How to Build a Growth Flywheel in Your Business

• 38:37

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Growth flywheel, Green Pal, Brian Clayton, entrepreneurship, Uber inspiration, software development, customer feedback, content creation, AI integration, data analysis, business growth, marketing strategy, small business, tech startup, business experiments.

SPEAKERS

Bryan Clayton, Speaker 1, Damon Pistulka

Damon Pistulka  00:08

All right, everyone, welcome once again. The faces of business. I am your host, Damon Pistulka, and I am excited for our guest today, because we have none other than Brian Clayton from Green pal with us here today, and he’s going to be talking about how to build a growth flywheel in your business. Brian, thanks for being here today.

Bryan Clayton  00:29

Damon, it’s great to be with you. Thanks for having me on. It is awesome.

Damon Pistulka  00:32

And I’m still jealous of the background you there in in wonderful Costa Rica today. Thanks for being here.

Bryan Clayton  00:42

I appreciate it, man. I S I had this on my schedule for today, and I thought, okay, yeah, I’ll get off the beach. I’ll come in and talk to Damon, do a good interview. And so this is actually a nice break from doing nothing. You know, you can only do nothing so long. So

Damon Pistulka  00:57

there you go. There you go. I’m glad we could be a nice break from doing nothing, and hopefully we’re going to have some fun here today. And Brian so we, you know, let we’ll talk a little bit about green pal in a moment, but we really like to get to know who we’re talking about. So if you could share your background a little bit, where are you from? How you got into what you’re doing today with green pal, that’d be cool for us to start.

Bryan Clayton  01:23

Yeah. So, born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, and I have never had a job. I have always had my own little business, and I was fortunate when I was a kid to be forced into entrepreneurship by my father. He got tired of watching me play Super Mario Brothers all day, and I remember the day very clearly. He interrupted my Nintendo playing and said, Hey, get off your butt. The neighbors need somebody to cut their grass. And I said, I said, Hey, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t mow yours. And he said, Well, what you do now? And and he is, he was a military guy, so this was not a request, it was a direct and we went next door, mowed the neighbor’s yard, and for an hour of work, I got paid 20 bucks, and some I remember it very clearly. Something happened in that moment, and something just clicked. I thought, Wait, now I can just do this and make money and not have to hassle you guys for for money, for new clothes, or soccer cleats and things like that, and and I remember when I got done, I started making up flyers I’m on our home computer, and pass them around the neighborhood. And got 10 customers that that first summer. And I just kept doing that. Kept doing that through high school, kept doing it through college, and over a 15 year period of time, built that into an actual business, eventually growing the company to around 150 employees. And then, and then it was acquired. That business was acquired by a national company that operates several of them and and so I was very fortunate to to have a good father to to force me to do something I didn’t want to do, but that was good for me. And then, and also be in a growing community like Nashville, where, if you’re running a small business, you could just trip over new business every day, because new stuff is built, new people. People were moving there. There’s prosperity there. So lot of hard work, but a lot of luck and and built and sold that company. And then I took some time off, did a bunch of traveling, and got really discontent that I didn’t have a mission, I didn’t have a project, I didn’t have a reason that it was important for me to get out of bed early in the morning. And I thought, Okay, well, I’m gonna start another company. What should I start? And at the time, Uber was just getting rolling. Uber was just started in a couple of cities in the United States. And I’ll never forget, I I took an Uber ride for the first time in San Francisco. And, and this was 2012 2013 and, and I thought that was magical, that you could just push a button and something happened in the real world. And I thought, somebody’s going to build this for lawn mowing. It might as well be me. And so it was naivete as an asset, but recruited two co founders. We started working on green pal. Here we are 10 years later. It’s a 10 year overnight success. Yeah.

