Episode 33: Creating Lasting Impact By Helping People Better Their Lives Through Franchise Ownership W/ John Hewitt

Welcome back to the Self-Employment Success Podcast. My guest on today’s podcast is John Hewitt. John is the founder and owner of Loyalty Brands, a company that developed a business system that drives customer loyalty, repeat business, and financial stability for franchise owners. In John’s words the Loyalty Brand family of companies help build happy, successful, franchisees. You may recognize John’s name though from his previous business ventures including Jackson Hewitt Tax Services and Liberty Tax. John founded both of those companies, which are two of the most successful franchise businesses in the country, with locations in almost every town. They are at this point common name brands. In this episode John shares his story and it is fascinating. From building the first digital tax preparation software in the early 80s that was so far before its time that H&R Block wouldn’t use it because “they will never use computers”. To acquiring a small tax business with 6 locations in Virginia Beach, Virginia and turning it into Jackson Hewitt, which he then grew and sold. To then starting Liberty Tax where he had to compete with Jackson Hewitt- his own prior company, that had his own name on the brand. How he grew Liberty tax and now is building Loyalty Brands. John calls himself the great grandfather of taxes and I think I call him that too at this point. And be sure to listen to the end, as John shares his heart for faith, family, and impacting others. How among all of the business success he has achieved, he defines his success more by the amount of lives he has been able to change and how he is passionate about making a difference in the world, leaving it better than he found it. So with that introduction, I hope you enjoy this episode of the Self-Employment Success Podcast with John Hewitt.

Links:

PeaceLink Financial Planning

Loyalty Brands

TRANSCRIPT

Leland Gross (00:02.326)

All right, welcome John Hewitt to the Self-Employment Success Podcast.

John Hewitt (00:07.736)

Thank you, Lila.

Leland Gross (00:09.53)

I'm excited to have you on today. I think your story is incredibly impressive and one that comes with deep impact and profound success. And so I'm excited for the listeners to be able to get some slivers of wisdom and to just hear from you today. So kick us off, tell us a little bit about you and kind of what you're up to these days. We'll jump into kind of.

how you got to where you are, but tell us a little about yourself and where you are and where your business is today.

John Hewitt (00:41.624)

We're, we're in an umbrella company that has 10 different franchise systems. So we're looking to bring in franchisees into, into things like inspection, house inspections, roofing, dog grooming, taxes, accounting. We're here to help people find what they want to be and seize their drink.

Leland Gross (01:09.306)

Amazing. So you own a company that kind of helps match franchisors with franchisees. Is that correct? Okay. Okay, awesome. So you own the businesses that you're franchising as well. It's not like if I have a company, I can come to you and you'll consult on that. Wonderful. So tell us a little bit about

John Hewitt (01:18.898)

We, yes, we own the franchisors and we're looking to attract franchises.

John Hewitt (01:29.324)

Exactly.

John Hewitt (01:34.508)

Exactly.

Leland Gross (01:39.342)

So that, and just so listeners know, that company is called Loyalty Brands. And that's John's newest passion project and business that he's building currently. But John, tell us your story. I got the privilege of a quick recap before we hit record, but I'd love for you to tell the listeners kind of your history, what brought you to this point today.

John Hewitt (02:06.352)

Sure, one of the many, many blessings in my life is I found out what I wanted to do when I was 20 years old. Most people, I interviewed thousands of people and asked them, what do you want to be when you grow up? I always ask that.

Most people don't know, even at whether they're 20, 30, 40, 50 years old, they don't know what they want to be when they grow. And so I was blessed when I was a student at the University of Buffalo to take an H&R Block course. And I loved it. And I started working evenings and weekends for H&R Block tax, doing taxes. And 12 years later, I was running 250 H&R Block locations.

Leland Gross (02:25.744)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (02:47.226)

My dad who had always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but he had, I was born when he was at Michigan State and he had so many children so quickly he could never afford to go on his own. So he decided that this was the time that he had bought one of the first Apple computers by mail long before there was an Apple store. There weren't even 100,000 Apple computers in the country.

