43: Re-Inventing Yourself Through Entrepreneurship // The Story of Bryan Clayton

In the early days I made the mistake that I thought that what we were doing was over complicated. And what I didn't realize was is that no, actually the work is not that complicated. If you just stick with it for a long period of time, it can take you places in life that you may not have otherwise ever been able to reach.

Welcome to From Rock Bottom to Rockin It. I'm your host Eric Gilbert Williams and this is the podcast where we explore personal stories of people who hit absolute rock bot, then got back up, wiped off the dust, kicked failure to the curb, and now they're rocking it like you'd never believe if you didn't hear it. Live right here we cover subjects in business, sports, and life in general. If you like this podcast, please share it. These interviews are intended to inspire, to motivate, to give hope and vision. So please share this episode with someone who needs it. Use your Instagram account, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, hand signals, trained pigeon scent, smoke signals up in the air, use morse code, whatever you like. Just share the love and share this episode. Also, email me anytime. Podcasterricgilbertwilliams.com Send me questions you would like to have asked of future guests and I will incorporate them. Or just send me some suggestions on how to run a better podcast. Or just say hello, I'd love to hear from you. That's podcastericgilbertwilliams.com I know you're going to.

Love today's interview, so let's get started.

With us here today on From Rock.

Bottom the Rockin it is Brian Clayton, a hard pressed, grinding style of a traditional entrepreneur that I definitely relate to a lot, who also turned into a tech entrepreneur. And I say it this way from traditional entrepreneur to tech entrepreneur. I say it that way because there's a huge difference between a traditional business or a brick and mortar business like a restaurant, et cetera, versus a tech company and versus a tech entrepreneur. They're completely different and we're going to talk a lot about that today. Brian built his landscaping company up to over $10 million in ARR. That's annual recurring revenue and then sold it. And now he's starting what you can refer to as kind of the uber of landscaping. And this all sounds nice to talk about millions in sales and jumping industries and doing great things in tech. But the icing on the cake really distracts from the reality of how much hard work and how much of a rollercoaster ride it is to go from one industry to another and from an entrepreneurial, basically from zero to building something that has substance in the real world. And on that note, Brian, you have.

A lot to share.

I'm excited to chat with you. Welcome to the show. How you doing, man?

I'm great. Thanks for having me on your show, Eric. Great.

And you know, one of the things that I was interested about when I first saw your profile and we first started to connect is the possible connection between landscaping and my old business in construction and more specifically in residential roofing. And I remember when I first got started in the roofing business, I had my nail gun and I'd be up there in the middle of winter, middle of summer, whatever it is, scorching hot, freezing cold, whatever. And specifically when we didn't have any work, when we had downtime, when there was a lag, we would just go do landscaping. We would go either cut some grass or we would go in wintertime, we would go and lay down some salt and de ice the sidewalks and all that stuff. So it was no surprise to me when I got into the business from an entrepreneurial side and building up the client base and building up our revenue, that a lot of my workers ended up doing landscaping as well. So did you have a similar experience? Like, I feel like there's a lot of connection there. Tell me your experience about hiring people in landscaping.

Yeah, that's one of the cool things about a service business is, you know, whether you're in a roofing business, construction, home remodeling, landscaping, even home cleaning, it can kind of help you cut your teeth on business ownership and what it means to be in business for yourself and just simple things like for bookkeeping, basic marketing, basic legal, hiring, firing, delegating systems, processes, you know, everything from customer service to how you can spur word of mouth and all of these little things that really pretty much 90% of businesses have, you can learn in a service based business like landscaping or roofing or whatever. And for me, yeah, that's how my landscaping business started. It was very much, very humble. In the late 90s, I started mowing yards to make extra cash and little by little grew this little lawn mowing business that was just me and a push mower to me and 150 employees over a 15 year period of time and did everything wrong first before I did it right and learned the hard way and learned a lot of lessons through mistakes that I made along the way, particularly around hiring and firing. But if you want to scale any business, you're going to have to get good people on the bus. You're going to have to get good people around you. And that was one of the skills that I learned in the first company, which I then was able to parlay into my second business, GreenPal. And that's one of the cool things about a service business. I see a lot of folks, they have this great, huge, big business idea that they want to start, but they don't have any experience with any sort of business at all. And I usually tell them it's like, look, maybe you might start a simple service based business, start a home cleaning service, start a pressure washing service, you know, just for a year so you can kind of get some experience under your belt, what it means to be in business for yourself, maybe even put some money in the bank, some seed capital in the bank, and then you can maybe raise funds for this big idea you have. So it's kind of funny, you started in a service based business like I did, and it's probably taken you all sorts of places in life that you never thought it would.

Yeah, it sure has. And it keeps doing that on and on. I'm always surprised by what kind of opportunities it's opening up. And I never would have thought that picking up a nail gun and jumping on a roof would lead to this direction. And so people that are listening to this right now, there's different types of people that are always listening to the show. And some people would probably relate to, hey, I'm in a financial pickle or I'd like to better myself or hey, I want to start my first business or I want to do my next business better than the last time. It's a very simple and luring concept. To think that by picking up a nail gun, buying a lawnmower, and just walking around the neighborhood, I could end up potentially building a multimillion dollar business. And I wanted to get your perspective. Someone listening to this show right now and they're like, oh, wow, I could buy a lawnmower and just start pushing it around and charging money for cuts. So that could turn that into a large business. Is that something that's realistic for me and how do I go about doing that? And how long is it going to.

