Buckle up for an insightful episode that's all about entrepreneurship, tech solutions, and the power of perseverance. We talk with Bryan Clayton of GreenPal. Drawing inspiration from companies like Uber and Airbnb, and armed with his favorite book, The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, Bryan explains how he transformed his vision into a powerful platform, GreenPal.
Connect with Bryan Clayton:
Website: https://www.yourgreenpal.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-clayton-a96b33214/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yourgreenpal/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greenpallawncare
Follow the podcast at @itsjustbusinesspodcast on all the major podcasting platforms.
Connect with us:
To get in touch with us, email the podcast at itsjustbusinesspodcast@gmail.com.
Join us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn - we appreciate your support!
www.itsjustbusinesspodcast.com
You can find Dana @adashofboss, @dana.dowdell and @hrfanatic
Dana Dowdell – Boss Consulting – HR Consulting
Google - https://tinyurl.com/y4wxnavx
You can find Russ @reliable.remediation
Russ Harlow – Reliable Remediation – Disaster Restoration
Google: https://g.page/r/CXogeisZHEjMEB
Buckle up for an insightful episode that's all about entrepreneurship, tech solutions, and the power of perseverance. We talk with Bryan Clayton of GreenPal. Drawing inspiration from companies like Uber and Airbnb, and armed with his favorite book, The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, Bryan explains how he transformed his vision into a powerful platform, GreenPal.
Connect with Bryan Clayton:
Website: https://www.yourgreenpal.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-clayton-a96b33214/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yourgreenpal/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greenpallawncare
Follow the podcast at @itsjustbusinesspodcast on all the major podcasting platforms.
Connect with us:
To get in touch with us, email the podcast at itsjustbusinesspodcast@gmail.com.
Join us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn - we appreciate your support!
www.itsjustbusinesspodcast.com
You can find Dana @adashofboss, @dana.dowdell and @hrfanatic
Dana Dowdell – Boss Consulting – HR Consulting
Google - https://tinyurl.com/y4wxnavx
You can find Russ @reliable.remediation
Russ Harlow – Reliable Remediation – Disaster Restoration
Google: https://g.page/r/CXogeisZHEjMEB
Hi Russ.
Russ:Dana, how's life treating you?
Dana:It's good. I feel like I haven't seen you in a while. How have you been?
Russ:Living the dream, always trying to find new ways to solve problems, and business brings plenty of those, so it's exciting.
Dana:Yes, and we are going to talk to another business owner today. We are joined by Brian Clayton. He is a successful entrepreneur and co-founder of GreenPow. Brian, welcome to. It's Just Business.
Bryan:Dana and Russ great to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Dana:Thank you for being here. All right, so you started manual labor landscaping business and now you are still in kind of that sphere, but in a different capacity. So tell us about your journey into business.
Bryan:Yeah Well, so you're exactly right. I started a lawn mowing business in high school as a way to make extra cash. I actually I wasn't like a natural born entrepreneur, I was actually forced into it by my dad. I think he got tired of watching me play Super Mario Kart all day long and he said, hey, get off your butt. I lined up a gig for you. You're going to go mow the neighbor's yard. And it was like a direct order. It wasn't. I wasn't living in a democratic household, so he made me go mow the neighbor's yard and for an hour work hours worth of work I've got paid 20 bucks and that was awesome. And I was hooked on entrepreneurship from that moment, ever since, as a 14 or 15 year old kid. And so I remember the first thing I did is I passed out some flyers around the neighborhood and by the end of that first summer I had like 20 customers and I was off and going and just stuck with that lawn mowing business all through high school.
Bryan:And then when I went to college, I wasn't like I didn't get like a scholarship or anything. I had to figure out a way to get cash to put myself through school and so I mowed grass all day long and went to school at night. And then, after I graduated college, I had to make a decision Was I going to go into the job market and take a pay cut because I was making some pretty good money mowing yards, or stick with this lawn mowing business? I really didn't want to be a lawn guy my whole life, like it wasn't why I went to business school. It really didn't appeal to me that way. I actually hated mowing grass. I hated the smell of cut grass, I hated everything about it really. But I thought this could be my lane, this could be my way to, like, make something of my life and build a real business in this industry. And so I took what little I learned in business school and I made a little business plan and, over like a 15 year period of time, little by little, year by year, grew it into a real company. Eventually, like I got it around 150 employees and $10 million a year in revenue. And then in 2013, the business was acquired by a national company in the space.
Bryan:And so who that business? From just me and a push mower to me and like 150 people, learned a little bit about how to grow and scale a company and then sold that and then kind of, I didn't like retire, but I didn't have to work anymore. It was a weird thing. I was only like 32 years old, so I had enough money to like do what I wanted to do. So I thought the game was over and I thought, well, I'll just like live the good life.
