ing but also not generating revenue.
Canopy Tree Service has written can- didly about a truth many operators would rather ignore: time manage- ment, not equipment, is often the biggest driver of profitability . What is striking about their approach is that they define time management much more broadly than most owners do. It’s not about pushing crews to move faster -- It’s about preventing wasted motion before the workday even begins. Their crews start each morning by reviewing the day’s jobs, loading the right equipment, accounting for weath- er conditions, and identifying anything that could trigger a return trip. The log- ic is straightforward: if three employ- ees spend an hour driving back to the yard for a forgotten tool, the business doesn’t lose one hour -- it loses three labor hours plus fuel, vehicle wear, and schedule flexibility. That is why the industry’s obsession with on-site productivity can be mis- leading. Measuring climbing speed, chipper utilization, and cleanup effi- ciency feels productive because those activities are visible. They happen where managers can see them. They feel controllable. Drive time is different. Nobody caused the truck to cross town twice. Nobody intended for a crew to sit idle waiting for an address confirmation. Nobody deliberately built a schedule that sent two crews past each other on the high- way. The waste is distributed across dispatching, routing, estimating, cus- tomer communication, and daily plan- ning. Because it belongs to everyone, it often belongs to no one. Yet that invisible time is frequently where the largest profit leaks occur. Here is the breakdown I see most often when I sit down with owners and actu- ally pull the data: •Productive on-site time: 5.5 to 6.5 hours per crew per 10-hour day
Average drive time between jobs — excluding the morning trip from the yard to the first stop — is 1.5 to 2.5 hours.
sitting on the jobsite. They’re hiding in the hours between jobsites. WHAT OWNERS ACTUALLY MEASURE VS. WHAT’S ACTUALLY KILLING MARGIN Ask a tree care owner what metrics they watch, and you’ll hear familiar answers: climbing times, chipper uti- lization, fuel consumption, crew-day production, maybe equipment uptime. Those are important numbers. The problem is that they’re also the num- bers most mature operations have spent years improving.
squeeze from a veteran climber, an ex- perienced ground crew, or a well-main- tained chipper. A climber with 15 years in the saddle is not suddenly going to become 20% more productive. A 12-inch chipper is not going to start processing 18-inch material. In most established businesses, the gains avail- able on the jobsite are incremental. Yet many owners continue searching for breakthroughs where only mar- ginal improvements remain. They are looking for nickels in the place where the dollars have already been collected. So where is the slack? It is in the time the truck is moving. Or worse, not mov-
There is only so much efficiency left to
50 | Summer 2026 ArborTIMES ™
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