Nick McGowan (00:02.684)
Hello and welcome to the Mindset and Self Mastery Show. I’m your host, Nick McGowan. Today on the show I have John Hewitt. John, how you doing?

John Hewitt (00:12.78)
Incredible, thanks for asking.

Nick McGowan (00:14.574)
Absolutely. Second time you give me that answer. So I appreciate that, man. Hey, why don’t you kick us off? Tell us what you do for a living and what’s one thing most people don’t know about you that’s maybe a little odd or bizarre.

John Hewitt (00:27.246)
There’s many, many bizarre things in my life, but one thing that people don’t know is that long before poker became televised and huge, I played in the World Series of Poker back when there was less than, in 1978, when there was less than a hundred participants. Now there’s over tens of thousands of participants. But I’m a CEO of Loyalty Brands. have eight different franchise systems.

focused in three divisions. One is tax and accounting. One is roofing and siding and solar. And the third is everything pets led by our mobile pet franchise.

Nick McGowan (01:12.732)
Nice. Now this isn’t something I’m sure you turned on overnight. And I’m sure it wasn’t also like an easy transition from being in the World Series of Poker in the 70s to where you’re at now. But give us a little bit of context. How did you get started with all this?

John Hewitt (01:28.685)
I started when I was at the University of Buffalo. I took an H &R Block course, loved it. And 12 years later, I was running 250 H &R Block locations. And you’re not old enough to remember a world without computers, but back in the 70s, my dad bought one of the first Apple computers, and he was the CFO of a public company. He liked it better than the mainframe that was running this public company. And he was a visionary. He decided that we should computerize taxes.

So we both quit our jobs in 1981 and built the first tax software for an Apple computer. No one wanted it way ahead of its time. I got lucky and found a company in Virginia Beach called Mel Jackson Tax Service. We bought six offices from his widow and went public and merged the two companies, changed the name to Jackson Hewitt, and 15 years later sold it for $483 million.

And Jackson Hewitt went on to become a billion dollar company. So our first major venture was a billion dollar company. And today Jackson Hewitt has about 6,000 offices there, top 25 largest franchise chains in the country.

Nick McGowan (02:42.012)
Yeah. Do you feel any sort of way knowing that it’s a billion dollar company and it’s not yours anymore?

John Hewitt (02:48.683)
No, after that I started Liberty Times and that became another half a billion dollar company. So I’ve founded two half a billion dollar companies and again I brought in over 5200 franchisees in my career, helped 5200 families and plus they had hundreds of thousands of employees. So no, don’t, I do this for the journey and the joy and

Our mission statement says it all, and that is having fun, improving lives.

Nick McGowan (03:23.484)
Yeah. Now, let’s take a bit of a step back to you and your dad. Starting this thing off, did you have ideas of, well, this will turn into a potentially a billion dollar company and then we’ll sell it we’ll get another one. That’ll become sort of the same thing and we’ll help lots of people. Or were you kind of looking at it like, well, my dad and I get to build this thing. We have an idea. Or was it kind of a mixture of all of that?

John Hewitt (03:48.053)
Well, there were two parts to it. One is building the software. And then second was building Jackson Hewitt. The first part, when we built the software, we were just trying to sell it. So we tried it. We went to H &R Block and said, you know, I’ve been an executive at H &R Block, one of the top 50 executives in the country. I said, buy my software. This is the future. And they were so conventional and antiquated that

In an Andrew report in 1983, they said, people ask us why we don’t computerize. we say, we tried it. Customers don’t care. We’re never going to computerize. So they just were so conservative. But with the tax company, when we bought Mel Jackson Tax Service, they had six locations and Blockhead 9000. We set out in my business plan in 1982, I said, we’re going to try to get to one more office than H &R Block.

Nick McGowan (04:27.28)
Never.

John Hewitt (04:47.179)
We’re going to try to get to 9,001 offices, adding 8,995. Well, we only got to 6,000, but it did become a billion-dollar company as a result.

Nick McGowan (05:00.966)
So you talked about the mission statement, fun and inspiring people, right? Improving lives. So those should be core competencies for every human. Like we should have fun and we should improve other people’s lives. And I really believe that purpose is a community thing. It’s not a solo mission. sometimes people can get lost in that where it’s like, well, my purpose feels so deeply intimate to me that this is the thing.

