Ep 245: From Mowing Lawns to $8M Founder with Bryan Clayton

SHOWNOTES

“Like there’s this weird thing of the disappearing lawn guy… he shows up two or three times and then just drops off the face of the earth.”

If you’ve ever hired a service provider who mysteriously vanished, you’ll appreciate this episode. Bryan Clayton took that exact frustration and turned it into a multi-city marketplace now used by 300,000 people every week. But this isn’t just about lawn care. It’s about systems, scale, simplicity — and why this might actually be the best time in 30 years to start a business.

Bryan Clayton is the CEO and co-founder of GreenPal, the largest lawn care marketplace in the United States. Before launching GreenPal, he built a landscaping company from the ground up to $8–9 million in annual revenue and 150 employees before selling it to a national firm. He combines deep operational experience with tech-driven innovation.

WE ALSO TALKED ABOUT

• Why reliability matters more than price when building a service-based business
• The power of niching down to one core use case instead of trying to do everything
• How to manage a two-sided marketplace (customers and service providers)
• Why cancellation policies must balance fairness on both sides
• The difference between starting in an established industry vs. inventing something new
• Why Bryan believes this is the best time in decades to start a business
• How AI acts as “middle-to-middle” acceleration rather than end-to-end replacement
• Why founders should personally handle customer support — even years into the business

If you’re building a service business — or even thinking about starting one — this episode is packed with practical insights you can apply immediately.

Tune in to hear how Bryan built two businesses in completely different ways — and why simplicity, customer feedback and systems thinking made all the difference.

And if you want to stay updated on future episodes:

Get regular access to tips, techniques and advice from experts about growing your business:
https://onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter/

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• GreenPal – https://www.greenpal.com/
• Bryan Clayton on LinkedIn 

My newsletter is for people who need a way to make money from home so they can build a better life for themselves and their families:
👉 https://onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter

_____________

Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

Affiliate Disclaimer: If you click on links on this page and then make a purchase, I may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you).  I am a proud affiliate of these resources because I use them in my own life and business.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 245: From Mowing Lawns to $8M Founder with Bryan Clayton

[00:00:00] 

Trudy Rankin: There’s this weird thing of the disappearing lawn guy. He shows up for two or three times and then he just drops off the face of the earth. That’s how Bryan Clayton described one of the most frustrating problems in the lawn care industry, and honestly, it applies to far more than just lawn mowing.

Because when a service provider disappears, it’s not just inconvenient. It actually erodes trust. And Bryan realized that fixing that one problem could unlock a much bigger opportunity. In this episode I talk with Bryan Clayton, the CEO of GreenPal, which is often described as the Uber of lawn care.

But this isn’t just about building an app. We talk about how Bryan grew a landscaping business to $8 to $9 million in revenue and 150 employees before selling it, why reliability beats price in almost every service-based business, and the power of niching down to one clear use case. We also talked about how to balance a two-sided [00:01:00] marketplace without alienating the other side, which is not an easy thing and why Bryan believes that this is the best time in 30 years to start a business.

So if you’re building a service business or thinking about it, this episode will sharpen how you think about systems, scale, and simplicity. Because Bryan has built not one, but two businesses in the same industry, first as a contractor and then as a tech founder. So he understands small business from the ground up, literally, and now helps over 300,000 people each week connect with reliable lawn care providers.

He’s practical, systems driven, and refreshingly honest about what actually works.

Trudy Rankin: Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m Trudy Rankin and I help people who need a flexible work from home option grow the online side of their business so they [00:02:00] can earn more, stress less, and have greater freedom in how they live.

Today I’ve got Bryan Clayton with me. Now, Bryan is the CEO of Green Pal, and that may give you a bit of a clue about what we’re going to be talking about, but it’s been called, GreenPal’s been called the Uber of lawn care. Now, the reason why this is kind of interesting to me is that way back during COVID times, I was working with the Australian Federal government to run a program that was helping people over the age of 50 or people who are carers or caregivers start a business so that they could, you know, not have to rely on basically the government for their support. And one of the people in that program actually went out, he was an executive, had been an executive in a big organization. He went and he started a lawn care business. And it did not take him very long for it just to, it just exploded. It just actually got so big that he ended up having to go and get some help.

