Don’t Let Your Tree Care Service Backlog Own You.
Noel Boyer takes a very different approach to his business than most owners. To Noel, growth isn’t his main objective. It’s a byproduct of providing his clients with world-class tree care service. He only pays for marketing on a local radio station, and Noel relies on word of mouth to keep growing.
Noel’s company, All About Trees, has consistently had a 13-week backlog of work for the past three years. Due to this, he’s lost some potential clients to competitors. There’s plenty of pressure to grow, buy more equipment, hire more crews, and expand his territory, but this pressure doesn’t faze Noel. To him, true success is looking forward to working every day and delighting his customers with a great experience.
Here are Noel’s tips for tree care service success:
- Focus on profitability over revenue
- Allow your crew leaders to resolve issues
- Good owners delegate as much as possible
- Grow at a pace you’re comfortable with, not the pace others expect
- Give your employees the chance to fail and learn
- Your best leaders aren’t the best climbers
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FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Ty Deemer:
All right, everyone. Welcome back to Green Industry Perspectives. I’m your host, Ty Deemer. I’m on the marketing team here at SingleOps, and we’ve got a great episode for you today, a repeat guest, someone with a ton of great insights into the tree care industry. We have Noel Boyer on the show, from All About Trees. Noel, welcome to the show.
Noel Boyer:
Hey. Thanks for having me back again. I figured you’d never want me back after the last one.
Ty Deemer:
No. We loved having you back, and got a ton of great feedback from your first episode. Noel, I know you’ve been on the show before. You’re kind of familiar with what we do here, but we always like to start off with just a little bit of immediate value for our audience, and we ask a similar question. In the last six months or so, since we talked, what have been a few of the things or common threads that you feel like have helped All About Trees have a successful start to the busy season, and then continue it throughout the rest of the year?
Noel Boyer:
One of our company’s strengths has always been our people. So, fortunately, through this entire pandemic, and all of the troubles that came with that, with attempts at closing businesses and stuff, wondering whether you’re an essential business or not, we were able to work throughout the whole thing, and we have not lost any employees through this process. We’ve managed to keep all of our people on. We were actually bringing on a couple more at the time, and continuing to train. During the pandemic and everything, I had five of my guys that I really needed to get their Class B CDLs. So, I hired in a trainer on a weekend, and brought them all in, and we were able to get all five of them passed on their CDL. Just continuing to invest in my people throughout this [crosstalk 00:01:59], that’s been our biggest win. It’s what, I feel like, has kept all my people here. Right now, we’re up seven percent over last year, which was our biggest year ever. So, we’re still doing well, and still got my team all in place here.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. Can’t ask much more than that, having your team in place. How big is your team now? How many people do you have on staff?
Noel Boyer:
If you count me, I mean, we’re still a small company. If you count me, we’re 15 people total. I’ve got two-and-a-half in the office and 12 guys in the field, and then I finally was able to hire a … It’s not that I wasn’t able to hire, but I finally broke down and realized that it was time for me to delegate the sales position in my company. So, I did hire a full-time salesman, which I have always done here for the last 16 years. I have done nearly all of the sales. This year, I’ve got a full-time salesman. It’s helping free me up a bunch to get back out on the crews, and train with the guys, and just be more present. For the last however many years, I would show up, grab my schedule for the day, tell everybody hi, and out the door I went. Then I would be the last one in, never got to [crosstalk 00:03:20] at the end of the day. Having that sales position filled has been a huge benefit to us, too.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. Because I think that’s a relatively new thing, since the last time we talked. What was that process like, bringing in someone to take the reins of a role you had been so pivotal in? Was that tough, in some facets, to give up, or was it more of a, “No. Let me train them up,” and then it was stepping out and enjoying it? Was it a little bit of both?
Noel Boyer:
Maybe a little bit of both. Definitely tougher for me to give up. I’ve owned this company for 16 years. Through the years, I have let go of being the crew leader, and I let go of scheduling, and I let go of the bookkeeping, and all these other hats that I have, one at a time, taken off my head and handed to somebody.
