Wow, where do i begin...

(For reasons obvious, to prevent giving away my identity some of this I will speak about it generically)

I'm sure we have all heard about the importance of doing your due diligence before signing anything. The problem is, you can only make an assessment based on the information presented to you. We would naturally think, perhaps naively, that the information presented is accurate, factual and in good faith.

In addition, part of due diligence is asking questions in order to gather more information. The problem is, how do you know what questions to ask, or what are the right questions?

This is the dillema of being a Jumping J-Jays franchisee. For as much of the slick sales pitch is fed to you, there is plenty of other information that isn't.

What is it like doing castle deliveries?

This probably depends on your perspective. The majority of people you meet are happy, understandable given that the most deliveries are in connection with a childs birthday party. In this regard seeing all these little smiling faces is the rewarding part of the business. You do run around a fair bit from place to place and get to meet a lot of people, and there is opportunity to build rapport with other business owners who may hire you for event.

Despite what is told to you, weekends can be quite full on with deliveries even if you arrange for them to be delivered early so that you have a break in the middle of the day. Likewise, doing weekday deliveries as part of LAMP does also take a lot of time. So while the business is marketed as a three day a week business, in my experience it is more than that, and the supposed investements of your time listed in the franchise documentation I would say are quite optimistic in most areas (more on that and LAMP later).

If you are doing deliveries by yourself it can be quite exhausting and can leave you feeling very sore come Monday morning, especially during the businer times and especially if the larger castles are going out. It is not unusual for example having several castles to pickup around 9:00PM on a Saturday which means you are often not in bed until after midnight, and you may have to get up at 5am to get ready for deliveries on the Sunday. You may not see your kids much if at all on the weekend.

If you don't have enough physical ability you will find installing the larger castles very difficult or impossible without a helper (makes things easier but after you've paid everything you won't be left with much profit). The damn things are very heavy even though you aren't directly lifting them.

You can get quite filthy.

You can also get very wet. The "free raincover" selling point is is more about John's absolute reluctance to refund money. This way, the castle can go out no matter what, but you will be the one dealing with the customer when the cover does not work as expected, or "the kids hardly got any use of the castle", or demands for a refund. You will be hard pressed to find any competitor that will go out if there is any hint of rain.

Another point I wasn't counting on before I started. Often you deliver to backyard birthday parties. Often, it means family/friends are invited, and there are cars parked all over the street. These days with streets getting narrow it can make access difficult. Also I can't count the number of times I've had to cart my gear way down the street because that is where I managed to park. More effort, more time.

What are the castles like?

Generally bright and colourful. They are (mostly) unique designs although there aren't a lot of points of difference with the competition compared to years gone by. Like most things in life ideas get copied and things like inbuilt slides etc. while once unique are now commonplace. The current flagship Fun Factory model is quite good. The others not so much. At the end of the day though the kids don't really care, they'll jump on anything, in essence you are marketing to the decision maker, i.e. the parent.

Most of the castles have interchangeable themes. This is basically a sheet of painted or printed vynil with velcro strips on the back which you stick on one of your "stock" castles. However from a customer standpoint they are marketed as individual castles so it looks like there is a lot of different stock. I seem to recall reading somewhere that the entire company operation has over 1000 castles (Largest operator In Australia, so the marketing hype goes). I find that figure very difficult to believe once you discount the themes. A typical franchise will start with 12-14 castles, the busier ones will have maybe around 20-25, but even if you total up the current franchisees plus the branches even 400 castles total seems optimistic.

The castles used to be a bit generic in terms of themes. The rationale behind not using disney characters, etc, was that the licensing costs can be exhorbitant, but aparently this didn't matter so much since the customers are adaptable so a child having a Peppa Pig party could have a "Toybox" themed castle. Or at least this was the story up until John threw it out the window and released the "Bouncer" castles as a desperate response to dwindling sales (if you can't beat them, join them?). These Bouncer castles are essentially the same as many other competing operators use, only that Jumping J-Jays charge more.

What about castle build quality?

I've read that some of the older franchisees have been unhappy with the build quality of previous castles. For the more recent ones, they seem to be quite well built when comapred to some of the cheap and nasty stuff the competition use. However, the extra quality does make the things heavier, therefore harder to work with.

