S4E9 – Bryan Clayton – Growing a $30M Marketplace

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Key Timecodes

• (00:58) – Show intro and background history
• (02:31) – Deeper into his background history and business model
• (06:54) – Understanding his business model
• (14:16) – Deeper into his business strategies
• (20:52) – How he expanded his business
• (29:03) – A bit about the company numbers
• (35:47) – When did he break a million
• (39:01) – A key takeaway from the guest
• (42:57) – What is the worst advice he ever received
• (44:44) – What is the best advice he ever received
• (48:56) – Guest contacts

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Intro

Hey. This is Sean Tepper, the host of Payback Time, an approachable and transparent podcast in building businesses, increasing wealth, and achieving financial freedom. I’d like to bring on guests to hear authentic stories while giving you actionable takeaways you can use today. Let’s go.

[00:00:18.040] – Sean

My next guest built a tech company, essentially an Uber for Lawncare. It’s a marketplace business where you have a buyer and seller on the same platform. Think of businesses like Uber, Airbnb, Eb, et C, eBay, Group on. It’s not an easy business to start because you’re bringing on the two audiences. Well, in this business, he talks about their 10-year journey. They actually built up the business to about 30 million in revenue. We spent some time talking about some of the lessons learned in the beginning, how long it took to make their first million, and we spent a lot of time talking about marketing, really helped answer that question is, how do you market to two audiences at once? Okay, let’s dive in. Please welcome, Bryan Clayton. Bryan, welcome to the show.

[00:01:00.600] – Bryan

Sean, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

[00:01:02.650] – Sean

Yeah, thanks for joining me. So why don’t you kick us off and tell us about your background?

[00:01:06.520] – Bryan

Yeah. So my name is Brian Clayton. I am CEO of a company called GreenPal. Greenpal is a mobile app that works like Uber or Instacart or DoorDash, but for lawn care services. So if you need a lawn mowing service rather than calling around on Craigslist or Facebook or something like that, you just download GreenPal, you pop your address in, and someone comes out and takes care of the chore for you. And GreenPal is a 10-year overnight success. My two co-founders and I have been at this for a little over a decade, but now we’re nationwide in the United States with about 300,000 people using the app to get lawnmowing done every week.

[00:01:40.820] – Sean

We’re going to dive into your backstory here, lead up to the business a second. But 300,000 customers or people in the platform?

[00:01:49.780] – Bryan

That’s right. 300,000 homeowners using it, and then around 35,000 contractors using it to run their lawn care business. So we connect homeowners that need the service done with contractors that operate business on the platform.

[00:02:01.380] – Sean

Got it. And for the listeners out there I’m looking at, it’s yourgreenPal. Com, Trustpilot score. We’re big on Trustpilot as well. Your Trustpilot score is a 4.8 out of 5 with 732,000 reviews. That’s outstanding. Way to go.

[00:02:18.710] – Bryan

Yeah, it’s important to start collecting those reviews day one because they build up and they don’t add up, they compound. So you got to get a full high wheel going.

[00:02:27.770] – Sean

Seriously, that’s one high score for that many reviews, so good on you. I have to say this because there was, going back about 10 years ago, it was a fad where everybody was coming up with the Uber 4X. And how many of those businesses actually survived? Very minimal. But you, you pulled it off. So it’s like Uber for lawnmowing or for lawn care, essentially.

[00:02:51.600] – Bryan

That’s right. Yeah. And you bring up a really good point. 2013, ’14, ’15, Uber was exploding, and they were seemingly bending the world to their way. And so a lot of venture dollars float into these Uber for X ideas. So everything from Uber to home cleaning, Uber to laundry service, Uber for valet parking, Uber for home painting, everything. The thinking at the time was that there would be an Uber for everything, and maybe there still will be yet. But a lot of these companies crashed and burned because a couple of reasons. They tried to scale too quickly. They tried to put venture dollars into a model that was broken. And it was like putting rocket fuel into a Toyota Camry. And at the time, we were thinking, should we raise money? We were like, well, should we go this, the venture capital route? Should we raise a bunch of funding for this like everybody else? And we started to do that. And we were like, Man, this sucks. We’re having to build a product that venture capitalists love and not one that customers love. And I thought to myself, I don’t really want to do this.

[00:03:55.470] – Bryan

And at the same time, it was like Uber for home cleaning raises $55 million, and then 12 months goes by. Uber for home cleaning shutters its doors. I’m like, Damn, that was quick. What happened? I felt bad. I’m like, That’s a founding team. That’s somebody’s dream. That’s gone. I came to the realization that I think venture dollars were destroying more of these companies than they were help funding. So we didn’t do that. We just self-funded it and went slow and low for a long time.

[00:04:22.120] – Sean

But for you, now when you started this, so we go back 10 years, did you found this in 2012, 2013?

[00:04:29.100] – Bryan

Yep, I had the idea in 2012, honestly played entrepreneur for about a year, did everything but build a product, made all the mistakes that everybody makes when they’re first starting out and went in the wrong direction. And then in 2013, we got our first product at the door. That was a total failure. We paid a development shop to build it. None of us knew how to code. And so we made that mistake. And then so took another year to teach ourselves how to code, how to build software. And then so 2014, we built the whole thing and really didn’t get a good product out the door until 2015. So yeah, we’ve been at this 10, 11 years, but it took three years just to get pointed in the right direction.

[00:05:10.580] – Sean

Right. Now, did you keep a full-time job and bootstrap this on the side, or did you go all in?

