The Transformation of Lawn Care into a Tech Odyssey - Bryan Clayton : 124

Join us as we enter the world of GreenPal, known as the Uber of lawn care, and learn how feedback from the very people you serve can pivot the direction of your business. Hear firsthand the sacrifices and dedication required to run a landscaping company and the emotional rollercoaster of selling it to embrace a technology-driven model.

Bryan Clayton is an entrepreneur, author, and speaker who has built a successful career by focusing on hard work, perseverance, and innovation. He is the co-founder and CEO of GreenPal, an online platform that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. Under Bryan's leadership, GreenPal has grown into a multi-million dollar company with over 200,000 active users.

In this episode, we get an intimate look at Brian's nomadic lifestyle that has shaped his current philosophies. Brian talks about working remotely while travelling the world and how personal loss can alter one's perspective on life. He also discusses the hollow satisfaction that often comes with material wealth versus the richness of experiences. This conversation with Brian will inspire anyone looking to blend entrepreneurial spirit and personal growth and provide tangible insights to forge their unique path to success and happiness.
Let's enjoy his story.

To connect with Bryan: https://www.yourgreenpal.com/

Transcript

Daniela SM : 0:00

Hi, I'm Daniela. Welcome to my podcast, because everyone has a story, the place to give ordinary people, stories, the chance to be shared and preserved. Our stories become the language of connections. Let's enjoy it, connect and relate, because everyone has a story. Welcome my guest, Bryan Clayton. Bryan is an entrepreneur, author and speaker who has built a successful career by focusing on hard work, perseverance and innovation. He is the co-founder and CEO of GreenPal, an online platform that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. It's like an Uber for lawn care. He comes to share his inspiring tale of how he transformed a teenage task into a flourish empire and that persistence and making sure your customers are happy are the keys to any successful venture.

Daniela SM : 1:07

I enjoyed listening to Bryan's entrepreneurial journey. It is fascinating. As part of me, back on my head, I wish to have a great idea and turn it into my own business. Another aspect of Bryan's life that I find super interesting is his nomadic lifestyle and slow travel. The more I crave travel, the more that I am coming across nomads in my path. Brian's story is totally an honest look at all the good, the bad and the ugly of his journey so far. So let's enjoy it. Welcome, Bryan, to the show.

Bryan Clayton : 1:47

Daniela, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Daniela SM : 1:49

Yes, and you are all the way in Tulum and joining the nice weather.

Bryan Clayton : 1:54

Yeah, Tulum, Mexico is my favorite time of year to come down here because it's real calm and peaceful. It's their slow time of year, so that's how I like it.

Daniela SM : 2:01

Yes, beautiful, yeah, the beautiful scenery that I can see is magnificent. Why do you want to share your story? Because I know you go into so many podcasts, so why do you want to share your story?

Bryan Clayton : 2:11

I like to share my story, what I hope somebody comes away with listening. If that guy can do it, I can do it too, and so there's nothing special about me. I'm not particularly talented or brilliant in any sort of way. I've just kind of stuck with one thing and worked at it for a very long time. So for me it's the home services industry, particularly lawn care. I started mowing grass in high school as a way to make extra money and stuck with that lawn mowing business for 15 years and built it up into a big business and sold it. Now I run a company called GreenPow which is the Uber for lawn care, and GreenPow is a 10 year overnight success. So I've spent 22 years in one industry and I'm kind of an example of if you just stick it out, working on one thing for a long time, you can eventually achieve success.

Daniela SM : 2:55

Great. When does the story start exactly? Because you said that you're a regular guy, but you are a regular guy with a great idea and that is not that ordinary.

Bryan Clayton : 3:05

Actually, I'd like to say I had some kind of brilliant moment or epiphany that I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. But the reality is is I was forced into it by my dad on a hot summer day. He got tired of watching me play Nintendo and the air conditioning and he said get off your butt. I talked to the neighbor. They need somebody to cut their grass, and so he made me go mow the neighbor's yard. And I was 14 years old, I remember after I was so pissed off because I didn't want to, I didn't I begrudgingly went over there and cut the grass and and after I got done he then walked over and showed me all the spots I missed and and helped me do quality control hold my first lawn mowing. And the best part came I got paid 20 bucks and I thought wait a minute, now, this is awesome. I just made $20 for like an hour of work.

Bryan Clayton : 3:56

This is the cheat code to the video game. Why doesn't everybody just do this? Because I just made some serious cash and I was so excited. The first thing I did was I went. I said I'm back to the Nintendo. I went to my old school desktop computer and made up some flyers and started passing out flyers around the neighborhood and by the end of that first summer I had maybe 10 or 20 customers in the neighborhood and just stuck with that home services business, lawn care and landscaping business for for a long time and it worked like a video game almost.

Daniela SM : 4:26

You only knew about cutting the grass because your dad gave you some tips. But about landscaping, and do you decided you want to study that, or how do you learn?

Bryan Clayton : 4:34

Yeah, I didn't even know how to start the lawn mower. When I first got started, my dad coached me through that and he said no, this is what you do. And then when I did the when I got done with the job it was it looked horrible. So then he pointed out all the spots I had to fix. So so that was the first kind of lesson in entrepreneurship was how to execute the work, but then but then how to go back through and make sure that you did a great job for your customer and how to make sure your customer is happy. And so from the very first moment, I learned that lesson and entrepreneurship is always teaching you these things.

Bryan Clayton : 5:05

And so I kind of worked at one level at a time, and as time went on, I started to study the landscaping industry, learning about different plants and trees and fertilizers and seeds and things like that.

Bryan Clayton : 5:16

Not because I was particularly interested in it Actually, I hated it, I wasn't interested in it at all but I saw these as ways to make more money because I could sell other services to my customers.

Bryan Clayton : 5:28

Lawn renovation, for example, is a really profitable service that you can offer your customers. And so one year I went to the library this was back in the 90s and I read every book I could on different types of seeds and I would talk to people that sold seed and they would teach me different types of seeds you could plant in the grass that would do better than others, and so that was an example of the business forcing me to learn things that I wasn't particularly interested in. But but in order to succeed, I had to kind of go through that and in, and even to this day, 22 years later, running GreenPowell, which is a tech business, I've had to learn things that I never would have learned otherwise. I'm not interested in software development, I'm not interested in product design, but I've had to learn these things to build GreenPowell. So even back then, learning about what type of seed to plant, I'm still I'm still to this day learning, learning new things on how to execute and succeed in business. It's kind of a cool thing about running your own business.