Damon Pistulka  04:11

So who had ever thought that the Uber ride would give you the idea and go into this that’s totally

Bryan Clayton  04:19

Life is Strange, sometimes with little moments that could change the way your whole life takes shape with just one little thing and and I remember it very specifically, because up until then, things you would do on your phone or on a website only happen in the digital sense. That was the first time where you would push a button and something real in the real world happened. And yes, that was like an aha moment for me, and that gave me the confidence that that that could exist for this little industry that I knew, the lawn mowing, landscaping business. I knew somebody was going to build it, and I just decided I wanted to be. The person, yes,

Damon Pistulka  05:01

yeah. And you’re right. It’s really, that Uber, really was the beginning of, you know, like, like you said, press, they come to you. They right, using your location, they you’re you’re using other resources around you, depending on who’s closest. There were so many things that were, were coming together just in that application. Yeah,

Bryan Clayton  05:25

it was, it was, you know, for the first time, everybody had a super computer in their in their pocket, and so we knew where you were, who you were, your payment method, and then on the other side, you could match all those things up. So for the first time, that was possible. And, and that’s what kind of gave me the inspiration of okay, because I knew how hard it was to run a lawn mowing business, and I knew what a pain in the butt it was for people to get matched up with lawn mowing services, because I solved the problem every day. And I thought, okay, technology can make this smoother for both sides of this transaction. Yeah,

Speaker 1  05:59

yeah. Yeah. So you, you,

Damon Pistulka  06:05

let’s talk about the switch, right? Because you, you start out mowing lawns, and you mow lawns until you sell this company and you decide to build a software company. Now, what? There have to be some good learnings in this.

Bryan Clayton  06:23

It was, well, like I said, it was, it was naivete as an asset. So I I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I was very naive to think I could do it. Because if I had known everything that was going to be involved, I would have never tried it. And so, so that was like, sometimes that can be like, a good thing when you don’t, you don’t really know the challenges and and you’re, you’re ignorant of the of what, of what lies ahead. And so that’s how it was for me, um, because I just built sold and, kind of, I scaled that company to to around ten million in revenue, and then sold it. So here I am. My chess is puffed up. I think I know everything. There is a know about small business and and, and I thought, Okay, this will be easy, because it all be, it’ll be software I won’t have to deal with, you know, 100 150 workers. I won’t have to deal with 90 trucks that are breaking down all the time, and insatiable customers and all these things. I thought this will actually be easier, because we’ll build the software and it’ll just, it’ll just work, and I learned a lot of hard lessons. So I thought we could my two co founders, and I thought we could just outsource the tech, and then we would do the sales, and then, and we would be off and going. So we tried to do that. We we thought, okay, this is what we think the app should look look like. And we hired a development shop to build it, and it took them nine months, and like, $200,000 and they delivered this thing that was a total piece of crap. It was hard to use. It was unintuitive. It barely worked, and I learned to be in the tech business. You have to learn how to execute tech. You can’t outsource it. And I’m from Nashville, and it’s kind of like saying, I have an idea for a song, I just need a musician to compose it. Yeah, either you’re either you’re a musician, or you’re not, and so either you’re in the tech business or you’re not. And so that was a really hard lesson. Cost us a year a lot of a lot of our seed capital that we had kind of collected. And so we went back to the drawing board and taught ourselves how to build software. And that took, like, another year of just going to YouTube University online classes. My co founder went to a boot camp that was like eight hours a day for six months, and we slowly picked up the skills we needed to to rebuild the whole platform from scratch ourselves while we learned. But at least at that time, we could, we could make changes to it and iterate on top of it and improve upon what we had. And so that was like the first, like stumbling block and hard, painful learning. And then the next thing was, I thought, this is hard. I’m glad we got that out of the way. And I thought, I’m glad the hard part is done. And then I realized, actually, that was the easy part. All of that was easy if and I learned the hard paper lesson, if you build it, they will not come and and, and I learned the hard lesson that pretty much every founder learns, uh, particularly if you’re trying to start a tech product, is that the actual distribution and sales and connecting what it is you have built with people that need it, that want it. It’s 10 times harder than just building the damn thing in the first place. Yeah, and going back to like the I’m not a musician, but, but growing up in Nashville and Music City, there’s, there’s all these strange parallels between the music business and and entrepreneurship. A friend of mine that was a recording artist told me, he said, he said, You know, I moved here to Nashville and and I had to learn how to I thought I was a good guitar player, and I realized I don’t. I need to sharpen up those skills. And then I got, I realized I got to learn how to sing and play the guitar at the same time. Then I got to be a good performer, and I got to be a songwriter. And so I did all those things, and then I realized that was the easy part. The hardest part is getting 10 people to show up at a show and and that’s the the life of a tech founder is no different, yeah, the building of the software, the design of the software, the the customer research, the the the the security of it, the all of these things that go in, yeah, into making a piece of software is the easy part. It’s really table stakes. The hard part is, okay, how do you, how do you get, like a distribution engine at the core of it to where it’ll grow itself? And that took years. It took years of of just grinding our way through it and try on air and learning how to how to market this thing, yeah,

