Bootstrapping Business and Developing Your Entrepreneurial Skills with Bryan Clayton

In this episode, host Eric Dickmann interviews Bryan Clayton. Bryan is the CEO and co-founder of GreenPal, an online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. GreenPal has been called the “Uber for lawn care” by Entrepreneur magazine and has over 100,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day. 

Before starting GreenPal, Bryan Clayton founded Peachtree Inc., one of the largest landscaping companies in the state of Tennessee growing it to over $10 million a year in annual revenue before it was acquired by Lusa holdings in 2013.

 Bryan‘s interest and expertise are related to entrepreneurialism, small business growth, marketing, and bootstrapping businesses from zero revenue to profitability and exit.

Eric Dickmann can be found on Twitter @EDickmann and LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/edickmann and my website https://ericdickmann.com

Bryan Clayton can be found online at www.yourgreenpal.com on Twitter @YourGreenPal and Instagram  @YourGreenPal

 Episode Summary: The episode summary can be found at https://fiveechelon.com/bootstrapping-business-develop-skills-s3e16/

If you'd like to contact us with feedback or guest inquiries, please visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/podcast

For more information about Virtual CMO strategic marketing consulting services, visit The Five Echelon Group at https://fiveechelon.com
 
Episode #47

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Transcript

Carla: 0:01

The Virtual CMO podcast is sponsored by the strategic marketing consulting services of The Five Echelon Group. If you’d like to work directly with The Five Echelon Group and receive personal coaching and support to optimize your business, enhance your marketing effectiveness and grow your revenue, visit Five Echelon.com to learn more and schedule a free consultation.

Eric Dickmann: 0:24

Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. This week, I'm excited to welcome Brian Clayton to the program. Brian is the CEO and co-founder of green pal on online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. Green pal has been called Uber for lawn care by entrepreneur magazine and has over 100,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day before starting green pill, Brian founded peach tree, one of the largest landscaping companies in the state of Tennessee growing it to over$10 million a year in annual revenue before it was acquired. I think you're going to love Brian's story today. He loves helping entrepreneurs and sharing what he's learned along his business journey. Hey, Brian, welcome to the virtual CMO podcast. I'm so glad you could join us today.

Bryan Clayton: 1:27

Hey, Eric. Thanks for having me on man.

Eric Dickmann: 1:28

This is exciting, because when we first connected, I got excited about this interview because as an entrepreneur, my first company, if you will, was a lawn service company, I used to have a small business with a few friends and we would mow the lawns of houses that were for sale. So the real estate agents are the homeowners of the builders needed somebody to take care of their lawns. And so we found a unique niche and actually, that was by spending money. All throughout high school. So that was a little bit of my excitement about this interview. I'd love to hear a little bit about your backstory. How did you get to the point where you founded this company today?

Bryan Clayton: 2:06

So that's funny. I hear that a lot. Something about the grass cutting business that is. So many fundamentals. In the lawn mowing business that just apply to all business. And it's kinda cool that you got your start. Mowing grass. I did too. I was drug into entrepreneurship about kicking and screaming by my dad on a hot summer day. Who forced me to go mow the neighbor's yard. He actually helped me do it and taught me how to cut grass rights. And we made 20 bucks and split it. And, I got hooked. I got hooked on owning my own business. I got hooked on entrepreneurship and by the end of that summer, I had 10 or 12 customers and I just kept at it, kept mowing grass as a way to earn extra money. And I kept doing it all through college and studied business in college. And by the time I was 25 years old, I had around 50 employees and I kept that growing that business into one of the largest landscaping companies in a state of Tennessee. Over 150 people,$10 million a year in revenue. And then in 2013, that company was acquired by one of the largest landscaping companies in the United States. And so going from zero to$10 million in revenue, no helpers to 150 people. Was a hell of a journey learning how to build a business. The hard way and to try on air. And, and then when I sold that business, I kinda got bored and wanted to start another one. The idea for green Powell was just very, Obvious to me, because I saw how hard it was for homeowners to find a good lawn mowing service. And so green palette is in a sense that Uber for lawn mowing, if you need to get a grass cutting service, you just jump on green pals app and you'll get hooked up with a good one and less than a minute, and been out this business for seven years. we have several hundred thousand people using it to get their lawn mowed, and we're going to do$20 million in revenue this year.

