Entrepreneurship Is Going From Failure to Failure Without a Loss in Enthusiasm with Bryan Clayton

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind.

I am with Brian Clayton, and Brian is an exciting entrepreneur, Nashville, Tennessee, doing great things in his first business, which is lawn care. And he's taken the suggestion his dad had when he was growing up, go out, make some money, cut some grass, and turn that into a career. And he has evolved as the industry and technology has evolved. And so, Brian, I'm excited to follow up with you on the exciting new ideas of taking a new company and executing, learning what you didn't know with new technology and executing that new idea. You know, you said it's a good thing. I didn't know what I didn't know because otherwise I wouldn't have done it. That's the story of every entrepreneur.

Exactly.

I'm real curious, Brian, about. Let's talk about, you know, you ran into the wall there, and that's, you know, that happens. The biggest hedge funds in the world today are started by people that were in investing, financial services, had network of friends, and they figure, oh, okay, I'll go out and I'll start my own hedge fund. They go out there and it's crickets. They find nobody is interested in them. They think, I had all these friends with all this money is like, well, you're not proven, you know, over here you had all this backing and this, that the other. And they've got to get out there and grovel and be creative and put out 200 door hangers, you know, in their, their $10,000 suits, you know, that version of that.

Exactly.

Stories all the time, even, even with BlackRock, you know, and so it's the norm that you think that because you know the industry, you know how it works, you know the people, you feel like you're going to know how to start a new business, but then you run into the big concrete wall of the unknown. And these are the things you've got to learn if you're going to start this new business, because all of the new businesses there have some kind of twist to them. You're either going to be like everybody else and just a good version of everybody else, or you're going to come up with a new something, either with just a slight twist or a whole new thing. And you kind of came up with a whole new thing in a basic service that people have always needed to have done, and it's been done in one way or another. But you came up with this new idea and you thought, piece of cake. This is going to spread all over the country. People are going to instantly see it, you know, because you saw it and then you found out, no, people are dumber than mud. They do not see it. I mean, they might be geniuses, but their brain is already full of what they're thinking about. They're not seeing through my eyes the potential of this thing and how great it could be for them. And so then we got to go through the motions of explaining it to it and figure out how to explain it to a lot of people so we can find our client base. You know, I saw a thing, one of the nature. I got a. I got a new. One of the new OLED TVs that I'm watching, you know, the colorful programs, and I started watching one of the nature things, and I was talking about. It had a tiger, you know, a Bengal tiger. And it showed the hunt and everything. And it said, the tiger only succeeds. This is a tiger now. Only succeeds one out of 10 times.

Yeah, that's a tiger.

That's a tiger. So, you know, when we go out there, don't expect to be, you know, anybody to have any sympathy for you. This is just the way it is throughout the world. You know, from animals to baby, you got a prospect, you got to earn your way, and. And you went out there, talk about how you went through that thought process and learned those things, got them in place. How fast was it? How frustrating was it?

Yeah, extremely, extremely challenging because you approach the problem and you approach the solution from a preset set of assumptions. And a lot of those assumptions are based in your experience, and. And they aren't necessarily the case for the customer. And so there's a big gap between company logic and customer logic. And so the only kind of roadmap you have, if you will, when you're inventing a product from scratch is customer feedback. That's the only thing you have that can guide you to building something that people want to use, will keep using and keep patronizing and pay for. And so if you're not willing to solicit that customer feedback, make it really simple, like removing all of the friction for them to be able to speak with you and tell you where you stink and tell you what, what you wish, what they wish that you would do for them, well, then you're kind of, you're kind of just relying on, on luck. And so, and for us, we were reading a book called the Startup Owner's Manual by an author named Steve Blank in those days. And that's all that book is about is what they call get out of the building. It means just get out of your office and go meet face to face with the early adopting users and customers that you have for your product. And as simple as that sounds, most entrepreneurs don't do it because the feedback hurts. We think our customers are stupid. It's not what we want to hear, it's not the easy thing to do. And so we don't ever do it. And that's why 95% of startups fail. One of the reasons. And so like you said earlier, you have to get that first minimal viable product out the door, get it in the hands of customers, and then start talking to them, get the feedback, improve the product, and rinse and repeat. And if you're willing to do that for 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 years, you can make something from scratch that people will use and more importantly, continue to use that they will. It will keep sticking around and retained because if you can't do that, then you don't have a product. Were scaling and this stuff, these things sound simple, but they're kind of going back to Warren Buffett. A lot of his strategies are simple too. They're just not. Well, they're not fun to execute and they're not the things that we gravitate towards. But if you're willing to do them and do them long enough, you can create a product from scratch that will succeed.

