Tree service companies

After a storm, the problem is not the calls you miss. It is the ones you take.

Two days after the wind, everyone with a limb down is ringing everyone with a chipper. Megan answers all of it, asks what is under the tree and whether a truck can get to it, and gets the jobs worth rolling on in front of you first.

Start Capturing Missed Calls →How it works

The wind dropped around four. By seven the phone had rung forty times.

You have not looked at most of them. You are standing in somebody's back garden looking up at a red oak that has split at a union about thirty feet up, with half of it resting on a garage roof and the other half still attached and moving slightly every time the wind gets up again.

The phone is going in your pocket while you are working out whether that is a crane job.

Here is what makes this trade different from everything else in this library. Every other page here is about the call that never got answered — the lead that went to a competitor, the customer who did not leave a message. Your problem after a storm is the opposite one. You have more calls than you can service, and the difficulty is not capturing them. It is that most of them are work you should not take.

There is a branch across a driveway that will take eleven minutes and cost you an hour of drive time. There is a woman whose neighbour's silver maple dropped a limb on her fence, who wants you to tell her whose responsibility that is, which is not a question you can answer and not a job you want in the middle. There is somebody who wants the wood left for firewood and the brush hauled, and somebody else who has already been told by his insurer that they will pay and has not read the part about which half. And somewhere in those forty calls are the two or three genuine removals — big wood, structure underneath, access for a truck — that will pay for the week.

You cannot find those by listening to voicemails at ten at night. And the people who own them are not going to wait, because by tomorrow morning there will be four companies with out-of-state plates parked on that street, knocking on doors.

That is the week the year is made or lost, and it is decided by a phone nobody is answering.

The calls

Eight callers, and after a storm you get all of them at once

The volume is storm work and small pruning. The money is planned removals and commercial contracts. Telling them apart in ninety seconds is the entire skill.

Transfers

The tree on the house

Something came through a roof, a conservatory, a car. The caller is rattled and frequently still inside. This is genuinely urgent, it is the highest-value storm work there is, and the first thing that needs establishing is whether anybody is hurt and whether there are wires involved.

Transfers

The hanger nobody has noticed yet

A limb broken but still up in the canopy, over a driveway or a play set. Homeowners describe it as "a branch that looks a bit odd" because they do not know what they are looking at. It does not feel urgent to them and it is the call you most want to reach you today.

Books

The planned removal

A dying ash, a silver maple too close to a foundation, something the customer has been meaning to deal with for two years. No urgency at all, high value, and completely determined by what is underneath and whether a truck can get in.

Captures the lead

The branch across the driveway

Eleven minutes of saw work and forty minutes of driving. Perfectly reasonable request, frequently a loss once the trip is counted, and much better handled by batching it near other work than by rolling a crew for it.

Screens

The neighbour dispute

"His tree dropped on my side." There is a legal question underneath it that varies by state and is not yours to answer, and there is usually a second property owner who has not agreed to anything. Worth identifying on the phone before anybody drives out.

Captures the lead

The insurance job

"My insurance is paying for it." Sometimes true, often partly true — the removal off the structure and the structure repair frequently sit differently from clearing the rest of the tree out of the yard. Getting the adjuster's status established early prevents a difficult conversation about a bill.

Takes a message

The municipal, utility or property-management contact

A right-of-way, a schedule of work across a portfolio, a campus. Route-dense, recurring, procurement-driven, and completely lost if nobody answers during business hours — which after a storm is precisely when you are in a tree.

Screens

The firewood caller

Not a customer. Somebody who wants your wood, or who is offering to take a tree down cheaply with a pickup and a saw and wants to know if you would sub it. Screening these out costs nothing and saves a callback made from a bucket.

Two entirely different phone problems, in the same year

For most of the year, tree work is planned work and the phone behaves like any other trade's. Homeowners ring in the evening about a tree they have been worrying about. Property managers ring during the day. The winter is dormant-season pruning, which is when the people who actually know about trees ring, and when the good commercial work gets scheduled.

