The Uber of Lawn Care: Bryan Clayton’s GreenPal Story

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast, From the Ground Up, where we interview startup founders exploring their journeys, their success, challenges, and lessons learned. We hope to be inspired in discovering what it takes to build a thriving startup. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, and excited to have with us today Bryan Clayton, founder of GreenPal, a bootstrap startup that went from no revenue to 30 million in annual revenue and growing. Bryan, welcome to the show.

Bryan Clayton: Jake, it's great to be on your show. Thanks for having me.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. So Bryan Clayton isn't just another CEO. He's a visionary and ground- and a groundbreaker as the mastermind behind GreenPal, an innovative online marketplace dubbed the Uber of Lawn Care by Entrepreneur magazine. He's revolutionizing the way homeowners connect with local lawn care pros, boasting over 200,000 active users. GreenPal pulses with thousands of transactions daily, a testament to Bryan's knack of understanding the market needs. But there's a twist: GreenPal isn't Bryan's first rodeo. Before this digital marvel, he birthed Peachtree Incorporated, transforming it into one of Tennessee's landscaping giants. Under his leadership, it soared to an impressive 10 million in annual revenue, ultimately catching the eye of LUSA Holdings, which was acquiring it... which acquired it in 2010. Incredible story, Bryan. Um, as I understand the landscaping industry, and correct me if I'm wrong, is a 90 billion...  

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, that's right.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: It's huge. That said, that's a huge market. And I think for a lot of people [who] don't really understand what the opportunity is, could be: how did you get into landscaping initially? Just curious.

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, yeah, you're right. It's, it's a huge, huge industry. You wouldn't think it'd be a 900 billion dollar industry, but it's, it is that big. And, and I think there is uh there's correlation between the least glamorous and the least uh sexy the idea or the industry, the greater your chances of success. And that certainly has been my case. Uh I actually started mowing grass in high school as a way to make extra money. Stuck with that lawn mowing business all through high school, all through college, and over a 15-year period of time I was able to build it into a real business, a real company, eventually getting it uh over 150 employees, uh eight figures a year in revenue. And then it was acquired, uh acquired by a national company, a big national outfit that had thousands of employees. And then after that I took some time off and got bored and thought "what am I going to do now?" And that was where I came up with the idea of GreenPal. And, and decided to start a tech company and kind of had to reinvent myself.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it was a, it's a question I'd like to ask: how do you go from lawn care to technology? Kind of walk us through that. Because if you're, if you're not a computer science engineer or you don't have a technology background, for a lot of people it's about "what's a business opportunity and then how do you apply technology to that?" But first you have to be able to, to build a product. So kind of what was the transition from going from lawn care to technology?

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, I was kind of solving my own problem. Uh you know, I spent 15 years growing a landscape company and I saw every day how inefficient it was for a homeowner that just needed basic lawnmowing services to connect with a solid service provider. And then I also saw how challenging it is as a, as a lawn mowing professional to make a living in that industry. It's, there's a lot of things that makes it, make it a lot harder than it should be. And so I thought a technology-based platform could solve these problems for both sides of the transaction. So I kind of had the industry knowledge, the scars I guess you could say, and, and, and that was all I had going for me because I didn't know the first thing about how to build a tech company. I didn't know how to write code, I had never built a website or anything like that before. Um neither had my co-founders.

I recruited two co-founders to start this business with me and the three of us were kind of three hustlers, but we didn't have any hackers. Ideally you get a hustler and a hacker hacker together and it's a match made in heaven. But we were just kind of three uh motivated uh people that wanted to, wanted to build something big. And, and we, I guess we figured that we would learn whatever we had to learn as we went, and that's kind of how, how it happened. We, we first started by, by trying to pay a dev shop to build what we thought GreenPal should be, and that was a total flop. It was a waste of about a year and all of our money, about $150,000. And then we had, we learned the hard way that "hey, we're gonna have to learn how to build software, we're gonna have to, to go to YouTube University and take every online course we could get our hands on and learn how to code." And, and, and we did that and, and rebuilt the whole platform. And over a three-year period of time uh got the skills we needed and, and got the platform rebuilt.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Three years is not a short amount of time, a lot of investment of time and energy and money. How do you even start looking for engineers? Because there's a lot of people out there that might have a product idea, they might have an industry expertise in some field. How do you go about finding people that can build a product that you're trying to create?

