John Hewitt is the "Hewitt" in "Jackson Hewitt Tax Service," and today, he's sharing his extraordinary strategy for winning with you. John has helped thousands of people become entrepreneurs and he knows what works and what doesn't work. This is an episode you do NOT want to miss.

In this episode, John shares:

• The secret difference between making millions or failing in business
• The #1 key that John used to build a $500M+ business
• How to hire the right people to support your winning strategy

Mentioned in This Episode:

• Read John's Book iCompete
• Loyalty Brands

About John:

John Hewitt is the "Hewitt" in "Jackson Hewitt Tax Service," after which he founded "Liberty Tax Service" with over 6,000 offices. John sold his interest in Liberty for nearly 500 million dollars. Now John and his partners and friends are helping Entrepreneurs discover how to become CEOs - "Building Their Empires" for the King of Kings. He is the author of the fascinating book iCompete and the CEO of Loyalty Brands.

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About Angela

Angela Frank is a fractional CMO with a decade-long track record of generating multimillion-dollar marketing revenue for clients. She is the founder of The Growth Directive, a marketing consultancy helping brands create sustainable marketing programs.

Her new book Your Marketing Ecosystem: How Brands Can Market Less and Sell More helps business owners, founders, and corporate leaders create straightforward and profitable marketing strategies.

Angela is the host of The Growth Pod podcast, where she shares actionable tips to help you build a profitable brand you love.

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We have an excellent episode today with one of the titans of business, John Hewitt. I wanted to let you know my mic had a bit of an issue, so I have a little bit of a robot voice. And John's episode is amazing.

So I won't keep you any longer and I'll let you get right into the episode. Welcome to The Growth Pod.

Today on the podcast we have John Hewitt, who is the Hewitt and Jackson Hewitt Tax Service, after which he founded Liberty Tax Service with over 6,000 offices. John sold his interest in Liberty for nearly $500 million.

Now John and his partners and friends are helping entrepreneurs discover how to become CEOs building their empires for the king of kings. He is the author of the fascinating book I Compete and the CEO of Loyalty Brands. John, welcome to the podcast.

Angela, thanks for having me. It's a great pleasure.

I am very excited for our conversation. Today you are going to be sharing your extraordinary strategy for winning.

You're somebody who has helped thousands of people become entrepreneurs through franchising. Can you share a little bit about the key lessons that you learned as you developed your extraordinary strategy for winning?

Well, it's been 55 years. I've learned a lot. They say the people that made the most, that are the most successful made the most mistakes and I can assure you that's true.

So I made more mistakes than almost everyone. I built, as you said, I built two chains, one of 6,000 locations and 4,000 locations, total of 10,000 locations.

And now we have eight or nine different brands. We're just adding our ninth different brand, different franchisor with loyalty brands. So still going.

So we had all company owned stores and in August we had 6, we went to 11 by January 2nd, January we had 15 and 3rd January we had 22. So that's pretty good growth in two and a half years to go from 6 to 22 locations.

And so franchising is an incredible growth vehicle both for the franchisee and the franchisor. So second biggest mistake I ever made at Jackson Hill was not franchising from day one.

So when we sold it 15 years later for $483 million and we had to start over with, with Liberty Tax, first thing we did first day, we started franchising from day one. So lesson learned. If you start all over again and after 15 years and you're not a lot better the second time, you're an idiot.

I love that.

I think that one of the biggest things that I've learned through kind of making my own mistakes as an entrepreneur is you have to learn from your lessons and not repeat those mistakes. And so I love how you said that you learned that lesson and you didn't want to repeat it and make that same mistake. In your experience.

When you're working with entrepreneurs, what is the biggest misstep that you see them make when it comes to strategy? You mentioned that a thousand of your franchisees became billionaires and a thousand of them went out of business.

So is there a key thread between all of those franchisees that went out of business and what can we learn from their failure?

Exactly. When you acquire a franchise, the most important thing you you do is you acquire a system of doing business. Think of it as a recipe.

So if, if a famous chef gave you a recipe to cook a dish and it said, add a pound of sugar, why would you add a pound of salt? Why would you add a half a pound of sugar or one and a half pounds?