Ty Deemer:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Noel Boyer:
This one was the one that I could never seem to let go of. I felt like I was the representative that was the face of our business that our customers needed to see. It took me a long time to get past that. The fortunate part for me was that I was able to entice one of my good friends, who has been an arborist even longer than me. As a matter of fact, 26 years ago, when I took my first job working at a tree care company, this guy was working at that company. We’ve known each other. We’ve, both of us, been in the tree care business for … He’s going on 30 years. I’ve been in for 26 years. It was pretty much like picking up where we left off. I really didn’t have to do any heavy lifting on the training to get him right in the zone with my customers.
Actually, you hate to hear it, but I want to call it a win whenever some of my customers are like, “Oh, I like dealing with Kevin better than Noel.” So, I guess, in that case, that just means I chose well. I’ll take the credit for just choosing well instead of being the asshole that they wanted to get rid of, and deal with somebody else.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. That’s good. I love that. To your point, too, at a company your size, you’ve built it very strategically as time has gone. You didn’t add people for adding people’s sake. You brought in the right people. As that came, you had to delegate tasks. I think that’s a topic that a lot of owners struggle with, because they started doing everything. They probably love doing everything. What would be your advice to some owners that are getting to the point where they need to step back a little bit in different areas? What advice would you give, maybe, in what areas to start stepping back first in, or just how to cope with the actual emotional side of letting go of parts of your business?
Noel Boyer:
I mean, I think it definitely starts with your ability to trust your employees to take it on. Sometimes we’ve had employees here that might have even felt like they were being thrown to the wolves a little bit. Sometimes we had them stepping far outside of their comfort zones to fill a position that we needed filled. We just had confidence in them, and we would look around in the room and say, “Who here has the skills or the ability to do this,” and ask them if they’re ready to take that on, and the challenges that come with a new position, whatever that might be. The one that comes to my mind is a climber that’s been with me for a while, but he’s really good at dealing with the people, and he interacts well with the crew. Sometimes it’s not always the best climber on the team that becomes the next crew leader.
Ty Deemer:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Noel Boyer:
The crew leader position is one that you need somebody that is able to deal with the customer, and able to understand the work order, and able to make sure that the work is done, but it doesn’t always have to be the best climber, or the best operator, on the team. It needs to be the person with the personality that fits that position. We’ve made some bad choices through the years. Everybody does. I think the other piece of advice I would give, if you’re trying to let go of some of that stuff, is to prepare yourself mentally, at least in the short run, for somebody else to do that job not as well as you were doing it.
Ty Deemer:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Noel Boyer:
If you have this expectation where, “I’m going to turn over this task, or this duty, or this position to this person, and I know that I’ve been getting this much accomplished whenever I do this, and I need them to do the same,” well, it’s not going to happen right off the bat. You’ve got to give somebody time to build into that position. While there is a tendency, and I have it, too, to rush them in, this crew needs to do $3,000 a day, and you’re the crew leader of this crew now, and this is what we expect from you, but the new guy is not going to be able to carry that load as easily as an experienced person. Make sure that as you add tasks to somebody’s list, that you’re not the person that’s setting them up to fail. You need to set them up to succeed by making your goals for them realistic.
Once they start to attain that goal on a regular basis, you can up the goals. We have definitely brought people in to a new position in the company, and expected too much, and pushed too hard. The next thing you know, we’re getting phone calls that fences are broken, or they backed over the mailbox, or whatever, because they were being pressed to rush instead of taking the time for quality.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. That’s a really good call out, too, because I think there’s a perspective of it from someone, whether you’re a manager or whether you’re a business owner, you look at a task sometimes, and I think our inclination is, “I’m tasking them with one very specific thing to do just as well as I used to. I did it just as well, or I did it that well, while I was juggling all of these other things. Surely, they can do that one task to my level that I was doing.” To your point, that’s not always realistic in the terms of you had all of that experience to build up to do that, to do it at that, and it was yours. You were the owner of the business. There’s going to be a certain level of care and diligence that you brought to it, because your name is on the letterhead, so to speak, of, “This is my company.”
It sounds, maybe, like a mind-blowing thought. “Oh, don’t expect them to do as much as you could do.” But so many people do that because you’re saying, “Well, I only was asking them to do one little part of my job, like I used to do it.” It’s not that simple.