Take to get really big?

Do you want to walk us through your first year as a landscaping entrepreneur? The very first year, yeah.

So that's one of the cool things about starting your own business, is that it can be the vehicle that takes you to places in life you never thought you could go. And so it's like you said, when you're picking up a nail gun and getting on A roof or me getting a push mower. Those are very humble beginnings. But if you just stick with it for a long period of time, it can take you places in life that you may not have otherwise ever been able to reach. And that's certainly how it's been for me. My first year in the landscaping business was very much me just mowing yards every day and then at night doing bookkeeping and marketing and rinse and repeat every single day until I hired my first employee and I screwed that up. And then I figured out a little bit more about what I was looking for, and then I got that right, and I got my third and fourth employee and so on.

And how'd you screw it up?

I have to ask.

What happened?

So in the early days, I made a mistake that I thought that what we were doing was over complicated. And I thought that it was like super complex. And I thought I was looking for some unicorn rock star employee that cared about our customers and wanted to do quality work and just had the work ethic. And so I was looking for this very unique, special person. And what I didn't realize was is that, no, actually the work is not that complicated that I needed to build like a process and a system that they should follow and a training system, if you will, and then a system of checks to make sure that we were executing the services like we wanted to. And that simple kind of concept took me three years to figure out. And it's a trap that a lot of new business owners fall into, is you think what you do as a business is very complex and complicated and that the people you hiring just suck and they just don't get it, when in fact your system suck, your processes suck. To use McDonald's as an example, one of the quotes from Ray Kroc, who built McDonald's, was, We have a business that delivers excellent results with mediocre people. Now, not to degrade people that work at McDonald's, but what he's trying to say is that they can stick anybody in that system and then get a consistent result over and over and over again. Now, that's an extreme example. Your business is not going to be McDonald's good, but you kind of have to think about it that way, that you're spinning your wheels because everybody in the marketplace is just not up snuff. It's that you don't have the processes and systems to put them in. And that's a mistake that I made for a lot of years until I just spent a lot of time building the Best training process for landscape what we call techs, technicians, and getting them up to speed in three weeks rather than three months. And then educating them on what goes into a job well done and how we check for that, and then letting them be able to buy into the company's success in terms of the company was profitable, they would be profitable, and so on. Like these things took a lot of time to figure out. And a book that I picked up probably five, six years ago that just read out of it for the heck of it was called the E. Myth by Michael Gerber. And that's all that book is about, is these sorts of things working on the business, not in the business. And that was something that took me a long time to figure out because I didn't have that book. If I had that book, it probably would've saved me five years of my life.

That book changed my life as well. Actually. My first business coach that I ever hired after I screwed up my first couple of ventures, figured, okay, well, I better hire someone to help me. It was mandatory reading before we actually got started was to read the E Myth by Michael Gerber. And we'll put a little link to that book on the show Notes of this episode because it's such a relevant book and it's so important, in my opinion, for every starting entrepreneur. I want to ask what happened with that first employee? I'm still curious. Did he quit? Did you fire him? What happened and why did you have.

To let him go? Yeah, I'll never forget it. He just up and walked off in the middle of the day. Like literally just quit. And I'll never forget it. I said, greg, what's going on? Where are you going? He goes, man, this job ain't for everybody. And just walked away. And I'll never forget that. So I was left all alone. Simple to finish the day's route, like double the work. And so it's a painful lesson every business owner goes through. And you can either get bitter or you can get better. And I see a lot of business owners, they get bitter. I like that.

Oh, that's a nice one.

Bitter or better, you know, I mean, I can't tell you. I do volunteer mentoring for this entrepreneur nonprofit entrepreneur organization and everything from folks with hair salons to pressure washing services, all the way up to $100 million businesses, I just kind of add my two cents. And I see a lot of folks that are bitter, particularly in today's job market, in today's labor environment, they're bitter and everybody sucks. Nobody's got work ethic. This generation's terrible. Nobody wants to do anything. Everybody's lazy. Well, you can get better or you can get better and you can figure out how to build the process and system to put people in so they can win and help them win and get them from 0 to 1 in terms of a good employee. Or you can go out of business, or you can just be a solo freelancer. And with no employees, you gotta make that decision for yourself.

How many times do you think you wanted to quit in the first two years?