Bryan:And that was very boring and it only lasted like three months, maybe six, and I thought, well, what am I going to do with my life now? It was like a reflective period of my time of my life, and I thought, well, I want to get back in the game, I want to, I want to start another company. But what am I going to do? And I remember I got done watching the social network and I thought that looks fun. Running a tech company looks fun, maybe I can do that.
Bryan:And I thought, well, what kind of tech business should I run? And I thought, well, somebody's going to build an app that works like Uber, but for long care, and I know the long care business. Why can't that be me? And it was kind of naivete as an asset. I didn't really understand how challenging it was going to be to start a tech company but recruited two co-founders and we started the idea of GreenPow, which is the Uber for long care. And now you know, here we are, 10 years later. Greenpow is a 10 year overnight success around 300,000 people using the app to get lawn mowing services and profitable and self funded. And so, like you mentioned, it's 23 years and kind of one industry on the blue collar side, in the trenches side, and now on the tech side.
Russ:So tell me with and I love that you can use another industry's brand to kind of educate what you do. Very simply, you say that it's the Uber for long care and I know exactly what you mean. I go in the app. I find somebody can mow my lawn. They show up and do it. I pay them through the app. So there's got to be a lot of pieces to that. There's got to be some education factor to that. So what are the biggest surprises that you ran into? You know, even though you knew the industry. But going into this tech side, it's a great question.
Bryan:So the yeah, there's a lot of unknown, unknowns, and so the first thing is I was kind of like solving my own problem. So I was able to start on first base because I saw how difficult it was to like just order a basic lawnmower service for homeowners and because, running my first company, people called us every day like 40, 50, sometimes as many as 100 people a day wanting us to do this, come out and mow their yard, and we no longer did those residential basic services so we would refer them out to like smaller server providers and then people would call us back and they would say, hey, I called all those names that you referred me to and none of them called me back, and so we were in like this loop and so I figured like technology could solve that problem. I saw it every single day. So I think if you're starting a new piece of technology, it could be helpful to solve your own problems in that way, and that authenticity in that way can be a competitive advantage. And so it definitely was for us. We were able to kind of start on first base, knowing the industry, knowing what we were trying to do with tech and make it better.
Bryan:But that was it. Like everything else, we kind of had to learn. And so we had to learn how to build software, learn how to code, learn how to design software, learn how to do all these things. That took a few years and then did all that, built the product and thought, wow, that was really hard. Oh, this should be easy now. And then we were confronted with like, no, that's the easy part. The hard part is actually getting awareness around this new product and, again, marketing and distribution around the new product. That, like distribution, kills more new technology products than anything, because that is the hard part.
Bryan:And so then we had, like, began the daunting task of like how do we get people to know about GreenPowell? How do we get people to find GreenPowell when they need a lawn mowing service? How do we place this product kind of in their just natural journey and when they're trying to solve this problem? And that's a lot harder than building the product itself. So that was one thing that I didn't know starting this business, that that went.
Bryan:There's a big like difference between running a traditional type of small business landscaping company, construction company, restaurant, you name it. They're hard, they're hard enough, but it's like a hundred times harder to invent a brand new product from scratch that does not exist, nobody knows about, nobody knows they use it to solve their problem, because that's like an order of magnitude more difficult. And so for me, we just took it one step at a time, like we just got to get 100 people to use it and nothing else matters until we go and find 100 people to use it. And then, after we got to 100, we thought, ok, now we got to 100. Now we just need to get to a thousand.
Bryan:And the gap between 100 to a thousand was like two years and we just kept, we kept making these little small goals and these they didn't add up. They compounded over time and now we're at 300,000 people using it. We want now we want to get to a million. We need a million people using this. But took a long time and I didn't know. Nobody told me that. Nobody told me that it was a lot more challenging to to get the product in people's hands and distribute it than actually building it in the first place.
Dana:So I have a question related to the sale of your original business, because we often don't talk about. When you start a business, you don't ever think about it not existing anymore in your life, right? So when? When you were 32 and you, you sold it, were you looking to sell it at that point, or?
Bryan:Good question. It's so anybody running a business. Some people run a business thinking they're going to have it forever and hand it down to their kids, and then some people like have these, these dreams of selling it one day. And I think, as you are running and building the business, you need to like really know what the end game looks like and you need to plan for it and you need to execute a strategy against that, that, that that end point, like.
Bryan:My favorite book is the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and one of the things that that book talks about is begin with the end in mind. And and I think if you're running a business doesn't matter if you're, even if it's just you cleaning houses you need to begin with the end in mind as to what that looks like in five or ten years and then work backwards from that. I did not do that, and so I thought I really thought that I was going to run. I didn't really even think about it and I thought I was just going to run the business forever and I thought it was very as a very good lifestyle business. But there was a very weird thing that I didn't understand was happening at the time of running it, that that I was getting fulfilled by the evolution of of me growing alongside the business's growth. So so, if you're doing any business well, you should evolve into a whole new person every year, two or three years you should be completely unrecognizable as to the person you were five years ago versus the person you are today, because the business is extracting these, like these, learnings from you. You're like picking up books that you never in a million years would have read. You're watching stuff on YouTube you never would have watched. You're listening to podcasts you never would have listened to, because you've got to like get the skills to play this game and work through levels of the game. And so you evolve into a whole new person. And so for me, 15 years of that like I didn't understand it at the time, but I was like passively getting a sense of fulfillment by that because I liked it, until that plateaued and it wasn't.
