E270: From Landscaping Hustle to Tech Empire: Bryan Clayton’s $90M GreenPal Revolution

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Whereas now, okay, now you're taking actions, and it can
help you brainstorm, it can help you get closer to
where you need to be to where one of my
favorite quotes is is is patient with the results, impatient
with actions. So it's like you're impatient about doing things
and you're patient about the results. AI can close that

(00:22):
gap between you doing nothing and taking action in the business,
using AI to crunch the numbers on those types of
things and send the right offer at the right time
to the right customer. Now that's possible, whereas before that
will take like a NASA level data scientist to pull off.
Now you have it in your back pocket. Right around
twenty thirteen was when all of these kind of SaaS

(00:43):
products started coming along. Software as a service and you
can buy off the shelf a routing piece of software,
or payroll software or job clocking software, and you can
cobble these things together and automate many aspects of your business.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Hello and welcome to the How to Exit Podcasts, where
we introduce you to a world of small to medium
business acquisitions and mergers. We interview business owners, industry leaders, authors, mentors,
and other influencers with the sole intent to share with
you what it looks like to buy or sell a business.
Let's get rolling and now a moment for our sponsors.

(01:32):
This episode of How to Exit is brought to you
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lower middle market business owners achieve their ultimate exit a
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(01:53):
Final Assent specializes in preparing businesses for sale, building value,
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unless they're confident they can sell your business at the
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(02:15):
with maximum value and a peace of mind. Start your
journey today at Final Assent that's www dot Final Ascent
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I want to highly recommend you get Acquisition Officionado magazine
every month Acquisition of Ficionaudo magazine brings you tactics for
business buying and selling you won't find anywhere else. Learn

(02:37):
firsthand from industry leaders who share their success stories, featuring
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business acquisition industry. This multi platform mobile magazine speaks to
acquisition entrepreneurs wheretherver they are in the journey, and I
want you to visit acquisition afficionado dot com today. Hello,

(02:58):
and welcome to the Hot Exit pot Cast Today. I'm
here with Brian Clinton and he is the CEO and
co founder of green Poal, a platform kind of They
described it as the uber for long care. I'm looking
forward to the conversation thinking for me and here Brian Ron.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
Great to be here, Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
Awesome. So I always start with the origin story. I
always start with kind of the background so people can
get to know you, like you and get connected with you.
I know you're running green poald. Now talk about how
you got to the startup in your background a little bit,
because there's some interesting things that I know about you
that other people shod too.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
Yeah. So, so before I started green pal, which is
kind of like the uber for lawnmowing. I actually had
a lawnmowing business. I have been involved in the landscaping
business pretty much my whole life. And I wasn't born
like an entrepreneur or business owner. The reality is I
was forced into it by my father, who got tired

(03:55):
of watching me play Nintendo all day. I remember one
day in like nineteen ninety five, I was playing Super
Mario Kart and he he was. He was upset that
I was playing like like nine ten hours a day.
He said, hey, get off your butt. I talked to
the neighbors. They need somebody to mow their yard, and
I said, well I don't. I don't do that. I
don't mow yards. He said, he said, well you do now.

(04:17):
And my dad was a military guy. This was not
a request, this was a direct order. And so he
dragged me next door, and I'll never forget it. We
mowed the yard together. I didn't know what the hell
I was doing, but he started pointing out all the
areas I missed, and then and then a light bulb
went off. I got paid twenty bucks for like two
hours of work, and I thought, man, wait a second,

(04:39):
this is amazing. I can just go get more of
these and put them together and make as much money
as I want. I'm just going to do this, And
I made some flyers, passed them around the neighborhood, and
that first summer I had like twenty customers mowing their
yards every week, And little by little stuck with that
lawnmowing business through high school and through college and eventually

(05:00):
throwing that into a real company. Eventually it got to
about one hundred and fifty employees.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (05:05):
And then in two thousand and fourteen it was acquired
by a big national company that runs these landscaping businesses
all over the country.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
It's interesting because kind of how I've been an entrepreneur
since I was a little kid, and one of my
first entrepreneur gigs was more on lawns. Actually, I had
an older cousin about three or four, two or three
years older than me that lived nearby, and him and
I were into the video and games, and the local
gas station had both one called dig Doug and Centipede

(05:35):
or a Wizard of a War. They twitched Digdug for
Wizard of War. Every dollar we could find we fed
into those machines. We hung out there, we drank Slurpees
and played this video game. We made that guy rich well,
one of the neighbors. One day he broke his leg
or something couldn't mow his lawns. He asked me if
I could mow the lawn. And I was in third grade.
So I'm this tiny cot and I'm a you know,
my nickname back then was Shrownnie Ronnie. Nobody calls me that.

(05:57):
Now I'm as big as two men. But they was,
you know, it was this little bit, skinny reil of
a kid, and he said, who do you know that
can mow my lawn? So I called my cousin up
and I said, let's come down here. I'll weed eat
it alawn. I'll grab my weed eater, you grab my
dad's more. There's two doors down. These guys can give
us thirty bucks to MOA's they are twenty five bucks
or on like the MOA's lawn, and I'll split it
with you. We'll go play the game. Because he's always

(06:17):
done there. He's He's the reason I could go to
the gas station at that age because he would go
with me. Right, he's older kid. So we mowed that
lawn and we're like we went down and spent it instantly,
Like we mowed the lawn, threw the stuff in my
dad's garage. He even closed the garage door, ran down
to the you know the there, and put at every
dollar we had to that machine and then that light
bulb went off. By the time we were done, my
dad and my uncle, my cousin's father were begging us

(06:41):
to stop because they had to come help us. All
we had. We had sold so many lawns, we couldn't
get them all done.

