Mowing Down Barriers to Build a $30 Million Tech Empire with Bryan Clayton

Speaker 1: 0:04

Hello and welcome to Underdogs, bootstrapers and Game Changers. This is for those of you that are starting with nothing and using business to change their stars, motivating people who disrupted industry standards. This is the real side of business. This isn't Shark Tank. My aim with this podcast is to take away some of the imaginary roadblocks that are out there. I want to help more underdogs, because underdogs are truly who change the world. This is part of our Content for Good initiative. All the proceeds from the monetization of this podcast will go to charitable causes. It's for the person that wants it. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Underdogs, bootstrapers and Game Changers. Maybe I said it in the right order, maybe not. The premise is still the same, so I have an amazing guest today. If this is the first time joining in, I really look for stories that I think are going to help you. This channel is all about education and awareness, knowing that you can defy the odds. You can do anything you want to do. Brian's story is perfect to tell you this. Sometimes in the world, it gives you what you need to help you present the messages you need. Brian's one of those stories. Nothing against the people that we have apply to be on the show. I look for a very particular type that's literally going to help you start your business, start your life, be motivated that sort of story. Great to have Brian on the show. Welcome, thank you so much for being here. Well, thank you for having me on. It's great to be here. Yeah, your story is like there's some things in life that I couldn't write any better. We have a docu-series where we travel the world for seeking founders of organizations. The person we just visited in Cambodia. It's like you couldn't write a better story for what the story we're trying to tell for that docu-series. I feel like your story is perfect for what we're trying to do here. Starting the way you started, I didn't want to give too much of your background and your company yet because I want you to lead us down that journey of what it was like to start where you started and go where you are. Now we're going to jump right in. The first question I have for you is talk about what initially got you into your first business, if you don't mind.

Speaker 2: 2:24

Yeah, I actually started mowing yards in high school as a way to make extra cash. I think my dad got tired of watching me play Nintendo all day. He said hey, get off your butt. I lined up a gig for you. You're going to go mow the neighbor's yard. This was not a request, this was a direct order. He made me go cut the neighbor's grass. Luckily he did, because I made like $20 for an hour worth of work. I was hooked. I was just hooked on owning my own business. From that day forward. I never had a job since 14 years old. I always just stuck with my own thing. I saw that as the vehicle to carry me places in life that ordinarily I wouldn't be able to do. I just stuck with that lawn mowing business for 15 years, just grew it year by year, little by little, eventually getting it to about 150 employees, around $10 million a year in revenue, and then was able to get the business acquired by a big national company in landscaping.

Speaker 1: 3:21

Yeah, it's so impressive Starting from a one-man lawn mower operation, and that's the pivotal point of where I wanted to be on this. I know a lot of people are asking you about your tech and we'll get there. My main interest is you go from one-man lawn mower team to $10 million company. I want people to know that they can get off their butt and stop playing Nintendo and they can start with a lawn mower right, Totally.

Speaker 2: 3:46

I think there's actually, in my experience, the least sexy and glamorous the business, the greater your chances of success. That certainly has been the case for me.

Speaker 1: 3:56

You say it really well because unfortunately, I've chosen the other path. I've chosen a couple businesses to be in that literally my competitors are billionaires that are okay with losing money. Please, folks, don't do that. Unless you absolutely want a lifestyle business, choose the less glamorous, because that's the one that you can really set things off. Brian, like shining example, can you walk me through some of the process on how a one-man operation becomes a $10 million company?

Speaker 2: 4:26

Yeah, I think it's important to have big goals and to have dreams and to visualize those to begin with the end in mind, so to speak. I really wanted to build a big landscaping company and maybe the biggest one in my market. I just had a chip on my shoulder to do that. That's important, that's your North Star and why you want to do. It changes and evolves along the way, but it's important to have that. But then I think you need to set that aside and don't even worry about it anymore and then focus on the routines, the processes and the habits, the daily habits of what you're doing as a person, as an individual, because you are your business, your business is you. How are you are conducting your personal finances, how are you showing up for the business, how are you taking care of your customers? And just modifying and improving those daily routines and habits on a daily basis, working your way towards that big goal and is focusing on really small micro goals along the way. For me, it was okay. I'm mowing 10 yards a day. How do I mow 20? Okay, now I'm doing 20. I want to do 40. Now I got to hire an employee, and that's a big moment in any founder's journey is hiring your first employee, because you're basically doubling your business in one swoop, just figuring out every little level of the game. And after I got one employee, I got three or four, and then after I got maybe five or six employees, I thought, okay, now I don't want to mow yards anymore, I need to manage all this. How do I get to that level? And that was another couple of years and I guess maybe year five. I realized that I wasn't in the lawn mowing business at all, I wasn't in the landscaping business at all, I was in the sales business. I needed to create some sort of kind of sales engine at the core of this business. I needed to create a process that was better for sales than my competitors were doing, and so that took about three or four years, but that wasn't unlocked to get from 500K in revenue to a million, to two, three, four, five, and then after year five I mean after five million dollars a year in revenue I started to realize, okay, this is no longer about me and my ambition and my chip on my shoulder. This is more about the people and the culture that depend on this business. There's 50 or 60 employees now and I have to create a place where they can thrive and try to get where they're going in life, and so that was kind of a next level of the game. So you really do work at, like a video game, almost just one level at a time. Don't worry about Bowser, because you're not on level 10 yet. Just focus on one level at a time and get to that level, and then at the end of every level there's a new final boss. Yeah, because you solve problems Doesn't mean you're done. That means you get to solve more problems.

Speaker 1: 7:09

Yeah, just embrace that. I think there's incredible opportunities in the service industry, especially like the maybe some somewhat would say the less glamorous side of the service industry. But, like you probably see, like I do online a lot, it's like just buy this small business that's in the service industry, put a manager in charge and all it's going to do is crank money for you. Tell me about your thoughts on that.

Speaker 2: 7:30

Yeah, no, so thank you Most of the time.

Speaker 1: 7:34

Thank you.

