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We need a new definition of success—one that harmonizes meaning and money.
Imagine diving into your workday with renewed energy, leaving behind the exhaustion or dread of a monotonous grind.
Traditional beliefs about success and the root cause of burnout are the same:
Prove yourself.
Work harder.
Take care of the business, and it will take care of you.
We’re recycling the mindset and practices that keep us stuck. Our souls need a jumpstart into The Age of Humanity.
Tune in for a new way of working that honors our nervous system and the bottom line, using knowledge of the brain, the Bible, and business. We’ll discuss timeless truths that amplify growth, ignite change, and reshape the world of work. No corporate speak or business BS. Let’s get to the heart of a rewarding career and profitable growth.
We speak human about business.
What’s in it for You?
Value, Relevance, and Impact (VRI): No, it's not a new tech gadget—it's your ticket to making your work genuinely matter to you and your company.
Human-Centric Insights: We prioritize people over profits without sacrificing the bottom line. Think less "cog in the machine" and more "humans helping humans."
I'm your host, Rebecca Fleetwood Hesson, your thrive guide leading you into the new Age of Humanity. I’ve navigated the highs and lows of business and life, from achieving over $40 million in sales, teaching thousands of people around the world about leadership, trust, execution, and productivity to facing burnout, divorce, raising a couple of great humans (one with ADHD), and navigating the uncertainty of starting a business.
I’m committed to igniting change in the world by jumpstarting business into profitable growth with the timeless truths of our humanity.
Sound crazy? It’s only crazy until it works.
Hit subscribe to never miss an episode, and leave a review to help other listeners discover our show.
Want insight and advice on your real career and business challenges? Connect with me on social media or email me at rebecca@wethrive.live. Your story could spark our next conversation.
[00:00:00] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Welcome back to the Business Is Human Podcast. I’m your host, Rebecca Fleetwood Hession, and we’re here to bring you episodes that blend meaningful work with profitable success here to steward what I call the age of humanity. I believe if we transform the way we work, we can transform the way that we live. As always, my friendly request, if you like what you hear, hit subscribe so you don’t miss any episode and leave a review to tell the other humans that they might like it too. Always looking to help you and connect with others. Alright, let’s get into it, shall we? Hey, welcome to the show. I’m excited. We have a great guest today. His name is Bryan Clayton, and what I love about Bryan’s story is this is a guy that just finds a need and fills it.
[00:00:56] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: He’s looking for opportunities to serve in whatever way that he can and it’s working. So he took a lawn care business to a $10 million sale, not an everyday occurrence, and then took some time to figure out what he wanted to do next and realized that there’s this opportunity to kind of uber lawn care so that you can just go to an app and hire a lawn care service. And so he built this and many years later, almost a decade in, he has been written about in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Wall Street Journal, CNBC did a story. He is one of Inc. Magazine’s top entrepreneurs. The guy has figured out how to figure stuff out and all of it based on a few nuggets that I want you to listen for today. The main one being that find something that a human needs and find a way to serve them well doing it and then the money will come and then the growth will come versus especially in the tech space where oftentimes it’s what’s my sales number going to be when I sell this big thing without thinking about who does it serve? Does anybody even want this thing that I’m building? And so I love this conversation with Bryan because it is rich with leadership nuggets about what it means to understand who you’re serving and serve them well. Alright, here we go.
[00:02:36] Bryan Clayton: Hey, how you doing?
[00:02:37] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Good. How are you?
[00:02:39] Bryan Clayton: Doing great. Good to connect with you, Rebecca.
[00:02:41] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Alright, I’m excited to chat with you today. You have a lot of topics that are near and dear to my heart on your list of podcast topics. I’ve got all of your Inc. magazine, serial entrepreneur, all the stuff that gets written about us online, and I love that for credibility, but what I really love is when an episode is the thing that touches your heart because that always makes for a better conversation. Totally. So when you think about all of the things that you typically talk about or things that you wish you could talk about as it relates to business being human, that’s the basis of my conversations. Yes, business needs to control, measure, and optimize, but humans are personal, emotional, and social, and the best leaders and teams know how to integrate with safety and growth. So that’s the work that I do. What are those topics that you go, oh man, I could talk about that all day? What is it?