Bryan:It wasn't as if I had conquered the world or anything, but in my little world of Nashville, tennessee and the landscaping business, I I kind of reached close to the mountaintop and and now the next step of the journey was going to be something like opening a branch in Atlanta or or Memphis or Chattanooga or a nearby city, and I didn't really have the appetite to do that, and so I went through this two year, maybe three year, like sideways part of the business that I just hated. I just didn't like the fact that that I wasn't growing, I wasn't learning, I wasn't evolving, I wasn't prospering in that way. I was making money but all the other stuff wasn't, wasn't growing and and that like weighed on me until this hit me one day. I was like I was like I'm just going to sell this company and from the moment like I had that, that that thought to the day I was able to get the business acquired was over two years, because, because I didn't have an exit plan in place. There's a great book called Built to Sell that walks you through a strategy on how to build all the systems and processes and get your business ready for sell.
Bryan:I didn't have any of that.
Bryan:It was basically like me, with 150 people and organized chaos every day, and so I had to take the business down to the studs.
Bryan:I mean, yeah, we had some systems and processes, but nothing like what an acquirer was going to want, and so I had to take the business down to the studs and really rebuild it from the inside out to get it ready to sell even as much as like moving the location of the company 60 miles to be closer to the nucleus of middle Tennessee. And it was weird like going through all that, almost fell in love with it all over again because that was challenging and we made it more streamlined, easier to run, more profitable and so on. But that was how I experienced it. So you know anybody listen to this that wants to sell their company. You need to. The way you're going to run your business to sell it eventually is very different than how you're probably running your business right now and you need to think that through. You need to maybe work with a broker to help you develop that plan and execute against the game plan, because it'll make life a lot easier and it'll make your outcome a lot better.
Russ:I don't know a ton about the landscape space but I'm learning a lot. My 18 year old son has kind of branched off from working for me to kind of start his own business and landscaping Awesome, that's great. And so I'm learning like there's a whole, it's a wild out there. You know there's guys who will still mow lawns for 20 bucks and you're like, how do you even pay for gas, right? So there's a lot of competition in the market. There's under the table guys, there's legit businesses there's, you know.
Russ:So he gets a lot of referrals still from larger landscapers who are not interested in doing the residential mows anymore because it's not as profitable. They're looking to do hardscapes, commercial work. You know all these other things may be drainage and so it's interesting to see. But so GreenPow in and of itself, I mean you're solving the problem of bringing providers and, you know, people who need lawn care together. Like this is the problem that you're solving. So how do you bring both sides of that to that? Like I can think about marketing to homeowners that need their lawn mode, or, but it's two different things. How do you bring in both the providers and the clients who need their service?
Bryan:Yeah, it's a marketplace with a chicken and an egg problem and you have to solve for both sets of problems at the same time. And you know every marketplace faces this challenge. It doesn't matter if you're trying to get on Airbnb and you're trying to book a cottage in Billings Montana. You know you as the customer, they better have that inventory ready for you, and so they have to solve that problem as well as getting you on the platform. And so we have the same problem. And every city has to be built from the ground up with service providers and consumers. Now, in most every marketplace, like ours, the demand side, meaning the person spending the money, is usually the harder one to acquire. The one that's making money is usually a little easier to acquire. But in the early days, when we had nothing, it was very much a hand crank, manual process the first thousand lawn care services now today we have 32,000, but the first thousand all had my cell number and, like I, personally onboarded all of them, and one of the things that we did to kind of get over that cold start problem was I would say hey, listen, I've got this platform. Greenpowell, this is the vision, this is where we're trying to go Right now it totally sucks. We don't have the features that you need, but we need you to quote and we need for you to show up and mow the yard when you get hired. That's all we need and like. For that I will give you free coaching on how to grow a lawnmowing business, because I know a little bit about that, and so I did that. For the first several hundred Is a way to like hand crank the supply side. And then we focused on the demand side, which is homeowners or consumers, and how do we market to them? How do we draw them to the platform at a local level and be where they're looking when they're trying to solve this problem in their life? And just by hand cranking the supply side and then getting some little bit of momentum or flywheel on the demand side. We got it to work in one city, nashville, and not even Nashville like the suburbs around Nashville, and then we developed a little bit of a playbook about how to roll it out into like Atlanta was our second market, tampa, florida was our third, and so on, and now we're nationwide in every city of the United States.
