From our company’s inception, we wanted to keep overhead low. This makes sense for any startup, but we’re planning to maintain our “leanness” into the future. I don’t mean cheapness; we, of course, have operating costs, and we like new and functional equipment. We collected some cool data over the course of 2023 that might be insightful for arborists considering going into practice for themselves.

The main goal behind staying lean is to avoid the bloat that tree care companies often struggle with. When they start out, they think they need certain things to be productive – big wood chipper, chip truck, a few big saws, maybe a loader, a couple of crew members. You’ve got to pay those things off, and if your wings aren’t fully spread yet, that can be a crippling challenge.

The example set by “big arb” results in most tree companies looking more or less the same: the same equipment, a website full of business-speak and nothing that really distinguishes them. We found that tried-and-true model had some flaws, so we tried a different approach. Besides, we think the big-arb business model is boring. Part of the fun and fulfillment we get as arborists and business owners is figuring things out.

And this is no exception.

Packing light

Arboriculture is for people who like physical and mental challenges. Climbers especially know that feeling, whether you’re pruning or removing trees. It ain’t easy, and we love that sometimes.
Do you climb with the heaviest harness possible? Or do you like to climb feeling light and flexible? Our company, Tree First Arboriculture in Ferndale, Michigan, is an experiment that applies that light-and-flexible philosophy to the tree care business.

So, how’s it going?

Our company just finished our fifth year earning the most revenue to date, while being as busy as possible. Too busy at times, perhaps.

Tree preservation is our focus. We manage trees in a place where heavy pruning and removing trees are often the only two options given to people. We did not want to be a for-profit, tree-killing business masquerading as tree care, and we happened to be in the right place at the right time to stand out as another option.

While we understand that not every geographical area is the same, we’ve found standing out as a young company to be easy as long as we are thorough, talk to clients like people and, above all, advocate for trees and nature.

Lots to talk about here. Plenty of jobs consisted of mostly pruning, with the additional removal of a small dead shrub or something. To account for that level of crossover was too tedious. So the categories were determined by the main goal of the job.

Zeroing in

Clearly, pruning was our big moneymaker category last year. I’m thrilled that soil amending was the third-highest percentage, and even more thrilled that insect treatment and tree removal were last. Storm damage was abnormally high for the year due to a series of consecutive ice storms in February and March. I don’t expect that percentage to remain consistent in coming years.

Considering every meeting I have is basically a free consultation (because I talk so damn much), that consultation percentage only accounts for those who paid for one. Perhaps if I charged folks more often, that consultation percentage would grow while the other categories would shrink. It probably comes out in the wash either way.

The assessment category includes all levels of risk assessments, soil analyses and any other site analysis. It probably has some crossover with the consultation category.

The miscellaneous category contains mostly one-off jobs. It also includes things like cabling and propping. Plenty of pruning jobs had crossover with cabling, but again, that couldn’t really be accounted for without producing a ton of data points.

The soil amending encompasses things like fertilization, developing soil-improvement zones and performing root-crown excavations. Next year, we have plans to expand this percentage with the creation of a lean “soil van,” much like how we’ve built a lean pruning van. (Photo) More about that up ahead.

I’m thrilled at this breakdown overall. Alright, let’s keep going.

Saw jobs and non-saw jobs

I’ve broken down our 2023 jobs into two categories: Non-saw jobs and saw jobs. (Figure 2)

We couldn’t think of a better way to categorize them other than by calling them saw jobs and non-saw jobs. To generalize the way the public sees us tree folk, they probably think we do 99% saw jobs. And they’d be right about that in my region.

Promoting stewardship

Another element we implement to stand out and stay lean is to encourage clients to keep their material on site following a job. Promoting environmental stewardship to clients has worked marvelously.

For non-saw jobs, there really isn’t anything we leave behind. But for this upcoming explanation, I’m talking about the 62% of our jobs that were saw jobs.

We don’t operate in a rural or heavily forested area. In those areas, it is easy to chip debris into the forest or wood lot. We work in a metropolitan area with lots of large trees, but very much an urban and suburban place.

Figure 3 provides a breakdown of how often we hauled wood or wood chips off site.

Across all of our jobs, 17.2% of the time we hauled material from the site to somewhere else. Across all of our saw jobs (pruning, storm damage, removals), only 27.7% of those jobs required us to remove material off site. Compared to most tree outfits, I bet those are insanely low percentages.