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, I think it's, it's a tough question because you know, how do you... and I, and I dealt with this, I, I, I wanted a technical co-founder but I didn't know any coders, I didn't know any developers, and I didn't know anybody that knew, had these skills that I needed. So I had to become an engineer. So I think that can work, you know, if you're sufficiently motivated, you can learn the 80/20 on, on what it takes to code up a website and code up a mobile app. It might take you a few years like it did me, but that's certainly um a, a great way to do it. Because then you're in a position of authority in terms of how to delegate. Anytime I've ever tried to delegate something that I didn't have the acumen around, I didn't have like the 80/20 understanding of, it's always blown up in my face. You want to delegate from a standpoint of stewardship and not of from abdication. Like "you handle this, I don't know how, I don't know how to do it, you handle it." That's always blown up in my face.

So becoming a, not a great engineer but a good, good enough one uh, then put me in a position where I could recruit other developers to our cause. But that wasn't until year four or five uh did we start hiring uh devs to help us and kind of plug them into what we were doing by hand. Um and, and you know, we went to places like Upwork and uh and, and job boards and things like that and kind of got tapped into that community. And then kind of, kind of went growing out from laterally from there. But uh, but had we not learned how to build software ourselves, I don't know that we could have ever been [in] a position to ever delegate it effectively. Some people do, but, but it, we tried and it, and we spent all of our money doing it and wasted a year of our time.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I want to go back to the company before you started GreenPal. The landscaping business, that's everywhere. I mean, if you have trees, shrubs, lawn, um there's an opportunity to go work and, and figure out how to pay the bills and potentially how to build a company. When I was in high school, one of my good friends created a landscaping business in high school. Paid him so well he was making more than his parents and ultimately he built that into a significant company really serving corporate entities in Silicon Valley: Apple and IBM and these big you know enterprise-wide uh agreements. How did you take your company from doing lawns initially to growing it to acquisition?

Bryan Clayton: Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Walk me through that a little bit because I think that kind of sets a foundation to kind of where you went from there to where you're at today.

Bryan Clayton: I love that story of the blue collar millionaire uh like you just described. I mean that, that, those, those are fun stories. Man, and I saw a lot of this as I was building my landscaping business, that, that uh the guys with dump trucks moving dirt around had tons of cash and were buying real estate and farms and, and, and doing all sorts of interesting investing and investing in other businesses and stuff. Like these blue collar millionaires were actually like better businessmen than, than the guys that wore suits every day uh is, is kind of what I saw. And that was inspiring uh when I was growing up in the business.

And, and I guess it was maybe year five or six that I started to tr- really try to wrap my head around, "okay I'm, I think I'm in business but I'm really just self-employed and, and how do I, how do I get out of that quadrant, get, and get a business built where, where, where it maybe could, it ultimately run without me?" And that took like two or three years of taking the business I had down to the studs and rebuilding it from the inside out: building in systems, building in processes, um you know building in standard operating procedures. Really working on the business and getting out of working in the business. Um the, the book The E-Myth by Michael Gerber is one of my favorite books and after I read that book I, I was like "yes this makes sense."

