Tree Care Reviews

I answer phones for my brother Sal, or I used to. Sal climbs like he was born in a harness and he talks on the phone like it is a debt collector. When that oak came down during the storm in March, we had forty some calls before breakfast and Sal was already in a tree two streets over with a saw running. Every one of those calls was somebody scared, with a roof or a car under something, and half of them got Sal's voicemail and called the next name. This time the Launchbarr voice answered them. Booked the estimates, took the addresses, told people honestly where they were in line. Two customers told Sal his new girl in the office was a sweetheart and when was she starting full time. She is not a girl, and she does not get tired, and I might be a little jealous of her phone voice, I will admit that in writing. Sal gets to stay in the tree now, which is where Sal is a gift. On the ground with a phone he is a liability, his words mostly. He said it himself in the truck: Gina, I think she out talks me and out climbs nothing, so we are each doing our job.

In this county there are a hundred outfits with a saw and four of us with real insurance, near enough. I pay for comp on climbers, a bill that would make a normal person sit down, then watch a man with a pickup and a ladder win a removal because he did not have to. A homeowner two towns over told me she almost hired that man. Then she read our Google page and the insurance papers are right there, and two reviews talked about us roping a pecan away from her neighbor's roof, piece by piece, nothing on the fence. She said she had not thought about the insurance part until it was in her face, and then she could not unthink it. Her husband stood in the yard the whole time and at the end he said, that is why yours costs what it costs. I have been waiting nine years for a man to say that first.

My estimate book used to live on my passenger seat and my Saturdays lived in other people's driveways. Half the appointments, nobody home. A note on the door, a dog through the glass, forty minutes burned and me mad at a person I never met. The confirmations and on the way messages Launchbarr sends cut most of that out. People answer back, yes, gate is open, dogs are in. It gave me most of my Saturdays back this fall, which my daughter noticed before I did.

I am Harlan's son Wes, I run the ground crew and the chipper, and I will tell you the thing nobody in tree work likes to say out loud. After a storm we are heroes for two weeks and then the phone goes dead quiet, and dad starts doing math at the kitchen table that nobody enjoys watching. What I did not expect was the reviews from the storm jobs to keep working after the yards were clean. The review asks from Launchbarr go out when we finish, and people actually write it down while they are still grateful, crew names and all. A man across town read one about us tarping his neighbor's roof the same night as the takedown, and he booked three big pruning jobs in the quiet weeks of October. Steady work, priced right, nobody's roof involved. Dad is a perfectionist and he does not praise easy. He stood in that man's yard watching my rigging and said, your grandfather would have charged half and complained twice. I asked if that was good. He said, son, we are the expensive ones now and they keep calling anyway. Then he went back to work, which from dad is a speech.

I have climbed for twenty six years and I answer a phone the way a man answers a wasp nest, fast and already annoyed. It is not personal. My ground guy used to climb down nothing, he would just yell the number up at me and I would call back at lunch sounding like a hostage. Storm week last spring, the phone did not stop for three days and I did not touch it once. The voice Launchbarr put on our line answered every call, asked where the tree was, what it landed on, whether anybody was hurt, and booked the look in the order it should be booked, worst first. People with a pine through the kitchen do not want a menu. They want a person. She sounded like one. What got me was the reviews after. Folks kept writing about the calm lady who talked them off the ledge at midnight. One man wrote that he chose us over two cheaper outfits because the lady on the phone knew what a widow maker was. I did not correct anybody. She is better at my phone than I ever was, and I have made my peace with being out talked by my own answering system.

My husband Earl fells trees and kills phones. Not on purpose. He drops them out of lifts, runs them through the chipper wash, leaves them on stumps in the rain. Calling this company used to mean calling Earl three times and me twice. The review ask goes out on its own now, right when the yard is clean and the check is not even written yet. Earl read it twice at supper. He said, Ruth, they think I am organized. I said, Earl, lately you are.