Daniela SM : 6:22

Yes, and Brian, it's interesting at the point that you bring that you didn't have the passion like, oh, I want to know everything about seeds and plants. However, you did it, and so I wonder if you know the difference, if you have anything that you really are passionate about, that you know the difference between learning something that you have to versus something that you really love?

Bryan Clayton : 6:41

I think follow your passion is bad advice. Follow your passion in business is bad advice Because most of the time you can't make money at what you're passionate about. Some people do and we get kind of tricked into that. You know, I saw YouTube short the other day about this, this boxing referee, and he's just so excited to be in there and he's, and he is, he is ref officiating between these two boxers and you can see on his face he was probably a boxer at one point time and now this is his dream job. And so it's like the lesson of the of the of the YouTube short was like follow your passion and you'll be successful. Well, I mean, if you want to be a professional sports referee, that's like 1% of 1% of 1%. Very few people get to achieve that position.

Bryan Clayton : 7:23

I think that can be a fool's errand where it's like okay, I'm passionate about music, so I want to be a professional musician. The chances of that are one in a million. I'm from Nashville, tennessee, and we see a, we see 1000 musicians come to Nashville every month trying to be the next big country music thing. So I think, for me, be passionate about the results and the process and the success and the achievement and the personal development and then, later on, the development of the people around you and being able to sow seeds to use the metaphor to sow seeds of success for them, giving them career opportunities, giving them ways to challenge themselves and to be more than they were before they started working with your company, and those things are fun.

Bryan Clayton : 8:08

I'm passionate about those things, but I've never been passionate about the landscaping business, never been passionate about mowing yards, even now. You know I run GreenPow, which is one of the largest networks of lawn care services you can hire from a smartphone. I'm not passionate about lawn care. I really don't care about lawn care. I care about helping small business owners grow their business in the landscaping industry and that's what I'm passionate about. I think. Find the output of the endeavor, of the mission and get passionate about that. But the thing itself is very rare that you're going to be passionate about it.

Daniela SM : 8:39

Yes, and they always say that when people are passionate about something, it's like the 1% and most of us are looking for. What is that that move us, that tick us? I like how realistic your story is, that you're saying that I wasn't passionate, but I focus on the results.

Bryan Clayton : 8:56

Yes, and that was the reward. And the other thing was you start to notice this. As you pour your sweat and heart and soul into a project and try to make it grow, like I mentioned earlier, you're challenged in ways that you would never be challenged otherwise, and you're learning things and developing into a whole new person every year or two, and so you're evolving and that's a very rewarding, fulfilling process. You don't really understand it as it's happening, but you start to look back. Maybe you see a movie or a book or something that you read five years ago and it's like it's not even the same movie, because you've evolved into a whole new person. The business has forced you to take on new skills and virtues, and so that's a lot of fun, that's rewarding, and so I became passionate about that. It was when that kind of plateaued that I decided to sell that company because I no longer got that.

Daniela SM : 9:49

The other thing, brian, too, is that let's say you don't have to be passionate, but you also have to be smart enough to come with an idea that is actually going to be profitable.

Bryan Clayton : 9:58

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Daniela SM : 10:00

What kind of mindset do you have to have had achieved that?

Bryan Clayton : 10:04

Yeah, it didn't matter if it was my first business mowing grass or my second business running green power. That's a marketplace for long-care services. The one thing is true in the 22 years you have to focus on solving a problem for customers and making their life easier in some way, and if you can't do that, then you don't have a business, you don't have a project, you don't have an endeavor that's worth working six, seven days a week on, and so it all starts from there. I kind of knew that in my first business, but nobody really told it to me. I knew if customers weren't happy, they weren't going to keep spending money and they weren't going to refer their friends.

Bryan Clayton : 10:41

So it's kind of like one of these natural things about business that course corrects itself. If your customers aren't pleased with the product or service you're putting into the marketplace, you're not going to get much traction, and so you kind of need to, especially in the early days, make it really easy for customers to tell you everywhere you're letting them down, everywhere that they wish you would do better for them. And you have to talk to them, you have to ask them, you have to make it frictionless for them to tell you this. That was one thing I stumbled onto in my first company, and in my second business it's using that customer feedback as free R&D, as if your idea is good or not.

Daniela SM : 11:18

Wonderful. Thank you for sharing that.

Bryan Clayton : 11:20

And so, brian, you had your landscaping business from age 14 and tell 33 is when I sold that company, yeah, and then took a year off and then started GreenPow.

Daniela SM : 11:30

So you were at a period where you didn't have anything to do or you sold the company.

Bryan Clayton : 11:34

Yeah, it's exactly how it happened so built and sold the first company and after that it wasn't like I was super wealthy or anything but I didn't have to work anymore. So that was nice. I could kind of think about what I wanted to do next. I really believed that I was just going to be an investor and do kind of interesting projects, but not anything like really hard again, because the landscaping business eventually grew it to 150 employees and it was doing eight figures a year in revenue and it was like organized chaos. Every day it was always something wrong, always a truck breaking down or always some kind of issue Once you name it. And so I sold that business and I was like man, that was really stressful. I never want to do anything that hard again. And so I thought I was. Just.

Bryan Clayton : 12:21

I read a book by Robert Kiyosaki called the cash flow quadrant and in that book he talks about this quadrant of the investor, the capitalist, and I thought, man, that sounds really cool, I want to do that. I tried to do that and it really just wasn't fun, it wasn't fulfilling, it wasn't. It wasn't. There wasn't a mission that I was part of, there wasn't a reason really to get out of bed in the morning, and so I realized that my business, the project that I was working on, was the reason that I would get out of bed early in the morning Was the thing that was causing me to learn new skills. It was the answer to the question If it wasn't for me, then what? And if you don't have a mission, if you don't have a project you're working on? There is no answer to that question, and that was gone, and so I became. I became very discontent. I didn't know why for a while, but then I figured it out Damn, I need to start another business. I really don't want to, but but yeah, I need to start another project.

