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Uncharted Entrepreneurship - hosted by Brent Peterson out of the Minnesota chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization – brings you daring stories straight from the trailblazing entrepreneurs who are unmapping business frontiers across every industry. Settle in around our virtual campfire as Brent sits down to pick the brains of startup pioneers, visionary founders, and intrepid CEOs whose origin stories - marked by unexpected twists, lessons, and stumbles along unpaved paths - will inspire your own trek in launching a boundary-pushing venture. Trading war stories, strategies, and even warnings, these audacious guests invite fellow founders and future leaders into their confidential circles in a uniquely transparent, wise, and motivational way. So join us off the beaten business trails to light your entrepreneurial fire!
Brent (00:03.103)
Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Brian Clayton. He is the founder of Greenpale. Brian, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role, maybe one of your passions in life.
Bryan Clayton (00:14.238)
Awesome. Well, thanks for having me on your show, Brent. It's great to be here. I am CEO, co-founder of GreenPal. GreenPal is an online marketplace. It's an app that works like Instacart or DoorDash or Uber, but for lawn care services. So if you need to get grass cutting done rather than calling all over the place, you just download GreenPol, pop your address in and somebody comes and takes care of it for you. GreenPol.
Green Pal is a 10 year overnight success. My co-founders and I have been at this for a little over a decade, and now we're nationwide in the United States with several hundred thousand people using the app to get their lawn mowed.
Brent (00:49.651)
That's awesome. And passions? Any passions in life?
Bryan Clayton (00:52.266)
You know, I've been an entrepreneur for 22 years.
and I've never had a job. I've always been in business for myself and I think one of my passions is building a business that helps customers, that is profitable, that is prospering, that is winning. That's a passion of mine and that's you know when I had a actually before Green Pal I had a landscaping business that I built up over a 15 year period of time and it was acquired by a
Bryan Clayton (01:26.732)
building I tried to go lay on a beach and I realized that one of my passions was entrepreneurship and so that's what's kept me going through some of the challenging parts of the journey.
Brent (01:37.247)
That's awesome. So I do want to touch on a couple of points.
I do want to talk about your growth from being a blue collar entrepreneur to a tech entrepreneur, which is super fascinating for me. Then I would like to talk about some time off and how you've dealt with that. I did an exit a couple of years ago and I actually worked for the business for a couple of years, which I think was 24 months too long. So I agree with you.
ideas around your app and I think it's a fantastic idea. So start off with sort of that, I'm not gonna say struggle, but when you go from being the person who's doing the lawnmowering or just making sure that the lawns are getting mowed, to being a tech person, what were some of the struggles in that?
Bryan Clayton (02:35.338)
It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. So when I had a landscaping business that I built from just me and a push mower to 150 people.
like 90 trucks going out every day and eventually around $10 million a year in revenue. So it was a pretty big business. And when it was acquired, it took like two years to get it sold and it was really challenging. And after I did all that, I thought, man, that was really hard. I don't ever want to do that again. And I thought I knew everything there was to know about building a business. And I thought, well, after getting bored, you know, not having
And I thought, well, I'm going to get back in the game. I need a project. I need something to pour my life's soul, my energy into. And so I thought, well, I don't want to start another business again like I had because that was really tough. I want to start an easy business. I want to start a software business because that'll be so much easier. And man, I didn't know what I didn't know. I was quickly confronted with the reality that it's 100 times harder. And the thing that nobody told me
tech company, you're usually inventing something brand new from scratch that does not exist. And that's a lot harder than just a traditional business. You can start a construction company, a landscaping company like I had, a home cleaning business, dry cleaner, restaurant, whatever. Those businesses are hard. But...
you're executing a known game plan. You're basically rolling up your sleeves and out competing your competitors and you're just working your butt off, trying to hustle a business together.
