Forged In Fire

Episode 26: Building a Lawn Care Empire with GreenPal

• Nate Pharmer-Eden & Cole Farrell • Season 1 • Episode 26

Share episode

Bryan Clayton transforms a high school lawn mowing side hustle into an 8-figure landscaping company before creating GreenPal, the "Uber of lawn care" now serving 300,000 weekly users nationwide after a decade of determined building.

• Started mowing lawns in high school and grew it into a company with 150 employees over 15 years
• Sold first landscaping business for 8 figures in 2013 and quickly realized retirement wasn't fulfilling
• Identified opportunity to create an Uber-like service for lawn care despite having no tech background
• Spent first two years learning to code and building prototype, then struggling to find initial users
• Discovered through direct customer engagement that reliability and convenience matter more than price
• Describes growing a business like playing a video game where "every level has its own dragon to slay"
• Advises entrepreneurs not to start anything they can't commit a decade to
• Recommends not partnering with anyone you wouldn't give $10 million to start a business with
• Emphasizes closing the gap between what customers actually experience and what founders think they experience
• Views AI as a revolutionary tool that has transformed how they analyze data and solve problems

Please leave us a review! This helps us grow and bring more real-world insights to entrepreneurs like you.


Send us a text

Speaker 1:

Forget what you've heard. Forged in Fire is where real entrepreneurs come to share the untold truths of success the late nights, the crushing setbacks, the moments that change everything. No fluff, just fire, ready to step into the heat and unlock what it really takes to build a business. This is where legends are made.

Speaker 2:

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to another exciting episode of Forged in Fire. I'm your co-host, nate Farrin. Again, allow me to introduce my co-host here, cole, how you doing, brother, come on stage.

Speaker 3:

Hey, what's going on? How was? Your day so far.

Speaker 2:

Man, it's one of those days where I woke up this morning and I looked at the calendar and I've got things from like I don't know 8 am to like 8 pm and then somebody's like, hey, can I also schedule another 8 pm meeting with you. So you know, it's just like that life, like the entrepreneur, is like you know what YOLO, Somebody's got to do it, it's got to get done. But enough about me, man, how are you doing?

Speaker 3:

I love it. No same thing. It's funny. We were just recording an episode recently and we were talking about this theory of you know you trajectory and that's awesome. Or you go entrepreneurship and you have a very unlinear projective and very unpredictable, but you put the work in up front and then it should hockey stick in a perfect world. But there's a lot of those days up front where you're questioning everything you do, but it's part of the hustle. So, all in all, things are good. I am excited for this interview. This is going to be one of those really exciting ones that meshes that entrepreneurship world with the real estate stuff. So I have one thing to ask of everyone before we get started, which is please, please, please, leave us a review. This is what helps us grow, this is what helps us do these episodes. It helps us find more people. So just one thing that would really help us is please, whenever you're listening on, go to comments, go to below and just leave a review.

Speaker 2:

I love it. Today is going to be amazing, dude. I'm super excited. We are going to be interviewing the one and the only, brian Clayton, who is the CEO of GreenPal, and GreenPal has been known to be called the Uber of lawn care. I have zero idea what that means, but we're going to find out together. So, brian, how are we doing? Brother, come on stage, man.

Speaker 4:

Nate and Cole. It's great to be here, guys. Thanks for having me on your show.

Speaker 2:

No, pleasure is all ours. So please tell us a little bit about yourself. What got you here? What brought you here?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, so, like you just said, I'm the CEO and co-founder of GreenPow. Greenpow is an app that works like DoorDash or Instacart or Uber, but for lawn mowing services. So if you own a home or you're a real estate investor and you have grass that's growing outside, somebody's got to mow it. Rather than calling around on facebook or google or something like that, you just download our app, pop in your address and someone comes out and mows the yard for you, and green pal's been around about 10 years. It's a 10-year overnight success. It's nationwide united states now. So anywhere where you live in a town with over 20 or 30,000 people, you can use GreenPow to get lawn mowing done.

Speaker 3:

That is so cool. I have so many questions to dive in there, so I want to dial all the way to the beginning Before we go into the nitty gritty. All the way at the beginning you said a 10-year overnight success and I love that you said that, because it is such a funny thing. So tell me about the journey and just kind of it depends how deep you want to go. But what did it look like? Why did you start this? How did it start building? Tell me more.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. So I think when you are inventing a new product, you're building something from scratch, like we were doing when we started GreenPow. I think authenticity can be a competitive advantage, so I was solving my own problem. My first business was a lawn mowing business. I started mowing grass in high school as a way to make extra money and stuck with that lawn mowing business for 15 years, growing it into a real company, eventually building it to about 150 people, and that business was acquired by a national company in 2013.