Damon Pistulka  11:06

yeah. Well, and you make a great point, because software applications have developed to the point now that it has to be a good application just

11:17

to get in the game. That’s

Bryan Clayton  11:18

right. That’s table stakes. Yeah, used to be maybe 10 or 15 years ago, software was so terrible that you, if you had, like, a premium, really polished product that worked flawlessly, maybe that was a competitive advantage. But these days, that’s people expect that that Uber, Amazon, you know, Instagram, Facebook, these, these, these massive platforms of incredibly complex technology work like running water, yeah. And so the user, the customer, the consumer, is indoctrinated for perfection. They expect perfection. And so a well executed, well built piece of software is just like a ticket, an entry, entry into the game. I mean, yeah, this thing, it doesn’t, it doesn’t differentiate your company.

Damon Pistulka  12:07

Yeah, I like how you said that they expect perfection, like running water.

Bryan Clayton  12:11

That’s right, that’s right. And we have Uber, we have Jeff Bezos to thank. You know, with Uber, we have them to think. And even, you know, services like Instacart and DoorDash, you know, these services work every time. I’ve used those services at all, almost once a week, and I don’t think it’s ever not worked. So, yeah, we expect perfection.

Damon Pistulka  12:33

Yeah, yep. So then you moved into the really hard part, and the part we’re going to talk about today a little bit more and how you build this growth flywheel in your business. So what were some of the things starting out that that you guys learned and really helped you continue getting that flywheel moving? Yeah, the

Bryan Clayton  12:55

the first thing is, like the cold start and and your first 100 customers, I think the first 100 customers, first 100 sales, need to be hand to hand combat. I think you need to be knocking on doors, you know, setting up a boot booth at the mall, yeah, flyers. You need to do whatever it is, like, belly to belly with the first 100 people. And then you kind of need to get in the trenches with them on how they are using your product or service. So you can then understand, like, how to tweak it to build something that people actually want. So then you can get to the next level, maybe 1000 people. And then from there, you need to start thinking about, okay, how am I gonna get from 1000 to 10,010 1000 to 100,000 because you can’t get there passing out flyers. And so the first thing is nail it, then scale it so hand crank the first 100 sales, and then after that, it’s like, okay, like we talked about before. Not only do you, not only do you have to innovate on the product, you have to innovate on the distribution. You know, it’s not good enough to just build a good product. You also have to have some kind of secret sauce on how you’re spreading it. And so that’s where, like, It’s fancy word of like, a growth flywheel comes into into play. And I remember speaking Uber. I studied every little thing about Uber I could to learn from how they were growing so quickly to apply it to my little startup. And I remember the there was a a talk that the founder gave where, where they sketched on the back of a napkin their their growth flywheel. And it was okay. We know that if we have a certain number of drivers, we get a certain number of consumers, and then we need to focus on one thing, wait times. We get wait times to go down. That means more consumers are happier with it, which means that they refer their friends, which means more consumers come on, which means vendors can make more money, which means more vendors come on. And then the whole thing kind of reinforces itself in this flywheel effect. And so we started looking at that. Okay, in our business in terms of, okay, well, well, how can we juice? Juice the the cycle in our business, okay? Well, we kind of have a similar business in terms of lawn care providers submit pricing, and consumers hire the one they want to work with. But, but then beyond that, it kind of breaks down. And we, we started noticing, okay, how do we, how do we get more consumers beyond just word of mouth, and how do we use the exhaust of what’s happening in this in this flywheel, and try to use it to get more customers? And we came up with this idea of, okay, well, when we get all this transactional data, we know the square footage of all these properties. We know how much it cost to service them. We know which which Lawn Care vendors at a zip code level are reliable, which ones aren’t. And we know the average price per square foot. We know and we know all of this stuff about what’s going on. We can take that and we can package that into a unique piece of content that were, when somebody’s looking for a lawn mowing service, they stumble across our content around, okay, here are the top five lawn care services in Seattle, and here’s their average pricing per square foot. Here’s how often they show up on time. And guess what? You can also hire them right here. Yeah. So that little, that that flywheel effect of, okay, these things are happening. We’re getting this data, we can then recapture that data, package it up in a nice, easy to digest piece of content for new consumers to discover what green PAL is, was, was, was the flywheel effect that we stumbled upon. But this stuff doesn’t have to be complicated. Hey, if you’re if you’re a plumber and you want more bathroom like remodels or something, you just need to make it part of your workflow that you document every step of the way, and you send it off to a VA who packages it up into nice Tiktok videos and puts it out for you. And that’s just part of what your business does. Your business is not only in the in the business of doing plumbing work, but it’s also in the content creation business. It’s in the short video business. And so you have to bake into the DNA, into the into the actual workflows of the business, these sorts of things so the so the business can grow itself and and there’s a growth flywheel in the center of it, yeah,

