Do you enjoy your “honey-do” lists that keep you busy on the weekend? Have you ever thought about ways to try to monetize those? Our guest today, Bryan Clayton, did just that. He took an every-week household chore and turned it into a thriving $20 million enterprise and it is still growing!
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LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:
- Learn more about GreenPal: https://www.yourgreenpal.com
- Connect with Bryan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-clayton-a96b33214
- Connect with Bryan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bryanmclayton
- Connect with Bryan on Instagram: https://instagram.com/bryanmclayton
- If you are ready to franchise your business or take it to the next level: CLICK HERE.
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Bryan Clayton 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. one of the largest landscaping companies in the state of Tennessee growing it to over $10 million a year in annual revenue before it was acquired by Lusa holdings in 2013.
Bryan‘s interest and expertise are related to entrepreneurialism, small business growth, marketing, and bootstrapping businesses from zero revenue to profitability and exit.
ABOUT BIG SKY FRANCHISE TEAM:
This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team. If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/ or by calling Big Sky Franchise Team at: 855-824-4759.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:00):
You’ve worked hard to build your business, and now it’s time to grow. Welcome to the Multiply Your Success Podcast. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team and serial entrepreneur. And the purpose of our podcast is to give you a weekly dose of inspiration and education to help you multiply your success. And as we open today, I’m wondering if you enjoy your honeydew lists that keep you busy on the weekend. And I’m also wondering if you’ve ever thought about ways to try to monetize doing those honeydew lists.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:37):
And our guest today, Bryan Clayton, did just that. He took an every week household chore and turned it into a thriving $20 million enterprise. And it’s still growing. Bryan, who joins us today, has bootstrapped and built two different companies, and he shares with us his journey and his process and some of the things he’s learned along the way in going through that. So let’s go ahead and jump into my interview with Bryan Clayton.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (01:05):
Thanks for having me on, Tom. I’m Bryan Clayton, I’m CEO, co-founder of a company called GreenPal. GreenPal is the Uber but for lawn mowing. If you’re a homeowner and you don’t want to mow your own yard, rather than like calling around on Craigslist or Yelp or Facebook, you can just download our app. You get hooked up with a great lawn mowing service in a few minutes. I guess you could say we’re like a nine year overnight success.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (01:27):
We’ve been at this for almost a decade. Now we’re nationwide in the United States. A few hundred thousand people using the app.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (01:32):
Wow! That’s incredible. Of all things, the Uber for kind of this landscaping, lawn mowing, lawn care kind of industry here. How did you end up in this space? What leads you here?
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (01:46):
Yeah, I think if you’re starting a tech company, particularly inventing a new product from scratch that doesn’t exist, it can help to be solving your own problem. For me, my first business that I ever started was a lawn mowing business. I started mowing grass in high school and all throughout college. And over a 15 year period of time built one of the largest landscaping companies in the State of Tennessee. Eventually getting my little lawn mowing business over 150 employees, grew it to over $10 million a year in revenue.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (02:16):
And in 2013, that business was acquired by one of the largest landscaping companies in the United States. Growing that from just me and a push mower to me and like 150 people, I learned a lot about the landscaping business, how it works, and how to grow a business. When I sold that company, I retired. I didn’t have to work anymore. It was nice, but I got bored. I thought, okay, what now? Well, I’m going to start a tech company, because that should be pretty easy. Luckily, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (02:43):
The idea for Uber for lawn mowing was one that I kind of had in the back of my head and I thought, well, if somebody’s going to do it, might as well be me. And recruited two co-founders and we went to work and that’s how we got to where we are. It was 10 times harder than I ever thought it would ever be. But that naive take can be an asset sometimes. It certainly was for me when I got started on this company.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (03:04):
Wow! Well, and thank you for sharing that Nice overview. As you were about going into your background and getting into it, I was wondering, did you have a tech background beforehand or how you came into it? You were really coming in from kind of a technician that started a business. You were in the field. You were already operating, knew what had gone on, and grew the business. One of the reasons I was excited to have you on is you’ve gone through this process of kind of bootstrapping multiple businesses now and growing them significantly.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (03:38):
I’d love have to talk about when you started each of these different companies, were there any things that you noticed that were consistent as you started your first, into your second, and maybe something to share with the audience on some of that?