Bryan Clayton : 13:12

And so the idea for GreenPow was one that I saw every day running my landscaping business. People would always call my office begging us to come do basic lawn mowing services for them. Because they couldn't get anybody to call them back, we would refer them out to other other lawn mowing services as kind of a favor you know, it's just something you know nice to do because we no longer did those services, and so I knew that an app needed to exist to connect people that needed a basic lawn mowing service with people that wanted that business. I knew somebody was going to build it. I was fairly confident it would work. So I thought, well, maybe I could work on that. Seems easy. You don't have all these employees, you don't have all these trucks, you don't have all of this, this nightmare of running a construction style business. And so I thought, well, I could do that. Maybe in two years, you know, sell it. And I didn't know what I didn't know. I was very naive, and but I recruited two co-founders.

Bryan Clayton : 14:07

We started working on the first version of what this app should be, what this Uber for lawn care should be, and quickly realized that, wow, this is way harder than I thought it was going to be. So many things that I didn't know and I guess I made a decision after about six months. I was like, well, if I quit this, then what am I going to do? I got to build something. So I thought, well, from now on, I'm always just going to work on my best idea, no matter what. No matter what, I'm working on my best idea and there is no other. Like default. That's my default and I guess, fortunately, I'm not very creative. I haven't had any better ideas. This is the one good idea.

Bryan Clayton : 14:44

Uber for lawn care at GreenPow is the one good idea I've had in a decade, and so I just suck it out and no matter how hard it was, no matter how bad it didn't work, I just focused on really small goals and my team and I would throw everything we had into achieving that small goal and then we would move on to the next goal. So the first goal was 100 customers. Took us two years to get 100 customers. Then we wanted to get 1,000. And that took another three years and then we wanted to get 10,000. Now there's 300,000 people using this app for lawn mowing. We want to get to a million.

Daniela SM : 15:17

Wow, I wanted to go back when you were having the landscaping business. How many hours were you working a day?

Bryan Clayton : 15:23

The landscaping business was full contact sport six, seven days a week, 15 years straight. It was never easy. It was always hard. It was not the type of business that you could turn your back from and just put on autopilot. I didn't have a vacation for like eight years of that time and I've never been married.

Bryan Clayton : 15:43

I think one of the reasons I've never been married is because I was married to that business for 15, 16 years and because it was always something you had to have your hands around, whether it be employee turnover, unhappy customers, equipment breakdown, equipment theft. You've got all these assets. You're getting broken into and robbed all the time cash flow issues, taxes, audits. I was always under audit by some taxing authority at any given time, whether it be local, state or federal. So it was just very stressful. But that's kind of what it took to be successful in that business and I don't regret any of it because it kind of teed me up for my second company, which also is hard, but hard in different ways. Now, because it's technology based, I'm able to kind of pull back and live a much more comfortable lifestyle. But the first five, six years were just as hard.

Daniela SM : 16:33

And what did your father have to say about? Wow, I took you out of plain Nintendo and look at you. Now you're having no life because you're working so hard.

Bryan Clayton : 16:41

He said yeah, I never thought you'd take it to it quite like you did. I'm glad I didn't buy you a pair of ice skates or something, because you just would have been an ice skater. So he kind of makes fun of me. I guess he goes. I never really thought you'd just like dedicate your whole life to mowing grass, but I did and that really was a smart decision because that simple, unsexy, non-glamorous service has been a vehicle that carried me to places in life that otherwise nobody would have ever hired me to do the things I've done, building my first second company, so kind of doing my own thing, working hard on this one thing I was very lucky to have stumbled onto that.

Daniela SM : 17:23

And when you sold your business. So having money, did it change you?

Bryan Clayton : 17:27

That particular moment, no. But before that, yes. The business really started to make some good money year 10 or 11. And so I was able to afford a really, really nice lifestyle. I lived in a big home. That was always my dream to live in, the neighborhood that I first started mowing yards in. So I was mowing grass in like the best neighborhood in town at 19. I was like, if I can just live in this neighborhood by the time I'm 30, all of this wool have been worth it. So I did that. I was able to build a nice home in that neighborhood and achieve that. That was fun for about three months, and so that wore off. And now then the home became a pain in the butt. It was always something dealing with it. So I learned that about myself, that that wasn't going to make me fulfilled. And then I always wanted like an exotic car, and so I bought a Ferrari and I bought a Lamborghini just because I wanted one. And that was fun for about a month. And so then I learned that about myself, that that's not it.

Bryan Clayton : 18:24

By the time I sold the business and got this financial kind of bump, I'd already kind of matured through the mistakes that I had already made around buying a bunch of crap that I didn't need. And then the guy that sought my business was kind of an arrogant dude, but he was worth about a hundred million dollars and he gave me a piece of advice. When we close the transaction, let me give you some advice. You know, you've got this wire transfer that is going coming to your account, so you have more money than you've ever had, which he was right. And he said it's a lot harder to to make a million dollars than it is to hold on to a few million dollars. And that just stuck with me. And he said there's going to be a lot of really crappy investment advice. There's going to be a lot of people pitching you ideas on how to what to do with this money. And he said let me just give you some advice. Don't screw it up. It's going to be a lot harder to keep it than it did to make it. I was like man, well, I almost killed myself trying to make this money. I'll listen to this advice. And so the first thing I did was I just took all that cash and put it into single family homes.

Bryan Clayton : 19:26

Real estate 2013. Real estate prices were down, and so I was able to buy a bunch of long-term rental properties, and so it was cool because I acquired all these assets. But now I was poor all over again. I had no money. I had literally like $20,000 in the bank and that was it, and then all my all my cash was in rental properties. These things were cash flowing because they were paid for, but but I was buying really like crappy properties. I needed a lot of work, and so all the money was going back into fixing them up. That was a really really good thing, because I couldn't screw that up. I couldn't go backwards. I never wanted to pick up a weed eater again. I never wanted to drive a lawnmower ever again. So that was really good advice that I followed, and that was kind of what I needed at that time, because if I had not followed that Vice, I definitely would have screwed it up and I definitely would have lost it all in in Bitcoin or some crap.

Daniela SM : 20:13

So you sold your vehicle in your home.

Bryan Clayton : 20:16

Yes, hold all that. I Went from a 7,000 square foot home with a pool, with a, with an auxiliary house, to a 800 square foot condo in Nashville and now I still all I have and I'm never there. I travel 10, 11 months out of the year. That's the lifestyle like that I wanted, that I didn't know, I wanted, but I really couldn't have that lifestyle. My first business, because you couldn't leave that business for 24 hours. If you left that thing for three days, you'd come back and it would. It would just be like a crater in the ground smoldering. So different, different type of business. So that's.