Speaker 2: 7:37

You know it's like I see this stuff too. You know, like on Instagram reels or TikTok. You know it moves from one thing to the laundry mats. You can go buy laundry mats and Airbnb. Yeah, you can make millions of dollars sitting on the beach. Just go buy a bunch of laundry mats. And it's like one of two things Either that's true and and and they're doing that, or I'm stupid and it's one of the two. It's like either. I'm an idiot or that is true, there is no, it's like one of the two, and it's usually you took the words out of my mouth. Yeah, so, no, the thing is is be careful of any anybody that's selling you advice on how to make money, because it rarely works out. The people that are out here hustling and grinding are busy doing their thing. They're not. They're not selling systems or secrets for that. So, at my, you know, I think I'm obsessed with the idea of the, the blue collar millionaire. And because I was growing my man yes, yes, thank you as I, as I was growing my first business, I was, uh, surrounded by people that were no smarter than me, that didn't have any skills that I didn't have, but were like, hey, eight-figure net worths and they moved dirt for a living. They had dump trucks, or they were plumbers, or they owned a home cleaning company or they laid carpet or all these different kind of trade service businesses. They were crushing it and they were buying real estate and doing all sorts of things. They're like they had more money than some of my customers who were doctors, lawyers, dentists, who sometimes would write me a check that would bounce, and so it's just kind of funny. I loved the guy that would show up in a beat-up pickup truck in overalls but had a bigger net worth than the guy wearing a suit. So, that inspired me you know, Absolutely. Being surrounded by that still to this day, 20 years later, influences how I make decisions and look at businesses. So yeah to your question can you buy a system in a service-based business and then put a manager on it? Probably not, unless there's something really unique or some kind of proprietary thing. Most of the time, proprietors of service-based businesses basically have just created a job for themselves, and it might be a lucrative job, yeah, but it's really hard to break out of that self-employed paradigm and get into the business owner paradigm and it takes years. It takes years of reinvesting back in the business. There was many, many years me building that first company and also with building GreenPowell, where I paid people that made more money than I did. Yeah, but I saw it as a necessary thing to do to kind of get through that level of the game, because I knew, if I could just get over to the next hurdle, that eventually we would create more profit at some point. And so the shorter answer is no. You can't just buy a system or go into the carpet cleaning business and pay a manager and then pay techs, because there's proprietors, there's self-proprietors out there who are going to out, hustle you, outwork you and do a better job for less money, so don't go down that path, yeah.

Speaker 1: 11:04

I knew we were going to get along, but you've taken the words out of my mouth like a million different times. These are some of the same things I say and that's why I was really curious to hear your angle. I'm all about the blue collar millionaire too. I think the world gets a little bit better. I've worked in when I was kid, in college and stuff. I worked in country clubs and high-end restaurants and things like that and I always loved the dirty cowboy at the bar that you never knew was the billionaire. You'd have him. Like one restaurant I worked at really high-end Like. You'd get the guy with the fancy Rolex and car. He'd come in and he'd treat you like crap. And then this cowboy that had been at the end of the bar for months that you'd met and always asking how you're doing. You find out later that he had gotten trouble and banned from the restaurant for years for landing his helicopter in the parking lot drunk. You know it's like and I love those stories, right. So and like-.

Speaker 2: 11:52

And that guy owns land. Oh yeah, he owns houses. He's got multiple properties. He's got four or five different businesses going on. He's got his hands in so many things. He's a far more interesting dude to hang out with than the other dude in the suit and a Rolex.

Speaker 1: 12:07

Oh, I couldn't agree more, and I think the world gets better. And that's part of the premise for what we do and like this show and everything is because I think we need more underdogs making it, Because then you have the cowboy at the end of the bar who's caring, who's usually giving to some charity, doing some sort of good work on the side with his money. You know a heartfelt human being. You know it's like we need more of those people into their success, which is why we do what we do. You know, and so including telling stories like yours so people know, it's possible. If you were to like dwindle down and tell me like one key factor that like is the key to anybody out there that's starting from nothing, and like trying to get to like a $10 million company or we're gonna get to your next company next, what's the underlying key, what's the secret?

Speaker 2: 12:51

Yeah, it's okay. So if you take, like your week, seven days, first off let's just say seven days, because if you're going from zero to one, this is a seven day a week thing. And I'm not saying you gotta work a hundred hours, but I'm saying you're always on, you're always thinking about your business, you're always returning customer phone calls, you're all. When you're in the shower you're thinking about it, when your head hits the pillow you're thinking about it. And so it's seven days a week. So if you can take those seven days a week, and then you gotta divide those days into three buckets of things you're gonna do, and the first bucket is you're gonna work in the business.

Speaker 1: 13:28

You're gonna be answering customer phone calls. You're gonna be making sure the trains run on time.

Speaker 2: 13:34

You're gonna be making sure customers are happy. You're gonna be making sure vendors are paid, employees are paid, the shop is clean, whatever. You're working in the business and it's like you're a one-armed paper hanger and you're doing that ideally Monday through Friday, Then Saturday is all day long, ideally six, seven, eight hours Really intense, difficult work. You're working on the business, so you're gonna be working on what's my marketing system? How am I getting new customers in the door? What's my employee training system? We have really high turnover here and by the time I train somebody they leave and it's a pain in the ass. And so what do I do? I need an employee training system. I spent a year building lawn care university because it took six months to train a lawn mowing tech, and after I got done with lawn care university, we got it down to six days. Six days is a boot camp. Boom, you know more about mowing yards than 99.9% of people. That's awesome. And so you're working on the business. What are the systems and processes to get me out of self-employed and get me into business ownership? And then in the seventh day, Sunday, maybe three hours you'll give yourself half a day off. You're working on yourself. You're taking time to read the books you gotta read YouTube, university listening to the podcast you gotta listen to taking the courses online that you gotta take. I mean you gotta be good at like 30 different things to pull off running a business. You gotta be a good manager. You gotta be a good leader. You gotta be a good copywriter. You gotta be a pretty good designer. You gotta be a pretty good accountant, legal All of these different things you gotta be 80, 20 good at. And so nobody teaches us any of these things. So you gotta set aside time to teach yourself these things and you can learn anything. You gotta learn for free online on YouTube. And so you're doing these three things, these three buckets, and so in the first year one, two or three, maybe 80% of your time is in the business, 10% on the business, 10% is on yourself. And then year three, four, five, maybe it's half and half. And then year six, seven, eight, nine, it's more like 90, 10. The other way, yeah, You've developed so many systems, You've learned so many things. You've evolved into a whole new person, unrecognizable from where you were five or 10 years previously. So now you have all these capabilities you didn't have before, and so now it's 90% on yourself on top of the business and then 10% in the business making sure it's running. That's how you go from 100K or $100 to 100K to 250 to 500K, to a million, to three million, to 10 million.

Speaker 1: 16:14

You know, folks, if you watch the podcast a little bit, I did not meet with Brian before and pay him to say these things. So now you're not just hearing it from me, you know, and like the other people that have been on the show, but that's Brian. That's part of this too is like I feel like there's a lot of bad information out there and I feel like we got to hear from people like you the truth about it. You know, it's like it's not a $99 course and you're making 10 grand next month. It's a lot of hard work, it's a lot of after it's learning, like you're saying. But here's the thing, and I don't want to jump. I have so many questions for you. We could do this for five hours, but would you say that I want to jump to the tech company for just a second? Would you say so? Obviously, just to give you folks a little bit of background. Brian started the landscaping company, worked it to 10 million from a one man operation, sold it right, and then he gets into tech and I want to ask you, like how much of the skill set from your original company has helped you in your tech company?

