Bryan Clayton 13:09
It is so painful, how much easier it is these days than it was back then. These days, you can spin up end-to-end training system for new employees, new recruits for whatever the hell it is you’re doing, and a fraction of the time than when I was first doing it in 2005. Because back then it was damn quarter in the yard, like takes all day to shoot something that you might watch for five minutes. And then you get there and you put that on like a quick time thing and it’s in a file somewhere and then you have a test but that’s on a Word document and like literally is very much been counting and manually. And mainly executing it one phase at a time and like somebody’s like, watching over their shoulder and make sure that they’re going through this man nowadays, like there are so many platforms, so many SaaS solutions for this type of thing where you can shoot it on your phone, upload it in the field, use chat GPT to make the copy and you’re often going into test is integrated and all that, there’s literally no excuse to not systemize a lot of these aspects of your business these days. That was one of the things that was so painful when I sold that company and started a tech business was seeing all of the ways my life was hard and like technology could have made it a lot easier.
Jeremy Weisz 14:32
It still sounds like you’re doing it was just harder, but you were doing videos. And basically training. And by the way, I did an interview with other founders of Thinkific. So you could check that one out. And that’s what their platform does. There’s a lot of platforms out there, but actually we use Thinkific for our resources and courses and stuff like that. Also, it’s called Thinkific, like think and then IFIC so people can check that out. And there’s a lot out there. But I just liked, I think his family member, maybe his brother was the technical co-founders are very technical, but it does everything it needs to probably you wish you would have that solution in five, it’s like, you pay 50 bucks a month, and you can host all your stuff and everything like that.
Bryan Clayton 15:20
What a time to be alive. What a time to start a business. In many ways, it’s so much easier than it’s ever been.
Jeremy Weisz 15:27
But employee training, so I can see that that’s really helpful to see the next piece of growth is customer satisfaction you need to put it into customer satisfaction system in place. What did you do as far as that goes that people should think about?
Bryan Clayton 15:41
Yeah, well, it’s going to sound trite. But it literally just asking people how we’re doing? Like, what are three things you wish we would do better? And what are three things we can do to make your life a little easier, like we would literally email our top 300 customers on a weekly basis. And that was something that I deferred for like five years, because I thought that our customers were insatiable, unreasonable, looking to get one over on us, we were at odds with our customers a lot of times, and that was a totally wrong attitude to have. And that was the source of a lot of kind of my misery at times running that business. And when I changed that mindset to let’s just ask our customers how we’re doing. And then let’s act on that. That’s the first step. And then you can fix a lot of the problems that you kind of knew about. But maybe you were deferring them, or maybe you were sweeping them under the rug. And so that’s step one. And step two, putting in a system to make sure you reinforce that little thing, but then also do business with yourself Secret Shop yourself, I started doing that, and I still do it to this day with GreenPal, I would have my, my fiancée at the time, call in to the front office and just ask for an estimate and ask for, go through the whole sales process, you know, and, and I would just kind of watch it. And I came to learn that we were actually quite rude to people that wanted to do business with us, I didn’t know this. But it wasn’t until I like signed up for my own business and did business with myself that I come to realize this. And so there’s this weird, like, gap that forms in every business between founder logic and customer logic and the founder is like looking at all everything from one paradigm and the customers looking at it from a whole another perception a whole another paradigm and like there’s this weird gap and the I think the only way to close that gap is to do business with yourself and ask your customers how you’re doing. And then the third thing is do your own customer support. At least an hour a day. If you do that you’ll never be at a loss for what are the top three things you should be working on as a founder. And so even to this day with GreenPal, I still try to do at least an hour a day, sometimes more of phone support, chat support, email, tickets, you name it, because I don’t want this gap to develop between my thinking and customer thinking.
Jeremy Weisz 18:22
You mentioned this and like a lot of people swear by the MPS they’ll sending that out or to their clients customers. There’s two things that stick out when you talk about this. One is, you were asking the top with 300 customers what can we do better? What was the best methods to get a response back? Because they’re busy people, right? How did you make sure it was, I don’t know, engaging? Or there’s just something in it for them? Or would they just respond? I don’t know.