Speaker 4:

So I guess the first act of my entrepreneurial journey was building and scaling that landscaping company to eight figures and then exiting it. And after I did that, I was going to just kind of live the good life was my plan. I did some real estate investing and my plan was just to go sit on a beach and not have to do the grind of entrepreneurship anymore. But that got boring really quick. Things got existential. I didn't have a purpose in my life anymore and I didn't realize that. I didn't anticipate that happening. But I realized that I needed a project. I needed something to a mission, something to want me to get out of bed early in the morning and continue to grow and continue to try to achieve things. And so I thought, well, maybe I can start a tech company. I just watched the movie the Social Network. That looked easy in that movie, so maybe I can do that.

Speaker 4:

And so I was very naive in thinking that I could become a tech entrepreneur. But I thought, well, somebody's going to build the Uber of lawn care Because at the time this was about 2013, uber was just getting kind of popular and I thought somebody's going to build this, this for, for, for landscaping services, so it might as well be me. And, uh, I told two friends about the idea and and we started working on it, and we we didn't, didn't know what the hell we were doing, and and we started learning how to code and learning how to build software and teaching ourselves how to do that. And the first prototype took us like two years to build, and we slowly started getting a little bit of customer feedback about how to build this marketplace that connected buyers and sellers in this industry. And so we started working on making the app better, making ourselves better, making the business better and, little by little, making it easier to use and growing the user base to where now around 300,000 people use the app every week to get lawn mowing done.

Speaker 2:

Dude, holy cow, I love this. Hats off to you. I mean, having the idea of doing like the 15 years of just lawn care back then and then selling it off. That's the first hats off to you. Kudos to you on that. That is a success in and of itself. But then realizing, after you're chilling on the beach, investing in a few other things, that you're bored. You're like you know what? I need a new challenge, I need to do something else. What can I possibly do? Watched a movie, realized hey, you know what, somebody's going to do this, it's going to be me. And so you did it. And so now fill me in, kind of and you can take this from whatever avenue you want. What were some of the struggles and trials and tribulations from? Rather maybe be the conceptual idea of like trying to figure out what the heck you're doing with tech, or maybe it's scaling the business to now over 300,000 users using this. What was that journey like and what were some of the struggles and headaches and pain points?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, it's a very helpful thing to not know everything, starting blind Like right, starting blind you don't understand how challenging it's going to be and you don't understand the struggles that lie in front of you. And that's an asset, because if you did you would never get started. And so I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't know how to build a tech product, I didn't know the first thing about how to code software and I didn't know how to design software and I didn't know about how to invent a new software product, and so it was kind of all of these things we kind of had to figure out as we went. And so when I first started, I thought the difficult thing was going to be the execution of the technology, and I thought that that was going to be the challenging piece of it. And I thought, well, we don't know how to build software, but if we can learn how to build software and we can just get an MVP out there and just start improving it, if we build it they will come. And it was actually if you build it, they will not come. And so what I learned the hard way was is that actually the building and execution of the technology is the easy part is table stakes. That is kind of your entry ticket to the game. The harder thing, and actually like 10 times or maybe even a hundred times harder, is the distribution and the, the um. Putting the product in the hands of people when they need it and making it completely intuitive to use and and seamless and frictionless for them to use. Um is is much. It's a much harder thing and um, looking back it, it should have been obvious, but it was just one of those things I had to learn for myself and it's kind of like.

Speaker 4:

I'm from Nashville, tennessee, I grew up in Nashville, and so the parallels to entrepreneurship and tech entrepreneurship to the music business are almost like exactly the same. So we get a hundred people a week moving to Nashville and a lot of them want to be like the next big country music singer, and so they think that the hard part is like becoming a songwriter and they think that the hard thing is being able to play the guitar very well and sing at the same time and being able to do that like on stage and being able to write your own songs and being able to perform well. Like that's the hard part. And, and maybe, maybe the hard part is getting a record deal or or, aka venture capital. And then they, they do all of that and then they realize actually that was the easy part. The hard thing is getting 100 people to show up at your show and and so entrepreneurship is no different.

Speaker 4:

Um, the idea, the initial, like MVP, the initial beta product, is table stakes. That's the easy part of it. The hard part of it is the distribution, getting the awareness around your product. That's a hundred times harder. And so you have to innovate, not only on the product, but you have to innovate on the distribution. And so that was like the hardest lesson that we learned in the first three years of the business, because we were learning how to code, we were working on ourselves, we were learning how to build software, we were building the first version of the platform, and then it was crickets. It was like pulling teeth, it was passing out flyers, knocking on doors, like meeting people at Starbucks, it was Craigslist, cold calling. It was all of that just to get our first like thousand users and then like from a thousand to ten thousand users. It was no easier. It was just grinding out content and just grinding out, you know, just through trial and error experiments, trying to figure out how to get people to use this thing that we had built.

