The grass is always greener, as the saying goes, and when our guest today saw the opportunity to build his lawncare empire and launch GreenPal, a lawncare marketplace he jumped in with both feet and never looked back.
Bryan Clayton is the Co-Founder and CEO of GreenPal, and has lived the lawn care life before. He also knew what lawn care professionals needed and what lawn care customers wanted, but he didn’t know much about launching an app.
Today, GreenPal is the largest on-demand lawn care marketplace in the US with the goal to be the easiest way to book a local lawn care company for yard maintenance services at an affordable price.
We talked to Bryan about his career journey, how to sell your company, and the decision to bootstrap GreenPal to $30M in GMV.
About Bryan Clayton:
Bryan Clayton is the Co-Founder and CEO of GreenPal, an online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. GreenPal has been called the “Uber for lawn care” by Entrepreneur magazine and has over 300,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day.
Before starting GreenPal, Bryan Clayton founded Peachtree Inc., one of the largest landscaping companies in the state of Tennessee, growing it to over $10 million a year in annual revenue before it was acquired by Lusa Holdings in 2013. Bryan‘s interest and expertise are related to entrepreneurism, small business growth, marketing, and bootstrapping businesses from zero revenue to profitability and exit.
In this episode, we discuss:
(01:14) Bryan’s 10-year journey to being an overnight success
(02:04) What building a sales process was key to his first business, Peachtree
(03:22) Scaling the sales team
(07:30) Deciding to sell Peachtree
(10:13) How he built GreenPal differently and why they have bootstrapped
(12:37) The evolution of his leadership style at GreenPal
(14:42) How GreenPal solved the marketplace problem by focusing on the supply side first
(17:15) Has bootstrapping effected their decision-making
(23:27) How being an industry insider helped him navigate a lot of the blockers in starting GreenPal
(26:33) The importance in building community in their lawn care professionals
(28:23) Advice for other marketplace founders
(30:29) The decision tree for his time and why he says no to many requests
(34:05) Understanding a job function before you delegate
(34:49) The most rewarding aspect of being an entreprenuer
(36:19) What the next 10 years of GreenPal looks like
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Building the Uber of Lawn Care with Brian Clayton of GreenPal