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How to build a business the smart, independent way, with Bryan Clayton
23 Plays1 year ago
After building and then selling a hugely successful lawn care business in Tennessee (USA), Bryan Clayton found himself at a loose end. So he did what any sensible person would do and started up another new business.
Ten years have passed since Bryan and his co-founders launched https://www.yourgreenpal.com/. In this cheerfully animated conversation, Bryan shares the story of his journey so far.
If you are considering seeking investment to grow your business, then you really need to listen to this episode. Bryan shares some pearls of wisdom that could change the path you are on.
We also talked about the similarities between making it big as a musician and building a successful business.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-clayton-a96b33214/
https://www.yourgreenpal.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to LAN and Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, welcome back to the Untitled SEO podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Laws. And here in season three of the podcast, we are doing LAN. That's live action networking. There are so many interesting people in the world of digital marketing and SEO that I'm not possibly going to have time to meet them all. So I'm picking a few out who I think will be interesting for both myself and you, the listener. And we have a guest from Foreign Shores today. Honored guest, would you like to introduce yourself?
Meet Brian Clayton and GreenPal
00:00:29
Speaker
Well, Andrew, thanks for having me on. My name is Brian Clayton, and I am CEO and co-founder of a company called GreenPal. And GreenPal is a platform in the United States that works like Uber, but for lawn care services.
00:00:41
Speaker
Brilliant. I suddenly realized that it's sometimes a foolish mistake assuming that someone's abroad from the UK if they don't have a British accent. And it's particularly foolish because I grew up during the Cold War in between two enormous American Air Force bases. Oh, nice. So a lot of my neighbors growing up, you know, were American. That's awesome. I did realize you were probably based in America when I tested your website. Awesome. Because I really liked the sound of it. So
00:01:11
Speaker
you kind of told us a little bit about it. So George, tell us how you arrived at this place.
Journey from Lawn Care Business to Tech Entrepreneur
00:01:18
Speaker
Yeah. So my first business was actually a lawn mowing business. I started mowing grass in high school as a way to make extra money and stuck with a little lawn mowing business through college as a way to pay for college. And then when I graduated college, I had to make a decision. Was I gonna
00:01:32
Speaker
just go into the job market and get a job doing something with my business degree or stick with the lawn care business. I didn't really want to be a lawn guy, but I saw business ownership as kind of my lane, as something I could just kind of throw everything I had into. So I made a little business plan.
00:01:48
Speaker
and ended up growing that lawn care company into a real business, around 150 employees, eventually getting it over eight figures a year in revenue. And then in 2013, a big national company in the industry came along and wanted to buy that company. So I sold it.
00:02:07
Speaker
and it was acquired and after that, I took some time off and I got really bored and I went through kind of an existential crisis because I didn't have another project. I didn't have a thing to kind of throw all of my passion into. And so I thought, well, somebody is going to build a platform, like an app, a website to make this industry I know run smoother and easier, kind of like what Uber was doing at the time for ride sharing. And I thought, well, why can't that be me?
GreenPal's Success and Ambitions
00:02:36
Speaker
And I made a little business plan again and recruited two co-founders and started working on the idea of what the app should look like and how it should work. And they never looked back. And now 10 years later, GreenPal is a 10 year overnight success where nationwide in the United States, around 300,000 people use the app every week to get lawn mowing. And we're closing in on a million. We want a million people to use the app.
00:03:04
Speaker
So you've struck on something that I'm really interested in here.
00:03:08
Speaker
I'm going to guess we're roughly the same age. I think I might be a little bit older than you. I'm basing that just on a little fuzzy screen listeners here. You said cold war and I'm a product of the cold war as well. I remember those days very well. Okay, cool.
Importance of Industry Knowledge
00:03:23
Speaker
So something that I've seen a lot of and I'm guessing you might have as well in the last 25 years is people trying to launch an app or a website because they've had this fantastic idea
00:03:35
Speaker
but they then learn quite quickly that they don't have the background to support that idea. So I'm really interested to speak to you because you did it. You did the business that your app is then an accelerator for.