Speaker 1 (06:47):
And they're like to learn what it means to run
a business.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
And in Oklahoma, the summers get to one hundred and
five hundred again ten with you know, eighty percent humidity.
So there was like my parents were like. My dad
was like, you've got to stop the this is horrible, right,
So they made us shut it down. But then we
moved out into the woods in the country and uh,
like in the middle of nowhere, five miles from town.
And UH, when I was older, we I had another

(07:12):
adventure into lawnmowing. Uh. I asked my dad to work
for him. At this point, he had a painting company.
He painted houses, and uh, he said I was too
young to work for him. So when he went to town.
I strapped his push mower uh to the back of
my bicycle and pedaled it into town with gas tied
to it and everything else and a weed eater. I
strapped everything and like bungee cort it and tied it

(07:34):
to uh uh to the lawnmower and put that on
my bicycle and drug it five miles into town and
went door to door started more on lawns. And I
didn't even tell him. He didn't even know I was
doing it. And so into story, I got bit by
a dog, uh, and the cops called my dad because
I got bit by a pit bull. They bit my
legs and uh, they caught the dad asked to talk

(07:58):
to me to the cop when they were saying, he's okay,
but he did get bid he needs to go to
the doctor. And the cop had to tell my dad, well,
he can't get to the phone right now. He's over
finishing the lawn. He's mowing right The guy paid me
and left. He paid me like thirty five bucks from
back then. That was a lot of money and they
had already left. So I'm gonna finish this lawn. And
you know, the cop was taking care of the dogs
so that's how I got to go to work for

(08:19):
my father in the painting business. Like, if you're old
enough to do that, you're you know, it's probably safers
that you work for me, so you know, but.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
I love it. It's a great business to learn ninety percent
of what you're gonna need for any business. Right you
learned stuff like customer service and how to keep track
of expenses and how to make money by paying somebody
else to do the labor and you do everything else.
It's one of those ways to learn most of everything

(08:49):
you're gonna need to know for almost any business. And
I love when I talk to people they're like, yeah,
my first business was a lot of moning business, and
I kind of stuck with it, you know, I stuck
with the same thing that I know for now twenty
five years, and it's taking me places that I would
have never been able to go in life. So I'm
fortunate that my dad forced me to mow my first yard.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
So let's go into so you sold that. What was
the process of selling your landscaping business, What was the
trigger that made you want to sell it? And then
kind of how did you go about selling it?

Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yeah, it was interesting building that business from just me
and a push mower to me and three or four
employees and then me, you know, five ten years later,
I woke up one day and I had thirty crews
going out every day, and I thought, Man, this is
actually getting to be a big business. And one of
the things that was happening as I was growing that

(09:41):
business was that I was evolving as a new person
every year or two because the business was requiring me
to learn new skills and take on new challenges and
evolve and grow alongside it. And that was kind of
like a fulfilling, rewarding thing. I didn't even really realize
it at the time, but that was something I was
getting fulfillment from the business. And I guess it was

(10:05):
about year fifteen that kind of plateaued. I had kind
of grown it to I'd gotten over the eight figure mark,
and I had had managers in place and salespeople in place,
and it was kind of running like a well oiled machine,
almost to point, you know, that that it could run
without me, and I was getting bored being in the business.

(10:25):
I guess I'd hit a point of burnout, and so
I decided, well, I'm going to explore the opportunity maybe
somebody would buy this business. And I found a business
broker that specialized only in the landscaping industry, and he
met with us and he said, you got a lot
of work to do to get this business Rdatey to sell.

(10:46):
There was a lot of things that I didn't realize
that you had to have in place, and different types
of ways the business was to be structured, and accounting
practices and things like that. So it took about a
year to get all of that straightened out, and then
about another year to sell it. And then after I
sold it, it was a weird thing. It was like
a piece of me was missing, like that I had

(11:08):
ran the business for so long that that it was
a part of my identity. It was a part of
like why I got out of bed in the morning,
and it was a part of like who I was,
and now that was gone, and so I had to
go through this identity crisis, where what do I do now.
I didn't really want to start another business, but I thought, well,
maybe I could be a tech entrepreneur. And I'm pretty
sure somebody's gonna build like an uber for lawnmowing. Maybe

(11:29):
that could be me. And so I recruited two co
founders and started working on the next thing.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
Well, that's interesting because quite a few people experience what
you experienced, right. It's like when I got out, even
even in a smaller scale, when I got out of
the real estate business, I knew I didn't want to
go back into the real estate. I transferred to my Basically,
my business partner is the one who acquired it, so

(11:55):
he took over the business. We split the real estate
up it so it wasn't like a huge cash flow,
Like didn't get it any big influnch of cash. But
I owned quite a few rentals that was making decent money.
And I sit there, like, what am I going to
do next? Is we tie so much of our identity.
That's another reason why I went to that self help program,
is why am I tying who I am with what

(12:17):
I do? It just wasn't logical for me. We all
do it. If I go out and ask, you know,
if I set down to the coffee shop and I
ask ten people like who are you? They'll tell me
what they do. And they won't say, hey, my name's
you know, Brian. They'll say, oh I you know. They
might say I'm Brian. But you know, they'll say, oh,
I do landscaping, like hey, who are you? And they'll say, well,

(12:38):
I do landscaping, Like no, I ad like, you know,
what's your name? First of all? Right, and you know
what do you enjoy doing? Right?

Speaker 1 (12:46):
And they they interesting, it's a weird thing, but you're right.
It's like, I don't know if it's our culture, but
that's where we derive purpose, is what our vocation is.
And for me, it was kind of like, what why
why is it important for me to get out of
bed at six o'clock in the morning. And the reason was, well,
if you don't, there's there's there's ninety plus guys at

(13:09):
the shop who are going to be waiting for you
to get directions from you. There's customers that are gonna
need you. There's there's vendors that need you. And my
business was the reason why I got out of bed
at six o'clock in the morning. And with that, when
that was gone, there was really no answer to that
question why is it important you get out of bed
early in the morning, And so I had to kind

(13:29):
of create that again now with greenpal It's like, okay,
now I have that all over again, where it's important
for me to get up, be sharp and feel good
and have energy because because of all of these people
that count on me to perform. So I think it's
a natural thing. I don't know, maybe it's a cultural thing,
but I certainly can't break away from that. My business

(13:50):
is the reason why I have to be tuned up
and ready to go every morning.