Noel Boyer:
Yeah. No. That’s definitely true. It’s not just my name on the letterhead or whatever. It is that after all of these years of doing this, I have a comfort level. I’m a decent climber. I’m okay at various parts. I’m an okay mechanic. I can weld shit the guys break. I’m not great at any of those things, but one thing that I have always taken pride in is being able to turn around a difficult customer. We had something happen on their job site, and they’ve been mad at us or whatever, and there needs to be a resolution. I’ve always been really good at that, negotiating with somebody who’s upset. You put a new crew leader in there that, number one, they don’t have the experience of doing that, but they also don’t have the comfort to just be able to look somebody in the eye and say, “We need to go straight on past. I’m sorry about what happened. We need to go to the next step, which is now what are we going to do about it?”
You have to empower somebody in that position to take that on and to make concessions with somebody, if they need to. You don’t want to give away the whole job, but you want them to find resolutions, so that I don’t have to be involved every single time anything happens. So, we do that. Everybody on my crew has the capacity, and not only that. I mean, it’s not that I don’t want to hear about it. I want to hear about it. But I would love to hear about it after it’s already been resolved. That’s normally the case. The guys all have, almost what I would call, a budget, only it’s not about money. It’s about conceding to somebody and saying, “Hey, I’m sorry. Whenever we dropped this log, it smashed the irrigation in the yard. We didn’t know it was there. We couldn’t have known it was there. I know that you’re going to have to have an irrigation guy come in here and fix this. How about we haul off your brush pile back there behind the shed, just to make even?”
They do that all the time for people. I’ll hear about it, but it’s usually whenever they post a five-star review on Google, saying, “Immediately after breaking something, they fessed to it. There was no me, chasing them down about it. We just came to an agreement about how to deal with it.” For the newer crew leaders … We only have three crews. I’m sending out three crews a day. Even at that, we’ve got three crews, but really, I’ve got four or five crew leaders, and sometimes we just rotate through them because I’m trying to bring guys up to be comfortable in that position. Even though I do a good job retaining my people, nobody stays forever. So, I want to have the next guys ready to go, if anybody decides that there’s something else out there, or family emergencies, or whatever it is that pulls them away from work.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. Those are all really good points. One thing that we had talked through before we pressed record, talking about what this Summer has looked like for you all at All About. It’s been busy. You have a pretty healthy backlog of work. I think it would be really interesting for the audience to hear you talk about your team’s backlog, how it compares this Summer to what you typically would expect it to, or want it to be at. How do you, as a business owner, process backlog, in the now and in the future, for how you plan to get to all that work?
Noel Boyer:
Sure. You and I were talking before you hit the record button. You were asking, “What would your ideal backlog be?” I think I said probably about four weeks, or maybe six. That’s a nice, comfortable spot, where you can tell people we’re a month out. Right now, we’re more than three months out. We’ve got about a 13 week backlog in front of us right now. While that does leave me with a level of comfort, in having plenty of work piled up in front of us, and the phone’s still ringing off the hook, it also leaves me in a bad spot because we do lose some jobs over our backlog. It’s not that often that we lose them to previous customers, because to tell you the truth, we’ve had about a two month backlog for the last three years. We just never seemed to really draw it in any closer than that.
There’s people that pull me aside and they’re like, “Man, you’re missing the boat so hard here. You could buy a little more equipment, hire three or four more guys, and you could go catch that up. You guys could just race on from there. You can close more jobs.” The truth is, I don’t want this company to own me. I want to own the company. I want to grow it at the pace that I’m comfortable with, and not be forced forward by a backlog. While there is negative, and with the impatient customers, and with missing out on some of the jobs because our backlog is too high, the other thing that it affords us is we’re able to … Right now, and for the last two years, we’ve been moving our prices to where they really should have been for a long time.
Springfield, Missouri, it’s a fairly small city in Podunk-land, southwest corner of Missouri. It’s a very, very low cost of living here. Income is not really that high here, on average. Here in Springfield, Missouri, the average price for a three bedroom, two bath, two car garage house is about $140,000. So, it’s cheap to live here. Wages are not as high as they are in other places in the United States and such. But also, it’s not as easy to charge the rates that many of my friends are getting in larger cities, or other markets all over the United States. So, this backlog has let us start to push our prices up to where they really belong. We’ve never been not profitable, but as most people know, as you grow your business in gross, your percentage of net usually goes down. It’s not common for gross and net to both escalate.