[00:03:43] Bryan Clayton: One thing that happens a lot with founders, particularly of tech companies like mine, is that this weird gap forms between our logic and our customer’s logic. And we forget that at the end of the day, yeah, we’re building technology, but it is all people and it is all about the people that use your products, the people that get value from your products. And if you lose sight of that, you then get stuck in this place where you’re speaking a different language than your customers, and they’re looking at the problem that you solve from a different perspective than the problem that you think you’re solving. And it’s just this weird thing. And so it sounds trite and obvious, but a lot of founders veer off course because the first thing we try to do is we try to outsource customer service. One of the first things we all try to delegate is customer service, and I used to do 100 percent of our customer service.
[00:04:39] Bryan Clayton: Now we have 12 people that handle all of that, but I still do at least an hour a day. Sometimes I try to do two or three hours a day of live chat, of answering the 1-800 number, of processing email tickets because that one little forcing function causes me to always be aware that it’s actual human beings using our technology and that these people have different problems. They have different expectations. Sometimes we let them down, and it’s like always trying to keep that front and center is something that I try to bake into my daily habits. And so that’s something I like to talk about because nobody talks about that.
[00:05:18] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: When I read through your information, the thing that popped out to me is, of course they call it serial entrepreneur, which sounds like your, I don’t know, it always just sounds kind of shady. It’s like what? Serial killer, serial entrepreneur, there’s just something there that doesn’t sit in my spirit.
[00:05:36] Bryan Clayton: It needs better branding.
[00:05:37] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: It does need better branding. But when I read through stories like yours, I think find a problem and solve it is really what you’ve been doing. You took a lawn care company to a $10 million sale. That’s not normal in that industry. Is that a fair statement?
[00:05:59] Bryan Clayton: Yeah. Yeah. It doesn’t happen often in the home services industry. That was kind of my first phase, and then I took some time off and then had to reboot and become a tech entrepreneur. And so the transition from a blue-collar entrepreneur to a tech entrepreneur was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.
[00:06:16] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Wasn’t that just about you found a problem that you could solve with tech?
[00:06:20] Bryan Clayton: It was a couple things. It was I wanted to start the next phase of my entrepreneurial journey, and so I thought it would be kind of cool to build something. My landscaping company, we had thousands of customers, but I wanted to build something that had millions of users, millions of customers. And so I thought, okay, the only way I could do that is with a tech platform. And the idea that you should be able to push a button and get a lawn mowing service to come take care of this chore for you was one that I had for years running my landscaping business. I saw every day how disorganized the marketplace was and how it was hard for somebody who needed a basic lawn mowing company to find them and hire them. And so that idea was one that I saw every day. And then when I sold the business, I took a year to figure out what I wanted to do, and I thought, well, I’m going to try this. And I quickly learned that it’s a lot harder than it looks, that inventing a new product from scratch that does not exist is a lot harder than just getting in the trenches and slugging it out and building a blue-collar style business. Both are hard, but inventing something was 10 times harder. And so I was very much solving my own problem, but I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t know where to even start, and I just started trialing it and erring my way through it.
[00:07:40] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Well, and you’re also needing to then teach people how to buy your service differently than what they’re accustomed to.
[00:07:47] Bryan Clayton: Totally. It’s not only are you inventing something brand new, but you’re having to indoctrinate the masses that this is the new way of doing things. And this is actually a lot easier than doing it the old way. And so home services is kind of where food delivery was in 2011. In 2011, if you wanted food delivery, you could have anything you wanted so long as it was pizza and Chinese. And then there were these options like Grubhub and Seamless and a couple other little websites where you could kind of get it done. That’s where home services is today. It’s like where food delivery was back 15 years ago. People still do it the old way. They still dial for dollars. They still leave voicemails when there are platforms like GreenPal where you can just push a button and get it done. And so it’s a lot harder than you think connecting what it is you do with the masses. So that’s one of our biggest challenges, combating the status quo.
[00:08:41] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Well, a lot of the work I do connects your nervous system to behaviors and business. And so what you’re doing is you’re disrupting a pattern that has existed since forever ago.