And then there was a third thing that kind of dovetailed from that, was working on myself. So you're doing those three things at all times if you're trying to get out of the self-employed paradigm and into the business ownership paradigm, is you're working in the business, you're working on the business, and then you're working on yourself. You know, what are the, what are the leadership classes I need to be taking? What are the books I need to be reading? What are the, you know, what are the, what are the conferences I need to be going to to level up? I think every small business reaches a choke point um of, of the founders' capabilities, of, of what their skill sets are. And that was a uh a learning curve for me. I had to like look at myself in the mirror and said, "I haven't evolved and grown in the last couple of years. I've got to level up to take this business to the next level." But that's, that was what made it challenging and made it rewarding. And, and if you're doing business right, you should evolve into a whole new person every two or three years. You should be unrecognizable to yourself, you know, five years uh growing and pouring your soul into a business.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, they say when you stop learning, you stop leading. So evolving who you are and what you do and what's in your industry expertise that you want to have, you don't have. I mean you learned how to code and, and program which I think is very inspiring. Um a lot of, a lot of big challenges to tackle there, but ultimately it's improving yourself and I think that's really a great, great trait to have. Um so you, you kind of got the foundation of the industry and then going to GreenPal and building out this platform, walk us through that business model so we understand for the listeners, what exactly is it, how does it work, and, and what's the process of getting started if you want to use your app?

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, so it is a managed marketplace. So we connect buyers and sellers and we kind of modulate the exp- experience to where a homeowner can just jump onto the app, put their address in, and they get quotes for a basic lawnmowing service. And then they can read reviews, look at the stats around how often they show up on time and things like that, and hire the, the right pro that they want to work with. And then they come out, uh take a picture of the yard after they're done, they upload it. And if everything looks good, you just push to pay and then you push another button to set it up for the whole season and it just happens uh like clockwork in the background. You don't have to worry about it anymore. And as a, a pro, you, it's one operating system for you to run your whole business. You just plug in, now you get all the customers you, you need uh are sent to you you know via a text message. You can quote the lawns you want to work with, and then uh everything is handled in one place for you: all of your route, all of the stops that you have to go from date- from place to place, and all of your CRM. You know, who are these people? Uh what is their contact information, what are their preferences? Um you know, what's their schedule look like? All of these things are handled in one platform for you. And then the marketing automation: after you get done with that first mowing, we, we then nudge the homeowner to book ongoing services and add on other services like shrubs, fertilizer, gutters, snow plowing if you're up north. So it really is like a bo-, a business in a box. And that's why we do what we do. We really want to help these service providers grow their business uh you know, get a better livelihood on our platform than they could otherwise.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: What's the mission behind the product?

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, yeah, the mission is, is, is really simple. It's to, it's, it's to make lawn care professionals more money with less headache. To literally improve their lives, to improve their livelihood. We, we have 32,000 contractors that use the business to, to use the platform to run their business and we take that very seriously. Uh this is how they put their kids through school, this is how they make their mortgage payment, this is how they are trying to achieve whatever goals they have in life. We help them get there quicker. So that's, that's all we optimize for. Every decision we make is, "okay, is this in the long term going to make vendors more money? Is this a good thing for vendors?" Because we believe uh when we solve for the vendors' needs, they love to use it, then we have a, a, an experience for consumers to then order them off the shelf so to speak. Like you could order something on Amazon, you can order a lawnmowing service because they're, they're on the platform, they're engaged, they're running their whole business through it. And they have to love it and they have to be getting value from it. Their life literally has to be made better by it or they're not going to use it.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I understand where uh it's, you're defined as like the Uber for lawn care because if you're an Uber driver you don't have the clients, you don't have the systems and you don't necessarily have the, the, the revenue model in place either. So if you're part of their program, you have a business, you can support a family, you can you know do things maybe on the side of your current full-time position. So it's almost like a business platform for landscapers to really help optimize their own business and hopefully scale it up, and ultimately everybody kind of wins in that equation if, if I'm hearing this right.