And he liked it better than the mainframe that was running his public company. He was a CFO of a public company. So he convinced me to leave H&R Block. And so he quit his job as CFO and I quit my job. And in 1981, we built the first tax software for an Apple computer. Uh, you're not old enough to remember a world without computers, but it scared people, people were afraid of computers and no one wanted it.

Leland Gross (03:43.477)

Mmm

John Hewitt (03:45.322)

In fact, we were so visionary, H&R Block, who was our biggest competitor, had 9,000 locations. They said in an annual report the year after that, they said, people ask us why we don't computerize. We say, why shouldn't we? It doesn't save us any money. Customers don't care. We're never gonna computerize. So we got a second blessing. I found a company here in Virginia Beach called Mel Jackson Tax Service.

And we bought Mel Jackson Tax Service from his widow, six offices. And the biggest blessing in that was that the weather here is so much nicer than Buffalo. So in 1982, I moved my family down here to run Mel Jackson Tax Service with our computer system. And been here ever since. The, uh, within a few years, we changed the name to Jackson Hewitt. We merged the.

Leland Gross (04:26.642)

Yeah.

John Hewitt (04:43.97)

computer company and the tax company and we began to franchise. We went public and 15 years later we sold it for $483 million. So almost a half a billion dollars. I had a non-compete that lasted three years and but it didn't cover Canada because Jackson knew it hadn't yet gone to Canada.

John Hewitt (05:13.038)

had done Canadian tax returns and I knew the Canadian tax system and how well each and our block did in Canada. So we opened our next tax service called Liberty tax service in Canada. And within three years built a top 100 retail franchise chain in Canada. So now I built the top 100 in the U S and a top 100 firm in Canada and Jackson even has 6,000 offices.

Still the 23rd largest franchise chain in the country went on to be a billion dollar company. So I founded a billion dollar company. Now I had to compete against that company. I had to compete against my own name and my own software and my own system. And yet not only did Liberty tax us, uh, beat up on and grow faster than Jackson Hewitt, we grew faster than Jackson Hewitt and H and R block combined. We opened 4,000 offices in 12 years.

Top 10 fastest growing franchise or ever. So now I've founded two chains one of six thousand one of four thousand to that admit again this chain was worth a half a billion dollars and It was public so my stock again and Then I now that's when I started loyalty brands and so that was five years ago we have to our

By far the two fastest growing brands at loyalty brands are A-tax. I'm a 54-year tax expert. I call myself the great granddaddy of tax preparation. And I am a great granddaddy in person. So I just had my third one. And almost my fourth one will be here in February. But our tax is doing well. But surprisingly, it surprised me. Pets have totally surprised me.

Leland Gross (06:50.944)

Thank you.

John Hewitt (07:10.21)

The whole industry is just exploding and our mobile grooming is growing even faster than our tax division. So that's where we are today. We have, as I said, we have 10 companies franchising. It's the old 80-20 rule where 20% of them are doing fantastic and the other are growing, but not nearly as well.

Leland Gross (07:38.046)

Mm-hmm. Okay, so there's so much to unpack there. And it's exciting. Like, I love hearing your story because you are John Hewitt of Jackson and Hewitt Taxes, which is a, I mean, every town has a Jackson Hewitt. Every town has a Liberty Tax. You've, you're the founder of two of the largest franchises in the world and where probably many of our listeners have their taxes done.

or at least know someone. Everyone knows someone who has used Jackson Hewitt or Liberty Tax. So that's just, I mean, like. In and of itself, truly impressive, but then you break down the fact that you came back to the United States and have to compete with your own company that's using the own software you created and has your name on the door. You're competing with Jackson and Hewitt to with Liberty Tax. And you beat yourself.

You then created Liberty Tax and grew it to be even bigger. That is truly amazing. Truly like a remarkable story. Like what do you think in those days, like you know we're coming back to the United States. I've built this one business. Now I'm competing with it. What were some of the things you did to say, hey, like

We're going to really grow Liberty Tax. We're going to, for any of these franchises, I guess. But I just think the Liberty Tax piece is so interesting because you're competing against yourself, your former self, which you could break that thought down into how often we're competing with ourselves internally. We're our own biggest critic. You are actually competing with yourself. So what were some of the things you did that was different to be able to...

really achieve that level of success.

