Posted On: Saturday - April 11th 2026 6:56AM MST
In Topics: Treehuggers Salesmen Race/Genetics
It was the best of trees, it was the gnarliest of trees…
A more proper term would be Arborist, and one of our two in this tale could rightly be called that. Lumberjack is another, but we are discussing guys who take down trees in city spaces - colloquially, it’s just “tree guy”. (No, I’ve never seen a woman do this work and not ever even heard of one.)
This is really dangerous work. The machines are one thing, as wood chippers could be the stuff of nightmares… or Coen Brothers movies. The buckets on top of those “cherry pickers” can be dangerous among power lines, and then there is the climbing and lowering of thousand pound limbs down in some carefully planned way to avoid bashing sheds and windows. Therefore, it takes some smarts too.
The scariest I’ve seen this tree work get was a time when one young guy, assisted by his two helpers on the ground, was up in a Magnolia tree. That’s soft wood, and, ropes and all, at one point, he told me he was on his own - in the rock climbing world it’d be called “free soloing”. These were White guys that worked for cash. (I really doubt they had insurance either.)
From that last bit, the reader might be able to tell where this is leading… Race/Genetics is one of the topic keys. I just want to discuss business and finances here, so I’ll leave the story of cheap, or not, labor for another post.
It was about an over half-century old pecan tree that had to come down a few years back. Having foot and a half diameter limbs sitting horizontally 20 ft. over the roof can be unnerving... once people kept mentioning it.* It was sad, but this one had to go. My wife was worried and called one guy a day before a hurricane was due to arrive… haha, no, she still not quite there yet with the prepping mindset … so… some months later I called a tree guy who was at the time a friend of, and in a business relationship with, my friend. This tree guy is black.
Now, I appreciate hardworking guys of all races (so long as they don’t break into and swamp the country). For the black contingent, I’ve said before that a whole lot of them seem to need physical work to keep them out of trouble. You might say this guy is a success in business. When he’s got a job, this guy works hard, or used to. He’s too old to get up into the tree anymore though, so his son is up in the cherry picker while he supervises it all from a perch on a wheelbarrow. This tree of ours got cut down without damage to property, so I have no complaints there.
But this post is about the finances and handling of money. Black people are generally very very poor at this. You see these stats about average or median wealth of people by demographic, and, well, they fare terribly. It’s not that they don’t or can’t make good money. This guy does and can. They just can’t HANDLE it worth a damn. Because this first of two tree guys was - see that’s yet another bad finances story itself - a friend of my friend, I gave him all the benefit of the doubt in bargaining.
I got screwed, or I screwed myself, in the bargaining, I realized after the fact. I tried to imagine the size of his crew, the amount of time to do the job, and the upkeep of equipment, etc. I’m no Socialist, but I wanted to pay a fair price. Nah, I overestimated how many guys he had out (collecting the limbs, using the chipper, etc.), and I found out he paid them less than I’d thought. He made out better than he would have with a more savvy customer. He’d have probably done the job for $1,000 lower. That’s on me - I can’t complain there either. More on this in the postscript.
First thing, he hadn’t sharpened his chipper beforehand, so he borrowed my extension cord and did that, taking up 1/2 an hour. Things just weren’t really planned out. I’d already found out how bad he is with the money, running on the ragged edge as far as problems with both the big truck and the chipper, from my friend. Loans were involved, and this guy finally got tired of being told he had to pay them back in a timely manner. But, he got himself a nice ride to style and profile.
Whatever comes in gets spent, simple as that… no financial planning is done for the case of another of the big hydraulic cylinders springs another leak, or, say, the one time when a big limb crunched up the roof of the cherry picker.
The cloud of caring for nothing, which overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness, was very rarely pierced by the light within him.
Uhhh, yeah, anyway here’s the kicker: About a month after the work, this tree guy’s wife, acting as business manager, called me up. “You’re the one at [Redacted Address] with the big pecan tree, right? OK, so when do you want it taken down?”, she asked, somewhat exasperated. Oh, I see. It’s either that this guy doesn’t even keep track of what he’s done, or it’s that he doesn’t want the wife to get ALL the proceeds. I’d paid him in cash, so it’s probably the latter.
Now, another big pecan tree was in a much worse spot. I couldn’t even see HOW it could be taken down, without smashing structures. There was no way I would call tree guy #1, as I’d paid too much that time, and, no, I didn’t trust him with this job. Instead, I called the one White guy who I’d gotten to take down somewhat smaller trees fairly recently.
I suppose it’s not completely apples-to-apples, this Black & White comparison, as this White guy is in a class by himself. He used to do software work, and he’s probably the smartest tree guy I’ll ever run into.
In this case, he couldn’t bring his machines in, so he had his hired climber. (I know he climbs them too, but not this time.) The crew of 3 White guys had to have complete trust in each other - another factor in this comparison - as the ropes had to be set just right to bring these big pieces of wood down from up to 75 feet up.
We’d made what I thought was a fair deal, a lower price than for the other Pecan tree some years ago, and it was a more difficult job. I’m here to write about the handling of the finances though. This guy has a $150,000 tracked crawler machine with spidery outriggers, a couple of trucks, the chipper, a skid-steer, and more! He’d told me during that last job, as I talked about paying him cash, that sometimes he doesn’t want it, as he has to put money in the bank to show good credit for the bank and his loans (such as on the crawler).