[00:05:16.910] – Bryan

Really good question. So for me, I have two co-founders. So my two co-founders kept their full-time jobs. They were working at Dell Computer at the time, and they hated their corporate gig, and they wanted something bigger and better. And I saw that ambition in them, and that’s why I wanted to join forces with them. And so they worked nights and weekends for five years of this business. Me, on the other hand, my first business was a landscaping company. I ran a law and knowing business from the time I was in high school for 15 years, and I built that up into a pretty big company, around 150 employees, eventually getting that landscaping business around $10 million a year in revenue. And so in 2013, that business was acquired by a big national company. And so after I sold it, it wasn’t like I was super wealthy or anything, but I didn’t have to have a job anymore. I was able to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and do what I wanted to do. So I made a decision. I thought, Well, I’m just going to work on my best idea from here on. I’m just going to work as hard as I can on my best idea.

[00:06:23.740] – Bryan

And GreenPal is the best idea I’ve had in 10 years. I haven’t had any of the better ideas. So that’s what kept us going through those hard years, especially the early years. So for me, I worked full-time on it, but I didn’t take a paycheck for the first four years.

[00:06:36.460] – Sean

Wow! What a story. Really appreciate the transparency there. That is awesome. Listeners out there creating a business. I’ll tell you what, some of the listeners know my journey on Tykr is we’re in year three and a half and we’re getting there. But same thing. It’s like this does not happen overnight. Okay, I have to touch on the landscaping because of the numbers here. Revenues, you said were 10 million.

[00:06:59.530] – Bryan

That’s right Yeah. I grew that business to eight figures and then it got acquired.

[00:07:04.070] – Sean

Yeah. I’m guessing that I’m just going to shoot in the dark here and you can correct me. Do you sell for about 20 to 30? Was it about a 2-3 X multiple?

[00:07:12.550] – Bryan

So that type of business is anepita, so everything that flows to the bottom line and about an 8X multiple on that. So while I’m under NDA on that, that’s typically what happens on those.

[00:07:24.110] – Sean

Got it. Okay, yeah, I won’t prior anymore, but it’s good to know. That’s pretty good, though. 10 million in revenue for a service business. You said how many employees?

[00:07:32.920] – Bryan

150. 150. Yeah, give or take, when we were acquired. And the business is still going today. They’ve been running it for about a decade, and they’re making more money in it than I ever did. So it’s still thriving.

[00:07:43.820] – Sean

Right on. Okay, so let’s dive into GreenPal here. We’re going to touch on some of the numbers. Let’s get right into the concepts a little more so people have a better understanding. I’m going to keep it surface level from what I’m hearing, and then we can dive in further. So you have two audiences on one platform. So I consider that, a lot of people call that a marketplace, think like eBay coming in. You’ve got your buyer and seller. Group on, another great example, buyer and seller coming in the same location. So you’ve got a lot of people out there that need lawn care services. They come into the platform looking for contractors. And then you play the middleman. And do you take a membership fee per month, or do you take a cut of every sale?

[00:08:30.130] – Bryan

Yeah, so it is a true marketplace. It works like… Ebay was one of the first examples of this we saw in the 90s and still doing well today. Airbnb is a great example of a successful marketplace. Uber is a marketplace, but it’s more of a managed marketplace. You don’t pick your driver. They assign your driver. But marketplaces in travel, like Expedia, have existed for a long time. And so we run just like a marketplace where we connect buyers and sellers in this one use case, in this one industry. So normally as a homeowner, or if you need a lawnmowing service, you call around, get quotes. With GreenPal, you get five quotes in 60 seconds, and then you can read reviews and hire the contractor you want to work with. As a contractor, it’s really hard making a living in the lawnmowing business. You have to chase your money all the time. Nobody ever pays you on time. You’re always trying to figure out how to get new customers. You’re passing out flyers. You’ve never ran a Facebook ad campaign or Google AdWords campaign. You don’t want to take a year and figure that out. Your days are just like organized chaos.

[00:09:29.220] – Bryan

And so it’s our job to streamline that and make that easier, make it to where contractors can easily get 100 customers in a month. They get paid within 24 hours of the work that they do really quickly. And so it’s our job to materially improve their livelihood, enable them to make more money with less headache. And that modulates them and gets them onto a platform to where homeowners can hire their services just like ordering something on Amazon. So we have to solve two problems at the same time and make it easier to transact than it is normally just with a pen and a pad and phone calls.

[00:10:01.140] – Sean

Love it. So it’s like a database of talents you can look for. And then you’re also handling the payment. Sounds like payment transaction is right there as well. So it’s the convenience of helping the small business owner with cash flow.

[00:10:14.030] – Bryan

That’s right. Yeah. And I forgot, I didn’t answer your question. So the way we make money is we take a transactional piece. So anywhere between five and 30 % of the transaction, depending on how much volume the vendor is doing to the platform, we take to operate the platform and to market it and to improve it and to make it to where it’s vibrant. It’s a vibrant, liquid community when the contractor plugs into the platform.

[00:10:36.140] – Sean

To the entrepreneurs out there, I’ll sometimes address them like breaking the fourth wall in movies. So a transaction fee model. I really like these types of models, like investing in the stock market. Think of advertising plays where there’s fees that just keep running and there’s no limitation. And the same thing with payment tech, the fees will keep running. So this model here, I would say it’s probably superior to SaaS because SaaS is great. It’s recurring, but it’s limited fees per customer coming into the business, whereas this, you can just run the meter and keep going. Now, are you a pure play transaction fee business or can people pay a subscription for maybe higher placement or tiered placement ads within?

