"So what's your other job?"

shaggs

G'Day Ekka
Seems like there are alot of guys here like myself who either
1. Work a second job when trees are seasonal/slow
2. Work trees as a second job
3. Came to trees after a career change (ie mechanic)
4. Worked as a climber and now another part of the industry
5. Trees are only job
6. (add other type here)

I thought this may make a good poll (not sure how to do that poll thingo)

Sounds like there are alot of interesting and diverse jobs out there, and all these experiences bring a different focus on the industry.

Any chance of setting this up??

Cheers

Eric Frei

This is all I do, full time.

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JohN Dee

+1.

Fulltime - Overtime Job, all year round.

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Jeff Darby

Me aswell all year in and out.

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TrevMcRev

I work about 5 jobs - all doing trees!

Feels that way at times anyway.

Steve Tipton

Tree work and tower hire to tree people is my only job.
I wanted to be a gynacologist, but I was too tall............

newguy18

Depends.I do trees,I work on anything mechanical,carpentry,plumbing,roofing,electrical,remodeling,landscaping.i'll think of more jobs I've done and still do give me time.Oh eric I got a camera so I'll post some pics of trees in my area in the pic forum a little later.

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old schooler

shaggs

I've been in the tree game since 1988, as usual started draggin branches for the local guy for some $. Always had two jobs and have been a firefighter and paramedic for the past 15yrs. Love both jobs as they are very different but also crossover in alot of ways.
I guess you'd call trees my "1st job" as its that way on the tax records, brings in more money and takes up alot more time.
I work anywhere from 4-6 days/week on trees and rostered days/nights with the firies.
I employ an arborist as I have enrolled twice to do my cert III, but just get tooo busy and let it go.
This site has enspired me to once again enroll in 2008.......God help them!!!

olyman

im like newguy--got fingers in a lot of things--which sometimes causes near nothing to get done-------

ropensaddle

Tree man 100% but moonlight as a ladies man

Eric Frei

Hmmm, is that a pistol ya packing or ...?

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shaggs

Isn't that the job we all want???
I wonder what their workcover premiums are???

newguy18

Does it have medicare,a retirement plan,liability insurance?

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Therrin

Tree work pays all the bills.
Sellin firewood is the tree-related side job.

I do some welding for people around here on a semi-regular basis.

Once in a while my former boss contracts me to do high ropes course/rock climbing instructor work when they're short handed. They spent several years training me, re-training me, rescue training me.... then I started a tree business. At least all that training went to some good use...

I enjoy workin with people though, and teaching, so it's nice to do once in a while.

ronnyb

Tree work 50% and landscape/ planting 50 % of the time. Before this, I was a police officer. That was absolutely the worst job I've ever had.

shaggs

G'day Ronnie B
How long were you in the wallopers for??

TreeDimensional

My tree care business subsidises my farm, but I consider myself a farmer first as you got to plow when the time is right. We work trees year round but winter time is when we do the most pruning. We also prefer to do our large removals in the winter time as the impact to the yards is lessened, not to mention, you can dress for the cold but you can only undress so much for the heat. The older I get, the more cloths people want to see on me.

Summer is storm season here and we are kept busy enough doing storm work. Its NO fun working in a park with power lines and people all over the place, at least in the winter you only have to look out for the lines.

quercus

Same here. Occasionally I help out on technical climbs for riggers or crane companies as I was IRATA certified for a few years.But I only do this when I have the time for it. As a hobby I help installing rope courses for local youth clubs and summer camps for kids.

Eric Frei

Quercus, in Belgium can any ole idiot do trees or you have to be licenced or something?

We're flooded with hacks here, really screwed the market in the last few years. Then with the property boom every man and his dog has a 12" to 18" chipper (courtesy of equity loans), trees being done for 1990 prices.

How does it work where you are?

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bigshea13

same here. during last storm fema paid for homeowners to obtain saws. some bought chippers and used gear and began hacking. alot of those hacks moved on to become legit treemen yet some just learned enough to get by. those are the ones that screw things over here. one larger tree company in the area took on a hundred or so workers and began thier saga. they obtained many buckets and skidder buckets allowing any idiot to do tree work. I think anyone that gets into industry should first have to hip thrust his loser arse up a few trees before jumping in a bucket. bucket babies i call them. they watch us all week long climbing the off road spurs and taps, in vallys, over steep hills, in marshes, and back yards. sure its easy taking out trees and pruning from the comfort of a bucket.. I could go on and on but whats the point? these guys pick up a few tricks and the next thing you know they are "tree men" most cant even tell you the genus of the tree they are working on. this seems to be ok with state utilities as well as state agencies as they let it continue.

azrael

Does this mean there is significant down time, or idle days...or just that you have to quote cheaper to win jobs....are you still busy enough.
My Consulting is closely allied to the housing & development industry and economic 'security'...it's been on steady downward spiral for the past 18months..with development generally going very quiet....with a flow on effect to be felt later in the building trades I'm sure.
For me...when the demand isnt there...it's just not there....no matter what you charge...or how good you are at what you do.

