Jordan Upkavage (3:28)

All right, Alex, thank you so much. Jason, your name is first at the top of this slide, so take it away bro.

Jason Lee (3:35)

Awesome. Thank you very much Alex for having us on today for this webinar. As you mentioned, my name is Jason Lee. I own Sky Frog Landscape in Gainesville, Florida. We're a full service, design, build, maintenance, landscape company. We do a minimal amount of tree work from the ground and a little bit of plant health care within our scope of work. Jordan and I met post college and also host the Greenside up podcast together. And Jordan, take it man.

Jordan Upkavage (4:05)

Thank you Jason. My name is Jordan. I am part of a family owned business which is independent tree Service in Tampa, Florida. My dad Jerry started the business in the late 1970s. So we've been in business for 48 years and my sister runs the office and we have a fleet of crews that go out, employees wearing hard hats. We have five certified arborists on staff and we do a lot of tree pruning. We do tree removal and we have bucket trucks and wheel loaders and lifts and grapple trucks. And we also do plant health care which I'd like to touch on today. As far as helping getting ready for spring, getting our act together for plant healthcare was critical for that. So I'll share some stories about that. And we specialize in saving trees. So supplementary support, bracing, lightning protection. We kind of found a niche there as being one of the few people that perform that work and perform it well. So from a you're going to hear from a family owned business and how we operate in Tampa. And Priscilla, I'd like to pass the mic to you.

Priscilla de Rubis (5:13)

Thanks Jordan. Thank you. TCIA and Granum. My name is Priscilla Drubas, I'm the vice president of Lynch Landscape and Tree Service. We are right outside of Boston, about 20 minutes outside of Boston in Metro West. We're a high end residential multi service landscape company. Maintenance, design, build, irrigation, tree service, fine gardening, plant healthcare. Our company has been in business about 45 years. It was started by Mike and Kelly lynch was Just one truck. And now we have over 100 trucks and over 100 employees. And we have four certified arborists on our team. We have three tree crews. Our mix is mostly, you know, maintenance and design build, but we do about 20% of our revenues is in tree work and where. I'm really glad to be here and excited to have this conversation.

Jordan Upkavage (6:08)

Awesome. Well, let's jump into this. What's. What's our first topic here? Okay, so we have what used to break in spring. So we're all waking up and we're leaving dormancy, and we're about to do some STEM elongation here and get our businesses going and moving for the warm season. So prompt one here is what used to break for you when spring volume hit. So after it gets going, the phone's ringing, your crews are out moving. What's the first thing that tends to break in that springtime rollout? So, Jason or Priscilla, do you have a story that goes along with this?

Priscilla de Rubis (6:53)

I don't necessarily have a story, but I think maybe what differs in the Northeast for us is that in the winter, we're really quiet, other than snow. And then in the spring, it's unbelievable chaos. And so you have this mix of operational staffing and customer chaos. So what kind of breaks for us is that? You know, scheduling blows up all of a sudden. You go from zero to 60. There can be equipment failures, things that kind of sat around all winter long. The mechanics didn't get to. That can be an issue. You know, if there's a labor shortage that we didn't take into account or people aren't coming back from layoff, that can come into play as well. So there's. Those are usually our biggest challenges when we head into spring.

Jordan Upkavage (7:39)

Yeah, that's. That's fair. Being in Tampa, Florida, we do, you know, tree work year round, so we don't really close down for winter or go into hibernating. You know, we're working year round. So as far as when spring comes for us, there's not really something that would break if. If we have, you know, a seasonal type employee model where, you know, in the wintertime we might dial back a little bit when we come out of the spring or when it's happening. The people that we ended up keeping throughout the winter are usually the heaviest hitters, the ones that are the most highly trained, the ones that we want to keep, you know, on payroll 52 weeks a year. So for us, spring isn't that strenuous. It's kind of easy for us. Because we haven't yet built up a huge team. What I would say that could be a parallel is in Florida we have a lot of hurricanes and so we don't really have to get ready for spring volume to hit. We have to get ready for when the hurricane's coming. What do we do? And so if we use that for my analogy, it would be an inventory of our hard tools and resources. Do. Are all of our lifts serviced? Right. Did they get my machines get serviced in October, in August and between December and January. So if, you know, normally our hurricanes are in September, October. So we've already checked the box for maintenance, hydraulics, aerial boom inspections. We do that in the beginning of August. So everything coming out of the gate for hurricane season is ready to rip. And we already have a whole pile of extra saws that we keep stored, you know, just in case we have, you know, an all hands on deck scenario. So for us, I'm not going to say getting ready for spring. It would be getting ready for hurricanes and it would be a looking at our, our hard tools, are they serviced, are they ready to go? Are there hydraulic hoses that need to be changed out before they blow? Do we have the saws that we need before there is a shortage? And then a look at our employees. So sometimes, and this is what I did last year, I increased throughout the bulk beginning of the summer, our labor staff. So if we have, you know, that storm response, we have the labor resources to do it. So I kind of would run a little extra heavy in the dog days of summer getting ready for that potential blowout that we saw October of 2024, when we had Hurricane Milton. And it was, it was a disaster. I mean, I took my family and evacuated, you know, two hours east to Orlando. And the morning the storm passed, I came back to Tampa and I didn't field a single lead because I didn't leave my neighborhood. It was tree on house, tree on house, tree on house. And the next day, Friday morning, we had a crane in the air and we did 20 consecutive days of craning trees off of houses. So it was just a straight crane crew responding to the worst of the worst while the other crews responded to what didn't need a crane. So I guess my attempt at answering this is if you're getting ready for spraying a hurricane, take some time to just audit yourself. What resources do you have and are they ready to rip and go out of the gate to where they're not in the field for the first time? And then we realized that they weren't maintained or there was a neglected problem that didn't get serviced. Where did communication fall apart? Sales, dispatch and then the field. So I started, I'm going to answer this question very genuinely with not trying to plug Single Ops as a software real talk. I started using Single Ops end of 2017, the beginning of 2018 and prior to that we were pen and paper carbon copy proposals or I would type up a proposal in a Excel or another processing type of a widget and I would print an email, save the PDF and email the, the client the proposal. When we started to Single Ops we didn't use it in the way that it was capable of being used. We used it for, you know, scheduling but only the admins knew what was going on. I, I didn't share the crew user side to my team because and call this a flaw to me I put a mindset of oh, it's computer based, they don't know how to do it or they don't want to learn how to do it. And I set a ceiling that didn't need to be set. So I kept the schedule. Nobody could see it but me on what we're doing today, what we're doing tomorrow. And I would print the work orders and I would hand the work orders out to everybody. And it was a bottleneck of me being the bottleneck so I didn't share the information. And then I discovered this crew calendar and I'm going from a, a month long calendar on my desk with everything scheduled that way to like, oh my gosh, there's been a crew calendar here this whole time and I didn't use it. So I started using the crew calendar and assigning jobs to crew leaders and gave them a login and I stopped printing out work orders and handing it to him. I said, hey guys, here's your login. There's a computer in the shop, you can pull it up on your phone if you want or you can print your own work order at the shop if you want a hard copy. So like not setting a ceiling to my team and allowing them an opportunity to be a little more visible of what's going on took so much effort off of my plate for them to have that information. And now I got teams that are looking at what they're going to do tomorrow on Friday and they say, oh, I see that I need 15 sheets of plywood that's on Chris Kidd's truck. Let me go ahead and get that in order at the end of the day Thursday. So it's less of a cluster come Friday morning. So giving the visibility and empowering our our team to do things that I put a ceiling on them ignorantly or not, just for leadership I put a ceiling on them. So removing that and giving them an opportunity just made my life way easier. It made their life so much easier. And now on the fly, if a crew gets done at one o', clock, we can stack another job on them, upload it to single ops and say hey Damien, refresh your single ops. There's a whole nother work order right there. All the crew notes are there about whatever detail, the gate, the squirrels, the client's personal preferences of whatever. It's all there. And so it just made my management of it so much easier so that as far as where to communal communication fall apart, it was because I was hiding it. I was keeping it all to me and opening that up just made my life so much easier. Plan Healthcare seems to be all the buzz in the green industry right now. Are you like many business owners that don't know how or where to start, or are you looking to add a new tool to your PHC toolbox?