For me, honestly, never. And I've never really felt I've been in business for now 22 years. A lot of ups and downs, a lot of highs and lows. And I've never felt the desire to quit, to give up. And it's not because I'm some kind of relentless individual. I think it's, for me, it's like by default, I'm always gonna be working on whatever my best idea is. And I guess, luckily I'm not terribly creative. And so I get a good idea about once every 10 years and I just put a decade on it. And so for me, the first business, yeah, I hated it for a long time, but I could always see the light at the end of the tunnel and see that if I could just get X, Y and Z right, that I could get to the next level. And I think looking back like 20 years in the rearview, you could almost look at business like a video game. You can look at it like 10 levels and you just need to work through one level at a time. You don't need to worry about Bowser, you don't need to worry about all of these things in levels 8, 9 and 10 when you're on level 1, 2 and 3. And so for me, one thing that's made sense was just focus all your intensity getting through that one level that you're on, throw up the flag and then get started on the next level. And for me, the first three employees in that first company were, that was some of the hardest learning experiences. Once I figured that out, I could get the 10 and I could get to 20 and 30 and so on. And then like, and then you've got new dragons to slay at the end of every level, you know, next thing you know, you're facing a situation where it's like, okay, now I need a full time HR person, but I can't afford one, and now what do I do? And so it's like the challenges get bigger as you go through the progression of Building your company. But that's one of the cool things about it. And you as the founder and as the leader, you level up. You get new experiences, you get new knowledge, new wisdom as you go through this journey of creating your company. Whereas if you're doing it correctly, you should evolve into a whole new person every two or three years. You should be indistinguishable where you were five or ten years ago. You should be a completely new person. And then the business has forced you to level up and do and grow in that way. That's one of the things I love about it.

Here's a question for you. I remember when I was in the construction business, and there were some tough moments in there, for sure, on a few different fronts. And I talk about them in different episodes here, but money issues or collections issues or employee issues or Mutiny and all these things. And I remember very clearly feeling like I had to bottle up the insecurities I might have or the fears I might have or the frustrations I might have and sort of shelter my employees from it. That was the way I put it in my mind, is I have to protect them from my own doubts. I have to present them a confident face, even if I'm not feeling confident. And I can't let my customers know that I have a cash flow issue and I haven't paid a supplier or something like that. I have to sell this job. In order to sell this job, I have to present the best foot forward, and the best foot forward has to ignore the fact that I'm human and struggling. They have to just see that I am the rock star and convince them that they need to hire me instead of hiring anyone else. Initially, I found it was fine. I could bottle it up, hide it, deal with it, work through it, whatever you want to phrase it, and push through. And in hindsight, I look back at all this time and I think, wow, almost no one knew what I was actually thinking. Not my clients, not my partners, not my employees, in many cases, not even really my best friends. Sometimes they did, but even with them, sometimes it was embarrassing to tell them my struggles, to tell them that I couldn't go out tonight because I had to put my personal money into the company to get through a little hiccup or that I had to cancel some sort of vacation that we were supposed to do together because I just have to be on the business because there's a crisis. It was embarrassing, and I would hide it from them. And I'm wondering, does that ring any bells with you? Does that resonate with you in any way? Did you have something like that?

I have no idea what you're talking about at all. I've never experienced any of those things. No, that's totally normal. And I think the management of your own personal psychology and business is table stakes. If you are not able to withstand and almost ingest that stress and show a confident face, exterior to your customers, to your people, to your team, it's going to be difficult. And, you know, whether it be like your people coming to work in the morning and they're going to reflect whatever personality and vibe you give off, like, if you're disorganized and frustrated and pissed off and running around like your hair's on fire, that's the way the company's going to run. So you have to really internalize all that stuff. And anybody that's been through it will tell you that at every level that it's like that. But on the other hand, you know, if you're running a company for five or 10 years and every day's like that, and you never get your head above water, and there's never any moments where it's fun, and there's never any moments where you're making money and it's feeling good, then you're doing something wrong. So it's like there's ups and downs, and there's going to be moments where it's like that, where, you know, you might have a bunch of money in accounts payable and a bunch of money accounts receivable, and you're squeezed between the two and you're trying to figure out how to keep all the plates spinning. It's okay to have moments like that, and it's okay to go through periods of that. So you do have to have a stoic, almost mentality when dealing with those things. But on the other hand, you need to figure out what is going wrong, because that is not how a business should run all the time. The business should make money, it should be profitable. It should have cash in the bank. It should have good processes and systems in place to where it's not organized chaos every day. So that's happening for you as the founder, like it's happening for you. So you get off your butt, come in on a Sunday and put in five hours working on one problem. It's like, okay, well, why is there no money in the bank? And you just literally ask why five times. Well, why is there no money in the bank? Well, because I lost money on this one job and now I'm working my way out of that. Why did I lose money on that one job? Well, because the estimator I sent out mismeasured it. Okay, well why did they mismeasure it? Well, because they're an idiot. Well, no, that's not the answer. It's like, no, because we didn't have a training system in place to teach them how to measure this stuff. So it's like this is a training problem. Fix the training problem. And so if you, if you do work through the five whys exercise over and over and over again over several years, you can fix these problems to where you don't have the crisis that you just described, which will happen, but they should only be periods in the story. Like for a story to be interesting. There are those challenges that you as the hero must overcome. But the whole movie can't be that or else it's not a pretty exciting movie. The hero eventually has to overcome it. Right? And so you do have to let those moments motivate you to work on the business. Find the time to work on the business to where you don't wake up and you just hate life. Because that's unfortunately the reality for most small business owners is that it's just a nightmare. And a lot of times they have overextended themselves with either credit lines or credit card debt or equipment financing. Now the business is no longer this thing that's an asset. It's just a loose, it's just a chain around their neck and they can't get out of it and they're personally liable to it. And so that's a terrible spot to be in. Let yourself get that spot. Use these moments that feel like crisis and chaos to motivate you to make the business better.