Bryan Clayton 18:57
In those days, it was just a straight up old fashioned handwritten email. But these days, we integrate these things into our live chat. If somebody’s talking to us through live chat on our app, and then that also integrates and connects to email. I think live chat and email, probably the best way is to ask, you mentioned earlier like NPS and that’s a good way to kind of get a finger on the pulse of what’s going on. But the NPS is an output metric of like what’s happening. I think like you really need to like what are the input metrics? What are the things that I’m doing to improve the customer experience and let’s focus on those. Yeah, and NPS survey is good. It kind of like tells us how good or bad things are, but what are the actual like habits the things we’re doing every day that helped us get there and for me, like the daily habit is running customer support personally, every day for at least an hour. That really helps me, like, if you talk about leadership style, my people see that and so when we’re sitting around in a meeting discussing some things like I was like, I can say, no, actually, I talked to four people last week that had this problem. And so, this is baked in actual interaction with the customer, it can be helpful for a founder to do that tactically. And also from a leadership perspective.
Jeremy Weisz 20:24
What was something that came out of that was surprising? When you ask those 300 customers, how can we do better, what surprised you?
Bryan Clayton 20:34
I thought, then, and when I was starting GreenPal that all they cared about was price. All they cared about was like, I didn’t really want to ask the question, because I thought they would say, I really wish you would like cut your prices, or I really wish you would like charges 5% less or something like that. But no, it wasn’t that it was more around reliability. Like, you guys, can’t you come out on Monday, one week, and then you come out on Wednesday, another, and I know, like, rains a factor stuff, but you don’t communicate these things to me, I don’t know. And so like, I kind of knew that was a problem, but I didn’t really want to address it. So I had to build a system back then, where it’s like, okay, it rained on Monday, we need to communicate to everybody that was gonna get service on Monday that we’re going to be there on Tuesday, and so on, and like, build a process and a routine to fix that. And then guess what? I didn’t hear that anymore. And now it was three more things. And so you just go through those cycles of iterating, through improving your business, based on what customers are telling you, not what your ideas or assumptions are.
Jeremy Weisz 21:47
Yeah. And you baked in what’s interesting, Bryan, you’ve baked some of these things into GreenPal, right? So like reliability, I’ll have you talk about it. But like these pain points that you’re experiencing in this survey, and customers is also embedded into GreenPal. So talk about from a customer user experience, how is it baked into GreenPal, and we can split out with reliability? Yeah, it’s
Bryan Clayton 22:14
Yeah, when I started GreenPal, in many ways, I was solving a lot of my own problems. I was solving things that I saw exist in the real world between buyers and sellers in this business, and so I knew that that was going to be an issue, I knew that the case of the disappearing lawn guy was real, because I was kind of that guy, at certain points. And so I knew that we needed to solve for that. And the way I felt like we should solve for is we should just hold vendors accountable for how reliable they are, if they’re supposed to be there on Thursday. Let’s score that. And we can now because we have technology, and we’ve built this platform, we can score, how reliable they are, and how often do they show up on the days that they’re supposed to. And then we can surface that to consumers and let them make a better-informed buying says some consumers don’t care about reliability, maybe it’s just an empty lot or a rental house, just mow it once a month, I don’t care. But if you want your lawn mowed on Friday, that’s important. And we need to score that. And that’s been a critical thing that’s separated GreenPal from like the status quo is you can jump on GreenPal and quickly look at okay, these service providers are scored on how reliable they are, and how serious are taking running their business.
Jeremy Weisz 22:14
What else is embedded into a GreenPal? Again, reliability is one. I’m gonna actually, Bryan just share my screen for a second. And just so people can see. So if you’re listening, there’s a video of this on YouTube. So you can see yourgreenpal.com, you can see, again, just some of the things to think about from my website perspective. I’m sure Bryan has tested this a million times of how this is laid out what customers are looking for. But one of the things that sticks out to me, following this, oh, look, I love looking at websites and kind of the user experience because this is what they spent a long time testing. You can see it’s got a lot of the social proof stuff here. It’s got pricings, we’ll probably asking you about that. And then look, it says tired of unreliable local lawn care. I mean, hitting the pain points in the subject. One thing I want to point out is, you’re talking about the reliability. And you have a bunch of resources here of different cities, all popular locations, obviously, I’m outside of Chicago. So I’m looking at this, you can see right, this is also a social proof reliability piece. It has higher how many times a person has been hired. So you put in here, too, because of that.