Jason Lee (14:56)

Mitigro is an innovative product that focuses on root and soil soil health. A different approach than loading up the ground with more npk. Mitigro is a blend of mycorrhizae, fungi, bacteria, vitamin B and Iba, which is a rooting hormone.

Jordan Upkavage (15:09)

The concept is simple. More roots equals a healthier and more robust plant. This simple concept is exactly why both Jason and I have incorporated mitigro into our PhD programs. Deep Root applications on my end for mature or struggling trees, soil drenches and and spray applications for when Jason installs trees and installs new sod.

Jason Lee (15:30)

Give Mitigro a shop for yourself. Their product is easy to apply and no special licenses are needed. Visit mitogrowpro.com to learn more. That's M I T O G-R-O-W P

Lizzy (15:40)

R O.com Jordan, I'm going to jump in here. I had one comment that came through that just said that there was some great appreciation for the quote of Audit yourself. So major kudos and shout out to that. Thank you Nicholas for your comment there. Two questions came in and I think that they're pretty quick ones so I'll

Priscilla de Rubis (15:58)

just jump in with them.

Lizzy (15:59)

1. What systems do you use to track equipment and vehicle maintenance? And two Go right ahead. Go right ahead.

Priscilla de Rubis (16:07)

We use Fleetio.

Lizzy (16:09)

Fleetio. Beautiful. Christopher also asked, do you employ a mechanic or mechanics on staff?

Priscilla de Rubis (16:18)

We do. We have three.

Lizzy (16:19)

Beautiful.

Jordan Upkavage (16:22)

So what I'm going to answer the question, what mechanism do I use to track maintenance? We have a whiteboard that hangs on the wall in our shop. And it's a whiteboard that each lift goes on, each wheel eater goes on, each truck goes on where we track the maintenance of it. But we do it not based on the individual unit and the number of hours on the unit and the number of miles on the unit. My operates 50 out of the 52 weeks a year. So I mentioned earlier that in August, when we get ready for hurricane season, everything gets serviced. Well, being growing up in Florida, I'm an avid saltwater fisherman. And so at the Beginning of August, August 6, every year is the opening day of lobster season to go catch lobsters in Florida. So we close our business and it's a mandatory vacation where all of our team takes a week off in August, my family takes a week off in August, and that way we can be, you know, fishing for wahoo and 800ft of water or snorkeling or spearfishing. And we don't have teams working. I do run a skeleton crew for a handful of people that go drop off machines for service or pick them up from service. So every single August, every truck gets oil changes, every lift gets an inspection to the dealer that we purchase the lifts from. And then we do the same thing between Christmas and New Year's, it's the second week that we're mandatory closed. We have a little bit of work option for some people that skeleton crew to run trucks and equipment in and out. So that's how we track it. It's done every August and every December, January, and we just keep, keep track of it on the whiteboard.

Jason Lee (18:16)

You got me back now, Jordan?

Jordan Upkavage (18:17)

Yeah, loud and clear.

Jason Lee (18:18)

Okay, awesome. See, we have two mechanics in house. We operate probably 15 to 18 vehicles and, oh, I don't know, 30ish lawnmowers and probably 40 or 50 pieces of two cycle equipment. A lot of that is done on whiteboards in our shop. And then we also have utilized Trello, probably not to its full capacity, but with especially our mowers and two cycle equipment tracking, some of that has done a good job for us.

Jordan Upkavage (18:47)

Cool. And I don't have a mechanic. We lean on Ford to service the Fords, Freightliner to service the Freightliners and then the. The dealer to service our lifts. We do. Our crane operator is also a very. And we rent the crane. Right. It's a privately owned business named Billy and he is a very fabulous mechanic. So some of our one Offs that aren't a dealer thing or they're not a Carlton stump grinder thing, we take it to Billy's house and he can break it down and put it back together. So that's worked for us. We just, we don't have the space at our shop for a mechanic and outsourcing that to someone that we trust for our one offs has been the winning ticket so far. Partnering with that. Okay, well this is going by fast. We're already 19 minutes into this. We gotta, we gotta get.