Speaker 2 (13:55):
One of my military buddies he heated landscaping out of
once you got out of the military, like you going
for military intelligence because that's what we did, you know,
top secret military intelligence stuff. Telling in a landscaping business
in Florida, and he was doing really well with it.
But his biggest problem was is keeping great workers around
and knowing where they were there and mowing and stuff.

(14:16):
I'm leading up to the question of did you have
ninety people roaming around and mowing lawns? Did you already
have tech and nable? Do you have GPS trackers in
their car? Could you tell where they were? Did you
give route planning any type of software involved or it
was it all paper?

Speaker 1 (14:32):
You know, these days, I think business in many ways
is probably easier than it's ever been because back in
those days early two thousands. No, we didn't have any
of that. That stuff might have been accessible, but it
was super super expensive and it just really wasn't reliable,
and so no, it was all manual. It was it

(14:54):
might have been it might have been Yahoo maps or
map quests, printouts and spreadsheets and clipboards and post it
notes and just kind of organizing it all and you know,
in this kind of organized chaos type of way. And
when it got to one hundred and fifty people, it
was it was almost more than I could that I
could handle and as and when I sold the business

(15:16):
and transition into becoming a tech entrepreneur, I saw all
of these ways that I was making life harder than
it needed to be, because right around twenty thirteen was
when all of these kind of SaaS products started coming along.
Software as a service and you can buy off the
shelf a routing piece of software or payroll software or
job clocking software, and you can cobble these things together

(15:40):
and automate many aspects of your business. And I was
kind of running the business in the nineties all the
way up until twenty thirteen, Like my mindset never really
kind of shifted, and I still see it even to
this day. You know, business owners in twenty twenty four,
twenty five that are still running like they're in the nineties.
So I think think there's an opportunity, especially now with AI,

(16:02):
for business owners to kind of get into the into
the into the latest type of software, latest type of
technology to make their life easier and also improve the
customer experience. So for me, you know, it was always
kind of like a whack a mole type of thing. Okay,
this what is the what is the biggest problem we
have in the business at this at this month, And

(16:24):
let's just spend ninety days on it and build a
system to solve it until we can and then we
move on to the next one. And you mentioned, you know,
employee turnover, employee training, that was a big bottleneck for us,
and I realized I had to create I had to
create Landscaper University. I had to I had to create,
you know, a series of training modules to to bring

(16:45):
somebody up to speed that had never mowed a yard before,
who had never planted at bush before, had never prone
to shrub before. How do I how do I train
them from here to to to master gardener in six weeks.
So that was where we spent a lot of time
was was was training and being able to get something
up to speed quickly.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
I imagine that and then uh, well, I mean today,
I've demoed quite a few, even tried one or two
of them for my little pest control company on for
a while. But today they actually have if you have
a tablet or a smartphone, there's apps that set right
down there that's GPS tracking. They'll do re routing if
a customer you know.

Speaker 1 (17:25):
Uh, it's so much easier to used to be.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
Yeah, customer counsels on you. You can reroute or they
can send you a message, and you can send a
message to a customer and say I'm running five minutes behind,
and it's all you know, it's all in there, and
it ties right into your accounting software. So it just
feeds right into your your quick books and everything. You know.
They're a little proud of them. Like for a small company,
it was like two hundred the one we were using
was using them. They went like two hundred and twenty

(17:48):
five dollars per user. And yeah, for a while they're like,
we use We tried it out, and then we just
at some point decided it wasn't worth it went back
to paper because we were too small for it.

Speaker 1 (17:59):
That's what a lot of small business owners run into
is that by the time you add all these tools up,
you know, you can easily get over one thousand, two thousand,
three thousand dollars a month, and then next thing, you know,
all your profits going out the door paying for these tools.
And you have to really kind of you have to
like try everything on the market and then pick out

(18:21):
the best setup for you. And most business owners like
get burnt out, you know by when the first or
second one doesn't work, because it's like they're they're sold
this this this this promise that this will solve all
of your problems as a as a handyman, or as
a long care guy, or as a painter, or as
a pest control operator. And and this happened to me

(18:42):
when I was running my landscaping business. I would try one,
I'll get burnt out on it, and then I would say,
we'll screw that. And and what I learned when I
when I had to build software was actually, man, you
got to try them all and like just give them
each two weeks and then just pick the one that
you want to go all in on and that's that's
a lot of work. I mean, that's I mean, that's

(19:02):
Saturdays and Sundays ripping this out and putting this in.
So it's just kind of one of those things, like
it's a lot of upfront work and then you don't
see the benefit until like month six or year two.
But it was eye opening when I started building software
that man I could have I could have done this
for payroll, I could have done this for for clocking

(19:23):
man hours. I could have done this for vehicle maintenance,
and instead of just doing it all by hand.

Speaker 2 (19:28):
You know, if you think back when you started, one
of the biggest problems you'd have if you tech enable
the long care businesses. Most of your workers aren't tech enable, right,
They're not techies. Right nowadays people come out of the
womb with a cell phone in their hand. My nine
year old and my fourteen year old no more about
electronics than I do. They've had tablets and they've had
at least, you know, two thousand dollars worth of electronics

(19:49):
in their hands. It's both of them since they were,
you know, two years old. So between you know, between
the iPads and games, nations and everything else, they touched.
But you know, people of our generation, either we're tech
enable or not. It was kind of a binary switch.
And mostly as you'd be hiring didn't know how to

(20:11):
use a tablet or a piec of urophone. So you know,
every time you make that switch, you're frustrating them because
they have to learn something they're not comfortable using.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
Yeah, yeah, they Back in those days, you know, there
were there were executives that had their secretaries print off
their emails and and I remember I had a business
partner for a while that that was the case. It
was it was like pulling teeth to drag them into
the twentieth century. These days, the problem is a lot
of this type of software that you use in business