John Hewitt (09:35.445)

Well, first of all, let me say this, that I started

Jackson Newt when I was about your age. I was 33 years old and 15 years later, I sold it. And I have to say this, if you run a business from a $129,000 investment in 1982 to $483 million dollars and with thousands of vocations worth $500 million dollars, if you haven't learned a

Leland Gross (10:09.987)

I'm sorry.

John Hewitt (10:10.162)

If you get to start all over again, then you must, you gotta be way better than you were when you started your first company. And I've learned so many lessons. So I took many of the lessons learned at Jackson Hewitt and there were a lot of little things. I mean, there's just hundreds of things I learned in those 15 years, right. That made me start quicker. But one of them.

The biggest one was this, that the second biggest mistake I ever made at Jackson Hewitt was when we bought the six Mel Jackson offices in August of 1982, H&R Block had 9,000 locations. And so we naively or stupidly or crazily set a goal to have 9,000 offices, to have 9,000 in one office.

So we had six and they had 9,000. So we were set a goal, we're gonna be number one with 9,000 others. Well, Jackson-Hill only ended up getting to 6,000, but that was a massive billion dollar company, great success. But I started out and we, by the first January, from August to January, we added five offices. So now we're at 11. The second January, we added four more offices and now we're at 15.

The third January we added seven more offices and now we're at 22. So in two and a half years, we had grown from six offices to 22 offices. Most, almost anyone would be very happy with that kind of growth from six to 22. But I realized since our goal was 9,000, that I was going to be a thousand years old by the time we got to 9,000 and so something had to change.

Leland Gross (11:53.583)

Yeah.

Leland Gross (12:06.566)

Thank you for watching.

John Hewitt (12:07.114)

And so we immediately embarked on franchising. And franchising is a wonderful system where, um, you make, you create opportunities for wannabe entrepreneurs to be all that they can be. They can make money and actually you get great people to pay you to work for you. So when you acquire a franchise, you pay money, right? And then you pay an ongoing royalty. So I brought in over.

Leland Gross (12:28.375)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (12:36.43)

5200 franchisees in my career. People pay me, quality people, pay me to work for me. And so our growth went crazy. We went from 22 offices to 49 offices to 200 offices to 400 offices, and we began to see the growth that we had envisioned by just franchising. So I waited two and a half years at when I started.

and bought Mel Jackson to franchise. When I started Liberty, day one we were franchising. That was the one significant change that made a huge difference in growth. But there's many, many things, there's dozens of things and hundreds of things that we did better.

Leland Gross (13:10.278)

Mmm

Leland Gross (13:26.298)

Oh, I'm sure. And I'm curious for any listeners who are considering like, do I buy a franchise or do I franchise my business? For things like Liberty Tax, like if you, or, you know, Jackson Hewitt, either one, when you are franchising your business, how do you control quality across the board? Like if you have all these people coming in,

paying you, is there a vetting process? I mean, like you think when you think franchise, I immediately go towards the like restaurant franchises. And you know, like if I go into McDonald's, I'm gonna get the same quality every time. You know, like it is a consistency across the board. But how do you build that? Like how do you scale? Cause the idea of someone's gonna pay me to work for me.

and run a branch for me and I get a royalty on all their production. I'm like, obviously that sounds incredible. But then how do you make sure that it's successful when there's such a large volume?

John Hewitt (14:39.414)

That's very important, extremely important, because whoever offers the least service, the worst service in the country, determines the brand name that you get with consumers. So you have to maintain a high level. You have to police the system and make sure people are offering great service. And you have to have the methods to eliminate anyone who's not.

And it comes down to your, the word system is the key word. My job as a franchisor is to create a system of doing business that is best in the world. Your job as a franchisee is to follow that system. And so we are constantly challenging people from the day we meet them, they first inquire until...

until they leave our system to follow the system. And are you someone that's gonna listen and follow the system? And believe it or not, that's the toughest thing to do. In the 5,200 franchisees I've brought in my career, not one has followed the system 100%. So the best, the people that become millionaires, they listen 98 or 99%. But I've had, so I've created 1,000 millionaires.