Jason Lee (19:39)

Did you have another, did you have another question we needed to answer?

Lizzy (19:42)

I don't just have one, I actually have two, so buckle up. First one, which is question. When you assign jobs to your crew leaders, how do you handle the different equipment on various days?

Priscilla de Rubis (19:56)

I think it's job dependent. If we have, we have a dingo, we have a dingo for each crew so that really isn't a problem for us. So if a dingo is needed, each crew has their own. That isn't an issue if it's equipment that needs to be shared. It's just dependent on the job. And that's, that's determined by, you know, the production staff, how that's scheduled and they, and they utilize single ops very well for that. So that's a plug for single ops because we really embrace technology at Lynch. I was just going to say we had a different experience in Jordan that people were really resistant to, to switching to going on to single ops and we did about six years ago. But we, we pushed it, we pushed it, we pushed it and now the whole company embraced it. It took about two years. It wasn't easy, but everyone embraced it. And now, you know, it's just, it's just, you know, in our rhythm every day to use it and to utilize it to its full potential. So for equipment it's really job dependent. That was a long answer, but it's job dependent.

Lizzy (21:02)

That's okay. Follow up question. What is a dingo?

Priscilla de Rubis (21:07)

It is. You know what? Somebody who has better experience with equipment could probably answer that better than I can. I know how much they cost because I take care of that, but I've never used one.

Jason Lee (21:16)

It's classified as a, I think now mini skid steer would be the proper term or compact utility loader. It's a, a small track machine that is various sizes and lifting capacities. But Dingo specifically is made by Toronto. Multiple attachments. Yeah. Branch managers, little baby stump grinders. We use them for trenchers, buckets, forks. So very versatile piece of machinery rocking.

Priscilla de Rubis (21:40)

I know how much they cost.

Jordan Upkavage (21:43)

And then the way I do it, each crew is structured differently. So I write something that's called the world. Right. This is the football plays of what happened today in independent tree service. So we have Chris kidding. He drives an F650 with a nifty SD64 and a giant. We have Curtis who has a forester unit bucket truck. We have Damien over here with a nifty 50 and a ditch which zahn same thing here. And then we have plant health care and a stump crew. And then we have grapple trucks that pull around and haul the debris for those crews. So if a job calls for a nifty 50 and an Avant, I'm going to schedule that with Damian or Sergio. If it calls for a 64, that's going to go to Chris Kidd. If it's a bucket, that's going to go to Curtis. So the jobs are best placed for the equipment and the operator that operates that specific equipment every day. I hope that answered the question. So we have here. Let's blend three and four together. What surprised you most about peak season pressure? When did you realize your systems weren't built for scale? What can surprise me about peak season pressure? I'm going to call it burnout. Right. In Tampa, Florida, it is hot as can be. And when we're busy, you know, we could be multiple weeks booked and people can't wait. They need it done sooner. And so we start trying to work Saturdays and pull the overtime and we have. It's like pulling teeth sometimes to get people that want to work on a Saturday. And I'm over here going, oh my gosh, it's time and a half. You would think everybody would be drooling for the opportunity. But I think a lot of our people, they're family people, their moms or their dads or, you know, they're normal people and they're getting burnt out and they just like to have two days off work. So what can surprise me is in peak season, when there's peak money, we can have people really appreciating the time off and they're not really caring about an extra eight hours of overtime because they just want to chill out at their house. And rightfully so. I covet my own weekends.

Jason Lee (23:53)

Priscilla, what do you guys see? I mean, you're up. Jordan and I are. Since we work year round in Florida, you know, we're not. You guys are the viewers or listeners that are listening in from Ontario and Canada. I mean, you guys have much more of a, you know, Dance.

Priscilla de Rubis (24:11)

Yeah.

Jason Lee (24:13)

Yeah.

Priscilla de Rubis (24:14)

At this point, nothing really surprises me about peak season. But I think what did surprise me in the beginning, how intense everything gets and how quickly it gets intense, tense. Because it just seems like we're about to start our season next week. We've had enough snow melt finally to start our season, and it's literally gonna go from zero to 60 like that. And I think that's what always surprised me about it and how the pressure that we always call the 90 days, about 90 days of hell to get from April to. To the end of June. It's. It's that intense. And I think that that's, you know, everyone gets very amped up. A lot of, you know, feelings come out. A lot of disagreements can happen. And I think that's what was surprising to me in the beginning. At this point, nothing surprises me. To Jordan's point, you know, trying to get people to work some overtime on weekends, that can always be a challenge. And that surprises me too, because I'm like, don't you want to work a little bit more when you can? Because in the summer, we do scale back a little bit on. On overtime just because our. And kind of with residential, it ebbs and it flows. People go to their summer homes in the. In the summer, and it intends not to be as such a demand in the summer for us, but then picks right back up in the fall. So I think that is what surprised me. What about you, Jason?

Jason Lee (25:39)

So we, you know, when we just kicked off our. Especially for landscape maintenance, for us, we call it in season, out of season. We're a full service landscape company, so our design, build, install, you know, we roll that year round down in Florida. But for us, we get this false sense of security in Florida because we. We go to every other week on our maintenance schedule. And so we just kind of our. We lulls us into this sense of security. Well, this week we went back to our full summer schedule. So this was kickoff week, and it was very timely that we're doing this webinar, and this is the topic. So for the past two or three weeks, we've been, you know, double checking all of our equipment. Our mechanics have been going through everything. We're, you know, optimizing our schedule to go from at the end of last year, we. We run a flex schedule where we're running four tens all. All season. But as we sell extra contractual work, we'll build out a Friday schedule. And then generally at the end of the year, if we're adding a crew, we add it right now, so we added a crew going into springtime right now. So we're filling out all of that schedule. Some changes compared to the end of last year and you know, from where it used to be, natural catastrophe. When this moment hit this week, knock on wood, it's only Thursday, and we have a little bit of work to do tomorrow. Hasn't been that bad. You know, on Tuesday, got a call from our operations manager. Hey, you know, we've. We're in our second day operations. We lost two backpack blowers during leaf season through the winter, we need to buy two backpack blowers and edger and a hedge trimmer. Great. Do it. So, you know, we're doing our equipment checks or personnel checks. You know, we're trying to run a little bit lean, as lean as we can, but then still needing people to, to fill in when people don't show up and for growth. So it's like, hey, we need to add two more people, you know, as quick as we can. And so we, we stress tested that this, you know, this week. And it's not peak season, obviously for us, but it's the kickoff. And as Jordan said, in Florida, during peak season, it's the heat is our stress test. You know, that's our, that's our kick in the pants in the summer.