So what happens is in franchising is our job is to give you the best system in the industry. I've done that for 55 years. If I do my job. Your job is to follow that system, follow that recipe. Well, it goes against all human nature.

Out of the 5,000 people I brought in, not one has listened 100%. The superstars listen 98 or 99%. The losers listen less than 90%. So it doesn't matter how smart you are, it doesn't matter how educated you are.

It doesn't matter how matter how experienced you are. Education, experience, intelligence do not matter. Following the proven system is the key to success.

Interesting. I love the margin that you explained there where the people who failed listened only 90% of the time.

You, you'd think that the failures would have listened like less than 50% of the time or Something. But you're saying that that margin of people who are successful and not is 8% difference. So that's very eye opening to me.

Let's switch now to people who have a winning strategy, and you are clearly one of them. You have written an entire book on your strategy for winning. Could you sum up in a snippet for us what is the key element to a winning strategy?

And how do you continue to use this in your business? Today?

Before I tell you the one number one most important thing, let me say this, that I realized about six weeks ago that that's the number one question I get asked. They say, you've been extraordinarily successful. What's the key thing? And I realized what I said is I do a weekly mentoring webinar.

And I said one week that that was the question. I said, you know what? I Love Love Top 10 lists started with Top 10 Commandments in the Bible.

And for each of my companies at Jackson Hewitt, we had a top 10 list. This is the most important things to do. At Liberty, we have the top 10 list.

At our new franchise, Zoom and grooming, mobile grooming, we have this, our top 10 most important things things to do. I love love top 10 lists. So I said, you know what? There, that's the number one question I've been asked and I'm going to tell you the answer.

But there's there's at least 10 things that are critical to having massive success. And I said, on next week's show, I'm going to go give you my top 10. Well, it turned out the next day I wrote down 10 pretty quickly.

Surprisingly, I thought I could only write down five or six. And then before the show, I thought of two more. So my top 10 is actually top 12.

But I figure in the Big Ten Football Conference, there's about 14 teams, so they call it the Big Ten. So if they can do it, I can do it. So I have about 12 key things, and I spent an hour going over the top 12 things.

So I'm not going to, I'm not going to take the time today to try to elaborate on all 12 of them. But I will say that the number one key is perseverance. That in my life I've helped hundreds of thousands.

I've had over 5,200 franchisees who had hundreds of thousands of employees, and I've helped tens of thousands of people. And no one gets to skate without adversity. Everyone faces adversity. And so the key thing in massive success is perseverance.

They got to kill me to stop me. I mean, there's no stopping me. I'm unstoppable except by death.

So perseverance, I think that's so powerful. What you said about nobody skates by without an adversity, I think is something that people don't realize when they are getting into business.

And that ability to take it and keep getting up over and over and over again. And like you said earlier, learn from your mistakes and make sure that you're not repeating them. That's key. So I really love that.

I'm curious, how has your strategy for winning changed over time? Or has it remained pretty constant for you?

No, it's changed dramatically over the years. Dramatically over the years. When I was your age, when I started Jackson Hewitt, our mission statement was winning customers for life.

And so back in the, in the 80s, 70s, 80s, it was customers number one, customers number one, customers number one. But somewhere along the journey, people started smart people like Herb Kelleher, the chairman of Southwest Airlines wrote a book called Nuts.

And in the book he said, no, no, no. If you want your customers to be treated as number one, you have to treat your employees as number one.

And so our mission statement changed when we started Liberty Tax to focus on employees. And then when we started franchising, our success is due to happy, successful employees and happy, successful franchisees.

If you have happy, successful franchisees, you can't. You're unstoppable. If you don't have happy, successful franchisees, you can't, you can't succeed. You will fail. So it's that simple.

And yet 80% of franchisors fail. Believe it or not, 80% of franchisors fail. Sure, you have your HR blocks and your Jackson Hewitts and your zumengrium and your McDonald's.

You have the great franchise system, but most fail because of that one simple thing. They set up a system so it's a happy, successful franchisor, and they're not as concerned with the franchisee.