Eric Dickmann: 3:41

That's an amazing story. And, just to go back to something that you said, which I think is really interesting, so many young people get an experience. As an entrepreneur with a small business, mowing the neighbor's lawn or, the old lemonade stand or whatever. And sometimes that really gives you the bug because you can see putting in a little effort, if you have a good idea, can make a reward in terms of the income that you produce. So what do you think it takes to be a good entrepreneur?

Bryan Clayton: 4:10

Yeah. to that point. Mowing grass. And there's fundamentals there that you're talking about business. it's a relentless focus on the customer. It's a very competitive business. It's one that you have to flat out be better than your competition. so it teaches you to, to understand what our value proposition is. And if you stick with it, it's one that can help teach you systems and processes and routines, because a lot of it is based on the same processes on a daily basis. There's a lot of fundamentals that go into all businesses that you can learn in the lawn mowing business. and so for me, great entrepreneurs, understand that they are working not only in their business, but also on their business. And that's one that took me a long time to figure out the difference between being self-employed and actually having a business. I didn't figure that out until probably year six or seven. I was just working myself to the bone. I was trying to keep this business afloat just through sheer will. And it wasn't until I had an epiphany almost to understand that, okay, I have to take a step back and I have to delegate some time, during the week to work on the business, develop the processes around what it is we're doing or else I'm never gonna make it. I basically figured out that I had just built myself a job. And then I started to really build myself a business. And after about four or five years of doing that, I actually had something. I had something that could run without me.

Eric Dickmann: 5:26

There are a couple of things there I'd like to drill into a little bit more, but, as a business start. So if we take this scenario even further, when you start out in a lawn mowing business as a kid in high school, You're using the lawnmower that your parents bought you and, they probably fill up the gas tank for you. So it's basically pure profit, right? You're going out, putting in a little labor and then receiving a reward for that. But the reality is that most businesses don't work that way. There's an investment that you have to make in your business. And I know that you're a bootstrap business. Talk to me a little bit about what it means to bootstrap your own business and what it really takes in terms of ongoing investment to grow something like you've grown today.

Bryan Clayton: 6:07

Yes for me. My personal philosophy is that bootstrap businesses are the best way to attack growing a business from scratch. And so I feel like a revenue is the best form of financing. There is. It was beaten into my head. as a kid, when I was cutting grass, I would, I had these headphones that I would listen to all day long and I listened to talk radio. And every day at two o'clock, the Dave Ramsey show would come on. And so I was basically about a fault forced to listen to Dave Ramsey, talk for four hours every day. And one thing that at the core of his teaching is building your business debt free living debt-free, using debt as sparingly as possible. And that's how I built that company. I took it from one truck to over 90 trucks that were going out every day. Every one of those vehicles was bought from the revenue that the business generated. And so that was just my ethos, my philosophy on how to build that company. And, it meant a couple things. it meant that I had to move slower at it. It instilled like a sense of discipline and a relentless. adaptability and to how I ran that business, because it had to grow off of its own revenue. So for me, building your business off of its own sales is a good way to force that discipline. It's a good way to always be focused on doing the right things and focus on only two or three things at a time. and it's one that can help you, in a sense, like not make mistakes, because if you take on, let's say, a credit line for$100,000 or$250,000 before you know it, if you don't deploy that capital wisely, not only are you in the same spot you were when you took it, but now you're$250,000 in debt. And so now guess what? You don't have a business, you don't have a job. You got a chain around your neck. And that's something that always scared me. It was something that, I didn't ever want to like, not have to run the business, but I didn't want to. And building a debt-free building it with no outside capital was one that allowed me to always focus on the I always focus on doing things better than our competitors and building a sustainable company. And that was one of the reasons why I was able to get it sold was because it was debt-free.

