$58,000 a Month From Tree Removal?!

This guy makes six figures from tree trimming without ever touching a chainsaw. Let me explain. And steal his homework. You want to teach me how to do this? Am I wearing the right outfit for this?

No, but I think you'll be all right.

You think I'll be okay? Meet Chris. He didn't grow up around landscaping. He wasn't born into money. He just knew one thing that everybody else with the chainsaw didn't. How to get customers. So how does a guy with zero tree trimming experience start this business?

I think it's just adhd. I'm all over the place. I'm really good at marketing and so I just leverage and lean into my strengths and find people that are really good at trimming trees and use them.

That is a term that people might not know what it's called, which is often called subcontracting. It's not like you're finding full on employees that you have to own entirely. You are bringing on people just for jobs.

Yeah. So like if you want a house built, the builder doesn't do anything other than communicate with subcontractors. He's gonna hire a concrete drywall guy, framing guy. Communication at scale is what I like to call it. And so that's all we do, except we just need a tree trimming guy and a stump grinding guy.

But the real secret to running a business and not working in it isn't you, is it?

No.

Who is it?

It's this guy right here.

Okay, so this is James. I've been wanting to meet you, man.

Absolutely.

Okay, so tell us this ridiculous story.

Yeah. So a few years ago I wanted some system where I could get all these ideas out of my head. So I went to this job board and I said I want an entrepreneur in training. And James applied for it.

Why did you decide to take a shot at my whole life?

I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I knew that if I didn't take this chance now, I might just get caught in whatever that looks like. So I was like, if it doesn't work, so be it. I'll find a job later. But I wanted to take a shot.

Now how does it work? What does a day look like in your life as opposed to your life day to day?

Now is more so just managing my crews expectations as far as job cycles, job flows, and then also just making sure that I'm on top of the customers.

You got guys like this all over the place.

Yeah.

Run around. Is this a typical job? What's going on?

So this is a typical Trimming job for us. Basically, what we're trying to do is raise the canopy up, thin it out. A job from A to Z, like this one to two hours.

I think I probably need to do this, don't you think?

Absolutely.

I'm gonna need that saw. How long you been doing this?

Nine years.

Whoa.

About to be ten in August.

Congratulations. That's incredible. You're making this look way too easy.

Try to put it like. Sorry. With the.

With the P. You guys, I'm killing this. Two hours later. Cody is really good at tree trimming. Chris, are you impressed?

So impressed.

I know normally when it's already there, you kind of just give it, like a hard yank and it should be coming off.

I feel close.

It's close.

It is perfect.

Yeah. Super.

A lot of work.

Yeah.

Dude. How ripped are your forearms from this?

More shoulder?

Yeah.

Shoulders.

Yeah. I don't need to go to the gym anymore.

Oh, no, you'll stay in shape with this job right here.

For sure. How does it work from getting the lead to getting paid?

Yeah. So a lead comes into us, it comes into James, and he will kind of get some rough information, get the address. Either he will drive there himself, or. Or he will send our most trusted subcontractor there. He'll go there, he'll quote it, knowing now, after a few years, what our sub is gonna charge, and then we'll pass the information onto the subcontractor. We'll get a time. We don't usually charge up front because it's just not that type of a business. And then usually within a day or three, they'll wrap up the job. And then we will send an invoice through our software to the customer. They will pay us directly, and then we'll pay what we owe the sub to them directly.

What are you doing?

I'm getting ready to climb this tree here. I threw my. My hook ready to pull myself. This is called the srt. So single rope tie. Put your carabiner on your saddle, and you just pull away.

Whoa. Oh, my God. Chris. No wonder you don't do this.

No, no. I'm afraid of heights.

And we trim away, kind of get rid of all these little stuff right here.

Yeah.

And make it look a little thinner, but mainly going for some dead wood.

Did you climb trees as a kid?

I didn't actually. I actually started to climb trees when I moved out to Texas nine years ago, so I was new to it, But I've been, you know, I've been climbing for six years. But in the Industry for nine years.

Do you have a ton of business?

We stay pretty busy.

We stay pretty busy year round.

So how much of your business do you get from us? A lot.

A majority of the work. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You keep it employed. Cody, you want to climb the tree? Do I want to climb the tree? Absolutely. Absolutely not chance. Team Bear, let's talk about challenges of outsourcing. So you have these subcontractors. They're gonna help you run this business by doing the actual work while you source them leads. How do you figure out if they are gonna be terrible or not?

If only I had a crystal ball. Like, that's the hardest part about this business is managing the subcontractors. It's really trial and error. So we will have five subcontractors quote the same hypothetical job. So we'll literally meet up at like a public park and say, all right, this tree needs trimming. What would you charge? You know, and just take notes on all five of them. And then you just gotta try them and see not only, like, if they're late, but how late are they? They're gonna be late. Right.