(20:42):
is not as good as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok uh whatever.
It's not. It's not as robust as these tools that
they're that that they are accustomed to. So they kind
of have to like almost go backwards and and be
forgiving of of this you know, customer service, customer relations
management piece of software that might not be as smooth

(21:04):
as Uber is. And so that's the thing that we
see with UH with long care services that use green pal.
Greenpal is great it's built for lawn mowing services to
to make their life easier, make more money with less headache.
But it's not as good as as a TikTok or
Snapchat or as an Instagram. These are these are one
hundred billion dollar companies. So uh and so and so

(21:26):
these new like uh, you know, eighteen nineteen year old
kids going yards and they and they plug into green pal.
They're like, hey, it doesn't it doesn't upload the image
as quick as as Instagram does. Or it doesn't you know,
the routing is not as good as when I when
I order an Uber, I can see the car drive up.
It's like, well, we don't have two thousand engineers working
on it. We have we have forty and so it's

(21:47):
like that's the disconnect these days. It's like you have
to be as good as Amazon, uh to to to
be able to compete.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
I bet Ai is changing the way you do business
as far as the engineers go too, right.

Speaker 1 (21:59):
So exactly, man, it's it's it's it's like every time
you turn around ron, it's like it's a new what
was cool three months ago? It's like old is like
it's like table stakes. Now it's like it's just it's
it's very very uh almost causes me anxiety in terms
of like how quickly things are changing, But it's making

(22:20):
things a lot easier. Whereas when when I was first
learning how to code, when I sold my landscaping business
and started Greenpal, I had to teach myself how to
write software. And I and I just look at how
how AI can write software and in seconds what uhsould
take me days? Uh? And I think about the implications
around that, where you can you can try things out.

(22:41):
Used to be like, well we don't we don't want
to try that because it'll take us a week to
build build it. Well, now we can build it in
an hour, launch it, deploy it, See how people react
to it? Do people use it? Do they not? Okay,
it wasn't a success, Okay, scrap it because the writing
of the code was was done you know by this
this this computer that understands code better than any engineer.

(23:03):
And so it's it's it's exciting, but also it causes
me a little anxiety, if I'm honest, because it's like,
now you really got to be on your a game
to be able to reinvent the business and and and
re almost almost toss away what you might have spent
years building because now you kind of have to rebuild
it from an AI first approach. And it's it's gonna

(23:26):
be interesting to see you in the next five years.
I think I think plumbers will make more than doctors.
I think I think plumbers will definitely make more than
attorneys because a lot of this knowledge work is just
going to get abstracted away.

Speaker 2 (23:39):
Yeah, the latest versions of AI come out and they're
scoring higher than PhD level professionals in all those fields
and in medical and law and other stuff.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
So it's wild.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
Even if you're a top rink attorney and you passed
the bar at a ninety seven percent time or something, congratulations,
you're only as good as a twenty dollars a month
AI exactly exactly.

Speaker 1 (24:01):
It's it's kind of like you have, you know, some
way that graduated from Harvard Business School just following you
around all day and the only thing that he, you know,
he wants to do is make you happy twenty four
hours a day. You could ask him anything, and it's
just it's just like that's the world we now live in,
and it's like, what do you do if you spent
the last you know, ten years being a business consultant.

(24:24):
You know, it's like that's going away, and so it's
it's wild. I think if if you're in the type
of business where you're you're fixing clog drains, your painting houses,
you're mowing yards, you're doing things that AI can't replicate,
I think you're in a good place. But if you're
a knowledge worker, I would be I would be scared.

Speaker 2 (24:46):
If you listen to Elon there even those jobs are
gonna go away, he claims. Yeah, he claims that there'll
be over ten billion humanoid robots by twenty thirty.

Speaker 1 (24:56):
It certainly is possible. You know if three years ago,
you know, before the chat Chee Pet four came out,
you know, if you had said, hey, what if I
told you there was this thing that you could have
in your pocket and you could talk to it, and
you would not be able to tell that it wasn't
a human I would have told you you were crazy.
But now this thing, I mean, it will talk to
you like a human being. It passes that test. And

(25:20):
and you know, so who knows what the future holds.

Speaker 2 (25:22):
I have people I use it and with the people
listen to the show and they come and we have hangouts,
So about twice a month. We had one yesterday where
people who are trying to buy business and stuff will
come hang out, will network will tell everybody who we are,
what we're trying to hunt down, and what we're blyying,
and then a lot of the guests from the show
will show up and answer questions so nobody can. The

(25:44):
whole goal is nobody leaves the show. I mean the
meeting stuck anywhere like nice, right, So if you're stuck
on somewhere on a mergers and acquisitions type of deal,
come hang out with us. Ask questions and somebody in
the room probably can answer them, and a one of
the you know, some of these guys have fear of
talking to business owners. They don't understand how to build

(26:04):
a report. And I'll give them prompts on how to
use chat to PET to role play. It's actually really
good at role playing right now where you and I'll
show them how good it is that it's intuitive, Like
I'll tell chat peet, you know, I'll pull it up
in front of the in this meetiing and go, hey,
chat to p T. We're gonna role play. You're a
business owner I'm a business acquisitions guy. You own X

(26:24):
y Z type of company, and uh, I want you
to play the business owner and answer my questions. The
goal is to build deep rapport with you and get
an understanding of your business. Are you ready? And you're like, yeah,
that sounds like fun. You know, it talks back to
you and I and I don't give it any more
prompt I just go ring ring and it'll say it'll
answer the fun. It knows that ring ring means it

(26:46):
like it's supposed to answer the phone. And this thing
will say hello, so and so, you know construction company,
and you know, you just your role play and walk
through it and it doesn't It'll build a backstory on
the fly like you ask it, tell me you know,
how built the company built, and it'll just act like
it rolls places like you wouldn't believe.