Eric Dickmann: 8:07

Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO onsulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. when you looked out and you want it to start a new company and you started Green Pal, I don't know about you, but if I drive around my neighborhood on any given day, there will be dozens and dozens of different trucks from different companies, all doing lawn care within the neighborhood. And so looking at that as a potential business venture, I got to say, there's a lot of competition out there. So clearly you looked at it and said, this is both a problem and an opportunity, right? Because there are so many people that are out there doing this, but yet you saw that there was an opportunity to create something in a very specific niche that allowed you to exploit that opportunity. Talk a little bit about what your thought process was there, because I think it's so important for businesses to understand that they have to find that runway. They have to find that niche and they can be successful even in a crowded space.

Bryan Clayton: 9:46

Yes. And you certainly can be. And, for you're exactly right. It's a S it's a hyper competitive business. The barriers to entry are pretty low. And you can, in many parts of the country, you can swing a dead cat and hit five lawn mowing services. Especially like in Florida and Southern California. And so you have to figure out, okay, what is a, not only do I have to do a great job at the service, I have to, do a good job of getting customers and keeping them, but you have to figure out some kind of structural, competitive advantage, some kind of way that you can compete better than your competition is. So for us, one thing that we did was we looked at. what was called route density from day one. we knew that, if we could just get 10 clients on one street, or 10 restaurants on one side of town that we could do a better, more consistent service at a better price than the hundreds of competitors that are services that our customers could call. So that was one, one thing that we've, that we did very early on when we got out of the hustle of just running a business, trying to figure out how we're going to build a company was okay. We can focus on. Being more efficient in our operations and only soliciting and trying to grow our client base who are within like a minute or less drive the existing clients that we have. So we can reduce drive time. We can reduce time wasted that the customer doesn't want to pay for. And we can do a better, more consistent job at a better price than our competitors are doing. So that was one structural advantage that we developed early on in running that business that carried through, through the 15 years of running, it was always have a relentless obsession with operational efficiency and to do it better flat out, just better and more and more reliably than our competitors in our market was.

Eric Dickmann: 11:24

Yeah, that's very interesting. What are the things that I preach to my clients is this idea of reducing friction in your business as a way to provide better customer service and really grow your business and when I looked at what you guys were doing from a purely, from a customer standpoint, what I actually wrote these down, I saw that you were reducing friction in a couple of ways. You were connecting clients with service providers, which can be a huge chore. If there. Dozens of people in the neighborhood who are providing service, how do you even know who to call? because a lot of times they were even working during the day, right? And there are never going to pick up a phone call second, who's the best one. How do you know if a company a is better than company B there's very little way of knowing that I'm helping people understand pricing. what should I expect to pay for this? Because I think everybody just test the waters and see what people are willing to pay, but you help people understand what they should pay. And then the last one was really around. Payments themselves. So many of these businesses. operate by cash. they want to receive a check or something like that, but we all know we're going to a cashless society. People like to pay by credit cards. They like to do things online. So really removing the friction there. does that sound about right where those, some of the key points that you were looking at in terms of developing this business?