[00:11:21.040] – Bryan

It’s a really good question. So it’s funny. Marketplace founders like myself often envy SaaS founders, and SaaS founders envy marketplace founders. Both of us think that the other journey is easier. The grass is greener. Yeah, we think the grass is greener. I look at a SaaS business, I’m like, That is so freaking easy. I’m already building all of that. I have to have all the SaaS tools on each side of the transaction, and then I have to make everybody happy, and I have to combine the SaaS tools into a marketplace. I already built everything you built that you’re charging $200 a month for. This is what I think. And then the SaaS founders like, This sucks. Ii can only… I got to answer all these customer support questions, and I’m having white glove concierge or somebody onto my SaaS tool for 50 bucks a month, and that’s all I’ll ever make. Maybe if I go up market, I can get 200 a month or something. I wish I was in the marketplace business because I could make $5,000 a year if I just grow their business. So both are hard, is the reality. They’re both really hard.

[00:12:26.620] – Bryan

And marketplaces, from my perspective, are really hard because like I said, we have to build all the SaaS tools. So everything: scheduling, payment system, review system, route optimization, CRM, everything from profile management to marketing automation. We build all of that. So then a vendor can just plug in, get all the clients they want, and get booked for the whole season, and it’s maintained and organized and keep everything organized in one place. And then on top of that, none of this works unless we can market to demand and bring demand onto the platform. And so we built all of that. And then what we came to find out, the thing that’s actually five or ten times harder is distribution, getting the platform, the product in the hands of consumers when they need it, and letting them know that this is out there for them to use, that is 10 times harder than just building the platform or the tools to begin with. And it’d be like Airbnb. How many hosts would put their house on Airbnb if there was no consumers looking to book it and there would be no marketplace? And so they figured this out really early.

[00:13:37.760] – Bryan

A lot of people don’t know this, but the technical co-founder at Airbnb in 2008 was one of the preeminent spammers in the world. He had networks of Gmail accounts and figured out growth hacks and really black hat stuff in order to spam and market services. And so that’s one of the reasons why we have Airbnb today, is because those guys did some dark arts things to get their first several thousand customers and to build that initial liquidity. Had they not done that, there would be no Airbnb. It’s a beautiful product that works well, but the value really is in the distribution and getting people to sign up and use it.

[00:14:15.600] – Sean

Yeah. Just what’s going through my head is, let’s say you’re a marketplace founder meeting a SaaS founder, and they start talking about how hard those businesses and you’re like, Oh, that’s cute. You got a SaaS. Hold my beer. I’m dealing with a marketplace here. Yeah.

[00:14:32.140] – Bryan

I’ve already built everything you’ve built for free, by the way, because that’s table stakes for my business.

[00:14:37.640] – Sean

That’s cute. You got a SaaS. Like you said, both are awesome, both are hard. But I tried, the audience may know this a little bit. I attempted a marketplace a decade ago and had a pretty significant failure. It was a spin-off of Groupon. The issue with Groupon was they would take 50 % of all the restaurant sales, and that would cause, especially a low profit margin business like a restaurant, they pretty much go into the red, but they treat it as a loss leader. Well, we lose money on the first purchase, but we hope they keep coming back thereafter. That creates the ongoing cash flow. I came up with an idea with a buddy of mine said, Hey, what if the businesses paid us a monthly subscription of 100 bucks but they keep all the profits? And the businesses were like, oh, man, when is this going live? We’ll pay you now as your early bird special. So we start selling this thing over a hand over fist. And the problem was consumers. We could not figure out a way to get the consumers into the business fast enough in the business. I pushed it for about nine months and lost a lot of money.

[00:15:41.430] – Sean

But that was the issue. Let’s lead right into how you overcame that issue. Because you’ve been doing landscaping so long, you know the contractor side of the business. But how did you get the consumers into that business is fast enough to support those contractors?

[00:16:02.780] – Bryan

Yeah, in most marketplaces, the side that is pulling their wallet out and paying the money is usually the harder to get. And the side that is making money is usually the easier to get. They’re both hard to get, especially when you don’t have either. But you have to get over that chicken and egg problem. And it really occurred to us, I guess, month two or three, we paid this Dev shop to build the first version of the app and we had no users. So the first thing we had to do is we had to get 100 people to use the damn thing. And we just started passing out door hangers all over Nashville, Tennessee, passed out 300,000 door hangers. And we got a few hundred people to use it, and we started really studying their use. We would meet with them at the kitchen table. We would meet with them at Starbucks. We would ask them everything they loved about the product, which was in those days, not a whole lot because it was pretty crappy and everything they hated about it. And they would tell us, but they always were let down that the product didn’t work seamlessly, but they never told us, I don’t want this.

[00:17:06.850] – Bryan

They never told us, I don’t need this. And so we use that as validation to keep going. And one question we would always ask them is, Well, how do you normally get this done? How do you normally find a lawn guy? And I had all these preconceived notions from 15 years in the industry, and they would always say, Well, I would call the number off of a flyer and they wouldn’t call me back. And then I would ask a friend for recommendations and they would ghost me. And so I would go to Google and just type lawnmowing service near me. We kept hearing that over and over and over and over again. And so we thought, Well, we just need to advertise on Google. Let’s just do that. And we had a little bit of money that we pulled together. I remember we spent like 20 or $30,000 of our own cash the first month on Google AdWords and wasted all of it. It was just like a total failure. We got a few customers, but our cost per acquisition was thousands of dollars. It was like $500 to get one customer that was going to spend $29 on a lawnmowing.

