The Home Service Expert Podcast - Identifying Customers’ Pain Points to Become The Preferred Solution in Your Industry

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

Bryan Clayton is the CEO and cofounder of GreenPal, an online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. Described as the “Uber for lawn care” by Entrepreneur magazine, GreenPal has over 100,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day, and more than $20 million in annual revenue. Bryan was also the founder of Peachtree Inc, a company which grew from 0 to 150 employees until 2013. In this episode, we talked about small business growth, marketing, profitability...

And I really didn't want to be in the lawn mowing business. I didn't go to school to learn how to cut grass, but it was a good little business. I had a couple little helpers, and so I just stuck with it. Made a little business plan and executed against it. Got done in three years what I thought would take five. And then fast forward over a 15-year period of time, I built that business up to over 150 employees, over $10 million a year in annual revenue, and 70, 80 trucks going out every day. It was a pretty big operation and sold that business in 2013 to one of the largest landscaping companies in the United States. After I sold that business, I took some time off. I retired. I didn't have to work anymore, which was nice, but I got bored. And so I thought, okay, I need to get back in the game. I want to get back in the arena. And the idea for GreenPow was just a simple one for me.

It was basically solving my own problem. I saw how difficult it was. Every day homeowners would call us begging us to come cut their grass. And I thought an app needs to exist to connect homeowners who need to have their lawn mowed with server providers. So I recruited two co-founders, and we went to work on the project project and now we're an eight-year overnight success. Several hundred thousand homeowners use the app and doing $20 million a year in revenue. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business.

Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello, and today I have a guest visiting us from Nashville, Tennessee. His name is Brian Clayton. He's an expert in entrepreneurship, small business growth, marketing, and profitability. He is the CEO of GreenPAL from 2014 to present from Nashville Entrepreneur Center Business Mentor. He started that up in 2020. Accelerators Organization Business Mentor 2020. And Peachtree Incorporated, he founded that in 1998 and sold it in 2013. Brian Clayton is a CEO and co-founder of GreenPal, an online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. Described as the Uber for lawn care by Entrepreneur Magazine. GreenPow has over 100,000 active users, completing thousands of transactions per day and more than $20 million in annual revenue.

He was the founder of Peachtree, a company that grew from having zero employees to 150 prior to navigating its exit in 2013. Brian, pleasure to have you on, man. This is going to be great. Awesome awesome thanks for having me on Tommy so I guess we'll just dive right into it first of all if there's any listeners out there feel free to comment and tell us if you've got any questions for Brian and I'd love to hear your story Brian everything from soup to nuts how you got into the home service space. Tell us about Peachtree and tell us what's going on with GreenPel. Yeah, so 20 years of entrepreneurship. In a couple of minutes, I was actually drug into the home services industry by my father, kicking and screaming.

He made me go mow the neighbor's yard on a hot summer day in the mid-90s. He got tired of watching me play Super Mario World, I guess. He said, hey, get off your butt. You got a job to do. You're going to go cut the neighbor's grass. Luckily, he did because I just stuck with that business. I mowed yards all through high school as a way to make extra cash. Love the ability to work for myself and to make as much money as I wanted. And I kept at that business all through college, put myself through school mowing yards. And when I graduated college, I had to make a decision. Was I going to go into the job market and take a pay cut or just stick with this grass cutting

business? And I really didn't want to be in the lawn mowing business. I didn't go to school to learn how to cut grass, but it was a good little business. Had a couple of little helpers. And so I just stuck with it, made a little business plan and executed against it. Got done in three years, what I thought would take five. And then fast forward over a 15-year period of time, I built that business up to over 150 employees, over $10 million a year in annual revenue, and 70, 80 trucks going out every day. It was a pretty big operation and sold that business in 2013 to one of the largest landscaping companies in the United States. After I sold that business, I took some time off. I retired. I didn't have to work anymore, which was nice, but I got bored. And so I thought, okay, I need to get back in the game. I want to

get back in the arena. And the idea for GreenPow was just a simple one for me. It was basically solving my own problem. I saw how difficult it was. Every day, homeowners would call us, begging us to come cut their grass. And I thought an app needs to exist to connect homeowners who need to have their lawn mowed with server providers. So recruited two co-founders and we went to work on the project. And now we're an eight-year overnight success. Several hundred thousand homeowners use the app and doing $20 million a year in revenue. So you signed a non-compete probably for a couple of years. Is that what happened when you sold in 2013? Yeah, I was signed a non-compete, although the non-compete was to not compete in the landscaping business. So I didn't actually start up another landscaping

company. So the non-compete didn't apply to GreenPow. What I was building with GreenPow was an app, was a marketplace that connected homeowners and lawnmowing services. So there really wasn't any issue there. And really, nobody even knew what the hell I was doing for like three or four years because we were just really slow and low. We were just trying to build the app and trying to build the technology. And it took a long time to get the business going. So there's a lot of listeners out here that are everything from garage to air conditioning to chimneys. I mean, we're in every single trade with the people that listen. What was the secret? Because it seems like to me, you go on Yelp, you go on Google, you look at the ratings,

you go on HomeAdvisor, there's a million different places. I mean, I could keep going. You go on Facebook. You go on Angie's List, the BBB, Thumbtack, Groupon, Nextdoor. There's a million places. How do you do that to stand out to get a $20 million market share? shortage of directories of names and numbers of lawn mowing services or any service really. So if you need to have your lawn mowed, chimney swept, garage door, whatever, you can get on Google and find an endless number of resources to find names and numbers, but you still have to poll these service providers. You still have to call them, leave voicemails, figure out what pricing is, figure out what their availability is, try to get a return phone call, negotiate on price, try to figure out if they're any good or not. And so it's easier than it was maybe 20 years ago to find these service providers. It's still very hard to schedule them and actually get them to show up. And so GreenPow is push a button, you get quotes back in less than a minute, you read reviews on who you want to work with, you hire them, they come out and mow,

you get a picture of the lawn that's after it's cut. You push to pay and then you schedule them for the rest of the year. And we have several hundred thousand people that use the platform and probably a third of them have never spoken to or seen their lawn cutting service. It's like almost invisible. And so that's what's differentiated about the analog experience of, well, you got to call, you got to leave a voicemail. Hopefully they call you back. Then you got to set up a time for them to come out and look at it. Then you got to negotiate the price. Then you agree on a price.