Speaker 1 (27:04):
And so this what you just laid out was did
it completely solve all the problems for you know? But
it closes the gap between where you are and getting
to a solution. It's like it takes away a lot
of the kind of cognitive overhead of Okay, well, first
I'd have to do this, I'd have to do this
i'd have to do this. Screw it. I don't want

(27:25):
to mess with that. It's like, no, the AI can
can make all of that BS go away, Whereas now, okay,
now you're taking actions, and it can help you brainstorm,
it can help you get closer to where you need
to be to where like one of my favorite quotes
is is is uh is patient with the results, impatient
with with actions. So it's like you're impatient about doing

(27:47):
things and you're patient about the results. AI can close
that gap between you doing nothing and taking action in
the business, because there might be some of you're confused
about It's like, uh, okay, well you know I had
ten new customers last week and now none of them
are signed up with me. Why is that? Well have
you thought about this, this, and this? Okay, yeah I

(28:07):
did this, I did that, but I haven't thought about
that expand on that. Okay, well, here's the list of
things you can do and then you go to work
and so it's like it closed the gap between you
doing nothing and taking action. And that's that's one of
the things I love about it. I always use it
to get unstuck.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
I guess you could say, so I'll give you a
couple more ways, just that I use it says I think,
I think the audience would like it, and I think
it might be helpful. There's custom GPPs that you can
do inside of them, right, you can actually train and
it's you know, you're writing code. You can definitely do this,
so you can go inside and create your own custom GPT,
a bot that's a little more trained on your industry

(28:44):
necessarily then the general one would be, or in a
way that you would like. So one of the ways
I do this is, let's say I own a newsletter company.
All pull down the best books, the best content. I
think I can get about fifteen or twenty PDFs that
I can stuff in this thing and so, and I'll

(29:06):
name it my newsletter board of directors. So that's that
it's a personal hidden gt GPT. And then when I
talk to it, I'll pre train it on all the
documents I can find on it, and I'll say, you know,
when I train it to talk to it, I just
like you're my board of director. You know, you're you're
a board of directors for a company that runs profitable
newsletters and you know, publishing content. So that's the only

(29:28):
thing that's like we're going to have a brainstorming session
talking about current issues and stuff like that. And your
job is to act like a board of advisors and
give me advice and ideas. And it's brilliant what it'll
come up with.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
Man, that's awesome. You know, that's awesome. And and I
think I think a lot of people aren't adopting it
yet because they're not willing to put in that upfront work.
They're not willing to set the context of Okay, this
is who I am, this is what I'm doing. Here's
some historical information about me, here's here's what I aspire
to be. And then also maybe here's some data, you know,

(30:02):
here's you know, in the in the context of an
email subscription, you know, uh, here in my open rates,
here's my last five emails. If you're willing to invest
that upfront work, it's a superpower. I mean it what
it can do for you, I mean it's like a
half million dollar Mackenzie consultant just sitting there right next
to you at your desk, working twenty four hours a day.

(30:24):
If you're willing to put in that upfront work.

Speaker 2 (30:27):
Yeah, with the new version they just released last week,
and I haven't got to play with it because I'm
I'm too cheap though by the two hundred dollars a
month one. So the guys playing in the two hundred
dollars a month version of the chet TIPT they're getting
to see it already. But this deep research thing, I've
seen the videos of it. It looks really impressive. That's
like having that mackenzie team on it. It's even better.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
So not just one a team, a team.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
The McKenzie team where you know, any of the big
you know, uh research companies where you like want to
do market analysis and stuff. If you to McKenzie and say,
I'm enterating the long care business, I need a deep
market research of the current state of the industry where
I need a strength you know swat, I need strength, weaknesses,
opportunities and threats. I need you know X y Z.

(31:12):
It would probably cost you minimum twenty five thousand, probably
two hundred thousand dollars and take them about three to
six months to produce the report, and.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Why not be as good as what you're gonna get
out out of working and AI correctly.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
Now with the demos I'm seeing on that deep research,
you give it the same prompt. You tell it that
you know what you're looking for the report. You give
it the kind of parameters like that. It doesn't come
back with the initial like ed. He can take five
to thirty minutes to respond. Don't when it responds, it's
five thousand word. You know, PhD level, McKenzie level report,

(31:47):
industry level report with sources. It gives you all the
links and stuff where it found the info and you can,
you know, you can discard some moment if you don't
like the source or whatever. It's incredible. I I really
think that, you know, McKenzie and those guys are in
trouble because they charged two hundred and fifty thousand dollars
of the fort and for two hundred dollars a month,
and soon I think they'll give us access down at

(32:07):
the lower levels at twenty dollars a month. You can
rip one of those things out in thirty minutes instead
of six months.

Speaker 1 (32:13):
I think whatever the best that's out today will be
the entry level commodity in six to twelve months. So
this stuff is coming faster and faster. It seems like
one thing I've been using it a lot for is
the stuff I've been lazy about So an example in
our business is is we do a lot of emails

(32:35):
for customers who use the service to get a lawnmowing
done but haven't used it in a month or haven't
used it in two months, and we'll send them a
follow up email. So, hey, you know, we notice it's
been three weeks since you had your lawnbode, would you
like to book Joe's Law Care service for another mowing?
And it used to be we would send out the
same email every time, and then you know, a year

(32:59):
or two later, we already writing like maybe maybe three
or four emails just so it wasn't the same email
every time, because that was like spam. And then and
then and then we kind of left it. I knew
it wasn't great, but you know, it's kind of one
of those things we didn't want to spend the time
on writing a bunch of uh personalized, uniquely crafted emails. Well,

(33:19):
now with AI, we can say, okay, hey, this is
the customer, this is this is how many times they
had Joe's lawn service. This is this is how many
days it's been since they since they used Joe's. This
is where they live, this is what people normally do
there craft one hundred follow up emails and put them
in the hopper. And so now we have a unique

(33:39):
email every time for missus Smith. That's that is that
is that is crafted for their situation. So is that
like a silver bullet to to to double sales? No,
but it's something that we've been lazy about that. Now
with AI, there's no excuse to be lazy about that
because we can we can just bang that out really
quick and create a better customer experience using AI. So