[00:18:03.490] – Bryan

So we thought, Well, that’s not economically viable. We can’t afford to pay for all this traffic. We’ll never make it. So we thought, Well, we got to somehow figure out a way to compete in the organic section, and started looking at that. And we were like, Man, this is hard. Reading SEO blogs all night, going to YouTube University, and just trying to learn SEO became my full-time job for about a year. And that’s all I did. I reverse engineered at other websites. There were no other websites like ours, but there were things like Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor and Thumbtack, and even Craig’s List that were ranking for these terms like Lawnmowing Service, Nashville. I started reverse engineering these things. I couldn’t compete for Lawnmowing Service, Nashville, but I could compete for Lawnmowing Service, Franklin or Smyrna or Goodletsville or Bellevue. The bedroom communities. And so we just started doing that. We started writing the best content and building links and getting press mentions. And we started ranking for these not easy, but pretty straightforward terms at a very local level. And we started noticing traffic uptick, and we started building out a little mini marketplace in these little towns.

[00:19:13.330] – Bryan

And that informed our strategy on how to do that in every little town, every little city in the United States, which is what we did. Took a decade, but that’s what we did. We became one of the preeminent marketers of long-term care services in the world, and it took us years to figure it out and years to execute it. But that’s how we got the flywheel going.

[00:19:34.320] – Sean

That’s awesome. So it sounds like the marketing strategy that really worked best is to use SEO and really focus on, were they landing pages for specific suburb cities of major markets?

[00:19:48.400] – Bryan

Individual handwritten, handcrafted specific landing pages for lawnmowing services in every community, over 15,000 people in the whole United States, one at a time. And not just creating that content by hand, recruiting the vendors and curating the vendors and bringing them onto the platform, building the liquidity in every one of those little towns. Because just because you rank doesn’t mean you have a product. And that’s how we get 60 % of the people that use GreenPal, the consumers, and the other 40, 50 % come from word-of-mouth. We don’t do anything else.

[00:20:23.610] – Sean

Wow. Okay. So that’s the almost 50-50 split there, but word-of-mouth and SEO. That’s right.

[00:20:30.850] – Sean

That’s it.

[00:20:31.730] – Bryan

And the point is, I think the point I drive home is new startups, new founders, new projects like this. Focus on one channel and just be the best in the market at that one channel. Don’t try to sprinkle all of your efforts over four, five, or 10 different things because you won’t be any good at any of them. You won’t compete at any of them.

[00:20:50.030] – Sean

Yeah. Amen. I agree with that. Talk to me about the timeline to launch a new city. Did you first start talking to some vendors, some of the lawn care professionals first and say, Hey, we’re coming to your market. Do you want to jump on the platform? And then at the same time in parallel, would you start building out those landing pages and go a few months? Or how did that work?

[00:21:14.940] – Bryan

Yeah. Well, first off, we spent two years just in Nashville, Tennessee, one market. Because at the time, if 10 people used it, eight of them were pissed off. There’s a million things that can go wrong. And this is where the marketplace founder envies the SaaS founder because there’s literally an infinite number of things that can go wrong between, My grass is four feet tall and I need to hire a reliable, honest contractor to come mow it for me. The guy didn’t show up. The guy’s kid got sick. His lawnmower broke down. His lawnmower got stolen, truck broke down. He just didn’t feel like working that day. Hit rain. Fence gate is too big. Fence gate is too small. His lawnmower blade is too dull, grass is too tall. I can go on and on and on. Let the dog out. And all of these things that can go wrong between, I just needed a simple landmowing service and it actually got done, and it got done well for the price that was quoted. It took us two years. If eight out of ten people were pissed off, to reduce that to two out of ten.

[00:22:17.080] – Bryan

It wasn’t until we were able to do that. This is one of the reasons why Uber for home cleaning failed, Uber for laundry service failed, Uber for all of these different things, is because they didn’t do that. They tried to scale. Eight out of ten people were getting pissed off. Let’s throw some money at it. Let’s buy some more distribution for this. Let’s piss off some more people because that’s what the VCs want, that we need to show top-line revenue is what their thinking was to raise the next round. Because if you don’t show that top line revenue growth, you’re dead. When you play that game, you only have so much time to prove out what you have to prove out to raise the next round to continue on. If not, you’re done. And so we didn’t want to do that. We spent two years, and it was so painful because it was just like we were making peanuts, but we were still trying to figure out, Okay, eight out of ten are pissed off. How do we get that to five out of ten? How do we get that to two out of ten?

[00:23:11.250] – Bryan

And so on. And here, we’re still 10 days in, or 10, 10 years in, and we’re still like, How do we make lawnmowing quicker, faster, cheaper, smoother, more reliable, more consistent, more convenient? If it’s 9.8 out of 10, how do we get that to 9.9, solving for those last few instances where something goes wrong and there’s a bad experience for either side of the transaction. Focusing on one thing in one market is how we did it. We spent two years just in Nashville, and then our second market was Atlanta, Georgia. Third market was Tampa, Florida. Each to them took like six months to a year each. There was a lot of hand-to-hand combat, cold-calling vendors, pitching them on the idea. Nine out of ten would hang up on you, and then one out of ten might give it a shot. Then you really got to prove the worth of the platform to those early adopting contractors. Now, 10 years in, we got a waiting list in every city of contractors wanting to use a platform. But in those days that we had no name, we had no reputation, our product sucked, and it was really hard.

[00:24:14.930] – Bryan

It was very challenging.