John Hewitt (05:07.207)
improving lives.

Nick McGowan (05:30.906)
This feels like it was part of your purpose. Do you agree with that?

John Hewitt (05:34.651)
Yeah, well, it should be a goal for all of us. Most people only want to, they want to, from each person they work with, they want to improve their own lives. And so they manipulate other people. So it’s a rare minority that understand the real purpose of life.

is to serve others and to make a difference. so that is a rare trade, actually.

Nick McGowan (06:10.512)
Would you think that’s something that can be cultivated and learned or is that mostly internal and like a talent we come into this planet with?

John Hewitt (06:20.077)
I think there are most things can be learned. Some things can’t, like attitude. I’ve never been able to change someone’s attitude. But I think that can be learned to appreciate. And as you get older, most people, or many people, if not most, they mellow and they understand that giving back is rewarding. And if you’re…

If you pay attention, the more you give, the more you receive. So it’s self-fulfilling that as you experiment with giving, you get more, you receive more. And I don’t personally typically receive nearly as much as I give each person from that person. But good things happen to me if I give to other people.

Nick McGowan (06:51.825)
Mm-hmm.

Nick McGowan (07:11.034)
Yeah. Was that something that was kind of innately part of the way that you looked at life or was that something that came along earlier in life? Like maybe through your pop even?

John Hewitt (07:20.079)
I learned it from my parents and I watched my parents and you know, I’m lucky I had my parents until I was into my 60s. And when I was in my 40s, one of my people, father died and I said, did you have any regrets? And said, yeah, she said, there were some things I wish I had told them. And so I sat down and wrote a letter to each of my parents and I got different.

skills or lessons from each one of them, right? They’re very different people. And that was one of the lessons I got that both of them had, is they were very giving and beloved because of…

Nick McGowan (08:04.348)
That’s cool. What a beautiful thing. I mean, you can learn a lot from your parents. Sometimes it’s what to do. Oftentimes it’s like what not to do. But for you to also be able to be empathetic and understanding of the other people you work with. Look, you’ve done this for a long time and the people listening to this show are typically leaders either in their own businesses or in their careers and their ups and downs. We all get that. For the most part.

John Hewitt (08:17.415)
you

Nick McGowan (08:29.786)
the ups and downs when you look back, you can see how they tie together like the how the points all worked out together. What are some of the main things that you’ve really kind of worked on on yourself, be it internally or just the way that you kind of work with people over the course of time that you look back, if you had to give a bit of a synopsis or summary to it, these are some core things to go through.

John Hewitt (08:52.168)
I think that my philosophy is that without without downs the ups wouldn’t be as high. You know if your life just went and just had a few ups here and there then the so your ups are higher because you go into valleys peaks and valleys your peaks are higher.

And so I’ve had to change and improve over the years. And, I’m fanatically committed to winning. To win, have to have the best system. To have the best system, it has to be improving. And so I’m fanatically committed, but improvement requires change. And improvement and change are, if you’re going to be, if you’re going to do great things, you need to be uncomfortable. There’s no comfort.

in changing the norm or in being outside the box all the time. You have to be uncomfortable. And so I learned to put up, not only to put up with discomfort, but to embrace criticism.

Nick McGowan (09:52.954)
Hmm. Yeah, that oftentimes people can hear be coachable. And sometimes you can think, well, fuck off. I’m trying, you know, and other times it’s like, okay, well, I want to learn from this. Those hits at different times can trigger things out of us. There’s deeper things that have happened or, know, somebody criticizes and they’re really asking a question we can be triggered. I think it’s a separate piece of like, you need to process through that and understand where that all comes from. But being able to take those hits.

the advice that you would give to somebody, what does that look like for them to be able to not interpret throughout and go, well, I’m terrible, this is how it is and understanding and basically showing ourselves grace. Like you are here who you are right now and in the future you won’t be because there will be more time and experience through that. But what advice like would you give it to an employee or even a leader in your company? Like here’s the deal, dude, that sort of thing.

John Hewitt (10:51.016)
It’s case by case, of course. We all face different adversities and we’re all in different, we all have different skills. We all have faced different problems.