[00:08:54] Bryan Clayton: It’s just the way people have done it for decades. You have to quickly educate them in about three seconds that this is a better way of doing it.
[00:09:03] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: It’s safe and they can trust. It’s all those things.
[00:09:06] Bryan Clayton: All of those things you have to communicate directly with good copy, but also indirectly with the product design and brand and your reputation and all of these things. You have to overcome and educate and get somebody thinking, okay, yeah, actually this does make sense. I can just put my address in this. I can just get somebody to come out and mow and I don’t even have to make a phone call. Where has this been my whole life? And so that’s a lot harder to do than just starting a blue-collar business. I did not know that when I started this 10 years ago. So the first five years were pushing a rope up a mountain. Now that we’re a decade in, we’re nationwide in the United States, we have around 300,000 people using the platform, and things are going well now. But the first five years were really tough.
[00:09:51] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Well, the theme that I hear in your story is you’re looking for things that are relevant. You just said, I still get on and solve customer problems and look at the tickets a couple hours a day, which is not typical for somebody that’s been in a tech business for a decade. Like I said, been outsourcing it. But you are staying really close to the relevance of the customer. Because I think what gets lost in the tech industry so much, and I have many clients that have CEO founders, what gets lost from VCs is the relevance piece. It’s all about how much is this going to sell for and what’s the valuation of this. And it’s all this money discussion. And I was always looking at the business model and saying, does anybody want this? I know it’s cool. It sounds really cool in your copy in your video, but who wants that?
[00:10:46] Bryan Clayton: And as simple as what you just said sounds, that is the trap that 99 percent of new founders fall into. It’s like building a product in search of a problem. And a lot of times, particularly in tech, these tech founders will try to disrupt and build new products and solutions in industries they’ve never worked in, and they’ve never really actually experienced the dynamics of that industry or the problems firsthand. And so they set off on this year-long, two-year-long, sometimes five-year-long quest to build something that nobody wants. And so the quicker you can get to 5, 10, 20 customers, the better that thing is. Everybody wants to do everything but that. They want to build the system, build the brand, get the social media going. It’s like, let’s just get 10 credit card numbers and see if we can get somebody to pay us for what it is we’re doing to make their life easier. Yeah, it’s crazy how simple that advice is, but we all want to do everything but that because that stuff’s not fun.
[00:11:48] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: The number of times I’ve said to clients, what happens when they buy it? And then they get this look on their face like, oh, we’re not there yet. I’m like, you might be late. Because that experience, especially if you’re building something new, the experience of what happens when somebody finally says yes is everything to get to trust, whether they’re going to come back or talk to somebody else about you. And I think we’re in this weird, you exemplify this, we’re in this weird space as a society where we starved out the trades industry and sent everybody to learn to code and sent everybody to college, and now you can’t get a plumber to save your soul. And actually, my grandfather was a plumber. I’d been in this coaching business for 10 years, and I almost started a plumbing business instead because I knew where this was going to go.
[00:12:40] Bryan Clayton: Exactly.
[00:12:41] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Everybody got a toilet. You can see it happening at some point. There’s going to be such a high demand for this thing. And so we’re in this weird kind of fun space that says we need this trades blue-collar work, but people are so accustomed to technology, and you are melding those two together in a really beautiful way, but not losing the relevance of your customer.
[00:13:08] Bryan Clayton: Yeah, that’s one of the things that caught me by surprise when I started this company. Even though we’re writing code and building a product with millions of lines of code, and we’re not creating new technology, we’re using some pretty advanced technology to make this thing magically happen. But at the end of the day, none of that matters if the patio doesn’t get blown off, if all of the grass clippings aren’t cleaned up, if the edges aren’t nice and neat. It’s like I’m still in the lawn mowing business after building and selling a $10 million landscaping company and then building this product where tens of thousands of transactions are happening. I’m still in the lawn mowing business. It doesn’t matter that all of this technology, product design, all of these things, none of that matters unless the lawn is completely mowed. And it’s kind of the same thing if you think about Airbnb. Airbnb works, and what they’ve built is incredible. But if you show up and the sheets are dirty, you don’t care about any technology that they have built. And so it’s the same thing. You can’t lose sight of that. Nobody cares how good your product is designed or built if it doesn’t do the basic fundamentals of what it’s supposed to do.