And so I’ve been fascinated ever since by [00:03:00] the fact that you can take something that, you know most people do when they’re teenagers, they go out and mow the lawns and actually turn that into a business that can actually support a lot of people. And so I’ve asked Bryan if he’d come on today and just talk about his journey from building this whole thing that helps businesses, that helps not just businesses, but helps lawn care businesses actually match up with people who need lawn care. So Bryan, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Bryan Clayton: Well, Trudy, thanks for having me on. That was a great introduction. Yeah, the lawn mowing business is great because you can learn 80, 90% of what goes into running any business by starting a lawn mowing business.

So I love talking about how people get started with their first business mowing grass. So I love that story that you started out with.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. So what about you? How did you even get into this space to start with?

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, I started mowing grass in high school about 30 years ago to make [00:04:00] extra cash.

And a lot of people start off that way in this business, and I just kind of started out that way and stuck with it. I mowed grass all through high school, mowed grass all through college. And then when I graduated college. I decided, okay, maybe this could be my lane. Maybe I could grow this into something.

And ended up growing that little lawnmowing business into a real company. I ended up getting it to about 150 employees eventually around I believe it was $8 or $9 million a year in revenue, and then it was acquired by a national company in the United States that runs these types of companies all over the country.

And so that took about 15 years and after I sold the business, I decided, okay, what do I want to do now? Okay, I know this landscaping industry very well. I don’t really want to go be a contractor again, because I’d kind of been there, done that. So I decided, well, maybe I could be a tech entrepreneur.

Maybe I could start a website, maybe I could build an app. I didn’t know the first thing about how to do any of that, but I [00:05:00] just decided, okay, maybe I could try. And so I thought that it would be a good idea that somebody should build an app that worked like Uber, but for lawnmowing services because I kind of saw how inefficient the lawnmowing business, the lawnmowing industry ran.

And, uh, that was the idea when I started 10 years ago, and that’s what I’m working on now with GreenPal. GreenPal is the biggest marketplace in the United States where you can just download Green Pal, pop your address in, and then somebody will come mow your yard for you. And around 300,000 people use it every week for lawn mowing services.

Trudy Rankin: That’s really, really, really interesting because, you know, there, there are a number of labor platforms, I call them labor platforms. I don’t think anybody else does, but I call them labor platforms where you can go and get help for a particular task that you have, but you’ve chosen to just hone in on that one task.

Do you think that niching down to one kind of thing is better than sort of going a lot wider, like you don’t do landscaping and that it’s all lawn care?[00:06:00] 

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, the GreenPal is focused on basically everything that goes into keeping your lawn and landscaping tidy and neat and maintained. And it starts with the mowing.

Everybody needs to get the grass mowed every week or every two weeks. And that’s kind of like the onboarding, the on-ramp, for how people come to use it. And I think when you’re trying to make a space run more efficiently, when you’re trying to make something run like an Uber or in the United States, we have a home delivery platform called DoorDash.

When you’re trying to make those magical experiences happen, it can be optimal to focus on one use case. And so for us, focusing on just the lawn mowing was how we were able to create an experience that was just 10 times better than doing it the old way because as it turns out, like hiring a lawn care service kind of sucks because you call around, you get some estimates, you hire somebody, and then they’re like, they may show up, they may not.

Then if they show up once, like there’s this weird thing of like the disappearing lawn guy. Like he shows up [00:07:00] for two or three times and then he just drops off the face of the earth like, you want, did this guy die? Like, what happened to this guy? And that’s common for some reason in this business.

And so our platform makes that easy, makes that as easy as just pushing a button, getting it done. And then on the other side, it’s a business in a box for lawn care services. Everything they need from getting new customers to organizing it into one profitable route, to getting paid very quickly, and then the, marketing automation to keep them getting booked every two weeks or every week.

It’s really hard to do all of those things, all those nuances, unless you’re focused on one use case. And so for us, we’ve lasered in on just this one thing. How do we make ordering a lawn mowing service quicker, faster, cheaper, better, more delightful, more efficient. And we started that 10 years ago and we’re still working on that today.