Bryan Clayton: That's right. Win-win-win. You know, the, the vendor wins because they got a customer and they're, and it's a profitable customer and they're getting paid on time. Consumer wins because their grass was 4 feet tall, they were ghosted by three other contractors, and now somebody came out and took care of it. And the platform wins because we take a small transactional fee for all of the transactions on the platform. And so it really has to be a win-win-win for it to work. And you're right, it's kind of like Uber in that sense of, let's say you want to make money giving rides. You don't know "what's the first thing I'm going to do to build a, a car service?" I wouldn't even know where to start. Or like a Chinese restaurant wanting to deliver uh food um and they don't have couriers, they don't have an online POS, they don't have their menu on an app somewhere. So DoorDash handles that for them. Um and so we're kind of oriented like a lot of these other multi-sided marketplaces where we really enable the consumer to have a, a crisp, seamless, frictionless experience, but also suppliers and a way to make more money, have a better livelihood and, and do and, and get more profit with less headache. If we can't solve that, then we don't have the, the experience for consumers.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You're tackling two markets. One, getting the contractors on board your platform and building that marketplace. As well as the consumers that get visibility about how to find you and how to use your product. And ultimately connect those two. It's challenging to build a business, but to build a marketplace I think is twice as challenging. What, what's been some of the insights you've learned as you've built this company, again, how long have you been building the product?

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, we're, we're a 10-year overnight success. And to your point, it, it is challenging. Marketplaces are tough because they're like four-dimensional in a way. Um if you're building a traditional business like my first company, a landscaping business, it's, it's kind of linear. You know, "okay, if I do X, Y and Z, I I I, I'll make some progress and I know if I just put in these inputs I'll eventually get to the output." But building a marketplace is not like that. Building a marketplace is, is like you're a, you're a farmer and you're just cultivating a little over here. And you know, "okay," then you wait a while and then you see what happens over here. Like there's no like, there's no real easy way to connect the dots and get from, from one end, one end to the other. You really have to experiment and tinker with, "okay, if I, if I raise um, if, if I raise the pricing a little bit over, over here, what happens to this cohort of customers, you know, a year from now? Or if I change this rule in the marketplace..."

Uh like right now we have a rule where, where if a vendor doesn't show up on time you know uh three times in a row, they're then demoted in the platform. Uh so, so what happens if we change that? Does that, does that mean that there's not enough vendors, not enough liquidity? And then homeowners aren't getting enough quotes and then they're not happy and so on and so on? It's all of these little, little things you can tinker with and, and it's a never-ending experiment. Um we have a mantra we live by that "action produces information." It's a quote by Paul Graham and, and we, we try to remind ourselves of that every day, that we're just going to do this one little thing and then we're going to get some information and see if it worked, and then we're going to double down on it or try something else. Building a marketplace is a lot like that. It's, it's a never-ending continuous experiment.

And, and in particularly like a local based marketplace like ours, where we connect buyers and sellers at a local level, uh we, you know we basically have 50 different individual businesses in the United States, maybe even a hundred where every one of the cities is its own uh network, it's its own flywheel, its own, its own atomic unit. And we have to like monitor that. "Okay, we don't have enough vendors in Seattle, we need to run a campaign to recruit more there," or "we have too many in, in Tampa, Florida, we need to stop letting people on there." You're always monitoring supply and demand. So it's a never-ending orchestration and, and that's what makes it fun.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Where's the biggest investment go back into the company to build the business?

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, you know, it's uh, right now it's, it's, it's "how do we get to a million users?" We, we, we have 300,000, we're trying to get to a million. We want to get there in a couple of years. And so what do we, you know, do we do more of what already works, or do we try new things you know? And so a lot of times as a, as a founder you're wearing the hat of a capital allocator. Uh you, you, you're, you're getting money coming in and you're putting money back out to work and you're making little bets. Yeah, starting a business is not, not like chess, it's like, it's like poker. Uh you literally are just making individual bets you know based on what you see and you, you know, with the best knowledge you have available to you. Um but, but you don't have all the inputs on the board like you do in chess. And so that's, that's, that's what it's like uh running the business at this stage of the game, is, is really putting on the hat of a capital allocator and figuring out, "okay, we're going to put some more money in the SEO, but we're also going to make these 10 experiments on these 10 other channels and see if we see any other signs of life in any of them." We're experimenting with good old fashioned direct mail, like snail mail. You know, like when a customer signs up and they use it one time uh and we send them a postcard in the mail, does that help bring them back in? So we're always experimenting with, with ways to get more customers and, and to put the product in the hands of the people that need it when they need it. Uh but for us our bread and butter is organic SEO. You know, we, we have tried to carpet the internet with our content so when people are looking for a lawnmowing service they're connected with our platform and then we connect them to one of our vendor partners.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I like the fact that it's about continual experimentation and A/B testing and trying new methods and, and you never know what's going to stick or work.