[00:14:23] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And that is a leadership message for any business, even if you’re working inside a large organization. I always want to know the work that you do in your department, where does it go next and where do you get that work from? Because if you’re not serving whoever inside the organization or an outside customer with high quality, then you’re at risk.
[00:14:47] Bryan Clayton: And it’s kind of like why that show, I don’t know if it’s still on, but there was a show called Undercover Boss.
[00:14:52] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Yes.
[00:14:52] Bryan Clayton: I don’t know if they’re still doing that show.
[00:14:54] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: I don’t either, but I was obsessed with it for a while.
[00:14:57] Bryan Clayton: Yeah, it’s why it was so funny. The CEO of Dunkin’ Donuts or whatever, to see him try to work the donut fryer and try to deal with a customer who’s pissed off that there’s no sprinkle donuts. It is just a funny show, and it shouldn’t be like that. That guy or gal should know the whole business, soup to nuts, end to end. That’s why that show was so funny to watch.
[00:15:25] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Yeah. It doesn’t mean that he has to be in there doing the work every day, but you got to have enough context to know what matters and what doesn’t matter.
[00:15:33] Bryan Clayton: Exactly.
[00:15:34] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: I just read an article the other day that one of the latest Starbucks CEOs had a consultant background and he tanked the company in six months because he didn’t know the business. The numbers and the business are actually two different things.
[00:15:51] Bryan Clayton: You can’t substitute that real-world experience. You can’t do it all day long because you’ve got to run the company. But trying to bake that into your habits, when I first mentioned, that’s why I still answer the 1-800 number for at least an hour a day. I still try to stay in the trenches firsthand so I don’t lose sight that we’re trying to serve human beings and solve their problems with a platform.
[00:16:16] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Give me some examples of things that you’ve learned from being hands-on, answering the number, and doing some of that frontline work.
[00:16:24] Bryan Clayton: Well, in the early days, the thing that probably saved the company was we had built the platform in such a way to deliver the cheapest lawn mowing service you could get. Because I had come to the starting block from a contractor’s perspective. I had run a traditional business. And when you have that perspective, you start to get jaded in a sense. You think that everybody just wants the cheapest solution.
[00:16:50] Bryan Clayton: And you just believe that in your soul because all day long you’re running up against losing bids and losing contracts over price. So then you say, well, people just want the cheapest thing they can get. That’s how we built the platform. Typically it was going to cost you 40 bucks to get this done. On GreenPal you could get it done for 33 or something like that. We built the system, the marketing, the messaging all around that value proposition. Then what we began to learn just through talking to customers and what I ran up against every day was people cared about the price, but really what they wanted was the guy to show up on Thursday. He needed to be there on the day they had booked the service. Because lawn care pros, they’re kind of disorganized and there’s no barriers to entry in the business.
[00:17:43] Bryan Clayton: So it’s just kind of like, shoot from the hip and hope it happens. I’ll get there when I get there. There was no accountability layer. What we kept finding was people would get upset. They’d say, hey, I booked him for Wednesday, but it’s Friday. He’s not here. I texted him. He hasn’t called me back. Does he want the job or not? Because if not, I need to find somebody else. And this kept happening over and over and over. And it wasn’t a matter of, hey, do you have anybody cheaper? It was, do you have anybody that will come out and do it on the day they’re supposed to? We had to go back, rewrite all the copy, rebuild the system in such a way that it forced accountability from the suppliers and scored them rigorously. These are the providers that are showing up on time. These are the ones that aren’t. Promote and downgrade providers,
[00:18:37] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: So you—
[00:18:38] Bryan Clayton: Reward and expel the ones that aren’t taking this seriously. And that was something that, had we not been talking to customers consistently, we would’ve never come across that. I would’ve kept doubling down on price, price, price, price.
[00:18:52] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: That happens all the time.