00:03:53
Speaker
So how important do you think that is when developing a new product? I think it's really important. I think when you are trying to bring a new piece of technology to the marketplace. So most of the time when you want to start a tech company,
00:04:08
Speaker
you are inventing something brand new from scratch that does not exist. And so that was one of the hardest things about starting Green Pal that I didn't anticipate. You know, I just built this, this landscaping construction company to over 100 people and eight figures in revenue and sold it. And I thought I knew everything there was to know about running a business. And then I started Green Pal and I realized, wow, this is way different.
00:04:31
Speaker
because now I'm inventing a new product. I'm inventing something from scratch. And so that's a, that's like a hundred times harder than just a traditional business because there is no playbook and you kind of have to figure it out as you go.
00:04:43
Speaker
And the only thing I had going for me was that I knew the industry. I spent 15 years in the industry. I was kind of solving my own problems. I was building a product for me that I would have loved to have had when I was starting my company 15 years prior. And so
00:05:01
Speaker
that helped and that was probably the only reason we got through the first three or four years was because I was able to start on first or second base rather than having to figure out the industry and the technology and what customers wanted and all of these things at the same time. So I think authenticity can be a competitive advantage. And I think it's important to have that kind of like firsthand tacit knowledge about what it is you're trying to innovate in and have the scars. If you told me, hey,
00:05:29
Speaker
You gotta go build green power all over again, but this time you gotta do it for plumbers. And the first thing I would do is I would go work for a plumbing company for six months. And I would just ride around in a truck fixing leaky pipes all day, every day, trying to learn what it is that is broken about that industry and try to apply technology to it. So I think it's almost impossible to build a platform like this without that firsthand knowledge.
00:05:58
Speaker
I think I'm going to use the phrase got the scars. I've never heard that. That's really good. That's a really nice way of summing it all up. And also, if you're doing something that you know, and you love, then some of the big challenges you hit, I imagine are just going to be fun, rather than it being, Oh, no, I don't know what any of this means. I think you you're kind of, you're just speeding things up. It's what I'm interested about with AI at the moment that people are expecting AI to
00:06:27
Speaker
just magically fix things, and all it does is just like a big fancy spanner. If you know what the problems are, it might help you fix it, but it's not going to tell you where the bolt is that you need to go and hit with the spanner. You don't hit with spanners, do you? Do the twisty thing.
00:06:42
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It helps to have those scars. The best way I've heard it described is specific knowledge, which means your whole life's experience and everything that you know about a certain industry and how it's broken and how it works, combined with something else that you know,
00:07:04
Speaker
maybe it's technology or design or good marketing or something, creates your kind of secret weapon. And for me, that was I knew the long care industry very well. I was willing to teach myself how to write software. And those two things combined made me somewhat unique in the marketplace. Okay, so remind me whereabouts in the states you you are. Nashville, Tennessee. Oh, beautiful. So
00:07:28
Speaker
You built your business, the initial one, and how far was the geographical reach of your initial business? I'm guessing 100 people is a lot of people. Yeah. It was one of the larger companies in the industry, in the region. So about a hundred mile radius of Nashville is what we covered. And ultimately we got to a point where we're sending out 90, 95 crews, everyday trucks, everyday rolling out of the shop and servicing customers' properties.
00:07:55
Speaker
And so it was a pretty big operation. And when I sold it, I thought, well, this time I want to build something that potentially a million people could use. I want to build something that could touch the mass market. And so I kind of had a chip on my shoulder to figure that out and to build something bigger because I was limited by gravity in that first business that I could only scale it so far. And I think that's one of the reasons why I explored
00:08:25
Speaker
getting it acquired because I almost plateaued in terms of my personal development, running that company. And so I wanted to run a tech business because I felt like I could scale it beyond my little backyard of Nashville. And so yeah, that was kind of my thinking at the time. It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be, to be honest, but I'm glad I did it. Yeah, the reason I ask your location and your sphere of influence is
00:08:52
Speaker
It always occurs to me when somebody takes something they really know and develop an app or a successful business from it, one of the channels that you have to open really wide is for feedback from customers who are in a part of the business you don't understand. So for example, you've been operating in Nashville. What happened when you get your first clients in, say, California, then the needs are going to be different and they're not necessarily needs that you can foresee. So what did you do to ensure that sort of positive feedback loop?
00:09:23
Speaker
Yeah, it's a very good point.
