PART ONE:
THE VISION
What This Is
I wrote this document for anyone who wants to understand what TreeShop is building and why it matters — whether you run crews and fight equipment in the woods while wondering why sixty-hour weeks still leave you sweating payroll, or you’re a customer trying to figure out why one company quotes $6,500 and another quotes $15,000 for what appears to be the same job, or you’re an employee showing up every day and getting better at what you do while remaining stuck at the same pay with no clear path forward.
TreeShop was built for all three of you, and the system we’ve created treats each stakeholder as equally important because the moment you prioritize one group’s needs over another, you introduce the kind of imbalance that eventually corrupts the entire operation.
The Problem No One Wants to Name
The tree care industry in America operates on a foundation so fundamentally cracked that everyone inside it has simply learned to work around the damage rather than address it, and the consequences of that collective avoidance have compounded over decades into a situation where the professionals who do excellent work get lumped in with the weekend warriors, where pricing has no relationship to actual costs, and where skilled workers have no pathway to build careers rather than just collect paychecks.
For operators: The pricing process at most tree companies involves driving to a property, looking around, thinking about what similar jobs have cost in the past, factoring in how busy the schedule looks this month, making some intuitive assessment of whether the customer seems like they have money, and then throwing out a number that feels approximately right while hoping the math works out in the end. This approach, which passes for standard practice across the industry, explains why 82% of small businesses fail due to cash flow problems — a statistic that reflects not a lack of hard work or technical knowledge but rather an absence of systematic pricing methodology that connects what you charge to what things actually cost.
For customers: You currently have no reliable way to evaluate who is actually competent at this work, which means when you collect three quotes that differ by thousands of dollars, the only comparable metric is the price itself, and so you either choose the cheapest option while hoping it works out, or you choose the most expensive option while hoping that quality correlates with cost, and either way you’re making a decision based on hope rather than information because the industry has given you nothing else to work with.
For employees: The skills you’ve developed over years of showing up and doing good work have no standardized way of translating into career advancement, which means you might be making the same wage after a decade that someone with two years of experience makes, and the reason for that stagnation has nothing to do with your abilities and everything to do with an industry that never built frameworks for recognizing and compensating progressive expertise.
I’ve spent enough time watching these patterns destroy good businesses, frustrate good customers, and trap good workers that I decided to stop accepting the situation as normal and start building systems that actually solve the underlying problems.
What TreeShop Is Building
The systems we’ve developed serve everyone equally because I recognized early on that any solution which extracts maximum value from customers, or squeezes employees to increase margins, or enriches owners at the expense of quality, would eventually fail in ways that damage everyone involved — including the people who seemed to benefit in the short term.
When I built the Mulching Score formula, the goal was never to figure out the maximum amount I could charge but rather to create a calculation that accurately reflects the actual work involved in any given project, and the formula itself emerged from years of tracking every job, every hour, every variable that affects how long forestry mulching takes under different conditions across different property types throughout Central Florida.
The result is a pricing system where customers pay for exactly what they’re getting, where operators know their costs are covered and margins protected, and where crews can trust that timelines are realistic because they’re based on validated production data rather than optimistic guessing — and nobody in that transaction needs to scrape or negotiate or wonder if they’re getting a fair deal because the math produces the same answer regardless of who’s asking.
The Three Stakeholders
Every transaction in this industry involves three parties whose interests have traditionally been positioned as competing against each other: the customer who has land and goals and a budget and needs work done, the company that owns equipment and carries insurance and maintains systems and makes the work possible, and the employees who actually perform the labor with skills they’ve developed over years of practice.
In the broken version of this industry that we’ve all grown accustomed to, customers try to pay as little as possible while companies try to extract as much as possible while employees try to earn more even as companies try to minimize labor costs, and the result is an adversarial dynamic where every transaction feels like a fight and trust becomes impossible to establish.
TreeShop operates on a different principle entirely, one where the customer’s needs hold no more importance than the company’s needs, and the company’s needs hold no more importance than the employee’s needs, because when you build systems with genuine equality between all parties, something interesting happens: the solutions become pure in a way that makes them self-correcting and resistant to the kind of corruption that plagues traditional business models.
The only way to break a system built on equality is through deliberate greed or intentional fraud, because the system itself contains no inherent drift toward exploitation — that tendency simply isn’t baked into the design, which means the formulas and frameworks continue working fairly as long as nobody actively corrupts them.
I’ve tested this extensively across hundreds of jobs over multiple years, and I can tell you with confidence that the approach works in practice the same way it works in theory.
Why the Industry Is Resisting
Change encounters resistance in any industry, and I understand why someone who has priced by gut feel for twenty years might initially dismiss a system built on formulas and production rates and mathematical precision — the instinct to defend familiar methods runs deep, and the claim that tree work can be systematized sounds implausible to people who have experienced the infinite variability of field conditions.
I’ve heard every version of the objection: that every job is different, that you can’t put tree work in a spreadsheet, that experience and intuition matter more than calculations, that this approach might work for simple jobs but falls apart when conditions get complex.
Rather than argue against those objections, I’ve chosen to simply run TreeShop on these systems and document what happens, because you can debate opinions forever but you cannot argue with results that are tracked and measured and verified across hundreds of real projects.
The data at this point speaks clearly: prediction accuracy above 97% on job timelines, quotes delivered in minutes rather than days, no change orders or surprise billing, and margins that actually sustain a professional operation capable of maintaining equipment and keeping good people and delivering consistent quality.
So I’m not spending energy fighting the resistance or trying to convince skeptics who have already decided the approach won’t work — instead, I’m going the transparent educational route where the system is documented, the math is visible, and the results are published for anyone who wants to examine them closely and poke holes in the methodology.
If you see something that doesn’t work, tell me and I’ll either fix the problem or explain why the system handles it the way it does, because this approach only improves through that kind of critical engagement.
And for anyone who recognizes the value and wants to learn the system, the door is open to join a growing network of operators who have decided they’re done with the broken status quo and ready to build something that actually works.