Gotcha. It makes a lot of sense. I can resonate with so much of that. And if we switch gears for a second and go into the rockin it moments going into for you in this 22 year career in traditional business and tech business, what would you say is the highlight when you look back and think of all of this? What would be the one moment that you look back and say, wow, this is why I do this. This is such an amazing experience for me and you're really proud of yourself. What is your rocking it moment? Would you say?

Yeah, there's several lows and several highs beginning the business sold the first one, the landscaping company, it was acquired in 2013 and it was the largest transaction in the industry in almost a decade. So that was a high moment. That was A mountaintop moment. But it quickly went away. I was happy for about three months, and then I thought, okay, what's the next thing you know? And I'm wired to want to be in the game. I'm wired to want to be in business. And so I had the idea for GreenPal, which is like the Uber for lawn mowing. And it was an idea that I kind of kicked around in the back of my head for a couple of years. And I thought, well, why not? Let's just see if I can pull this off. And So I recruited two co founders and we went to work on GreenPal. And so that high was then quickly transformed into a lower because I was at the bottom. And I had to start all over again. And it was ten times more challenging and difficult than I expected it to be. And it started the process all over again. Just building the business from scratch, getting a little bit of money, reinvesting the money and so on, and then had to learn how to celebrate the small wins and to get through those early years. And so for me, some of the early highs starting Greenpal was one day, I think year two or three. There was a big, big moment. 30 people signed up on a Saturday, and I didn't know who any of them were. That was a huge moment. Now thousands of people sign up a day, but back then it was a handful of people signed up, and I didn't know who any of them were. And so to me, this signaled that, wow, if I can get 30 people to sign up, I can get 300, then I can get 3,000 and I can get 30,000. And so it's like I had to learn how to celebrate these little small wins for many years. And so now there's big wins, you know, now, you know, we. We're doing multiple eight figures a year in revenue. We're profitable. We have a team of 30 something people. And so now the wins are bigger and they feel better. But I think the takeaway is, is when you're first getting started, start small, have a big vision, but start and act very small and celebrate the little small wins, because those are important. It's going to help you get through those first years, which are some of the most challenging.

And, you know, we said the Uber for landscaping, but, you know, for people that are listening and even for myself, really, what does that mean? How does GreenPal work in a nutshell?

Yeah. So homeowner needs to get their grass cut rather than calling around on Craigslist, Yelp, Facebook, or asking for recommendations for friends and family. That's how people normally get this service done. You just download GreenPal, you pop your address in, you'll get four or five quotes back in less than a few minutes. You can read reviews and compare them, compare prices, hire the contractor you want to work with right through the app. They come out and mow the yard for you. And if you like how it went, you just push a button, set it up for the whole year and it just happens like clockwork and you don't have to worry about it anymore. Just kind of set it and forget it. And then if you're a contractor, you Running a lawn mowing business is a total pain in the butt. We have built an entire operating system for lawn mowing services that run their entire business on top of our platform. So getting new customers, getting paid on time, scheduling, route optimization, marketing automation, all of these things are kind of baked into one operating system so they can run their whole little lawn mowing business on top of our platform. So we have two customers almost and we connect the two and make life easier for both of them.

That's interesting. I see a lot of service SaaS style tech startups that are focused on helping fill in the blank company run their business better. They're all over the place. And I also see a lot of connection style marketing tech startups that essentially are the middleman between the contractor and customer. But to see both in one shot was a little bit new to me. That's not something I usually bump into. And if you're able to do both in one, it's almost like running two businesses at once. Why did you choose to take on two businesses at the same time? Well, I guess first of all, do you agree it's kind of like two businesses having a flow in a system that helps contractors run their companies better is a potentially separate business than the marketing and the connecting with the clients. Would you agree with that or do you think it's more one?

Absolutely. And so one is a marketplace style business and the other is SaaS. So software as a service. And you almost kind of like have to make a bet on one or the other you and say okay, landscaping contractor, I have got a great tool set for you to use to help you run your lawn, your lawn mowing or landscaping business, and it's $149 a month and you pay us to use our software for billing, bookkeeping, et cetera. And that's a SaaS solution. And then, or you can have a marketplace which is we connect buyers and sellers and help them do business easier. We're more like a marketplace, but we have SaaS tools that both sides of the marketplace use to make it run smoother. And so a lot of marketplaces take on kind of this SaaS nature, but they still make money on the transactions. And so some other examples would be like, for instance, ebay, in the early days, they had, like, power seller tools that, you know, they would use to run their man you operate their, their inventory management and things like that. Or like StubHub was a very early marketplace back in the day, and they would help ticket brokers, like, you know, manage. Okay, these are. These are all the tickets that I have on hand and da, da, da. So, like, a lot of these marketplaces do have SaaS tools associated with them, but it's very difficult to charge for both. So you can't say, hey, I'm making money on the transaction and I'm charging you a flat monthly rate for the access to the tools, because usually those two aren't congruent. So we made the bet early on that we were going to be a marketplace. We were going to make it easy for homeowners to hire a good fit contractor in a matter of minutes, and then we've had to build out the tool set to make that vision come to reality.