Bryan Clayton: That's right.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I think it's always something you have to keep thinking about. You can't get complacent. How do you drive the business forward? How do you optimize it? All those things I think are important. When you first started the business and where it's at today 10 years later, what's one of the, the, the challenges you didn't anticipate or one of the biggest issues that you had to overcome that you didn't think about before you started building this type of business?

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, there was several. Um, the first thing right out of the gate that really caught me by surprise: I thought that because I, I was coming from a contractor mindset, I thought that the contractor side of it would be super simple. Because I was always in this competitive environment where it was dog eat dog and, and I was always trying to beat my competitors to the punch and sometimes they would beat me. And it was very fierce. And so I thought that the supply side of this, of this equation would be super simple. That, that contractors would be begging for this work and that they would show up on the day they're supposed to and that they would do a great job and that, that, that there would be no issues around, around that side of the, of the market, marketplace. And uh and after we launched it, you know, there's like a hund-, there's 100 reasons why it stinks to hire a lawnmowing service and, and, and, and there's a hundred things that can go wrong. And then, and I came to realize everything that sucks about hiring a lawnmowing service is now my problem. I have to solve every one of them as the platform.

And, and no, actually the lawn guy doesn't show up. And, and he is kind of flaky. And he will quote your yard and say he'll be there on Thursday and doesn't, doesn't even think to show up on Thursday. And so I have to build a platform that solves all these problems. And uh that was really challenging, I didn't anticipate that. Um, and so that was one thing. And then the other thing that, that nobody told me about is that when you're starting a tech company, most of the time you're inventing a brand new product from scratch that does not exist. You are bringing something new into the world that nobody knows about. Nobody knows how to use it, nobody knows it exists. And that's a lot harder than just building a, a traditional business. Building a landscaping company or a construction company or a restaurant or whatever, it's, it's a lot harder because you're inventing something new. And, and that was challenging. And it was like "if you build it, they will not come." Uh you have to figure out ways to get people aware of this product you're building. Uh and the actual distribution of the product is harder than, than building it was in, in the first place. So those were things that caught me out by surprise that were, you know, you got to get through those levels of the game. And that might have been the first three levels maybe, uh but once we got over and we got a little momentum going in a way, it kind of became a little easier and it became a little more fun. And like every level of the game has got its own final boss, and, and the, the trick is to not worry about Bowser uh because you're not on level 10 you know. To worry about what level of the game you're on and just do everything you got to do to get to that level.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: 90 billion dollars is a big industry. Uh technology hopefully helps that sector as, as you know technology continues to evolve. Who's your biggest competitor in this space?

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, it uh it's a good question. Um so the biggest competitor is the status quo, is, is ah, people doing it the old way, the hard way. Work for home services [is] kind of where uh food delivery was in 2009. In 2009, if you wanted uh some General Tso chicken, you would uh probably call the Chinese restaurant. And if they offered delivery, they would bring it out to you. Um maybe you might do an online search and maybe you might get hooked up with Grubhub, and you might try Grubhub out, and it may work out or not. Well, that's where we're kind of... nowadays, we've got three different, four different options. You got Uber Eats, you got DoorDash, you got you know all of these ways you can instantly order Chinese food and get it brought to you in 20 minutes. Um home services is kind of where food delivery was in 2009. In the sense that people still do it the old way. They still do it the hard way, even though there's options available to them to do it easier. And so we're, we're still in the early stages of educating the masses that "hey, you can do this as easy as you order groceries on Instacart." Um so the biggest competitor is the status quo.