[00:24:16.360] – Sean

Yeah. A lesson learned here is sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. Unfortunately, if you raise venture capital, the pressure cooker, it’s there.

[00:24:26.970] – Bryan

Slow is not an option.

[00:24:28.320] – Sean

Yeah, exactly. You got to move with speed, and that means sacrificing good customer reviews. I really like what you said a while back there was you were actually sitting down at dinner tables with customers asking them about the service, about the experience. That’s what it takes, is you got to really slow down and ask those questions, and it’s super slow, but it’s really important in the process.

[00:24:49.510] – Bryan

Absolutely. And the only reason we did that was I had built and sold a $10 million land skipping company, but this was really, I was a first-time founder all over again. I was terrified and I guess I was really paranoid that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing because I didn’t and because I’d never built a tech company. I read every book that I get my hands on about this, and at the time, there wasn’t a whole lot of books. Now there’s a book for every nuance and instance and niche of this whole thing. But back then, software eating the world, that was a new concept. Cloud was just getting going. Mobile was just getting rolling. The idea that you could push a button on your phone and something magical happened was new. We were reading every book we get our hands on, and there were very few, and we read them all. The ones that stick out are The Lean Startup by Eric Reiss, which is like the Holy Bible of this. Then his mentor is a guy named Steve Blank who wrote a book called The Startup Owners Manual, and he wrote that in 2009.

[00:25:58.670] – Bryan

What these books teach you in 2,000 or 3,000 pages of text is get out of the building, get out from behind the laptop and go talk to your customers. Well, I don’t have any customers. Well, you need to go get 10 customers, and then you need to go talk to them, and you need to make it dead easy for them to tell you everywhere you suck, because that’s the only R&D, that’s the only feedback. That’s the only way you know what you need to be building. That’s the only way you know if you’re on the right track or not. And it’s amazing how simple and obvious that concept is, nobody does that. Exactly. Nobody wants to. I didn’t want to. I certainly didn’t want to let go to every Starbucks in Nashville and Atlanta and Tampa, which I know the inside of every Starbucks in Nashville, Atlanta, and Tampa. I didn’t want to go there and listen to somebody berate me about all the stuff that sucked about my product. I knew it sucked, but I needed to do that to know what we needed to focus our efforts on and what their expectations were.

[00:26:57.500] – Bryan

There was a lot of false assumptions that I had thatthat I had not done that, we had wasted years and maybe never have gotten where we are today.

[00:27:03.030] – Sean

Right. Path less traveled, right? You want it. You really want it. You’re going to have to do this.

[00:27:09.410] – Bryan

Yeah, it’s just the way it is, man. Every founder goes through this. You hear these stories like Instacart, this IPO, I think a $10, $15 billion IPO. And you look back to the early days of Instacart, those guys, to get the first version of the product, they literally went to Trader Joe’s and over the course of three months, bought every single item and took it back to a 600-square-foot apartment that three of them shared. And they had a little studio where they photographed every single item and listed it on their website. That took like a year. And so then they had something they could market to consumers who could order this stuff, and then they would go buy it, and then they would go deliver it. That’s how they got their MVP, right? That’s hustle. If you’re not here, right? Everybody does this. Not a lot of people talk about it, but every successful story starts with that very early hustle story to get through level one, two or three of the video game.

[00:28:12.140] – Sean

I love it. Let’s take a quick commercial break. If someone tells you to buy a stock, the last thing you should do is buy that stock. The first thing you should do is ask why. Unfortunately, a lot of influencers on YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, and really the list goes on, are giving really bad stock recommendations and investment advice. The question is, how do you determine if what these people say is good advice or bad advice? That’s where Tykr can help. Tykr can quickly and easily determine if a stock is a good or bad investment, and it helps you manage your investments with confidence. But don’t take our word for it. Check out our trust pilot reviews to see what people are really saying. Go ahead and get started with a free trial. Visit Tykr. Com. That’s T-Y-K-R. Com. Again, Tykr. Com. All right, back to the show. Let’s dive into the numbers a little bit. So how many employees in the business?

[00:29:09.440] – Bryan

We started off with just me and my two co-founders, and that were 47.

[00:29:13.110] – Sean

Okay, 47. What’s the split there between software engineers and salespeople?

[00:29:19.520] – Bryan

We don’t have any salespeople. No salespeople. We’re strictly an inbound system. We develop content. If you want to say a content marketer is a salesperson, we’ve got five full-time writers. That’s all they do. We’ve got two SEO people. All they do.

[00:29:36.910] – Sean

Is SEO.

[00:29:37.800] – Bryan

We’ve got a data scientist that looks at all of this stuff that helps us formulate our growth strategy. We’ve got a full-time designer. Let’s see. We got five web engineers, two Apple engineers, two Android engineers, one engineer that works with nothing but APIs. So the engineering team is about 10, 15. The growth team is five to 10. We’ve got three product people. It’s mixed over product, design, content, growth, and engineering.

[00:30:13.150] – Sean

But.

[00:30:13.850] – Bryan

We don’t have any direct salespeople and five customer support people also. But we don’t do any outbound sales.

[00:30:20.730] – Sean

Got it. What I was thinking of is when you launch a new market, who’s calling the vendors to pitch them like, Hey, you want to try this platform out? Who’s doing that?