Bryan Clayton (04:18.218)
Well, if you're starting a tech company, usually you're inventing a new product, a new way of doing things. And nobody knows about it, nobody knows to use it, nobody knows how to use it. And so that's all a lot harder. There is no game plan, there is no roadmap. You just go from failure to failure trying to figure out how to make it work. And that was the thing that I didn't know. And so it was a lot more challenging. I thought the hard part was going to be executing on the technology, writing the software.
And while that was hard, the hard part is getting people to know about it, getting people to use it, and making people happy with your product and understanding how to build a product that does that was challenging.
Brent (05:01.031)
Yeah, that's a great description. And I guess I've always been in a tech space. So I can't say I went from one space to another. But I do understand the challenges around finding the idea. So my story is that I did sell my company a couple of years ago, and it was hard for me to just come up with that idea. Talk about.
What was it just natural for you to kind of go into the tech, the idea of this sort of app-based ordering of your lawn mowing?
Bryan Clayton (05:33.27)
That's the only thing I had going for myself was that I was solving my own problem. I solve this problem every day running my landscaping company. And so here's the problem that I solved that I thought.
that technology needed to solve better. If you're a homeowner or you rent a home and you need to get a basic lawn mowing service, it's actually like pulling teeth to get somebody to come out and just do the chore for you. You wouldn't think it is, but it actually is a pain in the neck. Because the companies you wanna work with don't have any sort of online presence, they don't have a receptionist, it's really hard to get them on the phone. And then like the reality is nobody teaches any of us how to run a small business. And so then you as the consumer
teaching these people how to run a business, what it means to show up on time, what it means to like bill the actual correct amount that you're supposed to get paid, like these simple things make it difficult for a consumer to get this chore done. And I knew that a platform could kind of modulate this whole experience from end to end and make it smoother and make it more seamless. And I saw this every day. My company, as we grew, no longer did residential services. We only did commercial services. So we did office parks, apartments,
shopping centers, banks, things like that. But still, we would get 70 or 80 people a day call our front office begging us, like, hey, will you come out and mow our yard? And we would have to tell them, you know, we don't do that.
But we would try to be helpful still and refer them, okay, here's four or five smaller providers that do. So in effect, we were kind of this connector service. And so when I sold the company, I thought, an app should exist to solve that problem. The demand is there, people want to get this chore done. Their supply is there, the suppliers are begging for this work, but it's hard for them to be discovered, it's hard for them to build up a reputation and have that be accumulated.
Bryan Clayton (07:32.736)
one place. And so I knew the problem was there. I knew technology could solve it. What I didn't know was how challenging it is to execute on building a marketplace that connects buyers and sellers at a local level. That was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. And then what I came to find out when I started Green Pal was all of the reasons that make it difficult to hire a lawn care service. All of the reasons why it sucks to hire a grass
to mow your yard, are now my problem. I have to solve them as the platform kind of proprietor and that took a long time just going from one set of problems to the next and solving them.
Brent (08:14.967)
Yeah, I have to believe that in this climate anyways, that it's harder to get the people to do the work than it is to find the people who need the work done. Is it just make it that much more difficult for you to go out and find, you're gonna have to find vendors to be part of the ecosystem, right? So explain about the back end part of it where you have to get enough providers to help people.
Bryan Clayton (08:39.458)
It's a great question. And so if you're building a marketplace like this, usually one side is harder to acquire to the platform than the other. So in Uber's case, there is no shortage of people wanting a $5 ride to a restaurant. But there is a shortage of people who are willing to give that ride. And so their side of the marketplace is harder to acquire riders or drivers. In our side, it's about 60-40 in terms of consumers
usually the harder to get to let them know about the platform and to acquire them. But vendors.
It's hard acquiring good ones. And so there's no shortage of people who want to hustle up $100 a day mowing yards. But there is a shortage of people who take the business seriously, that know what it means to show up on time and do a good job. And so it's our platform's job to screen out the business owners that just aren't taking this business seriously, and to promote the ones that are good. So if you get 10 vendors that sign up on Green Pal, usually one or two,
end up making the cut, so to speak, and end up doing well on the platform and end up pleasing people in such a way that they then get promoted on the platform. Usually we expel and demote 80 or 90 percent of suppliers who think they want to be in the lawn mowing business.