Eric here.

I hope you're enjoying the episode today. This is a passion project that I put together. I really wanted to do this. I really want to help people out there. I had so many people reach out to me when I was younger and when I was having a tough time and struggling. I've written a book about it. You can check it out on my website.

Please do.

But most importantly, reach out to me. Give me some feedback. What could I do better with this podcast? What am I doing that I should stop? What am I not doing that I should do? Tell me your experience. Give me some tips and suggestions. I really want to design this to suit your needs. And all you got to do is send me an email. It's EricEric GilbertWilliams.com or use the contact me button that you'll find on my website. Just send me an email. We'll have a phone call or we'll chat online. Doesn't really matter. I would love to hear from you and figure out how to make this show even better with your help. So please reach out and don't be shy.

One of the things that really struck me when I did the transition out of construction into tech, and you mentioned a little bit about it earlier about you had to Rebuild yourself, reinvent yourself. And that it was harder than you thought it was. I was blown away. You know, when I came out of construction, I was kind of, I would self describe as a big fish in a small pond. I had overcome so many obstacles and done so well within a very niche micro industry. And it rocked my world to realize just how small that industry was compared to the broader context of what's going on in the world. And once I was out of that little bubble of day to day operating a construction company and the ins and outs of it, and started to look at technology and what goes into scaling and fundraising and capital management and automation and dealing with people who are never going to physically work on the project and working with all these different owners who have their own attitudes and opinions that are different than perhaps my own. And it was very humbling and it was difficult for me to make the jump and finally make some progress. And you said earlier about celebrating the little wins. It also reminds me of another friend of mine who made a jump from being a heavy equipment operator to a software developer. Massive change of mindset and day to day experience. And people all over the world right now, specifically with COVID as an impact in a trigger point, are changing industries and looking at other industries or their industries becoming obsolete. And they're faced with the prospect of, okay, I have to figure out what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. And that might mean a complete change of everything that was normal. So I wonder if you could tell us about your journey a little bit in going from the pushing a lawnmower to running a tech company. How do you make that jump?

Yeah, it's one of the hardest, most challenging, but one of the most beneficial things I've ever done in my life. Like you, like you were just describing here I was running this big landscaping company, one of the biggest, in Nashville, Tennessee, where I live, and I sold it, which doesn't happen very often. And, and I was able to effectively retire at the age of 32. So here I am, like, I think I know everything there is to know about business and running a business. And I thought, okay, well let me see if I can start this tech company because that'll be easier than what I just did because technology's software is so much easier than wrangling, you know, a hundred laborers every day. And boy, I didn't know what I didn't know. It was like naivete as an asset because if I had known how difficult it was going to be, I'd have Never done it. But getting in the trenches and starting to realize and unpack how challenging it was going to be and kind of rising up to that challenge, you know, is one of the coolest things I've ever done in my life. And I learned something about myself was that I can pretty much learn anything I want to learn so long as I'm sufficiently motivated. And so if you're doing like, you know, you're taking on new challenges in business, you will acquire skills you never in a million years would have acquired. Like, here I am, I sold this blue collar company and next thing I know I'm reading every blog I can get my hands on about product design or SEO or front end coding or you name it. And my co founders had to do the same thing too. And we all kind of had to like, work on ourselves for a period of time to get the skills we needed to compete in this game. And it was very much like a gut check moment. Like, how bad do you want it? You know, how bad do you really want to pursue this goal in this dream? And if you do want it, then you're going to be willing to make the sacrifices to put in the time. If not, then don't play this game. And it was very much like a make or break moment. And it's funny, like how you describe, like, you know, you mentioned something that I went through too. Like, knowledge is a funny thing. Like, the more of it you get, it's like the more of it you realize you don't know shit. Like, you realize, like, I really don't know a damn thing about how the world really works. Now that I'm in, you know, running the software company, I see how complex all these things are. And I had no clue how all these things worked previously. Now I do. And so the more, you know, the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don't know. So it's a very humbling thing. And that's the cool thing about it. It's like starting a company, particularly a tech company, is one of the most humbling things you can do with your life. And that's how it unfolded for me. You know, that's how I experienced it. And looking back, I'm glad I did it. And another thing is, is this is kind of like, I guess part of the mystery or the allure of the, of the overnight success. You know, you see a lot of companies, particularly tech companies, that out of two or three years, they come out of nowhere and they're just crushing it. And what you don't realize is like that founder already crashed and burned on two or three other things and then they used all of that tech related experience into this one thing that did work. So I don't think there's any shortcut for that. Anybody that's wanting to get from like a traditional blue collar type of business into the tech business, there's going to be a learning curve. There's going to be a three or four year period of time just to figure out how to play this game. And it certainly was a case for me and my co founders and we just stuck it out. We celebrated this little small wins and kept the momentum going and now here we are. I had to teach myself front end coding, product design. My co founders had to teach themselves how to code and do technical things like SEO and digital PR and all these things. We had to learn ourselves along the way. And that was one of the best things about it.