Now that said, uh let's say you're you, you do it digital. You're the type of person that you want to try to use an app to get this done. Um there's, there's a bunch of places you can go for names and phone numbers. Um you can go to Angie's List, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, even Craigslist. Facebook Marketplace is a good, is a good one where you can get names and phone numbers of, of as many lawn mowing services in your town as you want, and maybe you can read reviews about them and look at some photos or something. But you still have to manually poll these people. You still got to call them, you still got to send out a, a request for pricing, you still have to like leave voicemails, and you have to manually check their pricing and manually check their availability, and then make a hire in the manual way. And then when you go to pay them, you still got to like negotiate on the price and like send them a Venmo or a check or something. And so it's still very manual from that way, from that point forward.

Um and then, so then, so let's say it's that aside, then you've got a couple of options uh where you can push a button and get it done. Uh there's a company called LawnStarter um that, that is, is running a similar type service. But they're more in the oriented in the way of they are your landscaping company. Uh they are like a digital landscaping company and then they subcontract the services. But at least you can go to their website and order services without making a phone call. But our platform is the only one where you get hooked up with local lawn mowing services that you work with through our platform, and you can hire and fire them, you can try different ones out. It's a digital way to do the, the, the old process. And, and we're not looking to be your landscaping contractor. We're just the marketplace where you can buy and uh and order from them in a much easier way than you could otherwise.

So in a sense that there's no direct competitors, but the main competitors are the, the ways that people are still getting this done. And, and unfortunately it's still "dial for dollars," voicemails, text messages, emails. "Hey you owe me for last week." "No I paid you." "Uh well no, no that was for the week before that." "No it wasn't. Look, see, I paid you here." "Uh no, uh no that was for that week before that." Like, like literally that conversation still happens. So it's our job to solve all those problems and, and make it to where you just push a button, it's done, you don't worry about it.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: It's funny you say that because my next-door neighbor has a lawn service that comes every, every couple weeks. And I hear the same conversations you're talking about right now um you know: "Hey, uh sorry I wasn't here when you arrived," uh "I paid you for last week, right? So... or last month, and are we all good with the numbers?" And you know look, at the end of the day you're doing the work, you should get paid when you do the work, not have to worry about tracking down, collecting. Which I I don't know a lot of people realize, but you know, if you're already doing the work and then you have to hope you get paid, that's a challenge, that's not fun. So I can understand as a contractor, hey if a platform gets me paid right when I do the work, I'd love that. And as a consumer I don't also want to have to haggle about the pricing every time a new shrub is cut, right? Or you know, "should I pay, should I tip now, do I need to tip, like what's the number?" And if there's an option to tip I'd love to do it, but kind of like Uber, you know, the expectation [is] you get in the car, you get from point A to point B and there's not a lot of haggling, it's just relax, have a conversation, get to your destination and everybody feels good about it. So I, I love what you've created.

Um as you kind of go forward, you know, there's so many different aspects of technology that's being disrupted with AI today. Um having started your company 10 years ago and seeing where AI is today, is there any integration with AI currently, do you see that as being a benefit to your platform? Walk me through that a little bit.

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, it's incredible. Um I, I think it's going to be an, an equalizer. Uh it's going to help, it's going to help people compete more on a level playing field, I think even at the individual contributor, worker level. Um it's amazing, it's amazing. I, I, I wonder what five years looks, looks like from now. For us, um, we use, use the hell out of AI for, for several things. Better matching, uh better, better fraud detection, um better uh better signaling around who, who's doing well and who's not in on the platform and promoting and demoting vendors. We use it for uh service descriptions. Like um you know if you want to order a, a shrub m- a shrub pruning, what does that include, what does it look like? So we can offer like a, a customized uh uh description to, to an individual user and not have to send them some bo-, boilerplate thing. Um you know, if, if I had had AI day one, I probably could have saved two or three years and, and maybe a dozen different hires.