Speaker 2: 17:11

Yeah, so I think it can help any new founder to try to hit a single or a double and a more straightforward business. No business, almost that's easy or simple business. No business is easier, simple, but a more straightforward business, a home clean service.

Speaker 1: 17:26

Let's call it a smaller business.

Speaker 2: 17:28

Yeah, and it's like you see all the inputs and you kind of can look at bigger companies doing what you're trying to do and you can kind of rob and steal from their ideas and just how outwork them out, hustle them, yeah, and out serve your customers better than they are, and you can kind of like will into existence, a profitable business that way. And I think it can really be helpful for everybody to start with that and spend five or 10 years doing that and grow it into something real and then maybe get it acquired or give it to your kids or something. And so then you learn a lot of the basics about what goes into running any business. So employee recruitment, employee retention, employee training, being a good leader for your people because that's what business ownership is and leadership is, it's servitude. And so learning and honing those skills, learning management, learning, customer service, learning all of these things you can learn in a home cleaning business. You can learn in a home painting business and then. So then now you know a lot of these things about what it means to be a founder and how that's different than like running a career and cause. A lot of people don't understand those differences, and so that's my advice do that hit a single or double and then you can swing for the fences on the really big idea Maybe it's a big tech company, maybe it's some bigger idea that you're not very well equipped for starting off as a first time founder. Yeah, that's kind of how I experienced it.

Speaker 1: 18:59

And so I agree completely, and a lot of people see it as a bad thing. They have to start with no investment, no mentor, anything like that. And cause, there is these people that go out and they build a business plan, they raise a couple of million dollars, they get to jump into a big business, right. And so my point and it sounds like you agree with me is it's okay that you have to start at this smaller business because you're gonna learn everything. And then even when you get and please vouch for me here if you agree it's like, even when you get into the big business, the tech company, how helpful is it to know every little part of like marketing and accounting and like, don't you manage these systems better in this bigger company?

Speaker 2: 19:38

now, exactly, and so then I was well equipped to start swinging for the fences building my tech business GreenPowl and it's not everything ported over, but probably half did and I was able to kind of start on first or second base and not have to learn all of these things all over again. While some things were different. I was managing laborers and mechanics and machinery and things like that in the first company and the second business. I'm managing developers, designers, engineers, things of that sort. So those are very, very different but a lot of things were similar. So start a straightforward business, start a blue collar business, if you will get some reps in, get some experience in, and then you can swing for the fences on the bigger thing. And the other thing is you have a track record then. Then you can, if you wanna raise capital, you have a track record to show to investors and say, look, I built this thing. Maybe if you live in the same town as me, you've seen my trucks or my presence in the marketplace and now investors are able to kind of like connect the dots and see what kind of founder you are and what kind of potential you have. If you don't have anything and you don't have a track record and you've never built anything, you've never tried anything, it's gonna be really hard to swing for the fences and build a 10 million or a hundred million dollar business. It's better to start and sell a small company and then step your way in.

Speaker 1: 21:02

And why would investors invest in you? You're a no name from nowhere. It's like you've never done anything before. You have this piece of paper with a business plan that maybe you learned about online and now people are gonna give you millions of dollars and that, I think, is what people see a lot of it. It's like you're telling the truth. It's like starting a smaller business. Learn the smaller business, be a person worth investing in, or maybe, hopefully, you don't even have to have investors. Tell me actually let's go into that a little bit Like did you take on investment at all in your original landscaping company and at what stage did you do that?

Speaker 2: 21:34

No, the first company, nor the second company. The first business I built debt free. And it was really really really difficult to build a business that way, debt free, because it's very capital intensive. You have to buy lawnmowers that cost 20 grand and trucks that cost 100 grand, and so paying cash for all this stuff was tough. And I bought a lot of used equipment, fixed it up and things like that. But that was the main reason why I was able to get the business sold was because the balance sheet had zero debt on it and a lot of my competitors wanted to sell their companies and they may have had a $10 million landscaping business, but guess what? They also had $10 million of debt and at that kind of mid-level market acquisition, the acquirer doesn't pay off the debt. That's on you and so whatever they buy it for, then you gotta clean that up. And so for me, I didn't take on any investors, I didn't take on any debt. It just kind of went slow and low and built it off of its own revenues. And that kind of teed me up when I built GreenPowell to really kind of think, okay, revenue is the best form of financing and if you do it that way, you can never really get too far ahead of your skis and you can never really screw it up by going too fast, and it always keeps you focused on one thing customers, because you need customers to use the product to survive, and whereas if you raise maybe a hundred or $500,000 from friends and family or angel investors, it's kind of easy to kind of like relax a little bit and take your foot off the gas and lose sight of the fact that customers are the most important thing. Because really, I mean, who wants to listen to customers whine all day? Who wants to call back? Who wants to call back and upset customer on a Sunday afternoon because something went wrong? Nobody. And so if you got a bunch of money in the bank, it's easy to kind of ignore that, but if you don't and you really need that customer to use the product next week, it's kind of a nice forcing function that keeps you focused on what matters customers and delighting customers, because they're the ones that are gonna decide whether you succeed or fail.

Speaker 1: 23:31

It's such a good point. And the thing is too, it's like if people get the, if people have the investment too quick, they spend it on a lot of stupid stuff too. It's like the fancy office wall hangings. You know it's we're gonna do all these big corporate lunches and things like that. I'm with you it's better to start scrappy. And the other thing is it's like you've never had. So you didn't take investment in your new company either. Your tech company, no. So you've never had a boss no.

Speaker 2: 23:55

You're like one of the true entrepreneurs that doesn't have a boss. My boss is my customers, yeah.

Speaker 1: 24:01

But that's it. Well, that's the other side that people don't realize. It's like where can I get investment? Where can I get these loans? Now you have a boss. Now the boss is your bank or the investor. Right, they're gonna be on your button. Everybody gets into business to have there be their own boss. You're not your own boss unless you do it the way you do it.

Speaker 2: 24:17

No, and I mean listen. Raising capital and getting good investors on the team with you can be helpful, and sometimes it does work out, but more times than not, that type of capital ruins the business rather than helping it, and so you just need to be wary of what you're signing up for and you will lose control of the business. And then the business is not a blessing in your life, it's a chain around your neck, because now you really have to show up and you're beholden to stakeholders and it's no longer fun anymore. So just be careful of that.