Looking backwards, where are you at right now with GreenPal? What sort of revenue, what sort of customer base, how broad is the reach industry wide? Where are you at? I'm curious.

Yeah. So started just in Nashville, Tennessee. Spent three or four years just in Nashville getting the product honed in, getting it dialed in and getting it consistent and predictable. And then we've started launching it into other cities throughout the United States. Now we're nationwide, anywhere in the country, in every major city. You can order lawn mowing service through GreenPal, doing multiple eight figures a year in revenue, Profitable, haven't raised any outside capital. And a team around 30 something people and still growing, growing quickly, month over month. And we have a goal to get to 100 million. And so that's what we got our sights set on. $100 million a year in revenue. And as time goes on, we want to be in the same conversation as an Uber, an Instacart, a Lyft, an airbnb. This is the default way you get this service done. You know, it's like, why would you go get groceries when you can just instacart? Why would you cut your grass when you can just order it on GreenPal?

This is a sort of a personal question. You know, I think about when I was in roofing and one of the unique things I found about roofing is the roof has a liability of the entire structure. If the roof has a problem, it can completely ruin everything that comes below it, which is everything. And the liability on that is a. It's a surprising thing in hindsight and I think that other people might look at whatever it is that they're comfortable in, whatever their industry is, and say, oh, well, my industry is more difficult or mine's more complex, or, you don't understand me because of fill in the blank. And it would be easy for me to say, oh, the liability on lawn cutting isn't nearly something like construction or not something like roofing or siding or windows or something like that. And I've been around long enough to know that that's probably not a fair thing to say. And, you know, I'm curious to hear, what would you say to people that would say, oh, well, you know, landscaping is easy because you don't have liability. I know it's not true. You know it's not true. But how would you respond to something like that?

I would tell you that every. That no business is easy. Like, you take the simplest business there is, like a hot dog stand. You know, the hot dog stand guy, he's got to worry about, okay, my supplier went up on me 10%. This guy's out of the kind of hot dogs I like. And I gotta scramble and get these. The axle needs greasing on the thing. Customer got sick last week and thinks that we're a hot dog made them sick. The umbrella is leaking. I lost my permit to operate on this corner over here. Like, every business is difficult, challenging, has liability, has its own set of unique problems. And no business is easy. Everybody thinks the other guy's business is simple and he's just making money hand over fist with half the work. And that's not the case. Every business is super competitive. Every business is challenging, has its own unique set of problems. And, you know, that's one reason why, like a lot of people ask us, well, you got the Uber for lawn mowing dialed in. Why not have Uber for home cleaning, Uber for roofing service, Uber for pressure washing, Uber for locksmithing. And what I have to tell them is kind of like what I just said is, like, every one of these businesses has a million problems, that they're all different. And you have to, like, live and breathe and walk in those shoes of that service to really understand them. And so until you, like, experience the business firsthand, you really don't know all of those things that you don't know and know. Yeah, like, the landscaping business is fraught with its challenges, you know, and that's what our company has set out to do, is to make all of those things run smoother, simple, easy, and crisp for the homeowner and make the livelihood of the service provider much simpler. And easier by solving all these problems with software, as many of them as we can. And yeah, no, it's got a million problems that are unique to it. Just like I'm sure there's a million problems in a roofing business that I have no idea that exists.

There definitely are. Like what you just described of getting to eight digits in revenue without outside funding and learning code yourself. It's a truly unique story. It really is. I've been working with a lot of different tech founders right now, and there's always a capital raise, there's always bringing in money from the outside, and there's always hiring out a team instead of learning it ourselves. And profitability is often something that doesn't come until a long, long way down the road. You know, to be burning 50 grand a month in order to increase rev by, you know, eight grand a month in many cases of a VC size would be good. That'd be a good thing. And that's a long way from profitability.

Right.

And you're kind of on the way to a Pegasus here. Potentially, if we look at a 10x valuation of 100mil val going to, let's say a bill, and that will put you in the unicorn status. But the Pegasus, of course, is a unicorn that's profitable. And people that don't know that, well, now you know, and you're on this trajectory to do that without the outside help. And I'm fascinated by that. Why did you choose not to get outside help? Why did you choose to do it all yourself with your own funding and never go for assistance?

