GIG-A GROWTH

A local landscaping intermediary is a microcosm of the booming gig economy

BY KARA HARTNETT

The uncertainty of 2020 gave new meaning to platformenabled work for the labor market, providing income security and scheduling exibility to a growing eld of gig workers tossed about by economic volatility of the COVID-19 pandemic and a rede ned workplace culture.

In an online survey conducted last November by daVinci Payments, nearly 35 percent of respondents identi ed as gig workers — de ned as temporary or part-time work contracted by independent workers for short-term engagements. Of those people, 59 percent said they work, most often using mobile apps, to supplement their incomes while 42 percent said they enjoy the more exible work schedule and 20 percent said they have a better work-life balance. e gig economy, daVinci says, grew by a third in 2020 to include 93 million people who earned a combined $1.6 trillion from that work. As unemployment spiked last spring to, by some estimates, its highest level since e Great Depression, 14 percent of respondents said they turned to part-time business activities because they could not nd a full-time job.

In Tennessee, 400,000 jobs were lost in the spring of 2020, and the economy has only added 287,400 jobs back to payrolls since then, according to the Tennessee Secretary of State. Many of the new positions are tied to tech in relatively new ways, whether that’s for helping meet skyrocketing demand for food and grocery deliveries, dog sitting, ridesharing services or other e-commerce services.

2014 2015 2016 2017

ANNUALIZED INITIAL FILINGS

2018 2019 65,000

55,000

45,000

35,000

25,000

15,000

2020

GREENPAL’S REVENUE GROWTH

$30 million

(Projected)

‘15 ‘16 ‘17 ‘18 ‘19 ‘20 ‘21

VENDOR GROWTH

12,000

10,000

8,000

6,000

4,000

2,000

‘15 ‘16 ‘17 ‘18 ‘19 ‘20

Source: GreenPal

GreenPal founders Zach Hendrix, Bryan Clayton and Gene Caballero

For those less affected by the wave of layoffs, the shift to working from home brought with it a new routine that, many found, included more time in the day. Digital platforms, new and established, enabled people to launch their own pandemic side hustles. Those revenue streams are set to grow: Nearly 80 percent of respondents to the daVinci survey said they were planning to do the same amount or more work this year.

James Knight is the personification of many of these dynamics. In March of last year, Knight was working as a client services specialist with tech insurance and services giant Asurion when he converted to remote work along with the rest of the company. The shift changed his entire lifestyle, he said, and gave him more time to focus on his family and dedicate space for work he loves to do. Namely, lawn care.

By July, Knight had launched his side business, Legacy Lawncare TN, through Nashville-based tech startup GreenPal, an all-service platform dubbed the “Uber of lawn care” by its creators. Founded by Bryan Clayton, Gene Caballero and Zach Hendrix in 2012, GreenPal markets a platform – via an app and a website — that connects independent vendors with homeowners seeking lawn and landscaping services. The service was launched in 2015 after a trip to Nashville Software School by Hendrix, who used the experience to build out the software.

Six years after launching, GreenPal is operating in 48 states and more than 250 cities and still growing. Its interface was developed to create a streamlined experience for customers without upfront registration and offers back-end support that helps Knight and other vendors manage their business.

“Their app handles the scheduling, the financials and the communication. I can literally just open the app and run my business,” Knight says. “That’s what I’ve enjoyed most about the platform.”

Knight says he also feels empowered by the control he has over his work, being able to pitch project bids in specific neighborhoods on his own schedule. Knight credits the cultural shift to remote work that came with mitigating COVID-19 that caused him to “accidentally” start his own company. He started April lockdowns as the guy who mowed his lawn twice a week, he said, and it grew from there.

“Had the pandemic not happened, the complacency and the routine that had been present for the previous two years would have continued on. For me, the pandemic was such a blessing. It birthed this business, my relationship got stronger, and I was able to do things with my boys,” Knight says. “It

really, truly forced us to look at things differently and do things differently because that routine had been taken away […] It helped me reclaim my life.”