I try to be a mentor for people and to listen to people. I try to be an active listener that so many people don’t listen carefully. What they do is they listen enough to say what they’re going to say next. And they’re thinking about what they’re going to be saying rather than pay full attention. So one of the things I start with is being a

exceptional listener and then I find out what I helped them figure out what they want to be. You know, I’ve asked I asked this question in every interview and most people don’t know the answer. I say, what do want to be when you grow up? And most people, 95 % or more of Americans don’t have a five year plan or five year goal. They don’t have a goal, so they can’t have a plan because the

Nick McGowan (11:51.255)
the

John Hewitt (12:02.974)
They don’t know where they want to be. So how can they have a plan to get to somewhere that’s neither here nor there? They could be going in the wrong direction. So I counsel people to help them to a self-realization and point them towards that rainbow, end of the rainbow. Everyone has their own desire where they want to be.

at the end of the rope or five years from now or 10 years from now. So it’s one by one listening and coaching and helping people help themselves.

Nick McGowan (12:45.124)
Yeah, what a novel concept. Let me help you help you. You can’t actually fix these problems for the people. And like you said a little earlier, you haven’t been able to change somebody’s attitude, because that’s them. That’s a them issue. They need to be able to change that. And I’m glad that you pointed out, you didn’t go to, coach them through this or anything, even verbiage wise like that, but use the word mentor. I think that’s a huge, huge difference because then you’re working with them.

You’re not coaching him, telling him this is the plague at your ass back in the game. This is how you do this thing. But you’re actually working with them on that certain entrepreneurs I’ll talk to when you really get to like deeper conversations, they’re like, I don’t want to do that with people because what if they’re not going to be here anymore or what if they’re not in the right spot and I’ve screwed up or whatever. And those can be internal conversations or like deep dark room conversations they have with themselves. But have you ever been in that spot where you’re like, look, I’m, I’m here for the person.

John Hewitt (13:27.79)
Okay.

Nick McGowan (13:44.004)
And your spot is no longer in the company because of what you’re saying to me, not because of their performance or anything like that. Have you ever had to like help somebody walk themselves out?

John Hewitt (13:49.406)
absolutely and I learned a good way to say that to people that this isn’t the place where you’re going to be exceptional. God has a place for everyone where they can be exceptional. This isn’t your place and you need to go find a place that you can be exceptional.

Nick McGowan (14:14.78)
I can appreciate that you probably have a deeper conversation with those people and that you want to help them. I had worked with a previous company before where they would ask people to seek excellence elsewhere, but it was a nice way of telling them to fuck off. They would be like, well, that’s a really sweet way of just telling them that don’t ever come back and hand in their keys instead of like, let me help you figure out a way to get through this. One of the reasons why I wanted you to be on the show.

was because of the work that you’ve done and the longevity of the work and also the person that you seem to be. And I’m happy to see that you are not only, it seems to be, but you really do genuinely seem to really care about these people. And having been through all this stuff, again, the people listening to the show are leaders in what they’re doing. And I can almost guarantee that a small percentage haven’t actually built billion dollar companies. There are probably some in here, but for the most part,

These are people that are trying to work, trying to learn, trying to grow, and trying to work through their own stuff. So with that in mind, working through the personal things that you’ve had to deal with, were there some major things that you can look back at and see some shifts that happened or even some specific times? Like that was a moment in time that everything changed from there.

John Hewitt (15:31.322)
absolutely. As I said, no one gets to skate and everyone faces adversity. And the more successful you are, the more mistakes you make. And often the bigger the obstacles you’ve had to overcome. So there were lots of dark periods where, or I shouldn’t say lots, but there’s some certain tens of thousands of difficulties. But there was a couple of very dark periods that,

Nick McGowan (15:41.936)
He

John Hewitt (16:00.914)
that didn’t look like we were gonna make it almost, that it was things happen. Sometimes it’s your own fault, my fault, and sometimes it’s external. It’s the industry fault. But you’re going to face those problems and you’re gonna get knocked down. The winners just always get up.

Nick McGowan (16:20.092)
Sure. Are there any stories that come to mind that were kind of early on stories or even like really growing pain stories?