Speaker 3:

I love this. There's so many good things in here and it's funny there's so many parallels to real estate of what you're saying with the same stuff, where I think a lot of people think in our world that it's like managing the building is going to be so hard, doing this is going to be so hard and it's not easy, but what they find is finding a deal is actually the hard part. Finding money to make this thing work and going through these crazy loops that's a whole different challenge. That was not expected, like you're saying, so I love that you mentioned that. And another thing that I just am so big on is the why not me. Like you said, someone's going to build this. Why not me? That positive mindset that I can do this, I think is so critical and it's probably helped. I'm assuming that you had that exit, that you built that company. You said, if I could do that, I can do this, and I think that's awesome.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I'll throw one thing in there. The building and selling in my first business certainly gave me the the the validation that I could do it. But it wasn't just that. It was when I was running that business. I was selling landscaping services to high-end clients in the town I grew up in, outside of Nashville.

Speaker 4:

One thing I learned at a very young age 18, 19, 20, 21, was that the wealthiest people in town that could afford to spend $20,000 a year on landscaping weren't any smarter than me, weren't any smarter than smarter people that I knew that were less successful. They were just the people that actually just went out and did something and they went out and started a business. They went out and started a dry cleaning company or a restaurant or an insurance sales company or something. They just like went all in on an idea and just grinded on that thing. They weren't actually any more talented or smarter. So this was an interesting lesson I learned at a really young age was that the successful people weren't necessarily the smartest or the most talented. The smartest or the most talented Then the other thing that I saw was when I was building out my network of like-minded small business owners in the blue collar space was this interesting thing of the blue collar millionaire where it was like Johnny dump truck with overalls it was worth eight figures.

Speaker 4:

He was also going to real estate auctions, you know, by bidding on, you know, single family homes to build out his little rental property portfolio and paying cash. And you know you wouldn't think this guy had two nickels to rub together. And so and he was super successful because he worked hard, he figured out one little business model, worked seven days a week on it, was relentless about it and ran it well and served his customers well. So these were interesting lessons that I learned, like in the trenches running a blue collar business. That gave me the validation to know that I kind of know these fundamentals and I can kind of figure it out in the tech world, if I can apply these fundamentals to this other world.

Speaker 3:

So good, so good. So let me ask you a follow up to that. Then I've always heard that and we're kind of a little bit different of a business, so it doesn't necessarily apply exactly. But I've heard the benchmarks that you hit as you're scaling, whether it's either of your businesses. It's, I believe, the one million, the five million, the 10, and it kind of keeps going. Did you hit any of those hurdles and or have any specific challenges at those pieces that kind of let you break through or not?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, in both businesses, because my second company, Green Pal, is doing multiple, around $30 to $40 million a year in revenue, and so we want to be a nine-figure business. And so we're at kind of like metaphorically like level six of the video game, and what I've learned is that this stuff is like a video game that every level has its own dragon, its own final boss that you have to slay, and the stuff that got you through Waterworld won't help you beat Bowser, and so it's like every level is different, and a lot of times the choke point is you as the founder, and I've noticed this about myself. It's like you're doing three things at once. You're working in the business, just trying to keep the damn thing running, and then you're working on the business. You're trying to build the systems around what it is you're doing. And then the third thing is you're working on yourself. You are leveling up, you are getting skills. You may not have the title of, you know, AI expert, but you're learning the 80 20 of how you can implement AI and what you're doing in your business. And if you don't, you know that's a bottleneck in your business.

Speaker 4:

And so to me it's like a lot of times I was the bottleneck as to why we plateaued at 3 million and we're trying to get to five, or we were at five and trying to get to 10. It was it was I needed to kind of shore up where, where, where I was lacking. And then and then, once I got like 80, 20 good at whatever that thing was, then I kind of knew what it was I was looking for to bring somebody in to focus on that piece of the business. Anytime I try to like skip that step. It's like, OK, well, I don't know, I don't know how to build a sales engine, so I'm going to go hire somebody who did sales for my competitor.

Speaker 4:

It's like, well, I didn't run the sales process, so I don't really know what the sales process should look like, but I'm going to hope they do and hope it works out. And like that never has worked out in 25 years of business for me. It's like I needed to like get in the trenches, roll up my sleeves, get, get my hands dirty, do it. Maybe do it half-assed, but at least do it. And then and then and then I know kind of what I'm looking for for somebody to execute it better than what I was doing.

