This image is from the cover of the author’s latest book, “Climb: 5 Supercharged Lessons to Elevate Your Arborist Career & Enhance the Urban Forest.” Image courtesy of the author.

You’ve either read about it or experienced it firsthand. If you find yourself in a room full of elite climbers – they may be from different places and use different climbing hitches and gear – one thing is common: They usually light up when the subject swings over to SRS climbing. Stationary-rope systems increase ascension speed and facilitate more ergonomic work positioning. But is it possible to take an SRS approach to business and personal growth?

This article is designed to share frameworks to help you achieve business ascension along with personal elevation by incorporating a new kind of SRS: Skills, Relationships, Systems.

When you gain awareness of a new system or a new way to approach work, you can harness higher levels of creativity, which gives you unmatched leverage that can make you unstoppable in your arena. Tree work is comprised of variables that force you to think ahead while adapting to changing situations. Being aware of obstacles and challenges can help you develop creative solutions to accomplish any task that is thrown your way.

Becoming more profitable is as simple as increasing revenue while decreasing costs. But even though we realize that, it’s usually easier said than done. Through my personal business journey, working with many individuals from different business backgrounds, I realized that what really separates a high-level performer and profitable organization from the ordinary is that individual’s or organization’s core foundation. As we would expose a root system that ultimately affects the canopy, let’s decompact the deeper mind – the root zone – to understand the driving force of our actions and how we can use SRS to elevate our game.

Decompact your mind
Back to our equation, profit is a function of higher revenue and lower expenses. So let’s start with revenue. Either you raise your price or increase the frequency of your service. If you know you need to raise your price and have the ability to raise it, but for some reason you can’t, that’s not a tactical issue. It goes deeper. Maybe you don’t feel worthy to raise your price, even though you know your prices are way too low. Go deeper with a simple question: Why? Keep asking this question to get to the root. Maybe you dealt with abandonment at an early age and feel that if you make your company profitable, you will lose family or friends or jeopardize your current social circle.

Oh, this is deep – but it’s going to make a lot of sense. An individual’s base level is comprised of trauma, which impacts core beliefs, which form a core identity. One misconception about trauma is that it is always horrendous; trauma can be as simple as being laughed at in front of your peers in school. Another misconception is that it is always “bad.” Trauma is essentially a strong impact; this can be good or bad, because it is a series of events that impact your beliefs and mental identity.
For example, if as a child you were exposed to tree work and had the time of your life, and it allowed you to experience the beauty of nature, that can be considered a “traumatic” event by definition, because it could form a strong imprint that will impact the way you see, and interpret, the world around you. Now let’s say those events developed the belief in you that hard work can be fun, or that you can have a money-making career in tree care. This can create an identity that you can accomplish anything you set your mind to, which allows you to easily raise or alter your pricing as you see fit, while still delivering exceptional value to your customers.

So the question is, how do you release “bad” trauma or recalibrate your mind? To offer a short and simple answer for the sake of this article, acknowledge whatever that issue may be and get to the root of it by asking “Why?” “Why is that a problem? Why does that bother me? Why should I be afraid of that? Why should I be worried about that? Why am I seeking validation from that?” Then release that restricted feeling by understanding that it doesn’t serve you and where you choose to go with your life or business.

That was a lot! But no matter how high you set your business and financial goals, remember this: How you view yourself – the beliefs you hold in your head – are ultimately more important than how knowledgeable and skillful you are. This is very important to explore and understand if you are serious about growing your company, because how you think affects how and what you produce. With that said, let’s climb with SRS.

SRS – Skills
Skills can come in different forms and aid in many ways. Just like in the tree care business, it takes a strong knowledge of arboriculture, paired with business principles, to succeed. Skills can be segmented into three distinct types.

Direct professional skills
Direct professional skills align with your core business – arboriculture. If we dice tree care into two broad categories, we have production and preservation skills. Production involves common services like pruning and removals, while preservation involves areas like consulting and plant health care. An arborist who learns more has the potential to earn more. This is why it’s advantageous for any aspiring – or seasoned – arborist to continue to grow their knowledge base in relation to trees. When you grow your knowledge past removals, past pruning, above consulting, above plant health care, beyond soil, above appraisals, beyond plantings, above support systems – learning more and more – you become a more complete arborist and trusted advisor who really understands trees, and who can advocate for the best tree care services or prescriptions.

Indirect professional skills
You can be the best arborist on the planet, but tree care knowledge is not enough. High-level communication, auditing your time in order to prioritize, motivating yourself, resolving conflict and even a commonly overlooked skill called gratitude can make or break your success as an arborist. You may choose to overlook personal-development training, especially if your role as an arborist is more solitary. But even if you don’t manage crews or have staff, developing these common soft skills can, again, greatly influence your ability to operate at peak levels, motivate teams and others or even secure favorable business deals.

Being able to create win-win scenarios is massive. We live in a world of constant validation seeking that can, in some instances, erode personal self-esteem, along with mental bandwidth. Low self-esteem and decreasing mental bandwidth can destroy sustained focus, preventing you from tapping into higher levels of creativity. The more aware you are of something, the greater creativity you can tap into to provide solutions and the more leverage you have in your arena.