Damon Pistulka  17:20

yeah. And you hit one of the things that we talk about a lot of the businesses that I’m helping, and that’s content creation, because it is so important anymore, if nothing else, the fact that you know what is, it’s, it’s, well over half of the buyers now are millennials, or close to it. And they want to be able to look you up on a phone. They want to be able to see who, what you are, who you are, what you’re doing. And really, not just, Hey, I’m going to be able to come there and mow your lawn, but who’s going to mow your lawn? How do they treat the world? How do they look at their life, you know, all these things. How are the employees talking in the whole scheme of things. And those, those that content becomes so important to not just say whether I could be the person that that could mow the yard is the person that aligns with me on things that I think are important as well,

Bryan Clayton  18:15

exactly, and something you just said, I was thinking about it the other day. So I’m 45 so I’m kind of, I’m Gen Generation X, almost millennial, somewhere in the middle. And, yeah, and for the last 20 years, millennial was, was one of those kind of, like, funny things you would call somebody, you know, you would call, like, every generation looks on the on the previous generation, and kind of cracks jokes on them and and for my whole life, we kind of, you know, if we call somebody a snowflake or a millennial, that was kind of the same thing. And the millennial in my head always kind of occupied this space of like the young college grad, not my customer. Well, time flies in 10 years, I’ll buy like that. Millennials are the customers now. Yes, they are, and so and so, that’s what you’re marketing to. And it’s like you just said, they they buy in very different ways than than than we were accustomed to 20 years ago. And and you have to make part of what your business does. Your business is not only in is not only in the plumbing, HVAC, home construction, lawn care, you’re in the content creation business. You have to make it part of the natural course of actions of what your business does in order to build any kind of lasting flywheel.

Damon Pistulka  19:38

Yeah, yeah, you certainly do. So what are the ways that you guys like to do it at Green pal, what are some of the ways that you’re, you know, creating content, connecting your your business, with the with a the people that are mowing the lawns, people that are that are actually getting their lawns mowed. So

Bryan Clayton  19:56

the, the first way we like to do it is just with the raw data. So. So the transactions that are happening, where they’re happening, how much they cost? Are they happening on time? And then tying that to profiles for individual lawn care services, that happens automatically. And we’re able to kind of do that in a programmatic way, if you will. But another way we like to manually do it is we literally just we pick out the best vendors in every market, and we interview them, and we take pictures of their properties, and we and we talk about what’s different about their business and and we create pieces of content and videos about them. And that’s kind of like a there’s no easy way to scale that, but that’s some of the highest ROI time we spend. So I think you have to look for ways to kind of automate it, but also ways to hand crank it. Yes,

Damon Pistulka  20:46

yes. And those are, those are the interview with your best, best vendors in the area. Have to be great relation building opportunities. Yeah,

Bryan Clayton  20:57

exactly, and, and particularly in the early days that was instrumental, where they would tell us, because we were on a first name basis with them, they would tell us, hey, you know, I really wish this, this piece of software, would look like this, or, I wish we had this feature or, or this thing’s annoying me, and it’s like that. Yeah, feedback is just free, r, d. You have to listen to that feedback, especially when you’re in a multi sided marketplace like we are. We have, we really have two customers. We have lawn care services and homeowners and consumers, and so we have to listen to both of them, strike the balance between what both of them want, and and, and sometimes we err on one side at the expense of the other, and we’re always correcting that, but you don’t know unless, unless you have that relationship with your key users, your key customers. So there’s that open line of communication.

Damon Pistulka  21:50

Yeah, really good. So in growing your your SaaS business, I mean, I talk to SaaS people all the time, first thing, they always think, there’s no way you can grow it unless you get investors and we pump all this money into marketing and all this other thing. And I think I really, I really admire that you guys have invested money back into the company and grown it organically that way. What are some of the things that you were in thought about doing, but we’re glad you didn’t on that way up.

