Top-performing crews build routes geographically tight, employ full-time dispatchers during peak season, automate ETA notifications, treat the foreman's phone as a dispatch endpoint, and review GPS playback weekly.
The reason this exercise matters is that most tree care businesses have already captured the easy gains on the jobsite. Their climbers are experienced. Their equipment is dialed in. Their produc- tion processes are mature. The next meaningful improvement is usually not found in cutting trees faster. It is found in helping crews spend more of the day where they create value. If you are looking for the easiest five points of margin available this year, start by measuring the time between jobs rather than the time on them. The jobsite is already optimized. The road between jobsites is not. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Joy Gomez is an engineer, process auto- mation expert, and the Founder of Field Promax. Known for his technical exper- tise and commitment to field service in- novation, Joy writes about transforming traditional business models into paper- less, efficient operations. He is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt based in Rochester, MN, dedicated to helping field profes- sionals work smarter through better tech- nology. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
one week measuring how your existing crews actually spend their time. Pull GPS data from every vehicle in your fleet. If you do not have fleet soft- ware, use location histories from com- pany phones, dash cams, or telematics apps. Separate the workday into three categories: time on-site producing rev- enue, time driving between locations, and time spent idling or waiting.
THE OFFSEASON MOVE THAT PAYS OFF IN PEAK
In my experience, the chimney sweep and arborist operators who treat the offseason as a maintenance-market- ing window, running review requests and referral campaigns to last year’s customers, start the next peak season with a noticeably fuller schedule. A fuller schedule means tighter geo- graphic clustering is possible, because you have more jobs to choose from when you are building the week. A thinner schedule forces you to take whatever comes in, wherever it is, and that is how you end up with a Tuesday route that runs from one end of the county to the other. Industry coverage of arboriculture trends keeps coming back to the same theme: the businesses that grow prof- itably in this trade are the ones that systematize the boring stuff, and drive time is about as boring as the boring stuff gets. AN OPERATOR TAKEAWAY Before you invest in another truck, an- other chipper, or another crew, spend
Then do the math.
A crew that appears busy for 10 hours may only be generating revenue for six or seven of them. The rest disap- pears into long routes, inefficient job sequencing, forgotten equipment, cus- tomer delays, traffic, and dispatch deci- sions that seemed harmless in isolation but become expensive when multiplied across multiple employees and multi- ple trucks. More importantly, calculate the labor cost of that lost time. An hour of unnec- essary driving is not one lost hour. It is three labor-hours for a three-person crew, plus fuel, vehicle wear, and lost production capacity. Across a full sea- son, those hours compound into real money.
ArborTIMES ™ Summer 2026 | 55
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online