Bryan:But that took a decade, took 10 years to do that. Figure that out and grow that. So it is hard because it's like going to Airbnb and wanting to book a place and there's nothing there. If you show up to get your lawnmower, you don't get any free quotes in a minute that you hear out of there and bad review in the app store, and so it's a challenging problem in a business like ours, but we have to.
Bryan:The way we did it is we solved for the supply side. We made their life literally a little bit better in terms of easier to get business, easier to get paid, easier to keep everything organized, easier to manage your route. And so they're like yeah, I'm just gonna list my services here, so then they could kind of be ordered off the shelf, so to speak, ordering something on Amazon. And that was, I think, what we got right. Where a lot of other platforms got it wrong, they thought that server providers in this industry were kind of like Uber drivers. They were like fungible commodities where you don't really care who picks you up to take you to the airport, but you do care that you want the same server provider every week on your property. And so we were able to kind of get that right, and it might've been because of my experience in the industry, but that's how we solved. It Took a long time, a lot of trial and error and a lot of pushing on a string for a long time.
Dana:Is there a mechanism for I'm thinking about the other problem that you experienced when you were running the landscaping business if you would refer out to other landscaping businesses and then they wouldn't show up, so they'd call you anyways. Right? So does the platform also solve that problem? And that there's a review or rating system or some type of structure to verify the credibility of a provider?
Bryan:That's really why we exist. You know and that was one thing that also caught me off guard when we started the business, I built and sold a landscaping business. I didn't want to get back in the landscaping business and I wanted to build a tech company. And so you know, first, six months in the building this tech business, you're writing code, launching shipping software. And then it weighed on me, I think somebody like called in, like complaining that somebody let their dog out because they didn't close the fence gate or something. And then it weighed on me, it hit me. It's like all the things that makes that that suck about hiring a lawn care service are now my problem. Like I have to solve every one of them. Like that's why we exist.
Bryan:It doesn't matter how good our code is, how well our technology works, how beautiful the design is of the application. All that matters is did the lawn get mowed on the day it was supposed to? And did it get done perfectly? And and it didn't just work, and, and and we own that end to end, and, and. So to your question yeah, like that's what we've spent a long time trying to solve is all the million things that can go wrong between you've got grass that's three feet tall and and a beautifully manicured lawn. All of the things that can go wrong between those two points are now our problem we have to solve. So how do we do it?
Bryan:Um, you know, the first thing is, is we? We we do some vetting on the front end to make sure we're getting good contractors on on the platform, but that you know that that that's weeds out like the lowest common denominator contractors. We then have to rigorously score them in terms of, like, how often do they show up on the day they're supposed to? That's a big one. Uh, when we first started, we thought we were trying to deliver a cheaper alternative to getting this chore done, and what we learned was that actually no, the price didn't matter. The problem we really are solving is the case of the disappearing lawn guy who doesn't show up on Thursday when he's supposed to. And, like, now you got to wrangle him. Hey, where are you at? Are you coming out? Yeah, I'll be there tomorrow. And he didn't show up tomorrow.
Bryan:Are you coming out? Well, no, my equipment broke. It's like that's the problem we're solving, and so so we so, with the rigorously score these service providers on our reliability of rating, on how often do they show up on the day they're supposed to, and, and then promote and demote them based on that. And then also other signals, your traditional star rating you know, we all know how to use a one through five star rating. We have that. Does that solve? No, all problems? No, but it does let you know what people are saying about their services.
Bryan:But other signals that are that are much more important are how often do they get booked for a second, third and fourth moment?
Bryan:Because that's an indication of quality and customer service and and and the ability to, to to run a good lawn mowing business. That's a big signal that we're able to capture because we're kind of facilitating this transaction, whereas when you hire somebody off of Facebook or Craigslist or Yelp or through a family recommendation, you don't really know. You're just taking a leap of faith. When you come on the green power, you can see these, these, these ratings, and then also we kind of demote and expel the service providers that don't ever get rehired or don't get rehired enough, you know, because that's a big signal of if they're good or not. So, so that's really the business we're in. Is is is is enabling the consumer to sidestep those bad experiences and enabling them to to just hire a reliable contractor the first time, without having to go through like the gauntlet of trying to figure out who's good and not, you know, through the manual process that most everybody else has to go through.
Russ:So I'm trying to think this through from a couple of different sides. One first, as a consumer. I think, well, if my guys, if I'm, he's scheduled for here for Thursday at two and his equipment breaks down and I really needed done it Thursday at two, is there a backup that someone else can come in and cover that for him? But also, in landscaping you got weather, weather happens all the time and you shouldn't be mowing in a pouring rain because it's just going to make a mess, you know. So there's other things like that in scheduling. But then from the contractor side, because I'm in the service industry myself, I think is there a way to create clients as well? Maybe I don't want to rebook with that client again and that's why I didn't get rehired.
Bryan:So how does that all?
Russ:work together.
