How the Reasons You Work Evolve Every Year with the Founder of GreenPal 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 want to dig into what you were just saying there. But let me tell everybody, I am here this afternoon with Brian Platon from Nashville. He's the founder of Green Pal. It is called the Uber for lawn care. He's 20 years been in the lawn care business and been successful in his previous business. This one's eight years old. They're up to $20 million annual revenue, 1 million homeowner users as of November last year, has over 150,000 vendors. Unbelievable success in the lawn care business. So thanks Brian, for taking this time and sharing my pleasure.

I'm having a ball. Thanks for having me on.

And you know, what I'd like to ask you is to get into that subject about, you know, people. The thought is, oh, I've got one why. You know, they'll always tell you in management training, find out their why. And I, you know, I, I try and be, I've gone all the way around the battlefield on that, you know, of total contempt for the thing. But it is important find out their why. If they've got a mother that's dying of cancer and they want to get her treatment or they want to be able to help their wife be able to quit her job so she could be a full time, you know, take care of the kids. You know, the whys are important, but you know, why I've always been content because, contemptuous of that is because the whys always come down to what we need more money. In fact, I remember doing a full Timers retreat up in North Carolina years ago and we were going around, you know, there's 200 people in the room. We're saying, you know, you know, what motivates you the most, you know, what motivated you when you came in the business, you know, and people are yelling out around the room and then what you hear one guy in the back said, mo money.

Yeah.

That'S what everything came down to. You know, he was like, can we stop all this nonsense? We need to make more money. And the thing is making money is a reinforce a way of keeping score. Once you get past the survival thing, it tells you on track. It tells you what you're doing is valid. The people respond to it, they beat it. And it's, you know, it is a way of keeping score. But, you know, it is one of the reasons. But like you said, you know, we. So much of this thing is like, well, growing up, you know, I just wanted to be a ballerina, you know, and horses, you know, I wanted to be in horses and. Or I wanted whatever music. And the thing is, you said it so well. The reasons that you work, your motivation, the things that are most important to you. That's why this thing about balance is so misunderstood in life, you know, you know, you're, you know, you don't do things like, you know, 12 minutes for this every day and 28 minutes for that because, you know, we have to have it all balanced out. You know, there's time if you got a kid and he's in the playoffs or she's in the playoffs for the soccer championship and they're on an all star team and the game is Saturday and everything else is canceled. I mean, there is no balance, you know, for that moment. That's the deal. You know, somebody's in the hospital, we'll go see him Friday and we'll go see him on Sunday, but Saturday we got the championship. And the thing is that, and whatever the cost is, all the money's going into that, you know, because this is her moment to shine, or his moment is, you know, once in a lifetime type thing. So the, the thing is your reasons even why you do what you do. And you'll also see this in entertainers in Hollywood. A lot of them started off as dancers and then they got into singing. And then all of a sudden, the last minute thing, they got a part in a play and they became an actress. And that was the end of the singing and dancing. Every now and then they got on a TV series. A lot of times they'll feature the other skills of one of the main players there. But from now on, they're mainly an actor. And the motivations change as you go through, but you gotta follow your current passion of the moment with everything you've got. And that will lead you to the other things that are on the other side of the hill. You just can't see it right now. But you're never gonna see it if you don't chase what you got. So talk about, explain that to people how the reasons like you found, the reasons you work evolve and change every year.

Yeah, you know, I agree with everything you're saying. I think one of the best quotes I've heard that kind of sums all this up is a Warren Buffett quote, a Warren Buffett truism. And he says, money isn't everything. Just make sure you have enough of it before you utter such nonsense. And, you know, I think that that pretty much sums it up, because you gotta have a certain amount of money in order to sustain yourself and to live a comfortable life. And I think, as when we get started in our career or in our business, that's what we're after. And I think we need to, like, go after that with ferocity. And we have to be monotonically focused on creating something that's profitable to give us that. So then we can do the next level of things that. That are. That are higher level, that are maybe on a higher level of thinking or more rewarding level. But you can't skip that step. You have to create some sort of income or wealth in order to do those things that might be more related to following your passion or more related tied to your why and so on. That's certainly the case for me. I busted my butt for 15 years building a landscaping business, got it to $10 million in revenue and sold it so then I could do the next business, which was more tied into. I really wanted to be in the technology space. I really wanted to create an app from scratch. I really wanted to learn how to do all of that. And that afforded me the ability to do that. And so. And, you know, I was making really good money running that first business, sold it, and wasn't making that money anymore. And so. And so. And so then, you know, it really wasn't driven by money the second time around. It was driven by, I really want to see if I can make this thing a huge, ubiquitous success throughout the entire country. And that was what drove me. But I don't think you could do that type of why right up the gate. I think it has to be more practical. I think you kind of need to get on first or second base, get a win under your belt, and then your why can evolve. At least that's been my experience.