If the franchisee doesn't make money and is unhappy, you can't win. And it's that simple. And yet most franchisors do not get that simple concept. So it's changed.

It's changed from customers to employees to franchisees, and now a real focus exceeding customers expectations.

I think it's so interesting to see how your strategy has changed over time.

As you say, a lot of people think about putting the customer first, but it really begins with what's inside the company and something we've talked a Lot about with experts on the podcast is the importance of starting with yourselves and making sure that your own plans for your business is fulfilled through what you're doing. But this takes it one step further.

It's not only you as a business owner, but your employees, your franchisees, things that you don't necessarily think about because you go from you to the customer. But there's this super important middle step, which is making sure that everyone in between that is being treated correctly.

And that's culture. I didn't learn until I was about 40 years old about culture that I wondered why Walmart was Walmart and Kmart was Kmart.

I said to myself, what's the difference between the executives at Walmart and the executives at Kmart? Are they smarter? Are they more educated? Are they more experienced? And I quickly realized they're not smarter.

You can hire the smartest person, they're not more experienced. You can hire the most experienced. They're not more educated. You can hire the most educated person.

So why are they, these failures at Kmart, these executives? What's the difference in the CEO and the CFO and the cmo, the C level executives?

And it turns out I realized, and I found out when I was about 40, it's culture and attitude. You know, Tom Watson senior, the founder of IBM, said, Give me 100 people that are with great attitude or give me 100 great engineers.

He said, I'll take the people with great attitude because you can teach engineering, you can't teach attitude. And indeed, one of my biggest failures in my career is trying to change people's attitude.

And they can snap out of their bad attitude for a day, a week, a month, but they snap right back into it. Well, however many I tried to fix, dozens, if not over 100, I would offer, I never got one to change their attitude long term.

So we hire for attitude and we focus on culture. We even have at both Liberty and now loyalty brands, we have a culture committee that's focused on employee culture, employee attitude.

Amazing. So when you're assessing somebody for a job, how do you assess the right attitude fit?

Because clearly, attitude is something that plays heavily into your winning strategy. So what are the key things that you look for when you're bringing someone new onto the team?

Well, you know, when you interview people at a job interview, people are at their best ever. It's even better than a first date. I mean, they. They don't. I mean, they are perfect. And they. Everyone can talk about themselves, and everyone's been.

Most of them have been schooled or practiced in interviews. And so they're at their best. So it's, you have to be asked very tricky questions. You can't just say to someone, do you have a good attitude? Right.

You have to, you have to ask them, ask them different questions about their experiences in life and then glean from those experiences what their attitude is. But most importantly is the higher up in position in our company, the more people you have to talk to.

So if you come in at the lowest level, you're going to talk to just two or three people to get an interview. If you come in at the highest level, like CFO or cmo, you're going to talk to a dozen people.

And so a dozen people are going to be looking at you individually, trying to see if you fit in, trying to see if you have the right attitude. And even when we do that, Angela, we're only, I'm only right like two thirds of the time. So you have to be very quick.

If someone six months later, three months, six months, 12 months later, if they do not fitting in, you have to go to them and move them out. I told one person who was particularly unsurprisingly obnoxious. I said, after I fired, when I fired her, I said, I'm not firing you.

You fired yourself. I mean, so and so doesn't like you. And another, I mean your peers don't like you. I mean, you, you're not a, you don't fit. I didn't fire you.

You fired yourself. But you have to, you have to realize you're not always going to be right and move quickly.

Because someone with a bad attitude can be very toxic in an environment.

Absolutely. So attitude is something that plays really heavily into your strategy.

And it's something that you're able to make sure that your entire company is taken to heart. And if they're not, you deal with them quickly.

When you are working with an entrepreneur who wants to reassess their current strategy and course correct, do you also recommend that they course correct quickly or how do you recommend, how do you advise them through that process?

What we do is to be careful and to do an accurate job. When they first start with us, we ask them their five year plan. Where do you want to be in five years?