Bryan Clayton  22:25

Yeah, when we first got started, we subscribed to the the tech press. Way of thinking that, Okay, you go and you raise a angel round of funding, and then you raise a series, A, B, C, and so on. And that’s kind of what you had to do. And so that’s what we that’s what we thought we needed to do. And it’s the first six months. I’m my co founders, and I are trying to learn how to code. We’re working 14 hours a day. And I thought, Okay, I’m going to, I’m going to try to go pitch investors on what we’re doing and and I remember going in on these meetings and pitching these, these, these, these folks, and just trying to get a $25,000 check or a $50,000 check. And I thought, this is a waste of time. I need to, I need to focus on building the product and where we can make $50,000 a week or $50,000 a day. And like I need to do less of this and more of talking to customers at Starbucks and and riding around in a pickup truck with Joe the lawnmower to figure out what it is they need, and I just need to go build that. I don’t. We don’t need to go down this path. And so that was an early kind of decision that we made and and we just doubled down on that and stuck with it and it served us well. I think there’s some businesses that raising funding makes sense, like there’s no other way to do it, especially if you if you’ve kind of been around the block a couple times, maybe you’ve built and sold a couple of these things, and you kind of know a lot of what there is to know when you can move a lot quicker with capital. But for me, yeah, I was a second time founder, but I was a first time tech founder, so and so, if you get, you know, if I had raised a million dollars, I just would have probably wasted it anyways. And so I got really lucky making that, you know, epiphany, or, you know, in the early days, that that was a waste of time for us. And now, you know, fast 410, years later, there was probably a half dozen other Uber for lawn care startups that raised anywhere from 20, $30 million to $100 million and a lot of them didn’t make it. Yeah, so and so, you know, we’re in good shape. That’s good. The cap table has three names on it, and we’re profitable. So, so I’m very, very thankful that we made that decision that early on,

Damon Pistulka  24:41

that is super cool. That is super cool. Yeah, and people don’t I, I tell you, a lot of people don’t realize how hard it is to raise capital, because I so many people go will think, Oh, I’m just going to I’m going to get this good idea. I’m going to raise money. We’re going to build it out, we’re going to do it. And, like you said, to get 25 Five or $50,000

Bryan Clayton  25:01

is, is 100 meetings, yeah, there you go. It was a full time job. It would have been me as kind of like, yeah. We were those three founders, but we were also, like, individual contributors wearing five different hats. So that would have come at the expense of code that I was writing, yeah, blog posts that I was writing, journalists that were I was talking to, and so for me, it just just didn’t make sense now, now that now the irony is, like you look on your phone, and I guarantee you, every app on the first page was funded by venture capital. So when it works it, it works great, but, but that’s, that’s a lot of times, you know, a one in 100 shot and so, and if that’s the journey you want to sign up for, then have at it. But you just need to know, once you start down that path, it’s really hard to reverse it. Yeah,

Damon Pistulka  25:52

yeah. So as you’re going along now, been in business 10 years, what is the best piece of marketing advice you had along the way,

Bryan Clayton  26:04

I’ve started reading. I started reading every book I could get my hands on about old school copywriting and and. And there was this book called My Life, in my life, in in advertising by this guy named Claude Hopkins. And it like it’s just 100 year old book about copywriting, and it’s so amazing, like 98% of it still is, like holds true to this day. And and there was one thing that stuck to me in that book, dozens of lessons, but one thing that, like I wrote on like the whiteboard, was we will, he says, We will let the we will let the 1000s decide what the millions will do. And, and that just stuck with me, that you, you just get a small number, you test, and then you invest, and, and that goes for product development. It goes for marketing. It goes for copywriting. It goes for tweaking things with the project. You just really have to look at everything like it’s an experiment. Really. The whole business is one gigantic series of experiments. And it’s like a lot of times in business and in life, we we get this analysis paralysis where we don’t take action on certain things because we don’t know what the outcome is going to be, whereas if we would just treat things like they were an experiment, let the hundreds decide what the 1000s will do, it kind of helps you move quicker, and it kind of helps you get closer to what works, and it helps you get closer to what what’s what’s going to what your customer wants. And so that stuck with me, and he probably wrote that 100 years ago, and it’s still true today.