Bryan Clayton: 12:41

Absolutely. Yeah, you nailed it. You went down and just hit all of the points of our value proposition. And that was, these were all the problems I saw in the industry running in it for 15 years after selling that company. I thought, okay, I see what Airbnb is doing for accommodations and what Uber and Lyft are doing. And to your point, reducing friction for getting a ride somewhere. And I thought, okay, this green pal needs to exist for this industry because it is fraught with friction. If you need to get your grass cut. You're going to have to dial for dollars and call 10 phone numbers. And leave 10 voicemails and hopefully some of them will call you back and then maybe they might come out and give you an estimate. And then if you hire them, how do you even know they're going to show up on the day they're supposed to, are they going to do a good job? And then how do you deal with the payment? Lee is still people leave a cash under the mat. And it's just, this whole process is fraught with friction. And that is what we attack as a digital service, as a digital marketplace is too, is the reduce and eliminate all of that friction. And so you can literally get done in 60 seconds. What normally would take you hours? you just jump on the app and you'll get quotes from five service providers in your neighborhood. You can read reviews and see what other people are saying about them. Look at statistics about how often they show up on time. We measure all of that and present it to you so you can then hire them. Right off the shelf, like ordering an Uber. And so let's take an a seven years to get there, but that. Vision has almost stayed the same. knowing that's what the problem we were attacking and that's the friction we were looking to resolve. And even to this day, we still searched for the friction. and one, one way we do this, we literally. Use our own service. We sign up for our own service every week to try to identify friction and understand how can we make this easier, more reliable, and faster. And that's one, one, one piece of advice I give to business owners is to do business with yourself. it doesn't matter what business you're in. If you're in the construction company, or if you own a pie shop. Do business with yourself, understand, call the front office, understand where the friction is in your business? because so often we get in the trenches of building companies and we focus. We make every decision from. From company logic and not customer logic. And so we almost have to get in that customer's shoes on a continual ongoing basis to understand what customer logic is because we lose sight of it. And to understand where that friction is.

Eric Dickmann: 14:53

That's such a good point. Customer experience is such a key in today's world, because there are so many companies out there that are setting the standard very high. And if you're not looking at things from a customer's perspective, you can really miss those points of friction that your knee you need to work on as a company to make it a better overall experience. I'm curious too, from your service provider standpoint, there are a lot of businesses out there that I find are penny wise, pound foolish. that they don't accept a credit card because they're worried about paying that small, transaction fee or they don't take Amex because it's slightly higher than a master card, or they insist that you use their personal cash app because they want to go around. the process completely. Did you find most pushback from the providers or the service providers that you're working with to say, now I'm dealing with a middleman. I have to give up some of my income in order to sign up for this service.

Bryan Clayton: 15:49

Yeah, that's a great question. So when you're building a multi-sided market like this, you almost have to customers. We have the homeowners that need to get their grass cut, but we also have to build a product and a platform and a solution to service providers. that literally makes their life better. It has to, or else they won't use it. And if they won't use it, then they're not there to be ordered off the shelf. And so we've over time. I've had to understand, okay, this is, these are the things that the tools that service providers need. these are the things that they're willing to pay for the things that they're not, this is what they care about. Here's what they don't. And over time, you're delivering more value than the transaction fee to use the platform. And also the credit card processing because you're right. A lot of the service providers. Are weekend warriors, maybe they're a teacher or they're a fireman, or they work full time and they mow yards on weekends. And in the afternoons, we probably half of our service providers fit that description is so they're not, they're not very sophisticated in their understanding and love and logic on how they approach business. And they're looking at that dollar or$2 transactional fee and the credit card processing, or like, why do I have to pay this? Then, so you have to over time demonstrate that your platform is making them more money. Than they could otherwise. and so hopefully they come to the arrangement. They understand that I don't have to do bookkeeping anymore. I don't have to send out invoices. I don't have to wait 45 days for my money. I don't have to worry about if I'm going to get paid or not. And over time they're conditioned understand. Yeah, this is the only way to do this. The only way to run my business, because I can just do one thing, which is do a great job of taking care of my customers. I don't have to worry about marketing. I don't have to worry about bookkeeping. I don't have to worry about mailing out invoices. And, and nine out of 10, suppliers, get it. Some don't. but nine out of 10 do, and you're not going to please everybody, but there's the ones that get it. it's our goal to take them from two or three customers to over a hundred in their first year.

Eric Dickmann: 17:43

Oh, that's great. I want to drill down into this whole idea, because I know that you enjoy marketing and you talked about the two big aspects of marketing for your company, where you actually have to market to the homeowners who are going to be engaging with your platform, but you also have to be engaging with the service providers to get them signed up and using the platform as well. So talk a little bit about how you approach those two different ways of marketing. Cause it's two totally different sets of clients.