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (03:52):
Yeah. My first company was a traditional blue collar type of business. Very much in the trenches, hand to hand combat. I learned a lot about the basics of what it means to start and scale a business growing that company. And that’s the beautiful thing about a service-based business, like a lawn mowing business or a home cleaning service or whatever, is that you can learn 90% of business in a very traditional, approachable type of business. That was really helpful for me when I built that first company.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (04:21):
Then I sold it and I thought that I knew everything there was to know about business. I kind of like had this like chip on my shoulder and boy, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Starting GreenPal, there’s a couple things that kind of took me by surprise. One is the technology execution piece of it was a lot harder than I ever thought it was going to be. I was quickly confronted with the reality that if my co-founders and I were going to build the Uber for lawn mowing, we were going to have to learn how to write software.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (04:49):
We quickly came to that realization and started working on the business, in the business, and on ourselves all at the same time. If you’re trying to start a new business from scratch, that’s one of the cool things about it. It’s going to cause you to level up and learn things you never in a million years would’ve ever learned. And that certainly was the case for us. We had to teach ourselves how to write software and how to build software even to play this game.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (05:14):
That was one of the challenging aspects of it that I didn’t learn in the first kind of act of my entrepreneurial journey. That kind of took me by surprised. We celebrated the small wins. We talked to our customers and we just set little small goals and kept going over a long period of time. It was just kind of that perseverance that got us through the first three or four years until we got our first 100, 1,000, and 10,000 customers.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (05:43):
Thank you. I’m wondering too is you’ve taken multiple companies now from the startup to many employees, you said 150, and eventually being bought out. And now the growth of what you’re doing here where you have probably staff and you have multiple customers you’re going after in this kind of business. You have the actual customer using your app and booking the service, but then you also have to be recruiting in these other lawn care companies or landscaping companies to come in to actually fulfill that service.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (06:16):
Talk a little bit about that dichotomy and you really have multiple companies or customers that you’re going after.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (06:23):
Yeah. That’s one of the challenging things about building a multi-sided marketplace like what we have. You really do have two customers, and they kind of sometimes have opposite desires and opposite motivating factors. We had to figure out how to strike that delicate balance between what homeowners need and what business owners need to run a profitable business. And it took a long time.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (06:48):
It took a long time to figure out how to build a product the consumers love to use and how to build a product that really helped lawn mowing services grow their landscaping company. And that’s why we stayed just in Nashville, Tennessee for four years, until we really figured out how to build an experience that delighted consumers and helped service providers grow their business. It wasn’t until then that we then began to move into other cities throughout the United States. We have a motto, “nail it, then scale it.”
