How This Guy Built A $30 Million Lawncare Business

Hey there! 👋

While everyone’s buzzing about the latest breakthroughs in AI, we have a story that goes back to the roots of entrepreneurship. Bryan started off mowing lawns as a kid. Today, he runs the Uber of lawn mowing, GreenPal, which is now a $30 million business. This is his story. As always, you can find the full podcast episode here at The Dealroom. Now, on to Bryan Clayton!

Note: This story has been edited for reading clarity

Founder, Bryan Clayton shares the story:

It all started when I got a Nintendo 64 with Super Mario Kart. My dad got pissed off because I was playing Nintendo all day long, and he talked to the neighbor one day, and the neighbor was like, ‘Hey, I'm looking for someone to mow my yard.’

He goes, ‘My son cuts grass.’

He came up to my bedroom and said, ‘I got a gig for you. You're going to go mow the neighbor's yard.’

I said, ‘I don't mow yards.’

He goes, ‘Well you do now.’

I got paid $20 for an hour of work, and from that day forward, I was hooked on entrepreneurship.

The first thing I did was start passing out flyers all over the neighborhood. Before I knew it, I had 10 or 20 customers. So, I stuck with that little lawn-mowing business throughout high school and college. Then, when I graduated college, I had to make a decision. Would I stick with this lawn mowing business that I had run in high school and college, or would I do something else in my life?

I didn't really want to be a blue-collar laborer for the rest of my life. But I could quickly envision what this business could become if I had 10 or 20 employees.

And I thought, ‘Well, I'm going to see how big I can grow this.’

I made a business plan and thought it would be worth it if I could get to a point where I had two or three crews going out every day and didn't have to personally do the work anymore. By year two, I had 20 employees. That business eventually reached $10 million in sales and was acquired.

Q: How old were you when, when you sold the business?

32 years old. I made the decision to sell it at age 30, and it took me two years to get it sold.

I tried to retire. I tried to just do real estate investing and it got really boring. Life didn't have meaning anymore. I didn't realize it, but my company was the reason why I got out of bed in the morning. So, I needed another mission. And that's where GreenPal started, the Uber of lawn mowing.

Q: How did you scale GreenPal into a $30 Million tech business without knowing how to code?

Well, it started with naivety. When I was running my landscaping company, I saw it was hard for consumers to quickly get pricing and discover which landscapers were reliable. And then, as a service provider, it's really hard running that kind of business because you don't have time to run sales, give estimates, or even answer the phone. You're literally cutting grass, and at night, you're mailing out invoices. It's just a grind.

I knew that somebody was going to build a platform that solved all those problems with a clean user experience. What I didn't have was the technical acumen.

I started attending tech meetups but had no luck finding technical people to start the business with.

I told two friends about the idea, and they said, ‘I'll quit my job tomorrow and do that with you.’

It was two guys that worked in sales at Dell. The three of us formed this company. We pulled our money together and sketched out what we thought the app would look like on a whiteboard.

We took pictures of those boxes and started talking to dev shops. We landed on one of the quotes that was $180,000, and we paid these guys to build what we thought the app should be. It took them 9-10 months. When we got it back, we quickly realized that this was a huge mistake. This thing barely worked; it was clunky and unintuitive, and there was no way we could do this if we couldn't go through iteration cycles quicker than 11 months.

At this point, we're all broke. I had taken all my proceeds from selling my business and locked them down in highly illiquid investments.

So, even though I had cash-flowing assets, I had little money in the bank. I was very cash-poor.

Q: What did you guys do from there?

I personally made the decision that no matter what, from that day forward, I was just going to work as hard as I could on the business. We have this terrible app; let's go door to door and talk to as many people as possible, pitching them on the idea of using it.

We did that until we got a hundred people, and they would always tell us everywhere the app sucked, but they never told us I don't need this. And one English lady said, ‘Oh, it would be divine if it did work.’

That stuck with me. Now we got to go find somebody to help us build this thing.

My co-founder is like, ‘Well, I found this thing called the Nashville software school. It's a boot camp for nine months, and it’s $12k.’

He put $12k on his credit card that he didn't have, and he started attending the Nashville software school 8 hours a day. Whatever he learned in a given week, he took and started rebuilding the platform from the back end.

We're like, ‘Word. Dev - check. Zach's going to become one.’

He's like, ‘Well, what you don't know is that it's going to take a lot longer than you think and somebody has got to build the front end of this.’

So I started going to YouTube University, looking up how to code HTML, CSS basics, and JavaScript tutorials, and I started taking every online class I could. After about three months, I became the world's worst front-end developer. But it was just enough where I could take what he was working with and connect to it and build the views.

We got to about 400-500 customers and then we got to a point where we could start just rinse and repeat.

People ask me if I will start another startup.

I will never do it again.

It's so much not fun, and your odds of success are so small.

Q: How did you scale the platform and get hundreds of thousands of users?

If I had to distill it into one thing, it would be the marketplace's ability to generate demand. I knew that Google was going to be a channel for us, but I was hearing it so much, I was thinking, ‘Man, this may be the channel.’

We won't compete for these head terms, but we could compete for the long tail. So, we had five or ten service providers in Smyrna, Tennessee. We interviewed them and wrote content about them. It was unique, rich, organic content about these small business owners that didn't exist anywhere else. From that bottoms-up approach, we started noticing in Google Analytics that we were getting a little bit of traffic.

Q: How did it feel when you made your first $10 million off of that?

Scary.

I thought, ‘Man, I don't know that we can run this at $20 million. I’ve never ran a $20 million business.’

If you're feeling imposter syndrome, it's a good sign. You want to feel it at almost every step of the game because that means you're pushing it as far as you can.

We didn't celebrate it because we've never really felt successful or like we've made it. It's always felt like day one. And it's always been like, ‘Oh, look how far we've come! Yeah, but we've got to figure this thing out.’

For Bryan Clayton’s full story you can listen to my interview with him on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or by clicking the image below.

Have a productive week!

Shamus