[00:30:31.020] – Bryan

Yeah, fortunately, we don’t do that anymore. In the early days, it was me, and it was only me for the first five, six years. But as time went on, the idea is I didn’t want to be in the sales business. I had done that already building my landscaping company. I had a hell of a sales engine at that business that was all outbound. And it was five sales guys, and that’s all they did, and I managed them, and I didn’t want to do that again. So I wanted to build a product that was inbound, not outbound. And so the only way to do that was to start with outbound and then to figure out, okay, how do we automate this? How do we make it to where people find us and discover us and sign up and self-serve their way through this because we can’t white glove concierge every one of these guys onto the platform. We’ll go broke doing that. We can’t afford a sales team. The cost, the average order value is just too low. The margins are too thin. So it’s got to be a self-serve system. And so now we’ve got a waiting list of contractors in every city we don’t really need anymore.

[00:31:38.970] – Bryan

But we do let some on. We do let some on as contractors churn out. But in those days, it was all outbound. And then the way we got through the middle, the messy middle, is through content. So if you type How to start a lawnmowing service on the Google, we pop up as one of the top five options. And so you can read a guide, a free guide on how to start a lawnmowing service that was written by me. And I built the lawnmowing service from $0-10 million a year in revenue. So I know a little bit about that. And I wrote this guide on how I did it. And so we get a lot of the contractors sign up that way. And then we have a whole pro blog that just goes through all the nuances of, Oh, my insurance just went up. How do I manage insurance costs in the landscaping business? Or, What’s the best route software? Or, I just broke a window at a customer’s property. Do I have to pay for that? What is best practices? Things like that. We just create tons of content that’s baked in my experience and what our vendors are telling us and surveys that we run with vendors that use our platform.

[00:32:37.240] – Bryan

So content is an inbound, is how we get consumers and vendors.

[00:32:41.800] – Sean

Right on. That goes back to your strategy is really SEO content. Like you said, about 50 % of the leads are coming. Sounds like both the consumer and the vendors, those small business owners, that’s the one strategy and word-of-mouth being the other. Now you’ve got the machine moving, the word-of-mouth is strong enough you’re bringing on both parties to the platform.

[00:33:05.120] – Bryan

That’s right. But it took a while. It took several years to get that flywheel going in. And we’re still day one. We’re doing $30 million a year in revenue. It’s a $99 billion industry. So we’re just a drop in the bucket. We’re not even a drop in the bucket as to how much activity is going on in this industry. So it’s still day one, and we want to get to a million people using it every week. And so we’ve got a 3x before we can even hit that goal. So we’ve got a long way to go. And so these two things of building a great product that makes 9.9 out of 10 people happy and then content, works for us. But at a certain point, we may have to bring on a team that works on nothing but referral or referral program, give 20, get 20, or works on some other type of growth tactic that creates another growth engine at the core of our platform. Or maybe we layer on different business models. Maybe we do fintech, where we do equipment financing through the platform. We make money that way, maybe bring on another revenue stream.

[00:34:15.550] – Bryan

So there’s a lot of things that we haven’t done yet that are going to require more people, more experts, more hires, different ways of thinking. So it really is day one, even though we’re 10 years in.

[00:34:28.620] – Sean

Right. I like the… You’re thinking like a big company. How do we bolt on more revenue streams? Essentially, you reverse engineer that. What are other value adds we can give to our customers and our vendors? And there you go. The fintech play, I love that one. We could talk about that all day.

[00:34:47.750] – Bryan

Yeah, and really, you have to. Because in tech, if you’re not gaining ground, you’re losing ground. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. You have to grow because you have to bring on new talent, you have to bring on new people, you have to bring on new ideas because these things get stale really quick. The things we were doing in 2018 to get through that level of the game are irrelevant as to what’s going on now five years later. And so let’s say we stopped growing and we’re like, Yeah, it’s pretty good. Pretty good business. It’s profitable, and we’re paying ourselves a good dividend. Let’s just keep it this way. It’s not that business. If you were running a traditional landscaping business like I had or a construction company or something traditional in that way, you can rest on your laurels and just stay small and stay profitable. But when you’re a tech business, when you’re a software-driven business, you got to keep growing because you’ll get left behind. Somebody else will out-innovate you and pass you on by.

[00:35:47.080] – Sean

You’re right. Absolutely.

[00:35:48.820] – Bryan

And.

[00:35:49.720] – Sean

Thanks for telling us revenues there. I was going to ask that. So 30 million in revenue today, what year or when did you break a million in revenue? What year was that? Let’s see.

[00:36:00.730] – Bryan

Our first year was 40 grand. Sounds right.

[00:36:07.140] – Bryan

Yeah. Second year was, I think we got over 100. Third year was 250. Fourth year might have been 500. The fifth year was right at about a million. And then we started really ramping up from there because then we were able to… A lot of times as a founder, you wear this hat of capital allocator. I know your main gig is capital allocation, investing, and how do you think through that? Well, as a founder, that’s basically what you do, is money comes in and then you figure out, Okay, how am I going to allocate this money? Metaphorically, what bets am I going to make in my business? It’s not like stock market bets. It’s not like picking stocks, but it’s like, Okay, do I hire another engineer? Do I hire an SEO lead? Do I not hire another content writer? Or do I do all of these things half-assed with freelancers for a while more? Or do I pay myself a better salary because I can’t pay my bills? My co-founder is belly aching. Do I give him some more money? Or am I saying, Hey, just hang on another year. I got to hire this contractor that makes a thousand dollars an hour to help us out with this thing?

[00:37:16.090] – Bryan

You’re making these bets as a capital allocator. The Snowball effect starts to take hold. You have a little bit more money, you can put it back out to work to make more money, and that starts to compound. And those levels of the game are more fun than the early levels where you have no money and the numbers are really tiny.