Usually, whenever you’re doing more volume, you’re making a bit less per job, or per day, or per whatever, but you’re making it up in volume. We have definitely found that to be true, as well. Some of it is just the realization, too, that some of the equipment that we have, nobody else in this town has. We have the ability to show up with our own crane, or a couple of big grapple trucks to get rid of a large volume of wood waste, or whatever. Nobody else has that. You have to consider that equipment is worth more on that job site, too. It’s adding to your efficiency, but it also adds to your cost. I think that’s probably the two things that I’ve noticed, the negative being, maybe, some disappointed customers, because everybody wants everything right now, and then the second one is it affords us the ability to push our prices forward a little bit, which is good.
The other thing that I can say about the backlog being that long is I do have some friends that really struggle with scheduling, whenever their backlog gets that high. A lot of times, when you show up for an estimate, you tell them what needs to be done, tell them how much it’s going to cost. You send them an email with all the details in there. They say, “Well, I want it done. What date are you coming?” We learned our lesson a long time ago to don’t give people a specific date upon confirmation. Unfortunately, for us, it has to be something we repeat over and over. When our phone rings for somebody wanting an estimate, we tell them right off the bat, “It’s going to take a week or so to get the estimate. It’s going to take 13 weeks to get the tree worked on.” Whenever I go out, or whenever Kevin goes out for the sales call, he repeats it again.
“I would love to do this work for you. Here’s what all needs to be done. It’s 13 weeks backlog.” He’ll give them the estimate. Then when they email or call to confirm, they get told the third time, “It’s going to be 13 weeks before the work gets done.” That way, they’ve heard it three times. It is a way for us to keep everybody in queue, and as that job rises to the top of the pile, I mean, maybe it is 13 weeks whenever we call them and say, “All right. It’s your turn. We’re up to your job,” but sometimes it’s convenient to work somebody in because we’re working right down the street or whatever, and it’s five weeks, or eight weeks. Then they’re pleasantly surprised. So, it gives us a little freedom and flexibility in scheduling, too, to be that far out and having such a huge pool of jobs to choose from, that we can add on jobs at the end of the day, if a crew is close by, or however we want to push somebody ahead because it’s close to a job that we were already on.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. That makes a ton of sense, too, just setting up the right expectation with your customers, and on the front end, and almost encouraging them to say, “Oh, maybe we should look somewhere else,” type deal. It’s like, “Hey, don’t sign up for this unless you know you’re going to have to wait this long,” because that’s the expectation you set.
Noel Boyer:
Yeah.
Ty Deemer:
We’re going to transition our conversation to some TCIA-related topics here in a bit. My last question for you, more focused on All About, is you talk about growing your business. I think most business owners, especially in the green industry, I think there’s this idea, and maybe it’s a newer one, maybe it’s been around forever, there seems to be a common theme of everyone’s excited about the aspect of growing their business. The market’s probably more competitive than it has ever been. People see these best-case scenarios of their business growing 30% in a year, becoming that million dollar, two million dollar, then the five, 10 million dollar business. You just seem to have a very different approach. You still want growth, but you want it to be on your terms and in your control. I think it would just be interesting for you to talk through how you think about growing your business. Whether it’s from adding employees or equipment, why do you believe in more of the steady growth year-after-year, rather than trying to make big leaps?
Noel Boyer:
I think that whenever we started this company, we grew every year, but it was just so organic. As we built our reputation in this town, what really happened was just more people were referring and calling us. Even right now, I mean, we did just shy of two million last year in 2020. I think that my marketing budget last year was 0.8%. We really don’t do any marketing at all. I’ve got a couple of local radio stations here that I run ads on, just because I’ve got a longstanding relationship with them. It’s two different radio stations that have the kind of clientele that just literally sit there and listen to that station all day long. One of them is NPR, and one of them is the Conservative talk radio station. Both of them are the upper income right side and the upper income left side. Those folks usually listen to those stations all day long.
Anyway. We hardly market at all. Our company grows every year because every single job we do, the goal is to go out there and make these people happy, and make them understand why they waited 13 weeks for us to get there. You have to prove your difference out there every single day. Whenever you do that, the growth becomes organic. It’s just bound to happen. If you don’t ever let anybody stay mad at you, and you can … With every job that the guys go out and do, if you can keep the people happy, it’s going to turn into more jobs, periods, especially in a smaller market like ours, where everybody in this town knows each other. They all talk. Never once in the 16 years that I’ve owned this company have I ever written a number up on the wall that says, “2.5 million. This is what we’re going for this year.” I know that goes against so many people’s businesses, business growth ideas.