Then there is a storm, and the shape changes completely for about a week. Call volume goes up by a multiple nobody can staff for, and it arrives in the first forty-eight hours. The company that gets the good work in that window is not the company with the best equipment. It is the one whose phone got answered while the other companies' phones were ringing out, because every one of those callers is dialling four numbers in a row and stopping at the first voice.

It is also the week your competition changes. Crews arrive from three states away and work door to door, and a share of them are uninsured men with a saw and a pickup who will take the easy wood and leave the difficult half. Homeowners in the two days after a storm are not in a good position to tell the difference, and they are making the decision fast.

What answers during all of this is a phone in a chip-covered pocket, sixty feet up, under a helmet, with a saw running — or a spouse at a kitchen table who has taken forty calls today and has no way to tell a hanger over a play set from a branch in a driveway.

Megan answers all of it in your company's name with no queue, asks the same handful of questions every time, and gets the ones that matter in front of you first. On the ordinary weeks she books the planned removals that fund the winter.

The expensive mistake is a truck roll, not a lost lead

Start with the thing that separates this trade from the others. Your mobilisation cost is enormous and it is nearly constant. A bucket truck, a chipper, a chip truck and a three-man crew cost roughly the same to put on a street whether the work there is eleven minutes or two days. Which means a job's profitability is decided less by what you charge than by whether the trip was worth making.

So the number to work out first is not the value of a missed call. It is the cost of a wasted roll. Take a crew day, divide by the number of stops you realistically make, and you have the figure that every unqualified visit is spending. Most owners have never written that down and find it larger than they expected.

Now the storm arithmetic, which is where a week of a year gets decided. In the forty-eight hours after severe weather your inbound is a multiple of normal and your capacity is fixed. You are not trying to answer everything — you are trying to make sure the removals with structure underneath and truck access reach you before you commit the crew to a driveway branch across town. Every hour that sorting does not happen is an hour of capacity spent on the wrong work, and capacity is the only thing you actually have to sell that week.

Then the quieter loss, which is the planned work. Dormant pruning, hazard removals and commercial contracts get enquired about during business hours, by people who will ring three companies and go with whoever calls back. That is exactly when you are in a tree. The winter book gets built on those calls, and they are the easiest ones in the trade to lose without noticing, because nothing about them is urgent enough to generate a second attempt.

There is one more cost worth naming, and it is the one nobody in this trade needs explained. This is dangerous work. Everybody who has done it for any length of time knows somebody it happened to. A quoting process that puts a crew in front of a job nobody asked the right questions about — no access, wires closer than described, more rot than the customer mentioned — is not only a margin problem. Getting the drop zone, the access and the proximity to conductors established before anybody drives out is a safety practice that happens to also be good business.

Against it, answering is billed by the second Megan is on a call, which suits a trade whose calls are short and whose volume arrives in bursts.

Pay As You Go is $29 a month plus $0.88 for each minute Megan spends on calls, with no included minutes. Professional is $199 a month and includes 500 minutes, then $0.45 a minute. Growth is $499 a month and includes 1,500 minutes, then $0.38 a minute. Enterprise is priced by conversation. Every plan includes the entire product — the plans differ by included minutes only — and calls are billed in real seconds, never rounded up to the next minute.

Example call

An example call

Thursday, 6:50am, the morning after a line of storms. Every tree company in the county has a full voicemail box.