And then they actually don't show up on the day they're supposed to. And then when they actually do show up, you got to figure out a way to pay them like through Venmo or mail them a check or something. So we make all that process a whole lot easier for the homeowners. And then also for service providers, we give them basically an entire platform that they plug into where they can operate their entire business on our technology and not have to do things like bookkeeping, waiting to get paid, trying to figure out marketing automation, trying to figure out how to get the phone to ring our platform panels,

all that for them. You know, I think it would be really cool if you gave me a demo video that I could post on our podcast. So under homeserviceexpert.com, we'll have your episode and then they could go there. We'll post from the user to the user, the UI. I'd love to see it from the customer perspective as well as the landscaper perspective on how it works because I think this is super cool. I guess I've got a million questions, but one of my biggest questions right now is saying,

okay, you got a really cool software. The problem is there's a lot of cool softwares out there that no one ever heard of. How did you blow that up? Did you use social media? How did you get the word out there? Yeah. So to your point, it's a software, it's what SaaS, software as a service. It's a SaaS-enabled marketplace. So there's a lot of different pieces of software that lawn mowing services can buy and use to help grow their business, but they're not a marketplace. They don't generate demand for them. And so ours is a marketplace. And so we generate demand for service providers by giving them opportunities for new lawns to mow nearby them. And then the software helps them do all of that a whole lot easier than they could otherwise.

The way we market the platform to homeowners is primarily through organic search. So if you are in Des Moines, Iowa, you search lawn mowing service Des Moines, Iowa or lawn mowing service near me, GreenPow pops up as one of the options you can consider as a solution to your problem. And when you onboard as the homeowner, you're then teed up to a half a dozen service providers nearby you to take a look at your property, consider how much it's going to cost them, mow it, and they submit their price. And if everything looks good, you hire them. I love that. I get landscaping done at a bunch of different houses. I even got this, you know, we blow the parking lot and everything. And so it does everything.

If they could blow a commercial parking lot, they could be anything, palm trees, oleanders, whatever it might be in your, is it across the U.S. and Canada? Where is the marketplace? Yeah, so the first four years we were just in Nashville, Tennessee, and we were trying to figure out how to orchestrate the delicate balance between the needs of homeowners and service providers. And so figuring out the orchestration of how we build out the marketplace took us a long time to figure that out. So we were just in Nashville for several years, and then we slowly began rolling it out to every city. And now we're in every major city in the United States, and soon we'll be in Canada and Australia and UK. But we focus on one thing, lawn mowing. It's the easiest way in the world to get your lawn mowed. It's not push a button and get the shrubs pruned. It's not push a button, get

your gutters clean. It's not push a button, get a landscaping design or locksmith. It's push a button, get the grass cut. That is how we have delivered the 10X experience over the analog version of dialing for dollars and trying to hassle somebody to come cut your grass. So that focus is what is kind of core to our success. Now, after the first lawn mowing goes well and you get hooked up with a good lawn mowing service that you feel comfortable with and that you have them booked for the season, then the UI will allow you to layer on additional yard maintenance services with that service provider. So if you need things like bed maintenance, shrub pruning, palm tree pruning, gutter cleaning, garage clean out, you name it, snow plowing, our software helps power all of those services, but only after we have enabled you to get hooked up with a good yard

maintenance service provider for the lawnmowing. Cause that's kind of the glue that makes it all stick together. So I actually had a landscaping company when I was young, we called it E and T Elliot and Tommy's. And then I moved out here when I was 19, I started generations landscaping. I used to do a lot of sprinkler systems, water conservation analysis,

and I got a lot of commercial accounts. I had plenty of residential. And I made good money. But the key to success for me as a landscaper was keep them in a small area, kind of like pest control. Keep your areas from your driving to as close as possible. So I love the technology. And that's how Uber works. Keep the rides as close as possible to your next ride. How does your software, does it work off of Google Maps? What are some of the key intricacies that you had to build to make that all function? What were the key elements to kind of hold it all together for the landscaper side? Yeah, that route density is core to building a profitable lawn mowing business, probably any route-based business.

And so early on, we inherently knew that. The challenge was building the density of homeowners listing all their lawns needing to get their grass cut in a dense area in one zip code. And so we focused just on Nashville and just really just one part of Nashville because we knew that from the outset. As time has gone on, we focus on trying to build as much density as we can into service providers' routes by teeing them up for the opportunities that that are most nearby the lawns that they're mowing and so when we send out an invitation we prioritize like okay this this service provider has 19 lawns already in that zip code let's give them first crack at it and then we go down down the order that way and

so that's kind of how we prioritize how we facilitate the matching between supply and demand. Because if a service provider doesn't have to drive all over town, they can offer a better price and a better experience to the homeowners. And really, then everybody wins. So that's really kind of what our platform is built to do. Yeah, no, it sounds great. I think for our industry, the garage doors is a little bit different. But I look at certain industries, whether it's pest control, certain things that are more service-based. They come out every week, every month. I think it's a great opportunity because it's easy to see what needs to be done. As far as the bidding system, do you just kind of put in there?

Does the homeowner have to kind of measure? I'm sure there's videos and pictures. How does that side work? Yes, you make a really good point. There's been a lot of startups, particularly in the wake of Uber's success, trying to be the Uber for X, the Uber for home cleaning, the Uber for lawn mowing, the Uber for maid service, the Uber for locksmiths, massages, you name it. One of the main tragic flaws for all of them is they, they have looked at service providers as fungible commodities, meaning you don't, you don't care who picks you up to take you to the airport. And they tried to apply that model

to all of these service based businesses. In reality, they're not commodities and they're not fungible. They're not interchangeable. And we knew that, you know, from day one, because I grew up in this industry, I knew that you want the same lawn mowing service every single week. Not only that, you really want the same crew. You want the same proprietor. You want the same person on your lawn every week. And so that's what we set out to power. We set out the power to introduce you to the best fit and then power that one relationship, not be your landscaping company. And then we send out whoever every week, we knew that wouldn't work. So to your point, there won't be like an Uber for garage door repair. There won't be an Uber for painters because these are not commodity services. They're nuanced.