To the Customers Reading This
You deserve to understand what you’re buying before you buy it, which is why TreeShop quotes show the formula used to calculate the price, with all the inputs visible — acreage, DBH package, production rate, travel time — so you can trace exactly how the number was generated and verify the logic yourself if you’re inclined to do so.
This transparency reflects a fundamental belief that you should never have to guess whether a price is fair, and that any company which can’t explain why a job costs what it costs has no business charging you for the work.
Your role in this transaction is straightforward: tell us what you want done, tell us when you need it completed, review the site plan and proposal we send you, ask questions about anything that seems unclear, and then decide whether we’re the right fit for your project and your budget.
You’re not negotiating against us or trying to win anything — you’re evaluating whether our service matches your needs at a price that reflects real value, and if we’re not the right fit, we’d rather tell you that directly than take on work we can’t deliver well.
To the Operators Reading This
You already sense that something is fundamentally wrong with how this industry operates, and you feel that wrongness every time you scramble to make payroll after a job you thought was profitable, every time a customer asks why your quote is higher than some guy with a truck, every time you lose a good employee because you couldn’t justify a raise that your margins couldn’t support.
The problem has never been that you’re bad at this work — you know trees, you know equipment, you know how to get jobs done under difficult conditions.
What you probably never learned, because nobody in this industry teaches it systematically, is what your equipment actually costs per hour when you factor in depreciation and fuel and maintenance and insurance, or what your employees truly cost when you add payroll taxes and workers comp and benefits to their hourly wage, or what margin you actually need to sustain operations and fund equipment replacement and build wealth rather than just survive from job to job.
That gap in knowledge represents an industry-wide failure rather than any individual shortcoming, and TreeShop exists specifically to close it by providing formulas that are already built, systems that are already tested, and results that are already documented across years of real-world application.
You can keep grinding the way you’ve always done it, and I pass no judgment on that choice, but if you’re tired of the uncertainty and ready to build something sustainable, we should have a conversation.
To the Employees Reading This
You deserve a career with a clear trajectory rather than a job that keeps you stuck at the same level regardless of how much you learn and grow.
The TreeShop Employee Code System exists because I watched too many skilled workers get trapped in situations where climbers with a decade of experience made the same wage as people with two years, where equipment operators holding multiple certifications earned no more than someone who just learned to run a skid steer, and where advancement depended on favoritism and negotiation rather than demonstrated competence.
The code system addresses this by defining every position along clear tracks where each tier has specific requirements, where every qualification adds to compensation in documented and portable ways, and where a code like TRS4+S+E3+D3+CRA carries the same meaning at any company using the system.
Your skills become transferable credentials, your certifications become recognized currency, and your career becomes something you can build intentionally through specific developmental steps rather than just hoping your employer notices your value and decides to reward it.
The Battle Cry
The tree care industry generates approximately $40 billion annually in the United States while employing hundreds of thousands of people and serving millions of property owners, which means it matters economically and socially and environmentally in ways that deserve recognition.
And an industry that matters this much deserves better than guesswork pricing that bankrupts operators and confuses customers, better than a workforce with no career paths and no compensation standards, better than a race to the bottom on price that degrades quality and erodes the trust that professional relationships require.
TreeShop represents the professional rescue this industry needs — not because I’ve figured out secrets nobody else could access, but because I’ve done the systematic work of tracking data and building formulas and testing approaches over years of real operations, and I’m willing to share everything I’ve learned with anyone who wants to build something better than what currently exists.
The system is built and running, the proof is documented and verifiable, and the door is open to anyone — operator, customer, or employee — who wants to be part of what comes next.
PART TWO: THE SOLUTIONS
How We Fixed It
Everything described in this section operates in production right now, running every quote TreeShop sends, every project we deploy to, every job we complete — which means the concepts have moved past theory into documented practice with measurable results. To be clear: THIS IS 100% of the revenue. REAL projects. REAL fiat currency being traded for my time, labor, and costs.
I’m sharing this openly because the industry needs access to systems that actually work, and because the only way to prove an approach is sound is to let people examine it closely enough to identify any weaknesses.
1. Business Operations
The Pricing Problem
The pricing process at most tree, mulching, land clearing companies follows a pattern so familiar that nobody questions whether it makes sense: a customer calls, you drive out and walk the property, you think about what similar jobs have cost in the past while factoring in how busy you are this month and making some intuitive assessment of the customer’s budget, and then you generate a number that feels approximately right while hoping the actual costs don’t exceed whatever you quoted.
This approach, which the entire industry has accepted as normal, represents a form of gambling where you’re betting your margins and your payroll and your equipment maintenance fund on guesses that might or might not reflect reality — and the 82% small business failure rate due to cash flow problems tells you exactly how often those bets go wrong.
What We Built Instead
The Mulching Score emerged from recognizing that acreage alone tells you almost nothing about actual work volume, because an acre of light brush and an acre of mature hardwoods represent completely different amounts of labor despite having identical parcel footprints.
The formula calculates work volume by combining acreage with vegetation characteristics:
Mulching Score = DBH Package × Acreage
Production Hours = Mulching Score ÷ Production Rate
Total Hours = Production Hours + Travel Time
Buffered Hours = Total Hours × 1.10 (accounting for real-world variability)
Project Cost = Buffered Hours × Billing Rate
A concrete example: 3 acres at 6-inch DBH Package, At TreeShop this is Medium. This project vegetation produces a Mulching Score of 18, which divided by 1.3 yields 13.85 production hours, plus 2 hours of travel time brings us to 15.85 hours, and applying the 10% buffer gives us 17.44 total hours, which at $500/hour produces a project cost of $8,720.
That number emerges from the formula every time you run it with those inputs, which means the customer gets the same price regardless of which day they called or how busy our schedule looks or whether they seemed like they had money — the math produces the answer, and the answer is fair because it reflects actual work volume priced at rates that sustain professional operations.