(34:01):
I think if you can start with those things you
know that you need to do but it's just messy,
maybe it's a bunch of unstructured data or it's a
bunch of spreadsheets, use the AI to kind of like
to start cleaning up those things you know you've been deferring.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
You know, it's it's incredible what it's capable of and
the speed the testings and deploy it. Like if I
were in your space, I would try to. I'm a
marketing or my NBA is in marketing, but I always
try things like you know, crafting email to all the
users in this guy you're like, you know these guys
as well, try you know, like you know, crafting email

(34:37):
that this guy only has six lawns in this neighborhood
and it's kind of you know, expensive for him to
drive over there and do that if you only have two.
That's why I know this industry a little bit, because,
like I said, a military buddy of mine had it
and he called me a brainstrom all the time, and
he hated picking up one or two houses in a
particular neighborhood that was out of his way because by
the time to unload the trucks and trailers and you know,

(34:58):
so he would always try to convince his guys to
go knock on the doors next door and stuff and
try to get a few extra houses in the new neighborhoods,
like you know, spend a little extra time and try
to get a couple more, couple more to make it worthwhile.
And with your tool, you could actually you know, get
somebody to potentially charge your premium. Say hey, you want
us to help your grow your business. We'll send your

(35:19):
existing company you mark the neighborhoods you want to grow in,
and we'll send those customers a discount code based on
you if they convince their neighbor to try your mowing service. Right,
So they know that neighbor better than you do. And
you know, just because if.

Speaker 1 (35:32):
They're doing ten yards on one street, they can do
it more efficiently. They can save everybody money. They can
do a better job because they're not driving all over town.
Using AI to crunch the numbers on those types of
things and send the right offer at the right time
to the right customer. Now that's possible, whereas before that
will take like a NASA level data scientist to pull off.

(35:54):
Now you have it in your back pocket.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
That's impressive. Oh, there was one of the guys. I
was talking to him trying to get a hum come
on the show. He sold his company. He had eighty
He sold it to his business partner. He was he
travels the world. Give you kind of background. They write software,
had eighty software engineers, uh, and they write software for
Fortune five hundred companies. They they talked they could they

(36:17):
write software that allows like the different SaaS tools to
talk to each other, so interconnection software. So Fortune five
hundred company uses Sealesforce and then some other thing. They
come in and write the code to make the two
APIs talk to each other. And these eight employees, you know,
they're doing million, you know, in the in the eight figures,
ten million plus a year in revenue. So he sells

(36:39):
it off to his business partner because he knows he
can't convince those top you know, Fortune five hundred companies
to change their ways very much, and he knows with
AI he can do this so much faster and so
much more efficient. He doesn't need out of the eighty
employees he said, like fifteen or something. I'm a mark
cut right, yea quite you know test you know, test

(37:00):
steen engineers, QA engineers and stuff like that. He doesn't
need that many with AI. That basically the AAI is
a better QA guy and a better test engineer than
most you know coming off there. So he's created a
competing company going to the same customers but writing different software.
So he's not really truly competing with his business partners
cost problems, but he's doing with eight employees and writing

(37:23):
the same line. He knew the lines. He knew how
many lines at code they could write a week, like
they knew how complex the projects they could take on,
and how you know, how many lines at code that
eighty employees could generate per week. And that's kind of
how they regulated that they needed more guys because they, oh,
this is a complex project is probably going to take
external lines of code to get this done. We only
have our capacity as X. We need to hire some

(37:44):
more people. He says, he can write as many lines
of code with AI and as eight employees than those
eighty people could do.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
Incredible. That rule of thumb is out the window. Yeah, incredible.

Speaker 3 (37:55):
And I think like, if you're elite, if you're an
elite engineer, an elite attorney, an elite consultant, like I mean,
top one percent and you and then you understand how
to leverage AI to control these things, then you're gonna
get most of the of the benefits.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
But if you're a mid level engineer, a mid level accountant,
a mid level attorney, I think you're just gonna get
abstracted away. Yeah, with the next couple of years.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Yeah, the collective intelligence of having all the different variety
of customers, it's something that no single customer could have
on their own. So if you're wider out, how to
leverage that collective intelligence of knowing what's going on in
an entire market, knowing what people charge in this neighborhood
versus that neighborhood and being able to say, look, everybody
else that's more on lawns in that yards are charging

(38:43):
twenty dollars are more per cut than you are.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
The data, Yeah, the data is what's going to be valuable.
But if you if you're just building an estimating tool
that people pay to use, that's going away. You know,
that's that's that's gonna be commodity.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
Yeah, it's insane that the stuffs so so out there.
I don't think it'll get I agree with him that
big companies a big fortune five hundreds will have engineers
on staff that we'll be able to do that. Like
you know, he cloned this gofware tool and clone salesforce,
but make it do X, Y and Z and the
AI that the AI can just get it done. I

(39:18):
honestly think that the place that's going to stick right
now is the translation from what a human wants to
what a computer can do. A lot of people don't
know this, but when I came out of the military,
I worked for Locking Martin as a senior test engineer.
My job was to break into firewalls, and they built
the systems and I broke them right. I had to
verify that they couldn't break. So I was kind of

(39:40):
a little ethical hacker for the for the for locking
Martin for government systems. But the toughest thing to do
was the requirements verification. So as a test engineer, they
would get these huge requirement documents and I had to
go by and verify it line by line every single
I wrote, you know, the test procedures. I wrote them.
Sometimes i'd automate them, I'd write code to do the
test work for me. But I had to write a

(40:00):
step by step procedure for every requirement that the human
had that they wanted the software to do. And a
lot of times what happened is we would do exactly
what those were and we take it back to the
military or whoever, you know, the three lettered agency where
we were selling the software too, and like, yeah, we
said that, but now that we've seen it work, that's
not what we really meant. What we really needed was
X But they didn't see what they needed until they've

(40:23):
seen it work. So that whole planet of games of
understanding what a human wants and putting it into that software,
I think is still outside of the reach of AI. Right.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
I think you're right, and The thing I struggle with
is is, uh, you know, we we have four or
five engineers. All they do is fixed bugs. I mean
they're not building anything new, They're not they're not doing
any sort of growth engineering or anything like that. They're
just making sure the site works bug free. So so

(40:54):
something that I wrap my head around is like, Okay,
that's great that you can speak into as prompt and
it can build you a game and you know it
can host it on a browser and a database. That's incredible.
But what about these four engineers I pay full time
that just go in and dig through our code of
fix bugs. When is AI going to abstract that away?