Example call6:50 AM · Thursday

Megan
Thanks for calling Halloran Tree Care, this is Megan, an AI assistant. How can I help you this morning?
Caller
We've got a huge branch — well, half the tree really — that's come down on the back of the house overnight. It's on the roof over the kitchen.
Megan
Right. First things first — is everybody out of that part of the house and is anyone hurt?
Caller
No, nobody's hurt, we're all fine. We've shut the kitchen door and we're staying out of there.
Megan
Good, keep it that way. Next one matters just as much: are there any power lines involved — anything down in the yard, or wires running through the part of the tree that's still standing?
Caller
There's a line that runs across the back but I think it's clear of it. Hard to say honestly, it's still half dark.
Megan
Then treat it as live and stay well away from it until somebody has confirmed otherwise — if anything is touching a conductor that is the utility's call before it is ours. I'm getting this to Sean now, not putting it in a list. Two quick things so he knows what he's bringing: is the rest of the tree still standing, and can a truck get round to the back of the house?
Caller
The trunk's still there, it split about halfway up. And yes — there's a gate on the side, it's wide, we've had a digger through it before.

Escalated to Sean within ninety seconds, ahead of thirty-one other storm calls: "Tree on roof over kitchen, nobody hurt, house partly evacuated. POSSIBLE LINE CONTACT at rear — utility to confirm. Trunk still standing, split at mid-height. Rear access wide, digger has been through the gate." A job that needs the bucket and possibly a crane, identified before the crew had left the yard.

An illustration of how Megan handles this kind of call, not a recording of one. Her opening line is the disclosure she actually speaks.

How it fits

Sorting a phone that goes from quiet to unusable in one night

The safety questions come first, every time

Is anyone hurt. Are there wires involved. Is anybody underneath it. Those get asked before anything about scheduling, on every storm call, in the same order — which is more consistency than any of us manage on the fortieth call of a morning. Anything involving a conductor gets the utility and 911 answer before it gets a quote.

The two questions that price a tree get asked on the phone

What is underneath it, and can a truck get to it. Those decide whether a job is a straightforward drop, a rigging job, or a crane pick — and they are the difference between a quote you can nearly give and a wasted trip. A homeowner will happily answer both and almost never volunteers either.

Storm calls get ranked instead of queued

A hanger over a play set and a branch across a driveway are not the same call, and after severe weather they arrive within a minute of each other. You define what escalates — structure contact, anything still suspended, anything near wires — and those reach you while the rest are captured for the order you choose to work them in.

Insurance status gets established at the start

Whether an adjuster has been out, whether there is a claim number, whether the customer has actually been told what is covered. This is the single most common source of a bad conversation at the end of a tree job, and it costs thirty seconds at the beginning of one.

The planned work still gets booked while the storm work runs

The dormant-pruning enquiry and the property manager with a portfolio do not stop calling because the weather was bad. During the week you are least able to answer, those are the calls most likely to be lost, and they are the ones that fill the calendar in February.

What Megan will not do, and where a call stops being about trees

Where there are power lines involved, she does not take a booking. Anything touching or near a conductor — a limb across a service drop, a line down in a yard, a tree that has brought wires with it — gets the same answer: stay away from it, call 911 and the utility, and nobody goes near it until they have made it safe. That is not caution for its own sake. A tree crew arriving before the utility does is how people are killed, and no job is worth being the company that turned up first.

She does not tell anybody it is safe to be in a room, a car or a yard. If a caller describes something suspended, split, or resting on a structure, the instruction is to stay out from under it and wait. She is not looking at it and neither are you.

She does not quote. Tree pricing depends on what is underneath the tree, what access exists, how much rot is in it and what has to be rigged, and none of those survive a phone description reliably. She can state your call-out policy and whether estimates are free, and she can tell somebody where they are in the queue after a storm, which is frequently what they actually wanted to know.

She does not give an opinion on whose tree it is or who is liable. Neighbour disputes are a matter of state law and of two property owners, at least one of whom has not agreed to anything. She captures it and it reaches a person.

She does not tell a customer what their insurance covers. She can capture whether an adjuster has been out and whether there is a claim number, which is genuinely useful. What is and is not covered is between them and their carrier, and a receptionist guessing at it creates a problem that lands on your invoice.

And she does not text. Everything reaches you by email — transcript, recording and summary. In a trade where photographs of a tree are how half of quoting now happens, that is a real limitation and worth weighing up front.

