In business, the word _**disruption**_ gets thrown around a lot. Most people talk about it as an outcome—what happens after a company changes an industry. That’s how I thought about it too, until I sat in on a talk at an EO conference. The speaker explained something I had never considered: disruption isn’t just a lucky accident or a rare event. It follows a formula—a formula that can be applied and recreated in any industry.
What follows is an excerpt from my book, _[The Disruption Formula]()_. My hope is that it inspires you the way that talk inspired me.
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As a business owner without a college degree, I used to think that my best chance to do something big in business would come down to luck. I figured that if I kept working hard and stayed in the game long enough, maybe someday I’d stumble into the right idea at the right time.
That belief held until October 2016, when I attended a business conference in Seattle hosted by the [Entrepreneurs Organization (EO)](). That’s where I first heard [Barrett Ersek]() tell the story that would change the way I understood the mechanics of disruption forever.
Barrett wasn’t a Silicon Valley tech founder or a venture-backed wunderkind. He was a guy who started in lawn care. In 1989, while still in high school, he started Custom Care Lawn Service.
At first, he planned to run the business part-time while attending college. But when his high school sweetheart became pregnant, Barrett left college, got married, and went all in on building the business to support his new family. By 1994, he had grown Custom Care into a $2 million-a-year operation with about 20 employees. But growth stalled. For the next few years, he couldn’t break through that ceiling.
In 1998, Barrett enrolled in a three-year program at MIT hosted by EO. The program consisted of five-day sessions each year, and it was during his second year that he met Verne Harnish—renowned entrepreneur, business coach, and author of Scaling Up, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, and The Greatest Business Decisions of All Time. Verne introduced Barrett to a simple but radical concept: that true disruption doesn’t require invention—it comes from delivering a 10X improvement over the industry standard. That idea became the foundation of what we now call the Disruption Formula.
That idea hit Barrett hard. He didn’t just want to grow his business—he wanted to disrupt the entire lawn care industry. But how?
At the time, one of the biggest barriers in lawn care wasn’t the service itself—it was the process of quoting. Getting an accurate estimate for lawn treatment was frustratingly slow. Homeowners would call for a quote, and Barrett’s team would have to drive out, measure the property in person, and then deliver a quote—often three weeks later. By that point, the customer had moved on or lost interest. Only about 20% of inquiries converted to sales. The whole thing was expensive, inefficient, and slow.
Barrett realized that if he could reduce the time it took to get a quote—not by 10%, but by 10 times (what we’ll refer to as 10X)—he would gain a massive competitive advantage over others in the industry. Instead of a three-week turnaround, what if he could deliver a quote instantly? That shift wouldn’t just improve the customer experience; it would completely disrupt the entire lawn care industry.
He started asking other business owners at the program how he might achieve this lofty goal. One conversation proved pivotal. Barrett spoke with the CEO of a web platform that had developed a new tax assessment tool for the city of Newton, Massachusetts. This tool used tax maps combined with aerial photography to let cities assess property values remotely—without needing a tax assessor to physically visit each property.
That was the moment the lightbulb went off.
Barrett realized he could use the same approach—but instead of assessing taxes, he’d use aerial photos and tax maps to measure lawns remotely. With that, he could deliver a quote to the customer immediately, without ever setting foot on their property.
The idea was so clear and compelling that Barrett stood up in the middle of the class, politely excused himself, walked out, jumped in his car, and drove straight back to Philadelphia to implement his new innovation.
When he returned to his office, he pitched the idea to his team—but they shut it down. Every single one of them told him it wouldn’t work. On top of that internal resistance, Barrett estimated it would cost $500,000 to build the technology needed to deliver instant quotes to customers. This was in 1998—well before Google Maps.
Faced with a team that wouldn’t buy into his new idea and a hefty upfront investment, Barrett made a bold decision: he sold the company. TruGreen, a division of Scotts Miracle-Gro, acquired it.
With time, capital, and a clean slate, Barrett built the software he envisioned to deliver instant quotes to customers. He assembled a new team who believed in the mission and launched a new company—Happy Lawn of America—on January 1, 2004.
On day one, the weather struck: feet of snow on the ground, six degrees outside. Every other lawn care company was frozen out—literally. They couldn’t visit the homeowner’s property, and even if they could, the snow made it impossible to tell what was grass and what wasn’t.
But not Barrett. His team didn’t need to visit properties. They could quote instantly over the phone, from the warmth of their office. This wasn’t just faster—it was transformative.
Instead of taking three weeks to deliver a quote, Barrett’s new system could provide a potential customer a quote instantly. As a result, conversion rates jumped from 20% to 80%, completely changing the economics of his business and giving him a serious edge in acquiring new customers.
Remember how Barrett’s first business took six years to reach $2 million in revenue? Happy Lawn, with its ability to deliver instant quotes over the phone—and drastically improve sales conversions—hit $2 million in just the first seven months. And it didn’t stop there: $3 million by the end of year one, $5 million in year two, $8 million in year three, $10 million in year four, $13 million in year five, and $16 million in year six.
By then, with 100 employees, a regional footprint, and a powerful growth trajectory, ServiceMaster—the dominant incumbent in the industry—acquired Happy Lawn.
That story stuck with me. Barrett didn’t invent a better lawn treatment or a new fertilizer. He found a broken part of the customer experience—the wait time to get a quote—and made it exponentially faster. That was his advantage.
And the more I thought about it, the more I realized: this wasn’t just a one-off. It was a formula. A repeatable framework for building a business that doesn’t just compete—but dominates.
With Barrett’s permission, I’ve evolved that framework into a formula—and ultimately, into the very book you’re reading now. I’m deeply grateful for the spark he created, for the generosity he showed in sharing it, and for EO, for hosting speakers like him.
I’ve spent the last seven years sharing that formula with other entrepreneurs. Watching them use it to shift their thinking, find their advantage, and dominate their industries. That’s why I wrote this book.
Because disruption doesn’t wait. And it’s not luck—it’s pattern recognition.
The pattern is simple: disruption is caused by making a product or service 10X cheaper, faster, or better.
That’s the formula. And this book will show you how to use it.
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Ready to apply the formula yourself? Inside _[The Disruption Formula]()_ you’ll not only learn how to implement it, but you’ll also gain access to 25+ case studies of companies that used it to disrupt their industries and create massive scale and wealth. You can [purchase the book here.]()