Talk about the timetable there, because, you know, every step. I remember when we were starting our business, Art Williams used to tell us that every nightmare, every delay, every step you go through, he said, be glad, because the people who want to compete against you, they're going to have to go through all those steps too. And every time you make it through to another level, you've separated yourself from the masses, you've elevated yourself. And so talk about. You said years. You didn't say. Because, you know, right now we would like to be like, okay, we gotta get my website changed. Somebody come in and redesign it. Bam. Two days later, new website. And, you know, years.

Years, years, years, years. Literally years.

Talk about those years now to get that feedback and then how you worked your way through making these changes.

So that's kind of what entrepreneurship is. It's going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. And so Just continually just to grind it out. You know, we had, we. Our first year, we ended up with like $12,000 in total revenue and 20 customers, half of them my friends and family. And. But, but we had enough validation to know, okay, this is worth this. This is worth spending the next five years on because. Because if we can make it work in this one neighborhood, we can make it work at all of Nashville. And if we can make it work at all in Nashville, then we could probably make it work in the Southeast. And if we can make it work in the Southeast and we can do it nationwide and just really kind of like looking at how you envision the future to be and then working backwards from that and laying it out into small attainable wins and just working that process over and over and over again, and then those small numbers begin to compound and. And you get a little bit of a snowball effect. And so for us, it was difficult because we were self funded. We bootstrapped the thing off its own revenue. So we were executing all this stuff. And so it was like we were teaching ourselves how to build software while improving the product. And we were also having to do the marketing at the same time and teach ourselves a search engine optimization strategy and really try to learn how to do that stuff at the same time while we were building the product. And so this concept of work life balance, particularly in the early days of starting a business, I think is bad advice because you're going to be working six, seven days a week because half the time you're working on the business, and then the other half of the time you need to be learning. Like, you need to be listening to podcasts like this one. You need to be watching everything on YouTube that you can that relates to your industry. You need to be going to conferences, you need to be reading all the books you need. Like, there's only so many hours in a week. And like, half of the time is literally going to be learning the skills you need to execute because odds are you don't have them yet. At least I know I didn't. And so it just took a very, very, very long time to get the momentum going for our little marketplace and to get it, get it out. You know, we spent four years just in Nashville trying to get it to where it would work reliably to where when somebody hired a lawn care service, they actually showed up on the day they were supposed to and actually did a good job and figuring out, like, the motivations behind the users on both sides of the transaction to satisfy the Demands that each of them had just took a long time, a lot of trial and error.

Well, you know, I remember one of the early days of the Shark Tank and they had this nice young lady on and she had some idea and she didn't have many sales and they all the blah, blah, blah. And it came down to where, well, you know, you need to get to trade shows and let people see it. You know, at least get to the trade shows and find some other distributors. And she said, yeah, I know, but you know, I'm just shy.

Not an excuse, not an excuse.

I'm just an introvert, you know. She said, and Mark Cuban, not an excuse.

And that's one of the beautiful things about business, is that it will force you to confront those fears. It'll force you to level up, force you to overcome those things.

And that's the deal. Where is, that's when you're going to find out if there is fire in your belly for this idea or not.

Right?

You know, do you really want it enough to make those changes or to make that learning? And now for you guys, you sound like you're a bunch of action people. You know, go here, do this, you know, hands on. But then to sit down in front of a computer and learn that boring nitpick. It's not, you know, most of the computer work is not hard, but it is boring. Boring and tedious and repetitious. And for you to make that shift had to be rough on your system.