Priscilla de Rubis (27:38)

But I bet.

Jason Lee (27:40)

But building those systems compared to what we used to have, where we just kind of, you know, the time would come and then we'd just have to figure it out. And then the figuring it out took months. You know, now we're streamlining that. Hopefully within a couple weeks, we can work out our operational issues and be running as smooth as we can.

Jordan Upkavage (27:57)

Cool. All right, let's run through number four real quick and then we'll hit the next slide. When did you realize your systems weren't built for scale? I'm still learning how to do that. I mean, from being a family business and just growing up in the field of arbor culture. I didn't know how to be a sales manager. I have a salesman that works for me. And yeah, I've never had formal sales training and I do a ton of sales. So learning how to be a sales manager was. It's an ever evolving journey. And then learning to lead all these people, learning to get the culture of independent tree service, of what I and we as a team want it to be. And so what I realized to go back to number one about software, me being the bottleneck of information is the barrier to scale. I need to remove myself from the bottom of that funnel. So it can flow seamlessly. And I need to empower other team members to be in a leadership role, be able to make decisions, win from those decisions and learn from the wins, fail from those decisions. I celebrate failure all the time because we learn something from it. And if we never try, we're never going to get better than where we are today. And I'll, I'll echo that with Plant Healthcare. I have a story about that, that right now, it's just, it's awesome because I took the reins out of my hands and put them in somebody else's.

Jason Lee (29:35)

So, Priscilla, before we started the webinar, it seems like you all run a, a pretty substantial business up in Massachusetts. You know, are you on, are you at a, a, are you in a point of scaling or are you all kind of stabilized with your growth of revenue or what do you, you know,

Priscilla de Rubis (29:51)

we are pretty stabilized at the moment, but, you know, we're. There's always room for growth, we always hope for growth, but at the moment we have our arms around where we are and it took us a long time to get there. I would say probably in the last few years, I feel like we've had our, the biggest handle on things, which has been phenomenal. You know, I think that the right people are in the right places. And I think to Jordan's point, that that's hard. You have to give up your control to do that, right? For myself personally giving, I had someone tell me that I had to delegate. And that was the hardest thing for me was learning how to delegate and it was giving up that control. That was very hard. And I know the president of our company, he had a hard time with that, too. And I've noticed with all of our divisional managers have seemed to have a hard time with that too. So once you kind of get the right people in place underneath you and you kind of build that, that support structure, I think you can build your company the way you want it to. And I think we finally got the right people in place. And the company seems, we seem to have our arms around it now. We do want to grow, but I think we want to grow at a less, less intense scale than we have in years past. Growth is good and that's what we want, but we need to be able to keep our arms around it and keep the right people cool.

Jason Lee (31:10)

I think growth, growth is always, yes, coming from a point where we're, we are putting the people into the positions now in the right seats so that we can scale and grow at a little bit more of an intense space. But looking into the five to ten year vision that I'm casting, it's like, okay, we're going to hit a point where we're going to hit that comfort level, and then what do we do with that comfort level? And I think you always have to.

Priscilla de Rubis (31:31)

Right.

Jason Lee (31:31)

A business is always going to have to grow to create opportunity for employees at some point.

Priscilla de Rubis (31:35)

Exactly.

Jason Lee (31:36)

Once you get to that healthy spot that it seems like you guys might be at, then it might be a little bit easier to just grow and nurture.

Priscilla de Rubis (31:44)

Yes, we definitely want to continue to grow, but I think we need to enjoy where we are a little bit because it took us a long time to get there and not get too crazy again and say, oh, let's go in this direction or that direction. I think we need to move a little bit more slowly because it seemed like we had several years of being very fast growth, and that's hard to get your arms around.

Jason Lee (32:07)

Our friend Tony Bass tells us that we have to. We have to have the courage to stay in that spot. So. And not have. It is.

Priscilla de Rubis (32:15)

It is because I've even struggled. I've had this conversation with several people here. It's like, oh, kind of feels boring after a while, you know, because it's been so intense for so long that it's like, oh, it feels like what's. What's next? You know, like, so.

Jordan Upkavage (32:30)

All right, let's jump.

Lizzy (32:32)

I was gonna say, do you guys want to do a round of rapid fire questions that we can kind of just make the quick answers?

Priscilla de Rubis (32:38)

Sure.

Jordan Upkavage (32:38)

Yeah.

Lizzy (32:40)

How many office admins do you have utilizing the scheduling feature for tree crews?

Priscilla de Rubis (32:46)

We have one that works specifically with the tree crew, but each division has their own admin.

Lizzy (32:56)

Jason, do you have tree crews?

Jason Lee (32:58)

We do not have tree crews.

Lizzy (33:00)

Now, how many office admins do you have utilizing the scheduling piece of single ops? I'll change it that way.

Jason Lee (33:06)

Sure. So no, I have an office manager and she has an admin assistant and they dual share the, you know, the scheduling responsibility. Michelle's our admin assistant and she champions a lot of the. The scheduling and moving of jobs day to day. But she runs. We run six maintenance crews, two install crews and fertilizer technician and an irrigation. So we're running 10, 10 different schedules through that that she manages.

Priscilla de Rubis (33:33)

Wow.

Lizzy (33:35)

And Jordan.