The DBH Package System
The question “how much per acre?” contains a fundamental flaw because it treats all acres as equivalent when they’re obviously not, and the difference between clearing brush versus clearing mature hardwoods can mean 150% more work on identical acreage.
Our packaging system addresses this by categorizing jobs according to the largest vegetation that needs clearing:
4-inch Package (Small): Vegetation no thicker than a softball at chest height, typically light brush, saplings, and palmetto.
6-inch Package (Medium): Vegetation up to the diameter of a gallon milk jug, typically small trees and dense Florida brush.
8-inch Package (Large): Vegetation up to the diameter of a salad plate, typically mature understory and medium hardwoods.
10-inch Package (X-Large): Vegetation up to the diameter of a dinner plate, typically large trees and heavy growth.
You select the package based on your largest vegetation, and we clear everything up to that size, which means the price reflects the actual work rather than a guess about what “density” means.
The Framework for Customer Negotiations
When customers enter a negotiation, they have legitimate control over two variables: the scope of what they want done and the timeline for when they need it completed.
Everything else — the cost of equipment operation, the burden rate of labor, fuel prices, insurance premiums, margin requirements for sustainable operations — exists as mathematical reality that doesn’t change because someone asks nicely or because you’re worried about losing the job.
If a customer wants to adjust the price, the conversation should focus on which of their two variables they’re willing to modify: reducing scope lowers the Mulching Score and therefore the price, extending the timeline might allow scheduling during lower-demand periods, but the underlying cost structure remains what it is regardless of how the negotiation goes.
The moment you start reducing price without corresponding changes to scope or timeline, you’re not negotiating — you’re transferring money from your profit to their pocket, which might feel like customer service but actually represents a failure to understand that your costs stayed exactly the same while your revenue dropped.
Consider the math: if a job requires $1,000 in profit to sustain your operations and you knock $500 off because the customer seemed nice or you really wanted the work, your costs didn’t absorb half that discount — they remained fixed, which means you just paid $500 for the privilege of doing the job, and no business survives long operating on that model.
YOU DID NOT EARN $500 less simply because you charged $500 less. That is a secret cost that you need to be honest about. Understand who paid that $500 of fair value that was there. Someone did, if it wasn’t the customer, it was you.
2. Workforce
The Career Problem
Any tree care job site in America displays the same scene that has played out for decades: crews of workers with no clear advancement path, minimal training standards, and compensation that bears little relationship to their actual skills or the value they create, all operating within an industry that has clung to a medieval “apprenticeship” model while every other sector has built systematic approaches to workforce development.
The consequences show up in skilled climbers making the same wage after five and ten years that they made after two, in companies that can’t scale because they have no way to systematically develop stability, and in a general sense across the industry that tree work is a job you take rather than a career you build. No one else will hire you? Go work for tree companies. Lol. Literally. Trees or Paving or Concrete…. It’s all the same story.
The Employee Code System
Rather than accepting the generic category of “tree guy” as the only way to describe workers in this industry, we created 16 distinct specialization paths that cover every aspect of modern tree care operations:
Field Operations: Arboriculture & Tree Care (ATC), Tree Removal & Rigging (TRS), Forestry & Land Management (FOR), Land Clearing & Excavation (LCL), Mulching & Material Processing (MUL), Stump Grinding & Site Restoration (STG), Emergency & Storm Response (ESR), and Landscaping & Grounds (LSC).
Equipment & Maintenance: Equipment Operations (EQO) and Maintenance & Repair (MNT).
Business Operations: Sales & Business Development (SAL), Project Management & Coordination (PMC), Administrative & Office Operations (ADM), Financial & Accounting (FIN), Safety & Compliance (SAF), and Technology & Systems (TEC).
Dynamic Qualification Coding
The code system captures everything an employee brings to the table in a format that travels with them and means the same thing at any company using the system.
An employee coded as TRS4+S+E3+D3+CRA+ISA carries documented credentials showing Tree Removal Specialist at Tier 4 (representing 3-5 years of proven experience), plus Supervisor qualification (meaning they can lead crews and make field decisions), plus Advanced Equipment Certification (covering bucket trucks and complex rigging), plus CDL Class A (allowing them to drive anything you own), plus NCCCO Crane Certification, plus ISA Certified Arborist status.
That code represents portable credentials that any company using the system can immediately interpret, which means skills become transferable, experience becomes documented, and the actual value that human being brings to the company becomes undeniable rather than dependent on negotiation or favoritism.
The Five-Tier Progression
Every track includes five tiers with specific requirements and corresponding compensation multipliers:
Tier 1 (0-6 months): Learning phase with close supervision, building fundamental skills, 1.6x multiplier on base rates.
Tier 2 (6-18 months): Demonstrated competence allowing reduced oversight, 1.7x multiplier.
Tier 3 (18 months to 3 years): Professional level with industry certifications and independent judgment, 1.8x multiplier.
Tier 4 (3-5 years): Advanced capability with leadership readiness and business awareness, 2.0x multiplier.
Tier 5 (5+ years): Expert status with strategic value and ability to train others, 2.2x multiplier.
The tier system means advancement follows documented criteria rather than depending on who complains loudest or who negotiated best during hiring.
The True Cost Reality
Understanding what employees actually cost — as opposed to what you pay them — determines whether your pricing can sustain operations or whether you’re slowly bleeding out while feeling profitable.
Consider an employee with the code EQO4+D3+OSH+E2 earning $45/hour: that $45 represents only the wage portion of what you’re actually spending, and the full cost calculation must include employer payroll taxes at approximately $4.84/hour, workers compensation insurance running 15-25% of wages in tree care (approximately $9/hour), and benefits plus insurance allocation adding roughly $13/hour — which brings the true hourly cost to $71.84.
If you’re billing that employee at $75/hour while thinking you’re making $30/hour profit, the actual margin is closer to $3/hour before you account for equipment, overhead, or anything else, and that gap between perceived profit and actual profit explains why so many tree companies feel busy and successful right up until they can’t make payroll.