John Hewitt (16:26.494)
Yeah, we started Jackson Hewitt in 82 and six years later we had about 50 offices and we had a chance to buy over 200 locations and from the second largest prepare. H &R Block had 9,000, the second largest had about 270 and

We had 50, we were third largest in the country. And we could, they approached us in October and said, would you like to buy these 200 locations? And so it was, we made the mistake of biting off more than we could chew. And so we way over expanded. We almost went bankrupt and had a very dark period from February of that year when we

when we were running into all the difficulties until the following January when we recovered with the next tax season, it was a very dark period and we almost went bankrupt. And it was my own doing that I did it, made the mistake of biting off more than I could chew, overexpanded, which is, I’ve come to learn that’s very common in business.

Nick McGowan (17:54.666)
It’s a wild thing that people want to be able to grow and grow rapidly, but then can miss the little tweaks and things that happen to us as leaders throughout the slowness of the growth. Like I’ve seen different people like cripple themselves or literally go out of business because they’re like, well, we landed all these clients and now what do we do? How do we do it? Our processes are shit and all these other things.

But what’s that balance look like, you know, of like taking the calculated or even crazy risks. That’s part of our sadistic mentality as entrepreneurs. Like sometimes we’ll fuck around and find out. Sometimes you learn the hard way, but how do you then manage going, all right, what’s the calculated piece to it? And I get that every situation is different, but for those people to understand, and I guess really what I’m getting at is what did you take away from all of that for the people that go?

Well, I need to grow, we need to grow rapidly. We need to do all these things. What advice would you give them other than like, calm down, sit your ass down and breathe first?

John Hewitt (18:58.094)
Yeah, remember I’ve mentored over 5200 franchisees and helped them and I spent

I’ve never gone to a franchisee and said, you need to expand. I spent a lot of time talking to franchisees, you’re trying to do it too quickly. And so it comes down to the basics, right? This isn’t rocket science. This isn’t as to how fast you can grow. You need two things. You need people and money. And so with each one of them, instead of saying you’re…

Nick McGowan (19:16.198)
Hmm.

John Hewitt (19:34.181)
You can’t meet that goal. You can’t add four more offices this year. I said, here’s what you need in order to let’s determine what we need in terms of open four more offices. need X amount of people. We need X amount of management and we need X amount of money. And is that available? And then I will help you analyze that. If you’re not sure you have the proper management personnel or, or I’ll have guide you in.

hiring that many people and the money is pretty black and white, then if you’re not sure, I’ll weigh in on each of those. But first let’s decide what you need in order to do that. And then I’ll support you. If we agree, this is the number of people, this is the amount of money, then I’m here to support you and it grows fast as you want. So I learned to say no by saying yes. I said, yes, you can do it if…

And then we look at the basics of the needs in order to have that growth carefully and manageable.

Nick McGowan (20:47.26)
So it’s calculated, a bunch calculated at that point. And it sounds like you kind of remove emotion from that where I can understand that a lot of people, if they’re in a spot where they’re unsure, it’s like new territory for them, your emotions can easily seep in. And some more so than others. I know for myself, I’m a hyper emotional person. So I can feel those things happening at different times that I’ve watched different people who seem to be emotionless.

move throughout things without feeling the emotion or the empathy of other people they’re working with and they’ll abuse teams. They’re like, I don’t give a shit. We sold 100,000 of these like go. You’re burning people out. So have you ever been in one of those spots where it’s like you’ve had somebody that has extremely grown, but now they’re starting to see some of like the kind of the cracks in the hole.

John Hewitt (21:38.498)
It happens to almost everyone. You’re almost always the best people are the most successful are tested because there people aren’t in general good delegates and people are generally the same person that can run one office. Well, isn’t the same person that can run 20 offices. Well, you know, there’s the way I think of it is

there’s chiefs and then there’s chiefs of chiefs. If you think of Indian tribes, I think of a tribe of TPs where there’s one camp and there’s a chief of that camp. But then there’s a hundred camps and there’s a hundred different chiefs. Who’s the chief of all of them? That’s the chief of chiefs. Most chiefs can’t be the chief of chiefs. So they miss on the skills and the ability to do that. And so they’re

In order to do that, you need to transition and your most people hit the almost everyone hits a wall where they’re just incapable of learning enough to go to the next level. And, you know, I built a company with in 1982, we had sales of, what was it? 350,000. We built the company with sales of a billion. So we went from $350,000 revenue to a million.

3 million to 6 million to 10 million to 20 million to up to a billion. And the same, you have to have, you have to trade in new people all the time. And most, you know, I was blessed that I had the ability to run both companies. could, I could learn and improve and, and adapt, but almost no one on my staff could. I had to change out my chief marketing officer, my

chief information officer, my CFOs, we had to change as we got bigger because they didn’t have the ability to go to the next level.