Speaker 2:

I love that so much. Cole and I, we go back and forth on this type of stuff all the time. It reminds me of this Dan Sullivan book, the who, not how, but before you can go ahead and place somebody in that how or who position, right, we always like to try to get our hands dirty so we know exactly what it is that we don't want to do. Right, we spend hours and hours in one direction, just to kind of like being in a maze. Again, you made an amazing video game analogy. I'm a huge gamer, I love it.

Speaker 2:

So, being in a maze and you go ahead and end up and you stop there, you're like damn, I can't move from that position. I got to go back, rewind, figure out another path to be able to get there. And with that, one question I wanted to ask you is when it came to the marketing, you kind of talked about being boots on the ground, going out literally physically handing out flyers. At what point was it that you realized what worked for marketing, and how did that work for you to be able to start going from the whole 100 to a thousand, from a thousand to 10,000? Was it a certain thing that you were missing or lacking, or was it literally just the day in and day out? Relentlessness of just consistently handing out flyers.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, so the it's really good question. So the first thing is is I think the first like a hundred sales, and whatever it is you're doing, should be like belly to belly, hand to hand, combat, you know, hand closing, hand pitching, hand concierge them on, even if you have a digital product like GreenPPal, like over the shoulder Starbucks, here's how you sign up, because then you can see, you know you close the gap on the you as the founder, your logic and the customer logic, because the customer is looking at what it is you do from their perspective and you're looking at it from the founder's perspective and like, believe it or not, they're totally different perspectives. So you want to really get in the trenches with them at the kitchen table and use the product with them. The first hundred, maybe even thousand sales. So that's important to know what it is. Your value proposition is what problems you're solving, what their objections are, what their internal thought sequences are when they're using your product, and then also what it is you're selling, because what you think you're selling is probably different than what they're buying.

Speaker 4:

And so what I mean by that, what happened with us was I thought we were building a system that would deliver the cheapest way to get a grass cutting service. Because I was coming to the perspective from a contractor's perspective. I had ran a landscaping business for 15 years, so I was kind of jaded. Every contractor in any industry thinks that every customer just wants the cheapest price, and so that's what I thought. And so I thought well, we can build this competitive system where a homeowner can sign up, they can get five quotes for lawn mowing. They can hire the cheapest one and they'll save five or $10 a week and they'll be happy. And so that's how we built the first version of the platform. And so then we started passing out door hangers and meeting with people and then getting them concierge onto the platform. And then, okay, I saw you hired somebody. How did it go?

Speaker 4:

The thing we started noticing, looking at that and going through those reps was actually no, it wasn't. They didn't want the cheapest, they wanted somebody for a fair price. They just wanted the guy to show up on the damn day he was supposed to. So it was actually reliability and speed, and push a button and get it done was the value proposition, and it didn't matter if it was any cheaper. Matter of fact, they might pay a little more money to have the convenience of.

Speaker 4:

Hey, I just I go to GreenPowcom, I pop my address in, I've got five quotes. I hire somebody. I know they're going to be there Thursday. Versus I go to Yelp or Angie's List or Facebook Marketplace I still got to dial for dollars. I still got to get quotes. I got to call somebody and I hope they show up and then they ghost me, which happens like half the time, and so they will spend $35 over here or maybe $40 over here.

Speaker 4:

They're not looking for the $20 solution to this problem. They want the reliable, fast solution to the problem. So that saved us from wasting five, ten years of building the wrong thing by getting into the trenches with our customer and understanding that, ok, they just want, they want somebody that's going to show up on time and they want it done quickly. And so that informed the copy that informed how the product was designed. It informed how the workflows of what people do when they interact with the product on both sides, on the consumer side and on the pro side. So getting in the trenches and hand cranking your first hundred or maybe even a thousand sales is important. So then you know like you nail it, then you scale it, then you know, okay, now I'm going to create an inbound kind of strategy around what this core thing it is that we do, cause I know this works I've seen it work a thousand times, cause I've done it a thousand times, now I'm going to scale that and create an inbound strategy.

Speaker 4:

So what we did is a content marketing strategy around every lawn mowing service in every town in America we started off in Nashville, spent three years just in Nashville and then slowly began installing that in every town in the country.