Like we’re optimizing just those same things. Like, okay, what are the two or three things that we need to focus on this week to make that [00:08:00] mission better? And, I think if you’re not focused on one thing, it’s hard to do that. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, I’m pretty sure you are right, because there’s once again these platforms, there’s one here in Australia called Airtasker and you can get just about any kind of help.

And so their focus isn’t so much on guaranteeing the quality of the work that you get or anything like that. It’s all about just having a consolidated backend system so that the pay side of things works. And so you wouldn’t be able to give, they wouldn’t necessarily be able to give that very intensive, good experience, I think all the time and across the board for that one particular type of service.

That’s really kind of interesting. I’m curious because I have an interest, I have a background as a chief information officer and I’m always been curious about these kinds of, what would you call them? Multi-service platforms. Not multi-service platforms, but it’s a platform where you’re serving two different, completely different customers at the same time.

So you’ve got your lawn care clients, but you’ve also got your lawn care [00:09:00] providers. So how do you, tell us just a little bit about how you go about keeping both of those types of clients happy. 

Bryan Clayton: It’s a very good question because a lot of times they’re at odds. And really most marketplaces run this way.

Like if you think about an Uber, you kind of like want to order an Uber and when I get done with my coffee, I’ll come outside and I’ll get in the car and just wait on me. I’ll be out in a minute. And you just kind of want to be your private chauffeur and that’s not the way an Uber driver makes any money, like they need you to be ready and get in the car when they roll up. If not, they’re going to wait maybe a minute or two and then they gotta go on to the next thing because they gotta do five of these an hour to pay their bills. And so in that dynamic, the rider and driver are at odds.

And so Uber had to build a system, says, Hey, if you’re not there ready to pick up, get your ride, you gotta pay a $5 cancellation fee and so on. And so GreenPal is similarly situated where we have to kinda [00:10:00] set the rules of the game and we have to create a system where buyers and sellers can get introduced quickly, can do business, and do it in a way that’s fair for both sides.

And a lot of that is kind of educating both sides as they use the platform. It’s educating a consumer to understand that, hey, you can’t just order a lawn mowing service for someone to come mow your yard this afternoon and then hit them up five weeks later and then have them come again.

And when the grass is three feet tall again, like that’s not the way this works. You need to get on a schedule every 7 days, 10 days, 14 days max. So a lot of the platform, the value it adds is educating consumers along the way, step by step. So the pros can come on board and understand that this is kind of a modulated experience that people get it and people understand that this is how we’re going to use it and this is how business gets done.

And then for the pro side, nobody teaches any of us how to run a small business. And so a lot of times, we mentioned at [00:11:00] the outset, that the lawn mowing business is kind of this on ramp to small business ownership for a lot of people and so many providers of lawn care services, this is their first business and maybe even be their first handful of customers.

And so like the way they learn what goes into running a small business is just through negative interactions with consumers and they kind of maybe get it, maybe don’t. And so it’s like, that’s why the experience kind of sucks for consumers is like they gotta hire these providers that really haven’t been around the block.

They kind of have to teach them in effect what it means to run a successful small business. And so our platform’s job is to kind of be a coach in their pocket, like a business in a box where a pro is trained almost to understand this is what it means to give proactive communication to your customers, to show up on time, to follow up, to ask them, hey, were you satisfied with the job that I did? To ask for repeat business. All of these things like, nobody teaches any of us how to do them. And so, our platform’s job is to [00:12:00] slowly nudge them every step of the way to kind of do the right thing that’s in their own best interest and also in their customer’s best interests.

So, if you’re not focused on just one use case, it’s really hard to get all of those nuances nailed. And I think that’s how over time we’ve built an experience that’s better than just calling around and hoping for the best. 

Trudy Rankin: Yes. And then, yeah. Yeah. Having to deal with the fallout when things don’t go the way that you expected they would go on either side.

This is just a purely technical curiosity based question, just from my perspective. Because I haven’t seen the app itself. When it comes to getting your lawn done, like there’s a bazillion reasons why people might organize to have their lawns mowed, and then for some reason they need to cancel. How have you gone about creating a process that makes it easy for that to happen in a way that doesn’t, well, it’s always going to inconvenience probably the lawn care provider, but [00:13:00] how do you make that process a good one for both sides?