And you call that pre qualifying them? Right? That's what it's called in the industry. So we're gonna pre qualify them. And then sometimes licenses are required, sometimes not. What about your area?

Depends on the state. In Texas, it is not required.

Love it. And it's totally gonna depend on what type of business. Right. Okay, I wanna talk about how did you even begin marketing this? Like, break it down for us tactically.

There's kind of like three core pillars in this. Real estate agents. They're touching a lot of different homeowners. Then you've got property managers. Same. And then you have landlords. Believe it or not, most landlords own on average, like three to five homes. You got a lot to own. One, you've got a lot that own like 10 to 20. And so one landlord might bring you jobs every year. And so you take this business that's not normally recurring, and if you have the right customer, it pays, becomes a recurring business.

Fascinating. And how do you get to them?

We used to do cold texting, but Texas just passed a law last month that made cold texting very illegal. So we have to be more creative now. Bandit signs, like yard signs, we place those out at every house that we do, and we ask the homeowner to leave it up as long as they're willing. That makes a big difference because it's like a silent testimonial to the neighborhood that we're good that Mary Smith likes us.

So you do the yard sale sale signs, anything else?

Facebook ads.

Yeah. And you're kind of a pro at that. That's something you do for multiple businesses, Right? So explain that to us.

How.

How does that happen at a really high level?

It's like Facebook makes it easy. The more I trust the Facebook algorithm to just show it to the people that need to see it, the better success I have.

How hot are these ads? Are these, like, super sexy graphic ads?

No, I mean, I take it myself. I edit it myself in 30 seconds. If I send it to my editor, it's going to take a day to get back. But it's just a selfie video on my front facing camera. 10 to 15 seconds is a sweet spot. Just a quick pitch, like introduce the problem in the first three seconds, introduce the solution in the middle three seconds, and then call to action in like the last five seconds and you're good to go.

15 second AD CTA at the end of it. And then you're a human so they get your face instead.

Yep. I'm the owner. I'm here in insert city name. That's very important. They want to know that, like, you're local.

Why don't we show them what an ad looks like right now?

Okay. All right. Got a tree right there. Look at this freaking thing right there. That looks like a tree, but that's not a tree. That's a liability because winter is coming, and if you don't get that thing trimmed before winter, the Dallas ice storms will hit and it will fall on your house and you've got a roofing claim on your hands. So check out fasttreecare.com that was incredible, by the way.

I'm stealing that entire script.

Thank you.

Chris didn't start by buying chainsaws or hiring a full crew. He started with a landing page that allowed him to quickly test demand for tree trimming services. Most new founders do the opposite. They jump straight into the deep end. Gear, equipment, logistics. No wonder so many go out of business within a year. The smartest entrepreneurs I know, they test demand first. And today, that's easier than ever with GoDaddy Arrow. Arrow is an AI powered tool that takes your idea and turns it into a domain, a website, and even ready to run marketing in minutes. Bring your idea online fast so you can focus on testing and growing your business. Big thanks to GoDaddy for sponsoring this video. Head to GoDaddy.com Cody Sanchez and use Arrow to turn your business idea into a real one. Today, you know any other secrets for marketing that you're like, nobody else knows this, but we do. But it's not that complicated.

Yeah. Our close rate when we do the hard thing and go on site and quote is like 74%. If we quote over the phone, which is the nice, convenient scalable thing. Right. Is like 47%. Right. So when our average job size is 1600 bucks, it's a difference of hundreds of dollars to just drive 30 minutes to the house and quote in person.

Oftentimes, don't you find too when you quote in person and you have the person can execute on site, you can just get it all done.

Oh, yeah.

So I think half the game with these service businesses is go touch hands.

Yeah.

Like get on site, do the quote live, and then on top of it, while you're there, ask, do you know any of your neighbors? Do you want to introduce us to any of your neighbors? Usually they won't, but you just go knock on the doors afterwards anyway and go, hey, Sally Lou and Sal, Cindy Sherman, let us cut their trees. Will you let us cut your trees too? Or can we help you out? Do you Understand how many 17 year olds are about to become millionaires by understanding how to sell online, by doing unreasonably hard things, and by taking the online offline with local businesses. Like for instance, here's an exercise. I think if you're young, you know what you should do right now? Pull out your phone, take a little video of yourself talking to a local service business and say, here's all the things I love about your business. Here's one thing I would do differently and I'll do it for you and give them an actual solution, an example of them changing their business because of one small thing you're going to give them for free. It doesn't actually take very much. And I'd be curious, Chris, what advice would you have for young guns who are watching this right now? And like, I want to start in local service businesses.