(41:15):
So I think in some ways it's like we're we're
we're right there. But I think a lot of this stuff,
like you just said, is like what the human brain
wants and what the what the AI can deliver. I
think we're still a little ways off.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
It won't be long before you'll be able to give
it your a turn on aero log and give it
your era logs, give it your source code and just
say monitor the error logues and you know, suggest patches
and bugsticks. Yeah, don't don't implement anything to until you've
got a human that said, blesses it right, you know,
but you know, if you see something in the law

(41:48):
codes or see something that you know that doesn't work
and error you know, error codes or whatever, uh, find
out whether it's coming from, identify it and make suggestions.
I think it's pretty close to me able to do
that now. If not already capable of it.

Speaker 1 (42:02):
You're you're, you're, you're probably right. And then that's half
of the of the developer hours. And so now then
you you've taken okay, four QA developers down to two.
And and you know, at Greenpal, that's kind of what
we're wanting to do with our team's forty to fifty people.
I kind of want to double the business with the
same head count. And I think every business owner at whatever,

(42:24):
at whatever stage of the game needs to be thinking
like that. It's like, Okay, I don't want to just
like I used to think when I was ringing my
first company that bigger was better, more employees was better,
the more the more people we had on the team
was better. Now I think the exact opposite. I want
less people on the team. And and I think if
you can think that way, and and and figure out
how to use do more with less AI. I think

(42:45):
it's how every business owner needs to be thinking these days.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
As a test engineer, that's one of the things that
took me the longest time is I would have to
like we'd have something would not work according to your
you know what, what the requirements were. Then you would
go look at the air logs and see if there's
an error there. And if you found one, then you
had to put the software into like in a development
wade where you could stuff the code and like go
next step, we go next steps. You're sitting there for

(43:08):
all you got, you know, on one little screen. We
had multiple monitors, one screen, you got the air log
waiting for something to pop up, and you okay, run
the next step. And sometimes that just slowing it down
caused the problem. Right, you got to catch it because
it was a raised condition. It only happened if things
were you know, one thing happened in sequence out of another.
So you run it through that and you're like, okay,
well run the next one hundred lines of code, and

(43:30):
then you know our job was you know, I didn't
write software, Chaine software. I could read it. I mean
I went to software reviews all the time. I could
read CE and and a bunch of other code that
they use back then, C plus plus and stuff. But uh,
I just didn't sit there and program it. Not for
them anyway, but they I say that I wrote a
simulator one I was in, but I did it in

(43:50):
like shell commands and other stuff. But you we would
give the lot like we would give an aero log. Say,
you know, here's the air coming in the log code.
We're pretty sure it comes in on this particular piece
of software between line one thousand and fifteen hundred. Somewhere
in these five hundred lines of code. We're ninety percent

(44:11):
sure that's where the problem is. And we kick it
back to the engineers and it would take days. I
think that process now would be seconds with the AI
till you know, it's just like you know, days of
you know, it takes me two days to identify, Okay,
it's probably right here in the code. Send an engineering
team and they would do a patch, and then I'd
have to regression test the entire system because they change something, right,

(44:32):
these are military systems. You change one light item, I
have to regression test the entire platform.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
All right, Now, all of that can be done in minutes.
That's incredible.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
Tell me about the space you're in and the tool
you've built, because we talked about a lot about what's
coming in the future. We talk about AI, we talked
about why you sold the company. But let's make sure
everybody that's out there listening kind of knows what it
is the what are the capabilities of your tool And
if somebody wants to, you know, reach out to your stuff,

(45:04):
just make sure they know how to get ahold of you.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
Yeah, So greenpal solves problems for for buyers and sellers
in the landscaping business. So if you're a consumer, your homeowner,
you need to get somebody to mow your yard. Normally,
you know, you would do a Google search or maybe
ask a friend or something for a recommendation, and then
you would dial for dollars and you would pull different
lawnmowing services nearby you and say, how much is it

(45:27):
going to cost them mow my yard? Give me an estimate,
when are you available. You would kind of negotiate on
the price, and then you would you would like maybe
venmo them and then and then and then after that
you might like set up schedule and you would do
all that manually with Greenpal. You in your your address
one time, and then lawnmowing services nearby you get presented

(45:49):
with a package of information about what you need, your
square footage of your yard, the aerial imagery of what
it looks like, street imagery of what your yard looks like,
any photos you upload, and then they submit you a
price back in a matter of minutes. So in fifteen minutes,
now you've got five quotes from lawn mowing services nearby
you that want your business, that will be there on

(46:11):
Thursday to come ow your yard. And then if they
do a good job, you can pay them right through
the app and set them up for every week or
every two weeks. So you go from not knowing anybody
to getting somebody scheduled and booked in a matter of minutes.
As a lawnmowing service, it's a business in a box.
It's a way to Okay, Now I get connected with
all the people that I need, all the customers I need.

(46:34):
I have one system of record for all of my customers,
what their preferences are, contact information, what their schedules are.
I have one place to kind of store all the
data around how much additional services like mult and weeds
and gutter cleaning and snow plowing. I can put all
of that for every customer, so it's like a CRM.

(46:55):
And then also marketing automation. So let's say, okay, you
got missus smith booked for every two weeks, but she's
also gonna need fertilizer, she's gonna need seeding, she's gonna
need mulch. So we're gonna help you upsell those services
as the year progresses, helping you make more money and
not having to do that manually because most of these
guys don't even do it. And so kind of having

(47:16):
like an end to end business in a box place
where long caer services can plug in and just have
everything kind of taken care of, where they can just
show up, do a good job for their customers and
get paid quickly is kind of all they want to
do anyways. And we don't do anything else. We do
do just the landscaping business. We're focused on just this
one use case and now around three hundred thousand people

(47:39):
use it every week for lawnmowing all over the United States.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Interesting, now, for the if I'm a lawnmowing business, do
I send my customers to something labeled as GreenPower, or
can I have something that's white labeled with my brand
and logo on it? Or how does ask a.

