From left: Will Loomis, Dayton McArthur, Lino Iriarte, Keith Clanton, Tevita Alatini, Jeaden Ventura, Joey Jurasek and Jon Perry with his dog, Red. Photo courtesy of Edith Daguio.

How do you know when it’s time to invest in an apprenticeship program? For me, it was after the fourth round of hiring a seemingly perfect candidate, only to be disappointed within the first few weeks. Overpaid and underperforming. That moment – sitting across from someone who clearly wasn’t the right fit for my company and knowing I had no real alternative – was when I realized I had lost control of something I was entirely responsible for. It was my problem and my job to figure it out. That’s when I knew it was time.

The hiring challenge

How do we build the best possible team and set them up for success? If you own or manage a tree care company, the importance of this challenge cannot be overstated. Your people really are your product. The quality of your work, your reputation in the market, your ability to grow – all of it runs through your team. And yet most of us spend more time thinking about equipment purchases than we do about how we attract people and bring them into our companies. Equipment can be a lot of fun and doesn’t call in sick, but buying more of it doesn’t solve the problem.

The reality for most small to midsize businesses in the tree care industry is that we operate in areas where population size alone almost guarantees a shortage of talented, qualified people to hire. The pool is small, the work is physically demanding and the skills required take years to develop. Even if you’re fortunate enough to catch lightning in a bottle and land that perfect hire, you also inherit all of their behavioral and value traits, which may or may not align with the culture of your company. You didn’t build them. You just got them – habits, limitations and all.

This is the core problem apprenticeship addresses.

When we are climbing trees, we have ropes, chain saws and endless tools to accomplish our tasks. As managers, we need tools, too. Apprenticeship is the most powerful tool I’m aware of to attract, build and grow a team. How you bring people in, orient them, structure their path and provide the resources and opportunities for their success gives you – the manager – the ability to actually build your company and your team. Not the other way around. You stop inheriting people and start developing them. What could possibly be more important?

Trainees preparing for their climbing test at the end of a 90-day pre-apprentice course. Photo courtesy of Buck Ashburn.

Creating the path

So what does that actually look like in practice? For us, it started with getting honest about what we were trying to build. What does an excellent arborist look like at our company? Not just the skills, but the person behind the skills? What are the values we won’t compromise on? What skills need to be developed, in what order, and who is responsible for teaching them? Answering those questions forced us to get clear on our own standards before we ever ran our first apprentice through the program. That clarity alone was worth the effort.

After more than a year of running our apprenticeship with around 20 staff members, the benefits have been remarkable. We can now hire for values and company-culture alignment first, then build technical skills in a structured and consistent way from there.

This also levels the playing field for owners and managers in a labor-constrained market. When an employee no longer matches the values of the team or is simply not the right fit, you are no longer beholden to keep them because you have no other truly viable alternative. That changes the entire dynamic of how you manage, how you lead and how your company feels from the inside.

Even more important, the quality of the candidates we now have access to has improved dramatically. When a company invests serious time, money and structure into someone’s development up front, both sides naturally raise their standards. Potential apprenticeship candidates appreciate the commitment – they can see you are serious about their success, and that makes them serious, too. It also allows us as managers to establish a much higher bar when evaluating who enters the program, both in terms of minimum qualifications and alignment with our values. The result is a team that isn’t just skilled, but genuinely healthy – people who want to be there and share a common sense of purpose. That combination, healthy and skilled, is what every owner is chasing. Apprenticeship gives you a real path to it.

From scarcity to capacity

There is also something important that happens to you as a leader when you build this kind of structure. You stop reacting to the team you have and start building the team you want. You develop a longer time horizon. You make better hiring decisions because you’re not desperate. You can afford to be selective because you know the pipeline is working. That shift in mindset – from managing scarcity to building capacity – is genuinely transformational.

So how do you know when it’s time? You know when you feel stuck with people you wouldn’t have chosen if you’d had a real choice. You know when your growth is being limited not by opportunity in the market, but by the team you’re able to assemble. You know when you look at your best competitors and realize their edge isn’t equipment or pricing – it’s their people.

One piece of advice for anyone looking at starting an apprenticeship program: just get started. Don’t wait for conditions to be perfect or for every detail to be figured out. Don’t wait until you “get big enough.” You will improve it as you go. What matters is beginning. You will have an edge on your competition. You will gain back the control to build your company the way it should be built, rather than being left with whatever outcomes others hand you. You carry all of the liability for how this business turns out; you should have the control to match.

Build the best possible team you can and enjoy being part of a truly winning group of people.

Jonathan Perry is the CEO of Hawaii-based High Regard Tree Service, an 11-year TCIA member company.

“How Do I Know When It’s Time To Develop an Apprenticeship Program” by Jonathan Perry is one of three articles that make up our How Do I Know When It’s Time To… business feature. The other two are “How Do I Know When It’s Time to Stop Being My Own Office Manager” by Andy Jones, BCMA, CTSP, and “How Do I Know When It’s Time To Train or To Terminate” by Korey Conry, CTSP.