Proper billing for a $45/hour employee should land in the $90-97/hour range minimum to achieve sustainable margins, and until you understand that math, every job you price contains a hidden subsidy flowing from your business to your customer. They will be loyal all the way to your bankruptcy… if you’re lucky.
3. Equipment & Fleet
The Hidden Cost Problem
Every operator knows exactly what they paid for their equipment, but very few can tell you what it actually costs per hour to run, and that gap between purchase price awareness and operating cost awareness creates the conditions for chronic underpricing.
Your equipment doesn’t just sit in the yard waiting to be used — it depreciates whether you run it or not, it requires insurance year-round, it accumulates maintenance needs with every operating hour, and it burns fuel and wears parts every time you deploy it.
The Six-Input System
We track six variables for every piece of equipment to calculate true hourly operating cost:
Usage Pattern: How many days per year does the equipment actually run, and how many hours per day when it’s working? Most operators wildly overestimate utilization, assuming a machine works nearly every day when the reality — accounting for weather, downtime, maintenance windows, and scheduling gaps — might be 180-200 days at 5-6 hours of actual runtime per day.
Purchase Price and Depreciation: What you paid and how long you’ll keep it, spread across actual operating hours rather than calendar time, because a machine that runs 1,000 hours per year depreciates per hour at a different rate than one running 1,500 hours.
Fuel Consumption: The actual burn rate for your specific engine, which you can find through manufacturer specs or tracking — my CAT 265 runs approximately 4.5 gallons per hour under typical operating conditions, which at $3.64/gallon means roughly $16.40/hour in fuel cost.
Maintenance: Annual maintenance typically runs 8-15% of purchase price depending on usage intensity and equipment type, spread across operating hours to get a per-hour allocation.
Insurance and Fixed Costs: Annual costs that don’t vary with usage, spread across operating hours to capture the per-hour impact.
Resale Reality: What you’ll actually get when you sell the equipment — not what you hope to get, but what comparable machines in similar condition are actually trading for — because overly optimistic resale assumptions distort your depreciation calculation.
Complete Equipment Cost Example
My CAT 265 breaks down as follows:
Depreciation: $7.78/hour (based on purchase price, expected operating hours over ownership period, and realistic resale value)
Fuel: $16.40/hour (4.5 GPH × $3.64/gallon)
Maintenance: $9.58/hour (15% of purchase price annually, spread across operating hours)
Insurance/Fixed: $2.33/hour (annual costs allocated to operating hours)
Total Operating Cost: $36.09/hour
That number comes from the inputs, and it tells you the minimum you need to recover per hour just to break even on the machine before you add operator cost, overhead allocation, or profit margin.
When you know your real equipment costs, you stop accidentally underbidding jobs because you thought the machine “only uses about $20/hour in fuel” or because you forgot that depreciation represents real money even though it doesn’t show up in your checking account as an expense.
The Loadout Concept
Different jobs require different combinations of personnel and equipment, and pretending that the same crew configuration works efficiently for every situation leads to either overspending on simple jobs or underequipping complex ones.
We call these job-specific configurations Loadouts, and each one has a calculated cost that rolls directly into pricing:
Light Maintenance Loadout: One ATC3+E2 technician at $89/hour true cost plus pickup and trailer at $31/hour equals $120/hour total cost, which at 30% margin becomes a $156/hour billing rate for pruning, consultations, and light work.
Standard Removal Loadout: TRS4+S lead at $115/hour plus EQO3+D3 operator at $77/hour, running bucket truck at $78/hour and chipper at $67/hour, equals $337/hour total cost, billing at $438/hour for most residential and commercial removals.
Premium Crane Loadout: Three specialized crew members totaling $327/hour plus crane and support vehicles at $167/hour equals $494/hour total cost, billing at $642/hour for complex removals, utility work, and technical operations.
When a customer calls, we match the Loadout to job requirements rather than guessing which crew to send, and the pricing follows automatically from the configuration because every component has a known cost.
4. Service Delivery
Why Acres Per Hour Fails
Most operators track production in acres per hour because the metric feels intuitive and provides an easy way to compare performance across jobs — and yet the metric contains a fundamental flaw that makes it nearly useless for accurate pricing.
An acre of 4-inch brush and an acre of 8-inch wood require completely different amounts of work despite having identical acreage, which means your “acres per hour” rate swings wildly depending on vegetation type, and a metric that swings wildly can’t serve as a stable foundation for pricing.
Inch-acres solves this problem by combining DBH limit with the acreage to get a work volume measurement that remains consistent across different vegetation types — you’re measuring the actual material being processed rather than just the footprint — and your production rate in inch-acres per hour stays stable enough to predict future jobs based on past performance.
Predicting Without Site Visits
I stopped doing preliminary site visits two years ago because the prediction system had become accurate enough to make them unnecessary for pricing purposes.
A recent project demonstrates the precision: 0.77 acres in Central Florida with a calculated Mulching Score of 4.62, divided by our production rate of 1.2 yielding 3.85 predicted hours of mulching work, plus travel time bringing the prediction to 4.35 total hours, against actual completion time of 4.0 hours — finishing ahead of schedule with accuracy above 97%.
This precision comes from having tracked hundreds of projects across varying conditions until the patterns became clear enough to model mathematically, and once you’ve measured enough and refined the formulas sufficiently, walking a property beforehand stops being necessary for pricing because the system already knows what the job will require based on inputs you can gather remotely.
The $500/Hour Rate
When customers hear “$500/hour” they sometimes assume the rate represents excessive profit, but the number reflects what professional forestry mulching operations actually cost to run rather than arbitrary margin-padding.
Consider what the rate covers: a forestry mulcher representing $300,000+ in capital that requires constant maintenance and eventual replacement, skilled operators who deserve fair compensation plus all the burden costs that employment actually entails, trucks and trailers to transport equipment, fuel costs that add up quickly even at 4-5 gallons per hour, insurance premiums that would make most people’s eyes water, software and GPS systems and safety equipment, and business overhead including office operations, administrative staff, marketing, and legal compliance.