Leland Gross (15:44.919)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (16:03.298)

but I've also had a thousand people go out of business. And the people that went out of business, listen less than 90%. So what we do, one thing unusual in our brands that almost it's not only best in our industries, but it's best in class in the United States and Canada. And that is we call our customers and ask them how we did. Virtually every brand does surveys.

Leland Gross (16:09.538)

Mmm.

Leland Gross (16:28.494)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (16:32.842)

They survey, you may survey your listeners, but every brand you would get an email survey or a card survey or something to fill out, but we go one step further, we call the customers. And what we learn is that it costs a little money, it doesn't cost much, it costs less than 30 cents a customer. But we learned that the customers like to be

quiz they like to be talked to and so it improved our retention rate just the improvement in retention rate paid for it paid for the cost then what I also learned Leland in my career and especially in tax but this is true in most of the all of our brands if not all of our brands is our employees of the franchisees who are doing the tax returns

Leland Gross (17:04.745)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (17:31.142)

aren't good at asking for referrals. They're not comfortable with asking for referrals. And they're not, they're not, they don't get rewarded enough for personal reward to ask for a referral. So we have a very personable person call you, say how did we do for you? 95% plus say great, it was wonderful. And that person asked for a referral. So now our referrals increase.

Leland Gross (17:33.814)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (17:59.946)

So we have an increase in retention, increase in referrals. And not every employee is a great employee. You're gonna find employees that are gonna need to be replaced. And you're gonna find superstar employees, average employees, and inadequate employees. And so do you wanna wait if you have a tax business? Do you wanna know on January 15th if you have a good employee or on April 15th?

Leland Gross (18:07.086)

Mmm

Leland Gross (18:27.206)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (18:27.53)

You want to know as soon as you can early in the season. So it allows us to go to underperforming employees and either retrain them, give them more guidance or mentorship or remove them. And you have, you can give your customers the best tax preparer or the work or a mediocre taxpayer, the worst. So it's sort of like in professional sports who, who's the first team.

who takes the floor or who takes the field when the game starts, right? And, or in ice, when hockey, who's the first team? And so you have your first team, your second string, your third string, and your first team gets more time. And so it's just an incredible way of monitoring the system and making sure that we're exceeding customers expectations. And it also improves our retention and referrals.

Leland Gross (19:01.851)

Mm.

Leland Gross (19:28.514)

So one of the things you talked about when we were pre-recording is the impact you've had. You mentioned, like, I've had the blessing of impacting thousands of lives for the better. And I think that that's a huge piece of self-employment. I think there's a huge piece of entrepreneurship that wants that. Where people that naturally are activators, that want to get going, that want to get

to leave a bigger impact than we can when we're confined to a nine to five desk situation. So for you, what does that impact looks like in your life? Like what's been the biggest piece of that pie for you?

John Hewitt (20:15.898)

It's well, the result is a amazing loyalty that I have from thousands of people. And even today at loyalty brands, the reason we call it loyalty brands is one of my franchisees at Liberty tax came to me just before we started loyalty brands and said, you know what you need to start a company that's just has people loyal to you. Because not.

Not everyone is loyal. And there can be difficulties and, uh, rebellion and, and disagreements. And so we invented, he invented the name loyalty and then I liked the brand loyalty, so I changed it to, you can't use brand loyalty, so I changed it to loyalty brands and, uh, so he provided a loyalty piece, but I have, even at loyalty, I have three people that have been with me 35 years.

230, about five that are 25 years, five that are over 20 years. I have a lot of people loyal to me, and I brought in 5,000 franchises, and they've had over hundreds of thousands of employees. So there are people all over the country that are appreciative of not only the fact that I set up an organization where they could prosper and be all that they can be, set up the system.