Speaker 3:

Awesome. And there's two things that you're saying that I really want to hit on One. I like how you're emphasizing the timelines, because I think a lot of people listening to this especially people that are thinking about doing a business or growing they like to think it happens overnight. And we mentioned this a couple of times and I love that. You say we spent X amount of years in this place, then we grew, then we spent X amount of years testing this out, because it just takes time. It's just the reality of growth. So I love that we're hammering that. Another thing I'm curious of is in that first kind of bottleneck stage after, when you're going through this first hundred or thousand sales and you start to really see in traction and then you need to just start bringing people on. What did you start with? Who did you start? As, like, the first couple of hires, why did you start with them? And I asked this from somebody that is in that position of like, okay, I'm seeing traction, I'm doing success, but how do I grow? I'm stuck.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, great question. So. So two parts to your earlier point. I wish I could tell you I approached this from this like, uh, like, uh, knowledgeable, uh, venerable, uh standpoint of oh, this is just gonna take time and we have to. You know, like no dude, I thought this was gonna take six months. I thought I thought, okay, I just sold this eight-figure landscaping business. I just sold this eight figure landscaping business and and I, and like I, conquered that little mountaintop. Now, now I want to, like, build a platform that is going to serve thousands of people a minute and that should take six months. That's literally what I thought, and that took four years, and so it wasn't.

Speaker 4:

It wasn't like I thought that that was how I should approach it. That was just the reality of how it unfolded for me, and what kept me in the game and how I managed my own personal psychology and how my co-founders did as well, is we just made a decision, like a personal decision, that, no matter what, we were going to wake up and work as hard as we could on our best idea, and it just so turned out like that was my one good idea you should push a button and somebody should come mow your yard. I don't have any other better ideas. And so that helps with FOMO, like a lot of times, like you know, it's like you see what's going on with you, name it, you know crypto or whatever, and it's like you know, well, did you have that idea? No, you didn't have that idea. So you know you can't have FOMO around that. It's like I didn't have these other ideas. I had one good idea and so we just spent a decade on that idea and executed as hard as we could. Was that okay? Well, you know what are the numbers. We have a hundred people using it. We got to get it to 500 people. What are we going to do to grow that number? Let's not worry about anything else. And so that's how. That's how it unfolded for us.

Speaker 4:

And, and and a lot of times you know, at any business, at any level, you're, you're wearing the hat of capital allocator, and so you got a little bit of money coming in and you got to figure out how you're going to put that money back out to work. And you always got to figure out what is the highest and best use of that capital, that money that that's going to help me get to the next level. And so when you start out, you're doing everything yourself. You're, you know you're writing the content. You're doing customer support, you know you're writing the code and in my case, you're, you're, you're, you're doing the outbound sales calls, you're, you're literally doing everything yourself.

Speaker 4:

And then, as time goes on, you try to figure out okay, I got a little bit of money. What is the thing that I know I can, I can, I can package up and put in somebody else's hands and almost like McDonald's-ize it in a way that somebody else can execute it and follow. My system makes $15 an hour and is going to do it much more thoroughly and better working your system than you can. But it literally took you 100 hours to develop that system. But that's leverage. Ok, how do I, how do I use the little bit of money that I'm making to put it out to work, to get some ROI and then package that with with a system that I've built with that as well?

Speaker 4:

It's not just as easy as calling up an agency and giving them money. That rarely, that rarely has positive economics, and so that's one of the fun things about entrepreneurship. You mentioned at the outset, like you know, the differences in paths versus like a career in corporate America versus entrepreneurship. You know you don't have these things at your disposal and like a linear career in corporate America and entrepreneurship you do. You have this leverage that you can create for your organization, for yourself, in terms of creating systems and using, putting money behind those systems to create more revenue, and then the compounding effect begins to take place. So you're always making those bets and they really are bets and you have to think of them as bets Like this stuff is not chess, it's more like poker. You don't have all the information on the board.

Speaker 4:

You really kind of you only have limited information and so you're making little bets to figure out OK, is there any? Is there any future with this little initiative? Ok, that did show some signs of life. Let's put some more money behind it. And if you can look at it like a game and you can look at it like a video game, it can almost at times, if you squint be fun. At least that's how I've gotten through some moments of it.

Speaker 2:

Oh my gosh, everybody's listening all of our viewers. You know exactly what I'm going to say now. This is that point in the show where I'm like pause, stop, rewind, play this entire thing all the way back, because Brian has dropped so many gems, so many little trinkets of knowledge. It will help you immensely on your journey in entrepreneurship. Now, before we dive into our next segment, I've got another question for you here. You did the 15 years, sold the business for eight figures Awesome. You're here in this role now doing GreenPail. What does the future look like? Because I mean, clearly, once you're done with something, you get bored quickly and you're like I'm on to the next one. So bring us into your world. What does it look like, rather than staying with GreenPel and expanding that to who knows where? Or maybe it's another project, but what are we thinking?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, one thing about the last business I ran was one thing I didn't understand was was that it was personally fulfilling to me because I was growing along with the company's growth. So if you're throwing everything you have into a project, into a business, one thing you'll notice is, like every year or two you become a whole new person and you'll start noticing that like friends you grew up with or people you went to high school or college with, that you hadn't seen in like two or three years.