Daniela SM : 20:47

It took me a while to figure out what I really, what kind of life I really wanted so you got all these real estate properties and then you fix them and you rent them and then so those are your incomes now.

Bryan Clayton : 20:57

That was my income for the first five, six years of Running Green Powell, because I didn't. I didn't, we didn't make enough money to pay pay myself a paycheck. Now the business is doing well, we can pay ourselves a good salary, but back then no, and so we've self-funded green power. We haven't taken on any any outside capital, and so part of that was going without a paycheck for a long time. My co-founders as well. They work nights and weekends, still work their day jobs, and so that enabled us to not have to do this song and dance of raising investor money and and Building a product that investors love but not one that customers love. So that was very helpful. People often ask me oh Well, I want to start this big thing and I'm like well, maybe hit a single or a double, do like I did, build a very simple business and grow it and sell it, and Then you can swing for the fences on the big thing. And that's kind of how I did it with Green Powell and it worked out.

Daniela SM : 21:54

And how do you find your co-founders?

Bryan Clayton : 21:56

I was looking for Somebody I could trust, that I knew it would work hard. That was all I was looking for. Usually, bad co-founder dynamics kill more businesses than they help. So I usually tell founders to go it alone for as long as you can Until you find your business soulmate, the person you can't imagine starting the business without. I found those two guys because I had Known them for for 20 years. They told me. They said, hey, listen, if you ever Do another business, I don't care what it is, I will work seven days a week in that business with you as long as it takes to be successful. And two guys told me that but why?

Daniela SM : 22:32

because they knew how you wear, that you had good ideas. What was the reason?

Bryan Clayton : 22:37

No, I definitely didn't have good ideas and I wasn't like talented or creative in any kind of way. It wasn't like I was brilliant in any sort of way. I think they they saw and respected how I went from nothing to Building like one of the bigger Landscaping businesses in the state of Tennessee. Now that that's some kind of huge big alcohol accolade. But For them to see that over a 15 year period of time, see me struggle, see me live on a $10 a day food budget, see me drive a 20 year old truck. When they were out Partying in college, I was I. You know, I was going to night class with grass clippings all over me. I think they saw that and they were like man, you know, I Wish I had done what this dude did, because now he doesn't have to work anymore and I'm having to work this terrible job, and they were making a good salary.

Bryan Clayton : 23:26

But it wasn't like their dream job. It was not their dream to go sit in a cubicle. It's no, that is nobody's dream. Yeah, and and you're literally a slave, you're selling your, your life for a paycheck. Nobody wants to go work that job. They hated their jobs. Okay, well, if he, if this dude, ever starts another thing I definitely want to join that journey with him.

Bryan Clayton : 23:46

And so they told me that and I thought well, there is another Idea I have. I don't know how hard it's gonna be, but thinking about doing it. And they're like I'll quit my job tomorrow and do that with you, and I thought, well, let's not quit our jobs just yet, because I don't know how long it's gonna be before we make any money to pay you. So let's do it nights and weekends. And that's exactly what we did for three or four years. And then put their jobs and we still couldn't pay on my market salary. They had to drive for uber and do other gig work to sustain themselves. And now, ten years in, we're making enough money to when we can pay ourselves a good market salary a little more than market.

Daniela SM : 24:23

Wow, ten years, that's. That seems like a long time.

Bryan Clayton : 24:25

Ten years. Yeah, took a long time, a lot longer than I thought.

Daniela SM : 24:29

Brian, what do you study?

Bryan Clayton : 24:31

What? The school for business management, which was pretty much a waste of time. I think I like go back in time. There's a. There's a few things I would do different. I should have taken the money I spent on college and put it back in my business. I should have worked harder on the business.

Bryan Clayton : 24:48

You know, back then in the late 90s, early 2000s, you didn't have YouTube University, so you really couldn't be exposed to all these different ways of doing business, whereas today you can learn anything on YouTube for free. So it wasn't like I could. I could follow somebody else's roadmap very easily, but knowing the things I know now, I could. I could do back then. And then now, with Green Powell, what do I study? I'm always looking for people that are one level of the game in front of me and so that maybe I'm on level five of the video game. There they are. They already beat level five. Now they're on level six, seven or eight.

Bryan Clayton : 25:20

If Green Powell's Green Powell's doing thirty million dollars a year in revenue, I'm looking for the founder or the or the practitioner that is doing a hundred million dollars a year, because I want to learn from them and figure out how they got from ten to a hundred. I'm not worried about the guy doing a billion dollars a year, because he might as well be on Pluto compared to where I'm at, but I'm looking for the one who's one or two steps ahead of me, who is doing podcast interviews. Maybe they're talking on YouTube. Maybe they did a fireside chat at a conference. Maybe they have a blog. Maybe they have a Twitter. So that's, that's what I'm studying. I'm studying for people who have actually done what it is I'm trying to do.

Daniela SM : 25:57

Interesting. Yes, it's not the first time that I hear from some entrepreneurs that is a waste of time to go to college.

Bryan Clayton : 26:05

Yeah, now, now, if you don't have a plan, you take the four years you would have spent in college and not done anything with it. Then, yeah, go to college. But there is an opportunity cost to college. You would be so much better to go. Go to a startup, go to a small business that that's in technology or whatever said, I don't care what it is. You can pay me $1,000 a month and I will work six days a week and I will do whatever you tell me to do. If you do that and get a seat on A on a growing tech company, you will learn more in six months of doing that or three months of doing that. Then you will in four or five years of college.

Bryan Clayton : 26:46

College is Is really overrated and before I like, get on my soapbox about this, but you know, you've got you've got our current administration Wanting to erase a bunch of student loan debt, and so, whatever you think about that is fine, but there's one thing we can all agree on. There's one simple truth. Well, apparently, since people can't pay back these loans, the degree wasn't worth it, because the degree didn't get them a job that could pay back the loans. It's like, it's pretty simple, like we can all agree on that, and so it's. So it's like well, maybe, maybe we need to rethink these things.

Daniela SM : 27:18

Yes, that's true. That's true. I mean, unless you want to be a doctor, that you do need to study.