[00:18:53] Bryan Clayton: Totally. We don’t want to get that negative feedback from customers because as founders, we’re so wrapped up in what we’re building. For me personally, a lot of my confidence comes from my business, and a lot of my pride is wrapped up in my business. So when someone gives me negative feedback about the business, it’s negative feedback about me.
[00:19:16] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Straight to the heart.
[00:19:17] Bryan Clayton: And so our tendency is to resist that and outsource that and shield ourselves from that. So I had to rewire my brain: no, this isn’t negative. This is free R&D. This is happening not to you. It’s happening for you. This will save you years of wasted time and maybe even save you from failure. That’s how I looked at it then and now. Okay, yeah, this person’s upset. The system let them down. Let’s figure out what went wrong and where it’s happening for us. This is where we’re going to make the business better because of this.
[00:19:52] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: It plagues so many leaders because our worth is so connected to our work that it’s hard to be humble. We want to double down, or like I said, we’re just disconnected from it. And feedback feels like an attack instead of information to get better. But what you just said is gold for anybody willing to look at it through that lens: if I didn’t hear that, if I didn’t receive it and say, okay, how am I going to shift based on that? You might not have made it.
[00:20:26] Bryan Clayton: Wouldn’t have. And we would’ve wasted years building something that nobody wanted, banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out why it wasn’t working, when really all we needed to do was answer the phone and listen to all the hundred ways we were upsetting people. A lot of small businesses do this intuitively because they have to. They need the customer to pay their bills. But this weird thing happens when you start trying to get into the technology space, particularly if you raise investor money. That investor capital can kind of paper over a lot of these things and cause you to deviate and lose sight of them. Luckily for us, we funded the business off its own revenues, so we didn’t have that temptation. We needed the sales. And also I was reading every book I could at the time. This was 10 years ago, and The Lean Startup was a real popular book about this kind of thing. And that book tells you basically three things: you’ve got to get out from behind the laptop, you’ve got to talk to your customers, you’ve got to meet them face-to-face because your life depends on it as a business. And so I took that to heart. Luckily that helped me avoid building something nobody wanted.
[00:21:38] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: I have a concept that I coach that says you have to have the story first, the human story first of relevance, and then money after. And what VCs often do is a money-first story and then try to back customers into it.
[00:21:56] Bryan Clayton: Hey, one out of ten, one out of twenty, one out of a hundred times it works. And when it does work, it works really big.
[00:22:04] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And then everybody chases it.
[00:22:06] Bryan Clayton: And then you start to think, I need to do that. And then what you don’t realize is it’s a one-in-a-hundred shot. That investor has their bets spread over 20 or 30 different companies. You as the founder, this is your one shot. You might get two or three swings at the plate in a lifetime. You got to think about these things. It’s a very all-or-nothing thing if you go down that path.
[00:22:27] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: I had a client that got caught up in this where the people backing her just were doubling down on some advice that I knew as a business consultant wasn’t going to work. I just kept looking at her going, that math don’t math.
[00:22:42] Bryan Clayton: Yeah, totally.
[00:22:43] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Math don’t math. And I knew that she was just under such stress, scrutinizing every single decision. And ultimately the money felt like it had more power than her gut instinct about the business, and it wasn’t true.
[00:23:02] Bryan Clayton: You hate to see it. And then you try to say something, but somebody has to learn that lesson themselves.
[00:23:08] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: So now that you’re in it and you’re looking at some of these customer feedback, you’re on the phone with customers, been doing this for 10 years now, what’s churning in your head and your heart now? Because typically somebody who’s a find-a-problem-and-solve-it person is always iterating into something bigger or different. Is there anything up on the horizon that you’ve uncovered that you think, oh, maybe I should go try to solve that problem next? Or what’s shifting in the industry, do you think?
[00:23:41] Bryan Clayton: It’s really two things. One, I made a decision when I sold my first business that I was just going to work on my best idea from that point forward no matter what. And so the first three or four years when it was really hard, it was like by default, that was the only thing I could work on. It was the only good idea I had. So I just kept plugging away at it. And I’m a big believer in just being the best at one thing and focusing all of your intensity on that until you get to the end of that. For us, the market is like a 90 billion dollar nationwide market for this very humble chore, and we’re just a drop in the bucket. We have a long way to go to connecting more people with what we’ve built.