I own this company and I climb second, because my lead climber is better and I am not too proud to say what is true. What I was too proud for, for years, was admitting our Google page looked like a yard sale. Old number on it. A photo of a stump from somebody else's job that a customer sent me as a joke. Launchbarr rebuilt the profile with our real work, the crane picks, the bucket over the pool cage, removals listed plain, pruning listed plain, proof of insurance where a scared homeowner can find it at 2 a.m. A woman told me last month she picked us off the map because we were the only ones whose pictures showed a tree coming down in pieces over a house like hers. She said, the other pages could have been anybody's cousin. Mine could only be us.

My partner Ray climbs, I run the ground, the bids, and the part where money has to change hands without a fistfight. Ray's position on paperwork is that gravity handles it. Estimates used to go out of Ray's mouth in a driveway and live there. The follow ups run now without me nagging either one of them. A big walnut removal we quoted in April, the man went quiet, I marked it dead, and the messages kept politely knocking. Ray asked if the system could also climb. I told him one miracle per department.

I am seventy one and still go up, slower than I say and faster than my wife says. A call came while I was rigging a leaner over a carport and went where calls go. The text back told her we got it, and she booked the look for morning. Used to be that job went to whoever answered first, and it was never me.

I am the daughter, I run the office, the schedule, and my father's blood pressure, in that order some days. Dad is a brilliant arborist and a terrible record keeper. Jobs written on fuel receipts. A removal quoted twice, two different numbers, both sworn correct. Everything lives on one board now. Every lead, every bid, every job, what stage, who owes what. Last week he told a customer, my daughter will have it on the board. He said it like weather, just a fact of the world now.

My website, if you could call it that, was a page my nephew made in about 2014 with a picture of a forest that is not in this state and words like quality and reliable doing all the heavy lifting. The site Launchbarr built is our work and only our work. Pictures of my crew rigging a dead ash down between two houses. The crane day. The stump grinder doing its ugly beautiful work. A man called in July and opened with, I saw the oak over the garage, mine is the same problem. He had already sold himself before I said a word. I just had to not talk him out of it, which historically is my strongest skill anyway.

I dispatch for a tree company, which means I am the voice of calm for people standing in their yard looking up at a problem bigger than their house. My old nemesis was the no show estimate. The reminders and the on the way texts go out on their own now, and homeowners answer them. Gate codes come in. Dogs get put inside. One man replied to the on the way text with a photo of the tree and an arrow drawn on it, which is the most prepared a customer has ever been for us. My angry call count is down to nearly nothing. I spend my days dispatching instead of apologizing, and those are different jobs with different blood pressures.

I do not give deposits speeches, I give tree speeches, and for years that meant I started removals on a handshake and a prayer and chased money through two seasons like a dog after a mail truck. A man owed me for a maple removal and a stump for eleven months. Eleven. I knew his dog's name better than my own. Now the estimate carries a deposit link and the truck does not roll until it is paid. A homeowner paying hers from her phone in the driveway said it made us look like the real company. We were always the real company. We used to collect like a hobby.

I ran ads for years and never could say what any of it bought. The ads Launchbarr runs are small and local, aimed at removals and pruning close to home. A lady booked a dead pine after finding us on her phone while sitting under it, which is the correct way to find a tree company, before it finds you.

I co own the company with a man who can lower a thousand pound log onto a dime and cannot return a text if his life depended on it. His life does not. Mine, running the office, sort of does. The messages get handled now as they come in. It asks the right things, how big, what is under it, can a truck get in, and books the estimate with the answers attached. A woman told me she messaged three companies at her kitchen table and we were the only ones who had a conversation with her. The other two sent her a form. She said a form never took a tree off anybody's house.

I sell pruning the way my daddy sold pruning, which is I did not, I waited for the phone. Pruning is not an emergency, so nobody calls about it until a limb is on the fence, and then it is a removal and a fence. This winter the dormant work filled in so steady I kept my ground guy on through February for the first time in nine years. He thinks I got smarter. The calendar got smarter. I just sign the checks with more confidence.

