Ep498: Bryan Clayton – Remember That New Things Bring New Risks

Andrew Stotz 00:02
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever, stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community. We know that to win in investing, you must take risks but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. To reduce risk in your life, go to my worst investment ever.com today, and take the risk reduction assessment that I've created from the lessons I've learned from more than 470 guests is time you start building wealth the easy way by reducing risk. Fellow risk takers, this is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guest, Brian Clayton, Brian, are you ready to join the mission?

Bryan Clayton 00:51
Andrew, let's get into it. I'm ready.

Andrew Stotz 00:53
I can feel your energy from when we first started talking. Let me introduce you to the audience. Brian Clayton is CEO and co founder of green power, an online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. Before starting green power, Brian founded peach tree, Inc, one of the largest landscaping companies in Tennessee, and he sold it in 2013. Brian's interests and expertise are related to entrepreneurship, small business growth, marketing, and bootstrapping businesses from zero revenue to profitability. And exit. My goodness, Brian, take a minute and tell us a bit about the value that you bring to the world.

Bryan Clayton 01:38
Well, thanks, Andrew, great, great introduction. I appreciate that. You know, for me, one of my mantras I live by as a Tony Robbins thing, and it's if you add value to enough people around you, eventually you will be successful. And that's just a simple heuristic I've tried to live my life by whether it be business partners, stakeholders, investors, customers, people that use products that I helped build, if I can just add 10 times more value than I get, eventually I'll be successful. And it's, it's just a little something that's always kind of kept me pointed in the right direction. So I try to live life by that ethos. And with my business. Now, green power, which is the Uber for lawn mowing, we really try to help small lawn care professionals make material income on top of our platform, we really focus on that we don't really care about anything else. And a lot of times, especially in early days, the lawn care companies that use my app made more money than I did. And so like that is best worked for me, it's worked for me add more value than you expect back. And usually it'll take you in the right direction.

Andrew Stotz 02:42
That's interesting. And maybe I just have a follow up question. I mean, there's people listening to this podcast, they totally believe that but it doesn't always work. Sometimes they may think that they're adding value. But in fact, they're not. Sometimes they may be adding value, but they're not getting the return. Like it may take longer, right? Yeah. So people get discouraged, and they start to think that doesn't make sense. And I just want you to give your perspective on those two things that maybe the person thinks they're giving value, but they're not or they are giving value, but it's not coming back, you know,

Bryan Clayton 03:22
yeah, it's definitely can't be a or it has to be, and it's, I'm adding value, but I can see where this is going. And I can see that if I keep down on this path, that eventually, it will benefit me in my project in my business, my company. And, you know, I've been in businesses where the sales people that worked for me, made double the income that I did, but I knew that if I could just figure out a process to make four or five or six of those sales people that we could eventually get the business to eight figures. And so it's not I think a lot of times in life, we look at things like or it's like, or am I adding value? Or is it like a zero sum game? It's No, you really got to look at like, it's an I'm adding value. And I see where this is taking me and if you see that it's a dead end. And a lot of times it is you got to change course, you have to audit these things. And and, and but on the other hand, it is very much an exercise of faith at times, I certainly have felt that way. I felt that way for the first three years of building green power. You know, we would have like 100 200 service providers using our platform we will be working so hard to generate new business and we were taking so little out of the equation. But I knew that if the numbers times by 10 and then and then doubled again, we would eventually have something so it was a balance between those two adding value, but I can see where this is leading.

Andrew Stotz 04:45
That's great and great advice for the listeners. I know one of my courses the valuation masterclass boot camp, we started slow, and I had eight students that came to my house and we did a six week intensive program. I used that time to try to design the program with direct interaction with the students. Then we then we moved it online for the second one that we launched, which was kind of the first one that we launched online. And, and we had so much we were ready to bring. And then we bought a little bit bigger audience and we bought a huge amount of value, our students had this, this is this must be more expensive.

Bryan Clayton 05:23
But yeah, that's what you want, you want to hear that, you

Andrew Stotz 05:26
want it to just bring a huge amount of value. And now we're in the second time of the online course. And we hear the same thing. And we're increasing our price every time that we launch. But the point is, is that if we didn't bring all of that value into it, then in some ways, it just turns out to be a dead end because the students aren't satisfied. And then they don't share the word and then you don't grow the product. So I think,

Bryan Clayton 05:48
yeah, these days, you really got to bring 10x value that you think you do in order to compete, there's just so much out there and you got it, you got to bring double and triple and 10 times more than you think you should. And like you just named three iterations on the same kind of course thing. The problem is a lot of folks want to start on a third, they want to start with the scale piece of it right out the gate, and it just doesn't work that way. You know, you got to get in a room with five, six other people figure out where you're going to change their life and then scale that.