Speaker 1: 24:53

I agree 100%. I was telling a story. Actually yesterday I started my business basically in a lean to. I don't even know like if you could call it an operation at that point, but I was lucky enough to have one of the richest men in the country come down and take a look at my business very early on and he's like I'll give you 20 grand for 50% and like believe it or not like, and you probably remember those days it was hard to turn down the 20 grand. I'd started the whole company with four grand and so that was like a lot of money. And then, like I think about that and I think about where we ended up and everything. It was like that would have been the worst decision I ever made in business and I've made some bad ones along the way but I would have been working for that 50% instead of 100%. For the last. I sold that company after eight years, and that's the other side I want people to understand, and so I'm so glad you weighed in on it. It's like investment's not always a good thing. Having a boss is not always a good thing. It's like you'll get scrappy if you need to.

Speaker 2: 25:48

Yeah, I think that when it makes sense to raise capital is a couple of different scenarios. One if you've done this before and you're about to do the same thing all over again and you know you can do in two years what took you 10? If you had capital and you know all the things to do, then go raise capital and move quick. You're ready for the rocket fuel. At that point you know what to do. So take on the rocket fuel and put it in a rocket. But if you don't know what to do, it's like putting the rocket fuel in a Toyota Camry and it's just gonna blow up. Yeah, and so if I went to go back in time 10 years to start GreenPowl, the first thing I would do is raise capital because I know everything there is to do and so I could put that capital to work. And so, until you have a machine where you can show investors say, look, you put a dollar in this side and then on the other side it spits out $2. It's just amazing, give me money and I'll give you more money than great. But it's not like most people look at raising money like oh, I would really like to start this business if I only had capital to start it with, and if you give me the money, I'll start it. And it's like no, no, no, no, no, no. Figure out a way to get started. Get some used equipment. Maybe this store fronts what you want, but maybe this one's the one you start with. Or if it's an online business, hack together your first website or something yourself. Get started with something and then in Snowball your way into something bigger. I think is a better path.

Speaker 1: 27:25

Yeah, it's such good advice. And one thing I lean on all the time and it's like I wonder right now if you could go back and talk to the younger you, because obviously I hate to say this for sure, but I would assume in your new tech company the sky is bigger. Your opportunity for money is, hands down, different. When you're working in your landscape company you're kind of limited by the staff, the amount of production you can do. Maybe you have to franchise, there's ways to grow, right but in a tech company your growth is more exponential. Would you agree with that? Yeah, you nailed it.

Speaker 2: 28:05

So the pros and cons of a traditional service-based blue collar business like my first company my landscaping company is pros are OK low barriers to entry. I can get started on level one, work my way up. I can just build it little by little. I can build it debt-free. I can just slowly accumulate market share in my market. I can hire employees and scale this thing and get it to $10 million a year in revenue. But at some point there's a lot of gravity that weighs in on that business. That pulls it down. So margins are thin. It's very competitive for the same reasons that make it not easy to start but approachable. To start Also lends itself to hyper-competition. It's very hard to defend the business in terms of protecting margins because there's 10 other competitors that do exactly the same thing you do. And then the other thing it's a small business. You've got 40 different taxing authorities with their hands in your pocket and so you're always defending and fighting off these different taxing authorities that want to eat into your margin. And then you've got employees that always want to be paid more and customers want to pay less and so you're always fighting that. So there's a lot of gravity that that that will hold that business to a certain point and it's hard to kind of scale out of that now it's been done. The company that my business, it was a billion dollar Organization. So yeah we can be done. But these are, you know, 30, 40, 50 year old organizations. They've been doing a long time. They, they were established long ago and developed economies of scale that that you, as a new founder, don't have. And so there's pros and cons. So, fast forward, sell that business. Fast forward, building a tech company. It's a lot harder because you're inventing a new product from scratch that does not exist. So that's a lot harder than starting a service-based business. That's a lot more difficult, maybe a hundred times more difficult, but it doesn't, it's not subject to the same type of like gravity that the other Businesses, because then that tech can scale you. Once you figured out you can, you can touch the match, the mass market. Yeah, a lot easier, because technology scales, it's not beholden to all these other factors that hold it down. So so that the two journeys are very, very different and have their own kind of pros and cons, and I I think it can make sense to do the first one first, the blue collar one first, and then the tech one second.

Speaker 1: 30:30

So actually, you explained it so well and I have a follow-up question, and the reason behind that question is Do you think part of that process I can, I can speak for myself and you tell me if this also is Something you you feel too? It's like we don't know. At some point, when we're starting as a one-man operation or a smaller ordination, organization or a Small business coming from nothing, it's hard to dream that big, isn't it like? Don't you need some time and some confidence in? Did you need, like? Could you ever have dreamed of the tech company before you started the other company?

Speaker 2: 31:08

No, no, not only no, hell, no, it's like the. The experience of running my landscaping business gave me the idea to build green power, the. So green power is the uber for lawn care and, and so Seeing all of the inefficiencies and things that were broken about hiring a lawnmowing service and the things that made it difficult to run a lawnmowing service, gave me the inspiration and the idea to build green power. After I sold the landscaping business and so Without that I would have never even had the, the, the exposure to, to marketplace inefficiencies that I knew that needed a product, so sure. So getting started just just in something unlocks Opportunities like that. Momentum creates luck. Yeah, and so you have you have confidence right. Yeah, totally, and and and so yeah, no, I think authenticity can be a competitive advantage, and so for me. I spent 15 years in the landscaping business. I was well suited to start the business that that worked like uber, but for lawn care.

Speaker 1: 32:12

Oh, I don't know that there's a better person out there to do it, and that's you know. That's the other thing too. I like I guess the point I'm getting at is like it really takes. We don't dare to dream that big, I think. At first some of us, you know, it's like I applaud people that were like I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur of a huge company at like 13 years old, that like that's great, like if you have that. But I think a lot of people are like I'm gonna start something. That's just daring enough, right, you know, and it's like, but once and I'm sure you'll agree with me once you start it, you start to learn it. You're like you know what I can do, anything. There is no business I can't get into anymore, you know, because now I've gotten some confidence through the initial one.

Speaker 2: 32:49

Yeah, I feel the same way and and I think it's important to kind of, at a point, begin with the end in mind, almost because that that dictates a lot of what you're doing. When I was building my landscaping company, I had a chip on my shoulder. I wasn't the cool kid in high school. I did, you know. I didn't have a date to the dance, I didn't get picked for the football team, and so I had a chip on my shoulder to do something. Yeah, prove that I could do something big, or at least what I thought was big. Yeah, and that's just a part of who I am, and I look for this when I'm hiring Employees and team members. It's like I'm looking for people that that have had that same life experience. It's just part of who they are. They have, they have something to prove, yeah, and and so I, you know, when I was building the landscaping business, I wanted to put a hundred trucks on the road. I wanted to. I wanted to hire over a hundred people, I wanted to do millions of dollars in sales. I knew that I didn't know how to get there, I didn't know what to do to get there, but I, I knew that, and so I think it's important to have that, that vision of what you want to be and do, because if you don't want that, then then it's okay to run a small business and and and take low quality revenue and Turn it into high quality revenue. And what I mean by that is I have a. I have a friend, a lady that runs a home cleaning service. She's got two employees and she does she's like the best in Nashville at Airbnb short-term rental cleaning and so she's got high margins. She's got a lot of good clientele and and and. In the course of doing this, she's she's interacting with property investors and property developers and she's seeing properties, and so she, like a few years ago, bought her first Airbnb. A couple years after that, bought a second one. Now she's up to like six good for her, and and. So she's taking low quality revenue yeah, thin, thin margin home cleaning revenue, yeah, and turning it into high quality revenue, passive income from real estate investments, and and and she's basically playing monopoly all over Nashville, yeah, and and and and so, and. So that's a path. You don't have to build a home cleaning company with a hundred employees. You don't have to build the next Molly maids Franchising system. You can. You can make good profit off of a small service-based business and then and then transform that into it's a more durable sources of income with with passive investors.