Well, you got to get in the game, and you've got to be able, you know, to go to the top. There's a lot. It's not a straight line, you know, going to the top, exactly. A straight line and finding your. You know, it's like artists, like, they'll put out, you know, back when there's CD albums, you know, they'd put out 12 tracks, 12 songs or so on an album they had no clue which was gonna be, you know, the Hit, they would take a guess, you know, the record company, they put out a couple of them as singles and hoping, but they never really knew how people were gonna respond. And you never know until you throw it out there. In fact, some of the biggest artists of the past, they had to be basically beat into recording songs that they became known for legendarily. I would. I would rattle some of those off. But, you know, people, you know, not everybody would know them. But the thing is this, like, you have to be flexible. You have to give it everything. You got to try a lot of different things, right? I will tell you this. Like Bob Dylan. Everybody knows Bob Dylan. And, you know, he's been a hit and this, that and the other. Then he's kind of become the old guy. And he puts out albums. He's been putting out albums all along. And I remember 10 years ago he said he put out an album and all of a sudden the critics liked it. You know, I listened to it. I couldn't see what was different from the rest of it. Anyway, they all love it. They decided, you know, it's like this woke generation. They decide certain things are in, certain things are out, right? They decided. The critics decided this was a great album. So they went and then they interviewed in all the magazines. Want to interview Bob. And so they say, you know. And they did, you know, it was going to. Did, you know you had something special here? Was there electricity in the studio?

Do you.

You know, and everybody kind of felt like this was different from all the others, you know, that you'd done for the last, you know, 15 years or something. He said, well, he said, we didn't know what we had, but we went ahead and did it anyway.

Damn right. And I love that. I love that momentum creates luck. You keep moving. It's kind of like if you don't have a job, you can't get a job. And so you always have to be looking at. One of my favorite books is the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And Dr. Steven Covey in that book talks about, you have this big circle and it's your circle of concern. It's everything that's going on in the world and it's all this stuff. It could be that Dogecoin is up 100% today or, you know, all this stuff that does not matter. And then inside of that circle of concern is your circle of influence. It's a much, much smaller circle, but inside of that circle is what you can actually do and what you can actually act on. And it's only in that circle that you need to be concerned is because. Is because when you act inside that circle, it gets bigger. And I agree. Like, if you just, if you, if you have a bias towards action and you kind of are willing to move on something before you're comfortable and ready, then that creates luck. And then everybody can say, you got lucky.

Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business as accrued over 5 billion billion in assets under management and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to Whiteellumwinning.com webinar Now, I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move up.

Absolutely. And as you have gone, talk about starting a business. And this has to do, you know, that's one thing, the purpose of a business, you know, when you start a business, the overwhelming thing with that business is it's like a new baby's born. You want to make sure that business lives. You want to make sure that business survives and then hopefully thrives. But if it doesn't survive, if you don't get enough money coming in quick enough to get that baby off the ground, you know, flap your wings when the business has started to where you can get some traction and get off the ground, you're not going to crash and burn right in the beginning. So the first motivation for a founder in starting a business is to get that thing off the ground and talk about those stages, those lessons, those experience of that. Because it's not a Pollyanna ride to the top of the mountain for anybody.