After accounting for all of those real costs, the margin that remains is reasonable rather than excessive — just enough to sustain an operation capable of maintaining equipment properly, keeping experienced crews, and delivering consistent quality.
Lower rates typically signal that someone is cutting corners, underpaying workers, deferring maintenance, or operating without proper insurance — and those shortcuts create costs that show up eventually, just not on the initial invoice.
What’s Included and What’s Not
Every Mulching Score quote includes professional forestry mulching equipment with an experienced operator, all labor costs and travel time, round-trip transport with GPS-calculated drive times, complete on-site mulching and cleanup, and a 10% buffer for real-world field conditions that might affect timeline.
The quote does not include stump grinding (which uses a separate formula), off-site debris hauling (since forestry mulching processes material in place), or grading and dirt work (since we clear vegetation rather than reshape terrain) — and stating these exclusions clearly upfront prevents the confusion that arises when customers assume more is included than the quote actually covers. Believe me— the transformations are crazy enough.
5. Technology
The Current Mess
Most tree companies operate on a patchwork of disconnected systems where the CRM lives in one application while scheduling happens in another while invoicing occurs somewhere else while job photos end up in someone’s camera roll while notes get scribbled in a spiral notebook while communications happen via text messages that disappear into chat history.
The information required to run the business exists, but it’s scattered across so many locations that assembling a clear picture of any given job or customer or equipment asset requires hunting through multiple sources and hoping nothing important got lost in the gaps.
ShopOS
We built a single system that handles everything operations requires, with different interfaces for different users:
For customers via TreeShop.app: Instant estimates based on property address and DBH package, GPS-calculated travel time, transparent pricing with visible formula breakdowns, and proposals delivered in minutes rather than days. Read the articles I teach the pros with. See the industry exposed
For operations via ShopOS: Proposal generation with all the math built in, crew management with assignment and tracking and performance measurement, equipment tracking with maintenance schedules and utilization rates and true cost calculations, job costing showing real margins on every project, and mobile apps that let crews update from the field while the office sees everything in real time.
One system with everything connected means no more hunting through five applications to assemble information, no more wondering whether the latest version of something is in the CRM or the spreadsheet, and no more losing track of details because they were recorded in a place nobody thought to check.
The Efficiency Score
We track prediction accuracy across all jobs — the percentage of time that quoted duration matches actual duration — and TreeShop maintains 99% accuracy across measured projects.
That metric represents accountability in a form that can’t be faked: either your predictions match reality or they don’t, and a company that consistently predicts jobs within tight tolerances has demonstrated operational competence in a way that no amount of marketing language can manufacture.
Imagine an industry where every contractor had to publish their prediction accuracy based on audited job data — the companies that actually know their numbers would score well while the companies that lowball bids and then change-order their way to profit would generate records exposing exactly that pattern.
That future is part of what we’re building toward.
6. Safety & Risk
Certification Integration
The Employee Code System tracks certifications alongside skills — OSHA credentials, equipment qualifications, professional licenses — with all documentation verified and maintained within the system.
When ShopOS assigns crews to jobs, it checks certifications against requirements and prevents mismatches: you can’t put a Tier 2 operator on a crane job because the system recognizes the mismatch and won’t allow the assignment.
This enforcement represents risk management that protects everyone involved — the crew members who won’t be placed in situations exceeding their qualifications, the customers who won’t have underqualified people working their properties, and the company that won’t face liability exposure from improper crew deployment.
7. Customer Communication
The Price Question
When someone calls to say they received a quote for $6,500 while yours came in at $12,000 and asks whether you can match the lower number, the request usually signals confusion rather than aggression — they have no framework for evaluating why the quotes differ so dramatically, the only metric they can compare is the dollar amount, and they’re hoping you can help them understand what they’re missing.
Treating that situation as adversarial negotiation misses the point entirely, because what the customer actually needs is education about what’s included in each quote, what’s probably excluded from the lower one, and what consequences follow from those differences.
Once they understand the comparison clearly, they can make an informed decision — which might still mean choosing the cheaper option if they’re comfortable with the tradeoffs, but at least they won’t be surprised later when the job goes differently than they expected.
Documentation as Protection
The customers who get hurt most often in this industry are the ones who purchased on price alone without documentation establishing what they were actually buying:
No written scope defining the work included, no definition of done, no site plan showing boundaries and exclusions, no formula breakdown explaining how the price was calculated, no accountability framework if results don’t match expectations.
When underbid jobs go sideways — and they reliably go sideways — customers who bought based solely on a low number have nothing to reference, no documentation supporting their understanding of what was promised, and no leverage beyond their word against the contractor’s.
TreeShop provides detailed site plans before work begins, written scope with formula breakdowns, photo documentation throughout the project, and clear records of everything agreed — because a price alone offers no protection while documentation creates the accountability that both parties need.
8. Value & Pricing
The Race to the Bottom
The industry trained customers to expect cheap tree work through a cycle that has repeated for decades: a desperate operator needs work and underbids a job, does the work poorly or cuts corners to survive the margin squeeze, the customer ends up unhappy but figures at least it was cheap, and the next time they need work done they expect similar pricing — which attracts another desperate operator who underbids to win the job, perpetuating the cycle.
Everyone races toward zero, quality degrades, trust erodes, and the entire industry suffers reputation damage while professional operators struggle to explain why their pricing differs from the guy with a truck and a chainsaw.
The Fear Behind Price Matching
Requests to match competitor pricing typically originate in fear rather than strategic thinking — the customer fears getting ripped off or missing a better deal, and the contractor who agrees to match fears losing the job or looking overpriced.
Both parties making decisions based on fear rather than information produces outcomes that damage everyone: the customer doesn’t actually know whether the lower price represents equivalent service, and the contractor who dropped price just transferred profit margin without any assurance the customer will be satisfied or return for future work.