Great question, and I'm not anti raising capital. You look on your phone, every app on the home screen, most likely you got there by raising venture capital. So when it's done correctly and done right and everything works out, it's a beautiful thing. The founders build a great product and eventually when they have a liquidity event through a sale or ipo, everybody makes a lot of money. And it's awesome. But the reality is it doesn't work out 95% of the time or more. And for most entrepreneurs, it's a bad bet. And all you gotta do is look at Y Combinator. And if you're not familiar with Y Combinator, these are like some of the most brilliant people in the world as it relates to building technical products. It's the NFL of the NFL. Y Combinator is behind the names like Airbnb, Stripe, Instacart, Doordash, even older companies like Reddit. And the list goes on. And there's probably 50 names that are like that marquee and that big and those huge outsized successes and maybe even more 50 or 60. And you're like, wow, these guys are masters of the universe. They have this incubator that has birthed Airbnb, Stripe doordash. What you don't realize is over the last 15 years is those guys have funded something like 3,000 companies. So it's 50 names that matter out of 3,000. Now, I'm terrible at math, but that's like single digit percentages of a shot, right? And everybody else went to zero. Maybe they had some active hires, maybe they sold for even money or whatever. But the reality is you got 50 or 75 really, really great success stories and then 2000 sad stories where a founder spent five or 10 years of their life and it went to zero and everybody got nothing. And so the reality is it's a bad bet for most entrepreneurs to go out and raise capital. And for us, I guess in the early days, we didn't have time. I didn't want to take six months off and go raise 250, $500,000. I just didn't want to do that. I wanted to get to work building a product and I wanted to get a hundred customers. And that's what interested me. And that's what we did. And once we got a hundred customers, we thought, okay, now let's go raise funding. And then we started looking at that and it's like, we're really going to have to stop what we're doing and not focus on the product and focus on fundraising. And it just never appealed to me. And then the other thing that may have, like naturally like shifted our thinking in this manner was we're out of Nashville, Tennessee. This is not known for a deep investor pool. Typically investors, especially back then out of Silicon Valley and other places wouldn't invest in you unless you were there. That's changed a little bit. But so for us, it wasn't like we had a bunch of opportunities knocking on our door. We just had to grind. Nowadays we say no to an investor call every day. Somebody hits me up almost every day wanting to pour money in this company. And now I'm in a nice spot where we're in charge of our own destiny, we're profitable, we don't have to raise capital. And then the third thing I'll say is it's like 20, 13, 14 and 15. When we were really first getting going, this Uber for X idea was huge. There was, you know, Uber was just taking over the world. And so all these ideas around Uber for laundry service, Uber for home cleaning, other Uber for lawn mowing app, we're getting all of this funding, multimillion dollars in funding. And so I'm just kind of observing this. And 12 to 18 months later, most of the time they'd be out of business. And what I started realizing was that venture capital was killing these businesses more than it was helping them because they were trying to scale too quickly. And I liken it to putting rocket boosters, Elon Musk rocket ships on the side of a barn and trying to get the barn to fly up into space with it. It just doesn't work when you try to pour on rocket fuel into a Toyota Camry. And so this is something that I started observing and thought, we're just going to keep our heads down and just work as hard as we can, try to grow the revenue, reinvest the revenue, and just see how far we can go. And that strategy has worked for us. Now, if you're listening to this, am I 100% telling you that you need to bootstrap your way through? Not necessarily, but it is something to consider. And if you think you can do it by way of funding off of your own revenues, that's usually a better bet. But there's some businesses that's not even an option. Like four or five years ago. If you want to start a scooter company, good luck trying to bootstrap a scooter company. It's one of those obvious ideas that needed a ton of capital. So there's certain ideas that have to have capital, there's certain ideas that don't. And you kind of have to weigh that out as a founder and pick your lane and bet on it.

Is there anyone that didn't believe in your vision of doing greenpal before you got started?

I mean, yeah, everybody. Nobody gave. One of the things you're going to learn if you're going to start a company, whether it be hair salon or a new tech company or a tech company that helps hair salons, whatever. It's like nobody cares. Like, just work on your business literally. Like, nobody's going to believe in you. Nobody's going to give a crap about what you're doing. Like, nobody's going to, like, root cheer you on. Maybe some. Maybe your mom will, maybe. But nobody cares. Like, literally nobody cares about your business's problems. Nobody cares about the challenges. Like you as the entrepreneur, as the founder need to be like, intrinsically motivated to want to see this thing happen. And Exist, you will never get any kudos or any sort of external motivation. It will be something inside of you that you just really want to see it happen. Because a probably nobody's going to get it. And it doesn't matter, just grind, just work on it. Get 10 customers, get 100, get a thousand, and don't even worry about that stuff.

Interesting. So I was almost anticipating that you were going to go into a story or how you worked through it, or talk about an instance where someone you cared about was a naysayer, for lack of a better word. But you really just sliced right through it and said, oh, just oh yeah.