If you have new castles, the vynil is stiff, and rolling them up properly can be difficult and exhausting.

Safety

Honestly there is a lot that Jumping J-Jays does safety wise which is better than the competition. I've shaken my head plenty of times when I've seen, for instance, competitor castles setup on concrete surfaces that were not only not tied down, but also had no crash mats used for kids to land on (There are even documented cases of children being injured or killed when a jumping castle has been picked up by a big gust of wind). Admittedly, some of the safety aspects you learn will depend on who is training you. But there are all sorts of nuances to learn, from electrical safety, to the types of knots to use on the ropes, right down to installation options (improvisations) you have on difficult sites.

There is however some contradiction as well.

The unique designs were purported to be safer than what the competition uses, mainly because the castle walls are inflated and not a netted material. This safety aspect was not only key differentiator and selling point from a customer perspective, but also from a franchisee/business perspective. Of course, now that the Bouncer castles are being pushed safety dosen't seem to be such a high priority anymore. See point 5 here back in 2013 what was said prior to the bouncers being released the following year. There is also this material I found spelling out the dangers of using castles with netted walls. In actual fact, there also used to be a great animated feature (which I cant seem to find right now) that popped up on the website along with John's photo showig castles in yet more states of collapse. Clearly this would be deliberately aimed at swaying the customer from booking an "unsafe" competitors castle, but after hearing John go on about the safety of his castles for so long I find the bouncers a bit hypocritical now.

The most nervous experiences I've had with safety involve the "Arch" type design and high winds. This type of castle has an ability to catch wind like a sail and you can visibly see the castle wanting to lift off the ground even when you've tied it down. I once set one up on a site where I had to use the supplied concrete blocks to tie it down, along came a major thunderstorm and promply blew the castle and concrete blocks over the fence. There is no telling what may have happened if the customer had not been able to get it back under control and shut down. Of course, now that the blower was off the castle innards started to fill with water... but thats another story.

Weight

These castles are HEAVY, especially so for custom designs like the Fun Factory. Prior to signing up i'd never even been on a jumping castle let alone installed one. Very clearly, when doing due diligence you understand this is a physical business but I think franchisees are quite unprepared as to just how physical, and how heavy these things are. For all the warnings and advice etc that are listed in the documentation about how you are not "directly" lifting anything, that you are using a trolley, etc, I think is quite misleading. I've seen a seasoned installer, while demonstrating the correct/safe lifting technique to stand a fun factory on its end (so that you can put it on a trolley), fail to do so even after 3 attempts. And this wasn't a scrawny bloke either. Fortunatly for me, during training I managed it on my first go, but barely. Subsequently I developed my own technique, probably not the best technique since it would increase the risk of injurying myself but it made lifting it a bit easier.

Then there is the "manovering" and "pivoting" of moving the castles about when they are rolled up. Again, not an issue for small castles, but often times it is difficult to have a large castle remian on a trolley without it falling off. Then there is the fact that you need to get the thing in and out of your trailer, which still requires lifting of some sort. Imagine how hard this is after a long day of errecting and tearing down castles. Again, there is no possible way for you to know what this is like just by reading some documentation.

It is true that after doing castles for a while that your body gets somewhat conditioned to it and you build muscle in the right places. However, some franchisees have openly admitted that they usually team up when installing the heaviest models, these franchisees tend to have slimmer/smaller frames. John works around this issue by a disclaimer of sorts - during sign up you need to aknowledge that you know these things are "heavy" and that you are physically fit, but for some people I think being fit isn't enough.

On the positive side, if you are a large, overweight bloke, you will certainly get into better shape doing this, assuming you can lift the bloody things.

LAMP - Local Area Marketing Program

The marketing requirements could really be the thorn in your side.

In a typical franchise, the dad is doing the physical stuff while the mum does the marketing. This is something that, generally speaking, would be better suited to females especially since you are visiting places that are female dominated industries. However, I know of at least a few instances where the male has done at least some or all of the marketing (myself included).