Since launching his company through GreenPal, Knight has been able to leave his Asurion job and replace his income focusing solely on lawn care. With his workload, he dedicates three days a week to recurring lawn service jobs and two more to special landscaping projects.

After departing Asurion in April, “I was much happier,” he said. “I was looking at Excel spreadsheets all day dying a slow death. And that’s no knock against Asurion; they are a great company and the job I was doing was very necessary [...] But with that said, I was handcuffed to a desk and I had to look out a window all day when I really wanted to be outside.”

Knight is no rarity. In 2020, GreenPal signed up twice as many new vendors as the year before, adding more than 5,600 lawn care practitioners. Twenty percent of those new vendors, according to internal company data, joined due to loss of employment or need of supplemental income.

“I think what has happened is you have a lot of these individuals that were working certain jobs and all of a sudden, ‘Hey, this job is gone. What can I do to provide for my family?’” Caballero said of that growth. “Our platform allows vendors to start bidding immediately once they pass the vetting process, so there’s not any sort of learning experience or anything like that. If you’ve mowed lawns before, then it’s kind of like riding a bike: You can go back and do what you need to do and that can be done fairly easily and quickly.”

The growth in GreenPal’s vendor network was helped in part by the company’s expansion into 30 new markets. In all, revenue — the company collects a commission on jobs it facilitates — doubled to $20 million last year and that growth has legs: The company is on track to bring in $30 million in revenue this year. By mid-May, another 2,500-plus new vendors had come aboard across the United States, pushing GreenPal’s total to nearly 24,000, and Caballero and his partners were preparing to launch in Canada. There, they will undoubtedly pilot their newest seasonal offering: snow removal services.

The state is also a beneficiary of the e-commerce boom

An evident side effect of the pandemic has been the record rate by which people are buying and selling goods online.

Consumers spent more than $860 billion with online U.S. retailers last year. That was up 44 percent from 2019 as spending patterns changed rapidly during COVID and digital platforms simplified the shopping experience and empowered third-party vendors with more sales and marketing tools. Amazon marketplace sellers — which account for 50 percent of all sales on the online retail platform — shipped 3.4 billion products last year and averaged $160,000 in sales. Social selling on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat also took off, with many sites now offering product and sales services to anyone with a login. You can now even pay your favorite local journalist — cough, cough — on Twitter.

With the tools of the trade so easily at the disposal of most people with internet access, technology has made it easier for people to make an extra buck from their hobbies and skill sets. Only time will tell how many of the record number of ventures launched in the past 15 months will survive long-term — historically, about 80 percent of new businesses in Tennessee are still operating a year later — but it’s clear the state is benefiting from the rise in e-commerce and will continue to do so.

In March 2020, a bill drafted by the National Conference of State Legislatures and sponsored on Capitol Hill by Sen. Jack Johnson added a provision to state tax laws requiring marketplace facilitators — Ebay, Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, Uber Eats, Postmates, etc. — that have more than $100,000 in sales in Tennessee to report and remit sales tax on behalf of their vendors. Reviewed prior to any notion of a pandemic arriving, the bill was expected to bring the state $84 million in previously uncollected tax dollars in its first year.

Since it was enacted last October, the state has received more than $160 million in sales tax from marketplace facilitators, about a third of which the state believes was already being collected. Even so, marketplace tax collections are set to exceed estimates by $131 million by the end of the year, according to the Department of Revenue.

The growth has helped lift state tax revenues 14.7 percent so far this year, with Tennessee now on pace to collect an unplanned $1.3 billion surplus by the end of June.

“The pandemic-led increase in online sales has led to a strong increase in the number of non-store retailers nationwide, as consumers have dramatically shifted toward online shopping, likely explaining part of the increase in new entity filings,” the state’s most recent quarterly business and economic indicator report said. “Strong sales tax collections have also been driven by recently implemented legislative changes requiring marketplace facilitators to collect sales tax on online transactions on their platforms.” — Kara Hartnett