Leland Gross (21:15.331)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (21:43.938)

that was industry standard and was differentiating enough that we were number one in growth each year, but that I mentored them, that when they have questions or I'm a very hands-on CEO, tomorrow I'll be in Dallas and I'll be meeting with existing franchisees, past and franchisees and potential franchisees. And the thing that

I'm obsessive about helping people. And so I'm obsessive about giving advice and changing people's lives. So if I meet you, I'll be giving you quizzes. For example, here's one of my quizzes. Can I give you a quiz now? You probably don't get quizzed. Okay, you probably don't get quizzed, right? So here's a quiz, one of my favorite quizzes, is pretend that there's two...

Leland Gross (22:22.36)

Mmm.

Leland Gross (22:35.333)

Hit me with it.

John Hewitt (22:43.138)

groups there are. And you were at a restaurant last night, I said, well, pretend that table was the executives from Kmart, the top three or five executives from Kmart. And pretend that table over there was the top three to five executives from Walmart. I said, what's the difference? I mean, are the, obviously Walmart is incredibly successful and Kmart is going bankrupt. And they've been going bankrupt for a decade,

What's the difference? Are the Walmart people the smartest? Are they the most experienced? Are they most educated? And I learned long ago that no, they're not the smartest or the most educated or the most experienced. If you could buy the most the smartest or the most experienced or the most educated. So why? What is the difference between those executives, those people? So that's my quiz to you. What's the difference between the Walmart executives and the Kmart?

themselves, not the way they, in what type of people are they that are different.

Leland Gross (23:51.044)

I don't my honest answer is I don't know I'm like

John Hewitt (23:53.717)

Exactly.

Leland Gross (23:55.702)

I'm sure there's not much different. I'm sure there's probably differences in the decisions they made along the way, but as far as quality of person, I don't know. I mean, they're probably, they're all human.

John Hewitt (24:09.391)

It comes down to this, it comes down to culture, the culture and the attitude. And an important part of the culture is attitude. In Tom Watson Senior, early CEO of IBM, a hundred years ago, said, give me a hundred great engineers, skilled engineers, and give me a hundred people that don't know engineering that have great attitudes.

Leland Gross (24:13.315)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (24:36.998)

I'll take the people with great attitudes because you can teach engineering, you can't teach attitude. And Leland, I've had thousands of employees and I made the mistake a hundred times of trying to change someone's attitude. And you know what? I've never been able to change someone's attitude. I've always been able to teach them skills, but never been able to teach their attitude. So at Walmart, there's a culture of performance and positive attitude.

Leland Gross (25:07.315)

Hmm

John Hewitt (25:07.47)

And that sets them apart from K-Mart. It's that simple. And when you're a company, you have a balance sheet. And on your balance sheet, you have cash, and you have equipment, and you have notes and other assets. Well, there should be a asset that's called culture, because culture sets the difference. The greatest companies have the greatest culture.

Leland Gross (25:34.026)

Mmm. I love that. And I think that's so profound. And even in my field, which is different, there's, it is true. It's like, I can teach you the skills of finance. Like I can teach you the knowledge, the systems, but I can't teach you character. I can't teach you personality, attitude, like relationship. I can't teach you that. That's something that's going to be ingrained. But that's important to

who I bring on as we craft a brand and a culture, like you said. So John, I'm curious, what has surprised you the most? Like you've had such an incredible journey and it continues to be incredible as you're building loyalty brands. What surprised you the most about your journey of self-employment?

John Hewitt (26:29.302)

Well, I've had a lot of surprises along the way. Because the easiest way to learn is by making a mistake. So I guess if I had to be surprised, it would be how many mistakes I've made. They say that the people that are most successful have made the most mistakes. So that means I'm incredibly successful. So I've made an incredible amount of mistakes. But it's surprising me how easy it is to get it right.

Leland Gross (26:37.89)

Mmm

Leland Gross (26:52.237)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (26:58.982)

and how so many people get it wrong. And, you know, Charlie Unger from Berkshire Hathaway just died. And my favorite quote from him was, if people weren't wrong so often, we wouldn't be so rich. So people make so many mistakes. But.

Leland Gross (27:20.046)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (27:25.154)

The secret of franchising, for example, and franchising, you said people want a franchise, and it seems like every mom and pop that has a successful business is thinking about growing and franchising and building their brand. And in franchising, the secret of success is incredibly easy. I'll tell you in a minute, it's just a very short phrase. And yet most franchisers fail.