Bryan Clayton 24:53
Yeah, because we’re in the middle of the transaction. We can show you what’s going on and we can show you, okay, this is the spot price for your lawn in your zip code for contractors that want to do that service. And here are your different options in terms of what other people are saying about them how reliable they are, and how often they show up on the day they’re supposed to. And then also, once you get to the menu of hiring somebody, you see another third metric of how often do they get booked for an ongoing service? How often do they get booked for a second, third or fourth visit? Because for us, that’s a key metric to indicate? Are they any good or not? Do you really want to work with somebody that only gets booked for a second or third visit 10% of the time, you want to work with the guy or gal that’s getting booked all the time. And so that’s something that we bring to the marketplace, because we’re in the middle of the transaction, we measure these things. Versus if you’re hiring somebody on Facebook marketplace, or Home Advisor or Angie’s List, they don’t really know that stuff, because they’re not facilitating the transaction.
Jeremy Weisz 26:01
Yep. So you could see, those are some things you think about reliability. What else did you from feedback wise, did you include in GreenPal? Because again, you’re listening to the customers, and it’s a dual-sided marketplace too, what else did you include because of feedback?
Bryan Clayton 26:18
Yeah, it was like when I started GreenPal. So I built and sold my landscaping company and I felt thought, man, I think I know everything there is to know about getting a business going. And then I started GreenPal. And I’m like inventing a whole new product from scratch. And I realized, you don’t know the first thing about this, it was it was literally like starting all over again. Even though it’s a second-time founder, I was a first-time founder all over again. So I had to learn all of these lessons all over again, by talking to vendors that use the platform, and also customers that used it. And in the early days, it was 20, 30, 40 people. And sitting at tables inside of a Starbucks, you name it, and anywhere where somebody would meet with me that tried it, it will tell me okay, I hired this person to come out and mow, and they didn’t have the right size lawn mower for the fence gate to get into the backyard. So they weren’t able to do it. It’s like, okay, we got to just take a note of that, that’s my problem, we got solved, or I hired this, this guy, and he actually mowed a little too low. And I like it to be four inches rather than not two. Okay, we got to build in a little thing for that. And it was like it was going over and over people very particular about their loans. Exactly. Some people don’t care at all, but some people are very particular. So it’s not like a commodity. So it was going through those interviews over and over and over again. And seeing like, all the 1,000 things that can go wrong between your grass is two feet tall and just trying to get somebody to come mow it for you, we now had to solve as a platform. And the only way we know what to focus on is by talking to customers, and letting them guide us and almost be like free r&d for what we needed to focus our firepower on because we had very limited firepower, we’ve been self-funded the whole way. And we kind of had to make smart bets with little bit of money we had.
Jeremy Weisz 28:09
We’ll get into growing the user base, a dual-sided marketplace is no joke to build, because you’re building to different sides. But I want to get it back into, you mentioned employee training systems, customer satisfaction systems, sales systems. At one point in the organization, you realized you had the operational pieces down and you realize now I’m a sales organization.
Bryan Clayton 28:36
Oh, that was a tough growth hurdle in my first business and my second business so in my first business, it was year five or six. And I had these epiphanies. Like, I’m not in the landscaping business, I’m in the sales business. I like if I can’t get a sales process, a sales system, a sales machine at the core of this thing, then I don’t have a business, I’m not going to get to 3 million unless I’m gonna be stuck at a million and a half 2 million for my whole life. And I’m literally going to be self-employed for the rest of my life. I’m never going to build a business if I can’t figure that out. And so I took like three years, like running a sale system myself, and doing it very poorly and ineffectively. And with very little success, but just making it better and better and better and better. And eventually getting a process that I could train somebody else on. I made a bad mistake in that first company of thinking that there was something mysterious about our industry and trying to hire salespeople that knew the industry and not necessarily motivated sales-oriented people. And I had to like, undo all of that wiring and say no, our industry is not that complicated. Actually, I just need to hire a motivated sales type of person and teach them my system. And once I started doing that, I was able to build a repeatable sales engine. And which eventually was about five or six people that reported to me. And I was kind of the sales manager in my part-time. And fast forward to GreenPal, I took that approach, again, very hand-to-hand combat very, very white glove in terms of getting people on the platform because that’s what was needed to get the first 100 500 customers. Then as time went on, I started to realize, well, that playbook won’t work for this because I can’t one at a time sell people onto the platform, I need a million customers to make this thing matter. And I started to ask them, how do you normally find a lawn care service, and they would always like, say, well, after I’ve tried everything else, I’ll just go to Google and type lawn mowing near me. And I’ll just dial for dollars on the search engine results page. And so we started like, seeing and hearing that more and more, and we realized, okay, our sales engine now is actually competing in this channel, we need to compete in Google organic search. And then we realize, however hard it was to build this platform, it’s going to be twice as hard to make that happen. We have to like orient the whole company around competing in this channel. And we made that bet early on in like year two, and we’re a decade in, and that’s still how we get 50% of the people that try our product out is through a simple Google search.