It really, it's tough. Everybody that's in business has started the business, knows how hard the first six months, year, two, three years are. And particularly my second company was excruciating getting it going. And, and you know, I love the book Think and Grow Rich. And one of the things that Napoleon Hill talks about in that book is that, is that ideas are stillborn. And so business ideas are stillborn. And it's only action that breathes oxygen into them. And so this stuff seems obvious, but it's oftentimes overlooked. And so, you know, a new business owner will just sit there and plan and plan and plan and hypothesize and like, make plans on top of plans and strategies, but without actually executing anything. And the only thing that's going to get you through that cold start, get you from zero to one, is just relentlessly executing on a couple of things at a time. And I remember when I was starting Greenpal, you know, we, the first six months a year were really tough and we didn't have any strategy to get people to use the app. But one thing we did is we made up 200,000 door hangers and passed them all over Nashville, Tennessee. That was one thing that we could do that day to get people to use it. And while we don't do that today, but it was a thing we needed to do at that moment. And just having that bias towards action to try make something happen will then unlock the next set of things that you should be doing. And I think a lot of times, you know, you get advice from people and you're getting advice from people who haven't actually done what it is you're trying to do and that can kind of steer you astray. And I remember when I was, when we were starting greenpal, I thought, well, I need to get me like an executive coach and I need to get me a coach to help coach me through this.

There you go, there you go.

So I did, I did. And he was a really nice guy and he had achieved success, but he's like coaching me on things that like, did not matter. Like I'm sitting there like I need more traffic to my website. Can you tell me how to do that?

No.

So I thought, I don't need a.

Coach.

I need like an SEO consultant to help me figure out how to execute an SEO strategy and to keep me on track for that. So I took the coaching money and I bought and I paid for a high level consultant that made $500 an hour that knew how to do search engine optimization and that was what I needed to do. And like that was the thing I needed for my business to execute, to drive the ball forward. I didn't need a life coach, I didn't need somebody to help me with these, these macro ideas and theories that didn't really matter to what my business was at, at that stage of the game. I needed more traffic. I need people to help me get more traffic. So that's what I went out and got.

And talk about the idea you had of the Uber for lawn care.

Yeah. So you know, I spent 15 years in the lawn mowing business and one thing I saw over and over again was if you need a basic grass cutting service, it's actually hard to find a reliable lawn Mowing service, they're hard to find. They flake a lot, they disappear. Um, it's hard to get them to return a phone call because they're busy mowing yards all day. It's actually a big pain in the butt. And when I sold that company, I thought, okay, well, what now I need to do the second thing. And. And the idea for GreenPal was an obvious one for me because I saw what Airbnb and Uber and Lyft were doing. They were creating like, magical real world experiences through an app on your phone. I thought, okay, this can and needs to exist for the industry I just spent the last 15 years in. And I thought, okay, well, I'll just recruit two co founders and we'll go to work and we should have this thing, like really going in like a year or less. And boy, was I wrong. I did not know what I did not know. And I didn't know how difficult it was going to be to execute on the technology and also just invent the new product. You know, I didn't really understand that there's a big difference between starting a business like a landscaping company versus inventing a brand new product that does not yet exist. And so there was just a lot of naivete. And luckily I was naive because that's what got me in the game. And we were confronted with the reality of how difficult it was going to be to make the app happen. But when we talked to the first couple hundred people that tried it out, we were hearing a lot of negative feedback in terms of, well, it didn't really work. I signed up and the guy didn't show up that I hired or they did a crappy job or. And so you heard a lot of negative feedback. But one thing we didn't ever hear was, I don't need this. We never heard that. And we also, we also saw people that were disappointed that our first release didn't do what they wanted it to do. So we took those two things. We never heard I didn't need this. And we never. And we saw disappointment on their faces and we took that as validation to keep going. And luckily we did those user interviews and we talked to everybody that would talk to us to guide us along the way if we were on the right track or not. And we've always done that. We've always made it really easy for people to speak with us, to let us know how we're doing, what they wish the app would do, where it came up short on both sides of the transaction, on the homeowner side and the lawn pro side, and we let that feedback guide us.

And Brian, that's such a great point that once you launch, until you launch, you can never get that feedback right. And that's a theme that's coming, that comes back more and more with people that are starting new businesses today.

You have to get it out there.

You have to get it out there and you can't wait, can't hold up waiting for perfection because you don't know what's perfect and you don't know how other people are going to see it, use it. And you shortchange yourself from not having that kind of feedback, you know, probably, and spending time and money going off and other directions where that's not really what they want right now. Thanks so much for sharing all of these things.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are 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 whiteellawinning.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.