[00:37:37.250] – Sean

Mel, what a cool story there. Those first five years, that was quite a hustle. And then fifth year, break a million. And then from year five to year 10, going from one to 30 million. That’s solid.

[00:37:49.450] – Bryan

Very well done. Yeah, compounding just starts to do its thing. A lot of times, really big successes, not that we are one yet, but really big successes and really incredible things can really just be explained in a way just through consistency and time and compounding. And a lot of times, if you just stick something out for long enough and keep growing the number, compounding does its thing. Now, if the number is not growing, you got to back up and figure out what’s going on and why the number is not growing. It still may be small, but that number has got to grow. And enough time goes by and pounding does its thing.

[00:38:31.310] – Sean

Right on. And how many markets are you in today?

[00:38:34.400] – Bryan

We’re in every NFL city and in every bedroom community around it. Last time we counted, it was over 300. So around 300 small towns and cities in the United States. We’re only in the US. We want to be in Canada, UK, and Australia, but that’s a whole other level of the game. Sure.

[00:38:49.630] – Sean

Scaling up, thinking big. Are you in Milwaukee?

[00:38:52.180] – Bryan

We are in Milwaukee, yeah. Okay. All right. It’s a good market for us. So try it out and let me know how it works.

[00:38:57.150] – Sean

All right. Awesome. Well, before we jump to the Rapid Fire round, is there one key takeaway you can give to some of the aspiring entrepreneurs out there?

[00:39:08.870] – Bryan

I just listened to an audiobook with… It was about Jeff Bezos and the founding of Amazon. And Jeff Bezos used this Sam Walton maxim. So it’s really two great founders and one lesson. The lesson is walk your store. And Sam Walton was famous for this. Even when Walmart was scaling to 100,000 or 1,000 stores, Sam would still walk the store personally and would just point out stuff and would get ideas, and he would walk competitor stores and would get ideas. Even at thousands of stores, he would personally hands-on walk the store. And then Jeff Bezos was famous for this. Every Sunday morning at 5:00 AM, his key lieutenants would get these wacky emails from him, where that was his walk the store time, and he was using Amazon. Com, and he was figuring out things that annoyed him and weird things and ideas and even things like copy tweaks and design changes. So Jeff Bezos was walking the store. And I think as founders, I’ve been guilty of this, we forget that. We don’t walk our own store, and we don’t do our own customer support, and we don’t sign up for our own product.

[00:40:29.090] – Bryan

We don’t even do business for ourselves with ourselves. So I think if you can use your own product, walk your own store no matter what it is, secret shop your business, use your own business. One of the things I did when I sold my landscaping company was I bought a bunch of real estate. I bought a bunch of rental homes, really just non-sexy rental property. I’ve got like 20 of these things all over Middle Tennessee. I used GreenPal to maintain the landscaping on all of them. I have learned more doing that. That’s awesome. 10 years in, there’s still stuff. There’s still stuff that I’m using my own app. But I’m like, This is crappy. I was like, Nobody told me about this. I’m using it as a customer. I think the more you can walk your own store, you’d be amazed at how much you can learn.

[00:41:16.340] – Sean

That’s great advice. I love that. All right, let’s jump into the Rapid Fire round. This is the part of the episode where we get to find out who Brian really is. If you can try to answer each question. Awesome. I know, right? Here we go. If you can try to answer each question in 15 seconds or less. You ready?

[00:41:34.760] – Bryan

Let’s go.

[00:41:36.220] – Sean

All right. What is your favorite podcast?

[00:41:38.460] – Bryan

Oh, gosh, that’s hard. 15 seconds. I liked this week in Startups with Jason Caliconas. I’ve been listening to it for… I’ve listened to every episode. He’s on thousands of them for 12 years. Not all of them are great, and he’s goofy, but I really like that podcast.

[00:41:54.590] – Sean

Good recommendation. I am familiar with him. I have not listened to the podcast. All right, what is a recent book you read and would recommend?

[00:42:02.710] – Bryan

If you’re whacked crazy enough to marketplace, great book called The Cold Start Problem by Gary Chen. He was one of the first key hires at Uber, and he talks about how to get over that chicken and egg problem, building a marketplace. Great book.

[00:42:17.460] – Sean

Nice. All right, what is your favorite movie?

[00:42:20.770] – Bryan

Let’s keep it business-related. One of my favorite movies I’ve seen recently, the founder, about the Ray Krox story. One of the great parts of that movie is, I think he’s got like 12 McDonalds at this time, and he’s walking into one of them and he’s picking up trash in the parking lot. Michael Keaton is playing Ray Krox, and he’s picking up trash. It’s a good lesson that no matter what level of the game you’re at, you need to pick up the trash in the parking lot.

[00:42:42.880] – Sean

That the smallest job, the biggest job doesn’t matter. You better be there.

[00:42:46.950] – Bryan

That’s right. What a great movie.

[00:42:48.970] – Sean

As soon as you said business, I was like, he’s going to say the founder.

[00:42:52.560] – Bryan

I love that movie. I love Michael Keaton. What an awesome movie.

[00:42:55.870] – Sean

Keaton is great.

[00:42:56.890] – Bryan

Yep.

[00:42:58.060] – Sean

All right. What is the worst advice you ever received?

[00:43:02.270] – Bryan

Oh, man. I think bad advice is, hire slow, fire faster. And here’s why. Everybody says that. And I think it’s to overcorrect the fact that we fire way too slow and we put up with people who aren’t good fits for way too long. And so the maxim is hire slowly, fire fast. And it’s like you don’t really want to fire somebody quickly. That’s a really important decision. You should really think through that. And what you should really think through is what mistakes you made bringing them on in the first place, and that’s where you should put a lot of your time. So I think that’s bad advice. But I understand why it’s come to be because we all sit on bad hires for like a year, five years, and it’s hoped that the problem will go away. So I think higher, slow, fire, fast is bad advice.