It was definitely a gut check moment. And it was a moment of, do I really want this bad enough? Because now I, you know, when I started the company, I thought it was going to be a two year thing and we would, we would just be nationwide. And then once we got in there, I realized, no, this is a ten year thing. And it was kind of a learning moment for myself personally. And I realized something about myself. It was almost like, well, you know, I'm not going to not be in business because I need to have a, I need to be in the game. I'm wired to love the game and I'm always going to be working on my best idea. And fortunately I'm not terribly creative. This is my best idea, was, is, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. So we're just going to stick with this. And that was what kept me and my co founders in the game for the first five years was like, well, by default, you know, it's too late to turn back now. We're just going to keep working our butts off and moving it forward. However slow and however long it takes is however long it takes. And that was what we needed.

Now, talk about how the numbers climbed. Okay. And the years involved, you know, from how long did you go? And, you know, did it come in a surge? Did it as a steady growth? You know, was there a breakthrough? Talk about, you know, the. The returns on your efforts. You know, it's like. It's. When it started to work, it's like, praise the Lord, it's going to work, you know, and it's starting to trickle in. You know, there's some gold dust, you know, glittering in the pan there. So. Well, let's just say, what was the sign for you that this thing actually was going to work?

Yeah, you know, you're exactly right. It's. It was little glimmers of hope. And for us, the numbers were really small, but at least they were doubling every year. And there was. The day I knew it was going to work, I think was maybe year two or maybe even year three. It was a Saturday that my two co founders and I were in the office working like we were every Saturday. And something like 40 people signed up that Saturday, and I did not personally know who any of them were. And that was a big moment because up until then, it was very much like grassroots, hustling up people like, you know, passing out flyers, you know, talking to customers, getting referrals. But this was a day in which it was a Saturday and just 30 people signed up. I didn't know them. And I thought, wow, if we can take that number and times it by 10 in every major city in the United States, then we can build a real business. And so it was just one of those things. We knew if we could continue to double, continue to grow the numbers exponentially, that. That it would take off.

So you finally ran out of friends and relatives.

Yeah, that's exactly what happened. And did someone.

Did someone marry a new wife that I didn't hear about here?

Yeah, that that strategy ran out of gas, and we had to figure out another way to get the word out. And it was when we started seeing that work to where we knew we could do X, Y and Z and get a result. That was when I knew it would work.

You know, you really, you know, the advice there that we, you know, for those coming up is you really want to work like a maniac towards that point in your career, and you need to know it's going to be a specific point that, you know, inside yourself, okay, I can make this work. I have proved to myself this thing can work. And from then on, it's just a matter of time and effort and compounding. And it takes what it takes, but the doubt and the fear and the paranoia and the, you know, the trauma you go through, that changes because now all the energy can go into the forward thrust. But that's a big deal. It is a specific thing, isn't it?

Yeah. And it's that moment, you know, maybe a moment in a chess game when you know you've won and you see it and maybe your opponent doesn't. And not the business can be a zero sum game like chess, but. But it is a moment and doesn't matter how long it takes, you know that you're going to win, and you know that it might take another five years, but at least you know that if you keep doing what you're going to do, nobody can take it from you and that you're going to win. And to use chess as another analogy, there's not one move on the board that wins the whole game. It's a progression, a series of things that you've done right day in, day out for many years that compound and build on each other. And it's literally a snowball that begins to build that momentum. And once you see that compounding take hold, you then know, okay, yeah, this is going to work. It's going to be a lot more hard work, but at least I know I've got something that's going to work.

And talk about how the compounding went after that. Yeah, you know, you see, you try.