Jeremy Weisz 31:15
That’s a tough route to take, I know you’ve tried different things, right? Because SEO is a long term strategy is an ongoing long-term strategy. And you’ve talked about in the past, it’s like, I love that analogy, use, it’s like getting in shape. Like you can’t just stop even if you’re in shade, you stop eating, right, you stop working out, you’re gonna go back to where you were. So it’s really a tough one, what’s worked with SEO? Why SEO, I mean, it’s like, it’s a tough decision to make?
Bryan Clayton 31:52
It goes back to a lot of, well, it’s got to be a core competency, I think in order to compete in it, you can’t do it, you can’t sprinkle on some SEO at the end, it has to be almost like core to what your company does. And you start to look at a lot of these really successful platforms, they start to look a lot like publishers almost like, big companies that that are, that are doing very well put out more content than a lot of a of news agencies, it’s really, really strange, but they’re getting a lot of traffic to their property and 1% of that traffic is turning into people that need their services. And so, playing that game is hard. And I think a lot of it in the early days does come down to good daily habits. And a lot like dieting almost and a lot of like faith and working a plan. Because with SEO and getting in shape, you don’t see results for a very long time. And you have to stick it out, you have to work it day in and day out and keep the momentum, and you go to the gym, one time you get home, you look exactly the same. SEO, you write 10 blog posts, your traffic looks exactly the same. But if you keep working the process the inputs over a year, you’ll wake up in a very different reality where it’s like now, okay, I’ve got 20,000 visitors to my, to my website every month, I didn’t have to pay for every one of those to come to my property.
Jeremy Weisz 33:24
That’s on works with this. So I’m looking if you’re looking at the video, you can see yourgreenpal.com and go to the blog. These are funny picture, obviously, can mowing over dog poop be dangerous? It’s worse than you imagined? What are things that you do that’s working from a content perspective for SEO?
Bryan Clayton 33:44
A couple things. One is, when it comes to blog posts and content, we really try to write content that solves people’s problems that answers a question that they’re actually asking. And the way we do that is through Reddit, Quora, Facebook groups. If they’re asking a question around, like, hey, I have a customer that that has a Great Dane that has dog poop all over the place, and I’m mowing this, is this bad for my health. Like, that was a question somebody asked. And so we researched it, and we wrote a piece about that. And so we might get, you know, I don’t know 100 visitors a week off that piece, and maybe one or two of them will sign up. And so focusing on answering questions that people are actually asking, and creating the content that solves a problem for them that helps them figure out how to do something has been helpful for us. And we don’t really do a whole lot of keyword research or anything like that. We just run this cycle of okay, people are asking these 10 questions. That’s right content for that. The second thing is the exhaust from our platform, the natural kinds of output of lawns getting mowed. How do we use that to create content? And so okay, well now we know the average price, we know the average like service cadence, we know how often people are adding on shrubs, shrub pruning, we know how often people are seeding and fertilizing and packaging that up and putting that into the vendors kind of profile has really helped us create unique content at scale for these individual service providers, so they can rank for lawn care Shamli or lawn care Peoria Illinois or something like that, these longtail kind of service Plus local city keywords. And so we do a lot of content handcrafted and then a lot of content programmatically. And that hybrid has helped us.
Jeremy Weisz 35:59
Love it. No, I love that the way you do customer research on some of those platforms, right, and just taking the questions and answering them, because anyone could go on Reddit and Quora in their specific industry. And take a look and see what actually people are saying, or Facebook groups or Amazon, somebody will look at Amazon reviews on products or books and things like that.
Bryan Clayton 36:19
Exactly. And the content, there’s not going to be premium, it’s going to be a bunch of people shooting from the hip, answering it ad hoc. And so you have to like pick out the nuggets, and use that as the basis for your research. And then like bring it all together and package it up into one piece that’s a lot more helpful for people.
Jeremy Weisz 36:39
Bryan, going back to the sales process for a second for Your GreenPal, obviously, SEO is helping with getting people there. When you had your lawn care business, and you grew it, what did the sales process look like when you had toiled for three or four years? Kind of walk me through that.