Brent (10:03.819)
Yeah, that's interesting. So you don't have to tell us any secret internal sauce, but.
You know, I know on Uber they have a way of vetting drivers and there's a way of giving feedback about drivers, the star system, but there's also a way of giving feedback for riders and I actually heard of a rider who got kicked off of Uber because they had such low ratings. Is it similar in your industry, in this industry that you have the, obviously you have the customers who are giving feedback on the performance of the lawnmowers or of the...
the vendors and is there anything else that kind of fits into that from a performance standpoint?
Bryan Clayton (10:45.61)
works very similarly. We have to do some vetting upfront to make sure that they're a legit business, but that's only like 1% of it. The rest happens on the platform in terms of we're always measuring their performance. How often do they show up on the day they're supposed to and actually complete the transaction for the customer on the day that they requested it? And then we score that, we give them a reliability rating. And then we also measure how often do they get booked
second, third, and fourth visit. Because in lawn mowing, you mow it today, it's still going to need it seven or eight days later. So if they did a good job, you're just going to naturally book them for the rest of the season. So we measure that. And then with those two metrics, we're able to discern, okay, these providers are solid, they're making a lot of people happy. These ones are not so good, so let's not show them as many opportunities. And these ones are terrible. Let's just sideline them from the platform. And we do that on a rolling basis,
Bryan Clayton (11:46.384)
to figure out who's good and who's not. And then we also have your standard five star rating and that helps, but really the real valuable signals are.
tied to the transactions happening on the platform. And that's what makes our platform different than an Angie's List or a Thumbtack or Home Advisor or even Craigslist or Facebook. There's no shortage of places you can go to get names and phone numbers, but then you don't really know if they're actually gonna show up on time. You don't really know if they do a good job. I mean, maybe there's some stars to look at, but that's it. And so in order to really deliver an experience that's more reliable than the status quo,
you have to capture that transaction and measure what's going on in the marketplace. Took us a long time to figure that out and to get that right, but that's what makes us different from the other ways people get this done.
Brent (12:41.267)
Yeah, that's, are you seeing pressure from now, other companies that are kind of moving into your space and you're gonna have to innovate more?
Bryan Clayton (12:48.722)
Luckily, I think the least glamorous...
and lease sexy your industry and idea, the greater your chances of success and the easier it will be in a weird way. So it's not like, you know, there was a huge, there was like a super like hyper competitive dynamic between Uber and Lyft and Uber eventually won because they raised more money and so on. Our industry is not like that. It's not like anybody's gonna like pull the rug out from under us. Even though we're doing around $30 million a year in revenue, we're still like
in the bucket for how much lawns or how much grass is getting cut and how many lawns out there that are still getting mowed. It's a 99 billion dollar industry in the United States and so we got a lot of white space a long way to go and there's one other platform that operates similar to us but not quite the same.
But most everybody else has either been acquired or gone out of business in the last 10 years. Now coming out of 2013, 14, 15, there was a tidal wave of money that got thrown at Uber for X ideas. So there was Uber for home cleaning, Uber for laundry service, Uber for valet parking, you name it. And 9 out of 10 of those businesses...
went out of business because I think venture capital was for them was like putting rocket fuel in a Toyota Camry. It just wasn't sustainable and they flamed out pretty quick. That's one reason why we didn't raise venture capital. We kind of observed this going on and we were like, we're just going to build a business that we can fund off of its own revenues.
Brent (14:24.191)
Yeah, so tell us a little bit about yourself and how has it been easier for you to move into this space because you don't have a lot of technical baggage. I'm assuming now you have some technical knowledge and baggage that you're kind of carrying forward, but has it been easier for you because you had a real raw understanding of the industry and then you can just implement some of those things and then you just looked for a technical solution to solve it?
Bryan Clayton (14:51.374)
It's a really good observation.