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (07:15):
And it took us a long time to nail it. I don’t think there’s any reason to go wide until you have figured it out. And that was kind of a strategy that paid off for us. Because then when we decided to move into other cities, we were able to move very quickly. Being bootstrapped helped us as well, because kind of like that old adage, necessity is the mother invention, really was true with us. We had to focus on one thing and that was our users. We had to focus on the landscaping professionals that used the product.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (07:43):
Were they making more money? Were they able to make more money with less hassle than before? And then were consumers delighted by it? Were they continually using it after they used it the first time? Until we figured that out, then we started to grow faster. But if we had raised venture capital, it probably would’ve forced us to move too quick and we’ll just feel blown apart by the seams. You see a lot of companies try to scale too quickly before they have it figured out, before they have it dialed in.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (08:10):
And luckily, because we bootstrapped, we had only one choice. It’s like we have a hundred customers. We got to keep them happy. We got to figure out how to get it to a thousand customers. Now we got to figure how to get it 10,000. That kind of slow and low approach was kind of key to our success and still is.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (08:25):
Yeah, and it’s interesting. I’m wondering too about the… When you talked about getting feedback from your customers or going through and then incorporating that, I’m just curious what processes you went through or if there’s any kind of system or process that you used in doing that.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (08:45):
Yeah, it certainly has evolved over time and evolved over the years. You have a hundred customers. Don’t overthink it. You put your cell number on everything. You literally put your cell phone number at the bottom of the email. You literally have your cell phone number on the screen. It’s just a hundred people. You want them to call you. I see this is a mistake made by a lot of new founders is that they want to hide behind the screen. They don’t really want to confront that customer feedback because it’s painful.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (09:13):
The marketplace doesn’t care. It’s going to tell you where you suck and you have to listen to that because that’s your R&D. That’s how you really understand what you need to be focusing your firepower on. It’s just a common mistake I see a lot of new founders make. For us in the early days, it was we removed all the friction between us and our customer. We made it really easy for them to talk to of us.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (09:35):
We made it really easy for them to call us or talk to us in live chat or email seven days a week, 20 hours a day, because that was how we knew what we needed to focus on. That was how we knew where we needed to prioritize our limited resources. Then as time went on, as we scaled out the team, we have full-time customer service people. I still do at least an hour at day of customer support, because there’s this phenomenon that occurs as a business grows. There’s a gap between founder logic and customer logic.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (10:04):
And that just grows and it just grows wider and wider and wider. You don’t even know what’s happening. The way you kind of close that gap between founder logic and customer logic is by doing customer support, talking to customers. They’ll tell you really quickly where you suck, and it’ll keep you on track. It’ll keep you building the right things and focusing on the right things.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (10:24):
That’s really neat. Do you have a pretend name that you go under when you’re doing customer service calls? Are you calling as you reaching out to customers? How does that work?
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (10:34):
I have an alias. Yes, I have alias that I use on our… I actually just use a seat that one of our customer service reps uses. I want unvarnished feedback. I want them to really let me have it like they let our customer service reps have it. That’s what I do and it’s a simple thing that keeps me on track keeps, keeps us humbled, keeps us focused on the right things. As a founder, as a CEO, as the manager, whatever you want to call yourself, a lot of times you wear the hat of capital allocator.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (11:07):
You have a little bit of money coming in, and then you got to figure out what bets to make. Do I put more firepower behind marketing? Do I hire more developers? Do I do more R&D? Do I hire data analyst? Do I hire a conversion rate optimizer? Where do I make my bets? And if you’re self-funded, these bets are really critical. They’re like bet the company decisions, particularly in the early days.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (11:28):
The only way you know how to make smart bets is by listening to users, listening to customers, and letting that guide your decisioning. That certainly has been key to our success.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (11:37):
Wow! Great advice. Great advice. Well, this is a great time for us to transition here a little bit just to talk about our misses, makes, and multipliers that we always ask every guest these questions before they go. The first one we like to talk is about a miss or two that’s happened and something you learned from it.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (11:56):
Ooh, man, you’re giving me PTSD on the misses. A big miss was when we first launched a company, here’s what I thought. I had the idea for GreenPal and I thought we could just pay a dev shop to build what we thought GreenPal should be. And then my co-founders and I would market it and we would be off and going. We did that. We didn’t know how to code, didn’t know how to build software. We pulled together 150 grand of our own money. This was like liquidated 401(k)s, credit card checks, you name it, to get $150,000 together.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (12:29):
Paid this development shop in Nashville to build what we thought GreenPal should be. Took like nine months to build. Launched it and it was a total flop, hard to use, buggy, didn’t have the features that needed. People hated it. That was a big miss because we delegated something that we had no idea about. We delegated too quickly. We delegated from like education. I don’t know how to do this. It scares me. You handle it. That’s a recipe for disaster in delegation. It was a big miss for us, but it was kind of our ticket price to the game.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (13:00):
We had to like spend that money and learn that mistake the hard way to understand that we were going to have to develop ourselves as real tech entrepreneurs. And that was a long, hard process, but it was one that we had to do to get into the game.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (13:15):
Wow. What a great… I mean, a hard lesson to learn I’m sure when you’re going through that painful, even through your face as I saw reflecting back on that. Well, let’s flip it on the other side here. What about a make or two that’s come along? You’ve you’ve already shared a whole bunch here, but anything else you’d love to share?