The service quality ranges. And particularly even in our business, like, you know, when we onboard a homeowner, we ask you, do you want the grass just knocked down or do you want like a decent job or do you want a manicured like golf course quality job? Like there's different service levels and service providers price it accordingly. And so trying to identify those unique aspects of a homeowner's needs and matching them with the best fit service provider is kind of what we have curated our platform to do. And that's why, you know, focusing just on lawn mowing enables us to give you that kind of Uber-like experience as a homeowner, because that's all we do. You know, if we did a bunch of other stuff, we wouldn't be able to give that kind of clean experience.

And so to call us to Uber for lawn mowing, it kind of gives you an idea of what it is, but it's really more like the Airbnb for lawn mowing or the eBay for lawn mowing. It's a marketplace that helps surface all of the options available to you in your zip code and enables you to make a hire really quickly and pay very easily and just get it done without having to go through the hassle that you ordinarily would. I love what you said there because I deal a lot with Amazon Home Services. I deal a lot with Facebook. I know what Google's trying to do. Google was the smartest one because Google just said, hey, I'm going to build a marketplace. I'm going to give a Google guarantee called LSA,

local service ads, and I'm going to do all the vetting for you. I'm going to go do the background check and I'm going to let you make the decision ultimately. But you see, a lot of these huge tech companies feel like we're going to Uberize the industry, which means commoditize it. The problem is, and I'd love to hear your perspective on this. You don't know how these guys were trained. You don't know what they're driving. You don't know how long it's going to take them at the previous job. And there's so much more customer satisfaction that goes into like a paint job. And there's prep work and there's all these

things that all these tech companies got a guy that graduated four years ago probably got an eight-year degree and he's sitting there going all i need is the data the data will prove everything but the problem is you need scalability too how are you going to get a place that's able to generate great human beings with background checks, drug tests, good driving records. They've got the know-how. They've got the transactional analysis. There's so many things. And I love it when Amazon comes in and says, we're going to give it to the highest bidder. They go into these manufacturers and say, we're going to buy it for really cheap. We're going to get all the labor to be cheap. They don't understand how much it costs to have

a good van or a good maintenance guy or pay a good employee with insurance. So I love how Amazon started selling things with labor and they realized, wait a minute, we can't pay a hundred dollars for a fan to be installed. And I'll tell you the guys that do a fan install, they go there, they sell the fan, and then they sell everything else. They don't look at Amazon at all as the a hundred dollars they look at as an elite to get everything else. So sales call Amazon is just these companies. I'm sorry. And I, you know, I use Amazon for a lot of stuff because it's convenient, but the problem is you want to have a relationship. You want to understand who this company is. And everybody asks me, are you worried about technology? And I'm embracing technology. I'm like, sure. You know, there's certain things.

I think, I think it's going to change a little bit, but there's one thing that I know I have, brand new trucks, brand new tools, technicians that are trained for three months before they actually go into the field. We get certifications. We do the background. We do the drug test. We do driving courses. We're trying to make things predictable because if they were to buy a company, they want predictability. And I think that's what all of us home service companies should try to build, is how do you create predictability? There's one word that scares me in all of home service that no one has figured out, and that's capacity planning.

Now, with mowing the lawn, I know that how long it takes three guys with the right equipment. But if we run out of gas, if a machine has a stall, if we hit a sprinkler head, there's so many unknowns that you just don't know and you can't plan on. You could be a certain route within a day. And I'll tell you, there's a lot of things you could do within one neighborhood because I've got a Christmas light business, too. But, you know, I'd love to hear your perspective because I hear all these people. Are you scared? And it seems to be the hot topic this year and last year of what's going to happen when this starts happening. I'm just not worried about it like most people are. Well, there's a lot to unpack there.

So Amazon, when they got into the home services space, I guess five years ago, they're a SKU-based business. They were trying to sell a plumber as a SKU off the shelf, and it just doesn't work that way. And their DNA is not to be in the services-based business. They were trying to sell a plumber as a SKU off the shelf, and it just doesn't work that way. And their DNA is not to be in the services-based business. Same for Facebook, same for Google. Facebook is a social network. Google is an advertising machine. So these big, huge conglomerates are not going to steer their whole ship towards the home services space and change their DNA to deal with all of the nuances to delight a customer. And so that's just not going to happen. So we don't worry about it either. And I guess my advice

would be to service providers that are out there in the trenches is to really look at all of these options available to them as ways to build more revenue. Like you said, the ceiling fan guy, heck yeah, sign up for that and be treated as a hundred dollars sales call. You get paid to show up to try to sell work. I mean, that's great. Nothing wrong with that. And so I wouldn't worry about the fact that Amazon is getting into the ceiling fan installation business. I mean, that's hilarious. They're not going to get into the electrician business the same way as an electrician is going to be in that business. But the electrician does need to be looking at ways to onboard leads from Google My Business, from HomeAdvisor, from Thumbtack, from Amazon Home Services, from SEO, from Facebook marketplaces.

You know, the electrician that's doing electrical service calls, and that's their business, needs to figure out ways to use these channels because I think every home services business needs to think like a technology company or else you won't. You won't make it. So it's not like, oh, that's a bunch of BS. Don't pay attention to it. Just do it like you've always been doing. It's and. It's good stuff and you need to be figuring out ways to leverage it because if your traditional business doesn't think like a tech company, then you won't make it. Your competitors are going to kick your ass. You know, I did Amazon Home Services. I've done Home Depot. I've done Lowe's. I've done pretty much, I've tried everything. I've tried all the home warranty companies. And what I've

learned is that certain industries, don't take offense to this, but this is where bottom feeders that don't understand marketing live. They live on there. And Amazon wants you to snap a picture when you get there. If you talk to the customer about something, you need to know about it. They're rated on this. They kick you off at this.

