Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Bryan Clayton, CEO and co-founder of GreenPal, located in Nashville, TN, USA.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
When building GreenPal, I was basically solving my own problem. I saw how difficult it was for a homeowner to hire a reliable small lawn care service at a reasonable price. I think when building a tech product from scratch, authenticity can be a competitive advantage. GreenPal makes it super easy for homeowners to get quotes for lawn care services, review pricing and read reviews about those services and make the hire they want to work with a snap. On the flip side, we have no doubt an entire suite of sass tools for lawn care services to operate their business much smoother and more efficiently than they normally do analog. The ideal consumers that use the GreenPal platform to hire lawnmowing services are working-class families who understand that hiring a lawnmowing service is actually cheaper than doing the yard work themselves. For the lawn maintenance companies that use the GreenPal platform to run their lawn care service, they tend to be smaller owner-operators, one-man shows, and Solopreneurs.
Tell us about yourself
Before starting GreenPal, a platform that connects homeowners and lawn care services, I ran a landscaping company for 15 years, growing it from just myself and a push mower to over 150 employees and over $10 million a year in revenue. The company was acquired in 2013, and then I, too, took some time off and used everything I learned about landscaping in the street and applied the building of the GreenPal platform to make it easy for Lawn care services to run their business on top of our technology while connecting them with homeowners that need their services.
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
Getting customers when you are new and unproven. Our first thousand customers came from Facebook groups; we would scan for Facebook groups for anybody who was asking for recommendations for lawnmowing services. After that, we interviewed hundreds of customers and asked them how they normally hire a lawnmowing service and came to understand that normally they would just go to google and search for a quarry like "lawnmowing service nearby me. "This informed our marketing strategy to shift towards Google organic search. Today over half of our new customers that use our platform come through Google organic search searching for lawnmowing services at a local level.
What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?
When creating a sass product, you have to continue to add value. Many sass products like ours only add value on the front end through an introduction between the homeowner and the service provider. You have to look for ways to continue to add value to keep them as a customer and as a promoter. We do this by offering ancillary services that a homeowner will need for yard maintenance throughout the lifetime they own their home. We have found ways to facilitate other services, such as landscaping remodel work, snow removal, gutter cleaning, etc.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
I will spend less time on things that don't matter. In the early days of creating a sass product, some of the best high-leverage time you can spend talking to your customers. Spend less time on things that don't matter, like social media, culture, and branding. Those things don't really matter in the early days; all you need to focus on is your customers, what they are saying and what they wish your product would do for them. Our single biggest mistake was delegating too quickly. Before we could figure out the technical aspect and technical execution, we tried to delegate all of the technical needs to an outside developer shop. You really had to have these core competencies in-house. My cofounders and I had to teach ourselves how to build software from scratch, and then and only then can we build out a team around us. Start small, do the small things over and over and over again, and they will begin to compound. Talk to your customers, use your own product on an ongoing basis and be your own customer. Be relentless in improving your customers' experience.
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://www.yourgreenpal.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bryanmclayton/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bryanmclayton
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-clayton-a96b33214/
If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.
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