I think the biggest issue is that I don’t want to grow just for the sake of growing. I want to come to work every day and be happy and not stressed out because I’m missing targets, and because the economy is not what we thought it was going to be when we set these goals. It’s not that I’m afraid to fail on a goal. I don’t care about that. I just want to come to work and know every day that our company is offering a service that nobody else in this town can offer, because we’re, by far, in this town, I feel like, the safest company. We’re following the fancy protocols more closely. Not only that, dealing with utility companies, we don’t do line clearance at all. Any time that there is a primary line within 10 feet of a tree we’re working on, we call them out and have them do a make-safe prune for us.
There’s other companies in town that do okay, but they’re not following all of that to the letter. I say that to say that while growth is important to a lot of people, it’s less important to me. If you want to know the truth, I would love to find a way to keep this company exactly the size it is right now and just make it make 25% more profit. That’d be great for me. I don’t like buying more equipment, and I don’t like hiring more people. I’d love to just take what I have and make it more profitable. In some years, we nearly do that.
I’ve had some years that we have had those 30% growth years. I’ve had some years we’ve had the five percent growth years, and everything in between. The main thing is I just want to keep it all on the tracks and not spend so much time focusing on the growth that I forget to take care of the customer or my own people. I think sometimes when you focus too much on only the growth, you get lost on the things that are what got you to where you are in the first place.
Ty Deemer:
That makes a ton of sense. Thank you for explaining that. I do think there’s probably more people out there than we realize that are more in line with you, but they’re also hearing all of these different noises around them saying, “Grow your business. Invest here. Do this and that.” There’s an element to it to where it’s like, “No. You’ve got to stay true to yourself, and why you’re in the business in the first place.” [crosstalk 00:26:56] I really appreciate that.
Noel Boyer:
I don’t think there’s any shame in knowing yourself and knowing your company well enough to know that this is the size where we are the most effective in the market. This is the place where we do the best, where we have the most ability to take care of our customers, where we are able to attract the best people. There’s no shame in a business owner understanding where his sweet spot is, and sticking to it. That whole if you’re not growing you’re dying thing, I’m not much of a … I don’t really buy into that.
This is coming out of the mouth of a guy that my company grows every year. It’s always been organic, not because I’m pushing that. It has just happened that we’ve been able to take the right people in our company and put them into the right seats, to be able to do a little more every year. So, buying equipment and all that goes with it, too. I mean, I have some friends that grow their company leaps and bounds every year, and they’re in big markets out in California and such like that. They’ll see 25% growth year, over year, over year, over year. I mean, they’re skyrocketing, and very profitable, too. If that’s the mode that works for them, then they should keep doing that.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah.
Noel Boyer:
This is the one that seems to work best for me. I think I’m going to hold the line here.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. I hear that. Well, transitioning the conversation. We do have an expo coming up. The TCIA expo is coming back. It’ll be here in November. For those that are listening, you’re pretty involved with the TCIA and on their board. Talk me through what are some of the initiatives TCIA is focusing on. What are your expectations/excitement for the expo this year?
Noel Boyer:
All right. Well, I’ll start with the big picture stuff that TCIA is working on right now, because I think that it’s easy for people to … They see the bill come in the mail from TCIA saying, “It’s time to pay your membership,” and I think that a lot of people, ominously, even me, and I’ve been on the board for three years. TCIA is doing a lot of things that, maybe, a lot of people don’t really even know about, as far as services to their membership. So, right now, it’s been a tough year for TCIA because they have not been able to work in-office. So, a lot of that synergy that comes with … I don’t think a lot of people know, but TCIA has nearly 50 employees. They, I think, were at 48 people employed by TCIA.
It’s a large office. There’s a lot of moving parts in there. We’ve got people that are in charge of accreditation, and in charge of management, and in charge of dealing with all of the events and people. There’s just a lot of moving parts with the people that work in TCIA. So, this year, the synergy of all of them being in that office, and being able to play off of each other, has disappeared. It’s been a tough year of Zoom calls and living on the phone all day, every day, because of the inability for everybody to get together. Now, slowly, we’re coming back out of that again. We had a board meeting a month and a half ago where we … As a board, it’s our job to not run the business of TCIA. It’s our job to give vision to where we think the organization should be going.