And we'll go longer if you want, but we want to know where you want to be in five years. And then we work together to build a strategy to get there. Because that in, for example, in our zoom and grooming franchise, right.

That each van nets about $50,000.

So if you want to make 100,000 a year, then you'll be happy with five in five years with two vans, if you want to make 400,000, you're going to need a vans. So we give them guidance up front.

Once they're in training, we give them a goal and then, and then all along the way we assess how they're doing on the plan. So we set a five year goal, then back it down to three years and then back it down to one year.

If at any point in that process, it never goes according to plan. Right. There's always adversity and some people are way better than they thought. A few people are way better, some people are way worse.

Most people are kind of in line. But we all the way along we're assessing. And so we go to you and say, you know, if you're on this track, let's say you're behind plant.

We say if you continue in this manner, you're not going to meet your goal. So either we need to put in more resources, time or money or following the system more closely or we need to adjust our goal.

So we adjust goals and we adjust plans on the, on, on the move. Right. And so we have to, we're always assessing, but it starts with each person needing to identify where they want to go.

And in all the human beings I met and helped, 90% of them don't know where they want to be five years from now.

I have had very similar conversations with people. It's hard to get people to even say what they want to accomplish in this year, much less five or 10 years down the road. So I love what you're saying.

You start there and make sure that they have a vision for where they want to go over the next five years. So with that in mind, John, I'm sure you have a vision for the next five years. I want to know what's next for you.

Well, we have, right now we have nine different franchise systems and we have three different, three different initiatives. Number one is I just completed my 55th taxes. So I have tax and accounting. And so we have a low end tax that competes with HR block called atax.

We have a higher end that does accounting and tax, higher end higher income tax returns and corporate returns and called ledgers. And we, so that's one focus is tax and account. We have a second focus that's construction and that's led by our new roofing brand, it's called CR3.

It's roofing, siding and solar and it's not even A year and it's about a year and a half old and we're in the top 5% of all year and a half old franchisors in growth.

We also have an inspection franchise, home inspection franchise that it's a nice fit between doing home inspections and having roofing because a lot of times you'll see a home that needs inspected when you're doing roofing, and when you're doing inspections, you see the roof that needs being done. And then our. But our fastest growing vertical is zooming grooming, mobile dog. Mobile grooming. Mostly dogs and people are just crazy about their pets.

They're especially the pandemic exacerbated the growth of the pet industry and it's more than doubled in the last four or five years and expected again to double the last four or five years. So we're adding to our mobile. We're adding this month to our mobile, a franchise on storefront grooming.

We're even looking at other auxiliary services.

Like some of our customers need pet sitting, they need dog walking, they need the poop picked up in their backyard and they need food delivery, they need transportation for their pet. So there's so many other pet services that we can provide. So we have three different initiatives now.

I'm 75 years old and I don't have time in my Life to do three different initiatives. So within the next two years, we'll be down to two or three years, we'll be down to 2 initiatives, we'll sell one off and then.

And then maybe in five years we may be down to just one. Most likely down to I'll just have one initiative now. I'll leave my.

I'll send my team and my systems with both of the other initiatives and they'll have access to me there my whole life. But my vision is within my five years, I'll probably be down to just one industry.

Amazing. It sounds like you've definitely got a lot going on.

And I also will mention to the listeners of this podcast, my dog groomer just quit my mobile dog groomer and moved to Florida. So if you want to start a Zoom and Groomin in Colorado Springs, I will be your first customer. I desperately need a new groomer. Please help me.

John in Denver. We have about eight bands in Denver.

Really? Do they come down to the Springs? We're about an hour away.

Probably not, I'm not sure. But we have interest in Colorado Springs, so.

Amazing. Yes, I will be a customer.

Retired Air Force.

So yes. Yeah, there's so many Air Force people here.

Also, there's a space force base and army base, so lots of people who are kind of making that transition back into civilian life and looking for something new to do. John, thank you so much for joining us today.

It's been my pleasure. Thank you for the great questions, of course.

If you enjoyed this episode of the Growth Pod, please leave us a review. Thank you so much for listening and I look forward to seeing you in the next one.