Noel Boyer has never taken the step to hire a business advisor, but has brought in professional help to lighten the load for himself and his staff.

“The truth is that most of those who own small tree companies start their tree company because they’re good tree workers, and then the next thing they know, they’re trying to figure out how to navigate through HR and marketing and tax accounting and bookkeeping and all kinds of stuff,” says Boyer, owner of All About Trees in Springfield, Missouri, for 19 years. He also is a member of TCIA’s Board of Directors.

“As I look back, there are a lot of things in those roles that I have done or have been doing for many, many years, that I had to get in there and really make some mistakes and mess them up before we got good at it,” says Boyer. “It might have been a good idea for me to have used a consultant or something back then instead of fighting my way through it the way I did.”

Consultants, executive coaches, mentors and other experts can be valuable for a business. Or they can be redundant, waste money and be costly in terms of opportunities lost and employee morale. If you’re a tree care business owner, you may be wondering whether they can help you.

Defining the expert

First, let’s differentiate between outsourcing, consulting, coaching and mentoring. In the simplest terms, outsourcing is hiring someone for a specific task, a consultant is hired to evaluate situations and recommend solutions, a coach can guide you to make decisions and a mentor’s focus is on providing the mentee with guidance and wisdom, often over a longer period of time. Not surprisingly, the terms are frequently used interchangeably.

“The main difference between coaching and consulting is that coaching pulls out answers from the client while consulting tells the client what to do,” states consultant Rosie Guagliardo, quoted on Forbes.com. “With coaching, you walk away with strategies for uncovering your truth on your own. With consulting, you get tools that can support you in moving forward and executing. Both can be useful depending on the client’s goal and intention.”

Coaching the coach

Eric Petersen is president of New Berlin, Wisconsin-based ArboRisk Insurance, an 11-year TCIA corporate member company. He can speak to both sides of the business advisor/owner relationship, as his firm both offers coaching services and has used coaches and consultants.

“Coaching would be helping the tree service do the things (they want to do), where consulting, to me, is more of informing them and giving them direction on what they should do,” Petersen says.

Petersen owns the business with his brother. They used Jim Skiera, former ISA executive director, as an executive coach to help set up a business strategy, delegate duties, set the company’s capacity and determine the partner-brothers’ roles and responsibilities.

“We spent a few thousand dollars on it, and it has paid off dramatically,” Petersen says. “I don’t have direct return-
on-investment numbers, but it was an investment we made knowing we were struggling in that area with the strategy of our business.

“We also hired a consultant for the culture side of things, where it was project based,” Petersen adds. “He helped analyze where our current culture of the company was and what areas we could improve upon, and gave us some suggestions of how we could accomplish that. That was for a much shorter term. It was very specific in focus and cheaper, because it was a shorter time frame.”

His coaching business – which offers five advisors with different specialties – is designed to create synergy with the insurance business by making tree care companies healthier.

“Everything we’ve built has been from a risk-management perspective, to help them (clients) better their business, get employees home safely each and every night and, ultimately, not have injuries and accidents,” Petersen says. “That translates into all these different areas of your business. If you’re running your business, in my opinion, from a risk perspective, you can’t be scared to take risks. You’ve got to know what they are and manage them.

“Take sales and marketing. The reason that’s part of our offering is, if you’re working with the wrong customer or the wrong type of job because you don’t have a focus on your sales or your marketing efforts, you’re going to be absorbing more risk – potential for injury, accident, property damage,” Petersen explains. “If we can help you become a better business and run more smoothly from all those different aspects, it lowers your risk and helps everybody win.”

Vetting the experts

So how do you find the right type of help, the right person, and what can it bring you?

“In this day and age, people will do something for a short period of time and then call themselves an expert,” says Dan Mello, owner of three green companies on the New Hampshire Seacoast. “You can claim whatever you want on LinkedIn or social media, and you can edit videos to look amazing. But that’s what you’ve got to watch out for. You’ve got to make sure you’re hiring somebody who has longevity.

“I would say that’s where I’ve made a mistake,” Mello says, blaming himself for not vetting his advisors more thoroughly. “I’ve been duped, if you will, by some of those things, and have gotten some bad advice.”

At the same time, Mello has used several consultants over the years, and most were successful relationships.

“I have a lawn care company right now because I hired two consultants to teach me lawn care, and I paid one of them a lot of money. But I was engaged with him for three years, and for all three years, having him available to me made me about three times what I was paying him. The first year alone, he taught me how to work product ordering, and I saved almost exactly that just by doing what he told me. The savings was exactly his fee for the year. That was kind of an eye-opening moment.”

The right fit

Mello has hired different coaches or consultants for different purposes, and is a big proponent of using them. But that endorsement comes with a caveat. It’s important to hire the right person.