Upside...there time to run around on the Tree world forums and or

quercus

When I started out people who wanted to start their own landscaping business or something related to it had to be certified. I worked in a landscaping company of a friend's father for a while, but then decided I wanted my own business and do what I've always wanted to do and that's working on trees. I couldn't stand the way these landscapers over here were treating them and realised that clients didn't know any better then to believe them. I worked for a few years in this landscaping business and therefore had the workexperience wich was required to start a related profession. There was simply no education for working on trees specifically available here so I started studying on my own. I had not much work the first year and so I worked a whole year to pay for insurance, a truck and a small trailer (at first I used my dad's SUV for that), my gear and tools and lived of what was left over for me, wich was not much. At first I did only what I thought myself capable of, dead-wooding, small removals, small pruning jobs... To get by I even did some other landscaping and garden maintenance work. Some for me, some for other company's as a subcontractor.At that time I was also active as a technical climber so that I could still do part of what I loved. I was attending every seminar, course, lesson, and everything that has to do with trees.Some of them gave me certificates and proof of education. So I got better and I got more tree work and my company got a little bit bigger to a certain point that I decided I wouldn't take anything other then tree work. I thought it'd be better off to know everything about something, then to know someting about everything, and I thought clients would appreciate this. In the meantime a certified education became available so I did that and became certified. That's when it actually hit me... People do not care around here if you are certified or not. They just want the cheapest and care for nothing else. So I set up a few information days and advertised for attending those. People came and during a four hour session they realised that trees are nothing to mess around with. You'd think that if they were educated, they would want a certified arborist to do the work. Instead of that, they hired a cheaper guy and told him what and what not to do on the trees. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. For some reason our lunatic government decided that there was no reason anymore to keep the certification required for this line of work. So they made our business available for anyone who has a chainsaw. Literally everybody can decide today that they want a landscaping or tree-care business tomorrow, and go to the registration desk where some papers have to be fulfilled, pay a registration fee of about 70 us dollars, and then you have your own business. This would take about thirty minutes. Ten minutes later you can start working. Then trouble began. Advertisings for so called tree-care started to pop up everywhere. Literally everybody started topping trees and so on and so on. Business became really hard for us as we tried to educate clients about tree-care and everything that's related to it. There were actually people advertising for tree-care here, and they didn't know the difference between an oak and a beach. Seriously... We literally had to start over again, because we had to compete with people who charge 12 dollars an hour. They could maintain this price, because they had no specialised gear or insurance or nothing. Business got better because we had our company name wich stood for, and got known for excellent work and we had more clients as time went by. So we were back in business again and had more work then we ever had. Then oil prices went up, firewood became a highly wanted product ,and now our ad's are between ten others who will do removals for free. We still have much work but there are only a few certified arborists in our area. Most arborists here compete with prices so almost no-one works together. It's also very cheap to hire aerial platforms here so the ability of knowledge on climbing is not so important. I'm actually the only certified tree-climber in a ten-mile radius, but when you see ad's of the hacks over here, it seems that everybody is an expert. We then started educating landscaping company's and they realised that they were better off with hiring us than to do it themselves. So after a while we got relatively much work from them. As a reward for working with us, we advertise for them everytime when we get the chance.We also introduced better prices for them as well. We know that there are company's who charge a lot more to the client than we ask, but we do not care for that. As long as we are getting what we ask it's fine for us. Some clients ask us if we can mow their lawn or install a porch or something like that and then we advertise for the businesses that we get work from, but only if we know for sure that they are quality-caring people who understand and know their line of work. Most of the time the clients are so happy and satisfied they hired us, that they hire the one we advertise for too to do other work. They realize that only qualified contractors work with qualified sub-contractors and they trust us so that's a good thing. At no point in time, we ever started topping or do unneccesary removals, to keep our business alive. Even if that meant that we had to stay home for a week with no income because of the fact that we had no work. We never removed trees for the fire-wood they produce, and are actually informing clients of the prices of this product nowadays. We say that we are not interested in the wood and that they better let some friend or relative who has a fire-place have it.Sometimes though clients demand that we remove everything from the job site, and I'm selling that wood, wich is not much, as firewood.
We keep preaching the good way to treat trees and to respect them, but price is a very large issue here. We now have certificates for everything that's about trees and our line of work. We're also very good insured for everything, even over the top insurance if I may say so. My regular groundie has no problem with staying home for a few days as he has a few gardens he can maintain for some elderly people. So if I have a spare day I help around for a company as a technical climber and I'm not sad about that.Also removals of vines on walls ,roofs and houses... If there's absolutely nothing else to do, I'm always climbing in my own trees, to try different techniques and to train some other climbers who are starting out. By doing so I hope I can make a change to the tree-care environment here and get different arborists to get to know each other and work with each other. On spare time I'm also doing maintanance on the machinery and gear. I keep everything spic and span so it'll last longer and it may save my life and that of others one day. Business keeps on growing though...We just bought a brand new chipper and we actually have high hopes for 2008. In this country trees are mostly seen as a problem. That has to change in every way possible. If it were my decision to make, I'd get everybody that buys a chainsaw go through a five day training course and sew everybody that tops a tree for everything they got!!! We're actually thinking about starting some sort of tree-health society that does nothing other than caring for tree health and start law-suits for those goddamn hacks and toppers we have around here. With the money we'd get, we could buy land and plant three times as many trees to compensate the loss.