[00:24:25] Bryan Clayton: Now, that said, at its essence, the problem we solve is you should be able to very quickly, cheaply, seamlessly get somebody to come take care of the chore of lawn mowing for you as a consumer. And as a pro, you should be able to plug into one platform and make as much money as you want based on how hard you want to work. Those simple things haven’t changed in a decade. But now with AI, we’re able to do a lot more magic inside that. We can dream up: what would magic look like inside our product? What would a 10-star experience look like? A lot of times it’s just the simple things. Okay, I hired somebody to come mow Wednesday, and they came and mowed, but I didn’t really like the job they did, and I want to hire somebody new, but I don’t want to lose that price. What do I do?
[00:25:19] Bryan Clayton: Magic would be: you could just find somebody who was better at the same price. So that’s just one kind of use case that happens inside of our platform a lot. We’re able to now crunch the numbers and say, okay, well in your zip code, we have a hundred contractors who have mowed similar properties at that square footage, at that housing price point, and now these are the three guys that we have with a 98 percent confidence that can mow you next Wednesday because they show up on time. And you can pick from one of these three, and we’re 98 percent certain that they will be there. Three years ago, it would’ve taken a team of data scientists, a UX/UI PhD, and a room of people that collectively make five million a year to solve. And now with AI, with our team—our team is only about 40 people, and our people are great, but none of them have ever worked at Google or Facebook or something—and so it’s like our team of good engineers can now execute at that level. A much higher level with AI and close the gap between where our product is and what magic is. That’s what we’re focused on now with the tools that we have available today.
[00:26:33] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: That’s exciting. And what a great use of AI in a world where people fear it, thinking it’s going to replace people, which is insanity. It does have that place of, like you said, creating a magical experience for people in a service that they already need.
[00:26:51] Bryan Clayton: Totally. Yeah. That’s the way we see AI. And it’s just that simple way of helping close the gap between what you do and magic. And just like—what if you could dream up the most magical experience inside of your business? What would that be? Let’s start there. Let’s compare that with what reality is today, and let’s just inch our way closer and closer with the tools we have now.
[00:27:15] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Oh, that’s exciting. Well, and people will say to me, I kind of want to start a business, but I don’t know. I’m like, you’re overcomplicating it. I pay somebody to pick up dog poop out of my backyard.
[00:27:26] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: There are things that people will pay you to do because they don’t want to do it. And even—I ran into this guy in the backyard a few weeks ago before the weather hit, and we were chatting about his business, and he’s put AI and mapping software into his dog poop pickup business so that I get a text that he’s on his way. So that way if I need to bring my dogs inside, if it’s that kind of— and it immediately invoices me. It automatically takes that out of my checking account, $16.95 a week, and I don’t have to think about anything.
[00:28:03] Bryan Clayton: And see, that’s the dog poop guy using AI to close the gap between what he does and magic. And this can be applied to every industry. And so that’s how we think about it. That’s how we see it. Just dream up what the best imaginable customer experience is, and then use that as your north star and work closer—inch closer—to that every day.
[00:28:23] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: But the big difference that you have this whole episode about is first sit down and think about: who do we serve, what do they care about? And then build magic around that.
[00:28:34] Bryan Clayton: Exactly.
[00:28:34] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Not just sitting in a vacuum and thinking, gee, I wonder what we could do because it would be cool.
[00:28:40] Bryan Clayton: Yeah, what do we like? Yeah, what do we think is cool? And none of that matters. You really got to start from the customer and work backwards. If not, you’ll build something that nobody wants.
[00:28:49] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And you touched on this, but I want to go just a little bit more on the relationship between you and the contractors because these are guys out mowing yards. How do you work on that relationship too that is also key to your success? You mentioned it a little bit, but dig into that a little bit more about how you are fostering those relationships and partnerships.