So it's, it's amazing to, to see what we have today and what we're going to have in three or four or five years. Do we worry about it like displacing what we do? That's, that's one reason why I went back... I go back to like, the least glamorous your, your, your industry, the least sexy your, your idea, the, the better your chances of success. Um you know, until we get like uh what is it, Molly the Maid from The Jetsons uh who clean the house, you know until we get her, I don't, I don't know that I'm going to be worried about robots mowing yards. Um so, so we're a ways off from that. But it does help us move quicker. And it does help us solve problems for, for users of our platform a lot more seamlessly rather than relying on like guessing and just "good enough." AI helps make it magical in a way um and, and anticipate issues before they happen. So we're, so I think we're in the first inning uh of, of what this is going to do for every tech startup and everybody needs to be thinking about it.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, you know, it's interesting, even our company. You know, we are in the business of helping you know place people with organizations, we work with startups, they get funded, we help them scale. And you know, we utilized AI you know five years ago, and as it's gotten better our systems have got improved and optimized. And now you know companies would come to us and say, "You know, we need to hire 10 people and they need to be developers, and it doesn't matter where they're at, they could be all over the US or globally, right?" And now with, with the technology, within 48 hours we can have a whole team of engineers they can hire, whether it's you know contract or full-time. And that doesn't happen five years ago without the technology that we have today. So I think it's, if you embrace the technology it can help improve how you go about your business. I think if you think of it as maybe a negative, not something you want to invest in, I think you're going to be behind the eight ball pretty quick and uh I think there's huge advantages for it. Um, your company today, what's the, what's the employee size? So we know you have the contractors you know, you have the, the marketplace and customers come to it. What's your internal team look like today and is it global, is it US-based?

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, so we have a team of six people in Nashville, and then all in 47 people, but we're all over the world. Uh our designers are in Eastern Europe, we have several engineers in Pakistan, we've got content creators all over the place, um marketers, uh we have one marketer in Austin. Um and so it's like we're all over the place, we're a fully remote team. And people sometimes ask me you know what my thoughts are on remote versus in the office and so on. And, and I, I feel like when we were first getting started, we all needed to be in one room, we needed to be on one whiteboard, you know whatever that team looked like, three, four, five, up to maybe 10 people. Um I don't know if we could have gone from zero to one fully remote. Um but now that you know we, we've got some momentum going, we, we've got a good product, good platform and, and it's working, you know we can, we can leverage and enjoy some of the benefits of being remote, being fully distributed.

And you know, to our previous point of, of AI, I think AI, you know, you always look for this mythical unicorn of the 10x engineer, and I think AI closes the gap between a mediocre engineer and that 10x engineer. And, and that same thing goes for a 10x designer versus an average designer or content writer or copywriter or, or you, or customer service agent. You know, we, we've recently uh reduced from, from uh four customer service people down to two. And, and two are doing a better job than the four could with, with AI. Um a more thorough uh uh job with more, with greater customer satisfaction. So it's our hope to continue to grow and continue to scale without having to bring on additional headcount, uh to be able to do more with the same staff uh with AI.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Where do you go from here? You've got a, a good product, a good platform. Is there anything in the product roadmap that you see coming that you're going to be working on? Anything that uh would be great to hear about?