Bryan Clayton: When we founded the company, we self-funded the business. We didn’t raise any outside capital, so we had to be lean and mean at the outset. And we didn’t have all of this extra revenue for a big customer support staff or like a phone bank for people calling in. And as we kind of had to build a platform that solved a lot of problems on the fly.

And one of those was cancellations and then also, how you see a lot of platforms and a lot of kind of subscription services like this are really hard to cancel. Even like a newspaper subscription is really hard to cancel or anything that’s a recurring billing thing, people are just resident to sign up for because they’ve been burned before.

We didn’t want to build a product where we were always having to deal with that. And so we wanted to make it really easy to cancel for consumers because it’s like, if you’re not pleased with the service and you don’t need it, [00:14:00] and we didn’t earn that repeat business, we don’t want to force you into it.

We don’t want to lock you into it. And so we just day one, you can cancel anytime. And we made that, we let that be known everywhere on the platform. And then as time went on, after, you know, maybe we got our first 10,000, 20,000 transactions, we kept hearing from pros. ” I have this route and I show up and I’m driving all over town and I literally unload the mower and I’m starting, I get half the front yard mowed and then I get my notification and they cancel.”

And like, “I can’t run a business this way. I cannot maintain a livelihood this way.” And so we had to take that feedback and then strike a balance between buyer and seller and say, okay, listen, you can cancel. Up until 5:00 AM the same day because that’s when they usually roll out and get started on their route.

And then after that, the only way for you to cancel is to call [00:15:00] them and here’s their cell phone number or text them, and then they have to cancel on their end. Otherwise you know, it’s happening. And, uh, we felt like that was a fair balance between buyers and sellers. And that’s where it is today, is there are no fees.

There are no arbitrary fees. What I have found is like nobody’s going to pay for anything that they don’t want to pay for, and at the end of the day, you end up dealing with more chargebacks and things of that nature than it’s worth. So we don’t charge any cancellation fees, but up until the morning of, you can cancel from your app, but after that you need to call your provider and they’ll have to cancel on their end.

Trudy Rankin: That seems quite a lot more fair than getting halfway through a lawn and then finding out that somebody’s decided they didn’t need you after all, and couldn’t be bothered letting you know quick enough. So I have a quick question based on that. And just curious, so you’ve got some feedback from your providers going, “Look, this just doesn’t work and it’s, you can’t make a business out of this.”

Talk to us a little bit about [00:16:00] how you went about researching your customer needs and your provider needs in terms of what they actually needed, wanted out of this service that you provide, this platform that you provide. 

Bryan Clayton: It’s a really good question because it’s so critical.

Because when you start a new business of any kind, you have all of these assumptions in your head. A lot of times you’re building for yourself. I know I was, when we started GreenPal, I was building the app and the marketplace and the platform to run kind of how I thought it should based on my experience as a landscaping contractor.

And so a lot of the decisions were rooted in that background and I got a lot of things wrong. And the first thing I got wrong was I thought we were building a system where you could get the cheapest lawn mowing service in a snap. And because as a contractor, my experience was consumers, all they care about is price.

They just want the cheapest price. So we just need to build a system that delivers the cheapest price. And what I came to find out was after interacting with the first dozen, [00:17:00] maybe even first 20 consumers that use the platform for lawn care, they wanted a fair price, but they just wanted their lawn pro to show up on the day he was supposed to show up.

Actually get the service done. Like the case of the disappearing lawn guy was really the problem the platform was meant to solve. And we found this out with like personal phone conversations. Literally like I know the inside of every Starbucks in our first three cities, because I would meet with as many people that use the platform at Starbucks or at their kitchen counter.

Watching them use the platform. What did you expect it to do? What do you, what did you wish it would do? What do you wish it would do differently? And so getting that one-on-one, like in the trenches, feedback from them helped me course correct that early on. Understand that, okay, no, we don’t need to orient this whole system around.