Speaker 1: 35:13

Yeah, that it's such a good point. You know, and that's, and you're right. I like I don't know about you. When you first started your landscaping business that you knew it would want to. You wanted it to Be huge. I got into my first business kind of begrudgingly, pushed into it by the city a little bit and Compliance issues at home and so You're not allowed to strip paint off of your car and driveways and and so I was kind of pushed into it and but then when you start doing it, you know some people are like super happy and some of the happiest people I know like keep the operation small. You know they love what they do, they enjoy working in the business a lot. You know like, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I like tell people all the time like to think about the business that you're starting and To see, like how it aligns with actually what you want to do. Like car business is my background. It's like if you love cars, you want to work in cars every day or your life. You know like you want to turn a wrench. You know that's a wonderful business and there's ways you can scale it, especially around the custom work. It is a labor of love. You know there's only so far you can ever go with it, you know. And so like, yeah, right, learning to, I want you to weigh in on, like choosing your first business, what's a good way? And we've talked about like I call them traction business, quick correction and slow traction. We like quick traction business would be one like you're talking about landscaping, working on cars in your backyard, that sort of stuff. You're gonna get clients right away and get some revenue rolling in. Slow traction would be, you know, like just for the audience. It's like well, you start a tech company, right, that takes some time to build an actual product before you can monetize it, and so you have to have some pretty good runway as far as money before you start it. But let's talk about like what do you think is the best way to analyze your first business and what to start?

Speaker 2: 36:50

Yeah, I think that Following your passion, it can be bad advice, because very rarely to your point. You mentioned like custom cars. Yeah, there's probably a lot of like fabricators and and Custom car enthusiasts that would love to have a business in that, but what you find out is that that's a really hard business to scale and it really becomes a labor of love, and so I think following your passion can be bad advice. I've never loved the lawn care industry. I've never. I hate, I hate, hate cutting yards, hated mowing yards when I was, when I was in my 20s Hated every day of it. Yeah, but but I but I found joy in, in the, in building the business, and I found joy in and hiring employees and giving them a livelihood. And, yeah, I found joy in seeing this creation grow and that was fun. Yeah, but the but but lawn mowing. I've never been passionate about lawn mowing. Now that I run Green Powell, which is which is like the nation's largest network of lawn mowing services and and I still don't like lawn mowing I like building a tech company. Yeah, I like, I like that. You know thousands of people use my product every day. That's fun, yeah, and lawn care services use it to grow their livelihood. That's fun, but I don't like lawn mowing so sure. I think I think follow your passion can be bad advice. I think I think it's better to focus on, like, okay, what am I good at and what can I make money doing? Yeah, and and do I see an opportunity where I can do something a little bit better or a little bit different? Or or Work a little harder than than than other people in the space and just out, hustle them? Yeah, and and and. Can I knuckle down on something like that? And and start from there? And and then find the joy. If you don't have to, like, be passionate about it, but find the joy in the process, yeah, okay, once I hit, once I hit my first hundred K in revenue, I'm gonna be really proud of myself because I didn't think I could do that. Sure, I'm gonna celebrate that like that's a million, yeah, and, and. So it's like. Find the joy in, in the, in the winning, in the milestones, but don't don't go after something that you're passionate about, because rarely can you make money doing that. There's a great book called the emith by Michael Gerber, and and there's a book about this lady that Baked pies with her grandma growing up, and so she, everybody told her that she just she made the best apple pie they've ever tasted. And so, and everybody always told her, you should open a bakery. And so she does it, and after like three months, she hates the smell of pies, she hates everything about pies, she hates making pies. Why did she start this business? This sucks so bad, and so that book talks about this lady's journey and how she turned it around and built an actual business and built an actual bakery, and it's a great book for any new founder to read.

Speaker 1: 39:42

Yeah, no, I'm so glad you went there too, and that's why I think definitions of starting and you don't know this when you first start and that's why I like to tell the audience, defining why you're going to do it and where you want to go with it. There is people that work in a smaller business. They actually enjoy it. There is the pie people of the world that like their smaller business but know that you're getting into it to have a job, because some industries that's what it's going to be. It's not going to be anything ever more. If you want to be the next Microsoft, you've got to just find that differently. You've got to get into a different industry. But I love your point of view today too. It's like start the smaller one, learn from it and then pivot to the bigger one and learning lessons along the way Exactly.

Speaker 2: 40:21

It really does put you. It's like playing baseball and starting on first or second base. It's really like, if not, you're in the dugout and you're not even in the game. It's like you're not even at the plate yet. And so start small, get a track record, get some kind of money, get some money put back. You're going to need some money. It's like I had a new founder the other day tell me. He's like yeah, I just want to start this business. He literally asked me this question. He goes I want to start this business, but, man, it takes like $150,000 a year for me to just pay my bills. And so how do I do it? Do investors pay me that, or how does that work? And I'm like first off dude, it's like when do you take that $150,000 and take it down to $30,000 or $40,000? You're single, you don't have kids.

Speaker 1: 41:11

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 41:12

We need to downgrade your apartment, sell that car payment, your clothes are way too fancy All these things Because your personal finances are the business's finances and vice versa, and so it's like you are your business, your business is you, and so it's like people don't really understand that and it always surprises me. It's like get your personal finances in order, get a small business going Bank some money because you're going to need some money for the bigger thing, and like stare at your way into this, stare, step your way into it.

Speaker 1: 41:45

I got an argument a little bit on Twitter the other day because they were talking about founders needing $100,000 plus salaries, and I started my first business by living in a trailer on a back lot with no water and no electricity, and so you're never going to convince me that I should have a huge salary off the bat, it's like, and I had people making over six figures quite a few of them before I was ever really paying myself. It's like, where do you k-? That's why Let me ask you this actually when is it, what do you think of pay yourself first and when is it time to pay yourself in business?