And I'm like, do you understand how much shit you have to go through to make them happy? Some tech, you know, and I can't talk bad about these companies because people do well on them, but usually the companies that do well, they have no overhead. Their wife works for them. Their son's running tickets for them.

They work out of their garage. So it's easy to, if you don't have an ad spend, but then you look at someone like Ken Goodrich with Gettle Air Conditioning that's doing a couple hundred million a year. He spends a fortune, but his average ticket's through the roof and they control the whole process. And I believe they control it better for the customer because people act like technology is the answer. Let me just tell you, any CRM, we use service type, but there's a million of them in HVAC and plumbing and even lawn care that actually send pictures on the way. They require before and after.

They require videos, updates, settings, everything. I mean, shoot, now they have sprinkler systems that tell you how much water you use. I mean, it's amazing what they're able to do these days. So I would say definitely to not worry as much about them. But one of the things that I tell people is we're not taking advantage of the customers and we're not taking advantage of partner marketing. The customers to me me they all have someone that could benefit from your service so this year for me i'm kicking off a bunch of new things to say how do i get jobs without trying referral clients and i've got some that'll refer me i've got certain people that refer me 50 jobs a year i need 100 more of those and i know how to

get them but no one really thinks about this kind of stuff and i think it's important and um i grew the landscape company literally i would rollerblade passing out flyers and i would literally go to all the commercial places and i'd say tell me about your current landscaping what do you love about them and when they say what they love about them they also say but but they come on Thursday morning. Yeah. They blow everything. And we're getting out of our cars and they ruin everything. And I say, so if we came on the weekend, would that make more sense to you?

And they say, oh, yeah, that's a huge. And you find out what their pet peeves are. And it's like, but the landscaper, I will say this. I was allergic to grass. It was a tough industry for me. But tell me about the technology industry because that's a big pivot and i've done a lot of technology and it's a tough industry because developers are kind of like contractors that are building a house yeah they promise you one thing

and then they say oh i didn't know you wanted to have a forgot login screen and oh and this and that and this and that so how's your experience been it's a lot like building a house except for it's it's sticks and bricks it's lines of code and it's it's hard took me three years i i had to learn how to build software to even play in this game so it took my two co-founders and i three years to teach ourselves how to write code and how to how to design software and how to build it and how to manage software and how to build it and how to manage developers and how to build a team that executes technology because we were in the technology business. I didn't know how to do any of that.

It took me a long time to figure that stuff out. But what I did learn as I kind of reinvented myself from a blue-collar entrepreneur, if you will, I had like four mechanics that worked for me every day. And all they did was just fix trucks and lawnmowers and stuff. I mean, it was very much much like a blue collar business. And then fast forwarding and like having to reinvent myself to be a tech entrepreneur. After I kind of completed that transition, I then saw like all of this stuff was like, holy crap. I had this business doing $10 million a year in revenue. If I had a couple of software engineers that were working with me

in that company, I could have made double software engineers that were working with me in that company, I could have made double the profit. So I saw all these really cool things that where it's like, if you could combine those two, where you know how to execute technology and you're running a traditional service-based business that's profitable, you could really work circles around your competition in terms of getting better leads, figuring out marketing automation, figuring out how to keep your clients happy, figuring out how to run operationally more efficient, figuring out how to develop your workflows in and out of your business, and how to deliver, as you said, a predictable, reliable service to your clientele.

Technology can help with all of those things if you know how to leverage it. And you don't have to hand build all this stuff from the ground up like we have GreenPow. There's a lot of SaaS products that you can buy and leverage in the right way. It's just you've got to think like a tech company. Yeah, you know, this is so important because, look, I figured out just in the last month, I picked 17 softwares I need to talk into one user interface, which means I need webhooks, I need a great API, and I need a great CRM to be able to pull data from, and I need a great accounting software. Now, I want to live in one area. That means I

don't want to have to log into Yelp, Angelus, HomeAdvisor, everywhere in the world to be able to get to push into those places so it's not that hard and you're right i could send handwritten notes to every person that pulled a permit i could write handwritten notes to every new homeowner in a certain zip code the day they move in i could send voicemail blasts and there's scc regulations and whatnot but there's compliance issues and certain things but when you figure this stuff out simple thing called Twilio does amazing things when you know how to integrate it properly and it's cheap and it's so beautiful because all of a sudden, but the problem is, and trust me, I'm sure you could talk for days about this.

You get the wrong guy, the wrong team, you mismanage them. You don't know what you're doing. You can spend a small fortune and be left. And I've done it four times in a row where I've left up going, why is this not right? Yeah. So you got to be very careful. And all of that, you're managing garage techs, you're managing your HR person, you're managing all of the, you're just trying to run a garage door business too, and be in the tech business. So it's hard. It's really hard. But if you can do it, you can create an eight-figure business in any service industry if you're in a major market because you

can invest in technology that does all of those things that you're talking about, that brings all of those things together, that has maybe a self-serve interface that homeowners can use. Because I got to be honest with you, my garage door falls. I don't want to call anybody. I just want to get on an app or a website and upload a picture of my garage door on the ground and somebody comes and fixes it that day. I don't want to talk to anybody. And I think a lot of people are going to be like me. They are coming that way, especially the millennials. But at the same time, I feel like there's so many people and there's a great book by Marcus Sheridan. They ask you answer that when you're making a financial decision, you want to be

educated. Like, look, if you need a liver transplant, now this is ultimate. That's going to be expensive. This is your wellbeing. But some people buy a pool that's $75,000. Some people are going to replace their roof for $35,000. They need to talk to somebody and get educated and they need their questions answered. They need to know what's the best roof. Do I want a metal roof? Do I want a shingle roof? Do I want a tile roof? What kind of gutters are going to work well? How long is it going to last? Does it answer the needs that I need? Because I'm only staying in this house five years or I'm going to give this house to my kids and they're going to raise their kids and the kids. you're right but a garage door you know i'm in the garage door business you could easily spend fifty thousand dollars on ten doors if you got a big enough house wood overlay with windows with

with just all the technology with them so it really depends i don't think there's a one size v and where but where tech comes into play there is is like you have the best kick-ass presentation that's technology-driven that nobody else has. And it could be imaging. I'm sure you're using this stuff. And then you've got a better sales process that's technology-driven than anybody else. And not just like a Salesforce CRM, but something that's hand-tailored to whatever your workflow is. That's how you leverage tech for that. And I had four salespeople that worked for me full-time in my landscaping business. to whatever your workflow is, that's how you leverage tech for that. So it's like, and I saw, I mean,

