Bootstrapping Businesses From Scratch with Bryan Clayton

Welcome to the Marketing Growth Podcast. I’m Shane Barker, your host for the show. Bryan Clayton is back with us today. In the last episode, he told us that he bootstrapped his business, GreenPal. Let’s pick up the conversation where we left off.

What I want to talk about is your journey from zero revenue to eight figures. I already alluded to it. I want to discuss that a little bit because we often refer to your business as a “small business,” even though it’s not small. The same goes for GreenPal—you’ve really built it up, and I don’t think my audience fully understands what it takes to do that.

I don’t think people truly understand the magnitude of that . They say, “Oh, you just work hard for a year.” No—you work hard for 10 years, and then you become an overnight success. I don’t try to scare people, but in consulting I ask, “Where are you at? What are you ready to put into this? Do you understand the magnitude of that?” Not to scare you, but to be realistic about what this outcome could be. How much time do you think you’re going to put in, and what do you think you’ll get out of it? And once again, are you going to enjoy that journey? What is it going to take to be successful? What does success mean to you? Is it a number, or is it more about enjoying your work, which has its own value?

Everybody has their own thing that they look at—what they enjoy or don’t enjoy. It could be “I want more time off. I want Fridays off, that’s what makes me happy because I hang out with my family.” Maybe it’s not about money as much if you’re only working four days a week. You have to look at what that is.

But how did you guys bootstrap GreenPal? And what about Peach Tree Inc., another company you built up?

Bryan, please allow me to pause our conversation for a minute and tell our listeners about the services that my team and I provide. We can help you with influencer marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and more. You can visit our website, shanebarker.com, for more information.

And now back to our conversation with Bryan. Was that the landscape?

Yeah. And I think there’s a thing—it’s all foundational, right? But that’s the thing: if you want to get up to whatever eight-figure mark, what do you need to do? It’s all little steps. And of course, it’s a lot of rights and lefts and lefts and rights and straights and right again. I mean, that’s what it takes. It’s funny—I had a business we built up (long story), but up to $25 million—we did it in two years. The reason I tell you that is we weren’t ever too worried about people doing the exact same thing we were doing, because we knew we had two years of R&D. They were definitely trying to get the end result together, but they didn’t have the hundreds of thousands of hours we put in to get it to that point.

So I think the value is in saying, “Out of these 50 things we need to do on a daily basis, we have to grind away and get 1% higher every three weeks, whatever that is, and spend a little more time here because customer service wasn’t great. Oh, we have a big problem with 90% of our people that are mowing lawns being felons, and we had something happen.” What do I mean? These are all things that we look at. I know you guys qualify your people, and you do a lot to make sure that it’s a no-brainer. You guys have made it stupidly easy for somebody to get their lawn done, because you looked at it and said, “Okay, why are we having problems finding good people when you just want to get your lawn mowed?” Not looking for brain surgery, right? It’s literally an easy task. There are people out there—how do we put those two people together?

So when you guys are talking about bootstrapping—because I want to touch on it a little more—did you guys, I mean, obviously you have investment money, but was there people that wanted to put investment money out there and you said, “Hey, listen, we don’t really need to do that”? What happened there?

It’s a different thing, right? I mean, when you have all that money, people go, “Oh, that’s awesome, it is.” But then you also have a different set of rules, too, right? You have a board, and you have people who are just going to say, “Hey, guess what? I don’t know if Bryan’s the right guy, so we got to bring in this guy who’s going to accelerate growth.” And you’re like, “Wait, but you don’t understand the vision of what we got going on.” Sorry, Bryan, and they push you. I’m not saying venture capital is bad, but I’m saying that it’s a different deal. You have a different level of commitment, and then you have a certain burn rate—if you don’t use the money, they’re not going to give you more. So, guess what? You’re making decisions and probably just kind of making it rain money-wise when maybe you need to make a better-educated decision.

And so I think bootstrapping means every dollar you spend, you’re having a meeting about it. You’re like, “Hey, we’re going to spend some money here. We got to do this.” Or you’re spending more time—”I got to learn how to code. Hey, I need to learn how to do copy. I need to write, put together a landing page. Where are we going to spend our money?” You’re definitely more strategic because every dollar that goes out the door is like, “Man, that 33 cents was mine.” And, well, I’m just, you know, we’re going to make it rain, we’re going to make this thing happen, and see what happens.

So, once again, I have plenty of businesses that I consult, and they’re like, “Hey, we want to go after capital.” And I’m like, “Not a bad play. But do you understand what that means?” It can be a different deal—great, it could be awesome, but it also could be the most stressful two years of your life. You blow through $15 million and you’re like, “What just happened?” And now your business is gone, or they just take all of your assets because they’re 51%—you’re giving up something for that cash. There’s nothing if somebody’s giving you cash or something else, and you got to understand what that would look like and what the best-case scenarios and worst-case scenarios are, right? I mean, there are plenty of CEOs that have been pushed out of their own business. Would you be okay with that? Well, I mean, look at Uber—absolutely, right? It’s your baby, and then all of a sudden, go ahead.

Yeah, I think that’s exactly what it is. Understand what you’re giving up. Once again, you get venture capital, and they’re probably going to give you a mentor and an accelerator program. The amount of growth that can happen in a short time can be phenomenal. But just know that if you don’t hit certain metrics pretty quickly, there’s an investment—they put money down, and they will move you aside and have somebody else come in because they’ve invested. They’re looking out for the best interest of their investors, the people in their funds and stuff, so that’s what I think people forget about. If you’re not performing, that doesn’t mean hours. If you’re not, things aren’t happening a certain way—then to maintain a two-year trajectory toward a sale or whatever that is, you’ve got to be able to keep up. Unfortunately, people don’t understand what that entails. A lot of times, you think your hours were crazy, and then you’re grinding it out, and all of a sudden you’re 20 pounds skinnier, and you’re like, “Yeah, nobody teaches us this stuff.” That’s the problem: do you understand what you’re giving up? And once again, it could make sense—awesome—but maybe it doesn’t make sense; you’ve got to understand what that looks like. Most people only want to look at the upside. “Oh, if we get this money, great—we’ll make it a $100 million company.” But what happens if you get kicked out in three months? What does that look like? I think that’s the problem with a lot of these things: they don’t understand the other side.

We’ve talked about how you guys bootstrapped. I think it’s awesome that you took over the landscaping industry. Thanks, Bryan. It’s been a great episode, and I’m sure listeners now know more about how to bootstrap a business. Our conversation doesn’t end here. We’ll discuss the landscaping industry in the next episode. So stay tuned.