Speaker 2: 42:17

Yeah, pay yourself first is a really is a good philosophy and I put that to work in my first company and with good success. And the other idea of paying yourself first is that you pay yourself as a bill, like first of the month, and if you do that, everything else kind of course corrects around that. And I guess I started doing that year five or six in my first company, but I wouldn't pay myself, I would just put that into a Vanguard account, yeah, and so 10% of whatever the business did boom right off the top. Yeah, it's kind of like a vendor bill, yeah, and that worked really well. Because what I started noticing is that all the other expenses kind of it kind of forced me to do the hard work of renegotiating that other contract. Or do we really need, like, a big bottle of water in the office, or can we just get a filtered water system? Yeah, that's $500 a month and looking for stuff like that. And so paying yourself first as a bill can be effective at a certain point in the game, not when you're going 0 to 1. When you have nothing, no customers, you have no revenue, you're just hustling. Thank you, you don't pay yourself first, no, you survive. And so, yeah, you have a roommate, you sleep in a spare bedroom, you sleep on a friend's couch, whatever. You sleep in a trailer behind your somebody else's house, whatever it takes. Because every dime you can save personally, you can reinvest into the business and if you're working a long-term plan, like you need that fuel, you'll need that capital. It's like you need that money you're saving personally to put back in the business.

Speaker 1: 43:55

Totally, and then you can put barrier sentry in the way of your competitors. Like, we ended up having the largest powder coat oven in the city while I was still living in the trailer, you know it's like. So that wasn't an investment that I had to make. You know like it was. The business was functioning. We grew a woodshop department, a manufacturing department for small vehicle manufacturers. All I was still living in the trailer and that's actually an episode we just had is like when do you know to get out of the grind and when is it OK to give yourself you know things, you know and that sort of stuff. And but I think once again, like dispelling a myth, I agree with you 100%. Yeah, first you can't pay yourself, because that's one place that you can take it out of, that's one place you can sacrifice have the cheaper meal, drive the cheaper car, you know, live a little bit more meager, you know, and it's like. But then it gets to the point where you're saying pay yourself versus smart, you know, but there is. And then same with on, and they loved your point about on and in your business today too, it's like there is a point for on and there's a point for in. You know, it's like everybody's telling you online these days if you're working in the business, you're doing it wrong. It's like tell me how the heck you're supposed to start not working in your business when you're the only person working there. Oh hey, I'm walking on my business today. You know, nobody showed up for the work, sorry.

Speaker 2: 45:04

Good luck. No customer is going to pay you to do anything, no. And so, yeah, you ease into that. You earn that. As you work in it, you start to see the systems you need to build around what you're doing. And to your early point, one of my favorite quotes, mark Cuban, says he says the least you can live on, the greater your options as an entrepreneur. Yes, and so, like you know your example living in the trailer that low personal burn rate created options that you could do in your business Totally. It created opportunity for you to do other interesting things, to create defensibility around your business. If it needed 10 grand a month just to survive, you would have had to be much more conservative. You would have done things that weren't quite as interesting and you wouldn't have built as quite an interesting business. And so the least you can live on personally as a founder, the greater your option.

Speaker 1: 46:00

Thank you for saying that You're teaching a masterclass today and it's like, literally, it's just a lot of the things that I like to say and so people are going to think I paid you to say them today. But this is the truth, folks. This is the truth of business. Not everybody gets stroked to check, not everybody gets to just work on their business. There becomes those times. It's all a journey and it's like me personally, I would have never had the confidence to open a big tech company at first, like no way. Like I opened something that would be grudgingly. I'm like I can just dare to get into this business, like maybe I can have this little thing. But then, once you get into it and you said earlier it's like you realize that these people that are doing it aren't that much better than me and I can learn this stuff. And you start to make progress and you're like I can actually do this and weighing on this for me too. I'd love you to back me up on it because I think you will. It's like now you can do anything you want. It doesn't even have to be business stuff. If you want to start a foundation, you know how to do that If you want to take off tomorrow and start a series on robots on Mars, you could figure out how to do that. One of the best tools, I think, as an entrepreneur is once you learn how to do this, you can do anything.

Speaker 2: 47:12

Oh, totally. I really learned that building my second company, greenpow, because I had to learn how to write software. I had to learn how to design software. I had to learn how to do copywriting. I had to learn how to deal with engineers and developers and speak their language, and so one thing I started learning was I can learn pretty much anything. I got to learn I can go on YouTube University and just sit down and just comb through all the BS and really dial in to something that's good and then just learn and do everything I'm learning and acquire a new skill I didn't have. And a lot of times we want to believe our own BS and we can say, well, I'm not an engineer, therefore I can't code that up. Or I'm not a designer, therefore I need to go get a designer. Or I'm not a marketer, I need to go hire a marketing agency. And then you believe your own BS and then you don't acquire these skills. And if you can break out of that and say I can learn the 80, 20 of pretty much anything, if I'm willing to put in the time to do it, it levels you up as a founder and it unlocks new levels of the game. The greatest of this is Elon Musk, by the way. He's got like seven companies and it doesn't matter if he's on the shop floor at Tesla or if he's with rocket scientists at SpaceX or if he's talking to the chief of marketing at Twitter. It's like he can speak at a high level to any of those actions and it's like he can move in and out of any different piece of any organization he has and speak it to a high degree of efficacy to any of those vocations. And so it's like you've got to learn this stuff, you've got to train yourself on this stuff. Don't believe your own BS. Just because you don't have the title doesn't mean you can't do it.

Speaker 1: 49:01

I agree at 100%. And wouldn't you agree? It's like once you get to a certain level, you're managing these things. But how helpful is it to know something about the things that you're managing?

Speaker 2: 49:09

Oh, it's crucial. Every time I've ever tried to delegate something that I didn't know enough to be dangerous about, it's always blown up in my face. Yeah, when we first built GreenPowell, we tried that I had never built a website, I had never built an app, and so we paid a development shop $150,000 to build the first version of the Uber for Longcare GreenPow and it was a total disaster. We wasted a year of our time. They delivered something that barely worked and it was clunky, buggy, and we realized, man, we got to rebuild this ourselves, and so I had to go back to the drawing board, take like six months, learn how to be dangerous just good enough to be dangerous at software development and we had to rebuild it with our own hands. And then only then could I go to a developer and say, ok, here's what we want you to do, here's how we expect you to do it. Here's how long it should take. Here's how much we know it's going to cost. Here's how we grade the quality of it. Go do this scope of work that I have defined for you. Oh, I don't know how this works. You go handle it. Let me know when you're done. Good luck. That always blows up in your face.