I had four salespeople that worked for me full time in my landscaping business. And I mean, dude, for us, it was still, it was all like spreadsheets and hand cranking and it wasn't consistent. I mean, like if I could have gone back and used technology to hand build the kind of stuff I needed,

I could have made double the profit I made and I doubled the market share. And oh my God, dude, you are talking. So you got a thing called a scorecard for every single person, your mechanics. And the scorecard, people ask, how do you do performance pay? How do you build a scorecard?

Well, what's the outcome you want for your dispatchers? You want less drive time? You want more capacity filling? There's all kinds of things that you want. You want less cancellations. We call it run rate. There's all these things. So you build a scorecard. People say, well, what if they cheat? It's pretty simple. You have a checks and balances system that takes a human being sometimes for data accuracy and you fire people and they will not cheat because it's

literally stealing. So I think a scorecard for every position. And I was going to say Salesforce, Zoho, Infusionsoft, HubSpot hubspot all these places they're expensive but they've already built something that you could get everything on and i've used all of them and they all work there's a beautiful program called zapier yeah and zapier just builds bridges into everything and if they don't have it they'll build it and there's a great code called Python that the people that develop in Python, the Zaps work really, really well because it almost goes to the next level with the Zapier to write. And I'm learning all these things right now. And I'm sitting here in the garage business going, you're absolutely right. How do you make the user experience seamless and easy and almost like a no-brainer?

And I find myself writing articles right now, the five best companies in Phoenix, and I'm not on there, but I'm the author. I'm really doing my research going, here's why, and I'm telling customers that we might not be for you, and here's why. Here's the thing is, we might not. Look, the thing is, would you rather be a jack of everything and take every job? If you've got a complex gate that you want to go in, don't call us. If you've got a crazy tough door or a crazy easy door and you're just looking for, hey, I'm in and out of this thing.

I never want to be the Walmart of the garage industry. But what's beautiful about what you said is you just said earlier, if you just want your grass folded, we've got somebody for you. If you want it to be cut nice, but maybe they're using a weed whacker as an edger, they're fast but efficient. Or if you want it to be groomed to the T, like a golf course, and they pull out the edger and they're not taking any shortcuts and there's no shavings left and the kids play out in the grass. And I'm sure you probably got someone that does like the pooper scooper too, that like as a service. I don't know if you...

We focus on just those three things. And we've built the self-serve system to get you set up for those things. But to your point, there's a lot of stuff we're not good at. We don't offer a landscaping design service. We don't offer a pressure washing service. We don't offer all of these other things that landscapers sometimes do offer, but we don't deal with anything because that's not what we play. And I think focusing your business on a few set of core competencies that you do better than anybody else in your

market, and then leveraging technology to make all of those things just so dead-ass simple for your customers to do business with you, and removing all of the friction that you can find for them to find you and do business with you, I think is a recipe for success. It doesn't matter if you're in home cleaning, if you're in driveway installation, if you're in pools, if you're in garage doors, if you're in lawn mowing, I think finding the friction, making it dead simple for homeowners to find you and do business with you and using technology to do that, I think is a winning recipe. So I feel like you've done a lot. You've one of the few people, and I've talked to a couple hundred on the podcast that have successfully exited a home service company. And from what I understand, and I don't know

about landscaping is typically they're going to take, I just bought a company yesterday. We take a multiple of EBITDA and that's how it works is we basically take their profit. There's a few ad backs. You know, if they had an attorney for your consultant come in for three months, we'll add that back because we're never going to have to do that again. And from your perspective, what would you have done differently if you were to market your business? And i know 2013 is different than today but forget the technology that you could use to market it what were some of the things did you have your books cleaned up i think what they do is a they're going to check a quality of earnings they're they're going to go into a lot of different things that probably a lot of us

never heard of talk to us about first of all the tipping point to sell and then what you had to do to prepare what you do differently. Yeah, looking back, you know, from the day I decided I was ready to sell the business that I had taken it as far as I wanted to take it, I was ready for a new set of challenges. From the day I made that decision to, like, wire transfer in the bank was two years. And so that was excruciating. It's like deciding to leave your wife, but still, like, hanging out and, you know, living with her, you know, for two years, which a lot of people do that too. But I mean, it was, which is not fun. And so it's like, it was really tough going into work every day, knowing that you were just trying to work towards getting it sold was emotionally difficult.

If I could have done it all differently, I would have had like a fiveyear plan to exit out of the business that I would have been working backwards from. And I mean, I'm sure, yeah, like everybody says that, but that's really hard to do. And there's a lot of ways that you run your business that is optimal for running a profitable business that's not optimal for selling a business. And so for instance, like you might look for every tax break you can get because you want to mitigate your tax bill at the end of the year. And so you're looking for ways to generate write-offs that you could avoid, but you're not necessarily doing that. Well, as it turns out that shoots you in the foot when it comes to time to sell, because you know, you're getting a multiple of EBITDA.