Jordan Upkavage (33:36)

So I. I run four tree crews. I had five last year and I actually had to lay some people off and shed a crew in November. So I run four crews and there's three salesmen in the business. There's myself. There's my salesman named Marti. And then my dad does some sales as well. Marti and myself do the lion's share of the sales. And each of the three salespeople schedule their own work. So the salesperson has that intimate knowledge of the client's requests or whatever permit approval. The salesperson's responsible for the permit and for the scheduling. So on the crew calendar, we'll know that we have a bucket crew, a nifty 64 crew, and two nifty 50 crews. So we'll tag our jobs in there, how it best fit, and then we'll also look at, okay, where are the crews in the part of town? Oh, we have two crews in Seminole Heights. I have a bucket job. Oh, there's an open bucket also in Seminole Heights. And then we can structure them together to be that support system. If a crew gets done early or a crew has a problem, you know, we're not just smattered across the whole county in a bunch of different directions. So the crew leader does that scheduling. And in single ops, if I do, let's say it's a half a day job for a nifty 50, I'll assign my job there, and then I'll create a task assigned to that crew that says half a day open assigned to Sergio. So then if Marti's scheduling jobs and he sees, all right, Sergio's in lutes. He's got a half a day open. Ooh, look at that. I got a two and a half hour job also in lutz. I'm going to take that spot. And so he'll assign his job to that crew, and then he'll delete the half a crew day task that was put as a placeholder there as a visual, easy reminder for us.

Lizzy (35:36)

That's awesome. And a couple of these questions that are coming in are touching on right crew. How do you find the right employees? And I know that's something we definitely touched on in this setup for our webinar. So I'll let you all take that away and work through this slide, and then maybe we'll circle back to some of these questions if we don't touch on them. When you guys talk about company culture and the right crew for the right fitness, it.

Jordan Upkavage (35:58)

Okay, so how do you ensure what's being sold matches actual crew capacity? I'm going to place that burden on the salesperson, on myself, on Marti, on Jerry. The salesperson needs to intimately know your team and know which crew or crew members are best fit for a particular assignment. So, so for instance, if it's a big gnarly removal, we're going to give that to Chris Kidd. He's the big gnarly removal guy. If we need somebody that's call it nimbly bimbly climbing, that's going to go to Damian. And then in the internal crew notes section we might have a note that says top climb needed. So when we're setting the world for the day, we can see those internal notes and have those support employees to go with that initial crew leader. So, so the short answer is whoever is selling the work and scheduling needs to have a very clear understanding of each crew's capabilities and who is going to passively excel at the job and then that job is scheduled to that leader. Do you want your office phone to ring more and increase service requests to your inbox? Want to push the gas pedal on your lead volume?

Jason Lee (37:18)

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Jordan Upkavage (38:03)

is it similar for you, Priscilla and Jason?

Priscilla de Rubis (38:07)

I think I agree with you. I think that that's really important. I think for us, I think one of the biggest, biggest shifts probably for us in, in having what's sold and the actual crew capacity was probably single ops really helped us with that because now we can see everything, everyone can see everything, you know, crews, what sold backlog. Whereas before we really couldn't really see that. So it was more on the salesperson to really take a look at that. But now that it's so visible, you know, I really credit single ops for really helping us with that.

Jordan Upkavage (38:41)

Cool.

Jason Lee (38:42)

And I think it's in, in anything that we're doing. We're, you know, and I would imagine in the tree care industry you're still, but you're still bidding budgeted hours so you're still, it's, it's a service based on time. So especially in our world in the landscape industry, whether it doesn't matter whether we're doing maintenance or building a back patio or, or making a lawn application, we're still bidding X amount of time that this is going to take with this material. So it's, it's getting that budgeted hour and then tracking the actual. So for us it's, you know, what the crew can do. Yes, the size of crew, of course we're going to, you know, have a, if we have a commercial maintenance crew, it's going to be a four person crew. Yes, we're going to compare those crews with that type of job. But it doesn't matter what it is, as long as we're having that comparison of tracking the actual hours based on our, based on our budget and hours. So, and we do that through single ops. All of our crews have a tablet. My office manager was down at the Verizon store today. We were working on getting three of our four, three or four of our tablets, you know, updated and back in the loop so that they can, you know, talk, talk to each other and talk to the Internet and single ops. And you know, we're punching in and out of every job and we look at those jobs on a weekly and monthly basis. And then at the end of the year for us it's a big deal, especially on a recurring contractual accounts, to pull those hours from across the year. And so it's a great, great asset for us to have to be able to do that through single ops and, and track everything. So that's how we're, that's how we're ensuring what our crews are doing.

Jordan Upkavage (40:13)

All right, so what changed when you tightened estimate standards? So the answer is, I didn't tighten estimate standards. I made it easier for the 3 of US salespeople to sell the same thing. And we used a fair number of templates and auto populated descriptions of items. So for instance, if we're going to do brace rods, I have the auto populated description referencing ANSI A300 clause 6 or 7 or 8 standard. Whatever it is, whatever the clause changed to, that's auto populated. And then I have a set price per brace rod that's put in there. But if it's a very challenging job or it's high off of the ground, or we need two rolls of scaffolding to get up to wherever we're putting the rods, we can add margin to bump the number up on the price per rod. Same thing on Lightning protection that's auto populated with auto populated photographs that are going to go into the proposal so the client can see what it's going to look like. It's a stock image that we took on one of our jobs and each salesperson is going to have the same language. And we do a ton of structural pruning, you know, reducing branches that are attach low and elongated or structural pruning young trees. I made a whole dropdown for structural pruning and it's three paragraphs of what aspect ratio is what the purpose of structural pruning is. And then I put two links of Dr. Ed Gilman's slideshows, his PowerPoints in the dropdown auto populated description. So the client can read from. Not me, I didn't invent any of this stuff. They can read from the professor that invented this stuff with those auto populated photos to make it make sense and be easier to sell. So we can verbally do that sale and education with the client, but then with a few clicks of the button we reiterate it and we give the information for the client to read that we didn't have to come up with. So tightening the estimate standards, I just streamline it to make it faster for us to do it all and that our estimates look similar.