Ty Deemer:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Noel Boyer:
There’s a lot of new initiatives that TCIA is working on right now that, I think, has us on the right track. Just to name a few, do you remember what a pain in the ass it is to get your CEUs for your CTSP, or any of your other accreditations or certifications? I mean, they’re going hot and heavy right now on a way, not only to get your CEUs online, but also where you could take your EHAP course online, or you could take your CTSP course online. So, they’re working on a big, new platform for [inaudible 00:31:37] digital learning.
Ty Deemer:
Cool.
Noel Boyer:
So that you don’t got to get on a plane and fly to Chicago to sit through a class to get through your CTSP, which is how I did it.
Ty Deemer:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Noel Boyer:
And then filling out stacks of paperwork to get all of your continuing education done. So, that’s one big thing that they’re working on. One of the other things that, probably, people don’t know that TCIA is spending a lot of time on is we have quite an effort going on right now in Washington DC to try to get past the finish line on this OSHA standard. I know that it sounds counterintuitive because a lot of people are going to listen to this, and you’re like, “Oh, great. More freaking regulation.” But what’s really happening out there right now that I don’t think a lot of people understand is that OSHA doesn’t have a regulation, or a standard, for arboriculture. So, OSHA inspectors are constantly citing tree businesses under landscaping or logging codes, which are not relevant to what we do, at all.
Not only that, ISA has the ANSI … ISA works with ANSI, and TCIA works with OSHA, and we all work together on all of it. The ANSI standard is a really, really well-written safety standard for our industry. That was not written by bureaucrats. That was written by professional arborists, who have spent a lifetime doing this. So, our ANSI standard is constantly being altered, and upgraded, and modified, but we don’t even have an OSHA standard. So, we’re just trying to get OSHA to give us a standard that is mirroring what ANSI is, so that we can all be on the same page on what’s an acceptable practice in arboriculture, and stop all these companies from being cited under logging or landscaping codes. As a matter of fact, OSHA currently doesn’t really recognize even crane use for tree care, especially not hoisting your climber into the tree, which has become literally one of the safest alterations in the way we do tree work.
Crane use in tree work, yes, you can go to YouTube, and you can watch videos all day long of people doing it wrong. Which would you rather ascend into a tree on? A crusty, dead stick that you have no idea what the weight value of that thing can hold, or on a crane ball, where you have a piece of wire rope there that tells you exactly what its capacity is? So far, as far as we know, there has not been one single case of a person being injured or dying while being hoisted into a tree on a crane rope. We started this initiative trying to get OSHA to hear us 25 years ago, and they’ve started to pick it up a couple of times. Now we have real momentum. We’re getting close. We’re even past the point of the small business panels that OSHA holds, we’ve already done those. So, now it’s down into the weeds of beating through the final verbiage of the code.
Ty Deemer:
Okay. That’s really exciting.
Noel Boyer:
It is. I mean, it’s really a big deal. I think that it’s going to help our industry all get on the same page on how to do this job safely together, and not have these two different codes that tell us two different ways of what we’re supposed to be doing. When OSHA and ANSI aren’t linked up, it leaves a lot of confusion for us that are out here doing the work.
Ty Deemer:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Noel Boyer:
One other thing that I think is probably a key to TCIA’s next steps is … I don’t know if it was just, maybe, some old bad blood from long ago, or just personalities, or what, but there had been a long time where the ISA management and TCIA management weren’t always really ready to work together on projects, whether it’s having a CEU clearinghouse where you could go to one place, and I can get my ISA, CEUs, and my [CTSPCU 00:36:06]s all in one place. I mean, we’re looking into that. We’re going to try to make it work because we’ve got leadership now at both organizations that are really interested in working with each other. ISA and TCIA are doing two very different things. TCIA is about the business end of it, and ISA is about the tree end of it.
There is a lot of overlap. There is, I’m sure, a lot of us out here that are members of both associations, and we would love to see some more synergy between those two. Now we’ve got leadership of those two organizations meeting with each other once a month, whether it’s by Zoom, or phone call, or in-person, and we’re making inroads on ways for ISA and TCIA to support each other. What the general population of the tree care community is going to get out of that is way easier interaction with both organizations, and the ability to basically be connected with both, in different ways but sometimes with that overlap being in mind, too.