And so, you know, all of those tax breaks that you were, you're seeking, you know, in three, four years ago are now haunting you because they literally are costing you five times or six times, whatever it is they saved you. And so that sucks. And so if you can like, just try to work an exit plan, it's four or five years and trying to make your business as profitable as hell and is holding on to as much market share as you can, and also building as much systems as you can to where you can hand it off, then that's going to increase your chances of success. A great book is called Built to Sell. If I had had my hands on that book when I was going through this process or five years before, it would have helped me a lot, but it didn't exist. That's what I would have done differently. One thing I did do correctly,

and I don't know if it's correctly, but luckily, was I built the business debt- have $5 million in debt. And so basically, it's like the owner has a big chain around their neck. They can't get out of the business because they've got all of these equipment loans and lease payments that they're personally signed for. And so, I mean, building that business debt-free was probably the thing that enabled me to get it sold because in most cases you know it just would have been okay yeah here's four million dollars for your business and now go pay off your four million dollars in debt yeah the one thing when you make a transaction they're gonna want you to pay off your vehicles and your machinery and all that the equipment has a shelf life so by the time

you'd appreciated the value of your machinery it's's time to buy a new one. And you got that free. And now you're working with crappy, that your mechanics are busy all the time. It's just, it's a never ending cycle. And here's a few pieces of advice for people too, is I think Brian, if you were to go out and take a vacation a year before you left and take a month off,

but really document it and say, look, I wasn't in very many meetings. I kept an eye on the CRM, but you prove that you could leave for a month and the company still runs. That's huge for an investor, number one, because they want to know, are you the glue? And even longer than that, or maybe even have a depth chart, but maybe have other people leave as well that says, you know, I've been with all my top management out of town for a week and we didn't skip a beat, not a beat. We didn't have to be on the meetings every day. There's systems. And let me just tell you, I'm not the best. I don't think I'm the best, but it's nice to know that the top leaders could be away and people

know what they're supposed to do because there's performance incentives instilled. Another thing is you're right. A lot of people that I find in smaller companies have two sets of books. One they send to the IRS and the one that they're keeping all the cash doing all this other funky crap with. And you got to understand when Brian said some six times more for every dollar you deposit that you were keeping of cash, if you're getting six times what the company is worth, if that was profit, that's $6 in your pocket. So start reporting everything. And the five-year plan means those last few years, you make the company. You know, a lot of times when I ask people when they're selling, I say, what would you do when you sold?

What are some of the instant ways you would make it more profitable? And they give me a list of people that they would get rid of but these people help me they help me get better some of them are family they've been here forever they work their way up those are instant ways you can make money and it's like as tough it is to pill that band-aid you should pull it before you sell it yeah exactly if you get to a point where you're lucky enough to have a business that you think you can get sold you know in those last three or four years you want to pay as much taxes as you can. I mean, you want to avoid write-offs because you want that business to be as profitable and making as much cash as it can, and you're going to pay taxes on it. That's antithetical to how I always ran that business.

But, you know, if I could have done it differently, I'd have definitely done that because I would have made it back five, six, six on the back end. I didn't know that. Yeah, to a certain extent, I do think there's certain write-offs like your vehicles. If you could do accelerated depreciation, you need the vehicles.

Those are all add-backs as well. You're still gonna have to pay those vehicles off. So I look at it as five years in the beginning of that five years. Does it give me more operating cash to grow? Because I need operating cash to do the hiring sales. But I think the other big thing that gets you above the 10, especially in this post-COVID essential business type stuff, is become a platform company that an investor, whether that's a venture capitalist or private equity, or potentially even a bigger partner, they want to come in and say, if you've got the platform,

the technology suite, the training suite, the recruiting suite, you've got the systems in place, the org chart, there's a movement for less. They're going to check your net promoter score, how happy are your employees and how happy are your customers. But if everything fits, they're going to say, could I stack companies underneath them? And if they can, they're going to pay you a lot more money because they're like, literally, it's stupid how it works, but you could stack these companies right underneath there and make money out of thin air.

It's called arbitrage. And it's a beautiful thing. And, you know, if the more you can know about that game, the better. But at the same time, you don't need to worry about any of this shit until you build a business that's doing a couple million dollars a year. I think a lot of guys get sidetracked by this kind of stuff before they get – look at business like a video game almost. Get through level one of Super Mario World, and if you're just starting out, get your first $250K. Then get to level two, which might be a million. And then level three might be two or three million.

And then once you get to $2 million or $3 million in revenue, then maybe you can start thinking about the five-year exit plan. The problem I see is a lot of guys that aren't even doing a half million dollars in revenue. It's like, oh, I want to sell my business. And it's like, I don't know. I don't know if you need to worry about that right now. What they're selling is a job. Because they're the guy to run all the jobs. It's very rare that I now. What they're selling is a job. Yeah.

Because they're the guy to run all the jobs. It's very rare that I see. And they're like, I made $100,000 last year. I'm like, no, no, no. You paid yourself $100,000. To replace your 80-hour work week that shows up and fixes stuff and runs calls on Saturdays and goes to the neighbor's house on Sunday night to fix something, it's going to cost me more than $100,000 to replace you.

Your business needs $0. Yep. You're self-employed. You don't have a business and that's fine. That's great. Like I'm not knocking any of this. Like I don't want anybody to hear what I'm saying. It'd be in like, think that I'm knocking the idea of building a home services business. I mean, that's the thing that enabled me to make something of myself, to be a self-made millionaire and retire at 32. Thank God I got into the home services business. But what I am trying to do is paint a realistic picture of what it takes to build and sell a business in the home services space. And it's like, yeah, the first two or three levels, you're self-employed. You don't have a business. And a lot of people, that's what they want.

They want to be their own. And that's fine. You're absolutely right. There's nothing wrong with that. I just don't like it when somebody comes to me and they say i've had 15 000 customers in the last 20 years my business is worth something and i'm like you're not worth your blood sweat and tears i'm sorry they're just not worth anything yeah what's worth something is your income statement your balance sheet and you show me how it's worth something because your income statement and your balance sheet. And you show me how it's worth something. Because there's no bank and there's no investor in the world that's going to give you shit for what you think your blood, sweat, and tears are worth. So you can't have your cake and eat it too. Either you want it to be self-employed and not make your business worth anything, or you want to hire people and delegate and create a system. If you're a systems expert, business ownership is for you.