Bryan:Yeah, it's a great question so. So accommodating for things like weather is important because we have to have like a flexible system that accommodates for that. But it's rare that weather like kills a whole day, but sometimes sometimes it does. We do bring in a weather activity into our system and automatically reschedule things based on weather. That catches about maybe 30, 40% of use cases. It really is up to the contractor to protect their ratings and because if they have high ratings they get hired more and make more money on the platform. So all of the incentives are aligned. So say, okay, I've got 10 yards to do on Thursday and it's supposed to rain Thursday, I better go in and reschedule them on the system Wednesday afternoon. So my home, so my clients know when I'm going to be able to get there, rather than rather than just not showing up. If they don't show up, they get killed on their ratings and so, and when the ratings go down, it's harder for them to get hired for more work. And so trying to build this feedback loop so good contractors get promoted and the non-reliable contractors get demoted and sometimes expelled, is how we deal with that. Sometimes, if it really good contractors, which we have several that are making over a million dollars a year on the platform. We'll do them a day early and say hey look, it's going to rain Thursday and my green pile rating is really important, so I'm going to show up Wednesday afternoon. So that's how that's dealt with. Now, the ability to pitch hit where it's like okay, this guy can't come Thursday, let's get you somebody else real quick.
Bryan:The business doesn't work that way, unlike Uber drivers where they're riding around town waiting for your call. There isn't like lawn mowing guys riding around with a truck and trailer with $40,000 equipment to say hire me so I can come over and do it. Now. It doesn't work that way. It's very much a route-based business. It's a portfolio of clients-based business. It's like I know I'm going to have this. I have 78 stops next week. They're all organized based on what part of town they're in and they're all like ongoing customers and so we're built to reinforce that.
Bryan:One-time cuts we don't really service them. You can use the system to try it one time, but after the first-time experience you need to book an every week or every two-week cadence and if you don't want to do that, then it's not a good solution to your problem, because contractors hate one-time cuts. They're not going to do them. They lose money.
Bryan:A lot of people don't know this by the time the guy or gal comes up the mows your yard. One time he or she lost money on that stop Because they don't know where it is, they don't know the nuances of the property. They've had to clean up a lot of deferred maintenance that the last guy didn't do or you, as the homeowner, didn't do. So it's a real pain for them, and so anytime somebody's coming out doing a one-time mowing for you, it's almost an audition in good faith in which to earn your business for the rest of the season, because you're going to need it done anyway. So that's the use case we solve for.
Bryan:So if the guy can't show up, for whatever reason, I mean really and truly, he should have a backup plan.
Bryan:He should have somebody that can help him through that, or he should emote you earlier or something. So if he's just going to leave you hanging, that's kind of a it's kind of a jerk thing to do, and so if that happens, you can just push a button higher, somebody else who's then gonna take care of you for the rest of the season. That's the way the system works, which is really congruent with the way the industry works. And it goes back to we really solve from the service provider first, because we care about one thing how do we make them more money, how do we drive more revenue to them with less headache? And if we can solve for that, everything else takes care of itself, because then they love to use it. Then they're there, then homeowners can hire them quickly. They show up on time, they do a great job and so on, and so we solve for that and almost nothing else matters. And it irritates and pisses off some consumers, but they're not really our customer anyway. They're not the person we're trying to serve anyway.
Dana:So to that point I love that idea of creating something for the consumer versus trying to make everybody happy.
Bryan:Right In this type of space you'll never get anywhere doing that and every you know you're huge like Uber has got a solution for pretty much everybody. They didn't start off with that, they were limousine cars, you know, and you really do need to nail one problem and solution for one type of customer and like really scale that before you start trying to be all things to all people.
Russ:How do you weed out some of the clients that don't belong on the platform? Let's say, somebody goes out, does the lawn. The person is just ridiculously picky or they're never happy. Because there are bad clients like that there are. How do you weed those out? Do they get rated at all? Do you they just take on a new provider? Start burning people out?
Bryan:Yeah this is a really good question, because if we let it just go unchecked, you would have somebody. Here's what happens, because when we first started we didn't know, and so what we would see all the time is like a certain subset of people that would come on, get me free quotes, let me hire somebody. They went and did it. Okay, great, I'll see you in seven weeks. They come back seven weeks later. Get me free quotes. I had a little ass guy. He knows I'm gonna screw him, so he's not coming back. But here's five others and I'll see you in another seven weeks, and they would just come and do one moe every seven or eight weeks.
Bryan:And so that was a lot of people, because anytime you develop this Uber-like beautiful push a button, magic happens solution, people will just bang on that button and they don't care. And so we had to build in controls to limit that type of behavior, because when you allow that, like you said, it burns out the contractor base and then you get what's called negative network effects. So in our business we have positive network effects. The more service providers that come on, the more homeowners like it, the more homeowners like it, the more service providers and so on, and price goes down and efficiency goes up, and it's just this beautiful network effect. But when you allow behavior like that, you get negative network effects, which is like the flywheel running in reverse. It's like well then, now vendors are pissed off, they abandoned. Now there's no vendors, there's no free quotes, there's no liquidity on the pricing, and so then they abandoned. And it's like and it doesn't take long for this type of business to evaporate to zero if you let that kind of stuff go on. And in every marketplace is kind of like this If Airbnb allowed guests or hosts to run out dirty places, it wouldn't take long for that marketplace to evaporate.