Cutting the price out, as cheap as we can, we need to orient it around speed and reliability quickly, getting quotes for lawn [00:18:00] care quickly, getting it done the same day, and then showing up on a continual basis. And so that kind of saved the company in a sense because had we built it just on my idea, we might not have built a sticky product. People might have tried at once, but they wouldn’t have kept coming back for the recurring service because it wouldn’t have been reliable. And so I think that that customer feedback, and especially in the early days is critical. It’s R and D and even as time goes on, we’re in year 10 and 300,000 people use this thing every week.

I still do at least an hour a day of customer support because I want to know from the people that are using the platform on both sides of the transaction, what they like about it, what they don’t like about it, and things we need to tweak. We’re always tweaking. We’re always optimizing this thing. 

Trudy Rankin: That makes a lot of sense because things change and we are going to get into another topic in a minute, but I’m really curious because I want to talk just about your business model just for a little bit from the financial side of things.

When people sign [00:19:00] up or start using your app. Do they sign up for like a, you know, an ongoing monthly payment that they pay and you handle the payments to the contractors? Or do they just sign up, you connect them with the contractor and the payments go back and forth between the customer and the contractor and you don’t have anything to do with it? What kind of a model do you use? 

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, it’s a really good question because it’s an important one. I think when you’re starting a marketplace that connects buyers and sellers, particularly around services and labor, that can be a small but very important detail. We knew at the outset when building GreenPal, I did not want to be the world’s largest general contractor of lawn care services.

I knew I didn’t want to do that because I had built a landscaping company with, you know, over a hundred employees and we had a lot of contractors and I knew that managing just a couple dozen contractors at any given [00:20:00] time was a total nightmare. I certainly didn’t want to build a platform that subcontracted, like there’s around 30,000 lawn care services that use the platform.

I didn’t want to build a platform, I didn’t want to put, build a platform that, that they were all in my employ. And so we had to build a platform in such a way that we enabled consumers to quickly get quotes, quickly compare prices, read reviews, make an informed hiring decision, but then quickly get them to a point where they can do business with that provider directly in an efficient way through our technology.

And so I know that sounds complicated, but the way it works is every pro that comes onto our platform creates their own Stripe hard merchant account. And then they connect that to GreenPal and then consumers pay them through that bank account, and then they pay a commission to the platform.

And so, so that’s how it works from a financial flows [00:21:00] standpoint. And it keeps GreenPal out of the position of being the contractor of Lawn Mowing Services, because we don’t want to be that, to being more of a marketing service for lawn care services. And so what we found that is more scalable, and it gets us out of this, out of the dynamic of, oh no, I hired you to mow my yard.

No, you didn’t hire GreenPal. You hired Joe’s Lawn Service with your GreenPal account. And that keeps us both from a legal liability and from a standpoint of being like in accord with the law in the United States. It keeps us in a position where we can scale and not have to be bogged down by these sorts of things.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, absolutely. You would be buried in customer complaints you know, trying to resolve those customer complaints. 

Bryan Clayton: All, all day long. And in the United States, the minute you start hiring and working lots of workers, you’re subject to a lot of regulatory burden that, that is just makes the business not scalable.

I learned that in my landscaping business and I didn’t [00:22:00] want to repeat it. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. So just to summarize, just make sure that I’ve understood correctly. Customers come in and they just sign up to use the app and they sign up for free. 

Bryan Clayton: That’s correct. Yeah, that’s correct.

They can sign up, they get five free quotes from lawn care services nearby them within about a minute. And, uh, that’s all free. And then when they hire somebody they pay the price. They see, they don’t pay any fees on top of that. And so they pay them directly on their card statement.

It says, you know, Joe’s Lawn Service. And then the lawn service pays a commission to the platform to run their business on the platform. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s interesting because it’s almost like a lead generation service. 

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, we’re more oriented around being a marketing service and lead generation than we are being in the contracting business.

Trudy Rankin: But it makes sense because it’s so practical. It’s perfect for your contractors or for your, the service providers. It’s perfect for the customers. And you are there in a very practical way, joining those two things together. 

Bryan Clayton: Correct? Yeah. 

Trudy Rankin: The monetization. Yeah. Added value. And the monetization side [00:23:00] of it is, comes through the providers who give you a cut, a commission, of whatever work they get out of that particular customer. That’s really, really an interesting model. And I like the practicalness of it because I’ve seen a lot of, in this space, in the marketing space of, okay, I’m going to collect a lot of leads for you online and then I’m going to sell you the leads.