The alternative involves showing the math clearly enough that the customer can evaluate value rather than just comparing numbers — here’s what our quote includes, here’s how the formula produced the price, here’s what probably explains the difference from other quotes you received — and letting them decide based on understanding rather than anxiety.
The True Cost of “Cheap”
A realistic scenario that plays out constantly across the industry: a customer hires the $6,500 option instead of the $12,000 professional, and the consequences accumulate.
The cheaper contractor removes three magnolias the customer wanted to keep, destroying $15,000 in property value and aesthetic investment.
The same contractor clears into a wetland buffer they didn’t bother checking, generating a $15,000 state fine for unauthorized disturbance.
When the building inspector arrives, the site fails because root systems weren’t properly cleared, requiring remediation work costing $13,500.
Total cost: $50,000 — for a job where “saving” $5,500 on the initial quote triggered $43,500 in additional expenses.
The $12,000 professional quote was the bargain, but recognizing that required understanding what the price actually bought.
9. Industry Reputation
The Current State
Mentioning that you run a tree service at a social gathering produces a predictable reaction: people imagine a guy with a truck and a chainsaw, probably a little sketchy, who maybe underbid their neighbor’s job and did mediocre work that required cleanup by someone else.
The professional operators who maintain credentials, carry proper insurance, invest in equipment, and train their crews get lumped in with weekend warriors because customers have no reliable way to distinguish between them — everyone claims to be professional, everyone claims to do quality work, and the claims all sound identical regardless of whether they reflect reality. EVERYONE IS #1… just look at their Google Ads.
Separating Professionals from Everyone Else
The Employee Code System creates portable credentials that actually mean something verifiable: when someone coded TRS4+S+E3+D3+CRA+ISA shows up at a job, that code represents documented skills, verified certifications, and proven experience that any company using the system can interpret immediately.
When “some guy with a truck” shows up, there’s nothing to verify — just promises and claims that might or might not reflect reality.
As more companies adopt the system and more customers learn to look for codes, the credential becomes a differentiator that separates professionals from everyone else in ways that marketing language never could.
Transparency as Competitive Advantage
Shady operators depend on information asymmetry — customers not knowing what things should cost, not understanding what’s included versus excluded, not being able to compare quotes in any meaningful way.
Transparency destroys that advantage entirely, because when customers can see the formula and trace the math and understand exactly how a quote was generated, the companies offering real value win while the companies hiding behind vague pricing and lowball bids get exposed.
We publish our formulas and show our calculations precisely because we know the math is sound, and every competitor who can’t or won’t match that transparency reveals something about the foundation their pricing rests on.
10. Customer Experience
What Lacey Built
When you call TreeShop, Lacey answers — and the conversation goes differently than the typical contractor experience where someone takes your information and promises a callback that may or may not happen.
She listens to the story behind your land: why you bought the property, what you’re planning to build, what chapter of life this represents, what outcome you’re hoping to achieve.
Then she pulls up your parcel, checks wetland maps, reviews satellite imagery, and looks at any surveys or site plans you can share, drawing a site plan that shows exactly what we’re proposing to clear with access points marked and features noted that matter to your goals. She sends you the plan, you review it together, and alignment happens before any pricing discussion — because understanding scope clearly prevents the misunderstandings that create problems later.
Only after scope is confirmed does she provide pricing based on the formulas, with every number traceable to the math that generated it, typically within minutes of confirming the site plan.
The 6-Step Remote Assessment
Our quoting process follows six steps that can happen entirely remotely:
Satellite imagery review examining vegetation density, coverage patterns, and terrain features, looking for hazards like trash and such
DBH assessment identifying the appropriate package size based on largest vegetation requiring removal.
Wetlands verification checking official maps for protected areas that might affect the project.
Access evaluation ensuring equipment can reach all work areas efficiently.
Site plan development creating a visual representation of the proposed clearing with relevant details marked.
Package matching and pricing calculating the quote using Mulching Score formula with all inputs documented.
Most companies require site visits before quoting because they lack systems to assess properties remotely — we can quote in minutes with just a property address because the formulas work from inputs available through imagery and databases.
Why This Matters
The typical land clearing experience involves calling multiple companies where one never calls back, another shows up a week later and eventually emails a vague estimate that turns out to be wrong once work begins, and the third gives a number on the spot that bears no relationship to the final invoice.
The TreeShop experience involves calling once, speaking with Lacey, receiving a site plan and quote within hours that includes the exact number along with timeline and everything included spelled out clearly — and if you approve, we schedule, we show up when we said we would, we finish when we predicted, and the invoice matches the quote.
That shouldn’t feel revolutionary because it represents basic professionalism, but the industry bar sits low enough that basic professionalism stands out.
What This Adds Up To
Ten categories of persistent problems, ten categories of working solutions.
The systems don’t require complicated technology that demands an IT department, or expensive consultants who disappear after the engagement ends — they require willingness to measure things accurately, apply math consistently, and trust the formulas rather than falling back on guesswork when the numbers feel uncomfortable.
The results are documented across years of real operations: the math works, the predictions hold, the margins sustain professional operations.
The question facing anyone in this industry is whether to keep doing things the old way — the guessing, the gambling, the grind that never quite builds wealth — or to learn systems that actually produce predictable, sustainable results.
PART THREE: THE VISION FORWARD
The MoneyBall Rules for Tree Care
After years of gathering, processing, studying, and deploying data from tree care operations — tracking hundreds of jobs across varying conditions, companies, customers, measuring what actually drives profitability versus what people assume drives it, and testing whether conventional wisdom holds up against documented results — I’ve identified nine principles that govern profitable tree care operations regardless of company size, geographic market, or service specialization.
I wrote about this in the MoneyBall Article but I figured it deserved to be in here as well.
These principles emerged from the same approach that transformed baseball: the recognition that an industry full of experienced practitioners can still be systematically wrong about what matters, and that careful measurement often reveals opportunities invisible to intuition alone.
Rule #1 — The Pitcher Rule (Leadership)
Data sets the pace while intuition follows the count.