For removal jobs, given they produce so much material, it is no surprise that we haul more than 50% of the time. But, in the grand scheme of things, removals only account for 4.5% of our overall jobs.

Providing a resource

How do we get clients to so frequently keep the biomass on site?

Tree care falls under the domain of land stewardship – taking care of nature. When this is explained to people, it is easy to extend that to retaining the material for compost, mulch, fires – whatever they could use the resource for. If they don’t have an immediate use for it, maybe their neighbors do. And if nobody does, guess what? Mulch piles literally disappear on their own.

It is a resource they’re paying us to remove, and they see it as an item on their estimate. If they can save money by not having us remove the wood chips from the site, 72.3% of the time they choose to keep them.

Hauling requires us to bring a dump trailer and sometimes a second vehicle. A whopping 72.3% of the time, all we need to bring to a saw job is a single van, where our mobile chipper fits inside. It is a reduction of expenses across the board: emissions, time spent, fuel spent, vehicles deployed per job, space taken up at a job site, etc. Inside our pruning van is our entire assortment of climbing, pruning and rigging equipment. All of it.

Lean practitioner

If you’re an arborist considering going into business to practice taking care of trees, I strongly urge you to exercise creativity in your business planning and equipping. Don’t just jump straight into going with the big-arb form factor.

Hopefully this article is some proof-of-concept that there is room to be creative in this space and that your clientele are ready for a more modern approach. They also really appreciate the commitment to making your practice better, instead of doing the same ol’ thing.

This industry is especially prone to the American “bigger is better” mentality, but we’ve found that smaller equipment isn’t necessarily under engineered. Sure, some is, but there are top-of-the-line small chippers that have all the functions that large chippers have, and then some. For example, our small chipper is a self-propelled mobile unit. One of the many benefits of a smaller chipper is, when pruning backyard trees, the drag path is only feet away from where the client wants the mulch pile.

When you don’t have $80k to spend on a chipper, you can still purchase a brand-new machine at a fraction of that cost. The small chippers we’ve owned have each been worth their weight in gold. And the same goes for our vans. Also, smaller equipment and vehicles are easier to maintain and are more affordable. And if you plan to focus on taking care of trees, you probably don’t need a gigantic chipper. We don’t.

We understand the limitations of having a smaller rig; we can’t take down big trees or chip larger pieces of wood. Fine. We’re equipped for the work we want to do, not the work we have to do to pay off big machines or a massive crew. When you do proper weight reduction, you’re seldom making cuts greater than 6 inches in diameter. And there are plenty of dedicated tree-removal companies around our work area.

Practitioner business model

We want to keep trees around by reducing their risks and stress, and the costs and equipment for these things are simply much less than the traditional big-arb stuff. And you don’t need a huge crew to practice preservation. Tree First has been run and operated by only myself and arborist Jack Novak for its entire existence. The practitioner approach is more difficult when a company is built with a traditional big-arb mindset.

This model works for us in our area because of our eco-centric approach and our intentional choice in equipment. It only works because we work in that way; we advocate for nature through our practice. If you work in the spirit of preservation, this can work for you, too. Of course, this doesn’t work if you’re only interested in removing trees.

I always say the quality of the work is only as good as the hand that cuts – or sometimes, the hand that doesn’t cut. The big-arb approach has compartmentalized and separated the roles of the arborist into many different roles: climber, PHC tech, salesperson, etc. The practitioner is all of those roles. There is no loss in communication with the clients because we are the ones making the plan with them and we are the ones working on the tree. Clients love this, and we have become good students of arboriculture in the process.

It is more work to be a practitioner. It takes time to hone the craft. But then again, arborists like challenges.

Conclusion

This experiment has been amazingly fun and rewarding, and I wouldn’t want any other good arborists to hesitate about going on your own. There are many examples of why the practitioner model can be a successful business model for those who want to eco-centrically practice, and who actually want to practice tree care and be about it.

If you’re an aspiring practitioner, I encourage you to reach out to us. Jack and I have spoken to plenty of arborists about our project, and we’re happy to share and advise.

Jeremiah Sandler, BCMA, is owner of Tree First Arboriculture in Ferndale, Michigan.