Ty Deemer:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). No. That’s great. We have about five minutes left. I don’t want to miss the opportunity to let people know about the expo itself, because I know it’s something that a lot of people are excited about and looking forward to. So, from your perspective, what are you looking forward to at this year’s expo? What can people, maybe, be on the lookout for, and just be prepared to actually be in person again?
Noel Boyer:
Well, that’s the biggest deal. I have so badly missed all of my tree buddies. I can’t wait to give everybody a big hug and a kiss whenever we get there. It’s been a long, cold year and a half of missing out on all my tree friends. I’m super excited. I think that there’s going to be a large appetite for … especially, it’s in Indianapolis, man. It’s a nice, central location. I think that it’s going to make it easy for anybody to get there this year. We have our largest trade show floor ever this year. We didn’t even have time to talk about the labor shortage and everything that’s going on in our industry right now, but what that’s leading to is a lot more people relying on equipment. The industry has stepped up.
We are going to have a giant, giant trade show floor, full of all the shiny stuff that really gets our juices flowing. There’s going to be all kinds of new stuff that’s come out in the last year and a half, grapple saws, and lifts, and buckets, and chippers. Everything is going to be there. TCIA does do a good job of bringing in good speakers, relevant stuff for growing your business, or keeping your people safe, or how to deal with marketing. They really work hard to cover all of the bases of not just how big businesses run, but especially little guys like me. Even though I’m slowly taking off one hat at a time, I’m still wearing 10 of them, and I need to know what the Hell I’m doing whenever it comes to online marketing, or trying to buy insurance, or what equipment, or how do I finance. There’s just so many parts of this puzzle.
I feel like if you will go to expo, and not just go to the classes, because they’re going to be informative, but take some time to interact with the other people there, and sit down. Try not to drink so many beers at Hooters every night that you can’t get up in the morning. Not that I’m not going to drink some beers at Hooters. I probably am. Make sure that you take full advantage of everything that there is to offer there. There’s going to be on-the-floor training sessions with some of the best trainers in the world there. There’s just a lot of opportunity to go there and learn. Honestly, if you go to expo and you don’t come back to your job on fire, then really, you did it wrong, because probably the biggest part of expo, to me, is not just going there and seeing the shiny stuff, and listening to the good speakers, and hugging and kissing my buddies that I haven’t seen in forever.
What it really is, it’s knowing that little old Noel Boyer here in Podunk Springfield, Missouri, with a tree company down here, I’m part of something way bigger. I mean, way bigger. Everybody in this industry needs to see that you’re not on an island. You are a part of something that’s enormous. We estimate there’s a half a million people in the United States doing arboriculture. So, don’t get lost in your own corner. Don’t stand in your island of fog. Make sure that you get out there and you see how big this thing really is, and become a part of it. If we can get people to start seeing it like that, that’s when we’re going to start to see people that think of this as a career instead of a job that is a stepping stone to the next thing.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I just got fired up for the conference, hearing that. I think you hit the nail on the head. It’s just an opportunity to get everyone together and actually engage with [inaudible 00:41:44]. The tree care space, it is a community. People enjoy being around each other at these events, which that’s not true for every industry. I appreciate you giving that breakdown.
Noel Boyer:
Yeah. No problem, bud. I can’t wait for it to get here. We’ve managed to sneak out and give you a couple of climbing competitions in this year with my old crew. So, I’ve got just a little bit of a taste of getting back together with my tree friends, but it’s nothing like expo.
Ty Deemer:
Absolutely.
Noel Boyer:
Last year, well, the last time we had expo, which is almost two years ago now, but we had 4,000 attendees. We expect that to probably go up this year, unless something happens. There is still various regional problems with the pandemic, and I’m hoping that by November, we’re going to all be able to take our masks off and take a deep breath, and really get together and enjoy each other.
Ty Deemer:
I hear you, Noel. I’m the exact same way. Well, Noel, thank you for coming on today. We got to talk about your business a little bit, and then some of the things TCIA is doing. Hopefully, if people have gotten this far, they’re fired up for expo now. Can’t thank you enough for coming on the show, and I look forward to seeing you in Indianapolis in November.
Noel Boyer:
Yeah. I’ll make sure and hunt you down. Thanks again for inviting me back.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. Thank you, Noel.
Noel Boyer:
All right.