Speaker 1 (47:54):
Great, really good question. So of the long caer services
that use our platform, around ten percent of them run
their entire business through green Pal. So they will send
a link to their green Pal store, which is hosted
on top of green Pal, and people can order service
right through them and not get quotes from anybody else.
And then and then they they also can invite people

(48:16):
into their green Pal account that they kind of meet
on the street or that call them from like a
Google search or something like that. They don't want to
have different systems. And then most most vendors use Greenpal
as a way to fill in bear spots in their route.
Or they might have fifty percent of their business on
green Pal, fifty percent of their business on pen and paper,

(48:39):
and then they slowly merge over maybe the slow payers
onto their green Pal account because the system does a
good job of nagging them to stay on track, and
so it's all over the place. We don't want to
be in the middle of that customer relationship between lawnmowing
service and consumer because we don't want to be in
the lawn mooing business. We're building the platform that makes

(49:00):
the whole thing kind of run smoother in a more
organized way. So it's part of our goal to be
like the system of record and the and the way
that Chuck in a truck Peter and a pickup can
go from ten customers to one hundred in a year
without having to do all the stuff that he normally
would take to do that.

Speaker 2 (49:20):
Yeah, one of the problems with scaling inside of that
is having the systems and processes in people. Right. One
of the reasons why my Buddies sold his besides getting
out of the Florida he is, he hit a certain
point where he just couldn't grow anymore because he's had
a hard time getting great employees to stick around and
cut grass, especially in Florida where he was. And he's like,

(49:41):
I can't scale if I can't get good people. And
every time I get a good person, they leave to
go do something better that pays more.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
Right, So that's that's a big headache. And then also
all of the you know, the count receivable. You know,
the long guy is the last person to get paid
in the stack of household bills, you know, and most
long care services don't know who owes them what, and
sometimes they forget to send an invoice and forget to
stay on track of people paying them. Green Palace built

(50:11):
to solve that problem on the fly. After a long
after the law care service gets done, they take a picture,
they upload it that goes to the consumer. They say, yeah,
that looks great, push to pay. If they don't do anything,
their card is built from the law care service within
twenty four hours. So it's just a thing that gets
taken care of and cleared on a rolling basis. It's
probably one of the biggest pain points we solve for

(50:33):
these guys.

Speaker 2 (50:34):
And I can see how they can scale because long
care is kind of like pool servicing and the fact
that you can buy route for one x like you
can buy a route for a one years worth a
route salary or revenue totally hits it. And the problem
with it is is in order to scale you have
to have one you have two things. You have to
have a great system of making sure you get paid
and tracking and all that stuff, and then you have

(50:56):
to be able to hire great people. You've solved the
side of you know, getting paid, tracking, and having a
system there for them. All they have to do now
is make sure they can get you know, spend time
on creating training programs to keep and train you know,
great employees, and they can scale. They can scale as
fast as you know they want. You know, I see

(51:16):
them all the time. I see route for sell because
I'm always calling through looking for business or sell. But
I see pull cleaning service routes and launch long care
routes for seal all the time. And they're usually one
x one and a half x. You know, a year's
salary is what they're asking, right, what they actually sell for.
Because I haven't bought one, but so I could see

(51:38):
where it would scale really fast.

Speaker 1 (51:41):
Right, So yeah, that's that's that's what we're set up
to do. And the question that I get a lot
is are we going to go into other things like
like pool cleaning or home cleaning or home painting. And
reality is is that there's so much white space just
in this one industry. It's a ninety billion dollars a
year in this the United States, that we're just going

(52:01):
to focus on just this one thing.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
Awesome, What do you see is a long term goal?
As you three years.

Speaker 1 (52:08):
I want to get to a million people using it
on a weekly basis for lawnmowing services. Right now we're
at around three hundred thousand and so I want to
basically triple the business. And we're so funded we haven't
taken on any outside capital, so that's kind of a
good place to be. We can we're kind of in
charge of our own destiny. And so, yeah, a million
people every week using it and I feel like we

(52:30):
can get there within the next three to five years.

Speaker 2 (52:32):
That's a great goal to have. Okay, well, how do
people reach out to you if they want to maybe
you know user service check it out, or maybe they
bought a lawn care service and what you're doing can
help them out. There's a lot of acquisition entrepreneurs who
look for landscaping and lawn businesses. That's another thing. If
if you know of them that looking for sale, like

(52:53):
you have customers or clients, they're wanting to get out
of the business. I know a ton of people looking
to buy them.

Speaker 1 (52:59):
Fantastic, make sure I throw them your way. Yeah, anybody
that doesn't want to mow their yard, just go to
greenpow dot com and you sign up. Quotes are free
and anybody that's in the lawnboing business or wants to
be in the longboing business. Just go to Greenpow dot
com and scroll to the bottom and click apply as
a vendor.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
Awesome, Well, I appreciate your time here today. I'll make
sure that your contact information that you've shared with me
is in the show notes so people know how to
reach out to you, and we'll wrap this up and
call a show.

Speaker 1 (53:27):
Thanks. Ron, I enjoyed it.

Speaker 2 (53:28):
It's fun. Hang out for just a minute, and we'll
call that a show. Awesome sponsored by do Dilio. Buy
it or selling a small business assimbly. The right team
is essential and that's where due Dilio comes in. They
work with individuals, independent sponsors, family offices, private equity firms
and small medium businesses, helping you build the perfect deal

(53:48):
team for every stage of your acquisition or sale. And
the best part, Do Dilio's matching service is completely free.
Is it dudilio dot com today? It is simple. Your
winning deal team

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