In this country, there are 4,000 franchisors. And I'll give you another quiz. To be in the top 50% of all franchisors in the country. Remember, I'm here to help you and change you, right? Make you better. So here's the quiz. 4,000 franchisors in the United States. To be in the top 50% of all franchisors. And there's great franchisors like Liberty Tax and Jackson Hewitt and Zoom and Grumman and H.R. Block and Subway.

Leland Gross (28:05.699)

Yeah, I love it.

John Hewitt (28:24.27)

To be in the top 50%, how many locations do you need to have?

Leland Gross (28:29.818)

Gosh. A thousand?

John Hewitt (28:34.006)

Remember I told you most fail, 20. Most franchisers, half the franchisers, 2,000 have 20 or less. Most franchisers fail. And they fail for one simple thing they don't understand. And that's this happy, successful franchisees. Happy, successful franchisees. It's that simple. If your franchisees are happy and have a good life,

Leland Gross (28:37.262)

You just need that point.

Leland Gross (28:54.994)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (29:03.378)

return on investment, you can't stop growing. But if they're not happy and or they don't have a good return on investment, so when franchisees build out, they build a system where the franchisor makes money. And they don't care. I mean, the franchisees, some franchisees may make money, but by and large they don't make enough money.

Leland Gross (29:07.897)

Mmm

Leland Gross (29:20.462)

Mm.

John Hewitt (29:31.542)

for return on their investment. So it's that simple. It's black and white. It's easy. I mean, how hard is that to understand, Leilu? I mean, you have to be a rocket scientist to understand the phrase happy successful franchisee and if you right, if you call each of the franchisees of a franchisor with less than 20 locations and find out are they happy and successful you'll find out they are not.

Leland Gross (29:46.406)

When you put it that way, it's very easy.

John Hewitt (29:59.266)

But if you call a brand that has hundreds and thousands of locations, are they happy and successful? Yes, they are.

Leland Gross (29:59.278)

Mm.

Leland Gross (30:06.65)

Mmm.

Leland Gross (30:09.894)

So what was the low point for you in this journey?

John Hewitt (30:13.418)

Yeah, you know, God doesn't put anyone here to escape. You always face adversity. And you know, some of the mistakes I made, I almost went bankrupt because of my overexpansion in 1988 at Jackson Hewitt. I almost went bankrupt in 1995 when the IRS had, in 54 years, the IRS had one horrible year where they destroyed the industry.

Leland Gross (30:17.322)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (30:41.174)

by a mistake they made in the long story. Had civil war at my last company after a bad year, internal fighting. So there's always, at Liberty Tax, I had the company for 17 years and 18 years. In the first 18 years, the board of directors, unanimous agreement, everyone's happy, we're growing.

Leland Gross (30:53.335)

Hmm

John Hewitt (31:11.214)

We're a $500 million company. And then we had one bad year, and a couple of people rebelled and caused a civil war. So, and as a public company, it's all over the media. So I get, I was eviscerated, eviscerated. But so there's, again, the, if God said to me, you're gonna have this,

Leland Gross (31:19.992)

We're gonna...

Leland Gross (31:26.984)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (31:39.83)

these troubles, you're gonna almost go bankrupt, or even if you're gonna go bankrupt, or you're gonna lose your company, or and he said, well I can have a rebellion at your company, or you're gonna lose your son, what would you take? Take the company, right? So, or your son's gonna be crippled, or take the company. So my, I start with a premise, God, family, and business, and I start, I'm the most grateful person you'll ever meet that

Leland Gross (31:53.898)

Hmm

EW

Leland Gross (32:04.463)

You're a human.

John Hewitt (32:09.458)

Every day I wake up happy, every day I go to sleep happy. And because I'm in business, I'm aggravated all day long, but I go to sleep happy and I never have a bad day in the sense that my attitude ever changes. I start grateful every day and end grateful every day. I'm in an incredible, I've had a blessed life and change.

Leland Gross (32:26.531)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (32:38.474)

changed the world and made it a better place.

Leland Gross (32:41.67)

Gosh. All right.