Questions

Tree Service Companies: the questions we get asked

After a storm I get more calls than I can do. Why would I want to answer more of them?

You would not, and that is the point of this page. The objective in the forty-eight hours after severe weather is not to capture every call — it is to make sure the ones worth your crew reach you before you have committed the day. A tree on a roof with rear access and a hanger over a play set are worth being interrupted for. A branch across a driveway twenty minutes away is worth batching. At the moment those arrive in the same voicemail box in the order they were dialled, and get worked in that order, which means capacity goes to whoever rang first rather than to the work that pays for the week.

What happens if somebody calls about a tree on power lines?

She stops treating it as a tree call. The caller is told to stay away from it and to ring 911 and the utility, because a line that looks dead is not a line anybody should assume is dead, and the utility has to make it safe before a crew can work near it. She still captures the address and the details so you can attend once it is clear. Getting a homeowner to hang up and call the utility is occasionally the most useful thing that happens on your line all week, and it is a call you would want handled the same way whether a person or an assistant took it.

How can she possibly tell a real removal from a branch in a driveway?

By asking the same two questions a good estimator asks: what is underneath it, and can a truck get to it. Those two answers separate a straightforward drop in an open yard from a rigging job over a conservatory, and they are the ones that decide whether a trip is worth making. She is not judging the tree — she is capturing the things that let you judge it in ten seconds from an email instead of forty minutes from a driveway. The rest is your rule about what escalates immediately.

Customers always say insurance is paying. Can she handle that?

She can establish where the claim actually stands, which is most of the value. Whether an adjuster has been out, whether there is a claim number, whether the customer has been told what is covered. What she will not do is tell them what their policy pays for, because the answer varies and because the split people find surprising — the tree off the structure and the tree lying in the yard afterwards frequently being treated differently — is exactly the kind of thing that turns into an argument about your invoice. Getting the status on the record at the start of the job is the cheapest possible way to avoid that.

Somebody's going to ring wanting me to top a tree. What does she say?

She takes it down as what the customer asked for and lets you have the conversation, because that conversation is a sales opportunity rather than a receptionist's argument. It is worth saying plainly on a page like this though: topping ruins trees. It produces weak regrowth from the wound, invites decay into the cuts, and leaves the customer with something more dangerous in five years than what they started with. Any company that agrees to it on the phone without discussing crown reduction is telling you something about how the rest of their work gets done. A caller who asks for it usually just wants the tree smaller and has heard the wrong word for it.

Isn't an AI going to sound wrong on an emergency call?

The disclosure is in her first sentence, so nobody is misled about what they have reached. Then the honest comparison at ten to seven the morning after a storm: it is not you answering, because you are already in somebody's back garden looking at a split oak. It is a full voicemail box, which is what the caller has already had from the two companies she rang before you. Somebody standing in a kitchen doorway looking at a branch through her ceiling wants to be asked whether everyone is safe and told that somebody is coming. Getting that in ninety seconds is a good outcome. Where these systems fail people is when they cannot understand a caller and will not put them through, which is a transfer rule and yours to set.

Our best work is commercial and municipal. Does this help with that?

Probably more than with storm work, because that traffic is quiet and it is easy to lose without ever knowing. Right-of-way schedules, campus contracts and property-management portfolios get enquired about during business hours by people who will contact three companies and take the one that responds properly. That is the exact hour you are up a tree, and it is worse in storm weeks, when your attention is entirely on emergency work and the procurement calls go unanswered for days. Those contracts are what make a winter predictable.

It's mostly me and two guys. Is this the right size of thing?

A three-man outfit is the size where the owner is also the climber, the estimator and the switchboard, which is precisely why it tends to matter. The economics are gentle because billing is by the second she is actually talking, so a quiet fortnight in January costs almost nothing and the storm week — when the volume is unmanageable and the stakes are highest — is the week it earns its keep.

The next line of storms is going to come through on a Wednesday night.

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