My wife Carla owns this company outright, papers, trucks, and the crane we argue about like it is a third child. I run a crew for her. Watching her run the business used to mean watching her drown in five places at once. The phone in her apron, texts on her personal number, Facebook messages she found on Sundays, emails from the website she found never. A lead could die of old age in four different inboxes and nobody killed it, it just got lost between them. It all lands in one place now, and Carla works it like a board at the shop, everything in a row, nothing in her apron. A man whose storm job we did told her at the final walk that we were the only company that ever answered him twice the same day. Carla said, that is because there is only one door now and everything comes through it. She fired two of her own phone habits this year and does not miss either of them. I run her second crew and I will tell you the truth, the office used to be the bottleneck of this whole outfit, and the office was one woman and a ringing apron.

I am old school in the specific way that I believed if I did good work the phone would handle itself, which is a fine philosophy until you count what the phone actually did. I never knew which ads brought a call and which brought silence. I spent on a radio spot one year because the salesman had a good handshake. Now I can see what brought each call and I can listen to the calls themselves, which cured me of a few opinions. Half the people who ring us are not price shopping. They are scared of the tree over the bedroom and they want to hear a calm human process. Hearing that changed how my estimates sound. I talk about the rigging first and the money second, and the money closes easier. The system told me by letting me eavesdrop on my own business.

I am the daughter in a father and daughter outfit, and yes, he still checks my knots. Now the number goes out by text while he is still in the yard. A lady signed a two tree removal before he got back to the truck. He looked at his phone and said, she has not even seen my handwriting. That is the point, Dad.

Plant health care is the part of tree work nobody photographs. Feeding, treating, keeping a good oak alive instead of cutting it down for ten times the money. I offered it for years and sold almost none, because it lives or dies on remembering, and I remember trees, not billing dates. The recurring side runs itself now. Customers are on a plan, the visits land on the schedule, the card runs, the receipt shows up, and a live oak we have treated for two seasons is the best looking tree on its street, which the neighbors have noticed out loud. A man signed up standing under that oak. He said he was not buying treatments, he was buying that view. My renewal list is the steadiest money this company has ever had, and it comes from the jobs I used to forget to sell.

My husband Tom climbs and I do everything that happens on the ground, including, until recently, begging. Begging past customers to remember us kindly out loud. Tom's position was that asking for a review is asking for a compliment and he was not raised that way. I was raised to feed people, which is close, but reviews feed the business now. The thank you goes out after every job, and a check in down the road, and the kindness comes back on its own schedule. Tom still will not ask anybody for anything. He does not have to. The asking happens, the work gets thanked, and he gets to keep his dignity and eat the referrals too.

My partner and I bought this company off a man retiring, and we inherited his customers and his confusion. Half the internet had the old owner's home number as our business line. Our own name showed up spelled two ways on different sites, with an address from a shop he closed in the nineties. People called the wrong number, got a confused retiree on a porch, and concluded we had gone out of business. We were losing jobs to our own listings. Launchbarr matched it all up, same name, same number, same address, everywhere a homeowner looks. Calls come to the shop now. The retiree called us last month, friendly as can be, to say his phone finally stopped ringing and could we take his sweetgum down at the family rate. We did. It was the least we owed him for three years of accidental dispatch work.

I run the office, which in tree work means I know which customers cry, which pay slow, and which have a gate code from 2019 that no longer works. The tasks tell the office who to call and when now, so the business no longer depends on my memory or my notebook surviving the summer.

I thought those square codes were for coffee shops and menus, and I said so in front of witnesses. My son in law put the code on the trucks and the yard signs, and a man scanned it at a job we were finishing and booked his own leaning tree before we left the street. I have spent thirty years believing the work is the advertisement. The work is the advertisement, that is still true. The code just lets the work talk to the whole street at once instead of one yard at a time. My son in law is insufferable about it and he has earned the right.