To create little goals that are attainable and, you know, if you can double them over and over and over again, that you'll have a real business. So for us, you know, the first year we wanted to do 100 transactions in a week. And we knew if we could get 100 transactions in a week, then we could get to 500. And we knew then we'd get to 500, we'd get to 1,000. The first year we didn't hit that. We only got to 70. But it was close enough to know, okay, well, we know we'll hit it the next year. So then the next year we hit 300, we tripled, and then the year after that we hit 1,000, and the year after that we hit 2,500, and the year after that we hit 5,000. And then year after that we hit 10,000. And so if you create those little goals and you celebrate them along the way, and you know that they are doubling over A period of time, well then it's just basic math. And that is reassuring to give you the ambition and reassure yourself that it's worth putting in the six and seven days a week. It's worth the sacrifices because if you just keep going, you know, you'll eventually get there.

When you say, you know, you'll have a real business, describe in your mind what would you say, what is a real business?

You know, that can be different for many people. You know, for, for some people it might just mean $3,000 a month in passive income and they can travel the world, you know, and that's a great goal. For other people it might mean that they want to have $100 million business or a billion dollar business. For me, a real business was one that was profitable, that was doing at least a million dollars a year. And I didn't think we had a business until we had that because my last business was doing 10 million a year and I knew we had to do at least a million dollars a year in revenue. And if we couldn't get that by a certain date and we couldn't see indications that that would eventually happen, that we were not on the right track. And so I think if, you know, my opinion is if you've got a good team, you're profitable, you're able to pay salaries, you're able to pay all of your vendors and make at least a million a year, then you've got a real business.

You know, Brian, I can't remember when I've had time fly faster. This has been so much fun. I'm going to give you one final word for entrepreneurs on the way up up that you know, they might just, they already have a business, but they're ready for a new breakthrough, they're ready to push it to another level. What would the final word be for them?

I just read a book by Simon Sinek called the Infinite Gain. And one thing that that book talks about is that just to look at business like an infinite game, to look at it like this is just the thing that I'm doing, putting my life's energy into my life's force. And this is the reason I'm getting out of bed in the morning. And if you look at business that way and look at it like an infinite game, is this going to be a 5, 10, 20 year deal that can help take care of a lot of the day to day bs? Another thing that this kind of helped me is like business isn't the source of my passion, but it is the source of My purpose. And so asking yourself the question, if it weren't for me, then what? If it weren't for me. X and so I'm all, there's different points in my life in business. I've been able to ask myself that question. If it weren't for me. Well, then there's, there's 23 people that depend on this company for a paycheck. If it weren't for me, you know, I've got these stakeholders that, that have put their backing behind the business and they'll be let down. If it weren't for me, then there's lawn care services that use our technology to run their business and then that will get all screwed up. And so a lot of, a lot of these like little things have been handled by bigger questions like that, that then enable me to guide my decisioning and my execution at the tactical level. And so if you're struggling in business or looking for a reason to level up, the next thing you know, maybe those things can help you, you know, if it weren't for me. X and how your business can be the source of purpose in your life.

And thanks so much for all of the this great insight. Where are you locked in now as your say, your business goals? What are you most excited about doing next?

You know, you get to a certain point in business and it's easy to look back and say, wow, we've made it. But I swear to you, like, it still feels like day one, like it really like eight years in, you know, we're doing good, we're profitable, we're growing, but we have so much further to go. The lawn care business is a 99 billion billion dollar industry and we have a long, long way to go until like we're kind of in like the, the ubiquitous like everyday way that you would get this done along the same lines as an Uber or Lyft or an Instacart or Doordash, then we're not done. We got a long way to go. So. So we're just going to continue to keep our heads down, continue to work, continue to double this thing every year.

You guys have got to be thinking in terms of hundreds of millions.

Absolutely. Yeah. That hundreds of millions. Definitely, Definitely the case. And it's totally doable.

Yeah. And that's going to be fun. And the thing is, if your eye is on it, you can get there so much faster than you possibly could imagine. It's going to be fun to just see how big this thing can get, Brian. Because I know with the momentum you've got now and the foundation that's in place, you are set up for long term success. Let's get together down the road and talk about all the new things you're getting ready to learn going forward because I've really enjoyed this and wish you the best.

Well, Larry, I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me on to share my story.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are definitely dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch. Go to Whiteellumwinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go Go Go.