Priscilla de Rubis (42:24)

That's exactly what we did. We just created the templates, made them very streamlined and so it's very, very easy for the sales, the account managers to come in and do those estimates very quickly and they're, they're uniform. It's also easier to train people if you, if you have somebody new, if the templates are there and you're, it's, I think just easier to train people that way as well. But I like that you added the education piece because we haven't done that. But I really like that idea.

Jason Lee (42:54)

Yep.

Jordan Upkavage (42:55)

Okay. How do you prevent over promising during peak demand?

Priscilla de Rubis (42:59)

I think you just have to set clear expectations with the clients. I mean, when we have, you know, it's a little bit different with maintenance because that's kind of on a schedule, you know, like a rolling schedule here. This is when we do, you know, your M.O. is this day every week. You know, mulch is. We're doing mulch now, we're doing weeding now. And so it goes, I think with tree work, you know, if we have a four to five week backlog, you know, we're setting that expectation with the client right away, hey, we're not going to get to this for, you know, a month. Is this something that's Urgent. If it's something that's urgent, we'll try to fit you in. If not, you know that people do cancel, you know, unfortunately. So we can fit you in. But I think setting just a clear expectation from the beginning, I mean we have that with our design build. I mean those projects takes take months and everyone wants it done by the fourth by Memorial Day here. And that's, you can't promise everybody that date. So I think it's just setting every very clear expectations with the client from the beginning.

Jordan Upkavage (43:58)

I'm so glad you said that. You do that at the front end. We do the same thing and it's over the phone. When somebody calls in because they want an estimate, we'll tell them we are four to five weeks booked from the time of the estimate or the time that the job is accepted. So it may take us eight business days to come give you a bid from the time of the call. So we set those parameters on the front end of how long long it can expect. Because the last thing I want to become is an estimate factory. I don't want to do that. I want to spend time where there's a high likelihood of closure and the engagement between client and business can be mutual beneficial. So we do that over the phone and then we do the same thing during the sales call. If there's something imminent or hazardous, then we'll make it work. We can rearrange jobs and make space available. But what we also do is in the peak summer and rainy season we keep an entire crew unbooked each week. So I keep five open slots per week. So it got rained out or we got half of the job and then the rain came. Well where are we going to fit them or are we going to come back four weeks later and finish the job? So we keep an open crew five days a week for the builder that didn't plan accordingly and has the oh no, my trusses are coming. Can you come tomorrow? So we keep those little sneaky spots in our schedule for safety issues and then contingency for rain out or employee issues, sickness, what have you.

Jason Lee (45:28)

We definitely, we try not to. Well we try not to over promise by just under promising and like you said Priscilla with the design joke with the, with this design portion of portion of this reality bud. It's, you know, we're, we're running a, you know Jordan and I just had a. Well it might have been on our this week's episode or today's episode of our podcast, but we were having the same, same discussion of Jordan runs a very rigid schedule where he's setting specific jobs for specific days. Six weeks out. Well, in springtime with design build, we have no idea what's, you know. Yes, we're going to give you, we're eight to ten weeks out. Great. Two to three weeks before. Hey, we're two to three weeks out. Well, hey, your job's going to happen next week. But if, it might not be till Wednesday, but if, if hits the fan on Monday or Tuesday, we might not start till Thursday or Friday. So it's a, such a sliding, sliding thing when it's not a, you know, a finite thing when we have jobs that are ever changing in that world of materials and add ons and you know, it's, it's permitting. It seems like the tree, the tree side of the business is very, well, no pun intended but very cut, more cut and dry. You know, it's, it's seems like a more finite scope of work. So we, we in our business, we try not to under. We, we do under promise so that everyone knows it's springtime. There's a lot of things going on, lots of moving parts. And then, you know, we do hit the point where we're ahead of schedule and sometimes we're, hey, can we start your job tomorrow?

Priscilla de Rubis (46:49)

Yeah.

Jason Lee (46:50)

So you know, that might only be 20% of the time, but that's, that's the way we're operating.

Jordan Upkavage (46:55)

All right, let's go to the next slide here. All right, training and readiness before dispatch. How do you ensure new hires, complete training before stepping into high risk work? Woof. Okay, so we live by fire, right? So you can just jump in and see how it goes. I think that's natural for a lot of businesses of. Let's see what you got. Can you do it? But we're not gonna put a new person doing a crane removal. That's just silly. Okay, so we do a lot of on job training. So I'm going to use the bucket truck that I have. For instance. The bucket truck is run by a gentleman named Curtis. Curtis is a certified arborist and he's been with independent tree service for touching on 25 years. And I was on Curtis's crew when I was in high school. He taught me how to climb. So the only way I knew how to climb on a tot line hitch was when I learned was on the job training. Okay Jordan, now's the time for you to shimmy up here and get those two pieces of deadwood. So we've made Curtis's crew kind of the teaching crew. So it's a crew. It's a king cab bucket truck. It was a custom order king cab bucket truck. Where you have your cab chassis, there's a back seat so we can run a heavier staffed crew to where he can be the nursery truck of teaching. And in a perfect world, I don't want Curtis to have to pick up a chainsaw. I want Curtis to direct the person on how to use the chainsaw, do the right type of pruning and that can all be on the job training. It doesn't always work that way, but that's what the vision was. So a lot of on the job and then when the crew leader that is doing that training, you know, if that person wants a rope and saddle, we'll ask the crew leaders, hey guys, is Chad ready for this? And they can say, yep, good to go. Or you know what, let it put him with me a little while longer and we'll let you know when he's ready. So we don't have a, a magic template of like here's how to duplicate what we do other than on the job. Let, let the committees do the committee work and grow those capabilities organically in the field. And then when the time's right, we're going to know and we're going to throw your feet to the fire and hope that the on the job training was enough. And within a few minutes of you doing it, we're going to discover if you are ready or not.