Bryan:So we had that problem and the way we solved it is you can only get free quotes three times per year, no more. And if you can't find somebody you like for the whole season for with three tries, then either you have really bad luck or your expectations or use case or something about your situation is not congruent with what our solution is. And when that's the case, we have an off-boarding kind of process. It's like hey, listen, we tried, there aren't any contractors that can solve your problem. Here's five other platforms like Craigslist, thumbtack, angie's List, home Advisor that you can try to get this problem solved, but we can't solve it for you.
Bryan:So we do have an off-boarding. Do we have like a robust rating system for homeowners? No, because if they can't get somebody for the long haul and I mean the whole season or like three or four seasons we don't want this situation where contractors are like having to see the same homeowners over and over and over again. It shouldn't work like that. If that's happening, then we're not solving the problem to begin with. So that's kind of the way we look at it. That's the way we solve for it.
Dana:I'm curious about the process of designing an app or a platform like this, because there's, you know, I think everybody has a good idea Like that would make a great app, that would make a great, you know, tech product. But there's, I wouldn't even know where to start. Can you share a little bit about how you got, you know, hitting the ground running on that?
Bryan:Yeah. So I'll tell you, what doesn't work is because we did it. We started the business and none of us knew how to code. None of us had never built a website before. We didn't know anything about how to do any of this, and so we just thought, well, we'll pay a development agency, or what they call DevShop, to build it, and then we'll market it because we're really good hustlers, and we'll be off and going.
Bryan:And that was a total failure, like it was just like dead on arrival To your point. Designing it. We didn't know what the hell we were doing, and so we kind of we gave them the wrong instructions, almost, and they built something that was barely hard to, barely able to use as clunky buggy. It didn't fulfill the vision of push a button, get free quotes and hire somebody. And it was wrong like on a thousand different levels. And we were confronted with the reality of if we're gonna be in the tech business, we're gonna have to learn how to build software. And so I took every course online, you know, every YouTube course, every online course. My co-founder went to a software bootcamp which was like full-time. He spent his last $8,000 for tuition to this thing and at the end of it, nine months later, we knew enough to be dangerous, to where we could rebuild the whole thing, based on the little bit of feedback that, like, a handful of people were giving us and most of them were friends and family. We were begging people to use it, and so that was one way that we kind of got, not even like to level two, like maybe to like out of the dugout to the plate, like that was a way to get to the starting block. And so then now we're at the starting block and now we're rebuilding it. And so your question is like how the hell do you even know what to build? The way we did it is I took classes in product design. That helped a little bit.
Bryan:But the thing that really helped was I looked for other platforms, apps, websites that were similarly situated. So Uber, for example, airbnb, instacart, doordash, postmates, rover, which is a dog walking thing, wag, which is a dog walking thing, and then maybe like 10 other ones, and I signed up as a server. I signed up to drive for Uber, like I delivered groceries through Instacart for weeks and months. I delivered hamburgers on DoorDash. I rented out like a spare bedroom on Airbnb. I walked dogs on Rover and Wag.
Bryan:Both Did that for like two years, not as a way to make extra money but as a way to learn, and I would see, I would like deconstruct how they dealt with leaving the dog outside with no leash and like what happens if the dog gets away and how they deal with I'm showing up late to the appointment or I didn't show up at all. What does the screen look like? What does the email look like? What does the text message look like? What is all this stuff? And I would like take millions of screenshots and then I'll take it all back to the lab and I would just like deconstruct okay, this is the workflow for how they get you from like you don't even know what Wag is to.
Bryan:Somebody walked your dog on Wag on both sides of the transaction and that took like months and years, but it was a way to kind of hack my way through product design and get it like. I don't know if you can get a degree in product and mobile app product design. Maybe you can, but I was able to get one for free that way by deconstructing what these other companies were doing for similar use cases in different like adjacent real world problems and then apply them to my humble little world of lawn mowing and to build a product that worked. And that's how we did it.
Russ:I want to emphasize the fact and go right back to this and say you did the work Like you didn't just, oh, I'm gonna throw a million dollars at this guy that developed this. I'm gonna throw two million to have them kind of fix all the bugs. It was like they gave us something. It didn't work. Now I gotta go fix this thing. And you put in the time and work. I mean, so many people, even listening right now, would say they would hit that obstacle and go, ah shit, I guess it's not gonna happen.
Bryan:Yeah, it goes back to make it as a entrepreneur. It doesn't matter what you're doing, like the guy or gal running the corner store is not working any less harder than I am. Like all business is hard, but like I think it could be helpful if somebody would describe you as an animal.