“They all had different talents and different strengths,” says Mello, who owns Seacoast Tree Care and Seacoast Turf Care on the southern coast of New Hampshire. He recently launched Seacoast Pest Control, employs 32 people in the three companies and anticipates $5.5 million in revenue this year.

“The thing about consultants is, you have to decide what you need help with and find who is good with that. Not everybody is good with everything,” Mello says. “I also think you hire consultants based on where you’re at in your development in the business – at different stages, you need different people. When you’re at a million dollars (in annual sales), you might need a coach who’s at a million dollars, or two or three. When you get to $5 million, you may want somebody who has done $10 million. It depends on where you’re at and what you’re looking for.”

Some consultants are tasked with specific duties, such as a financial bookkeeping resource called Turf Books or PCO bookkeepers who work in the lawn care and pest-control industry and provide the additional benefit of giving him the ratios and measuring the company against their database of the industry.

Mello is a proponent of business owners having an experienced, objective voice to help guide them to better solutions and decisions.

“We should always have a coach, and we should have somebody who is outside of our organization to give us unbiased feedback,” he says. “They need to know us. I hired an executive coach who was in the waste-management business. He was the CEO of a $1.2 billion company. He had 1,200 employees.

“I specifically hired him because I wanted a big-time CEO to watch me and criticize me and give me feedback,” Mello continues. “He would sit in on my meetings as I would run them. In the beginning, he spent a lot of time with us. Once he understood the players and he understood the scenarios, I talked with him almost every week. He would review my financials with me, but he was completely unbiased, and helped me out a lot.”

Accepting criticism

Part of that unbiased feedback was providing criticism that Mello needed to hear. Mello admits that dealing with today’s issues and anticipating tomorrow’s could bring his attitude down. His coach told him he needed to be more positive, saying, “You’re the leader, you cast a shadow. I don’t care if you’re tired, I don’t care if you had a bad day. You’re in a meeting with your four direct reports, and they’re going to walk out of this meeting unmotivated.”

Mello appreciated the candor, particularly coming from someone who’d experienced success.

“He wasn’t going to sit there and tell me nice things all the time,” says Mello, 46. “He is tough. He’s older. He’s in his 60s, so he’s from a different generation and he’s just a no-bullshit guy.”

Not all change is good

“One of the reasons I selected him as my executive coach is that he was a CEO for nine years. He was not a change agent,” Mello says. “I think you’ve got to watch people like that. It’s easy to walk into a company for a year, make all these changes, stack them up on your resume. But it’s hard to run a company for a long period of time, have long growth and have retention. That’s the magic in running a company. You make these changes over a long period of time.

“I had worked with change agents before where they wanted to fire the whole management team, bring in new people, and it’s just too much disruption,” Mello says. “In this labor market, you can’t do that. You have to learn to work with the people you have.

“There’s definitely a time to part ways with somebody, but for the most part, with the labor market, we have to figure out how to learn with these people and motivate them,” says Mello. “And the successful people in this business can find good talent, retain good talent and train good talent and develop them. You look at some of the most successful companies in our industry, that’s what they can do.”

Experience and more

“To be the most effective coach, they have to have a clear sense of your goals and your definition of success, because it’s all tied together,” says Jennifer McPhee. “If you’re not talking about things that are important to you or that fit into your life plan or your moral code, or support the legacy you want to leave, you’re not going to get the coaching that leads you in that direction.”

McPhee and her husband, Scott, co-own Harrison McPhee Inc. in Millis, Massachusetts, and have met with an executive coach once a month via Zoom for nine years. She met their coach 35 years ago, when he ran a successful commercial landscape-maintenance company.

“That was one of the important qualities I was looking for, someone who does have knowledge of the industry,” McPhee says. “I wouldn’t suggest that they have to have arborist knowledge specifically, but there are a lot of parallels between the tree and landscape industries in some of the unique challenges we face, whether that’s vehicles and equipment, the workforce we’re dealing with, the mergers and acquisitions we’re experiencing or some of the common contacts we have.”

A key component of their relationship is the personal connection and chemistry they share with the coach, according to McPhee. That ties in to her comment about understanding and being open to what was important to the business owners.

Making a personal connection

“If they’re strictly focused on what they think is success for the business, I don’t think that’s going to be a good match,” McPhee says. “The coach has to have a respect for what’s important to you, what your value system is, what motivates you, and understand what your definition of success is. Then they can help you reach those goals through wise business choices.

“But I think it needs to be someone who really has an interest in you as a person and in helping you achieve your goals, as opposed to just what they may think is the right thing to do based solely on their own personal and professional experience. As times change and people’s careers evolve, new motivations and priorities unfold,” McPhee says. “Your coach may have taken a completely different path to get where they got to. So they need to be interested and encourage your particular life plan and how that fits into your business plan.”

