down by month and then understand my third pillar, is that lead generation of what do I need to do activity-wise to achieve that? Because that revenue is going to be able to do X, Y, and Z within the business or personally or whatever.

And then the fourth one, and certainly not the last or the least important, is unit economics. So understanding what is my budget, personal or business, and then what are my expenses? What makes money? What's the 20% that drives 80 of the result? And we use those Foundational Four, it's called, to really help people kind of guide, but a lot of the mission vision stuff, 1-800-GOT-JUNK's a really big company now and they've done very, very well, but that mission and vision is for whether you have a $5,000 a month company or a $50 million a month company. Because if you have that clarity, which road you're going down.

Gordon Henry:

So Craig, if you can share with us anything about the growth of Local Handyman so far, what are your revenues, how many franchises are there today, and what's your expectation over the next year or two?

Craig Jooste:

So we have been very fortunate over the pandemic. Just real quick story because I know everyone's probably sick about hearing about it, but March 2020, that's when our son's birthday is, on his birthday NBA shuts down, NHL shuts down and I start getting calls from franchisees, "What the hell's going to happen?" Kristen and I sit down and she's like, "Is this it?" I said, "Well, if it's it, I'm going to go get a truck and a lawnmower. I'm not going back to an office and I will go mow lawns until we get through this." And talked to all of our franchise partners and said, "Listen, we're not charging royalties or any fees over the next month." And a month doesn't sound like a lot but, "Don't worry about it." We started talking to government on what's a essential service. We started having discussions on how our franchisees can look at loans and all this type of stuff.

Well, lo and behold, it was one month of, "What the heck's going to happen?" And then in May we started growing. We grew 300% year-over-year throughout the pandemic because people were home, saw things were broken, building offices at home, us all doing this type of thing. And so we were very, very fortunate because I know a lot of other franchisors that had fast casual gyms that were really hammered in the first year before they figured anything out with the government. So we started in 2017, proof of concept, so we're very young. 2018, we had three franchisees. 2019, we had 13. And we didn't lose anyone through the pandemic, which was great. 2020, we were up to 22. The initial year of the pandemic freaked people a little bit out about what the heck they're going to do, plus there was government money, so we had a lot of people sitting on couches, playing a lot of video games and watching a lot of Netflix.

The following year it's still skittish, so it was a little bit slower growth. And then funny enough, last summer I talked to some franchisors and I said, "Man, it really seems quiet franchising." They're like, "We think everyone's taking a COVID vacation of it's done in the pandemic sense and I just want some time off. I don't want to think about any of this," and then the fall hit and it was like boom, everyone's, "What am I going to do? Rates are up. Is there a recession coming work?" Nothing is recession-proof, but I would say we're recession resistant, and now we've started selling franchises again. So we have 17 entities that own 32 locations currently, so one group may own multiple locations that run separately. We were actually just out yesterday having a mini celebration. We just sold another location in Ontario and we have about six locations in discovery right now.

So our goal is to add at least 10 locations in Canada this year, and we're hoping for 10 to 15 in the US this year. We're actually speaking to a group in the states that wants to work with us in regards to franchise sales, et cetera, and building things out, so we're very optimistic. My goal in Canada's always been 100 locations. Some of that may come through master franchises for out east or Quebec where it's a language barrier for myself and the business, but that has always been the goal. Our five-year goal from last year would be 100 locations, and the business is doing well. We have great people that are into support. One of my goals, which I have failed at, is to have no employees. And we've had fantastic contractors, but it does come to a point where we need people that have to have certain internal touch with the brand that can push it a little bit further.

So we have some fantastic vendor partners when it comes to IT and marketing and all that type of thing, but then we also have internally on the support client success managers, that type of thing that help our franchise partners directly. So, the business is doing well. We've averaging about 1,000 jobs a year right now, so getting into the eight figure mark. Our goal is to get to that $50 million in gross revenue. The average franchise, and I can only speak to other franchise documentation I've seen for other brands in the States, they have what's called an Item 19. We don't do that as much in Canada, but in the States they have an Item 19 in the franchise disclosure document that says, "Our average location makes X." An average Handyman location across many of the national brands is in and around that $250,000 to $300,000 a year, but there's big variances there because you have guys that are doing multi-millions of dollars and you have guys that are doing $10,000 a month and it's themselves in a very small market.

Gordon Henry:

So if I'm an owner-operator, I've paid you the $40,000 but now if I'm making the $250,000 in revenue, I just pay you the 10% off the top. The rest is my money other than anything I'm spending for marketing, right?

Craig Jooste:

Yep. And how that is structured, some franchisors will have the money flow through them or some will do credit card process and actually pull their percentage per transaction. So each one of our franchisees, franchise partners, is an individual corporation. The employees are theirs. They have their liability insurance, workers' compensation, et cetera. All revenue flows through their corp, so their invoicing, credit card check, e-transfer, whatever. And then this is not to make earnings claim, so just to make the math easy, every 15 days, so on the first of the 15th we say, "Hey, you did $10,000 this period," we issue an invoice for $1,000 dollars, 15 days later, you pay it.

So it gives time for people to collect, et cetera. And then the 16th, the end of the month, on the 15th. So the first and the 15th, you're paying for the previous two weeks, and then your technology fee is also split up bimonthly. So it's $125 every time with your royalties, and then as you tier up, obviously your royalties go down. Once you hit $250,001, we're now charging you 9%. And then what you end up for that calendar year doesn't reset for the next year. You can stay in that tier as long as quarterly, you're forecasted that you're going to hit those numbers. Otherwise, we pull back the percentages as to where you're currently at.

Gordon Henry:

Right. Well, Craig, it's been great talking to you and hearing this story. I want to give you a second to tell people where to find you and learn more about what you're doing and how they can potentially become a franchisee, so give us that information.

Craig Jooste:

Sure. Fantastic. Thanks again for the time and the platform. I love having business chats with everyone. So localhandymangroup.com is our website. We have franchise brochures and videos and a whole bunch of fun stuff on there for everyone to see. If you're interested, you can email me directly, so craig@localhandymangroup.com. We are looking for franchise partners that want to join a fun brand, work with other like-minded people that want to drive and push a business locally, want to have some fun along the way, build some work-life balance. The beginning of any business is not work-life balance, you have to grind, but the goal is to drive to being in charge of your time. My job as the CEO and why I always put my email out there is to make sure that we bring in like-minded people. That is my commitment to our franchise partners so that we don't get a bad apple.

And other than that, I would say look at the brand and if there's a connection, the beauty for us, especially going into the states, even though we're an emerging brand, is we have open market. So those markets that have been sold out for Mr. Handyman in very exclusive neighborhoods, et cetera, where you've always wanted to get into, now you have the ability to get into those markets because the availability's there. And once you go through the discovery process, we would have you chat with our Canadian franchise partners to understand what it's like working with Craig, our brand, the business, what it's like, and I think everyone validates very well because everyone's been very happy with their experience.

Gordon Henry:

Fantastic. Well, Craig, again, thanks for coming on the show. Great to have you here. Really appreciate it.

Craig Jooste:

Thank you. Have a great day.

Gordon Henry:

And I want to thank our producer Tim Alleman, our coordinators Diette Barnett and Daniel Huddleston. They do a great job. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your colleagues, friends and family to subscribe, and please leave us five star of you. We'd really appreciate it, it helps us in the rankings. Small business runs better on Thryv. Get a free demo at Thryv.com. Until next time, make it a great week.

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