Andrew Stotz 06:14
Hmm. And the last thing I just before we go into question, I just liked what you said, you gotta have faith, you got to do it. And you got to be doing the right thing with the right people and have faith that it's going to work. And now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thinking it will be. Tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to then tell us your story. Oh,

Bryan Clayton 06:37
wow, this is so painful. So a little bit of backstory about me, I had a landscaping company for like 15 years I built it's like 150 people $10 million a year and revenue. And I ended up selling it in 2013. And after I sold it, I got bored. And I kind of retired. But I thought what am I gonna do now and I thought, Well, I'm gonna start a tech company to see if I can do it. totally foreign to me, you know, the first thing about technology, didn't know how to build any software. But I thought I could do it. And so I recruited two co founders, and we set out to build that Uber for lawn mowing. And so my first year in building green pow, I'm in this new world, it's a mysterious world I'm surrounded with. Now I have a couple of engineers working for me, you know, product designers, like you know, I used to have mechanics working for me now I've got coders working for me, and I'll never forget one day, one of my smartest people on our team had this thing humming in the closet in the office and it was like making this loud racket and it was putting off a lot of heat and like what the hell is this is 2012 2013 What the hell is this? And he says it's a bitcoin miner. And like Bitcoin, what are you talking about? He begins explained to me the theory of Bitcoin and what it was and is and what cryptocurrencies were and, you know, that's, that's pretty cool. You know? And this thing makes it he's like, yeah, it makes it and that's it. So it's like a money printing machine. He's like, Yeah, and never, never mind that the electrical bill went up to like, three grand a month, but, but I was like, you know, okay, it's kind of neat. I said, I said, Well, I'd like to throw some money at this. '' And he said, Yeah, you know, we could get two or three more machines and you can also buy this stuff. It's like, it's like 80 or $50 a coin like $50 for some invisible money. He's like, Yeah, but trust me this is gonna go up like man that's that's awesome. So all and I you know, we bought two or three rigs and I think I bought like something like 50 or 75 Bitcoin and, and I had like maybe 10 grand all in maybe 15 grand all in into this thing called Bitcoin. About six months goes by and I'll never forget it. I can see the look on his face. One morning, he's like, You're not gonna believe this. I'm like, I'm like what? He's like, we were hacked. Like, what do you mean we were hacked like greenPath was hacked, you know, or bitcoin wallet was hacked. And like, what Well, how could How was he possible? Yes, somebody stole all of our Bitcoin. What is it at the time? You know, it was like a five or six $7,000 hit what I had in Bitcoin. I was like, well, that sucks. Well, I learned a hard lesson there. And I never looked at cryptocurrency ever again. And you know, as time unfolded, I'm kind of in the rough in the back of my head back in the envelope doing you know, the math on what that investment would have been worth. And, and yeah, it went to zero and it didn't go to zero because it was a bad investment with zero because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. And we got all of our Bitcoin stolen.

Andrew Stotz 09:36
And I know it's painful, but that's part of the process of leaving our mistakes behind us through this catharsis of this podcast. Roughly Do you think that would have been worth today?

Bryan Clayton 09:50
You're 50 Bitcoin at what is it? Today's 50 60,000 I mean, you do the math. I mean, private yacht money. Yeah.

Andrew Stotz 10:02
So let's, let's review the lessons that you learned.

Bryan Clayton 10:05
And the lesson, the main lesson I learned was don't do anything, unless you're like whole heart and soul is in it. And really don't make an investment. Don't start a new business. Don't take on a business partnership, until unless your heart and soul six, seven days a week is in it unless you're really willing to dedicate the time to learn the nuances in the get into the trenches of whatever the hell it is, you know, if it's real estate investing, tech startups, you know, traditional businesses, if it's if it's stocks, bonds, equities, early stage, late stage, Bitcoin crypto doesn't matter. Like you need to turn off squid games, and turn on YouTube, in your living room, like your your your your, your living room needs to be a mobile classroom, your car needs to be a mobile classroom to learn the ins and outs of stuff, and I wasn't willing to do that with crypto back then. And that's what it was what cost me my whole investment I didn't, I didn't put in the time to roll up my sleeves and really understand what cold storage was and, and really understand why, you know, there were vulnerabilities in the system back then. And, and it because I managed it by applications. Like I don't know how it works, but seems like a good idea here, you handle it. That's usually a recipe for disaster.