You know, on the one hand, I think Bill Gates once said, I would rather teach an engineer sales than teach a sales guy engineering. And so there's that. And so I think if you are an engineer, you are a builder for you to go learn an industry and I think that can be deadly. I was on the other side. I knew the industry, I knew sales, I knew the problems and solutions. I didn't know the engineering, so I had to learn the engineering. So I think that has helped me
because I think that authenticity can be a competitive advantage and you can always like bring things back to a very simple clear way of thinking you know first principles thinking like what is the actual problem we're trying to solve here and all of this other BS that's in the way you know is irrelevant and you know for us it's really simple we
I know what it's like to make a living in the lawn care business and we focus on one thing. Like how do we make those people more money? How do we help them grow their business? How do we make their life easier? How do we get them more customers quicker? How do we solve problems in their daily life? Because I've experienced those problems. And then everything else from that point out takes care of itself. Customers get mowed on the day they're supposed to. They do a good job. You know, there's like five.
in 60 seconds when they sign up.
Bryan Clayton (16:17.918)
if we can make vendors more money, all of these other things take care of themselves. And so, you know, because I lived the life of waking up at four o'clock in the morning and sharpening lawn mowing blades and scraping a lawn mower deck before the sun comes up and then mowing grass all day until like eight 30 at night coming home and just like passing out on the carpet in my living room because I was so tired, you know, I didn't want to do bookkeeping and invoicing and stuff. So I have the scars around that we're always able to orient around.
what we're working on around solving problems for that person. So I think for me it has been helpful, but sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I wonder, like I still think maybe if you're a builder, you're an engineer, it can be easier to learn the sales and the business side.
Brent (17:04.223)
I have to ask, because you mentioned white space, and I live in Minnesota, and you know where I'm going now, because we only have lawn mowing half the season, right? And for the other half of the season, we have a very robust snow plowing industry that most of the lawn care businesses do in the winter, but it's obviously not as regular as mowing lawns.
Bryan Clayton (17:09.917)
Yeah.
Right.
Brent (17:34.697)
We don't even see the grass for three or four months. Our grass is covered in a couple inches of snow.
Bryan Clayton (17:37.41)
Totally.
Bryan Clayton (17:41.474)
Totally, yeah, it's a dynamic of the industry. It's very seasonal, especially up north. And so yeah, we actually did bolt-on snow removal about two years ago, and it was one of those things we did.
I thought again it was going to be pretty easy because to your point we have hundreds of contractors in your state that use the platform but the business goes to zero after about October, November. So they were coming to us like look, we're having trouble staying in business, we need something to fill the gaps and why don't you get into snow plowing. They were telling us this and I'm from Tennessee and while I've done a little snow plowing,
And so I didn't know that business very well.
And I thought, well, how hard can it be? We'll just, you know, we'll bolt it on and we'll just kind of build some other workflows and make it an ancillary service that homeowners can hire. And man, we've started to uncover that it's a totally separate, different business. And it took, like what I thought was gonna be three months, took two years to build like basically a parallel platform that handles snow plowing that is coupled with GreenPol
hire snow plow contractors, snow plowing contractors can complete transactions and manage their schedule and so on, but they really are two different businesses. And it was a quick lesson in focusing on the main thing and keeping the main thing the main thing, because it really did sidetrack us. If I had to do it all over again, I don't know, I'd probably still do it because it does keep our name in the press year round. USA Today mentioned us last year where it was like, we got a big
Bryan Clayton (19:25.996)
coming in you can order you can use GreenPile to push a button against snowpiling contractors so that's great for the overall platform and that's great for marketing that's great for our user acquisition strategy but we don't make a whole lot of money on it distracted us for two years building this thing out so it's tough it was a hard lesson in like your core competencies and not trying to go after every opportunity that might seem like a good opportunity it was a painful lesson that I had to relearn
Brent (19:53.519)
Yeah, it's a really good illustration of what we call a shiny object and an entrepreneurial organization or EOS. There's a concept of the shiny object and it takes you away from your core. I think in your case, this seems, especially for the northern businesses, they have to figure out either they're not going to work for half the winter or they're going to do something different. Yeah, so that's such a great story.