Speaker 4:

You don't even talk the same way as they do anymore and you're not even interested in the same movies or or music or whatever, like you're not interested in doing the same things that they're interested in anymore and you're like, you're like leaving them behind. It's kind of like one of those sad things, but it's just part of it, leaving them behind. And it's kind of like one of those sad things, but it's just part of it. And and and what that means is that you're you're evolving into a whole new person every year or two because you're challenged by, by all sorts of pressure that these other people aren't exposed to, because they're not like in the trenches running a business, and so the the thing is like that's rewarding at a like, like a human level, like like that's rewarding at like a human level, like I think that's like rewarding and fulfilling to you, and that was to me in the first 15 years running my first company. What happened was was I kind of plateaued on the company growth and plateaued on the personal growth. It wasn't like I conquered the world or anything, but in my little market of Nashville, tennessee, it was like the top three biggest landscaping companies in the state, so it was kind of like the next level was a weird place and I had spent two or three years plateaued and that became unsettling at a personal level and that's what prompted me to explore selling the company. Navigating the exit of that business was challenging in and of itself and so, in a weird way, when the business was acquired I became almost like fascinated with it almost all over again. So that was a strange thing. But sold that Now. Now all that's gone. Then I had this yearning to start another thing, start another thing, and I think if you're giving it your all, you're going to be always fulfilled by that development. And so my point is I haven't hit that plateau with GreenPow yet, because I think technology, just the way it's oriented, is that it's almost endless. It's boundless in terms of the growth and expansion because it can scale. We're serving three, four hundred thousand people. That's several hundred thousand more than I did in my last business, but it's still a drop in the even began to. I don't even know if I'm climbing the right mountain. So it's, it's like it's, it's, it's endless in terms of the personal development and the personal challenges you're going to face. So so I think, so long as I'm intrigued by by that aspect of it. I won't grow tired of it.

Speaker 4:

Now, somebody comes along tomorrow and offers us a billion dollars for this business. I'm not going. I would take that and so and so. It's like it's a balance of. You know, do you enjoy running it? Do you enjoy, uh, getting out of bed in the morning and working on the problems you're working on? Versus what does the ultimate, like financial end goal look like? It's all? There's always a balance there, but you know, for now I'm decently good at it, I'm having fun, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm intrigued by it. I feel like I'm growing personally from it. I'm going to keep doing it.

Speaker 3:

So so good. There's so many more questions I want to ask you, but I think it's time we hit our next segment. Nate, you agree?

Speaker 2:

I agree, I think I think he's ready. We got a surprise for you.

Speaker 3:

All right, Brian, here's what we do. Every episode, we ask every guest the same six questions. We call it our super six, whichever evolves.

Speaker 4:

And so here we go. What separates top performing entrepreneurs? What separates top performing entrepreneurs from like everybody else? Okay, let's think about that.

Speaker 4:

I think your top performing entrepreneurs are always paranoid about what their customers are thinking and what they're thinking in terms of what is it that my customers are experiencing and what is my perception of what they're experiencing is.

Speaker 4:

And so what I mean by that is like this show, undercover Boss.

Speaker 4:

It's always funny, like the CEO of whatever company, dunkin' Donuts you throw them in like a Dunkin' Donuts and he or she doesn't know how to work the donut fryer.

Speaker 4:

And it's like they don't know that all this weird stuff is going on in stores because they've never even been in a store, that all this weird stuff is going on in stores because they've never even been in a store. And so it's like you to close that gap between what your customers are experiencing and what, and what your perception of that is, is you kind of have to like do customer support, you kind of need to like answer the phone at least an hour a week, or something like that. You kind of need to get in the trenches, and, and so I think your best entrepreneurs, even at the outset, are always paranoid about that and I think the ways to combat that is like in the early days cell phone number or the 1-800 number redirects to your cell phone. Support at yourbusinesscom goes to your email inbox. It's like you're doing everything yourself and then, as time goes on, you manufacture yourself to be in the trenches, to to be hands-on on these things. That's one thing that I try to do.

Speaker 2:

So good. What is a daily habit that's contributed to your success?