Andrew Stotz 11:23
Yeah, so maybe I'll summarize a few things I take away, you know, the, I'm reminded of a story where one of the books that I wrote, and of course I teach is called How to start building your wealth investing in the stock market. And basically, it's very simple, you know, obviously, you want to start as early as possible, maybe buy for someone that doesn't know much about the stock market, maybe buy an ETF or a fund that owns every stock in the US or every stock in the world, and then contribute to that on a regular basis until you get up to $500,000. And then you start to play around a little bit with individual stocks or whatever. And so a lot of people are always excited in that class, you know, about getting started, but I invariably have the people that are roughly my age, let's say I'm 56. And they say, you know, they see me at the break, and they go look, I understand this, that you know that you're going to earn, you know, 10% a year or 8% a year over the long term. But Andrew, you got to understand I haven't saved any money, and I don't have anything from retirement. Can you tell me the fast way to grow my wealth? I get that question every single time.

Bryan Clayton 12:31
Every single time I have tried to make money quickly, I have struck out. I'm over like 100 on get rich quick. Every single time I've always gone to zero.

Andrew Stotz 12:43
And I always tell him you know, think about it for a moment, if there was a fast way of getting rich. Don't you think that smart people would already be doing it?

Bryan Clayton 12:52
Every Yes, everybody either gonna get rich, you're gonna get lucky, you're gonna either get lucky or you're going to lose all your money and hope is not a strategy. And yeah, and you know, but I've made the mistakes. You know, I've I've tried to there is no one move on the chessboard that wins the game. There's no shortcuts, it's always a build up.

Andrew Stotz 13:11
So the the last thing that I take away from your story is I wrote down new equals risk. Now think about this, like, Okay, I've got 30 years of experience of investing. And I'm still exposed to risk, I'm still, there's all kinds of risks that I'm worried about, right? Now imagine somebody that's never invested before and they walk in. Basically, they're exposed to 100% of all the risks yet, and the majority of risks that I'm exposed to, I understand. But the majority of risk they're exposed to they don't yet understand. It's a little bit like imagine a little baby, a little toddler, wow, it's crawling along the ground, all happy and wearing the diapers. And imagine that they're in the desert. And they're surrounded by rattlesnakes. But they don't know that

Bryan Clayton 14:02
that's what it is.

Andrew Stotz 14:04
They may even reach out and grab a look. And they grab it. So what I would just highlight to the listeners out there is new things that you do have a lot of risks, and almost all the risk of something new that you're doing. You don't understand whether that's going to the gym and lifting weights, if you've never done it, you're gonna It's brand new, you're going to be exposed to all the risks. So whenever you get into something, your first objective really is to understand the risks that you're exposed to. Anything you add, absolutely.

Bryan Clayton 14:35
Yeah, and the and, you know, how do you understand and learn how to mitigate that risk? You kind of have to get in the game, you kind of have to get in the trenches. How do you learn real estate investing? You buy your first investment property? How do you learn investing in equities or bonds? You got to get it you got to get into the game and start investing. How do you understand how to invest in tech startups but you need to start investing in tech startups. You're going There's going to be a cost of that there's going to be a ticket price. And you're going to, you're going to learn from your own experience. But you can sit here and just kind of plan yourself to death. And if you're not actually making any bets, it's really hard to learn. And that's one thing I've learned, it's like, it's a balance of getting in there and making manage risks and making manage bets. But, but also not be scared enough to not get off the sidelines. Because I see that a lot, too. It's like, and, you know, you're not going to really learn anything to get some experiential wisdom. It's, it's, it's kind of like an MMA fighter going into the Octagon and never haven't sparred, you know, you're gonna have to spar, you're going to have to make some small bets.

Andrew Stotz 15:41
Yeah, and he could have trained, but if he didn't spar, yeah, he would have theoretical knowledge. But he wouldn't have the practical knowledge of how to sustain a punch in the face.