Bryan Clayton : 27:23

There's probably six things that you do need to go to college for, and if you're not one of those six, go start a business or go work for a fast-growing company and do whatever you got to do to make it.

Daniela SM : 27:33

Yeah, that's a really good advice. Thank you for that. Talk about your new business, which has been there for 11 years. Okay, so how do you came with that idea? You, I know that when we spoke before, I was fascinated about how you became you. You thought about it, so, you, you. So what? What happened? What click there.

Bryan Clayton : 27:51

Yeah it. Well, the first thing was I experienced the problem personally, visually, so I think. Whenever you're starting a new product from scratch, you're bringing a new product to the marketplace. Authenticity can be a Competitive advantage. If you've experienced the problem, you know the industry. You you've been on the one side of the table or the other, or maybe both, and and you know where technology needs to make things easier. That was how I experienced it.

Bryan Clayton : 28:23

I, like I mentioned there before, I saw the problem every day running my long-care business. We had grown to where we no longer did residential work, but people would still call us for residential services, begging us to come mow their yard, and it's because the people that are actually doing these services don't have a a Receptionist, they don't have a call service. When you call them, there's nobody there to pick, pick up, and Even if they do get back to you, they're busy. They don't have time to come out and give you an estimate. They're just trying to keep their head above water. And so I knew that technology could make both sides of this transaction easier. So, on top of that, so I got this idea in the back of my head, and on top of that, at the time the smartphone was just getting ubiquitous, it was just getting to where everybody had one. So now all of these new things are possible. You know somebody's location, everybody's always connected, everybody kind of also Understands how to work these interfaces.

Bryan Clayton : 29:23

You know, in 2005 you didn't really do all of your shopping online. You didn't really go to, you certainly didn't go to your smartphone, yeah, but you didn't really go to your computer screen to get things done. You picked up the phone, you called somebody. Well, companies like Amazon and Facebook and other companies kind of indoctrinated the masses on adopting a UI, a user interface. So this is a new interface that you can, you can go through to book travel, to buy stuff on Amazon, to buy stuff on eBay, and that was a new thing. And so this, this adoption had, has slowly gotten to be so commonplace, so ubiquitous, that everybody was kind of starting to to gravitate towards a user interface to get things done.

Bryan Clayton : 30:08

And then, on top of that, we have local and Mobile introduced with all of that. And then you start seeing companies like Uber, like lift, airbnb, making these real world experiences happen almost like magic through a smartphone. That was a new thing and I saw this playing out and I thought I can't do that because that's that's a lot harder. But but I but I do. I do know this humble world of lawn mowing and I know it very well.

Bryan Clayton : 30:37

And if I can just learn the tech side, maybe, maybe I could build a platform that that works like Airbnb or lift or uber, where you could push a button and get a lawn mowing service and as a lawn care service, you could run your whole business through through this smartphone, this, this app, and these were new ideas. Now they seem kind of obvious, but but back then they they weren't so obvious. And because at that point in time software moved Bits, it didn't move atoms, and so what I mean by that is like everything you did on your, on your computer or or if you use your smartphone, it was just was bit was electronic, but it was just now happening to where Atoms would move. Car will show up, a space would be available in somebody's spare bedroom, food would show up at your front door, so so that was all starting to happen, and and I I thought, well, I'm fairly certain someone's going to build it for lawn mowing. Why can't it be?

Daniela SM : 31:35

you know, when you're trying to find Gardener, they're always busy and and they have already enough clients, so why would I try to get a reception? Is there somebody to pick up the phone if I'm already like max on my business?

Bryan Clayton : 31:47

Yeah, it's a great question, and and that was one of the things that Smacked me in the face when I started this company was was man? All of the reasons that suck about hiring a lawn care service are now my problem. I have to solve every one of them, and so it's like there is no magical, like technology you can build To solve the problem of the disappearing lawn guy, or the lawn guy that doesn't call you back, or the lawn guy who's busy and can't can't service you, and so we had to build it from the ground up. The thing is, is the lawn guy you know to call who's busy?

Bryan Clayton : 32:21

He may have a name for himself or herself, he may have a website, he may have a facebook page, he may pop up on google, he may people may be talking about him in facebook groups, but the guy who you really want nobody knows. He just started in the business, maybe he's only been in business for a year or two and he's only got 20 customers and he really wants a hundred. Well, that's who we connect you with. That's who we kind of bring on to the platform and allow you to hire, like you're hiring something, like you're buying something on amazon. It's finding those, those smaller hidden gems of service providers that don't have the the local brand recognition just yet, that we help grow their whole business and kind of our business in a box for them.

Daniela SM : 33:04

Okay, so I'm the new business person and you built me 100 clients. Now I don't want max out and don't have the capability. Will you tell me, well, now you can hire people and then you can work a little less, or do I get out of your platform?

Bryan Clayton : 33:19

Yeah, that's a good question. So Ideally we want to be with you, the business partner, for as long as you operate your business. So, as you, as you go from okay, I've got 10 customers, I can do 100 by myself every week, we want to get you there. And then, once you do 100, then the next growth hurdle is okay, now I got hired an employee. Not everybody wants to do that, not everybody wants to have employees and everybody it has their own kind of goals. So if you do want to hire an employee or a worker to, we can help you get through that and and help you Get through the next growth hurdle of your business get you another hundred customers.

Bryan Clayton : 33:54

One of the big problems and and challenges of growing this type of business I experienced this when I was hiring my first employee, two or three or four Is you. You hire somebody and you don't necessarily know that you're going to have the workload to keep them busy. What happens if you hire them and you don't have enough work for them and then you're paying them this weekly salary or weekly check and there's not enough revenue to cover it? You then the business owner. There's been many times in my 22 years where my, my employees made more money Than I did. So that's a big risk that you take, so it's so. It's our job as the platform to Help de-risk that. To make it a no-brainer, you're getting 20 new opportunities a day. If you just hire a helper, you can pick those up. So that's one thing.

Bryan Clayton : 34:35

And then the other thing is a lot of a lot of operators Don't want to hire an employee. They want to stay small and profitable. Well then they just, they just they just kind of stay where they're at on green power and they kind of Improve their route. So maybe they've got one that's 15 minutes outside of town, not a good fit for them. And they say, hey, listen, mr Smith, I don't have any other customers nearby you, I'm not going to service you anymore, but I'm going to push this button and green power is going to get you other quotes.