Because the systems are what you're selling. That's right. That's exactly right. There's some culture things I want to ask about, but culture to me is leadership. And you had 150 trucks. Talk to me a little bit about how you develop leadership or 150 employees. And you said 80 trucks, but talk to me about how you built that leadership up. And right now, even in the company you're in, there's a lot of leadership that goes into it because they're following you, right? So how do you build up that leadership, which inevitably turns into culture? Yeah, you know, leadership was a big part of my competitive advantage in that business

because it was a people business. You know, we had to keep people in order to deliver a good service because it took a long time to train a lawn mowing technician. It took way too long, actually. And I wanted to keep my people. I didn't want to have high turnover because the product suffered. And so for us, culture was everything. It was like the hundred and some odd people that worked there. We were one big family. And I think at a certain size business, that's a good idea. But on the other hand, you don't want to run like a family business. You want to run the business like a sports team.

It's like we keep the best on the team and we sometimes make hard choices and we cut people from the team. Whereas a family, you can't cut your uncle. But I mean, I did run it like a family. And so that was a competitive advantage for us. We did a lot of cool things. We had a lot of immigrant workers that came from Central America. And one thing we would do is we would give interest-free loans to these folks to build houses and businesses back home. That was really neat. And then we would celebrate those wins. And so it's like when the company wins, the employees win.

And it was just part of the culture that kind of galvanized us as a team. And it kind of helped us keep and hold on to people because they wanted to work there. It was fun. It was different than, you know, other places they could go work where they were just a name on a spreadsheet. And I knew the names of everybody that ever worked for me, you know, which was not easy. I would make little flashcards and memorize the names of every way that worked for me. And that's important. If you're going to have more than a couple of people, you got to be a good leader. You got to learn how to be a good leader. I didn't start off being a good leader. I don't think I ever became a good leader, but I got

to be decent. And I read stuff like from John Maxwell and Simon Sinek and a couple of other authors that I liked. And so constantly reading books on leadership, constantly trying to take courses on leadership, because that's a big part of it. If you've got a small business with 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 people and you think the culture in it stinks, well, you get exactly the culture you deserve as the business owner because it reflects you. It reflects who you are. So it's like if you walk in the office and you don't want to be there, well, you got exactly what you deserve because that's what you created. Being a strong leader, being the curator of the culture, the protector of the culture, setting the tone for what the values are as a business owner, that's one of the things on the pie chart, one of the big pieces of the pie. There are certain people that I know that could never be that CEO, that owner, that strong leader. And I do believe

there are people out there that find someone to fit that mold. And it's hard to find. But one of my buddies has a hundred million dollar company and he loves sales so much. And it's an ad agency that he stepped out. He hired the Kraft CEO from Kraft from years ago. The guy came in and built a culture. And I think it's really hard to do when you're a small company, don't become an owner and expect to hire someone else to take that role until you get to a certain size. Once again, probably level nine on Mario. Yeah, that's when you're Bowser.

You're right in the last stages there. And then finally, one other thing I wanted to touch about when you own the business is marketing is a big deal. What are some easy things you could say that probably some of us just were too blindsided? We don't even see in the right in front of us. You got to figure out as a business, you're only going to be good at a couple of channels. By channels, I mean, it might be Facebook ads. It might be radio ads. It might be SEO. It might be direct sales. It might be Thumbtack. It might be Angie's List. But you're really only going to be good at one or two. So really try to figure out which one of those one or two is how you make like 80% of

your revenue and just lean all the way into it. And so like you mentioned, the garage door analogy is like, well, there's not really an Uber for garage doors. It's not going to be a self-serve thing. Well, then it is a sales type of business. And so then you got to figure out, okay, this is how I have a sales system. And this is how I get the phone, the ring for leads for that sales system. And that's all I'm worried about. And so I get the phone, the ring for that sales system through bidding on Google AdWords or running Facebook ads or one or two things. It's not trying to do all of these things at once because then you're not going to be good at any of them. And that old

adage of like, I know I'm wasting half of my ad budget. I just, I wish I knew what half it was. You know, that's like an adage. You want to get as far away from that as possible. You want to know, look, I know if I put $3,000 into Google AdWords, I know it makes me $20,000. And you just need like if you can't answer that question, well, then guess what? You don't need to go buy a newspaper ad and a radio ad and Instagram agency and all this other shit until you can really understand the unit economics around every channel one at a time. And I did a small coaching call this past weekend a couple weekends ago and the guy is the top guy in his franchise of all of them and and i won't go into detail because he's gonna listen to this and he might be listening now but very very smart guy the best

number one guy in the franchise and he said so tell me i spent 12000 on my online a month. And he said, I'm not really sure. It's a little bit of Facebook, some Instagram, some retargeting, some display ads, some Google pay-per-click, some LSA, and some organic. And I said, the first thing I would do is find out how much it costs to acquire a customer or at least a lead in each one of those sources. Because to me, it sounds like you're shotgunning, you're spraying and seeing what sticks. And to understand that per marketing channel, you know, I talk about this a lot, but I've got 4,000 call tracking numbers.

4,000. 4,000. And people are like, I have 12. I'm like, 12,000. At least you have call tracking. At least you got 12. At least you got call tracking. Yes. Yes. you have call tracking at least you got at least you got call tracking yes yes cool things there's um there's uti codes that you can put utm codes on everything that actually make a dynamic number

pop up or so you could have a thousand just on google alone and understand where the leads are coming from what the search terms are and if they they're converting. And I don't want to bore people with the analytics, but I just feel like there's two things you need to do as an owner, and that's marketing. You need to understand your marketing. You need to understand your financials. Those are the two core things that most owners... I'm like, this is a balance sheet. They're like, well, I didn't go to college. And I'm like, this is just things... There's expenses. There's assets. These are things. It's not even about college. It's not even about high school. It's just understanding your numbers matter. And I think there's too many business owners that say, I don't even want to look in the bank account because I was there.