The pitcher controls the rhythm of every game, and in a well-run tree care operation, accurate data performs the same function by establishing the tempo for every decision that follows. Before making strategic choices about pricing, hiring, equipment purchases, or market expansion, you need reliable numbers showing your true production rates across different job types, your actual costs including all the hidden burden that most operators ignore, and your real profit margins on completed work rather than the margins you assumed when you quoted. Intuition developed over years of field experience remains valuable, but it works best when calibrated against measured reality — confirming the patterns you’ve sensed, correcting the assumptions that felt true but weren’t, and revealing opportunities your gut never noticed because they contradicted what the industry taught you to expect.
Rule #2 — The Catcher Rule (Operations Management)
See the whole field and call the right play.
The catcher occupies the only position on the field facing outward toward all the action, which creates responsibility for reading situations and directing responses across the entire defensive operation. Operations management in tree care requires the same comprehensive visibility: systematic documentation of job conditions, crew performance metrics, equipment issues as they develop, weather impacts on productivity, customer feedback patterns, and every other variable that affects whether work proceeds smoothly or encounters friction. Most operators document sporadically if at all, capturing information when problems force attention but missing the baseline data that would reveal patterns before they become crises — which means they’re constantly reacting to situations they could have anticipated if they’d been measuring consistently.
Rule #3 — The First Base Rule (Fundamentals)
Master the basics before swinging for home runs.
First base represents the foundation that makes everything else possible, and runners who try to stretch singles into doubles before they’ve secured first base usually end up with nothing. Tree care operations fail most often not from attempting sophisticated strategies that didn’t work but from neglecting fundamentals that should have been automatic: accurate estimating based on real cost data, consistent safety protocols followed on every job rather than just when someone’s watching, reliable equipment maintenance that prevents breakdowns rather than responding to them, and basic financial tracking that shows where money actually goes.
The companies chasing the latest technology or the newest service offering while their core processes remain unreliable are building on sand, and no amount of innovation compensates for fundamentals that don’t function.
Rule #4 — The Second Base Rule (Efficiency)
Speed comes from eliminating wasted motion rather than moving faster. The runner advancing from first to second covers the same distance regardless of how efficiently they run, but the ones who reach base safely have usually optimized their path and timing rather than simply trying to move their legs faster. Operational efficiency in tree care follows the same principle: studying workflows to identify where time disappears, where crews wait for information or equipment or decisions, where jobs require return visits because something was missed, where administrative tasks consume hours that could go toward billable work.
The impulse when business feels slow is to push harder — more calls, more quotes, more hours — but the leverage usually lies in removing friction from existing processes so the same effort produces more output.
Rule #5 — The Third Base Rule (Precision)
The closer you get to home, the more details matter.
Reaching third base means you’ve done almost everything right, but the final ninety feet to home plate is where games get won or lost on details that seemed minor earlier in the play — the quality of the lead, the read on the pitcher, the timing of the break. Tree care operations approaching profitability often lose margin in the final details: the extra trip to the supplier because someone forgot materials, the callback because cleanup didn’t meet expectations, the invoice adjustment because the quote didn’t specify what was excluded, the equipment repair that could have been prevented with scheduled maintenance. Measuring and optimizing the details that others ignore — the ones that seem too small to matter until you calculate their cumulative cost — often produces more profit improvement than chasing larger opportunities that everyone already recognizes.
Rule #6 — The Shortstop Rule (Adaptability)
Position yourself where the data says the work will be, not where tradition says to stand. The shortstop’s value comes from reading situations and positioning accordingly rather than standing in the same spot regardless of batter, count, or game situation — and the best shortstops use data about hitter tendencies to gain positioning advantages invisible to spectators. Tree care markets shift constantly as demographics change, development patterns evolve, storm seasons vary, and economic conditions alter what customers prioritize — and operators who position based on what worked five years ago rather than what current data indicates will find themselves increasingly misaligned with where opportunities actually exist. Tradition carries weight because it reflects accumulated experience, but experience from different conditions may not transfer to current reality, and the willingness to reposition based on evidence rather than habit separates operations that adapt from those that gradually become irrelevant.
Rule #7 — The Left Field Rule (Hidden Value)
Find profit in the work others avoid or undervalue. Left field sees less action than other positions, which means left fielders who excel have usually found ways to create value in situations other players consider unimportant — better reads on unusual plays, superior positioning for specific hitters, willingness to make catches others wouldn’t attempt. Every tree care market contains work that most operators avoid because it seems unprofitable, difficult, or unfamiliar: the small jobs that feel like a waste of mobilization, the complex situations that require more planning than most companies want to invest, the service types that don’t fit standard workflows. Operators who develop systems to handle this avoided work profitably often find themselves with access to revenue streams that face minimal competition, customer relationships that competitors never pursue, and market positions that prove surprisingly defensible.
Rule #8 — The Center Field Rule (Strategic Vision)
See the entire field and anticipate where the industry is heading. Center field provides the widest view of the game, and the center fielder bears responsibility for seeing plays develop across the full width of the outfield while communicating positioning to corner outfielders who have narrower perspectives. Strategic vision in tree care requires the same comprehensive awareness: understanding not just your immediate market but the forces reshaping the broader industry, recognizing how technology and regulation and labor dynamics and customer expectations are evolving, and positioning your operation to benefit from changes that will affect everyone. Most operators focus so intensely on immediate operational demands that they never lift their heads to see where the industry is moving, which means they’re perpetually surprised by shifts that were visible years in advance to anyone watching the full field.
Rule #9 — The Right Field Rule (Execution)
Consistency wins more games than spectacular plays. Right field produces fewer highlight-reel catches than center field, but right fielders who execute fundamentals consistently — making routine plays routinely, hitting cutoff men accurately, backing up bases reliably — contribute more wins over a season than players who occasionally do something spectacular while botching basics. Tree care operations that build systems delivering predictable results outperform operations dependent on heroic efforts to overcome chronic dysfunction, even when the heroics occasionally produce impressive outcomes. The goal is not to occasionally exceed expectations through exceptional effort but to reliably meet commitments through systematic execution — showing up when scheduled, finishing when predicted, invoicing what was quoted, maintaining quality that customers can depend on. Spectacular saves make good stories, but they usually indicate something went wrong earlier that shouldn’t have.
