Wow i was pleasantly surprised to see this post brought back up in my email. I was the one who originally started the post and man that was a long time ago. (2010!!) Its crazy how things change over the years. It seems like it is becoming harder and harder to make a good living doing tree work, but I think there is a ton of room for innovation. Teamtree I agree with you that we should be charging more, but then again we have to bid against each other and unless we all do it, the people with lower prices tend to win that game. Someone was telling me the other day about tree work in Fort Collins, CO and they were saying that most of the larger companies have somewhat of a typical rate for services that was much higher than here in Denver. Now of course that could be just hearsay, but I thought it would be pretty cool. Maybe we could unionize and demand higher rates....just kidding that would be a horrible idea. When I originally posted this I was running a 4 man crew and we were doing around $2000 per day. But honestly ever since then we have diverged from the typical tree model and we have seen some great results. Lets face it, nobody likes to go work their tails off every day with only one or two other guys....it gets boring! What we have done for the last few years is continue to make our one crew larger and larger, while also upping the daily money goals. Most companies just start new crews (which if we were honest is just another way to put a notch on our professional belts!!). One of my climbers was telling me the other day about a well respected company in town he used to work for and when I asked him how many climbers they run every day, he told me 4. But he said they also run 4 different crews with one climber/one groundsman with a goal of $1000-1200 per day. Guys let me tell you, thats a crappy way to work all day every day. So 8 guys have a goal of $4000-5000 per day, which is great but thats a lot of equipments, a lot of diesel and a lot of expenses! Why not do it a different way!! We now run 4 climbers every day, 2 groundsman and they all stay on the same crew and just go from job to job as quickly as possible, while still doing a good job of course. Our goal is $4200 per day, but I am only running 6 guys (sometimes 7), 2-3 trucks go out each morning(instead of 4-6 in a normal scenario) and they all get to have fun and joke and work together every day.
The funny thing is that I don't make any more profit(percentage wise) than I used to back a few years ago, but I guess seeing things grow and having the opportunity to provide more people with work is just fun....well at least most days!!