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, so uh we're at 300,000 users. We want to get to a million. We feel like a million, I don't know why, but it feels like that might put us in the same conversation as an Instacart, as a DoorDash, uh as maybe an Uber, like a household name you know. "W- hey, your grass is 4 feet tall, just, just, just get a GreenPal." Uh so that's where we're going. Um so it's still very much day one for us. And, and we've got ideas. Uh we, we uh we have a system of connecting buyers and sellers where sellers uh price the, the need on an individual basis. Uh but we'd like to leverage AI, make that more instantaneous, uh more intelligent, where a consumer could just come on board and see 10 contractors and their exact price. We would be able to predict that based on historical data, to where you could just hire them like that and not have to wait for them to give you a quote. So we believe that instant, instant matching, that, that way to instant book um could be a thing that, that propels us to the next level. And then, and then we have some other things uh with respect to uh financial products we want to put in the platform. We want to help vendors be able to buy more equipment, uh upgrade their truck and trailer and lawn mower and be able to finance that through our platform. So, so we're always looking for what's the next two or three things we're going to be doing to get us to the next level.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really great. I love to hear the evolution of this. Bryan, I didn't ask you this question at the beginning, but you've got experience in business a number of years, you've built a company it got acquired, you're building another thriving company. What's your background? Did you educate yourself? Four-year degree, was it in business? Were you an entrepreneur at heart when you grew up? Were you a paperboy kid that was you know always looking at making a dollar and, and doing things that were in, in the business sector? Kind of give us a little insight about you.

Bryan Clayton: Yes, it's been very much a School of Hard Knocks. Um and I, and I got started in the lawn mowing business because my dad forced me uh to go mow the neighbor's yard one day. He got tired of watching me playing Nintendo and he said, "Hey, get off your butt, I got a gig for you. You're going to go mow the neighbor's grass." And, and luckily he did that because, because just something just stuck with me. I was, I was like 14 years old and uh something just stuck with me. I made 20 bucks for, for an hour worth of work and I thought, "this is awesome." And I started passing out flyers all over the neighborhood and, and little by little in high school grew that into a little nice part-time business.

And then, and then I went to, went to college and, for, for, for business school uh at night. Um and then I would mow grass during the day. And there was this weird thing because I would go to like a high-level marketing class and they would talk about running an ad campaign. And I was like running my lawnmowing business and, and I was like, "this isn't how actual marketing happens." And then, and then, then I go to like a business operations class and I was like, "this isn't how you organize and run a business." And so there's this weird disconnect between what I was learning in business school and what I was experiencing running a business with five or 10 employees. And uh so when, when I graduated business school I, I had to make a decision. I was like, "I don't really want to be a lawn guy, I'd like to do something more glamorous, but I think maybe this could be my lane and, and I think maybe I could build a big company in this." So I kind of had a chip on my shoulder and uh used what I did learn in business school and made a little business plan and, and just started working on it. And uh you know fast forward 10 years, I, I had something, I, I had a, had a business that was kind of a little market leader in, in, in, in Middle Tennessee.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love that. Is there anything I haven't asked you that you want to share, Bryan?

Bryan Clayton: You know, um first off, great you know, great interview. Thank you for having me on, Jake. Uh I think uh I think other founders that are might be listening to this, I hope what they got out of hearing an interview with me is that if, if that guy can do it, I can do it too. And I think if you can remind yourself of, of the mantra that I like, "action produces information" and just kind of look at getting started in your business as an experiment. Or if you're in your business, maybe you're stuck, think about five experiments, just little things you can do. Action produces information, and then you take that information and then you roll it into the next set of decisions. You really can't get anywhere without getting started. And so get in the game, because only when you're in the game can you have a shot at winning. And so, so get started. It's not too late.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yep, I, I totally agree with that. Bryan, uh I want to thank you so much for your time here today. Fascinating story, love to connect with you in the future to see how your progress is going. Um for all the listeners that are listening, appreciate your time and spending it with us. It means the world to us and me, and until the ex- next episode, look to hear how things are going, Bryan, with you and we'll keep plugging away, we'll catch up on the other side. Thank you for joining, have a great day.

Bryan Clayton: Thank you.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that joined to make this podcast possible. And for all the listeners for listening, it means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now. We can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.

This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market. And they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.  

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