What can you learn from five decades in business? Gutter-Vac’s founder, Warren Ballantyne, reveals he made plenty of mistakes in his early years running a plumbing business. So when he and his wife Anne launched the Gutter-Vac cleaning franchise it was an opportunity to do business better.
“I made a lot of mistakes. So we took all those mistakes and when we started franchising and said, let’s see if we can fix them up,” Ballantyne says.
In 2025 Warren Ballantyne was inducted into the Franchise Council of Australia’s Hall of Fame. The accolade recognises his outstanding contribution to franchising and his role in shaping a trusted, professional model for service-based franchises across Australia.
The couple had originally adopted franchising believing it would be an easy, low cost way to expand the business.
“And we soon realized that that whole thought pattern was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. So then it took us the next 30 years to get it right. And we’re still trying to get it right, you know,” Ballantyne says.
“We’re just changing the whole fabric of the business as we speak to meet the market and the demands that are out there.”
Gutter-Vac’s Warren Ballantyne shares key insights
Ballantyne points to the difficulties prospective franchisees face in sourcing finance.
“So what we’ve done is we’ve said, let’s put our money where our mouth is. We’ve set up a rental system with a reasonably low entry price, that covers training and a small Gutter-Vac fee.
“We then rent all the equipment for the five-year period. So the great thing about that is that all the rental comes off taxable income,” Ballantyne reveals in a Franchise Business Spill the Biz podcast.
In this podcast he also talks about starting out in business, the need for innovation, the importance of listening to advice, how to manage working with your spouse, and the prospect of retirement.
