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In this week’s episode, we talk to Bryan Clayton from GreenPal about hiring smart, reducing waste, and allocating resources where they really matter.
About Bryan Clayton:
Bryan is CEO and co-founder 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 200,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day. Before starting GreenPal, Bryan Clayton founded Peachtree Inc. which had a $10 million annual revenue before it was acquired by Lusa holdings in 2013. In 2020 GreenPal generated $20 million in annual revenue.
About GreenPal:
GreenPal is an online marketplace connecting homeowners with lawn mowing professionals that want their business. Get 5 bids in minutes, pick the pro you want, and schedule and pay all online or with the mobile app. Founded by landscaping professionals to make the lawn care industry easier and more efficient for homeowners and vendors.
Show Notes:
01:15 Growing a high school job into a highly successful medium-size business
5:45 Hiring the right number of employees
6:30 Developing methods to minimize wasting time and other resources
10:30 Calculating how much profit every employee adds, and what the diminishing margin of return for manpower is
11:10 Working in the business vs. working on the business – making time for strategizing
13:20 Applying blue-collar business learnings to tech entrepreneurship
15:00 Triaging problems and focusing 100% of resources on the current major issues, one at a time
16:30 Doubling down on what’s already working, rather than fixing what’s not working, especially when it comes to customer acquisition
19:20 Inviting frictionless feedback and doing customer support yourself as a founder: closing the gap between customer logic and founder logic
20:20 Thinking about what you can be the best in the world at, and focusing all business resources on that one thing
25:20 Understanding your value to your customers: sometimes it’s less about the actual service itself, and more about selling people back their time
27:30 As a business that connects customers to contractors, catering to both sets of needs: customers want easy access to services, vendors want a sticky platform that enables fast payments, repeat business, marketing automation etc
29:15 Creating incentives for vendors to perform well starts with accountability: providing performance metrics such as number of repeat bookings, reliability and quality ratings etc
36:20 Identifying business problems and development goals, and implementing weekly strategies for success
44:30 Creating one or two highly specific goals and getting your whole team to commit to them