Bryan:Like oh man, russ, he's an animal. He's an I don't mean like a giraffe, he's got a long neck or something Like. I mean he's an animal Like somebody should describe you as that, because that's what it's gonna take to like get from zero to one. And so for me I didn't really wanna like throw all the money I made at the first sale to this on the second problem. So GreenPowell really kind of had to sing for its supper, so it was very much like necessity as the mother of invention kind of thing. We didn't have any money.
Bryan:Yeah, we had a little bit of money, maybe a couple hundred grand that we pulled together amongst the three of us and we pissed that away in the first year. So it was like we really, and if we had 20 million I would have wasted all of that because we didn't know what we're doing. And so the obstacles are what keeps you focused on your customer keeps you focused on solving problems, the hard way, learning about what the solution is. Because if you try to throw money at the problem, you know usually you're just gonna burn the money up, unless you've been around the block and done it a few times. Like if I had to go back in time 10 years. I probably would raise money and do in like two years what took 10. But the first time around I didn't know Like even though I had already built and sold an eight figure business. Building a tech business was totally different. It was very much the first swing at the plate for me again. So that's what we had to do to get from level two to three.
Russ:You know, I just wanna emphasize you gotta do the work, that's what people need to hear. You gotta do the work. You just there's no substitute for that. I mean, early on in the conversation you said you know it was a 10 year overnight success. I mean.
Bryan:Intensity is the strategy. That needs to be like the mantra of any business owner. Intensity is the strategy. It's like it almost doesn't matter which game plan you put to work, so much as you execute it vigorously and you are all in because that's what it's gonna take. Now listen, there's a lot of businesses that are easier to run than others, but most are really hard, especially if you're inventing a brand new product that doesn't exist. That is gonna be intense for five or 10 years.
Russ:One of the things that we do, Brian, is we do a lightning round with all our client, all our guests, and we ask some questions, and the first one I wanna ask you is what's the one thing you'd wish you'd known before starting a business, even at 12, maybe back then or maybe before this one?
Bryan:Yeah, you know it's weird. Building my first business, I literally went through this and I'm sure people listening can relate. I thought success was like trucks on the road and equipment and a number of employees and good looking uniforms and great office. That's what I thought success was, and so I would like index on these things. Rather than profit and market share and happy customers, that's really all that matters is like how much money are you making, how fast are you growing, how happy are your customers? That's success. And but, like as business owners, we can get sidetracked and think that success is buying a new piece of equipment, which, if, as it relates to getting to those first three goals, it is, but not like just accumulating. Like in the landscaping business, we would like just getting iron, just getting iron in the lot. Like you just wanted more metal out there. And man, I know it sounds crazy and stupid, but I lived it. And you buy that new truck not because it's the best truck for the application of what you're selling, because you need it. No, because, like, you equate that bigger truck with the bigger motor that is less efficient on gas with success. So that's a stupid thing that I've done.
Bryan:And then in the second business, like it was a very humbling thing. It was like a back to the basics thing for me, and it's like nothing matters other than the problem you're solving for your customers. Literally nothing matters and nobody's going to care about what you're working on other than the customers that you're solving problems for. So don't start the business. For all of these external things, these extrinsic motivations where it could be like the entrepreneur lifestyle on social media or something like that, none of that BS matters. All that matters is the problem you're solving for your customers and really nothing else. And so, like that was the second mistake I made. Like I really wanted to prove to myself and the world that I could be a tech entrepreneur and I wasted like two years thinking that that mattered. It didn't. So, yeah, those are mistakes I've made. That you know. I guess you got to learn the hard way.
Dana:What is your favorite way to market your business?
Bryan:For me, you know, the favorite way is is a product channel fit, which is what is the product that you have and what is the channel that is the best for it. So if you have, like a fashion brand, you know, I mean Instagram, TikTok, obviously Google search is probably not the thing for you, but I've got a solution where, if you have grass that's four feet tall, you can get somebody to come mow it today, and the best channel for that is Google organic search. Lawn mower near me. Lawn mower Lincoln, Nebraska. Grass cutting service Sefner, Florida.
Bryan:Like, how do we make our property pop up and be where people are looking like when they need it? Done Like Google has built the greatest business printing money printing machine in the history of mankind, because they have figured out a way to match intent with the answer, and so for us it's the best channel for our product, and so that's my favorite today. Now, if I sold this company, started a different one, you know that favorite channel would change based on product channel fit, and it takes a while to figure that out. But once you figure it out, go all in on one channel and try to dominate it.
Russ:Now you've created a business platform, but is there another business platform that might have changed your life or influenced how you've kind of developed this one?
Bryan:Yeah, you know, like I mentioned earlier, trying to learn from much bigger companies that had raised tons of money. We haven't raised anybody, we've self-funded this thing, but I mean Uber raised several billion dollars, airbnb a couple billion dollars, and trying to learn from what they were doing in their space and apply it to my little space was something that I was very fortunate to have access to.