Bryan Clayton 15:52
Could have watched every video on YouTube on jujitsu, I mean, all of them. And if he had never sparred, he's going to, he's going to get, you know, eaten up in the octagon, and yeah, right. And so until you get into the, into the ring, you're not going to learn anything, uh, sadly, and hopefully you don't lose your money doing it. But you but that's how you learn.

Andrew Stotz 16:12
And for the listeners out there, one of my experiences from interviewing so many people is that you don't have to start by jumping in the ring, you can start by working with someone who is in the ring. Yes, learn as much as you can. And then you start to put your toe in the ring. And then you start to go out. So a lot of young people think, and I thought to myself, just go do it. But you know, you can reduce risk tremendously by just working with someone that's already doing it. So based upon what absolutely this story and what you continue to learn, what action would you recommend our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate?

Bryan Clayton 16:48
Yeah, you're going to have to set aside the time you mean, if you set aside an hour a day to learn one thing, if you do that, for six months, you'll be like at 20 good at that one thing, you just have to set aside the time, you got to turn off squid games, you got to turn off Netflix, and you're gonna have to learn these things. And the cool thing you're going to find out about yourself, after you do this is you're going to learn that you can pretty much learn anything. And once you understand that about yourself, that's a lot of fun, that it's like almost a new unlock in the video game of life, once you realize that you can learn things that you previously had no clue how they worked. That's a lot of fun. And that's one thing that every time I've ever been, I haven't been willing to dedicate the time to learn from practitioners in the space. It's always cost me it's always cost me money. And it's always cost me time. So dedicate that time to work on yourself while you're working on and in the business of investing.

Andrew Stotz 17:51
When I graduated from high school was 1983. And we didn't have all the distraction of the mobile phones and smartphones and all this stuff. And now it's a world of distraction. And if you can follow what Brian is said and put down the squid games put down Netflix, that the chances of you being able to be rare compared to your friends is very high. I mean, you have a real opportunity because they are all sucked in to distraction. Absolutely. What is one resource that you'd recommend that our listeners could benefit from?

Bryan Clayton 18:24
For me? So one of my favorites, because when I started GreenPower, I'd have the first idea how to start a tech company one one online resource I've gotten a lot of benefit from is a podcast by a guy by the name of Jason Calacanis called This Week in Startups, and he has a course called founder University. So if anybody listening to this, and I'm in no way affiliated, but anybody listen to this, there's ever thought about starting a tech company, like a tech startup from scratch. Founder University is a real good kind of zero to one, here's how you do it step by step. We're not taught how to start businesses in high school and college. Nobody teaches you like basic accounting and company formation and governance and, and customer development and customer interviews and basic marketing. Literally, this is taught nowhere in a formal education. And so founder University is one of the best resources I have found. It's practical, step by step. Here's how you do it. It's not easy. It's not exciting. It's not glamorous, but it is stuff that you're going to have to do the block and tackling so to speak, to get something going.

Andrew Stotz 19:25
Sounds like we need to get him on the show. Oh, he's

Bryan Clayton 19:28
amazing. Yeah. Jason Calacanis one of my heroes.

Andrew Stotz 19:31
Yeah. All right. So last question. What is your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Bryan Clayton 19:37
Oh, for me, it's always about growth, growth, growth, growth, growth in my business because I am my business my business is like scaffolding of me is like me and scaffolding around me is my is my business. So like those things are indistinguishable, green pals doing 20 something million dollars a year. We're trying to grow that by 50% over the next 12 months, and we've grown 50 over 50% year over year for the last five years. So growing that number, it's getting bigger and bigger. And it's hard to we're hitting the large the law of large numbers. But trying to get that close to 50 million as we can is where we're going. And that's, that's that's my personal goal and business goal, because to me, they're indistinguishable. I am my business.

Andrew Stotz 20:20
Well, listeners, there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. If you haven't taken the risk reduction assessment, I challenge you to go to my worst investment ever.com Right now, and start building wealth the easy way by reducing risk. As we conclude, Brian, I want to thank you again for joining our mission. On behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Bryan Clayton 20:51
Yeah, yeah, uh, you know, every good story involves an element of risk. And every good in investment story involves an element of risk. So don't let risk scare you to stay on the sidelines. Get in the game. Put me in the game coach, because only when I'm in the game, can I win?

Andrew Stotz 21:11
Beautiful, and that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our wealth. Remember, ladies and gentlemen, this podcast is about one guest. One story. One mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives fellow risk takers. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz saying. I'll see you on the upside.