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (13:35):
Big make would be just focusing on one problem, one idea, and just giving it a decade. That’s probably been one of our I guess points of… I guess you could say secret sauce, is that we have focused on one chore. That’s lawn mowing. And it’s the easiest way in the United States to get this one chore done. A lot of times we’ve been sidetracked by bright, shiny objects and maybe chasing other opportunities, when in fact there was just so much more opportunity in the one thing that we were good at.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (14:06):
I think a good strategy is to just double down on what’s already working until there’s no more of it left. We still constitute like less than 1% of the lawn mowing that’s occurring in the United States. We have so much more white space in front of us and this one vertical where we can make it better, quicker, faster, cheaper, more reliable, more consistent. Making this one thing run smoother and smoother and smoother is what we do. That’s been a big make for us, was just focusing on one thing and doing it better than anybody else.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (14:34):
Really interesting. I’m wondering, as I’m listening to you speak about this, it makes me wonder about some of these guys or gals that maybe are on the same shoes you were in when you started your first lawn care and landscaping company that are maybe just getting started. Just curious, how has GreenPal been able to help some of these maybe just startups, maybe some high school kid that’s trying to make some side cash that grows into a business, how does that work? What have you seen happen there?
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (15:03):
Yeah, it’s really why we do what we do. We offer nice convenience to consumers. They can push a button and get a chore done, right? It’s nice. But really why we do what we do is to help folks that want to work hard, in a business for themselves, give them an opportunity. We’ve seen hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples of that where people will come onto our platform. Maybe they have like just one customer or two customers. And at the end of the first year, they’ve got a hundred customers, and they’re running their entire business on top of GreenPal.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (15:31):
We’ve got a Facebook group that we invite all of these folks into where it’s got a few thousand of them. We see these stories being shared inside the group on an ongoing basis like, “Hey, thank you, GreenPal. I was able to buy a new truck or put a kid through school or put a down payment on a house.”
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (15:46):
That’s really why I get out of bed in the morning, that’s why my team works hard on what we’re working on is because that’s what we’re in the business of is helping small business owners grow and double their business and in a short period of time to make material income. We believe anybody who’s willing to work hard should be able to make a good living in this industry.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (16:04):
Wow. It reminds me when I was a kid, my stepdad, he ran a lawn mowing business nights and weekends after work. He’d go to work and then he’d do this. He actually used it to buy his boat to go boating in the river with. I think he called it… I think it was called like Mowing Forward or something.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (16:24):
Nice.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (16:25):
Yeah, before the days of GreenPal. I think of someone like him that’s looking for that extra cash or just some startup person. That’s really, really neat what you’re doing. Well, let’s talk about this idea of a multiplier and we get a wide range of answers here. But I’m just curious, has there been a multiplier that you’ve used in growing the business?
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (16:47):
Like a force multiplier? Like a fulcrum?