Bryan Clayton: 18:09

Yes, it's good. Good question. there's a chicken and egg problem that exists in every one of these multi-sided marketplaces. So if you get on Uber and there's no rides available, you're not going to use it. if you're a driver and there's no demand, you're just going to turn it off and delete the app. So there's a nuance to a delicate orchestration between getting both sides of the transaction onto the platform at the same time, especially in the early days. Every market and every city that green power operates in we've had to build from the ground up. And so we spent three years in Nashville, Tennessee, just perfecting the push of button, get the lawn mowed, done a process before we rolled it out to other cities. And so for a long time, we had to really just focus on getting the product right, getting the product experience. And then we started to roll it out to other cities and we developed a little repeatable playbook of okay. When you launch a new city, here's, here are the 10 things you do. the first thing you do is you grind out some PR and you try to get the local media to cover you. So you can attract some people on both sides of the transaction, to the platform. Then you dial for dollars on Craigslist. You call every service provider you can, and you meet with as many as you can and vet them and get them on the platform. And then you start writing content about those service providers. So people searching for lawn mowing services in Tampa, Florida will come across green pile and maybe try it out. So that's just like three of the hundred things that we have to do to develop a city from the ground up. But we understood and develop that playbook, just through trial and error and doing it wrong and figuring out what worked and what didn't and for us, and for me, Growth distribution marketing is table stakes for any entrepreneur, any business like 30, 40% of the bandwidth of the company needs to be focused on growth and user acquisition

Eric Dickmann: 19:52

I know that you've created a really nice website. It explains the value proposition very well. I think there's a little pop-up that comes up and says, you're I'm in Orlando. So it says in Orlando, you should expect to pay X number of dollars for, getting your grass cut. what process did you go through to develop that it's not easy to develop a clear, easy to follow functional website.

Bryan Clayton: 20:14

You're telling me. the first us, so here. So here's how this happened. So I sell, I have a landscaping company doing$10 million a year in revenue, 150 people. I sell that. And I think, okay. I know all of these problems that exist and I'm going to start this app company. And, and here's, I don't know how to code. I don't know how to design software. I don't know the first thing about engineering, but, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pay us a development agency to build it. We'll market it, and we'll be off to the races. So I recruited two co-founders, neither of them knew how to write code. And, we pulled our money together and we spent$150,000 with a digital development agency in Nashville to build the first version. Launched it, and it was a total abysmal flop failure. Nobody used it. it was so disheartening. And we learned very quickly that if we're going to be in the tech business, we're going to have to be able to design build and execute tech. And so we had to go back to the drawing board. We were able to hustle up a few hundred people to use it, just through passing out flyers and stuff like that. And, we met with every one of those people. We listened to their feedback. We understood, okay, these are the problems we're solving. These are the problems we're not solving. this is what they wish it would do. This is okay. This is really our value proposition. We thought it was this. And we baked all of that knowledge into the second version and we built the second version. And so we spent 50 hours a week, like. Trying to learn how to do this and the other 50, like learning how to do it, whether it be online classes. code schools, bootcamps, YouTube videos, podcasts, everything. We get our hands on. We just, Just absorbed it and learned the hard way my co-founders and I, this is how you design software. This is how you market software. This is how you build software. And it took three years, literally. To go from not knowing the first thing about, the tech business to being able to execute and build a web app, a mobile app on Android apps. and how to do things like digital marketing. it took three years to go from zero to being able to get in that game.

Eric Dickmann: 22:15

That's a, that's so interesting because I hear that for many people, that there are real challenges in understanding what is the message that resonates with your target audience? And many times people put a lot of features on their website that they think are their key value propositions, but they're not really what resonates ultimately, with your end customers. So it is a process of trial and error. And do you think that it's where you I want it today, or is it a constantly evolving platform for you?