Priscilla de Rubis (49:27)

I would agree with the on the job training. Obviously you want somebody who has some experience and we do have an onboarding process and we do have safety protocols, but most of the training is on the job and we won't let somebody go to the next level unless their crew leader has said this person is ready to move on. It's just too dangerous. Tree work is too dangerous just to allow somebody just to, you know, kind of haphazardly go for it. I mean, we had a. We've had a very significant workers comp issue recently where someone fell off a roof, they're roof raking snow and you know, you can have as much safety training as you want. We do ladder safety constantly. I'd probably say that's one of our biggest safety programs that we have going here. And you know, we do ladder safety all the time and somebody still fell off a la. So it's just accidents will happen. But I think, you know, if you can just keep, you know, reiterating safety and continuing with training even when they are trained, when they're considered fully trained. You have to continue that training because it's so. The work is so dangerous. And even, you know, in maintenance and in design build, I mean, you have to continue that training as well. I mean, both of our workers comp. Incidents have come out of maintenance. You would think it would come out of tree, but it's come out of maintenance.

Jordan Upkavage (50:54)

Yeah.

Jason Lee (50:54)

For us.

Jordan Upkavage (50:55)

Go ahead, Jason.

Jason Lee (50:56)

With our, with our onboarding, we've, you know, it's still a very, it's an ongoing process, but we've identified two of our crew leaders, especially in maintenance, because that's where we have the most in and out. And it's by percentage of employee. It's a much larger portion of our business. And so we've identified two training crew leaders. And those crew leaders will train on the technical side of the work. And then more importantly, it's litmus tests for our, our culture. So after two to four weeks in the truck where we just used to throw heartbeats in any truck where we needed them that day, we're now trying to keep new hires within these two crews, you know, to get, get their knowledge base, learn what they're going to do in the field, what they already know, break some bad habits from previous companies maybe and show them our way of operations, but then also find out, you know, how they, how they will fit in as human beings in our business. So that's a big, a big step for, anyway, for our business.

Jordan Upkavage (51:52)

And what we do is on Wednesdays we come in 30 minutes early every single Wednesday. And every other week we'll do maintenance, grease, booms and what have you and take a little extra time to do a once over. And on the other weeks, we use the TCIA tailgate safety manual. And I knew that I didn't want to run the safety meeting, so I have Curtis, who's a certified arborist, he runs our tailgate safety. And we'll take a chapter out of the book or a topic out of the binder, and for 30 minutes, Curtis will teach it. Everybody takes the little exam. We make a bunch of photocopies, Everyone has a clipboard. And we take 30 minutes for education. And we'll pick about heat stroke. That's real in Tampa, Florida. We'll talk about that, that when we have caterpillar season, okay, we'll talk about stinging insects, we'll review who has an allergy, who has an EpiPen, oh, where's our first aid kits? And we take some time to let that structured training allow us to reflect on how we're operating and we don't get caught up in the blinders of go, go, go, go, go. And no one checked when the fire extinguisher in the truck or is it even still there. So the TCIA safety tailgate training that's led by NotMe has been helpful to let everybody stop what they're doing and then internally reflect on the topic and then share what happened the week prior, what was an incident meeting, what was a near miss that we talked about. And we can just pause for a half hour and just kind of recenter ourselves and know that we want to come to work, have fun, get paid and we want to go home safe to our families and repeat the process us.

Jason Lee (53:39)

Absolutely. Hey Jordan, we're pushing up on 4 o'.

Jordan Upkavage (53:41)

Clock.

Jason Lee (53:42)

I don't know if Lizzy wants us to do a little bit more Q and A. I'm good. Going over a couple minutes. What are you thinking, Lizzy?

Lizzy (53:49)

Lizzy is happy to do that. Lizzy is also very happy to already have prepared a word doc for the three of you. So if you want to keep going, you can. And I prepared a document approved by Ms. Amy Fine that you all can kind of plug in some answers. So either things that we touched on here today that we've already addressed for questions just to keep it for the long term and then future questions that people have throughout the rest of the webinar here. If you guys want to touch on anything else.

Jordan Upkavage (54:17)

Yeah, one thing I want to talk about, and we're at slide number six. It's here about me not being the bottleneck. So I got a getting a pesticide license in the state of Florida is very challenging. We got a pesticide license to run a plant healthcare division, whatever you want to call it. Right. So. So I was the keeper of the plant health care schedule where we're going to sell a spring and fall deep root application or a four times a year deep root, a paclobutrazole, whatever. We're going to be doing otc, palm injections, granular, the whole bit. And right now I have people working. I'm in New York City on my kids spring break. My whole family is and I failed in December to look at that. All of 2026 plant health care that we need to renew from 2025. I never did it. And I said, you know what, I shouldn't be doing this. I should have somebody else do it. And I have a lovely young lady named Brer who's been on our team for almost a year now. And I had Brer in the plant healthcare truck learning how to do it. And I said brer, we're going to sit down, we're going to meet in my office, we're going to spend all Friday together, I'm going to teach you single ops. So she brought a laptop top her own computer to the office. I said oh my gosh, this is amazing. And I showed her how to do a template of a four round deep route where the auto populated winter, spring, summer, fall verbiage goes what we're going to apply during a nitrogen blackout that we have. And I showed her how to do the schedule and I said, okay Brer, I want you to contact all of our healthcare customers and I want you to give them a phone call and send them a proposal for 2026 and if they accept depth, you're going to set the schedule of the months that you're going to do it. Some of them are on autopilot where just keep rolling with it and where I had a problem and I learned this. I sold some clients four round deep root four times a year and out of laziness I just renewed it for 2025. So we show up in March of 2025 and the customer gets the invoice and they're like hey Jordan, I signed up for 2024, I never signed a contract for 2025. I didn't want it anymore. And I was being rather cavalier with it and just out of laziness assumed it. And I learned a lesson. Her name was Mrs. Rosen was my client and so I didn't want that to happen again. So I sat, we were in the office for nine hours that day and I taught her plant healthcare. And then all of this week as I'm in New York City, here she is going through our 2026 and she's building her own plant healthcare route that she ran today, that she ran yesterday. It was all done by her and I removed the reins from my hands and I put it in Breer's hands and the amount of information that she was building back into the crew notes based on observations of Mr. Overstreet. The Oak tree near the driveway could really use it. It's looking worse than it did when I was here six months ago. And I said, brer, this is the prime time for you to contact him, for you to upsell and you to take this and run. So removing that plug of the bottleneck from me me has made my life so much better that I'm not staying awake till 2 o' clock. In the morning trying to do all of this and that we're actually able to give a better product to our client by giving somebody more time to do it. And I'm not always in a hurry forcing the same thing down the, down the throat here. Did we freeze? Oh, we're here. Okay. Do we have any questions that, that are. Are good for us to answer?