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (16:50):
Yeah.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (16:52):
Hiring good people and putting them in the right spots and delegating from a standpoint of stewardship. I think as you are growing your business where there’s just you and a helper, you and three people, you and five people, you and 10 people, you start off as this generalist and you’re doing everything yourself. You kind of figure out how to do all of these things, kind of like 80-20, good. And then as time goes on, you try to put people in those roles. That’s definitely been a multiplier for me. The book The E Myth by Michael Gerber is a blueprint for this.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (17:25):
Day one, when you start your business, you should really lay out an org chart and you might say, “Well, why do I need to do that? It’s just me.” But you need to be thinking through that like, who’s the CEO? Who’s chief of marketing? Who’s chief of customer service? Who’s chief of R&D? Who is chief of preventative maintenance for the machinery? Who’s chief of all these different things? It’s you. But as time goes on, you get to peel your name off some of these roles and assign them to either freelancers, contractors, employees.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (17:54):
For me, looking back in the last 10 years of building GreenPal, some of our main inflection points is when I have found a specialist who’s really good at one thing and been able to put them in a role where they can just kick ass at it, do it so much better than I could do, but they were starting off with a blueprint that I handed off to them because I did it for a while. I think it’s like as time goes on, you’re like 80-20 good at a dozen different things.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (18:20):
And then as you make money, you want to put people in these roles that they go way deeper on it than you ever could. That’s a big force supplier that I’ve seen looking backwards and one that I’m going to keep doubling down on. We’re hiring for a data scientist right now. I’m like just barely dangerously good at data analysis, but I need somebody who’s really good at it, who can just own it. We’re hiring for that role right now. When you get the that right, you’ll see it. You’ll feel it.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (18:53):
Definitely it helps the bottom line. It helps you grow the company. It helps you achieve goals. And that feels really good. It’s a lot of fun.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (19:00):
Yeah. Well, note, to any data scientist tuning in, reach out to Bryan over at GreenPal. He’d love to talk to you.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (19:08):
Bryan@yourgreenpal.com.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (19:11):
Perfect. Perfect. Well, and the final question we’d like to ask every guest is, what does success mean to you?
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (19:19):
Success means for me having fun doing what I’m doing and setting out goals and knocking them down, and also setting up opportunities for folks that are in the game with me. That’s what success feels like. And that could be as small as running a lawn mowing business and going from 50 to 100 customers, like it was 20 years ago, or it could mean going from 20 million a year in revenue to 50 to 100 million a year in revenue like it does today. Having fun doing what I’m doing, step one. I’ve been at this company for 10 years, but I haven’t worked a day in 10 years.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (19:54):
I have literally every day done what it is I wanted to do that day. To me, that’s the first indicator that you’re living a successful life. You’re doing what you want to do. You’re having fun doing it. And then feeling the emotion around, setting out a goal and just knocking it down with your team. That’s a lot of fun. And then setting out opportunities for those around you. People that use the products that we’ve built, they plug into our platform and they’re able to make material income. That’s fun. That’s what success feels like.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (20:24):
And then the people like stakeholders, employees, co-founders, they’re a part of this journey with you and success is kind of compounding. That’s a lot of fun. That’s what success feels like to me.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (20:34):
Yeah, amazing. I love how you shared… You talked a little bit about being a good steward or helping folks acting as a steward to train, educate, support. It sounds like this is all part of your plan and process. And just curious, how do you incorporate this stewardship mindset or mentality into the business, especially as you’re growing, right? You are passing off these important leadership roles to other leaders in your company. How has that been able to translate through?
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (21:06):
Yeah, it’s a Tony Robbins quote. If you focus on other people’s success, you just will be successful. I have tried to live as tight to that mantra as I can over the last 20 years. There’s been times in the last 20 years in business that employees that work for me made more money than I did. Some of my first salespeople that I ever hired for years took home more money than I did as the owner of the business. But I knew that if I could just set them up to be successful, that the company’s success and eventually my success would follow that.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (21:39):
That’s how I’ve looked at running this company. There have been many, many, many years where the landscaping services that used our technology took home multiple six figures, in some cases, seven figures a year. I didn’t take a paycheck. It’s like, wow, we’re giving all these opportunities for these folks using our technology to get new customers and make money, when in fact we’re living on rice and beans. But I knew that so long as we could mint and manufacture successful landscape service providers, that we eventually would become successful.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (22:17):
That’s how it’s taken shape. That’s how the first 10 years has gone. I hope the next 10 years goes that way too.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (22:23):
Wow! As we bring this to a close, is there anything you were hoping to share that maybe you haven’t had it to chance to yet?