As owners of a family business, the McPhees have an interest in succession planning and decisions that fit into their life plan.

“Let’s say, for example, you’re approaching retirement and are presented with an opportunity to purchase a piece of property for the company,” she says. “Well, how does that fit into what your timeline is for how long you want to be working, where you want to place your focus and what your plans are for the future of the company? This could be a completely different conversation for someone just starting out, who wanted to purchase some property and is hungry to put their energy into developing that area of the business.

“Having a clear sense of your priorities, your definition of success and the areas of the job that bring you energy, versus those that drain it, will fuel your conversations about everything in your business, from culture to purchasing decisions to mergers and acquisitions, and recognizing when it’s wise to sub out or hire out or subcontract other services.”

The coach’s business acumen is one thing, but if they can’t tune into what’s important to you, they won’t lead you in the right direction, according to McPhee. “The person has to be a good listener,” she says.

From good to better

For Tad Jacobs, his two years with an executive coach helped him improve his business and his life. It ultimately helped with the decision regarding selling his business, Treemasters in San Rafael, California.

“I experienced a 20% increase in total revenue under her guidance,” from about $5.5 million to $6.5 million, says Jacobs, who attributes it both to his coach’s input and the boom that came with COVID-19. “What was more important was the new relationship dynamics I experienced with my staff.”

Many of his employees had been with the company for decades.

“We had relationships based on things that started when I was in my 20s,” Jacobs says. “I’m a much different person now that I’m in my 50s. And they’re different people. We had some dynamics to the relationships that were rooted in 35 years of working together, which weren’t always as productive as they could be between us. She (his coach)was able to help identify where my weaknesses were and my accountability and what I could do to change. I can’t change people. I can change me. If I change me, they’re going to have a new relationship with me.”

Profitability wasn’t the objective for Jacobs hiring the coach; becoming a better company was. He realized he’d created a glass ceiling. Changes allowed more growth for staff.

Working with the executive coach made him a better leader and allowed for growth within the company, Jacobs notes. It made the company a more attractive purchase and therefore was good for him as a person selling the business, and good for the employees, because they actually had broken some old patterns.

Not for all

Back to Noel Boyer, where we started this article, and the “not for everybody” piece of this article.

Boyer has leaned on some outside help, but has thus far resisted any urge for coaching. And he’s done OK, he says.

All About Trees is an 18-employee company that has seen annual 10-15% growth over the years, so it has done well, Boyer says. Boyer uses a bookkeeper, a payroll company (“I used to do payroll myself, and it was awful.”) and an accountant for taxes.

There was a digital marketing specialist he worked with for a short time 12 years ago, and Boyer has considered contracting a company for hiring or marketing, but ultimately decided he’s most comfortable with the path he’s on.

“In the beginning, it was just me, and I hired a part-time college kid,” Boyer recalls. “I was doing all of the sales and climbing every tree and doing the paperwork at night and all that stuff. And then, about two years in, we had a big ice storm here in Springfield, and it just blew us up. And that’s when I was like, ‘OK, no way I can do this,’ and hired an office manager, who is still with me now 18 years later.

“We’ve definitely grown into this business together,” he continues. “From doing $220,000 worth of work that very first year – that was just me – we’re knocking on the $3-million door this year, which is really slow growth compared to a lot of companies out there. But it was the growth we could manage, and we just kind of stayed the size we wanted to, which is why we never brought anybody in for marketing. We just wanted to stay in our sweet spot.”

Boyer has attended conferences and educated himself, which has helped manage growth within the company. He consults informally with peers and pays attention to his market.

“It’s a tight-knit community here and everybody talks, and all we’ve got to do is go out and do kickass work every day and make people happy, and then it just keeps coming,” he says.

Note: Since he was interviewed for this article in early June 2024, Noel Boyer partnered with a tree care industry
private-equity platform.

“Now that we are part of a national platform, we have access to professionals to help us with HR, marketing, taxes, insurance and basic financial decisions,” says Boyer. “The new deal is still fresh, so I don’t have a lot of experience in the new setting yet, but it seems that we are laying the groundwork for growing faster than we have ever done in the past.”

Conclusion

As stated at the start of this article, consultants, executive coaches, mentors and other experts can be valuable for a business. Or not. But if you’re a tree care business owner, now you have a little bit more fodder to help you make that decision.

Note: See the sidebar to this article for details about when to hire a business consultant or coach, selecting the right advisor and how much to expect to pay.

David Rattigan is a former correspondent for The Boston Globe and People magazine who has written for the Tree Care Industry Association for 19 years. He’s received 15 awards for journalism and is currently an adjunct communications professor in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in seven national magazines including Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, The Robb Report, The Christian Science Monitor and Lawyers’ Weekly USA.