Lizzy (57:53)

Lizzie, I lost my little video link there. I was almost beat by the technology. I actually have a full page for you of questions, one of which was that I think would be really important is how are you finding the right crews? How do you know that you need more crews and more people?

Jordan Upkavage (58:16)

Take it away, Jason.

Jason Lee (58:20)

You know, how do you find the right people? We're any method that we can. I mean, through, through employee referrals through Indeed.com we utilize team Engine, which really, they do lots of things. We're just using it to streamline our job postings across all of the, all of the recruiting platforms. You know, bringing people in, it's. It's always going to be a challenge for everyone. And it's just siphoning through all of the, all of the applications and all of the people and the people that do interview and hope they show up after you offer them a job. I mean, the whole thing. And once you get the people on board, you know, for us it's. And we do a lot of contractual maintenance. So on. On our maintenance side of things, you know, we're, we're budgeting for, you know, 40,000 man hours for the year. So it's very simple for us to look at and say, hey, we're going to need this many people for this amount of time across the entire year on our design build side of our business, which I would think would get a little bit more into comparison of tree work and Priscilla can speak on both. But you know, for that it's, hey, we would like to do this historically is what we've been doing the past three to four years. So we can predict that we are going to do this amount of revenue in this many man hours. And you know, through these marketing efforts, we'd like to grow this division by 30%. So if we're going to do that, we'll assume going into springtime right now and we're actively making these hires right now. So we're, we're past the point of our presumption and I'm actively trying to hire three more people, so I'm adding on 6,000 more man hours so we can grow by that 30%. In this division right now. So that's the way I look at it. By man hours for maintenance, it's very easy to predict. And then as you sell more then you just hire. But on that, on that design build side of things, which I think would be comparable to tree work, it's, you know, how much, how much capacity can I sell? And then back it up. And so that's, that's the biggest thing for us.

Priscilla de Rubis (60:20)

Exactly, it's exactly the same. You know, contractually we know how much, how many hours we're going to need and how many crews will go from there with tree and design build, how much are we planning on selling or how much can we sell to sell out the year. So that, that kind of determines how many people we'll need to hire if we need to hire anybody at all. But in terms of how do we hire people, same as Jason. Like any route we possibly can, we do have an in house recruiter who does HR and recruiting, which has worked out really great. But I mean it's, it's, it's always a challenge.

Jordan Upkavage (60:59)

Yeah. And, and for us it's, it's kind of after we sold it. Right. Okay. We're however many weeks booked on this mini cruise, let's start another crew. Because we have the workforce workflow to do it. Just hiring people and starting another crew is, there's no magic button. But we would pull a crew leader from the current base that we have that would be a great candidate to. Maybe it's the climber or maybe it's a driver plus a climber. And those two people together will figure it out and we're going to give them a third groundman. So now we have, I don't want to call it a half crew, but we have a light crew and we give them the easier assignments to see if they can, you know, accomplish those well. And if it's going well, then we, we press a little harder and harder. There's no easy way to hire people other than every route to tap if it's indeed if it's Craigslist. We have people who have their sons working for us, we have cousins, friends working. And even if it's temporary, we had a friend working that was going to go into the police academy and he did, but he was a fantastic employee for seven months until the police academy started. So we look at every opportunity to onboard. But we also have, I'm going to call it a high bar to reach for us to be able to onboard because the last thing I want to do is onboard a problem or onboard dead weight that would equal a broken promise. So to work for me at independent tree Service, you must possess a valid driver's license. If you do not possess a valid driver's license, don't apply for the job. What that tells me is if you don't have a dlc, you likely have some life characteristics that aren't buttoned up that are going to equal I can't come into work or a personal character trait that I don't want in the business. So everybody has to possess a driver's license and everybody has to pass a drug screening before they can start work. So we set those two bars and maybe we have 99% of the applications don't meet those two criteria, which I'm going to celebrate that. That's 99 problems that I didn't have to have. And it's the one person that did qualify that's likely a better quality person that's going to fit into our culture of nobody wants to accuse somebody of rifling through their bag or stealing something. We want to work with good people that we trust and we have the same values between all of us.

Priscilla de Rubis (63:28)

Exactly.

Alex Albritton (63:30)

All right, I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up. It is 403, so we are at the end of our session. Really great session by the way. Thank you guys so much. So, yeah, thank you again to Jason, Jordan and Priscilla for your time, your expertise and your support of the industry. And big special thanks to Single Ops by Granum for sponsoring today's webinar. If you do have any questions, please contact us@businesssolutionscia.org to speak with one of our team members. I did post a link in the chat so you can sign up and register for our upcoming webinar webinars. I'll be sure to include the PDF of the checklist from Single Ops in our follow up email as long as some answers to the questions that we couldn't get to today. So thank you guys again for joining today and we hope to see you soon.

Jordan Upkavage (64:21)

And Alex, if I can, if I can plug this real quick. Jason and I's podcast is called Green side Up and we drop episodes every Thursday on Apple and Spotify and we can get deep in the weeds on very specific topics. So feel free to give us a listen. Apple, Spotify, Spotify. It's Greenside up podcast. You can reach out to Alex or Jason or I if there's a topic that you want us to cover or something that's very acute. We'll be happy to just be overly transparent and real on how two professionals are running green industry businesses and all of the struggles and wins and fails that we come across every day.

Priscilla de Rubis (64:57)

Thank you. Jordan. Great.

Jason Lee (64:59)

As you continue your journey toward entrepreneurial success, let Jason and Jordan be your trusted companions on this uphill climb. Don't miss out on future episodes of the Green side Up podcast. Make sure to hit that follow button to stay updated. For more ways to connect with the guys, check out the podcast description. Thank you for tuning in. And remember, keep working hard so you can play even harder and keep the Green side Up up.