Bryan Clayton: 22:46

Yeah. sometimes. You look back and you're like, man, we've come so far, but you always have in your head, like how far you have to go. And so like the Jeff Bezos quote, it's always day one, like that's genuinely how I have felt for six years building this business is always felt like day one. It has always felt like it's not. It's not growing as fast as you want it to. and so there's always like a hundred things you want to do. And there's three that you're working on right now. And so to your point, we've got several hundred thousand people using it. We're going to do$20 million this year. Our first year, we, we ended with 12 users and a few thousand dollars in revenue. So we've come a long way, but, we still have a long way to go in the United States, just in terms of mid-level markets and distributing the platform into all the nooks and crannies throughout the country. And it's so like green pal is in the lexicon of the English language. like I'm going to take an Uber to get to the party. your grass is five feet tall. Just get a green pal. And so we are part of that, just like default way to get this done. We're not gonna, we're not going to be finished.

Eric Dickmann: 23:45

So until you are at that point, what do you find is the most effective way to get that message out? Is it through Google my business and ad words? Is it through Facebook advertising? Are you relying solely on organic or using other social media channels? What do you find are the most effective ways to get that message out to your target customers?

Bryan Clayton: 24:04

Yeah. So I think. I feel like every startup, every business. Need be good at one channel? I think you're going to have to throw all of your bandwidth and all of your intensity and effort into executing at one channel. And that might be Facebook ads. It might be Instagram as that might be Google paid, Google ad words. It might be organic search. But, you're going to have to figure that out early and through testing this through trial and error to understand, okay, what is the channel that I need to almost bet the company on for us? We did. We bet the company on organic search in the early days. Mainly because our customers are early, adopting users were telling us that okay. After I have. Asked friends and family for recommendations. I've asked somebody at church I've tried to get the neighbor to get to tell me who he's using. And I've left all these voicemails as a last case resort. I'll type in the Google lawn mowing services near me. And, that's who we knew we wanted as a user, as a person who's ready to hire the person. Who's exhausted all the other options and they'll try something new that's who we want. And so we understood that. Okay. We want to be where that person is looking when they type that in. And then we were confronted with the Reality of to execute an organic search is daunting. It's really hard. And we started to unpack that and started to understand how to execute it, organic SEO and all of the inputs that go into doing well in that channel and, and got to work. We got to work on developing great content. We got to work on doing outreach for backlinks, from. From the media. we just got to work at it and SEO is a tough channel because to me, I liken it like, like dieting, almost like the first month of dieting. It's like a leap of faith. Like you're not seeing any results. And you're doing all this hard ass work and you want to give up because you're not getting any kind of results. searched is just the same way, except for it's longer. It's six months to a year of grinding out all of the inputs that go into executing a search and then you start seeing, okay. Wow. I'm ranking for some keywords, not the ones I want, but I'm ranking for some, I'm getting some traffic and I can see if I did this for five years, I might have something. And so that's really the journey we went through.

Eric Dickmann: 26:11

When I would imagine that for a business like yours, you've also got some additional challenges out there because there are other search tools that might not apply to other businesses, maybe like an Angie's list or a NextDoor app or something like that, where it's more homeowner focused, where they are searching for recommendations and referrals from other neighbors and whatnot that they might not know. are those part of a strategy as well?

Bryan Clayton: 26:37

so as far as marketing the platform on those bigger plat on those bigger

Eric Dickmann: 26:41

Yeah on other platforms, right?

Bryan Clayton: 26:43

Yeah. Yeah. I mean that now that is a good strategy for any business. you got, you want to look for the big networks and try to piggyback them so it could be Craigslist. It could be somebody big, like Angie's list, certainly Facebook. and so you always want to do that. You always want to look at what other big networks already in place, so I can attach to them. for us, it's a little nuance because those are connecting somebody looking for a lawn mowing service, with maybe two or three lawn mowing services who are paying for that lead, who are paying for that introduction. and so that is not really how we're situated. We're not building a better lawn mowing service. We are building the platform that makes the whole lawn, knowing industry runs smoother. And for us to compete in that channel, it'd be like, okay, am I hiring GreenPal to mow my yard? Or am I hiring somebody on green pal? And so it gets a little confusing. the dynamics of those platforms. I've never worked for us, but where we do, insert ourselves in a conversation is on Facebook. is on Google organic search. It is places like Instagram, where you might be asking for recommendations on Facebook and Facebook groups. I need a good lawn mowing service and that's where we try to put Green Pal in that conversation

Eric Dickmann: 27:50

How important are customer reviews to the success of a service like Green Pal.