Bryan Clayton : 35:02

And then, and then they're saying and it's like, well, I've got five already on main street, every yard it's on main street. I'm getting preferential opportunity on. I'm getting preferential First kind of dibs on, and so now I'm getting route density where, where I'm pruning my business and making it more efficient, making more money with less headache, that's. That's kind of the other role that green power takes on to help. Help that business owner doesn't necessarily want to do two or three hundred customers. Okay, great, then the name of your business, green power.

Daniela SM : 35:28

It is kind of like an uber for Landscaping and anything related. Is there any any other ideas that? You said that there is a dial like that in other businesses. So you said, oh, there's an opportunity. So I've always known that every business has its own set of problems.

Bryan Clayton : 35:43

But they're all unique. So the plumbers got a million problems, the the home cleaners got a million problems. The landscaper certainly has his or her fair share. Every home services Business is hard to run and they all have problems. The problem is only like 10 of those problems are the same. The other 90% are all unique to that industry and so a lot of people ask me like, well, what you know? I really a lot of customers ask man, it's really helped me out. My grass was four feet tall. My landscaper ghosted me. I use green power. I got somebody to mow at that same day at a great price.

Bryan Clayton : 36:16

I really wish you would do this for home cleaning, because you should just be able to, to just copy all the software and to say home cleaning instead of lawn mowing. It's like, well, boy, I wish it worked that way. But the reality is is that the home cleaner has a million other nuances and workflows and and specifics to his or her industry that the lawn care service doesn't. So Our strategy is is to continue to, to go deep on this one industry. We're just dropping the bucket.

Bryan Clayton : 36:42

You know Is a 99 billion dollar industry and so we're just a drop in the bucket, and and so I was reminded of this lesson when we, when we built snow plowing because it's a seasonal business, lawn care, obviously and so we had a lot of vendors and customers asking us for snow plowing and we're like, well, yeah, well, just build that on, pretty simple, and it took two years and it was almost as hard as just building the first lawn care app. It's so many different workflows, so many different customization, so many different. It's basically another business that rides alongside green power. It is not complimentary in any way and so it's really hard. So I guess my lesson my lesson I learned in my advice is just to keep the main thing the main thing and be the best in your market at one thing.

Daniela SM : 37:30

So you will say that for the house cleaning If you were a house cleaner if you had that experience, then you will have been able to understand the 90% of the nuances that you don't know Exactly exactly, and we saw this a lot in 2013 1415, 16, that uber was exploding and so all of this venture capital that was getting massive returns from uber and lift.

Bryan Clayton : 37:57

They wanted to kind of uberize Everything, and so there was uber for cleaning, there was uber for car washing, there was uber for laundry service, there was uber for Everything, and pretty much 9 out of 10 of these endeavors were out of business in 24 months. There were several challenges with that, but one of the main things that I observed was the founders of uber for home cleaning had never run a cleaning service. The founders of uber for car washing had never ran their own detail service, and so they they didn't have the, the scars, they didn't have the first person experience with what needed to happen. That's a failure.

Bryan Clayton : 38:36

I see a lot the door dash team, for example. They delivered the first 10,000 orders on per day. They delivered the first 10,000 orders on door dash themselves in their car, and even to this day, it doesn't matter who you are at door dash, they have thousands of employees. You still have to like, do I think, an hour a month of deliveries on the network, so you never lose sight of what it is we're doing here. So that's important. So start with what they they call it first principles, which is, you know what are we doing? I'm going to do it for a while. I'm going to learn the workflows and then figure out what the systems need to be built around it.

Daniela SM : 39:16

And you know what I think is interesting. I grew up in Venezuela, in Caracas, and when I was little, they had this guy who would come to your house and bring you the vegetables in a donkey Nice, and I feel like many hundred years ago, but he wasn't. And also there is always somebody passing by with an ice cream little truck. There was this guy who passed by trying to polish your knife. The cobbler used to also walk by, and so you had all these services that people used to pass by offering their business. People didn't go out of their house to go shop.

Bryan Clayton : 39:50

You see this a lot in like it's, particularly in Latin America. I spent a lot of time in Latin America and with services like like Rapi. I mean, rapi is basically everything it's food delivery, it's restaurant delivery, it's like a financing service, and so it's like magic those apps. They say that a new technology should be indistinguishable as from magic. Yeah, a lot of these kind of things that we've always had are now getting digitized and making it as easy as just pushing a button, and that's kind of the way it should be. If you're a new founder, look for those things. Look for those things that you can make magic with a screen.

Daniela SM : 40:26

Even I remember back home my dad, any bill payments or even to get a driver's license renew, even your passport. He will never go Like he was always somebody who had that job, who would do all the errands for you and you pay that person things. And so now, going back, I guess the way it was technology.

Bryan Clayton : 40:46

The key distinction here is, yeah, we've always had these things, but for most of history they were for the wealthy, they were for the privileged.

Bryan Clayton : 40:56

If you had resources, you had money, you had a driver, you have a personal shopper, you have a home cleaner, and so the unlock in the United States anyway, and maybe hopefully the rest of the world is making it so efficient to where now, if you live in the United States, you have a driver. Even if you were a blue collar blue collar job, you have a personal driver. You have a personal shopper with Instacart. You know, typically that was only something for the super wealthy in the United States, but now with Instacart you've got a personal shopper and it ain't that much more expensive. Now, with GreenPow, you have a guard, you have a personal guard, and our average customer on GreenPow spends $30, $40 a mowing every two weeks. We're not talking about a bunch of money here, and so that is kind of where it needs to go is, yeah, all of these conveniences that we've kind of always had for everybody, or pretty much everybody, is what technology needs to do. It needs to make it super efficient.

Daniela SM : 41:58

You said you spent a lot of time in Mexico. Do you see opportunities there too, or do you think that they already figured out?

Bryan Clayton : 42:05

You're seeing a lot of these new technologies make their way into emerging markets, which is cool because there's a lot of supply. There's folks that need these gig type jobs because in many of these countries their government has failed them and hasn't given them opportunity for good employment. So these gig type jobs where you can be a driver, you can deliver food, you can do home services, things of that sort are making it more efficient for people who want to do that work, connect with people who can afford to pay for it. So I'm starting to see that a lot in Latin America, in Asia. That's good to see. Is it solving all the problems that these places in the world have? No, but it is. You know, I talk to Uber drivers, doesn't matter what part of the world I'm in, and they tell me they make more money driving for Uber than they could just a regular cab or working a regular job. So that's good to see.