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (22:30):
Yeah. I was listening to a podcast the other day. They were interviewing a dude named Marc Andreessen who wrote the first modern day web browser. He talks about going out to Silicon Valley in 1992 and having the feeling that like, we missed it all. All technology companies have already owned the space, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle. These companies owned it all. We missed. It were too late. Wow! How funny is that? That was like day one. Dude invented the web browser. The internet happened, consumer internet.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (23:04):
Everything happened after that. It’s just insane. It was minute one of day one. I think as an entrepreneur, you can feel that way too. You can feel like, oh, I missed it. I missed the gig economy, or I missed crypto or I missed SaaS. I’m too late. Therefore, I’m stuck, so no reason to get started. The reality is, is that it always gets bigger. It always gets bigger and bigger and bigger. The market always gets bigger. You didn’t miss it. Get it in the game.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (23:31):
It’s going to take two or three or five years just to figure out what the hell you’re doing, but it’s better to start now because you didn’t miss it. It’s not too late. I have felt that way myself. That’s why I like to try to spread that message that it’s not too late. It’s going to get bigger.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (23:44):
Amazing. Great advice. Well, thank you for being here. I’m so grateful for your time and for being a guest today. And before you go, what’s best way for someone to find out more? If they’re listening in and just want to learn more about you and your story, or maybe be a customer, how can they do that?
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (24:00):
Life’s too short to cut your own grass. Focus on your business. Download GreenPal in the App Store or Play Store. Anybody who wants to get at me, Instagram is where I spend all my time on social. Hit me up @BryanMClayton. Just drop me a DM there. I’ll hit you back.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (24:14):
Great. And that’s Bryan, with a Y, M Clayton. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your time.
Bryan Clayton, GreenPal (24:21):
Thanks, Tom. I appreciate it.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (24:23):
Bryan, thank you so much for being a guest here on the show. And let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. Takeaway number one is when Bryan talked about being bootstrapped to start and launch both of his businesses and especially this most recent venture that he’s involved with. He said that being bootstrapped and not taking investor money allowed them to focus on how to build a product or a service that appealed and worked for the customer.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (24:55):
I thought it was interesting how when you take investor money, sometimes the leader maybe tempted to just ignore or burn through cash to kind of get through some of these trouble spots. When you’re bootstrapping it, you can’t quite afford to do that. I thought that was great. He stayed in his home market for four years until he figured out a way to do it well before he started going nationally and starting to expand.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (25:21):
Takeaway number two is to focus on one problem, or in this case, focus on one chore and double down on it until it’s working and there’s no more market left. And then focus on that one thing and do it better than anyone else. Kind of this whole idea of focus here that Bryan was talking about and the things that he has done to make him successful. Takeaway number three is this idea of founder logic and customer logic that Bryan was talking about. I thought this was a really cool concept.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (25:56):
I haven’t really heard anyone talk about it in quite this way, and he said, close the gap by talking with your customers. And he said, all too often, founders, entrepreneurs, the innovators sometimes lose sight of staying connected to that customer. And so you get that kind of founder logic and you start ignoring that customer logic. One of the things he said he does is he spends at least an hour every day talking to customers through their customer service department and he uses an alias. I thought that was brilliant.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (26:31):
Great idea. Great suggestions there. And now it’s time for today’s win-win. And today’s win-win is that it’s never too late. You did not miss your opportunity to make it happen. And I thought that was a really great takeaway out of this. He said, if you ever feel like you missed it, the reality is you haven’t. The market is still there. And he said, it’s not too late. The market is going to keep growing. And remember, it’s going to take you two to five years to kind of figure this out anyway.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (27:08):
And that’s just something for you to think about as you’re getting into maybe you’re franchising your business, like we work with our clients through. It’s going to take a few years to start figuring out this new business you’re getting into and whether that’s franchising or whether that’s just a new business segment, a new product line you’re adding, or just a totally new business venture. That’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review.
Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (27:34):
And remember, if anyone might be ready to franchise their business or take their company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in and we look forward to having you back next week.