Speaker 4:

I love that question. I love the book Atomic Habits and, and in the book he talks about like we don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall back to the level, talks about like we don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall back to the level, the level of our habits. And so, and I think a lot of times like business success equates to business habits, and and like what are the routines of the business and what are the things we're like grinding on every day? And so for us it's like goals almost don't matter and for us a habit is, it's like we're always looking at OK, one week at a time, what is it we're trying to do?

Speaker 4:

How many customers are we trying to serve this week and how many, how many pieces of content are we trying to put out there this week and how many you know how many touch points, or how many, or how many new cities we're trying to launch, or whatever it is we don't worry about anything else other than what we're doing this week, and so I think for us a good habit is not really worrying about the big picture too much, but really what we're doing on a daily and weekly basis and then the routines of coming into the office and getting those things done and not just like wondering what happened, is kind of like how we hold ourselves accountable to do it. I heard a good quote the other day I think it was Tim Ferriss, and he said and he might be quoting somebody else, but he said in one of his podcasts was that it's easy to hide behind changing the world. That it's easy to hide behind changing the world. And so what he meant by that was like big, lofty goals with no like really like minute, like tangible action plan, like it's really easy to hide behind that because months and years can go by with no progress on it. But it's not easy to hide behind.

Speaker 4:

I'm going to cold call 100 journalists today because this week we have got to get some PR about our launch in San Diego. We just have to Like we're launching in San Diego. We got to get to San Diego sometimes to cover the launch. So I'm going to call a hundred journalists every week, every day this week, like you can't hide behind that. Either you did that or you did not. And so the goal could be like we're going to grow sales by 75% this year. Okay, what does that even mean? It's like, okay, like what are we doing this week? And so that's, that's one of like the habits, like the daily routines, that that, I think, is gotten us from a hundred people using it the several hundred thousand, so amazing.

Speaker 4:

What is a piece of advice that you would give to yourself if you were starting again? Oh, you know, I think we talked about it is that it just does take a lot longer than you think it does, and that don't do anything, that you're not willing to give a decade to, and so and and and. On top of that, too, I got extremely lucky with my co-founders, and and. So I think a piece of advice I would give cause I cause I almost got unlucky there was another guy that I was going to bring in that at the last minute it didn't work out and he didn't join the business. Thank God he did it, because that probably would have been detrimental to even getting the business off the ground.

Speaker 4:

So so, when it comes to, like, getting started and then co-founders, it's like don't do anything, you don't think you're going to have the gas in the tank to do for 10 years. And I don't mean to say that like just like ingest. No, I mean like a decade. To say that like just like ingest, I mean like a decade. And then the other thing is like, as far as co-founders don't start a business with anybody, that you wouldn't write them a check for $10 million to start the business with you day one.

Speaker 4:

Oh, I don't have $10 million, so that's not a big deal, Well like let's just think, like okay, let's say you had, let's say you had your last $10 million. I'm going to strike you a check for $10 million to start this business, because if you don't have the confidence in that person, or even the desire to give them that money, then don't start a business with them Because ultimately, that equity is going to be worth much more than $10 million. You may raise a round of funding and dilute you by that. Or you may want to go sell the business for $30 or $40 million and their equity is going to dilute you by that. Or you may want to go sell the business for 30 or $40 million and their equity is going to be worth more than that. So go through that thought sequence of would I strike this person a check for $10 million, start this business with me day one. If you wouldn't, then just go it alone. That's not your business, soulmate.

Speaker 2:

Damn, that's good, oh my gosh. So what is your favorite business book?

Speaker 4:

Well, you know, I didn't start reading books about business until I was like 32. I wish I had started when I was 18. And so that was a mistake that I made, but I still try to read a book a month. My favorite business book is still I have not found a better one is Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and it's not necessarily a business book, but there's a lot of lessons in that book about leadership and just being a more effective person and being a more effective communicator and living a more effective personal life. So I try to read that book at least once every couple of years. It's a big book, and if I don't read it, I at least try to have it on the background and audible. So that's my favorite book in general, and I also apply it to my business life.

Speaker 3:

Awesome. What is your favorite part of owning and running your business?

Speaker 4:

I think it's the ability to have like no, no upside, like no unbounded upside, and what I mean by that is, like we talked about earlier like you work on a job, you don't have the ability to create leverage for yourself. You don't have the ability to take parts of your salary and put them to work in your job and create like leverage and as a fulcrum. There you don't just can't do that and and um, even if you're self-employed, it's kind of hard. I mean you kind of you can kind of do it, and most businesses start off as being self-employed, but so part of being like part of my favorite thing about being in business is is for myself, is like this, this, this role of being a general, being a capital allocator, seeing something in the world that does not exist and bringing it to life, and and then and then also in a way like helping people that get in the game with you, get where they're trying to go. So that's been a lot of fun.