He’s got jobs planned out a month in advance, he’s got his job starts planned to the half hour, he pays his crew well, at least from what he told me about his climber ($600 a day), and I don’t get confused phone calls from anyone. He uses the app “chipdrop”** to save on time and sometimes make a few bucks dropping his wood chips off. He goes to Arborist conferences even! I couldn’t imagine the Black tree guy doing any of these things.
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done;
Whaaa? Well, it’s a completely different world, doing business with the White tree guy, as opposed to with the black tree guy. Double entendre unintended, it’s like night and day. There’s a big difference in organizational skill, but mostly what I see as the biggest factor in success is the ability, or lack of such, to handle money, and tree companies make some good money.
PS: Now, I’ll let the readers mull something over. What I wrote about here is this black tree guy’s own business - I don’t have to be a customer again. However, the one thing about this black tree guy did that I really didn’t like was his method of bargaining. Sure, if we end up at a certain price, well, that’s free enterprise***. He started out at a ridiculous number of $9,000 - that’s what pisses me off and still does as I write this.
Of course, I told him no to that initial stupid pricing, and to come up with a better price, and we bargained way down from there.
This high-balling the price is not right, IMO. It’s just hoping for some real sucker, maybe an old lady,,, “Oh, my, sonny! I had no idea that things had gone up so much. OK, then…” “That’s just business”, one may reply, “If someone will pay $9,000, then that’s obviously the value of this service to him.” I think it’s plain wrong to start with a price that ridiculously high, hoping you’ll occasionally rip off some sucker. As a Libertarian, I could be wrong in thinking this way… what say you?
* Also, a MUCH smaller limb, about 2 inches in diameter came down onto a vehicle one day and cracked the windshield and busted the inside rear-view mirror.
** This is another “sharing economy” thing, and it’s pretty clever. Tree companies don’t want to run their trucks 10-20 miles to dump chips, and wood chip customers don’t want to pay much when, after all, it costs these guys to get rid of them. The app/site matches up chip consumers with chip producers by location. Sometimes, the tree company can make a few bucks, but if there is low demand, I think he said he might even have to pay out a few. Time is money, and so is mileage on the vehicles - AND, you’ve got to empty it, or you can’t go on using the chipper.
I just talked to guys nearby one time and got a load dumped onto my driveway that took 60 wheelbarrow loads to spread out! This sharing economy idea sure beats my getting occasionally being in the right place at the right time.
*** … and no taxes were paid by anyone, something to appreciate especially this time of this, the cruelest of months. (Yet another literary reference… as Peak Stupidity slowly becomes high-brow.)
Comments:
Moderator
Saturday - April 11th 2026 8:06AM MST
PS: It probably goes without saying that nobody would pay $4,000 for me to work on a sewer line for 2 days… that is, unless he REALLY ripped off the customer or maybe the taxpayers on some gov’t job.
Moderator
Saturday - April 11th 2026 8:04AM MST
PS: Right. I understand the idea of the division of labor and also of understanding what your own free (or not) time is worth. However, I could not have made $9,000 after taxes in that one 7 hour day. Were someone to offer me $4,000 in cash for me to work on a sewer line with him - could get a little messy, but not scary like tree work - I would think “Can I make that much doing something easier and up my alley?”
BTW, I didn’t mention this, but it was either the tree guy - I think it was - or me that was under the impression that the 1st black-felled pecan tree would take a day and a half. When it was done in 7 hours, well, that’s what hard work is about, but I still thought they came out well enough that I probably could have save $1,000 easily, and they’d still make plenty of money - workers, the boss, his son in the bucket, with extra for company profit and vehicle repair.. The guy doesn’t pay his workers on the ground very much either - at least it’s cash.
BTW, I didn’t mention this, but it was either the tree guy - I think it was - or me that was under the impression that the 1st black-felled pecan tree would take a day and a half. When it was done in 7 hours, well, that’s what hard work is about, but I still thought they came out well enough that I probably could have save $1,000 easily, and they’d still make plenty of money - workers, the boss, his son in the bucket, with extra for company profit and vehicle repair.. The guy doesn’t pay his workers on the ground very much either - at least it’s cash.
The Alarmist
Saturday - April 11th 2026 7:25AM MST
PS
I just spent €68 to have my summer tires mounted and another €40 to have winter tires stored for the season. I could easily do the remount, and I have the space to store each set of tires. In the hour it took to do this (busy days at the tire guys), I did a little business that more than covered the cost. The job is ultimately worth the value you can derive from doing something else, even when you already have the skills and tools to do it yourself, not that I’d ever pay someone as much as my day rate.
I just spent €68 to have my summer tires mounted and another €40 to have winter tires stored for the season. I could easily do the remount, and I have the space to store each set of tires. In the hour it took to do this (busy days at the tire guys), I did a little business that more than covered the cost. The job is ultimately worth the value you can derive from doing something else, even when you already have the skills and tools to do it yourself, not that I’d ever pay someone as much as my day rate.