There are a few central themes to the marketing:

Build Rapport

Build your database

Get infront of the customer before the competition does

So in a nutshell it works like this. You spend 1 day per week (supposedly, in my experience it is more) visiting childcare centres, kindergartens and schools in your territory, making phone calls, sending emails, etc to basically build rapport and convince these places to take your marketing material. At some point you also convince them to take up your offer of a free castle from which parents will need to fill out "parent permission forms", the information on which will be added to the database (JAYNET). Then, snail mail/email/sms marketing material will be sent out close to the childs birthday. The idea is that you are trying to get ahead of the competition by planting ideas into the head of the parents, since around 1 month out from the child's birthday the parent would be thinking/planning about what sort of birthday party the child will have.

Sounds simple right? I thought so too, until I started doing it for myself.

Firstly, there is a quota system which dictates how many childcare centres. kindergartens, etc, you must visit - this isn't unexpected given that its logical there needs to be some method to measure minimum performance required. A key problem here is that most of the performance is measured on the number of "bookings" (free castles) that you secure, as the ultimate purpose of doing this excercise in the first place is to get those forms. On face value as a franchisee you might think giving away a free castle is a great deal but i've had all sorts of reasons for not taking up the offer - not having the minimum number of kids required (typically 50), not wanting to have parents fill out forms, insurance concerns, safety concerns, space issues, access issues, logistical issues, being unable to control kids, not wanting to supervise kids(!), or simply can't be bothered. Add to this that sometimes it is not possible to get in front of the person in charge, or they are unavailable, or they aren't working on your lamping day, or no one will even let you in, and as you can see, the measure of your performance is not in your control and totally at the whim of a 3rd party.

When you do manage to secure a free castle booking you'll need to deliver it at some point.. Most franchise owners, or at least the male, also works full time, so this means getting up early to deliver castles at 6am to childcare centres, or having to take time off work to deliver during school hours, etc. This can be bloody difficult in the winter. This is often time consuming as well - the franchise manual says that a typical delivery takes 20 minutes - BULLSHIT. By the time you collect the forms (no forms, no castle), assess the site (each is different, and with different challenges), gain access, haul everything in and usually concrete blocks as well, add extra time for the rain cover and to route extension leads away from kids reach, errect signage, give staff your brochures, train the staff and you are looking at easily 45 minutes, usually longer. Then when you pick it up the reverse happens, only that you now need to spend an extra 10-15 minutes cleaning the castle because it is full of sand/bark/water/food/whatever, the castles get much dirtier than in a typical backyard party.

So you will need to do a set number of these bookings per quarter, per type of booking (e.g. 12 childcare centres, 3 schools, etc). It sometimes isn't easy getting these bookings, so that requires more legwork & time hassing people and visiting new centres, and now all of a sudden that seemingly easy 1 day a week becomes 2 or 3. But John Newton cares little.

With the backyard birthday party being the core business model since inception, one concern I had even before I started was that I noticed, as I'm sure many of you would as well, that there is a definite trend away from the "home" style birthday party towards playcentres and the like. When I raised this concern in the pre-franchise stage it was played down, and it was evident when I was operating that revenues has been drying up for some time. So the focus started to change, in that we were now promoting to sporting clubs and businesses (mainly Bunnings/Masters) to find those additional sources of revenue. The techniques used here are more about rapport building to get sales since it would not make sense to give Bunnings a free castle and have parents fill out forms. Still, it is very concerning that your core market is drying up.

$100,000 Turnover Gurantee

Turn over 100 grand or I will personally write you a cheque for the difference. Sounds like you cant lose right? Unfortunatly, you may not know how John Newton thinks.

When I first started, he told me about how much it "burns" that he would need to transfer money for bookings that were going to be done by a new franchisee. I didn't think much of it at the time.

Later I learned that he is all about the money. He will try very hard to avoid giving it to you.

The $100,000 gurantee comes with caveats. You need to meet all your obligations as per your contract including your LAMP. Any slip up, which is *very* easy to do especially if you are new (and he is banking on this), and the gurantee is void. Also, the money you get is less royalties and fees. Lets say your turnover was $80k, therefore $20k shortfall. That $20k would have anywhere from 30%-50% in fees and royalties, therefore the difference you are getting is more like $10k.