Leland Gross (32:46.89)

I have so many thoughts running through my head, but one of them is just like, you really have had such a profound impact and I love your values, God, family, business. In so many ways, I try and model my life the same way. And you don't know much of my story, but some of my listeners do. My wife and I had a son who needed to open heart surgery and things like that last year, the same time I started my business.

And there were so many moments, like you said, where it was like, okay, Lord, take my business, take anything, you know, like I would rather have like a healthy family and have, you know, just keep my priorities in line. So I love that. And you sort of already answered this last question, but to wrap up.

As you know, if you pull anybody on the side of the road and ask them, you know, how do you define success? That word means different things to different people. People will kind of define that differently for what it means to them. So for you, how do you define success? And have you achieved it? And if so, how do you know?

John Hewitt (34:00.223)

The thing that makes me feel that I've been successful in life is that I've been successful

is the number of people that are grateful to me. And I can go anywhere in the country and pick up and schedule a dinner, breakfast, lunch with people. As you said, there's a Jackson Ud in every town of more than 30,000 people. And there's a Liberty Tax in a town of more than 30,000 people. And people are grateful to me all the way back to HNR Block that I left 30, 40 years ago.

Leland Gross (34:09.795)

Mmm.

John Hewitt (34:35.078)

So I have so many people that appreciate and change their lives. And that is the measurement of my success, is how many lives I've changed and for the better. It's not about the heights you achieve. It's about obstacles overcome. And my favorite story in the Bible is the talent story.

Leland Gross (34:48.186)

Hmm.

Leland Gross (34:59.524)

Right.

John Hewitt (35:03.842)

and you have to use your talents. And I was standing in church 40 years ago, and when you're in church and they're preaching, it's almost like they want everyone to be a minister, like themselves. They're just so, they called on you to be a minister and give money, and I always felt a little guilty about going hand in hand in an occupation, right? That's the teeny little.

Leland Gross (35:30.945)

Mm-hmm.

John Hewitt (35:34.014)

thought, not a big thought. And then I was on the Finance Committee and I was standing there before church and he's, and I had missed the meeting because I traveled and I saw the chairman of the committee and I said, I'm sorry I missed the meeting, he said, you do what you do best, just do what you do best. And that was making money and giving a lot of money and changing lives in that way. There's different ways to minister to people, right? And one is...

Leland Gross (35:58.271)

Mmm.

Amen.

John Hewitt (36:02.106)

One is teaching about God, but teaching them how to have income and be self-sufficient and feel good about themselves is an important part of life. And so I minister to people in every way, but mostly through changing their lives financially and feel good.

Leland Gross (36:22.916)

Mm.

John Hewitt (36:30.546)

I mean, think of these thousands of franchisees who had thousands of employees who, so they're changing lives. It's pay it forward. So, I mean, I can't even imagine the number of people I've impacted with the pay it forward concept. So, that's how I feel success is making the world a better place in some way.

Leland Gross (36:38.06)

Mm-hmm.

And it's a tickle down at the neck.

Leland Gross (36:47.578)

Mm.

Leland Gross (36:54.658)

I love that. I love that your answer didn't have to do with, you know, once I have a bigger boat or a bigger house or any of that, it's making a lasting impact on people's lives. And it's true. Like you've impacted just the people in your life, which has been a huge sphere. And then they're impacting other people's lives. And when you look at the scriptures, the Lord, the whole story is like the Lord saying like, I want

you to be free and whole and full of life. And so often we're slave to money and we're stressed about it and it's a chain around our neck as opposed to helping people really use it as a tool to build freedom and to build the life that allows them to say, look at this harvest, you know, and I do think there's a really powerful

ministry to be had and caring for people in your unique spheres, whether that's, you know, up on stage at church or it's, you know, just in your office or in your day to day or in your neighborhood, just really caring for the people around you. I think that's really profound and you've had a really profound impact, which is amazing. Well, John, thank you so much. I honestly might need to have you back on here because you're a wealth of wisdom and knowledge and experience.

But I just appreciate you giving time and I'm so grateful for this conversation today. So thank you for being on.

John Hewitt (38:30.811)

It was my pleasure. Thank you.