No, I've got tons of those. And you know, one in particular. It wasn't that I needed people to care. I needed people to use my shitty product. Like in the early days, our product was so bad and so terrible, but I just needed like a hundred people to use it and because I needed to study their usage and I needed to be able to understand what we were trying to build and. And so we would pass out door flyers all over Nashville, Tennessee just to grind out a few dozen people to use the app so then we could interview them and figure out, okay, what did you wish it would do? Where did it break? Where did it let you down? So I needed like beta testers, for lack of a better way to describe it. And so I had friends and family that wouldn't even use it. And like, I remember one friend of mine was like, yeah, I was like, hey man, you know, I know, you know I'm pouring my soul into this business, but, you know, would you use the app to get your grass cut? I know you pay a guy to mow your yard. Would you use my crappy app to get it done? And he seems like he was dead ass serious. He was like, yeah, you know, I really like my guy and I don't want to change. So it's like, here's a good friend who would not like change lawn mowing services to help me out. So that was like, it wasn't like a letdown and like a, oh, should I continue to do this because he doesn't believe in me? No, it was like a pain in the ass because I needed him to use it and he wouldn't even do that to help me. It was a quick, like, lesson learned that nobody's going to care. The only person that's going to care about your new company is the customer whose problem it solves. That's it. No one else will care. Not your mom, not your dad, not your wife, not your husband. Nobody's going to care. The only person that cares is the customer who's going to pay for it, because it solves their problem. And that's really all you should care about. All you should care about is, do customers care? Because if they don't care, you don't have to care.

I really like that perspective. You really narrowed it down into a very succinct sentence. So thanks for that. I think we're getting close to time here. I know you got to get running. I really wanted to ask a question of you that I ask of everyone on the show. If you were to go back in time, let's say, when that first employee walked off the job and he just left, and you're stuck now doing twice as much work by yourself. And maybe you feel like a failure in that moment, or maybe whatever it is going in through your mind, whatever it is, if you're able to go back in time, like hot tub time machine style and go and talk to yourself, you had 60 seconds to give yourself to say something to yourself in that moment. When that guy walked off right there on the spot, boom, you just appeared. What would you say to yourself in that moment, looking back?

Yeah, outside of, like, don't give up. You know, this is the way it's going to be. This is the way it is. You know, like, outside of, like, motivational stuff, I would, like, give myself some tactical advice, which is like, spend less time working in the business. Spend more time working on the business. And you know, in business, you're going to be doing three things at once. You're going to be working in the business, for example, me mowing the yards. And then you're going to be working on the business, which is like, okay, what's my employee training system look like? What does my quality assurance system look like? What does my marketing system look like? And then you're going to spend time working on yourself. What kind of leader am I? What kind of manager am I? What kind of negotiation skills do I have? What kind of sales skills do I have? What kind of communication skills do I have? And so working in the business, on the business and on yourself, I would like. Took me a long time to understand that and internalize that. I thought starting a landscaping business meant that you just busted your ass mowing grass 80 hours a week. And it took me a long time to realize that, no, I need to come in on a Sunday afternoon and really look at our marketing and really look at, okay, this is how we're making the phone ring or really look at, okay, this is how we're making sure we deliver a consistent job every single time and how that little process hums and works like clockwork. And it took a long time for me to understand that. So I guess I would like try to beat that into my head early on what it means to work in the business, on the business and on yourself and how you dedicate the time that you have over a week's time to do those three things and building.

On a little inspiration of what you just said. For anyone listening, the first two people that send an email to me, it's EricEricgilbertwilliams.com and you can just find it on the show notes for the episode too. First two people to email me about this episode here with Brian at greenpal. It's greenpal.com Is that where we find you?

That's correct.

First two people to email me listening to this. I'm going to give you a free copy of the E. Myth Mastery by Michael Gerber that changed both of our lives, both Brian and my perspectives on how to run a business and how not to run a business. Send me an email. I'll send you a copy by.

That's a great gift.

Yeah, it is. I'll send it by Amazon so it'll just go direct shipped right to your place from online and yeah, just send me an email. We'll send you the copy of the book and you can reply back and tell me how you liked it and how it changed maybe your business. Brian, before we wrap up, the floor is yours here. If people want to find you, they go to greenpal.com I'd assume it's super easy to sign up and it's probably super smooth and people are going to have a great experience and there's no why they shouldn't. Is that about right?

That's right. Yeah. Go to greenpal.com or you download Greenpal in the App Store or Play Store. Anybody wants to hit me up. I spend most of my time on social and on Instagram. BrianM Clayton Just drop me a follow and a DM there. I'll hit you back.

Awesome. We'll put a link to that in the show notes to the episode as well. And on that note, Brian, thank you for taking the time to share your story, to share some of your rock bottom moments, to share your rocking it moments and your practical expertise or technical advice that you gave to everyone here in the same way that you would have given to yourself. So thanks for your time. Brian, I really appreciate you're doing absolutely fantastic work with Greenpile. I'm really curious to hear this story because it's not something I bump into very often. So thanks a lot for your time. Thanks, Eric.

I enjoyed it.

All right, everyone, we will see you next time on From Rock Bottom to Rockin It. Remember to look at how you can improve your day to day, how you can work on your problem, on your business, on whatever it is that you're working on instead of getting stuck inside the minutia of the day to day. So keep that in mind. We'll see you next time. Until then, have a great day.

And that's it, my friends, for this episode. We will see you next time. Please send me an email, say hello, give me some feedback, let me know what you think, give me some tips and suggestions. I'd love to hear from you. Also, please share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, doesn't matter. Just get it out there. I really appreciate it. And we'll see you next time on From Rock Bottom to Rockin It. Have a Rockin it day.

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