Nick McGowan (23:46.204)
Yeah. In the early stages of that, how did you know you were making the right decisions? And granted, I know you made wrong decisions at times because you’re human. That’s what happens. But being able to know when to change somebody else.

John Hewitt (24:04.759)
Well, the…

And first of all, I’m only right like 60 % of the time. When I made those changes, the new person I brought in wasn’t, I was only right about 60 % of the time. The most important thing in making the changes is to move quickly when you made the wrong choice, when you haven’t picked well. It’s clear when people need to be changed out because they don’t meet their goals.

Nick McGowan (24:27.228)
Mm-hmm.

John Hewitt (24:38.156)
So we, I’m very black and white that for example, it’s easy to measure someone in bringing in new franchisees, right? If our goal is 100, it’s either pass or fail. You either get to 100 or you don’t. And so if someone is incapable of growing and our goal next year is 200 and then the year after is 300 in there.

There you have to measure their ability to train and hire and support the new staff and to be able to budget and hire as fire to get to that level. It becomes apparent to everyone, not just myself, but everyone in the executive team sees the weakness of one of the key people and.

they, it becomes obvious that they have to, we have to get someone over. Now, we often went to those people and said, you can stay and we’re going to put someone above you. But virtually no one stayed in that situation. They went on to be exceptional somewhere else at a smaller company. And they, as we brought in more and more experienced, capable people.

Nick McGowan (26:03.9)
That’s interesting, because there’s, there’s also the idea of training and building within. And that wasn’t something you really mentioned, but I wonder if that’s a piece of it too, where I understand if you’re like, well, we’re going to put somebody over you. Do you want to stay? Probably not. You might have somebody every once in a while, it’s like, thank you. I didn’t want this responsibility and then it solves it all. But there are also times where people will show themselves working through the ranks where you as an executive team can remove that emotion from it and say,

This is the person that’s doing the right thing. Let’s shift this thing around and make that call pretty quickly.

John Hewitt (26:38.217)
Sure, I moved people. I think one of my skills and one of my blessings is I was able to pick people and move them to different chairs. So at one point, I moved someone at Jackson Hewitt from my attorney, in-house counsel, to director of franchise sales. At one person at Liberty Tax, the person under the CFO.

I moved him over to be director of operations. I moved people around over the years. I spotted core competencies and ability to improve and change. And I moved them into better suited spots for them and helped the company in that way. yeah, whenever possible, we tried to…

nurture people. always had beneath the executives were superstars or future superstars that we’re continually to train and to give guidance to that hopefully would be able to take over or move into one of the executive slots at some point.

Nick McGowan (27:58.94)
I’m sure there’s a lot that we could get into even deeper with that, with those different pieces and different people, even executive teams and people’s biases or not biases and all that sort of stuff. But I really appreciate everything we’ve gotten into today. And thank you for being on the show. I know that there’s a lot of things that you have going on throughout the day and for you to peel out time to talk about this. I think this is something where the entrepreneurs that listen to this or even people that are just trying to manage their lives a little differently can really get a lot out of this. And before I let you go.

What’s that one piece of advice that you’d give to somebody that’s on their path towards self mastery?

John Hewitt (28:34.468)
My general advice to everyone in life is find something you love to do. Work hard, persevere. On Monday morning, if you’re going to work and you’re not looking forward to it, life’s too short. I mean, change. Find something you love. And secondly, everything worthwhile requires hard work. There’s no skating. There’s no easy, easy win. And then the number one most important

Attribute for success is perseverance. Everyone gets knocked down. Everyone faces adversity. And winners just get up each and every time. You gotta kill me to stop me.

Nick McGowan (29:18.268)
That’s awesome. Again, John, it’s been great having you on the show. Where can people find you and where can they connect with you?

John Hewitt (29:24.454)
I’m at loyaltybrands.com and there are, if you would like your listeners would like a copy of my book, they can get my best-selling book for free. I compete and just buy a link on loyaltybrands.com.

Nick McGowan (29:41.02)
That’s awesome. Appreciate sharing that. And John, thanks again for your time. Appreciate you being on.

John Hewitt (29:45.561)
My pleasure. Thank you,