azrael

Quercus...Your passion,, and high ethics are clearly evident....and you are pro-active to improve what is an unfair, unregulated & frustrating situation....and that is commendable.

Maybe there is room to lobby in the municipal arena for regulatory change...to keep standards high....and hacks out. Theres a plethora of world-wide opinion and cases in Treeworld that would substantiate the need for this sort of change...

Remember.....Word-of-mouth is powerful ... and whilst ever you do superior treework you will always have that hard-earned reputation as a preferred provider.

Good luck

TreeDimensional

Like azreal said, Stay true to your ethics. I have assisted in the education of home owners, who have been victomized by hacks. I have recieved more than I could ever have expected in return.

bigshea13

sounds as if you live right nrxt door to me. only your not going to get that type of response in this tight wad as*ed area of the world. people are just making it and as i said before... i gotta eat too. right now standing back looking at what my role in the whole scheme of it is , ive come to a conclusion.
right now my role is purely money motivated.I think it //I know it got this way out of ignorance. i started out 14 with a pair of bright orange chaps, safety glasses, gloves, and a 046 blocking up firewood that my father sold on the corner our town{ 50-100 face cord/year}hobby. we had a few woodlots of our own plus several others that friends andfamily let us use. got good with a saw quick. my father made maple syrup so we wade around threw snow gathering sap from the buckets we'd hung on the sugar maples around the house. later onin years we 'd drill and tap hundreds of maples routing the sap threw plastic tubing into large gathering tubs.from there it went to the sugar shack where we fed endless amounts of wood into the fire in order to keep the process going.needless to say there was always wood to be cut.
i started out going to college for enviromental studies{ limnology/stream ecology/watershed} i also had to take a course in dendrology. it was there i met a few fellas in the forestry studies. after classes they would clean their saws on the coffee table in the student lounge and practice their "lumberjack" skills in the training area in the back. it was there I got my first taste of climbing....on a pole with spikes. later as the year went on i was his ground man doing small side jobs to pay for keg money. he hooked em all and not a word was said by anyone. a few years later got into driving tractor trailers cross country.that was the worste job ive ever had. a position came up at a tree co a friend of mine worked at. they were looking for a person to grind 1200 stumps with thier machine. it was a large{cant remember how big}vermeer, all hydrolic in/out up/down ....top of the line. i took it and ground em all out in four weeks. they offered me a spot as aground man for a bucket crew working out of town. young and careless i took that too. it was not what i had expected. long hours dragging endless amounts of brush from up out of ditches, across yards, and feeding it piece by piece into machine that beat the bejeezus out of you as it went in. this went in for months until a climber from one of the off road crews asked to have me work with him. what a relief. this guy was great to me, always willing to show me and let me do it. anytime there was atree that was too big or dangerous for the other crews our offroad crew was sent to remedy the problem. we had full range of all sorts of equipment.
the jobs were bid by the company to trim and remove trees in right of ways around the state for the utilities. the jobs were overseen by regional managers who placed general foreman in charge of specific job areas. the 1general foreman oversees the foremen who over see the journeymen and the rest of the crew.each job has a defined price tag on it. from the reg man to the gen foremen they try huryy the job along to increase profits. many got bonuses for work done ahead of schedule. some guys were taking home 10k bonuses on a 6month job. guys clearing large portions of line were also recieving bonuses and time off. another perk of being on a productive crew was the use of the bucket trucks after work to do "buzz" jobs. busy like little bees doing sidejobs for locals. sometimes depending on where we were working id go home with extra 6-8 hundred dollars extra in my pocket. many times we d have trees to do in back yards or enclosed in a fence. for those we put on our hooks and climbed em never giving it a second thought. why would i? Id been hooking the right of way trees. I had to. they required a mile of line a week and some of it was heavily grown over. limbs growing threw the conductors and around transformers. sometimes