And all you get is the leads. You know, you don’t get anything else with it. It’s just the lead. And this sounds like you are actually providing the lawn care providers, the service providers are getting more from you than just the lead. They’re getting support in terms of being trained in how to run a small business.

Do you want to talk about that part of it just a little bit more? 

Bryan Clayton: Yeah. I think the lead gen business model is a little tired and I think it can still work for maybe some kind of like high ticket purchases, maybe it might make sense for everybody but for something like a $35 or $45 lawn mowing, no contractor’s going to pay a lead gen fee for that. I mean, if they do a good job, get [00:24:00] paid and get booked, like, their margin on that is about 5 or 10 bucks in a best case scenario. So it’s, there’s not a lot of meat on the bone to charge for that. And so as the platform, we have to add a lot more value in other ways.

And the way we do that to make the whole system work is to say, okay, not only do you get all of the new customers you can handle, but you also get an entire platform where you can keep them all organized in one place, run your route. You can then quickly bill them through the platform.

The system makes sure that the consumer is notified and that their card is billed on time and that everything kind of happens in one place because yes, a lawn care service could set all these systems up themselves by integrating 7 different SaaS platforms and, having a back office.

But they’re just getting started. They’re doing less than $100k a year in revenue. They don’t have the wherewithal to sustain that overhead. So it’s our platform’s [00:25:00] job to quickly get them up to speed using the best tools right out of the box, all put together in one neat place that is designed for their day-to-day workflow for their livelihood.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense. And it brings me to the next question that I’m quite curious about. Obviously everybody’s talking about AI, AI this, AI that, AI everything. Do you use AI in your business? And if you do, in what way? 

Bryan Clayton: Yeah, it is an incredible, it’s almost like running the business on steroids.

It’s almost like there was a video game called Super Mario Kart back in the day where you could hit, you hit a little star and then like you could just run through the game and you were invincible and then stuff would bounce off of you. It feels like playing the game with that. And what I mean by that is like, it has leveled up every single player on our team.

Like I mentioned, we’re a self-funded small tech company, so we’re not hiring the million dollar a year engineer that Google is giving an offer to. We’re [00:26:00] hiring a good engineer, but not the best minds in the world. And you know, it is what it is. You work with what you can get, and AI closes the gap between every single member of our team and what world class status looks like, including the founder and CEO, by the way. If I was like a c plus CEO 2 years ago, I’m now getting closer to operating at like an elite level with AI in my pocket. Because it’s almost like you have your own like, MIT data scientists, your Harvard Business School graduate, and your chief of legal and your chief of marketing, like all sitting around the table with you at all times.

And I’m always pinging it multiple times an hour with help on projects. And that’s just me personally. I have required every member of our team to also use it and, uh, it’s really helped level us all up at an individual contributor level. Then on top of that, [00:27:00] we’re doing things that we could never do before with AI in terms of inside of GreenPal.

So I’ll give you some examples of that. The case of the disappearing lawn guy still happens, you know, when you’re doing thousands of transactions every single day. Just the law of larger numbers, you’re going to, you know, your edge cases happen more often. At least one time, an hour or maybe 10 times an hour, some lawn guy, somewhere in the United States flakes on the consumer.

And so that still happens. And so how do you prevent that from happening? Well, beforehand, you know, you kind of had to be reactive. You had to, okay, well, let’s send it over to the customer support team. Let’s try to get them somebody else. But now we’re able to predict when that’s going to happen.

We can take the sea of data, understand, okay, this guy was a day late on his, 4 times out of his last 10 transactions. So his probability of flaking on this particular transaction has gone up. So let’s make sure we have somebody else [00:28:00] already lined up. And so we’re able to prevent negative outcomes from happening with AI.

And that’s just one example of like one little problem inside of our business. We use it for getting new customers, for keeping customers and growing customers. Every step of the way. So if you’re not like looking for ways to implement this in your daily life and then also inside of your business, I think you’re probably going to get left behind.

It is a great time to uplevel your business. 

Trudy Rankin: So out of just sheer curiosity, who in your team is the one, or you say you require everybody to use AI, but who in your team is responsible for that really nuanced data analytics, any automations that you might put in place, that sort of stuff.