Daniela SM : 42:59

We need more of that All right, so let's move to your traveling. When did this all started? So you did have two businesses the second one you were working hard but when did you started to include the traveling, Because I know you're traveling a lot?

Bryan Clayton : 43:14

Yeah, I travel 11 months out of the year, usually try to spend about a month or two in one place at any time just to kind of really get a feel for it. I've always wanted to do this, but I kind of fast-tracked it. I guess about five years ago A friend of mine passed away from brain cancer so I watched him. He was a super, super successful guy and I watched him have seemingly everything to losing everything in 12 months Observing this. I was like man. I was 38 at the time. I'm 43 now and I was like you know, this guy was only 50. I better get busy seeing some stuff, because you know what, if that happened to me and he would tell me this he's like man, I wish I spent more time doing this, this, this, and so I learned from that, and so I thought the business green power was not really at a place then where that was a really safe bet, but I did it anyway, just started traveling and working, and so that's one of the good things about running a tech business, obviously, is that you can run it from anywhere in the world, and so that's that's what I did and that actually inspired me to work more, and they're inspired me to work harder in less hours, whereas, you know, up until that point I was working six, seven days a week, some sometimes 100 hour weeks, and while that was necessary at that stage of the game to get the business going from scratch, I had transitioned to a point where I now had a team around me and I was able to do high leverage work. So traveling has helped that.

Bryan Clayton : 44:34

A lot of people ask me. It's like well, I just want to, I want to start a business because I want to do what you're doing. I thought, well, you can't start. You can't start doing this, you have to kind of work your way into it, but I promise you it's worth it. So yeah, right now I'm in Tulum, mexico, and it's really pretty down here. I'm going to stay here for a while and then maybe this winter I'll head down to further into Argentina or Brazil and just kind of move around a little bit. I really enjoy this and I'm going to keep doing it for the next few years until I get tired of it.

Daniela SM : 45:03

So you go one month somewhere and then you go back to the States.

Bryan Clayton : 45:06

No, no, just move from one place to the next. I'll usually spend two or three weeks out of time in the States, usually around Christmas, just spend time with family, and then I'll bounce back from here and there. But most of the time I'm moving from one country to the next and just talking to people and learning about different places. To see different places that aren't necessarily super popular is kind of what I like to do.

Daniela SM : 45:28

And who do you hang out when you are in these places?

Bryan Clayton : 45:31

My co-founder kind of lives, a similar lifestyle. I hang out a lot. One cool thing about doing this for five, six years is I have friends all over the world. So here in Tulum I've got two or three friends that I'll hang out with. That is. One of the drawbacks is that you lose a lot of those human connections when you're kind of living this nomadic lifestyle and so you kind of have to reconcile that. You have to deal with that. But with technology these days and social media I'm able to keep in touch with my core group better than I could 10, 15, 20 years ago and I think that's one of the things that enables this kind of lifestyles. Through technology you can stay connected with the people who matter to you.

Daniela SM : 46:07

But what about the locals? Do you hang around with the locals or do you always kind of go with the expats?

Bryan Clayton : 46:12

I speak pretty good Spanish and really horrible Portuguese. I try to actively avoid Americans when I'm traveling. If there's a bunch of Americans somewhere, that's an indication that I am not in the right place. Ah, okay.

Daniela SM : 46:26

Now you have the places that you always go, or you just keep picking different places.

Bryan Clayton : 46:30

I try to do the American winters in South America and the American summers in Europe.

Daniela SM : 46:37

In Europe. Where have you been?

Bryan Clayton : 46:39

Oh man, I really like the Nordic countries. I spent a lot of time in the Nordic countries the Norway, sweden, finland, scandinavia, all of Iceland. Oh man, those are some of the prettiest parts of the world Expensive, super expensive. So you kind of have to balance that out with. Maybe. Some of the Baltic states are a little more economical and those are really underrated. I spent a lot of time in Riga, latvia, vilnius, lithuania and Tallinn, estonia. Those are three underrated spots in Europe in my opinion that are almost as economical as parts of Latin America and they're safe, super safe. Great food, great weather in the summertime. You wouldn't want to be there in the wintertime, but great weather in the summertime.

Daniela SM : 47:23

Yes, that's the thing. What about Turkey, Greece, Morocco? Have you been to those?

Bryan Clayton : 47:28

No, I've spent some time in the Middle East not my vibe, not my thing, but those are on my list. Next, I like to spend a lot of time in Greece. I barely know Italy. I think to really know Italy you'd have to do six months there a year. So that kind of part of that corner of Europe is on my list definitely.

Daniela SM : 47:45

Okay, and so you always stays in Airbnb.

Bryan Clayton : 47:48

It depends. One thing about this lifestyle is you got to be flexible. If I had 10 times the money, I would have a personal assistant handle all this stuff, and maybe I still should, because it's a lot of work researching a place and comparing the cost of hotels versus Airbnb. You know Airbnb is not always the better option, but sometimes it is, and the difference of experience is different too. I'll try to do research and compare the cost of a hotel or an actual boutique Airbnb or renting out somebody's spare bedroom. You got to be able to do the research because every place is different. That's one of the things that is kind of a drag about it. Because you go to a new place, you probably need to do a few hours of research. You could watch the videos on YouTube, read the blogs, compare all the notes. If not, you're going to be disappointed in waste time and money. That's one of the drags.

Daniela SM : 48:40

Okay, so you do encourage people to do research in advance, okay.

Bryan Clayton : 48:44

Absolutely, If not be prepared to waste money and time.

Daniela SM : 48:48

I was expecting that you just show up and, yes, you have maybe fixed the accommodation for a few weeks or maybe a month, but then everything else is an exploration. So I feel like maybe the research is mostly for accommodation and the rest you can just be an adventure.

Bryan Clayton : 49:04

Done that and made mistakes around it. So, for example, if I had booked an Airbnb in Hallbox for a week, I would have wasted all that money because I wasn't staying there. It was just it wasn't. It's a trashy, not pleasant place to be. And so I booked a hotel for two nights or three nights, and I would have left after two if I hadn't already spent the money. And so so test and then invest, and so test, test the place out, then double down and figure out if you want to stay there for a month. Yeah, in business and in travel.

