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Landscaper to $30MM Tech Entrepreneur: Lessons Learned on the Journey with Bryan Clayton, Ep # 131

Do you wish you had a wildly successful entrepreneur to show you the way to entrepreneurial success? Bryan Clayton is that person. In today’s episode, Bryan shares the secrets he learned from his experience building a multi-million dollar landscaping business and then transitioning to becoming a tech entrepreneur. Bryan has amazing insight into building different types of successful businesses and his tips will span any type of business.

You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in…

  • Bryan’s journey [1:22]
  • What it was like managing 150 employees [3:53]
  • Where he went to learn more to build his business [6:22]
  • The change from 1-5 million [11:02]
  • Why he sold his landscaping business [12:42]
  • What he learned from becoming a tech entrepreneur [15:24]
  • The money questions [31:35]
  • Final thoughts [38:22]

Bryan’s journey as an entrepreneur

Bryan Clayton started his entrepreneurial journey in high school when he started mowing his neighbors’ lawns. He continued his lawn mowing business through college. Upon graduating, Bryan created a business plan that would see his business grow into a $10 million dollar, 150-employee operation.

After leveling up his lawn care business year in and year out, Bryan felt that he had reached a plateau. Since he could no longer vision personal growth within his business, he decided to sell. After selling his landscaping business he was hungry for new challenges. Understanding the need for a lawn care app similar to Uber, he decided to create it himself even though he didn’t know a thing about app development.

Lessons Bryan learned from his entrepreneurial endeavors

During Bryan’s second act, he had to learn how to become a tech entrepreneur. His naivety greatly benefited him in starting the business. He figured starting a software company would be easy–it wasn’t. Along the way, he discovered these key lessons that could help any entrepreneur.

  1. Focus on the river of feedback – During the early stages of developing your business it is crucial to get honest feedback from your customers. Take away all the barriers between you and your customers so they can provide you with feedback on how to improve. Your customers can show you where your roadblocks are. Even at this late stage in his business, he tries to do an hour of customer support a day to truly understand the customers’ needs. Building this ethos into your company’s core values will help you understand the main ways your business can improve.
  2. Focus on your top priorities. Many business owners can get stuck focusing on the things that don’t matter much to their success. There are usually only 2-3 things that really matter to the success of your business. This is where your intensity should lie.
  3. Gain expertise prior to delegation. It’s hard to delegate something that you’ve never done yourself. You won’t have a solid understanding of whether the task is done right if you haven’t ever done it before. Bryan figured he could just hire someone to develop the idea for his app. However, with no prior experience in software development, he quickly discovered that he didn’t know the difference between a good app creator and a poor one. Even though it took him a year, he learned how to write software so that he could understand the process. Once he understood this he was able to hire someone to work through the process and create the app he wanted. Doing this for every aspect of his business has ensured that each part of his business is done to his standards.

Bryan Clayton has had an amazing career and we can all learn from his (10-year) overnight success. I know you’ll learn a ton from this interview. Share it with your solopreneur friends and please rate us on your favorite podcasting app so that we can continue to grow.

Resources & People Mentioned

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