Speaker 1: 50:18

You know one of the biggest things I see it in these days. So we have a facility here where we help small business people for free, like they can come in any time, like usually they schedule in. I probably help about 10 people a week, sit down with them up for an hour, from anywhere from accounting to SEO, anything else. And one of the biggest things I see over and over again. I mean there's a lot of them, but one of the shadier systems is websites. Right, everybody goes out. They're like I don't understand a website. I got to raise X number $1,000. Usually what I'm seeing, the going rate these days is usually people are paying about $10,000. I have a friend, close friend. They started a tech company. They paid $60,000. Then we look into their organic traffic, which is one of the main reasons that you want to have a website, and zero hits. Zero, $60,000, $10,000, zero hits. So please, if you're like Brian, saying like learn at least enough to be dangerous, because once you know a little bit about SEO, you'll know what questions to ask, even if you're going to hire somebody to do it. Like, know about it so you can manage it, so you don't end up with a $60,000 website that does nothing for you.

Speaker 2: 51:20

Yeah, and the reality is we've all made those mistakes. Sure, I still make mistakes like that. Yeah, I don't want to learn. I don't want to learn another thing. It's like now with AI. It's like I don't want to have to learn another thing, but every time I try to go hire somebody to do something that I don't know anything about, I'm the dumb ass spending $60,000 on a website that would no traffic. Yeah, it's like. Go to YouTube, type in how do I build a website? Yeah, and just watch videos for 20 hours per week. And I guarantee you you will be 10 times more equipped on how to get that website bill and what you're going after than you were 20 hours earlier.

Speaker 1: 52:01

Oh, absolutely, and you know like, if you're starting from nothing, it's one of the places you can save money. It's just time at that point. Free, yeah, exactly, and you're probably going to be a better off because you're probably going to build a better website than the guy that just scammed you for 10 grand and you didn't get any traffic on.

Speaker 2: 52:17

Exactly, or at least you're going to have some kind of knowledge to know who to hire and what success looks like and what you're looking for.

Speaker 1: 52:23

What questions to ask.

Speaker 2: 52:24

And it's like, well, you know, I don't have time to do this. Oh my God, if I hear that one more time, it's like turn off Netflix, turn off Spotify. Yeah, your car, your car should run on two things gasoline and and podcasts, yeah. And I don't mean like Joe Rogan, I mean like podcast Nobody's heard of that that that are talking about something very specific, about what you're trying to do.

Speaker 1: 52:49

Couldn't agree more.

Speaker 2: 52:49

YouTube University all your all. Sunday afternoon should be YouTube University. Somebody should. Should be talking about what's the new show on on on on Netflix. You don't know what they're talking about because you're listening. You're watching stuff on YouTube. You know fireside chats, keynotes, speeches, how to, tutorials, webinars, things that you skills you need to acquire to play the game. You're spending all your time doing that.

Speaker 1: 53:13

Yeah, I absolutely agree. You know 100%. That's why it's possible for anybody like. This is the best time on the planet to be an underdog.

Speaker 2: 53:21

You know like it's the best time in the world to be an entrepreneur I mean in the history of the world when, when, the late 90s, when I was starting my landscaping company, I remember I was like man, I really want to have a big landscaping company and this sucks. I've only got like one employee and I'm out here in the hot sun all day and I smell like gasoline and grass all day. This really sucks. I want to have one of these big companies. How do I do that? Yeah, and, and, and I'm just looking at all these big, these big ass companies with trucks all over the place and I really want to do that. And so I got a magazine, a trade magazine, and in the back you could, you could send off for some tapes that were audible recordings of a trade show, of a, of a chat between these founders of these big companies, okay, and what they were doing. So I, I, I clipped the coupon and I, I just opened up a checking account and I wrote out a check and I put that in the envelope and sealed it and put a stamp on it and mailed it off. And three weeks later, in a thousand dollars, I got three cassette tapes in the mail and and I listened to those cassette tapes in my truck while while going from stop to stop, mowing yards. That is how you learn this stuff back then. These days you can get information a hundred times better for free on on YouTube. It's just incredible so much easier now than it's ever been.

Speaker 1: 54:39

Oh, absolutely One. One question, though, is, like what's good advice for? Because we see a lot of bad information out there, right? We talked about some of it today. Like what's an advice for somebody that doesn't know any better Like you and I can vet the bad from the good information online because we know, you know, like, what do you think is a good way for a kid that's new out there trying to start something? To vet the good from the bad?

Speaker 2: 54:59

Yeah, because it's like UK. He's like, ok, he says, go to YouTube University, what the hell does that even mean? And it's like, ok, well, I'm going to prepare you. Half the time is going to be learning, the other half is going to be sifting through the BS and like, like, I mean you're just going to have to do it. You know, for every good hour of content you watch, you're probably going to watch two or three of bad content.

Speaker 1: 55:22

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 55:23

The more reps you put in, the more of this stuff you consume, the more you'll get a sense for what you're looking for and what you're not, and what works and what doesn't. So combine whatever it is you're learning with actual evidence in the real world of something that's working.

Speaker 1: 55:40

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 55:41

And so for me it's like I a guy that I, that I follow is was the first marketer. These names Casey Winters. He was the first marketer at Grubhub, pinterest, and then Uber hired him as like a consultant and so, and so these were. These were early tech companies. Grubhub is really important because Grubhub was, was was really early for for food delivery.

Speaker 1: 56:05

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 56:06

And, and and and. Uber for lawn care is kind of where food delivery was 12 years ago. You don't really think about using an app to get a lawn mowing service. So it's educational marketing, you have to create a way. Yeah, exactly In 2009,. You didn't really think about using an app to order Chinese food delivered to your home, and so they were solving a similar problem of what we're solving now. And so this guy's got a blog he does. He does interviews on podcasts, he does, he does keynote speeches and fireside talks, and so I'm listening to every spoken word this guy's ever put out on the internet, and every written word as well. Yeah because he was one of the first marketers at Grubhub and so I can learn from what they were doing. Sure, you know skills and content marketing skills and all kinds of things, so so this is a guy is exposing his knowledge. He's done what it is I'm trying to do. Yeah, he's not. He's not some guy with some flashy TikToker or Instagram page selling you know get rich quick programs and and and dry cleaning or whatever. Oh, you know he he's worked as an executive at one of these big companies that that I'm trying to fast follow. Yeah, so that's a great person for me to learn from, and so combine the online content with real world, like track record, and that's kind of how you'll know you're on the right track.

Speaker 1: 57:25

That's absolutely great advice, and a lot of times I look at their motives to it's like, yeah, do you follow Mark Randolph at all? Founder of Netflix.

Speaker 2: 57:33

A little bit.

Speaker 1: 57:33

Yeah. So it's like Mark's out there, he's just giving out information, right, because he wants to help entrepreneurs, you know, and it's like, and I find Mark a wonderful mouthpiece for, especially like pivots, like I'm a do you? Do you know the story of Netflix pivot?