They're scared of it. They're scared of what they're going to see. And I've been there too. Something that's helped me get through these things is just hiring a freelancer who's an expert on a fractional basis to hold you accountable. So it might be hiring that CPA that makes $300 an hour just to review your balance sheet for two or three hours a month. It might be hiring that CMO on Upwork or something like that, that makes 180 bucks an hour to work for you for two or three hours a week to hold you accountable to do these things. Think of them as like a fulcrum and just hire... Okay, imagine the best CMO marketer that you could bring on your team is going to make 250 grand a year. Well,

what if you could hire that person for two hours a week? And then they can help you be accountable on understanding, okay, this is how we're looking at the call number analytics. And this is how we're looking at what we spent to make that phone ring. And this is our CPA for every lead that we got out of Google AdWords or Facebook or Instagram or whatever. Just trying to put that tripwire in front of you by hiring the best for a couple of hours can help you hold you accountable as a forcing function to do all these other things you need to do. I have found it is better to hire the best for a couple of hours than to hire somebody who's a novice for 50 hours. You know what? That is such a great quote. I think that's genius.

So the best for a few hours. Rather than a novice for 50 hours. Novice for 50. Or somebody who's like an intern or somebody who just got out of school or some shit. Everybody wants to look for a deal. And it's like, they're not going to do anything but play on Facebook all day or play on Instagram all day. It's like, they're not going to do anything but play on Facebook all day or play on Instagram all day. It's like, they're not going to do anything.

Like go straight to the top, hire the best for a couple of hours and then execute the strategy that they help you lay out. I think that's awesome. And a little quick question I have in my notes. And then I want to ask my last three questions is what do you consider a good profit margin? What should people aim for in the home service niche? Painful. There were years during the financial crisis, 0, 8, 9, 10, 11, that we were just breaking even like 3%, 4%. When we were doing really good, 8%, 10%, 12%.

And I think that's industry by industry for sure. There's paint, there's garage, there's a million chimney. And then also if you're like an owner operator, you need to be on if it's you and a helper you need to be like up 40 50 you know if it's you and 100 people and you got managers and crew foreman and all this other shit then maybe it might be less than 10 well pay yourself 100 grand and then see what is the company should still make 7 10 12 15 i like 20 myself i think 20 is a good goal 20 means there's ultimate efficiencies 30 means you're probably overcharging or underpaying your workers and pay yourself first yep yeah up and first yeah michael mccullough read the book the richest man in babylon

one of my three books yep, such a great book. Pay yourself first. Always pay yourself first. Because if you don't, you're never going to pay yourself anything and your business is going to be sloppy. So I want to learn all about GreenPel. I'm going to email you. We're going to get my team on it. We're going to get some videos.

I want anybody out there. We're going to help you find a lot more clients. We're going to advertise this to landscapers. And a certain question I always ask is, number one, how do I get more of you? I want to reach out. going to help you find a lot more clients we're going to advertise this to landscapers and certain questions i always ask is number one how do i get more of you i want to reach out there's green pal how do i get more basically brian clayton is there a website is there a phone number is there an email what's the best way to reach out yeah so anybody listening to this that doesn't want to cut their own grass you just download green pal in the app store or play store or get hooked up with a great

lawn mowing service in less than a couple minutes. Anybody who wants to get at me is listening to my story. It's like, oh, that guy can help me with this specific question. You can hit me up on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to help you out. But try to be specific and something that I can help you with that's tactical. And LinkedIn is the best way to get at me. I've been hanging out on there a lot more lately. Okay. And I always ask top three books. It sounds like a richest man in Babylon. Both hotels.

We go to one, some Maxwell, some cynic stuff. You had to give me three quick books that change your life off the top of your head. Seven habits of highly effective people. Good to great. And the E-myth. Boom. Look at you you see readers are leaders you're never going to

change unless you read books or meet new people those are the only two dude if it wasn't for books i'd still be pushing a lawnmower dude i can tell you i just had 20 arrive and i'm like i got and then finally the way i close it out is uh you've got a lot of stuff in your mind and we probably didn't talk about everything. So I want to give you a few minutes for the listeners. Say anything, talk about anything, maybe some takeaways, maybe some go do this today. Could be anything you want, but just deliver as much knowledge and bombs as you could for the listeners. Well, one thing that I always like to look at business is treat it as what they call it as an infinite game. And Sam and Sinek just wrote a book

called The Infinite Game. And if you think about it as like, this is what I'm going to be doing with my life until it's over with, until I get it to where I have to get it to. It's like, as long as it takes, I will make this thing successful. And if you treat it as an infinite game,

then you'll see it through. Whereas if you think about like, oh, I'm going to do this for three years and sell it or flip it or make a million dollars in five years or something, maybe you can. But a lot of times, if you don't manage your psychology in such a manner that you know you're going to be doing this for the next 20 years, then you won't have the wherewithal to see it through and you'll burn out because business can be tough. So that's one piece of advice. Another piece of advice is there's another book called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. The moral of this book is to think of your life as a storyline. It's like you're the main character in a movie. And to live an interesting story, you have to live an interesting life. And I read this book and it clicked for me because I was like, oh, well, my business is kind of my life storyline.

And I am kind of like the hero in the story. And I go through ups and downs and I have to overcome obstacles and problems to get to the end of the story. And so if you look at your life and your life in business in that context as a storyline, that there's going to be highs and lows, but it's going to be worth it. It can kind of help you manage your psychology and also like give you purpose that your business can be your purpose. I love that. My business is kind of my life too. I think most of the people listening, you got to have that balance. But Brian, I got to tell you, I'll definitely reach out to you. I want to get as much resources.

Anything you think you could help, maybe activity-wise, to just have them run through. I've got all kinds of things, but we'll add it to the podcast and give them as much listeners as much as you can. Guys, here's the deal. If you're not on GreenPAL and you hate

mowing your grass, quit on GreenPAL. And if you're ever looking to make a change technology-wise, reach out to Brian on LinkedIn. And, Brian, I got to tell you, it's been an amazing podcast. You're a killer. You can just tell you got a lot of energy, you care a lot, and I'm definitely interested in learning more about GreenPAL. Well, thank you, Tommy.

I appreciate it. And I thank you for having me on. Yeah, this was killer, man. I'll be in touch. Awesome. You have a great day. You too, buddy. See you later.

Hey, guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on.

And do me a quick favor. Leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review. Make it four or five sentences, tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're just, we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying

to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.