Bryan Clayton is a former lawn mower turned landscaping entrepreneur.
Back in 1998, when Bryan was still in college, he started mowing lawns on the side to make a little money. Not one to settle for a little success, he decided to turn his lawn mowing into Peach Tree Landscaping and he spent the next 14 years scaling it to a team of 150 and $10 million in revenue, until he sold and exited the company in 2014.
Today, Bryan is the CEO and Co-Founder of GreenPal, the Uber for lawn care, which he founded in 2014 and has grown to almost 200,000 active users and over $20 million in annual revenue. GreenPal is nationwide in the US and will soon be expanding into Canada.
In this conversation, we discuss:
– Why you need to be willing to do things that don’t scale
– Marketplace disintermediation (and what it means to Bryan as the CEO of GreenPal)
– How business is simply an extension of your day to day life
Now, let’s hack…
Bryan Clayton.
Highlights from the interview
- [05:13] Bryan explains how he looks at business like a video game, which has contributed to his success. Like video game levels, the skills you need at one point in your business might differ substantially from what you’ll need later on, and day-to-day tasks can evolve over time to look very different.
- [08:45]: “If you’re starting a business from scratch, it’s an extension of you.” It becomes a big part of your personal identity, and a big component in where you want to go in life. This element can help you stay focused on the big picture, so you don’t get bogged down in details.
- [11:04] Working with a sales coach enabled Bryan to really accelerate and move his business forward. He still works with a number of consultants and freelancers for things like PR. Bryan recommends that if you can get a bit of revenue coming in, working with an expert consultant can be a smart move.
- [23:49] When you go into any tech-based business, like GreenPal, it can take a few years for you to really form and understanding of the nuances surrounding the industry you’re serving. It can even be worth working in an industry for a couple of years first to learn the ins and outs, before starting your business. One business owner that Bryan coached went and worked in the pizza industry for about two years before starting his own SaaS product for pizzerias. This gave him a firsthand understanding of the processes and systems involved in the pizza business.
Resources and links from the episode
- GreenPal
- A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life, by Donald Miller (available on Amazon)
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