The Bottom Line
TreeShop is built on a belief about sequence that contradicts how most people think about business growth: stabilize the business first, before pursuing expansion or innovation or market share. When the business operates on stable foundations — pricing that covers costs and generates sustainable margins, systems that function without constant intervention, financial clarity about what’s working and what isn’t — employees gain access to what they need to succeed because the resources exist to provide proper training, equipment, compensation, and career development. When employees succeed in their roles with adequate support and clear advancement paths, customers get taken care of properly because the people doing the work have both the capability and the motivation to deliver quality. When customers get taken care of consistently, they return and refer and build the reputation that drives organic growth, which strengthens the business and completes a cycle that reinforces itself. This sequence matters: business stability enables employee success which enables customer satisfaction which enables business growth. Attempting to skip steps or reverse the order — chasing growth before achieving stability, or expecting employee performance without providing support, or demanding customer loyalty without earning it through consistent service — produces the chronic dysfunction that characterizes most tree care operations.
Everything else is distraction.
The Commitment
TreeShop operates without compromise on the principles in this document and without complicated technology that requires specialized expertise to maintain.
The commitment is to use technology and software in combinations that simplify workflows while increasing profitability, safety, and experience for everyone involved — not technology that impresses people but creates dependencies, or that solves problems nobody actually has, or that requires constant attention to function. The approach involves ignoring current industry expectations and resetting them based on what actually works, questioning beliefs and rules that have never been tested, and proving things repeatedly to ensure we haven’t accepted limitations that exist only because nobody challenged them. The tree care industry has operated for decades on assumptions that benefit nobody — not the operators struggling to build sustainable businesses, not the employees trapped in dead-end jobs, not the customers unable to evaluate who actually delivers quality.
We are done accepting that those assumptions represent the only way this industry can function.
Separating Professionals from Everyone Else
The pop-up weekend business model has dominated tree care for too long, and the industry’s reputation reflects that dominance: customers expect low prices and questionable quality because that’s what the market has trained them to expect, and professional operators struggle to differentiate themselves from competitors who undercut on price while cutting corners on everything else. TreeShop exists to create separation between professionals who want to build sustainable operations and weekenders or part-timers who treat this work as a side hustle rather than a career. That separation happens through transparency — publishing formulas, showing math, documenting results — because transparency creates accountability that operators hiding behind vague pricing cannot match. It happens through credentials — the Employee Code System that gives skilled workers portable proof of their qualifications — because credentials allow customers to evaluate competence rather than just comparing prices. It happens through systems — the operational frameworks that produce consistent, predictable results — because systems reveal themselves in outcomes that customers can verify rather than promises they have to trust. We do not agree with shady business practices, and rather than simply complaining about them, we are building the solutions that make them obsolete and running TreeShop on those solutions to prove they work under real-world conditions.
What’s Available Now
TreeShop (the operation) — Forestry mulching and land clearing throughout Central Florida, running on every system described in this document. We deploy the formulas, use the employee codes, track the metrics, and publish the results because the system only proves itself through actual operations, and anyone evaluating what we’ve built deserves to see it functioning under real conditions rather than just reading about how it’s supposed to work.
ShopOS (the SaaS) — A B2B platform for tree service operators that handles the operational workflow from proposal to payment without requiring operators to become software experts or stitch together a dozen different applications. The platform reflects everything we’ve learned about what tree care operations actually need: proposal generation with built-in cost calculations, crew management with qualification matching, equipment tracking with true cost visibility, job costing with accurate margin analysis, and mobile access that keeps field crews connected to office operations.
The Founding Member Program — Direct collaboration with me to fix pricing, profit, and operations at your company using the systems TreeShop has developed and validated. Founding members get early access to everything we’re building, input on features and frameworks, and ongoing support as they implement changes to their operations. This isn’t a course you watch or a certification you earn — it’s working together to transform how your business actually functions.
The Choice
The tree care industry faces a choice that every fragmented, traditional industry eventually confronts: evolve toward systematic operations or become increasingly obsolete as the operators who do evolve consolidate market share.
This is a $40 billion annual industry in the United States, and it remains fragmented precisely because most participants have never built the operational foundations that enable sustainable growth — which means the opportunity exists for companies that systematize excellence to capture positions that traditional operators cannot challenge.
The forces driving this consolidation are already visible: chronic labor shortages that make employee development and retention critical advantages, operational inefficiencies that compound into fatal margin compression, customer expectations shaped by transparency and accountability in other industries, and regulatory complexity that requires systematic compliance rather than hopeful avoidance.
The MoneyBall transformation of tree care operations isn’t approaching from some distant future — it’s happening now, in companies that have recognized the opportunity and built the systems to capitalize on it.
The question facing everyone in this industry is whether to lead that transformation or spend the coming years trying to catch up to competitors who moved first.
The Invitation
If you’re an operator who has read this far and recognized something in these pages that matches your own frustrations and aspirations, the door is open to learn the systems TreeShop has built and apply them to your own operation.
If you’re a customer who wants to work with a company that operates on transparency and accountability rather than vague promises and mysterious pricing, TreeShop serves Central Florida for forestry mulching and land clearing, and we welcome the opportunity to show you how the process differs from what you’ve experienced elsewhere.
If you’re an employee who wants to build a career in this industry rather than just collect paychecks until something better comes along, the credential system exists and the pathway is documented — whether you’re working with TreeShop directly or with another company that adopts these frameworks.
The systems are built. The proof exists. The results are documented.
What happens next depends on who’s willing to build alongside us.
Stop guessing. Start knowing.
TreeShop — The professional rescue this industry needs.
@MrTreeShop on X
Originally published on TreeShop Substack