Leaders Perception Magazine is currently running an interview series called – What Are The Top 5 Mistakes People Make When Starting A New Business?
Today, we had the opportunity to interview Bryan Clayton who is a CEO at GreenPal.
Interviewee Name: Bryan Clayton
Company: GreenPal
Bryan Clayton’s favourite quote: Focus less on things that don’t matter – Brad Feld
Building a strong brand is essential for any business to succeed. It’s a promise of excellence that sets the business apart from its competitors. Bryan Clayton, CEO, and co-founder of GreenPal, understands this very well. GreenPal is an online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. In this article, we will explore how Bryan built a strong brand promise through community service, and how it has helped to reinforce GreenPal’s commitment to excellence in service to its community. Read on to discover insights from Bryan on marketing, branding, and community service.
The Interview
Thank you so much for joining us today! Tell us a little bit about yourself. What is your backstory?
Bryan Clayton :
Bryan Clayton is CEO and cofounder 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.
In your opinion, what makes your company stand out? Any examples?
Bryan Clayton : The best way to market your business is to establish a strong brand that means something.
A brand is a promise of excellence.
Our brand stands for excellence in service to our Community. Last summer our team began implementing a little program to get connected to our community and deep in our connections in building our brand promise.
We have a few hundred lawn care professionals that utilize our system and we ask them to submit to us candidates that are in need of a lawnmowing for free because they are in a tough personal situation .
So once a month we will go and mow a strangers home who’s grass is gotten 2 to 3 feet tall because they are in a jam.
One person was facing foreclosure another was getting ready to be cited by the city , we also try to help out single moms more than anybody.
I guess what we got learned is that despite what you might hear about the economy things are still very tough out there for working-class folks and this is the least we can do to help out and have a personal connection with our local community.
The result was we were covered in every local media outlet reinforcing our brand promise of service to the community.
What are the TOP 5 mistakes people make when starting a new business? Please share advice/examples for all of them.
Bryan Clayton : One big mistake we made when starting our new business was our failure to understand our value proposition.
What is it about the product , service and offer that compels people to say yes? Until we knew this, any marketing efforts or spend in any channels will be like pouring gasoline on wet leaves.
For instance, when we first launched, we thought people would like our service because its a cheaper way to get their grass cut. What we found through copy testing in different channels such as ad-words and FB is that the customers ability to get same day service is a much more effective and compelling subset of our value prop that drives more visitors and more conversions on our landing pages.
Nailing your value prop first is crucial. I would be happy to talk more about this if you’re interested, thanks.
Leaders Perception magaizne would like to thank Bryan Clayton for the time dedicated to completing this interview and sharing their valuable insights with our readers!
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