Speaker 4:

You know a lot of, a lot of, a lot of the fun of the last 25 years of me running businesses was seeing like people that work with me on the project like literally times make more money than me, which was which was cool. Or in my first business, like I would see like like people rolling up to the to the shop with new cars, and that was always fun. Or buying new houses that was always fun. So there's all kinds of like points of fulfillment in life that you're exposed to, running a business that you would never get. You would never get like running a thing by yourself or working a job. So I think it's one of the most enriching things you can do with your life. Now it does suck a lot of the time, so it's like it's not without its trade-offs.

Speaker 2:

Final question in this segment what is something new that you've implemented that's helped drive your success?

Speaker 4:

Well, you know, it just goes without saying, man. You know, it's like this steroid superpower that we have with AI. Now it's unbelievable how two, three years ago we would do so much damn busy work trying to take massive amounts of messy data and make sense of them or just not do anything with it at all. Now we can take a messy pool of data some in spreadsheets, some in docs, some in fricking post-it notes you name it and put it all together and make sense of it, and we can say, hey, for some reason, in Portland, oregon and this zip code, our sales are down. And here's all the data. Tell me why.

Speaker 4:

Okay, well, I've looked at it and here's 10 ideas. Dude, that didn't exist. Six months ago. You would have to have a data scientist that made 500 grand a year, pour over that for a week, and now you can literally dump all of that into an LLM and it can spit it back to you in a couple of minutes. And so I mean, what a what a time to be alive, what a time to be an entrepreneur, and so that's a lot of that's very exciting for us, and at times it makes me a little paranoid. It's like, damn man, what's five years from now going to look like, but for now it's like it is pretty powerful but for now it's like it is.

Speaker 3:

it's pretty powerful, so cool. Brian, this has been like phenomenal. I don't say this lightly and my other guests are all gonna hate me, but I think this was my favorite episode of all time. There's so many things that you said that I just absolutely love, and it's so cool hearing your story um, starting in lawn care when you were young, putting so many years into this building and scaling that business, and then selling it and then realizing I need a mission, I need a purpose, I need a reason, like what's next? And then you saying that why not me? Like, why not do this other thing? Let's try it? And going through those levels. I still keep thinking that analogy in my head the video games, leveling up, defeating the boss, and the things we talked about the bottlenecks, the nail it before you scale it. So many wise words. So thank you for coming on and I have two final questions for you. One, any final advice for anybody listening to this? And two, where can people find you? Where can people get more info?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, find me anywhere. Find me on LinkedIn, google. My name Brian Clayton. Linkedin is the first thing that pops up. Find me on Instagram greenpilecom, if you need somebody to mow your yard, and then you know final thoughts.

Speaker 4:

You know, at times I've always thought like I have felt this where it's like oh, I missed that, it's too late. Oh, you know, whatever it was when we were first getting started, it was called the gig economy, and and and and and we were starting in 2014 and people were like, oh, you missed it, it's too late. And the reality is, it's like it always gets bigger. It always gets bigger Like the pool, the pie always gets bigger. And you didn't miss it. Like it's not too late.

Speaker 4:

And, and you know, you look back on. You look back on time. Like like, google didn't didn't really get rolling until like 2004. And there was like a dozen search engines until then for like like 10 years. And so it's like like, like it, it, it always gets bigger. It's not too late. Like, get in the game, get started now, because in five years you'll be in a different reality than you are now. You'll be glad you did and if you believe software is going to be around 100 years from now, which I think it will be, then we're only in like year 20. So it's not too late.

Speaker 2:

So good, so good. Brian, this has been an honor, a pleasure, pleasure and a privilege to have you on Forged in Fire. Our house is your house whenever you want to come on back after you create the next I don't know five or six thousand companies and you want to come on back and fill us in and drop some more knowledge, come on in, please.

Speaker 4:

I'd love to guys let's do it, let's do it. I'll check back in with you guys in six months or a year and let you know what we're doing.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I can't wait. Dude, it's going to be a phenomenal, and those that are listening please get home safe If you're traveling. I hope that you guys enjoyed this episode as much as Cole and I did. This has been phenomenal. It's been a great learning experience. It's always great to be able to hear from such wise Everybody.

Speaker 1:

please get home safe. Take care. We're looking forward to seeing you all in the next episode of Forged in Fire. Leave us a review. Your feedback helps us bring more real world insights to entrepreneurs like you. Be sure to join us next time for even more lessons, struggles and breakthroughs on the road to success. Keep forging ahead.