Role of Customer Feedback in Growth
00:09:25
Speaker
This type of business is somewhat different in every geography at every region. And I think the first thing that we did well was that we picked up every book we could get our hands on in 2013, 2014, when we were building the company to try to learn
00:09:45
Speaker
some sort of repeatable framework to, to, to discover what it was we needed to be doing. And the first few books were the lean startup by Eric Reese. And then his predecessor is a guy named Steve Blank. He wrote a book called the startup owner's manual. And what these two books tell you in like a thousand pages of text is to get out of the building and go talk to your handful of customers. Go talk to, if you only have five customers, go talk to all five of them. But you know, you've got 10, talk to all 10.
00:10:14
Speaker
And, and they will guide you almost through like free R and D as to what it is you need to be building. And, and that's what we did. We did that out of paranoia and, and we kept doing that over and over and over again. Healthy, positive paranoia. Yeah, because we knew, we, we knew we were way out of our league. We were way ahead of our, of our skis. Yeah. I had, I had run a successful construction company, landscape construction company, but I didn't know what the hell I was doing running a tech business. And so.
00:10:42
Speaker
The only kind of guiding light was customer feedback and was sitting at the kitchen table with a hand, you know, the one person in, in a suburb of Nashville that was using it or taking somebody to Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts to, to, to, to have them tell me everywhere my product sucks. And, and taking that back to the lab and fixing it.
00:11:03
Speaker
And then doing that in our second, third, and fourth market over and over and over again to learn, okay, this is the nuance for every single town and city, and this is how we need to change it a little bit. And also we learned from Uber on how they were rolling out from town to town at the time. If you use Uber in different cities and countries, it's a different experience based on different nuances. And so we kind of took that and applied it to our playbook.
00:11:32
Speaker
And so in Florida, it's very different than how California operates and how Tennessee operates and how New York State operates. And so we've had to make modifications to the customer experience based on what customers are telling us and also based on what service providers are telling us based on the service offering, the cadence of service, how much things cost.
00:11:54
Speaker
geographically services are different. We don't do seeding in this part of the country, but we do reseed in this part of the country. So it's a never ending game of making it better and better and smoother and more contextually helpful to people.
00:12:10
Speaker
There's one aspect of this development phase that quite often people talk about, and it's a word I haven't heard you mention. You've talked in very positive ways about the potential and getting the scars and learning the lessons, but something I haven't heard you talk about that a lot of startups do is the pressure to monetize that comes from investors.
00:12:32
Speaker
So, I know the answer really, but did you have trouble from investors? Because if you're going out and you're taking time, I can imagine an investor saying, well, it's very nice that you took Jimmy to Starbucks and spoke to him for four hours, but where's the money? Or when are we going to start getting the first paying customers? Did you have trouble with investors looming over you and pressuring you to get to the money?
00:12:58
Speaker
Really good question.
Funding Decisions for GreenPal
00:12:59
Speaker
And I think it needs to be talked about more for new founders to hear because I was sold this idea that because I was starting a tech company, the first thing I needed to do was to go raise a round of angel funding. And, and, um, and then I needed to do everything I needed to do to get to a series a and not worry about anything but that. And so I started to do that. And the year one, I was just running all over town.
00:13:25
Speaker
meeting with angel investors and trying to beg them to believe in my vision. And they would always, to your point, ask questions around, well, what is the take rate? And I would say, well, it's between 5% and 10%. They would always say, that's way too low. You got to take 30% to 40%. And I know the industry. I know there's not enough margin for that to work. I know that that would be a non-starter. And I kept running into that over and over again. And I decided, you know what? I don't care how long it takes.
00:13:53
Speaker
to fund this business off of its own revenues. We're not going to go down this rat hole of trying to build a business that investors love. We want to build one that customers love and that service providers love. And I didn't want any pressure on the business that wasn't determined by customers. And so it was a very like,
00:14:19
Speaker
it was a decision early on in the journey that takes you down one path or another path. And so we decided to go, we're gonna self-fund this thing, we're gonna bootstrap it. And that meant part-time jobs for my co-founders. It meant like the most smallest, crappiest office with no windows for a long time. It meant seven days a week for a long time.