Hobbies
Just as trees cycle between growing and dormant seasons, so should you. All work and no play can really make a saw dull. Hobbies – or skills other than those of your core profession – can give you the needed recharge to elevate your career. How so? Being skilled in areas outside your work can help you see success parallels. Mastering a hobby or hobbies can help forge discipline, allowing you to focus on high-level business goals. Picking up a recreational skill also can build self-esteem and confidence, which allows you to find joy in other aspects of life. Study a foreign language, pick up an instrument, take cooking classes, learn about art or build something with your hands.

Hobbies can help you get through trying times at work, because they can reaffirm that you still have things you can be proud of. Having multiple interests can curb being addicted to one thing. Say you like to fish, but also experiment with pottery, carpentry and running. You have several things for finding purpose and allowing you to experience life on many levels as you engage your mind, body and spirit through different activities.

Don’t think you always have to work harder to become more profitable. Sometimes the answer is as simple as finding other activities that allow you to let go, recalibrate and return to work with heightened awareness and energy.

SRS – Relationships
The relationships you make are correlated to your communication skills and even your mindset. You can be the best arborist or tree care professional, with the right knowledge and skills, but if you cannot properly communicate value to your client, you’ll fall short in sharing and contributing the value you have to offer. True sales is about conveying value in a way that your client or market understands. It’s not pressuring, pushing or belittling people to go along with what you have – and if they don’t go along with your program, they’re the biggest idiots on the face of the earth. It’s also not robotically trying to build “rapport” or asking CIA-style questions to funnel your prospect down a path that only serves you.

Selling, at its core, is developing a true win-win scenario. A balanced act of giving and receiving. Give value, but you also must receive. The win-win cycle: Give so that you can receive, so that you can continue to give value. If you don’t win, too, you can’t help them win – or not for a sustained time. It is not about taking advantage of others so only you prosper, and it’s not about running yourself into the ground while the people you serve live better. Both can coexist. Create a business that allows you to operate at the highest level, so you can serve your clients at the highest level. Think win-win.

Also, relationships are not just about treating your clients well, but also treating yourself, staff, vendors and community members well. Education is a powerful medium for conveying value. This involves educating your team to elevate them, and your customers and community so that they are in a position to make better tree care decisions. Think of building value and improving your urban forest with community programming for neighborhood beautification programs, neighborhood associations, local tree commissions and garden clubs, to name a few.

SRS – Systems
A system is just a routine process that accelerates success. A system can be as simple as issuing follow-up calls after services are rendered or instituting weekly training meetings, or as involved as reviewing financial reports throughout the month or as refined as having a personal boundary to safeguard your mental health. Let’s talk about systems on a mental level, which, when properly ingrained, can help you achieve high-level results.

Fell, but never fail
No matter what happens, you always win, always. What? The key is forever engaging in the process while simultaneously disassociating from the outcome. Most people become so attached to the outcome that they fail to find joy in the process. You may want the sale so badly that you tie your self-worth and esteem to it. You feel good when things are good and bad when things are bad. This places you at the effect and not the cause. And when you are at the effect, external forces will always dictate your emotions and keep you on a roller coaster.

Like when you feel bad that the bid was lost or when you think the client was stupid for not going with your service, or that you are worthless and a bad businessperson because you didn’t make the sale. Wasted energy. In reality, you never lose. If you didn’t get the job, the prospect can still win by receiving value from another company, and that company gets paid – so you still helped the prospect – and another company. How awesome is that?

On top of that, you can – and should – ask one of the most powerful questions you can ever ask, “What else?” What else could you be doing? What else can you place your energy in instead of worrying and building up stress about a job, when there are endless opportunities for you to succeed right under your nose. But only if you are aware of what you have, and don’t simply focus on the one thing you lack – a missed job opportunity.

Well then, what else could you focus on? Maybe, with the additional free time, you can sharpen your sales skills, work on improving your business model, learn something new about trees, contact an existing client, roll out a new service line, study for a new certification, check in with your team, develop a new program to elevate your team, research new technology to streamline your operations or go have another sales appointment. The list of things you can do to realign your energy is, again, endless.

This mindset allows you to always offer the best service to your client and helps you become more empathic to their needs, which improves your listening, marketing ability and value-exchange/delivery processes. This also raises your professional vibe, which helps you stand out as a stand-up individual, which will often draw and drive more business to you simply because of your integrity, but also because you will not come off with a weird, needy energy that reeks, “I’m just out for myself and money and don’t care two cents about truly helping the client.” It requires a mindset shift to see the world as, “I can help people and make money,” instead of, “I can’t make money unless I make everything about myself.”

Conclusion
Hopefully this article helps remove the trash from your mind. What you will discover is an increase in energy and creativity that will allow you to solve problems with less energy, and help you develop a more profitable business that can generate revenue efficiently and reduce stress for the people who keep the business going.

Let’s face it, we all know about trees and how to run a company. The biggest secret is getting our minds in shape to work in our companies at a higher level and not harder. Let these strategies make 2025 a great, or even greater, year for your tree care service.

Edward Morrow combines his experiences as an arborist, accountant and author to help industry professionals elevate. He hosted the session, “The Financial Playbook for Tree Care Professionals,” and served as a financial peer-group facilitator at TCI EXPO ’24 in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the creator of Tree S.T.A.R.S., an outdoor-adventure book series on a mission to inspire the next generation of arborists. His latest book is “Climb: 5 Supercharged Lessons to Elevate Your Arborist Career & Enhance the Urban Forest.”