[00:29:11] Bryan Clayton: That really is why we do what we do. We offer a nice convenience to consumers. They can push a button, get this chore done, just like ordering food on DoorDash. But really why we do what we do is to help small business owners try to get where they’re going and try to help them get a little slice of the American dream, try to access what a successful small business ownership kind of feels like. We have hundreds and hundreds of stories of these guys and gals where they say, because of GreenPal, I was able to buy a riding mower. And as simple as that sounds, that’s the difference between pushing a mower all day and riding. And it’s—
[00:29:51] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: It’s a big investment.
[00:29:53] Bryan Clayton: A commercial riding mower is like 15 grand. They’re not cheap. And you could make more money with one of these pieces of equipment. And so helping them get more equipment, helping them—we get stories like, hey, I was able to pay off student loan debt, I was able to put a down payment on a house, I was able to put a kid through school. All these kinds of things. And so helping these people improve their station in life, helping them get access to a platform where they can plug in—they just work hard—they don’t have to worry about bookkeeping and billing and marketing.
[00:30:23] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Thank God.
[00:30:24] Bryan Clayton: Yeah. That’s why we do what we do. And what we build matters. What we build is important because thousands of these small business owners rely on it every day. It’s funny—every piece of technology goes down for some reason or another. We were down last week because of the—or two weeks ago because of the Cloudflare outage. And now when we go down, it’s like the phones light up, our text chat lights up. We have a Facebook group with thousands of contractors in it. It lights up like, hey, what’s going on? I can’t get work done. What’s happening? And I hate when that happens. And we’re always scrambling to get it back up. But then on the other hand, it feels good in a little weird way. It’s like, okay, at least somebody gives a crap. At least what we’re building matters. It’s important. Because 10 years ago, we went down like half the day and nobody ever said anything. So that sucks. That sucks when that happens.
[00:31:23] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: That’s when you know you have risk.
[00:31:25] Bryan Clayton: Yeah. So just two weeks ago, I was reminded like, damn, man, what we build is the lifeblood of thousands of these small business owners, and they rely on it every day to make their living. And that’s important. I take that seriously.
[00:31:40] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: I love that. And really—that’s in my heart of hearts—what business has always meant to be about is humans serving humans in a way that matters, and then we all get paid for it.
[00:31:54] Bryan Clayton: That’s the reward.
[00:31:55] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: That’s the reward.
[00:31:57] Bryan Clayton: And it only happens if you are making somebody’s life a little easier, making somebody’s life a little better, solving a real problem for somebody. There’s just no way to get around that. At its foundations, that’s what business is. And if you can start from there and build up from there, you can save yourself a lot of wasted years.
[00:32:18] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: What I’m hearing from you is advice that I have given to my kids since they were little: find a need and fill it.
[00:32:28] Bryan Clayton: As simple as it sounds, find a need and fill it. One of my favorite business books is The E-Myth by Michael Gerber.
[00:32:36] Bryan Clayton: You start with that, and then once you nail that, start to build systems around that—to where you can scale that over and over again, McDonald’s style. That’s the hard part. A lot of folks do find success in that simple piece of advice of finding a need and fulfilling it, but they never break out of self-employed zone. They never break out of freelancer zone. It’s like, okay, let’s nail that, and then let’s build the systems and processes around that thing that is working. The problem is a lot of founders, particularly in tech, they skip that step and then they go to the systems processes part. They’re building all that scaffolding around nothing that—
[00:33:12] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: On nothing.
[00:33:13] Bryan Clayton: Yeah. It’s crazy as this stuff sounds and as obvious as it sounds, billions and billions of dollars have just been crashed into the ground because they skipped that stuff.
[00:33:24] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: But I think when you build—you have built—starting with literally mowing people’s lawns, which is a service that people need, but they also have a high degree of quality interest in.
[00:33:37] Bryan Clayton: They need it.
[00:33:38] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: They need it, but they also want it to be a certain kind of way. That you’ve taken all of that understanding of connecting to whoever you’re serving—so now you’re serving small business owners doing that work—that same philosophy though is how you are replicating across the different things that you do.