Damon Pistulka  27:41

Yeah, yeah, that is. And it’s a great I like your, your phrase of business is one giant experiment, because it really is. And when, when people get stuck in a lane and they they’re not ready to, you know, read the results of the experiment and move a different direction, I think that’s where a lot of them go off the cliff and don’t make it

Bryan Clayton  28:01

That’s right. Or even worse, they never do anything because they don’t know what the outcome is going to be, and they don’t take any action, and they just stick with the same way of doing things, and then wonder why the business is flat or going backwards. So yeah, if you can just kind of reduce every decision down to thinking like it’s an experiment. We’re going to reduce it down to the smallest way possible to learn as much as we can. I think can help with marketing and however you build your product.

Damon Pistulka  28:31

Yeah, yeah. So what’s you know, with the advent of AI, everybody’s talking about AI, everybody’s talking about how it’s changing the game and anywhere in in all businesses really, what are some of the things that you’re excited for coming into the future, whether it be AI, whether other advancements that really are going to be exciting for you guys at Green pal,

Bryan Clayton  28:56

you know, at a at a personal level, this is my personal day to Day, like job duties, AI is kind of like, it’s kind of like I have a Harvard grad on my on the left hand and and a Stanford grad on the on the right hand side of me. And like, they just sit there and like, the only thing they want to do is just make make me happy. And like, yeah, I can. I can just query both of them for help. And it’s just amazing. It’s like, it’s just, it’s incredibly powerful. So to me, that’s cool. It’s like, no longer do you have to, like, get an attorney on the phone that makes $500 an hour to ask them a question about something. No longer do you have to, you know, rope in the CPA at $350 an hour, when you have a quick question about something, it’s like, yeah, you have the world’s like knowledge at your at your fingertips, and so at a conversational level, and so yes, at a personal level, like in what I do every day, that’s amazing, I think, for us. And implications in green palette. The low hanging fruit that it’s helping us with is taking a mess of unstructured data and helping it become understandable and structured and in a way that you can make sense of it. So I’ll give you an example for us. It’s like, for years we’ve had this weird thing where, where, you know, Columbus, Ohio, will do 10 times the transactions that a Miami, Florida will, and we just cannot figure that out. And so a data scientist to kind of, like, pour over it, you know, that’s, that’s a half million dollar a year person, yeah. And we’ve just never been able to, like, make that jump well now with, with, with, with these language models, we can dump in all of our database information. Okay, here’s all of the lawn care vendors. Here’s all of the customers. Here’s all the bids that replace at the zip code level. Here’s how fast it took them to hire. Here’s here’s when they showed up. Here’s the people that booked another service. Let’s make sense of this, and let’s try to, let’s try to draw learnings from it as to why this market is outperforming this market, and what we need to do to make this market operate as good as this other market. And so for the first time, you know, half a million dollar, million dollar a year person. I mean, that kind of person would make a million dollars a million dollars a year at Uber we have access to that now. And so that’s, that’s, that’s very exciting. And like every time I turn around, it’s getting better and better and better. And so for small businesses like ours, our team is only 40 people. It’s, it’s going to be interesting to see. You know what the next five years looks like for for small, medium sized businesses that have access to these super powerful tools that previously only the big boys did? Yes, that’s what I’m excited about.

Damon Pistulka  31:53

Yeah, yeah. That is super cool. And that the the example of, I love the knowledge at the fingertips, because I’m going to tell you it just like you said, yeah, you just, I don’t know. Oh, now I do. And we thought Google was good, right? We thought Google was and it is a big step up from a book or going to a library to try to find it. But the but the way that the large language models are brought to your fingertips is incredible. It’s

Bryan Clayton  32:20

incredible. It just summarizes all of the best of the of the open internet down to this one little thing you want to know. I mean, it’s an incredible thing. And I think in the next five years, I think plumbers will make more than attorneys, yeah, I think probably home cleaning services will make more than CPAs. It’s going to be super interesting to see what happens to like really high end knowledge workers, because that’s all commoditized now. So, yeah, it’s kind of terrifying when you think about it, yeah,