Bryan Clayton: Yeah. The way I handled it as the founder, because our team of engineers is now 14, I decided, okay, after trying out every member of our team to be kind of the steward [00:29:00] of these new initiatives, I honed in on one particular member that had been with us for about 3 years and made him in charge of new AI initiatives.

And so now all he does is look for ways to fix inefficient processes, look for places where the bucket is leaking and looking for ways to use AI to plug those leaks. And he’s incentivized and he’s in charge of coming up with new ideas, scoping them out, and then getting them built and getting them put in place.

And then one of the, not really one of the problems, but one of the challenges is, you implement one of these new initiatives and then you’re never done with it. You’re always tuning it, always optimizing. It’s like, okay, we put that out and then this is what happened. Okay, we need to change this, and this.

So it’s like people think like this new technology is going to eviscerate jobs. We’re doing more work than we’ve ever done because now we do all these things we can never do before and they almost never end. So now I need to hire more engineers to like shepherd these things along, [00:30:00] but we’re growing more, making more money as a result of it.

So it’s been a productivity unlock for us. And so I think putting at least one person in charge of it and then incentivizing them to live it, breathe it, own it can be helpful. But it starts with the top. I’m paranoid about this stuff. I feel like if we don’t get it into the DNA of the business and get it to where it is delivering results for us, we’re going to get left behind by one of our competitors.

Trudy Rankin: That’s really, really interesting, that’s actually fascinating because I’m interested in this whole area of ai and because of my past background, I’m fascinated by what you have to do to continually innovate, continually improve what you’re doing and things like that. But also, you know, there is that whole belief out there amongst a lot of people that AI’s going to eat the world and your job in the process. I’m guessing at this stage, an educated guess that the [00:31:00] skills that person already had plus their willingness to learn were what enabled them to actually become successful at this task that they’ve been given in terms of using AI to stop the leaking bucket.

Would that be correct? 

Bryan Clayton: Yeah. The way I like to think about it, the way I’ve heard it explained that makes sense to me and in my experience using AI is a lot of people try to use AI in their small business or in their personal life, and they one shot it and it like gives some half-assed result and it’s like, oh, that was stupid.

This is hype. And what they expect is an end to two end solution. And AI is not end to end. It is middle to middle. So what I mean by that is like you have to have somebody who knows what the hell they’re doing that is an engineer that, that has 10 years of experience doing this, could do it end to end, but they can take it from the very beginning and then with AI go middle to middle much quicker.

What used to [00:32:00] take six months can now take six hours and go through that like hitting the star in Super Mario Kart. Then you get to the end and somebody who knows what the hell they’re doing needs to implement it, put it into the business, study it, monitor it, tweak it, and then, rinse and repeat, go through the whole process over again, over and over and over again.

So it’s middle to middle, it’s not end to end, and it can take the middle and reduce it by 90% or more in terms of time and investment and expertise. Like you would have to have 7 different people from 7 different backgrounds and skill sets to pull some sort of initiative off. Now with AI you don’t, but you have to have somebody who takes it from the very beginning and the very end, and if you don’t, then prepare to be let down.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah, that’s definitely true. I’ve certainly experienced that with my own business, especially when you first, it would be lovely to dream about end to end, but it just… 

Bryan Clayton: Maybe we’ll have it one day, but we’re not there yet. 

Trudy Rankin: We’re just not there yet. But it [00:33:00] is brilliant. You know, it’s lovely to know that once you, when you hit a trigger point, some stuff can happen. Then a human who needs to have a look at it, some stuff can happen, and then you’ve got somebody who needs to implement it. It’s a really good way of looking at it. I like that whole middle to middle way of thinking about it. 

Bryan Clayton: And the Super Mario cart example, hitting that star and running through it, invincible, you still gotta have a driver. 

Trudy Rankin: Yes. 

Bryan Clayton: The car in this context is not driving itself and it’s not going to win the race itself. You just are just going through it in warp speed. That’s how you should think about AI is like, is hitting that star and like just going through the game on invincible mode, you’re still the arbiter of it.