00:14:47
Speaker
having to do everything ourselves, whether it be writing the content, the customer service, writing the code, doing the design. But that's what it took to get to a place where we could make enough money to then delegate these things and put professionals in these roles. And I'm glad we did it that way, because there was a lot of venture capital that went after these Uber for X ideas. So Uber for laundry service, Uber for home cleaning, Uber for valet parking, you name it. And
00:15:17
Speaker
And they all crashed and burned. They, they, they all destroyed somewhere, you know, at least a billion dollars, maybe more in venture capital because they were all trying to scale too quickly. And they were all trying to put, put rocket fuel in a Toyota Camry. And it just didn't have the unit economics figured out. They didn't have the product market fit dialed in yet. So I'm glad we, we decided to go to self-funded way. It's probably the only reason why we're still here today.
00:15:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think that initial delay is very smart. I mean, I've not been in exactly the same position, but I've been in a position where money coming in would have been really tempting and really nice, but also I've just heard too many horror stories.
00:16:02
Speaker
more so in the UK, we obviously we do have investors and we do have angel investors, but it's a very different landscape to, to in the States or what I know of the States. But you know, I know people who, for example, got this their startup funding from the bank. And after a couple of years, if the bank isn't comfortable, they want their money back. So your business is dead. Yeah, that kind of jeopardy. Wow. And I know, I know sometimes you're gonna have to do it if you are going to start like
00:16:30
Speaker
don't know, a jewelry store, you'd probably need money to like buy some jewelry. But if you're if you've got an intelligence and intellectual property based business, I imagine the smartest thing you can do is to protect that and keep that yours, you know, and I
When to Raise Capital
00:16:47
Speaker
like your attitude. It's almost kind of like this will live or die by our hands. No one else's
00:16:53
Speaker
I agree. I really do. And I think a couple quick litmus tests. I think there's a time and place to raise capital. And it's basically when you have a money printing machine, you know that you put a dollar in one side to get a dollar 10 out the other side and let's just go raise capital and let's get to work. But that's not how most tech founders go about it. They go about it, well,
00:17:18
Speaker
I'll start this business if I can raise money for it. And that's not really the way to think about it. It's, I'm going to get this, I'm going to will this business into existence. And then when I get to a point where I know I can deploy a million dollars and turn it into two, then I'm going to raise capital. And, you know, think about it this way. Like, would you mortgage your mother's home?
00:17:42
Speaker
to start this business? Are you that certain about the inputs and the prospects of how you would deploy that capital? And if you wouldn't, then why would you expect an investor to throw a half million dollars at you? And if you're not that certain about what you would do with that money, then that's going to lead to potentially a very sad outcome for you. You're going to lose control of the business. You're going to have all your equity washed out.
00:18:11
Speaker
It's important for founders to know what the game is that they're signing up for if they go down that path. Absolutely fascinating. It's refreshing to hear your angle and it's one I very much like. I'm originally from the DIY music scene originally from, I still play in bands and stuff. And the whole attitude of that is that you don't need anyone else's permission, but you also don't need anybody else's money.
00:18:37
Speaker
And that is very much echoed in what you're saying. Quite often read things or speak to people who have started a business, not just a startup. And their goal is this amount of revenue per year. Their goal from day one. And I think, well, it's almost like you're pointing the ship in the wrong direction. If you aim at something else, whether it's to have the best processes in the business being the most efficient, I mean, ultimately care for people and have your customer care at its peak.
00:19:07
Speaker
that's probably going to give you more opportunities for growth than just pointing a ship at a financial target. Totally. And you make a really good point. There's a lot of parallels between the music business industry and running a tech startup. And there's a lot of parallels between what a musician goes through bringing their art to the marketplace and potentially signing a record deal and things like that.
00:19:34
Speaker
and versus what an entrepreneur goes through bringing their product to the marketplace. And there's a lot of parallels. I've never spotted that. I've never spotted it. You're completely right. It's a brilliant journey. Karyan, I'm sorry, interrupted. Well, if you think about it, they're very
Startup Strategies and Parallels to Music
00:19:49
Speaker
similar. And a lot of them are kind of all or nothing, kind of winner take all outcomes almost.