Damon Pistulka  32:52

and and you don’t like anything. I think I was just reading an article about this, I think maybe even this morning. And it’s like, we all worry about jobs, right? But these things have happened. It was the train, it was the boat, it was whatever you want to call it, that people were going, Oh, now, now what? But we all it’s all transition and things change, and something new happens, and it’s the way it goes. But the huge thing that I you brought up this unstructured data into understandable, big data kind of analysis that is so intriguing to me, because, you know, in a company like yours, and just say, I work in E commerce a fair amount, you know, when you’re talking about 1000s of transactions, like you said, different transactions, different products, different states, different environments. Little’s over

Bryan Clayton  33:41

here, Little’s over here. Yeah, here, in this silo, some of it may be on damn post it notes. You can throw it all in, and it’ll make sense of it. The first time, 99.9% of business owners didn’t even mess with it, because it’s just such a like a cognitive overhead of getting over that for the first time, we can now make sense of these things,

Damon Pistulka  34:02

yeah, yeah, making sense of that data and really turn it into actionable information. That’s right. It’s

Bryan Clayton  34:09

so cool. What a time to be alive. Somebody said the other day, I think it was, it might have even been the CEO of Nvidia. He said, If you’re going to retire, this ain’t the decade to do it, yeah? So, so it’s kind of like, it’s like, it’s day one,

Damon Pistulka  34:26

yeah, yeah. That’s for sure. Well, you know, in in green, pal, you guys, let’s talk a little bit about the company. Where are you guys at today? I mean, you, you are. I mean, just, well, it’s wintertime in a lot of places, so it’s probably a time when you guys get to the little bit of of changing, updating and things like that. But what are some of the things you’re excited for this year with green pal itself and how it’s working and some new things that people are going to be able to experience?

Bryan Clayton  34:57

Yeah, we, we are. You. Putting AI into the internal kind of brain of the of the platform to help make matching better. So the way it works now is, if you are in Seattle, you put your address in and a text message goes out to 30 or 40 different lawn care services within about 10 miles of you, they submit their pricing, and then you hire the one you want to work with. That’s a lot better than doing it by hand and dialing for dollars. But what we want to do is, is we want to be able to say, Okay, here’s the 10 lawn care services in Seattle that want your business. And we know, with 99% certain, that certain, certain like probability, that this is the best one for you based off price and reliability, and that they 100% will show up on Thursday. Because right now, we can give a prediction in terms of of past performance, but it’s not always correct, and so we want to be able to crunch those numbers quicker in real time, to give you a better at more accurate predictor on okay, this is the best fit for you because, because it doesn’t always work out, you’ll hire a guy and his equipment will break, or you’ll hire this person and and they’ll say, hey, the grass is a little taller than I thought, and they’ll try to change the price. So it’s like those, those those places where the the Uber like magic breaks down. We think we, we can close that gap with with AI,

Damon Pistulka  36:22

that’s very cool. Yeah, yep, it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be very interesting. What you can do with that, that’s for sure. Yeah, and,

Bryan Clayton  36:33

you know, it’s like, we, we’ve stuck it out a decade now, now, now we’ve kind of turned the corner, and now we’ve got this big kind of fulcrum. I think a lot of like, success in getting one of these things off the ground is just not giving up and staying alive. Because, like, the next thing that helps you is it’s just around the corner. You don’t know when it’s coming, but just stay alive and because you’ll catch a tailwind at some point. Yeah,

Damon Pistulka  37:00

yeah, that’s for sure. That’s for sure. Well, Brian, it’s been awesome talking to you today, and I just want to make sure that we we mention your your site. It’s your green pal.com, that’s right. Haven’t been there before? You can get there. You can find local people that can help get your yard taken care of, and and other other landscaping stuff as well. I don’t want to say it’s just yards. I was looking at it today and and very comprehensive. I mean, you can go to your state, you can look at, you know, popular cities, see who some of the more popular lawn care specialists are in your area. Just such good information, like you were saying earlier, help provide the information for the people so they can make a good decision. Thanks so much for being here today. Well, thanks for having me on. Damon, I enjoyed it, yeah, yeah. Well, I wanted to say Usman, thanks for being here today. Appreciate you showing up and everyone else that was listening. If you got into this late, go back and listen to Brian from the beginning. Because, hey, you don’t, you won’t get to listen to many people’s story that successfully built a landscaping, lawn care company, sold it and turned around and decided to be a tech company founder and have now scaled that successfully themselves. There lots of great lessons to hear. So go back and listen that from beginning, we appreciate you out there, all you listeners out here. Every week, Brian, hang out. We’ll finish offline. Thank.