Bryan Clayton: 27:55

critical. and from a micro in a mid, standpoint. reviews or like in like internal reviews in terms of capturing reviews from homeowners that use a lawn mowing service, those are absolutely critical in terms of surfacing the good providers and demoting and expelling the bad ones. And so we rely on qualitative reviews. as a river of feedback to understand, okay, this is how we tweak our algorithm to recommend these four or five service providers over these ones. And so internally reviews are table stakes. Now externally in terms of, you've never heard of Green Pal, your grass is four feet tall. you come across this website. Sure. Sounds great. But, do I want to put my credit card in this thing? Let me Google some reviews about green pal. And so then you come across things like Trustpilot you come across the better business Bureau, the Google store app store, and all these places where reviews are being a mast. And if it GreenPower is a platform isn't being spoken about, there, then you may not try it. And For us, we have to build the system and build the process of the software in such a way to collect those reviews internally. And then people who like to use the service. we try to nudge them and encourage them to talk about it on some of these places on the internet, where reviews are being collected.

Eric Dickmann: 29:10

I know that you spend a lot of time as well, coaching and mentoring, other entrepreneurs, sharing, some of the trials and tribulations that you've gone through. As we come to the end of our interview here today. if there were one or two pieces of advice that you could give a young company, that's just starting out from the lessons that you've learned as an entrepreneur. What could you distill it down to?

Bryan Clayton: 29:34

Yeah. this is from my standpoint, this is from my building to businesses to eight figures. it's like having that necessity is the mother of invention dynamic in your business. So it's. Is financing the business off of its own revenues. It's having that operational discipline. It's like the movie, the Martian where Matt Damon stuck on Mars. Like he has to be creative. He has to be innovative with how he got himself out of that situation. Cause because he had no other options when you're self-funding your business, it's the same thing. It forces you to be innovative if forces you to be excellent at your business. And so that's one. Piece of advice I give. And then the second piece is Focus on your circle of influence and not your circle of concern. That's a tidbit from seven habits of highly effective people by dr. Stephen Covey talks about you have this circle of concern. So right now that could be like the presidential debates. COVID, all of this crap going on in the ether that really isn't is of no concern to you, but it's clouding your judgment and then you have your circle of influence. Just a little circle right. In the middle of all that. And that's the place where you can act. And so if you focus on that circle was like, okay, what are the three things I can do this week? That I don't want to do if I'm honest, because I would have done them already, but what are the three things I can do this week? that can move the needle forward. And so for us, like in the early days, one of those things was okay, let's just call our service providers. Let's get them on the phone. Let's see if they like using the service, what don't they like about it? And then while we got them, let's write a thousand word bio about their business and put it on their profile page. Maybe Google might rank it. I don't know if any of this is going to work, but it's in our circle of influence. Let's act in that circle.

Eric Dickmann: 31:16

I think that's great advice. And I have to say that I'm really so impressed with a lot of what you've said here today, in terms of how you've grown your business. the fundamentals that you put in place. and just this whole idea. And, when I first came into this interview, I was looking at this guy, Brian, he owns this landscaping company, but you are a technology company and you've referred to that over and over again during today's interview that you are a technology company or an app development company. And, that has been very insightful to me in just the way that you look at your business. Where can they find out more about you and Green Pal?

Bryan Clayton: 31:50

Maybe you're busy. Building your business. You don't have time to cut your grass. Maybe your grass is four feet tall and a, you don't call a bunch of people and leave a bunch of voicemails. Just download Green Pal and the Play store or App store. Enter your address and your email address. That's it. And you'll get hooked up with a great lawn mowing service and less than a minute.

Eric Dickmann: 32:06

Brian. That's great. I will make sure to link all of that up until the show notes so that people can find you. I really appreciate your time today and sharing the story of Green Pal.

Bryan Clayton: 32:15

Right on. Thanks for having me on.

Eric Dickmann: 32:19

Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.