it was so thick that gas fumes from the saws on the ground burned your eyes because there was nowhere for them to go. our main objective was to clear as much line as possible without an outage or injury. our crew worked on our equipment the entire time. the other crews had the mechanics do it. as far as I could tell I was on the best crew in the line clearance buisness. the foresters were happy with our cuts and wind rows and that made the bosses happy. for me it seemed like the harder i worked the better things got, so away i went. took some courses, got a few certifications. before i knew it i was the joker running the job. and when i didnt have my own others were asking me to come to their job to climb. the jobs were filled with bucket babies. there were lotsa guys with hooks and saddles but few that could trim as much line as fast as me.
later on i go to work for the utilities themselves. to start the union gives me grief because of the limited time iv had in industry<less then 10yrs> the utility wants me working cause they ve already seen my work.the union send me to a climbing camp run by the utilities own in house guys. they start off by handing out saddles, ropes, and yep you guessed it hooks. they were so impressed with my ability to climb that i actually ended up doing the demonstrations myself.
I eventually went back to work for a contractor and got into large removals and danger trees. big trees-big pieces-bigmoney. out of the dozens of foresters id run into across the state, not one had ever expressesed distaste of hooking. every off road crew id ever seen were using spikes to clear lines and id seen close to a hundred.
over the years ive developed a concience. i try to inflict as little harm as possible. but when times are tough and work is not plentiful i find myself having to do sidejobs cheaper and cheaper and with the rising cost of insurance...ouch!. my rational: if not me...then someone else. and hell, i can climbup that tree{with spikes}, give it a trim and shape and be back on the ground in no time so yeah ill do it for peanuts ,never once considering the possibility that im part of the problem. for the nickles i get for work i aught to spent the time doing something to correct the problem instead of being part of it. ive decided to study for and get certified. from here on out trees before money except in dangerous situations. I have done my fair share of hookless climbs so that wont be new. Im going to spend the summer working somewhere out of ny while i get ready for and find a test site.
hopefully sometime in the near future i too will be able to say that im doing my part. ignorance is no excuse and after joining this site i no longer have ignorance as an excuse. theres more to it than$



ps sorry about queer kiss hit. i could have said fagus

Therrin

Asplundh and Tip Top are the only tree services I know of in this county. Haven't met any other climbers. Even up in the actual forested areas, not just the city. Guess if I'm one of two or three one-man banders in the entire area, that isn't so bad

How does one get a start out where you guys are? Do most of you end up learning from having been or being in some type of tree company? I haven't heard much good about either of the local services, so if I'm doin quality work then it lets my sense of propriety rest easy concerning any jobs they're losing due to me.

bigshea13

if your into treework here chances are you started out in utility line clearence. most of the time they hire idiots to drag and chip brush who later fill vacant bucket spots. very few actually climb and when they do they are small solo trees. ive worked in almost if not every county in ny and its the same in every one. these people would rather cut a road to get in skidder bucket rather than climb 20-30 trees. when i get certified ill have to stay out of ny if i want to work, somewhere they value thier trees more.

DBS

1) Owner/Operator of a full service Building and Remodeling Co.

2) Owner Operator of a full service Landscape Co.

3) pretty much anything else too... not much i dont do. When I cant do something i am the 1st to back off and have whomever is qualified to do what needs to get done.


-Daryl

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Steve Tipton

Quecus,
It seems to be the story all around the world about people caring more about price than quality for tree care, with some exceptions.

Oddly, landscape contractors in NSW, Aust, need to be licenced, but anyone can do tree work here????????????
Steve

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newguy18

Same here if you are a handyman and you are licensed you can do anything including treework excluding line clearance.

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old schooler