Bryan Clayton (20:04.926)
Exactly.
Bryan Clayton (20:17.399)
Totally.
Brent (20:24.634)
has it been a challenge with employees? And I suppose for yourself, you don't have to worry about all those challenges anymore that a regular landscaper would have to deal with, right? You're really worrying, you're one step above that chain of labor that a lot of people are struggling with right now.
Bryan Clayton (20:43.166)
Well, it's so our internal team is is.
a little over 40 people. And so managing engineers, designers, content creators is very different than my former life of managing laborers and managers of laborers. It's a very, two different worlds. Even though they're both businesses, they're really two different worlds. And so to your point, one of the hardest challenges of running my first company to 150 people was managing of that labor, the unit economics of what it costs to put that labor hour
into the market and how much you could charge and how much the overhead was and keeping a margin there. Really, really tight business, very, very tight margins. And the managing of that labor is very risky. You're always prone to lawsuits and accidents and things like that. And then the turnover is high. You have to have a really good training program to get people up to speed. And so that was a really tough dynamic of running that kind of business. Green Pal is set up to help smaller providers
one man or woman operations, we have a lot of female led companies, and maybe a helper or two.
Your big companies that have 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 employees in the landscaping industry, they don't need another system, they don't need another process, they don't need another inbox. So they're not a good fit for Green Pal. Although we do have some providers doing over a million dollars a year on the platform. The majority are your one-man bands, Peter in a pickup, Molly in a mower, and that's who we've built the platform for. So in a way, we kind of add more pressure onto the industry in a sense of,
Bryan Clayton (22:23.539)
If I'm a technician.
why am I going to come and run a crew for a big landscaping company or work on a crew making 18, 20, $25 an hour when I can just go buy a thousand dollar lawn mower, plug in the Green Pal and make a hundred dollars an hour. And so we really want to help more people get into the business as sole proprietors and then connect them with homeowners that need their services very, very quickly and easily. Because as a homeowner, you want to work with that proprietor
You want to work with the solo entrepreneur that's working for themself because they do a better job, they care more. You don't want to work for some, you don't want to hire some outfit that's got like 20 employees and you don't know like they could have just gotten out of jail or something like that. And so that's how we're set up and we're hoping to accelerate.
kind of that this shift in people working for themselves, people in the gig economy, people having more agency over their life, we're hoping to accelerate that trend in some little way in this industry.
Brent (23:31.823)
I just want to make one comment on timing. And it seemed like every time I would do a podcast and the windows are open is exactly when the lawn care people would show up with their power blowers right outside the windows. There must be some connection that they make with that. And they just know, oh, this guy's doing a podcast. Let's make sure we show up with the power blowers right now.
Bryan Clayton (23:41.858)
Ha ha.
Ha ha ha!
Bryan Clayton (23:53.47)
We always know. Let me sing you the song of our people.
Brent (24:00.044)
Brian, as I close out, I give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug about whatever you'd like. What would you like to plug today?
Bryan Clayton (24:08.335)
You know anybody out there hustling up their business building other business. You don't have time to mow your yard So just go to Green Pal and you'll get free quotes and hire somebody to take care of it for you
Brent (24:17.351)
Yeah, and I have to say that I just love the solution. And I do like what you said earlier about targeting that sole opener, because I do feel as though, especially in this business, and I've never been in the lawn care business, but I have to imagine that it is difficult to run it on your own and also find customers. And this, it is, it sort of jumpstarts the ability for a person, like you said, to get a more or riding more, whatever it is, uh, and, and allow them to be in business.
quickly.
Bryan Clayton (24:48.018)
Exactly, that's why I get out of bed every morning. That's my passion.
Brent (24:51.199)
That's awesome. Brian Clayton, founder of Green Pal. Thank you so much for being here today.
Bryan Clayton (24:58.21)
Brent, thanks for having me on, I enjoyed it.