[00:44:03.690] – Sean

Actually, I do like that advice, but I know what you mean. You don’t want to pull the trigger and fire them on one little mistake.

[00:44:11.700] – Bryan

Right. And date before you get married maybe might be the better advice. What I like to do is bring on a new hire and let’s work on a project basis for a while. Let’s see if we like each other, see if the culture fits. Let’s do that for six months and then let’s get married. But just really nearly firing people, it may not be good advice. That’s one that I think that I’m on the other side of.

[00:44:44.930] – Sean

Right on. All right, let’s flip that equation. What is the best advice you ever received?

[00:44:49.740] – Bryan

I got a piece of advice once from the guy that bought my business, my first company, and he was an arrogant dude, but he gave me a really good piece of advice that I think saved me because he was worth about $100 million. And he’s like, Hey, we got this deal done. It took like six months to get it done. It was very contentious, and we finally got it done. And he said, Congratulations. The Wired transfer went through. He’s like, You’re wealthy now, and let me give you a little bit of advice. There’s a lot harder to keep a few million dollars than it is to make a few million dollars or make a million dollars. And I was like, What do you mean by that? He goes, Man, you’re going to be getting pitched all of these investment ideas, and you’re going to be getting all of these phone calls. Now that this money is in your bank, I promise you. And it’s going to be really hard to hold on to it. He’s like, Just put it all in something really simple and don’t even worry about it and just start over again.

[00:45:53.000] – Bryan

And that was really good advice because I did just that. I took every dime and I put it all in real estate and just forgot about it. And I was poor all over again. When I started GreenPow, I didn’t have any money to start it, and I didn’t have any cash because I put it all in real estate. I had cash flow, but that was going back into fixing these houses up. So it was exactly what I needed when I started GreenPow. And he was right because I was getting those phone calls. My banker called me that afternoon. He was like, Hey, I noticed you had this infusion of capital. You want to talk with our wealth management department? There’s been all kinds of stupid things that have come about in the last 10 years, and I probably would have lost it all on dumb ideas. So that was really good advice that I got.

[00:46:35.060] – Sean

That is brilliant advice. Wow, I’ve seen a lot of people make stupid decisions. You’re right. They get the money and then it’s this venture or this new startup here or that friend there or that family member there, and next thing you know, two years go by and it’s gone.

[00:46:53.680] – Bryan

Gone. Yeah. I didn’t listen to the advice. I only took 99 % of the advice. I was like, I don’t know, man. I took $75,000 and I thought, I’m just going to see what I can do with this, see if I can re-exit. And I started investing in the market and invested in some startups and did some other things. I lost every dime of it.

[00:47:15.860] – Sean

You should have been using Tykr.

[00:47:18.390] – Bryan

Yeah, I should have been using Tykr, man. I at least would have my 75. You would.

[00:47:23.160] – Sean

Have a lot more.

[00:47:25.050] – Bryan

Yeah, I should have been using Tykr. That’s the moral of the story.

[00:47:28.360] – Sean

That’s a good one. All right, let’s go to the last question here. It’s a time machine question. If you could go back in time to give your younger self advice, what age would you visit and what would you say?

[00:47:37.890] – Bryan

Oh, man. So many key moments. I would go back… Everybody said, Oh, I’ll go back to 18 and I would tell myself this, That’s unfair. Let’s go back 10 years. Let’s just go back 10 years when I started this business. I would grab myself by the shoulders and I would shake me and I would say, You have to learn when to delegate and not delegate too soon and not to delegate too late. And I did both wrong. So I would delegate too soon. So it’s like, I don’t know software engineering, and I can’t build this product. Therefore, I’m going to delegate it and you handle it. And anytime you delegate from a standpoint of abdication, it always blows up in your face. And so then I learned how to develop software. I taught myself how to code. And then I did that way too long, and I didn’t delegate quick enough again because now I know how to do it, and I could delegate from stewardship. It’s like, You handle it. This is how we want you to do it. I would give myself those lessons of the delegation by way of stewardship and not abdication.

[00:48:46.890] – Bryan

And if you can learn something just good enough, learn the 80-20 of it, then form up a process and delegate to somebody else and then move on to the next thing, rinse and repeat.

[00:48:56.260] – Sean

That’s great. I love it. All right. And where can the audience reach you?

[00:48:59.740] – Bryan

Greenpal. Com. Anybody wants to try out GreenPal for free lawnmowing quotes? And anybody wants to hit me up LinkedIn or Instagram is a good place to find me, Brian M. Clayton.

[00:49:09.640] – Sean

All right, Brian, thank you so much. This is great.

[00:49:12.230] – Bryan

Thank you, Sean. I enjoyed it. Thanks for having.

[00:49:13.520] – Sean

Me on. All right, we’ll see you. Hey, I’d like to say thank you for checking out this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts out there you could be listening to, so thanks for spending some time with me. And if you have a moment, please head over to Apple Podcast and leave a five-star review. The more reviews we get, especially five-star reviews, the higher this podcast will rank in Apple. So thanks for doing that. And remember, this show is for entertainment purposes only. If you heard any stocks mentioned on this podcast, please do not buy or sell those stocks based solely on what you hear. All right. Thanks for your time. We’ll see you.