Daniela SM : 49:36

I like test and then invest. That's great. The first job you probably were exercising molding and all these things on the landscaping business. But then the second one you were mostly in the computer, so when you were saying a hundred hours. So when you have time to exercise you're sitting all the time.

Bryan Clayton : 49:53

And those early days I didn't let myself get out of shape. That was one of the things I learned running. That first business was that you've got to maintain you know your temple. Not you're not going to make it, you're not going to finish this marathon. And so I guess it was year six or seven that I had that epiphany and I actually signed up for a marathon and so I ran a marathon horribly but got it done, took six months to get in shape for it and I lost 50 pounds doing that. So that was kind of like a mindset shift for me.

Bryan Clayton : 50:21

So you have to set aside time to sharpen the saw, so to speak, and you have to set aside time to take care of yourself. For me now I've got a virtual trainer that I pay a few hundred dollars a month. That keeps me on track. So he looks at my food that I eat, I put all that in my fitness pile and then he lays out workouts for me. So sometimes I have access to a gym, sometimes I don't, but still have workouts. I got to get done. I do about a 30 minutes a day of yoga I'll follow a guy on YouTube for that and so you can stay in shape anywhere in the world, if you just stay accountable to a routine, to systems, to actual like things you have in place. If you don't have those systems and it's just like oh yeah, I'm going to a new place, I've got to work out four times At some point, it'll never happen. That's the thing. You got to have some kind of commitment to some kind of schedule.

Daniela SM : 51:10

So what is your time? How many hours you work, how many hours you spend walking around?

Bryan Clayton : 51:16

These days I might work two hours a day maybe, but they're two really good hours. I think I read somewhere that the maximum amount of really good hours you get in a day is four or five. Problem is is that you got to work the 10 to get the four because you don't know when those four are going to happen. You're not really good enough to only do the four.

Bryan Clayton : 51:36

As time has gone on, I've gotten to where I know what high leverage things I need to be doing. I've got a team in place that's doing a lot of the execution and I'm checking on that. I'm measuring that against what it is we're trying to do and I know what success and failure looks like. So all of my hour or two of work a day is high leverage, whereas in the early days you don't have any of those things. So you've got to put in eight, 10, 12 hours a day to build those things up, and so that takes time and then you kind of ease into where you do an hour or two or five really good hours a day.

Bryan Clayton : 52:12

I read somewhere some CEO I can't remember who it said, who it was, maybe it was Jeff Bezos said I really just make one or two good decisions a day, and that's all I do. And so if Jeff Bezos is like here and I'm here, I'm trying to figure out how to get closer to that, you know, it's like how do I get to where I don't have to put in even the hour? I can just make one or two really good decisions a day.

Bryan Clayton : 52:35

And so that's where you're trying to drive towards.

Daniela SM : 52:37

Wonderful. Well, this is amazing. I think I can talk to you for more than an hour. So now you have a few possessions. So now you don't have big cars. So now you are a minimalistic.

Bryan Clayton : 52:49

Very much. So Back home I already have anything, and then I've got my bag, that I've got my stuff in, and it's amazing how you don't need 99% of what you think you do. And so that's something I learned. I had to learn that by having cars, boats, houses, all sorts of things and realizing that those things were causing more headache and grief than they were bringing joy. So learning that you know, you can hear somebody like me tell you that, but you don't really know it until you experience it. So it's like go ahead and experience it, Get the money and buy those things and then learn and then realize you don't need them. Or maybe you do like that. Some people actually do like that. What do I do with my money? I like to live in inspiring places. I like to see new places. I like to eat really good food. I like to take my friends out and treat them. I like to take my family on a vacation with me. What I do with my money now? That's a lot more fun.

Daniela SM : 53:42

I feel like, yes, you don't need things to be happy. It's just in, the more that you have, the more responsibilities and more headaches. That's true.

Bryan Clayton : 53:50

It's a strange thing, it really is. You see it, when you travel, you see people that are a lot happier than people in Western countries with a fraction of what they have, and so it's like, okay, well then I just need to, like, live that lifestyle. Well, I don't know that I'd be happy living that lifestyle, and so it's a weird thing, it really is. If I had to do it all over again, I don't know if I would do it any different. It's just you have to experience that and learn that and then figure out what balance you like of material possessions and those types of things versus not, because I think it's different for everybody. If there was one simple truth, then you could just say, okay, let's go do that, but I think it is different for everybody.

Daniela SM : 54:28

Yeah, there's no one formula for what suits you best for food or for exercise. What works? For you, so everybody is really their own world. And yes, I know there's hundreds of books of telling you this and that, but you have to find your own formula, and I think that's what the purpose of our life is to find what is our formula, because it's not in the book exactly. You can get all tips from everywhere, but that's it.

Bryan Clayton : 54:53

Totally.

Daniela SM : 54:54

Great.

Bryan Clayton : 54:55

That's why there is no answer to this question what is the meaning of life? Because if there was an answer, everybody would just do that thing. So it's like it's different for everybody, and so it's just like you have to experiment with what you like and what you don't like, what is fulfilling to you and what's not, double down on what is, and that's part of the fun, I think, and the business that you work on can be part of that. At least it has been for me.

Daniela SM : 55:18

Yes, wonderful. Thank you, Bryan. You are full of wisdom and insightful information.

Bryan Clayton : 55:25

Well, thank you so much. I enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for having me on your show.

Daniela SM : 55:29

Yes, it was wonderful. Thank you so much for all the tips and for teaching us all about your business, which is fascinating and make you think about wow, you're a fortunate man.

Bryan Clayton : 55:39

Definitely, I pinch myself every day.

Daniela SM : 55:42

Wonderful. So thank you so much, Bryan, for sharing your story with us.

Bryan Clayton : 55:47

Thank you so much.

Daniela SM : 55:48

Thanks. I hope you enjoyed today's episode I am Daniela and you were listening to, because everyone has a story. Please take five seconds right now and think of somebody in your life that may enjoy what you just heard, or someone that has a story to be shared and preserved. When you think of that person, shoot them a text with the link of this podcast. This would allow the ordinary magic to go further. Join me next time for another story conversation. Thank you for listening. Thank you.