Speaker 2: 57:49

You know they, they were in DVDs and then went to streaming and then try to try to do both at the same time, and that didn't work for a while and then they had to go double down on streaming the way they rebuilt that company from physical DVDs. The streaming is incredible.

Speaker 1: 58:02

Absolutely, and like the part of the story that gets me the most is their only revenues were in DVD sales and they actually they can the DVD sales and, like we're just going to focus on this rental thing, that's a tremendously hard pivot. Right, it's like okay, this is the thing that's working. Goodbye, you know, we got to focus and so, like, my point is it's like Mark out there is out there getting giving information. From what I see, he's not selling anything, he just wants to do it out of his good, of his heart, and I know Mark is being a tremendous pivoter and strategy is amazing. And then they were also known for a good culture, right, and so, like, those are the things I pay attention to. So not only do I bet Mark a little bit for being who he is, but I bet where his specialty is Right. You know, it's like we could learn a lot of things through Steve Jobs and I say this all the time but I don't want to learn how to live life from Steve Jobs, right, I want to learn marketing, I want to learn strategy, but I don't want to be any kind of human like Steve Jobs is Right, exactly, and that's okay, that's okay to pick and choose the qualities you want.

Speaker 2: 58:59

Yeah, that's part of it, that's put, and I call this asynchronous mentorship. Yeah, there are 40 people, 50 people, who I have followed for a decade, who I have learned. I've learned enough about from them, to the more than I than I learned in business school, yeah, and I've listened to every speech they've ever given, every talk they've ever given. They don't know who I am yeah, they've never met me. Yeah, but I have learned so much from them and I think that's a lot more effective and better use of your time than trying to hit somebody up on LinkedIn Like I want to pick your brain, like I'm sorry, nobody really has time for that. Just consume the stuff that these people are putting out asynchronously one way and you can get all the benefit anyways.

Speaker 1: 59:39

For free and there's a lot of people out there that are just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts and that's why I'm not saying everybody that's. There is some people that are selling some stuff probably that like have good intentions, they just decided their time needs to be valued that way, but I find most of them that, like I I've really looked at like most of them are doing it just because you know they make their money in business and this is what they do to try to help, right, but I can't say always but it's not always.

Speaker 2: 1:00:05

But in my experience, if they have a course with it, I don't know, usually usually it rarely works out. There is, there is a good group called authority hackers that you mentioned SEO early earlier, and these guys you know they they own websites and they do affiliate marketing and they're driving traffic to those websites and they sell courses. Yeah, and so it's like, look for that at least. At least show me something that you're doing over here that I can look at and you're selling a course with that. That's fine. I understand that you have to get the monetize your time, but but yeah, it's the ones that have been there, done that and kind of like maybe hung up, like hung it up for a while that that just are what they want to be a thought leader. Those are the best people to learn from in my, in my experience.

Speaker 1: 1:00:51

Yeah, that's what I noticed too, and it's like part of the battle is just betting the good from the bad information. You know, I also have a undergrad in biochemistry and love fitness. Oh wow, you know, and so it's like between business and fitness. I look online and I'm like, oh man, that's like that was actually kind of what got me into the. Some of this stuff is because I don't tell you what you want to hear. You're not telling people what they want to hear today. They want to hear they can pay $100 and then they can start a business that's going to make 10 grand next month, right, but that is not the truth. I don't know anybody that's done that. Personally, I don't know one person that paid $100, you know, for this course and then, like, let's bet and let's look into any major entrepreneur on the planet. Did any of those get their business idea from YouTube's top 20 business ideas from mailing in a course for $100? Can we think of one?

Speaker 2: 1:01:38

No, no, no. They saw something broken in the world that needed to be fixed and they built the product to solve it. And very rarely did anybody get rich buying a course from somebody else and following that plan. I don't know of any examples.

Speaker 1: 1:01:52

Yeah, I don't either, and so and that's part of the premise of this show is like I feel like it distracts people from just getting to the work. Getting to the work is going to be the biggest shortcut Every time I've ever tried to. I remember, just quick story, like I remember back to like being 16 years old and like protein powders weren't very complex, you know, and so, like we used to get this bucket or box excuse me, cardboard box with a plastic bag inside and it was the worst smelling, worst protein tasting you ever had in your life. But I swear to you that protein was the best working stuff I ever had, you know.

Speaker 2: 1:02:25

It's like and so I look at like life that way too.

Speaker 1: 1:02:28

If it's too easy, it's probably you know. If it tastes too good, it's probably not working as good. You know, if this is the easy road, it's probably not the one that's going to work the way I want it to.

Speaker 2: 1:02:37

Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, that's just the way the universe works. I don't know any other way to shortcut it.

Speaker 1: 1:02:42

Yeah, absolutely. You know, like I can't believe, an hour's up already, like it was so valuable the information you gave today and like literally I know I said it a couple of times it's like people are probably going to think like you and I had a conversation before and said say this, say this, say this, because it's actually what I believe too. But it's like, no, it's the truth and that's why, you know, like I said, a lot of people like talk to me about being on the show. This show isn't even officially released yet. By the time you see this episode. It will be, but we haven't even officially launched it. I get a lot of people contacting me about being on it and there's some amazing people out there, but I look for the actual story that I think is going to be the most beneficial to anybody out there trying to start a business, trying to change something, trying to do something Everybody's telling them in the world they can't do. And like motivating people like you that have been through this and you know like telling the truth of the hardships and you know like doing it from a good hearted place so you can help people, like it's invaluable and I can't thank you enough for taking the time to do it.

Speaker 2: 1:03:40

Well, travis, I really appreciate it. I appreciate you having me on. What I hope somebody gets out of hearing interview with me is that if that guy can do it, I can do it too. Yeah, and just get started, start small and set little small goals and keep working it. I promise you in five or 10 years you'll arrive somewhere. The only question is where, and the business can be the answer to that.

Speaker 1: 1:04:03

Absolutely, and you know before we get off. You've been stuck with me for an hour and that's what the wonderful thing about podcasting is, by the way. It's like he's stuck with me, no matter what. For an hour I get to ask any question. I want you know, like he's stuck here. So is there anything you want to announce or talk about? You know, before we close out the episode.

Speaker 2: 1:04:21

You know anybody that doesn't want to waste time mowing their own yard, just go to greenpowcom. You can get a lawn mowing service in 60 seconds, so check it out.

Speaker 1: 1:04:28

That's so awesome and, folks, thanks for tuning in today. I hope you got something out of this. I can tell you, like vouch, first hand. Everything he's saying is legit. You know there is stages to absolutely everything. There's an in your business time, on your business time. It's steps ahead and you can go he's a shining example of this from mowing a lawn to now owning a tech company. It's like it like couldn't ask for a better story. Thanks for tuning in. We'll have another great guest next week and we'll see you soon.