Bryan:I mean, it was a way to learn best practices, best strategies, best user interfaces for free. So that was one thing that I gathered inspiration and just tactical execution knowledge from. It would be Airbnb, uber, doordash, lyft, rover, wag, instacart all of those companies because they solve a real problem in the real world through a screen, which is what I'm trying to do, what I was trying to do and I'm still doing for lawn mowing. And you have to think, like before 2010, that wasn't a thing. Like before 2010,. The screen on your phone hell, you didn't have a phone wasn't a thing. The screen on your computer was very much atoms. It was very much like digital Nothing in the. You didn't push a button and then something magical happened in the real world. So those companies really taught us that yeah, no, you can. You can push a button and real problems in your life just get solved magically, like what a time to be alive, what a time to be an entrepreneur.
Dana:You also mentioned a couple of books already, but aside from those that you mentioned, is there another business book that you would tell everyone they need to read?
Bryan:Yeah, a guy that I like, naval Ramicott, says that I would rather just read the same five books over and over again than read all the books. And so, while I'm not, I'm nowhere near as smart as that dude, but I kind of try to do that and I try to just read the same stuff over again. So Seven Habits of Highly Effective People was more of a personal development book, but it's a lot of stuff does relate to people, I mean to business and people building a business. And then a classic is the E-Meth by Michael Gerber, and that is such a simple book but it really.
Bryan:Even though I'm running a multi eight figure business, the lessons from that book apply to what I'm doing just around building an org chart and systems and processes and roles and goals for all of our people. It's so easy to lose sight of. You know this rut we get in as business owners where we might have 10 employees but it's 10 people doing all the same stuff. There's no specialization, there's no roles and goals. Nobody knows what success looks like. We hate the business, we hate the smell of fresh baked pies and we got into this business because we like fresh baked pies. But now we hate pies and we hate this bakery that we opened, like that's what the book's about. Every single business owner goes through that story, and I've lived it, and so that's my favorite small business book. Great, now I want pie.
Russ:All right. Now, given your experience and some of the things you've already told us, and all the things you've been through and accomplished, I'm wondering I'm interested in the answer to this one, that's when did you feel like you made it? You?
Bryan:know it's a very much a dynamic thing. When I was mowing yards 19, 20, 21 years old my big thing at that point in my life was if I could just live in this neighborhood I'm mowing yards in. So back then I was going after the wealthy clientele in my little town. So this is where all the doctors lived, the small business owners, the insurance agency owners, the surgeons and so on and so forth. If I could just live in this neighborhood then I will have made it. And so I ended up being able to get there by 29 years old. So here I am, 29 years old. The landscaper builds a multi-million dollar house in the best neighborhood in town, and that was cool and fun for like six months and I thought I had made it for like maybe a week. And then I thought, man, there's so much maintenance on this thing and I hate this thing and like my neighbors don't like me because you know I'm like they're old and I'm young and I'm having parties and stuff, and it just wasn't what I thought it was going to be. And so I thought I had made it for like a week and then I realized that there was way more to the game than that and I thought, man, you know, if I can just build something with bigger impact, that would be a lot of fun. And so that's kind of what started me off building GreenPow.
Bryan:And now, 10, 12 years, there's been moments of quote made it. You know, I had a moment where I felt like I made it in our second year when 30 people signed up on a Saturday and I didn't know who any of them were. That was a big moment and I felt like I had made it in some small way. You know, even though, like today, thousands of people sign up every day, it was 20 or 30 people and I didn't know a name. I didn't know one single name because to me that indicated that I didn't have to like hand to hand combat, like ground and pound sell on this thing anymore, Like I could figure out a way to scale some sort of customer acquisition. So that was a moment.
Bryan:But, man, I feel like the made it thing is like there's moments and it's always day one, but that's kind of what makes it fun and that's why you're always drawn back to it, you know, and I think the day and the day that you quit trying to like grow is the day you start dying. So but if you're not careful it can be a hamster wheel. So I'm cognitive fat also.
Russ:And what do they say? The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence until you've got a bottle of lawn Right.
Bryan:And then use green pile. That's the case. Well, that's just it.
Russ:So, brian, I want to thank you for being here. Where can people, where's the one best place that people can find you, connect with you, learn more about you and and green?
Bryan:pal. Yeah, greenpalcom. No, don't know your own yard. Life's too short. Anybody wants to hit me up on on social Instagram is the best place. Brian and Clayton just dropped me a DM there.
Russ:Awesome, and we're going to have all of those things listening in our show notes and where they can connect. So go ahead, find it there, click, learn more about Brian Clayton and Green Pal and all the things that you know. Be inspired. I'm inspired. It was a great conversation. I just want to thank you for being here, taking time. I want to thank our listeners for being here and sharing this time with us, and I know you got something out of it. So take and like and share this with somebody you know that needs to hear the message that was shared today. And remember it's not personal, it's just business.