Bryan Clayton 37:02
Yeah, we eventually learned that we were never going to build a profitable business competing on price. And so a lot of people in that industry is super hyper-competitive, low barriers to entry. And so competing on prices is common, whether people want admit it or not. We had to shift the whole thing and try to figure out where are our customers trying to go, what are they trying to achieve? If you’re McDonald’s, you’re trying to increase sales, same store sales, and you’re trying to figure out how to get people to buy more extra value meals. And so we would look at that as like, well, how do we get people to buy more extra value meals? Okay, well, I got to tell you, the drive-thru looks horrible. It’s full of cigarette butts. It’s full of bubblegum wrappers, like I don’t want to eat here, like, this looks so awful. And we will take pictures of that like, and we will say, hey, here’s a before of what your drive-thru looks like. And we cleaned it all up, our technicians cleaned it all up as part of our weekly mowing. And now here’s what it looks like. And we just think that that might help you increase apple pie sales or something like that. And we will tie what we’re doing not just cutting the grass to how do we help you get where you’re trying to go? We will do that for restaurants or for apartment complexes, they would say we would ask them like, okay, yeah, well, what is your occupancy? What’s your vacancies like? Well, we’re at 89%. Really? Okay. Well, we went to the greater Nashville Apartment Association meeting last week, and they were saying that average in this market is 95%. What Why don’t you think you’re there? Well, this and this. And we said, well, what if we can help you move that a couple points, I think we can help you get to 91 or 92, over the next year. And if we don’t, then you don’t have to renew the contract. And we’re gonna get you there by making the grass a little greener and thicker, we’re going to install some flowers around the model, we’re going to install a seasonal color display around the entrance to lure people in. And when we weren’t able to deliver on that man, that’s a customer for life. They’re not bidding you out every year. And so taking that long view with our clients, and help them get where they were trying to go in business, and we weren’t just grass cutting, we were trying to help them get where they were trying to go with their objectives is what shifted it and that was kind of an unlock, and nobody else was doing that.
Jeremy Weisz 39:27
I love it. Right. So basically everyone can be asked there the question of their company, how can our company solve a bigger challenge for that person? And you were talking about, not comparing the features, but talking about the benefits, like you weren’t going in there long here. Like how can we solve their occupancy and what are the things our company can do? Because who would think a lawn care company is going to solve my occupancy, my vacancy, right, but you showed them ways they could actually help with that. So that’s great exercise to think through. The last question is, Bryan, first of all, I want to thank you. I want to point people, they could check out yourgreenpal.com. So if you are a homeowner or you own an apartment complex or something like that, you can actually get some quotes in your local area, because they’re all over the US. So yourgreenpal.com. My last question is on leadership. You mentioned that was kind of like the last piece of improving yourself. So what are some mentors, it could be your mentors in business or distant mentors, meaning books or resources you like we mentioned the E-Myth. And what are some of your go-to leadership resources?
Bryan Clayton 40:43
Yeah, every book John Maxwell has ever written, obviously, I mean that, and that’s really all you have to do. If you’re trying to be a good leader in a small business, you don’t need to read much else other than his stuff that and I stumbled on to John’s stuff. One day, I was driving into my office, running my first company and I had like this pit in my stomach, like, I didn’t want to go there. I didn’t want to like I didn’t want to go. And I was like, half the people that work for me are jerks. My customers are always complaining. Why does it suck so bad, and I hate this. I felt like a victim. And I thought and then something like a voice in my head said, you idiot, you built this, this is a reflection of you. This is a reflection of your enthusiasm. This is a reflection of your level of intensity you’re bringing to this business, you don’t have the fire in your belly anymore, like you used to. And that’s why all of this has decayed around you. And so I think it’s important to like, when you’re in business, everything is your fault. And all is scaffolding around you, your people, your team, you get exactly the culture you deserve as the founder. John stuff really helps you face that reality and then also remind you that it’s all about servitude. You really have to care and there’s no way to fake it. You got to care. And I don’t know any other shortcut. You have to give a crap about your people.
Jeremy Weisz 42:11
Bryan, I want to be the first one to thank you, everyone and check out yourgreenpal.com, check out more episodes of the podcast and thanks. Thanks, Bryan.
Bryan Clayton 42:20
Jeremy, I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me on.