00:19:58
Speaker
The best way I've heard it heard it seen it kind of play out was I was listening to a interview with a famous rapper in the United States named Ti and he was saying that he'll be walking down the street and people will will come up to him and say hey Can I do my verse for you? Can I can I can I give can I can I wrap my verse for you and he'll he's thinking it doesn't matter how good this verse you rap in front of me is and
00:20:26
Speaker
I'm never going to sign you because let me explain to you how this works. It doesn't matter how good that is. The way this works is you go do your thing. You work on your art and you get enough attention and buzz around you on, on, on Instagram, TikTok on YouTube. And then I come find you. That's how this works. And, and it goes back to, you know,
00:20:52
Speaker
It's not, the product is not enough. It's the distribution and it's everything that goes into getting the attention around the product. And that is the exact same way as bringing a new technology product to the marketplace. It doesn't matter, like you can show an investor how good your idea is or how beautiful your designs are. All they care about is, do you have 50 people using it, paying? And then I come find you. That's how that works. And so it's the two journeys are almost the same.
00:21:22
Speaker
Yeah, I'm going to end up writing this up and I'll give you credit for it because it's, you know, the less well-known you are, the worse the record deal you're going to get. You know, the position to be in is to have sold, you know, sold up a hundred thousand records yourself and then you don't need the record companies. They need you. That's right. I'm really quite taken with this. Um, so what's next, Brian? You know, I'm having fun running this business. When I saw my last company, I made a decision.
00:21:50
Speaker
No matter what, from this point forward, I'm going to do what I'm, what I like doing. I'm going to do what it is I want to do. And so I've had some 80, 90 hundred hour weeks running green pal, but, but I haven't really worked a day in 10 years. So, so I'm, I'm enjoying it. It's a lot of fun. It's challenging. It's growing. We're at around 300,000 people using it. I feel like I will have, I don't know why, but I feel like I will have touched the mass market somehow if I can get to a million.
00:22:18
Speaker
And so that's what we're focused
Future Goals and Expansion Plans
00:22:20
Speaker
on. In five years or less, how do we get to a million people using this app we've built? And we're going to do everything we got to do to get there. In this country, that would be one in 50 people. There you go. And we'll be in the UK at some point. We just got to saturate the United States first.
00:22:36
Speaker
I did the first thing I did when I wanted to see if you were international, because my mind was already blown by it by the whole concept, because my wife's a gardener, she's a horticulturist, she doesn't do mowing and stuff, but I know about that world. And I thought, wow, so I typed in Ipswich, which is where I'm recording from. And of course, a long list of Ipswich's popped up, like, wow, of course, none of them are in the UK. The bit of the country that I live in
00:23:03
Speaker
we're sort of to the east of London is where a lot of original settlers came from. So there's all the place names around here have many, many mirrored place names all around the state. It's a complete pain for filling in forms. If you're in the UK, you put in where you're from and the first suggestions will always be like Louisiana. Yeah. No, no, no, it's not. No, it's not. Anyway, Brian, it's been absolutely wonderful speaking to you. I was wondering if I could ask a small favor.
Entrepreneurial Advice
00:23:34
Speaker
That is, imagine somebody listening to this podcast now who has the idea and is struggling and is thinking of taking on outside investment or something that's going to take away from their equity, their belief, their vision, their dream in some way. What would you say to that person?
00:23:58
Speaker
Well, the thing I would say is take it as far as you absolutely can without that. And then you might find that you don't need outside capital. There's a quote that I like by Steve Martin, the famous comedian from the 70s and 80s in the United States. And he said, be so good, they can't say no. And this is applied to show business. And he applied that to his comedy, to his acting, to be so good
00:24:28
Speaker
that people who were auditioning him couldn't say no. And I think if you think about that in terms of you as a founder, you as an entrepreneur, to just be so good nobody could say no, there's probably a big gap between where you're at today and what that actually looks like. So get to that point first. Take it as far as you can. And you might say, well, I don't know how to do X, Y, or Z. Learn. Learn how to do it. Get on YouTube University.
00:24:55
Speaker
and you can teach yourself the 80-20 of pretty much everything. And then once you get to that point, you may find that you don't need investors, but only go to raise capital once you get to that point. Absolutely superb. Very succinctly and compactly put, Brian. Well, thank you very much for your time. I'm going to say goodbye. Would you like to say goodbye? Well, Andrew, thank you for having me on. This was great. Thank you. I appreciate it.