You’re still in the driver’s seat and a lot of people think they can get out of the driver’s seat and they’re let down when they find out they can’t. So it is really important to look at it from that context. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, it’s been really, really interesting sort of listening to you talk about this business and what you’ve done to set it up.

Just for our listeners, [00:34:00] maybe, you know, there are going to be some people who are still at that point where they’re kind of back at the beginning of the journey. They, maybe they’ve started a business or maybe even they’re thinking about starting a business. Lawn care is always there as an opportunity.

But you’ve been quite a long way through that. You’ve done that, you’ve built it, you’ve ended up building a business that you sold and now you’ve gotten onto the tech side and you’ve built a business and you’re growing it. If you were talking to, or if you were, if somebody was listening who’s just at the beginning of their business, what kind of things would you tell?

Just maybe three tips of the things that are the absolutely the most critical to get right when they’re just getting started. 

Bryan Clayton: Yeah. If you are getting started in an established industry that you’ve seen other competitors doing it. You can kind of emulate what they’re doing and just do it better, that’s one thing. If you’re inventing a brand new product from scratch, that’s another thing. Those are two [00:35:00] completely different journeys. And so the kind of the way you look at it is totally different. In the former, like my landscaping company, I was running a landscaping business. I wasn’t inventing a new product. The way I attacked it was, I just flat out out-served my competition out-served my customers better than my competition was.

And that’s how I grew a business from a hundred grand to a million, to 5 to 10. I think that kind of hustle can get you through that kind of business. Especially now with AI, these AI tools, a lot of these old kind of stodgy business owners aren’t going to take the time to implement them. You can run the game on easy mode and do that and outwork your competitors and out serve your competitors.

And that’s the way to look at that. In the other example of inventing a brand new product like I was with GreenPal, I was inventing an app that worked like Uber, but for lawn mowing, that’s a completely different journey. There, you’re really trying to discover, can I build [00:36:00] something that someone will pay for?

And you really, you just need to focus on two things. Building that thing and getting people to pay for it and everything else that you’re doing is almost a waste of time. And that’s a very different thing than the first type of business. And so knowing which one you’re doing and then applying the right playbook.

And then now like going in line with what we’ve been talking about, using AI to run through those things a lot quicker is how I would talk to myself if I was starting over or anybody who’s looking to get started now, which by the way, I think is the best time I’ve seen in my lifetime to start a business.

And I’ve been doing this since 1995. I would say within 30 years, this is the best time we have ever had to start a small business of any kind, because now you have all of these new tools that allow you to operate at a more elite level. And so it’s the best time that I’ve ever seen to get started on any kind of new project.

Trudy Rankin: I think that is absolutely [00:37:00] true. A hundred percent true. And I would just encourage anybody out there listening, if you haven’t started your own business and you’ve been thinking about starting your own business definitely look into this. Whether it’s a lawn care business or it’s a business where you’ve inventing something new.

Whatever it is it’s a good time to do it. Bryan, it’s been really, really, really interesting talking with you. If people were interested in either getting in touch with you or finding out more about GreenPal, where would they go? 

Bryan Clayton: Well, I appreciate you having me on, Trudy. I enjoyed our conversation.

Yeah, anybody that wants to find me, just Google my name, Bryan Clayton maybe throw GreenPal on the end and you’ll find my LinkedIn, my Instagram. You can just shoot me a message on any of those. And then anybody want to try out GreenPal in the United States, just go to greenpal.com. We will soon be in UK, Canada, and Australia.

So that’s going to happen at some point. Um, but yeah, greenpal.com. Easiest way to get a lawn mowing service. 

Trudy Rankin: Fantastic, and I’ll make sure I put that information into the show notes. But once again, thank you so much. 

Bryan Clayton: Thanks, Trudy.

Trudy Rankin: Well, I hope [00:38:00] you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. What stood out to me the most was this idea that reliability is often more powerful than price, and that clarity about which business path you’re on can save you years of frustration. And I also loved Bryan’s perspective on AI being middle to middle.

It’s not about replacing people, it’s about accelerating capability. And when small teams use it wisely, they can compete at levels that used to require entire departments. If you found this episode helpful, remember to subscribe so you don’t miss upcoming interviews.

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