[00:33:58] Bryan Clayton: Yeah. You touched on a good point. In a weird way, a platform like ours or a marketplace like ours is almost like a domino effect. Because the consumers—the homeowners—need the service done and they’re the ones who are paying. And so in a multi-sided marketplace, usually the side that’s paying is the harder one to attract and keep. But on the other hand, if you don’t first serve the service provider, you don’t have an offering for the consumer. So it’s kind of like—it’s a domino. You have to build something that small business owners, that landscaping service providers, love and want to use every day and get value from and will call you if it goes down because they can’t make a living anymore. And only then do you have them on the shelf, so to speak, to where consumers can order them off the shelf.
[00:34:49] Bryan Clayton: And it’s a weird thing that you kind of have to domino your way into it. And if you don’t first start with the supply side, you don’t have a service offering for the consumer side. And it took us about two years to figure that out. We took the service provider side for granted because I came to the starting block as the contractor and I just thought everybody wanted as much work as they could get their hands on at all times, anywhere, at any price—I’ll be there. Kind of the mentality I had. But that’s not true. That’s not the mentality 99 percent of small business owners have. It’s like: do I really want to work today?
[00:35:25] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: It’s not really the way. Sometimes people start a business—they don’t want to have to show up to work every day.
[00:35:32] Bryan Clayton: I was really surprised by that when I started this company. I just assumed everybody had my attitude running my landscaping business. They don’t. It’s like—oh gosh—it’s kind of rainy outside, I don’t feel like going out there. I’m not going to show up and mow those yards I was supposed to mow today. And so we had to build a platform that was kind of like carrot and stick. And that was something that really caught me by surprise when we first got started building this.
[00:35:58] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: That’s what makes life and business interesting—is we’re all different down to our fingerprints. And so the minute you start assuming that everybody sees the situation the same as you, that’s your first mistake.
[00:36:08] Bryan Clayton: Totally. Totally. And you don’t know until you get in there and start. It’s like the Mike Tyson quote: everybody has a plan until they get punched in the nose. And that’s how every single business is. You don’t know what customers’ expectations are. You don’t know how users are going to use what it is you’ve built until you get it out there and get it in their hands. So the quicker you can shorten the gap between nothing in their hands and something in their hands, the better. And there’s a good quote—I can’t remember who said it—but you should be embarrassed by your first release. You should be embarrassed by your first product offering. And that probably applies to every business. If you opened up a corner store, corner coffee shop, or bakery—you should probably be a little embarrassed with how it looks, but it’s okay. It’s open. We’re getting some—
[00:36:54] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Feedback. Got to get started.
[00:36:55] Bryan Clayton: We’re putting some reps in, we’re getting some liquidity going in the business, and we’ll improve that later. I think that’s probably a better strategy than just trying to get it perfect with all of your assumptions and then launching it and then realizing everywhere that your assumptions were wrong.
[00:37:08] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: A hundred percent. I had a client call this morning where none of the assignments from the last time that we had met had been done because they were over-engineering and perfecting. And I was like, yeah, but nothing really happened.
[00:37:21] Bryan Clayton: Nothing. Nothing is different.
[00:37:23] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Nobody saw any of the ideas that are still floating around in your head 30 days later.
[00:37:26] Bryan Clayton: Nothing is different today than the last time we talked. Yeah. That’s crazy. And it’s an easy trap to fall into.
[00:37:33] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Humans are funny, man. And that’s what makes—
[00:37:35] Bryan Clayton: Life.
[00:37:36] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And that’s all business.
[00:37:38] Bryan Clayton: Yeah. A hundred percent.
[00:37:39] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Well, I’m so grateful that you spent time with us today and the number of just nuggets of leadership lessons that apply to every single business that you’re in, based on our conversation, I know will be helpful for our listeners. So hey, as you’re doing great things out there, anything new that’s coming up, give me a call and come back and tell us how it’s going.
[00:38:01] Bryan Clayton: Awesome. Will do, Rebecca. We are at around 300,000 people using it. When we get to a million, I’ll shoot you a message and we’ll come back on and talk about how we got there.
[00:38:09] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Awesome. Awesome. Coming down. I’m coming down. Thanks for being here. You can follow us on Instagram Business Is Human or TikTok Rebecca Fleetwood Hession. It’s a great way to share some of the clips with your colleagues and friends. Alright, make it a great day. Love you, mean it.