From one mower and one truck to a global network of local franchisees — the story behind the name on the truck.
Jim's Group traces back to 1982 in Melbourne, Australia, when founder Jim Penman started mowing lawns to help pay his way through a PhD. It began as one man, one mower, and a handful of regular customers who valued someone reliable turning up when they said they would.
By 1989, demand had outgrown what one person could handle, so Jim turned the business into a franchise model — Jim's Mowing. Other operators could run their own local patch under the same name, the same standards, and the same promise to the customer, while building a business they actually owned.
That original mowing round grew into Jim's Group, now home to dozens of service divisions covering everything from lawn care and cleaning to building and pet care, with thousands of franchisees operating across several countries. The model never changed: local owner-operators, backed by shared training, systems, and brand standards.
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Jim's Mowing brought that same franchise model to Canada in 1997, starting with a single local franchise. The idea was the same one that built the brand from the start: give homeowners a local operator they can trust, and give that operator the training, support, and systems of a much larger network behind them.
Nearly three decades later, that's still what a Jim's Mowing franchisee is — a real local business owner backed by a global standard, not a call centre reading from a script.
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