Yeah. You got to start by making your first dollar for yourself. And one easy way to do that is just to find stuff around the house and sell it on Facebook, Marketplace. When that happens, you're going to see all the, like, the mini highs and lows of business. You're gonna have people ghost you. You're gonna have people be annoying and lowball you and then they're gonna hand you the money and it's, it's either not gonna be worth it or it's gonna be worth it. And if it's Worth it. You'll like the taste and you'll want more. If it's not, then at least you check that box for yourself.

I love that. Let's take a little side note. Do you ever try to resell the wood?

Yeah, if it's big enough.

So is this big enough?

Yes. So that's cedar. In the offseason, I help some high school boys with a firewood business. So I'll basically tell my tree trimming crew, hey, if we have oak, then drop it off here. And then I bought a splitter and these high school, split it up and sell it on Facebook Marketplace.

How much can you sell? Like a. Do you call it a bundle? Cord of wood?

Yeah, a cord of wood is like $500.

That's a lot.

Yeah. And so we're looking at like several cords. Wow.

Bring a truck back here is a couple K. Huh? Can't tell them the address. Okay. So the other thing that I thought was cool. And you'll have to tell me if you've ever done this. So another tree business that we looked at, they had contracts with the local city to go and either clean up or cut down trees that were storm liabilities. And then they would take a lot of the trees and they would turn them into these beautiful reclaimed wood tables and chairs and stuff. And then they'd sell them for like, thousands and thousands of dollars. Have you ever thought about doing that?

Yeah. We've got some real big ones in there. And you have to let them season to dry out for like a year. Whoa. And then you hire a portable sawmill for like 70 bucks an hour. They'll roll in here and they'll slice it in like 3 inch chunks. And then you could sell it by the board foot to woodworkers.

What a cool idea. There's so many ways to make money inside of every business.

I like to call it selling your sawdust. And so in every business, there's opportunities to sell your sawdust.

What a wild world. I guess the name of the game is just get in the game.

Yeah.

And you will find some ways to profit.

Yep. Yep.

Okay. I think it's easy to look at Chris lifestyle and think, oh, this is easy. I should start a tree business. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying choose your hard. Hard to be an employee, hard to be an owner, Hard to start, hard to never have started. You really get to choose your heart. But if you're like me and you're like, I just want to protect myself in this business, and you're scared of risk deposit at signing. I like to take cash up front. That's called a cash flow as opposed to a cash suck business. I also like to get paid before I do the service. So I even want to maybe get paid for showing up progress tied to milestones. So tree trimming, you get your money like that, you should get paid the same second that you finish the service. But let's say that you have a recurring monthly contract to trim the trees. Well, make sure you get that credit card on file. Retainage, hold back. So let's say you're paying the subcontractor first. Don't do that. You want to pay the subcontractor after you get paid. Let's talk about the contractor funnel. Here's how it works. You attract. You run through the requirements for each person you attract. You screen them, then you're going to onboard. And finally you retain. The better you get at each leg of the funnel, the easier this business becomes for you. In the beginning it's hard. Later it'll be less hard. If you guys want my complete guide to how to run a subcontractor business, click here. I'll take you through step by step, how we go from phase one sourcing to filtering to all the requirements you need to have to testing to make sure that they're actually good. And we'll even give you the debrief to figure out how you can rank your subcontractors. I got you. Okay, let's talk about customer language mapping and how you can actually figure out what your customers want because you have a sneaky way to do that.

So I used to do this a different. But now with AI, I do it an even better way. So if I'm starting a tree trimming business, I'll go find the people with the most reviews. Not necessarily the best, but the most. And then I'll just go to Google and I'll screenshot all of those reviews one by one. I'll go to ChatGPT, I'll upload 10 at a time and I'll say, do a sentiment analysis for me. What are some things that this company is doing right? What are they doing wrong? And then I'll use what it spits out in my ads in my messaging to know like, what pain points do I need to trigger?

God, so smart. So basically in the reviews you'll be like, they showed up late. And then in your ad you'll be like, never late, always on time.

Exactly. Yeah. Full refund if we're late.

That's so amazing. And probably you could do the same thing by googling or searching on Reddit. What do people hate about tree trimming?

Yeah, Reddit's a gold mine.

Yeah. Because often it's the things that people hate, which is their low trust index and this society. Well, nobody has lower trust than Reddit. Everybody hates everybody on Reddit. Just go to my reviews. They're like, she's a man anyway. And so if you find like what people are least trusting, then you can explain to them the opposite of it. That's like taking out their biggest fear. Right?

Exactly. Because a lot of times we guess what the problems are like. Let's say being on time is the big issue, but we think that they want the best price. We're like cheapest, cheapest, cheapest. Customer just wants you to be on time, so you're selling something that they're not even asking for.

That's so smart. It is really. The little things. I call this the no truck test. Most people think that you have to start with the truck, the equipment, the everything. No, you don't. Instead, I wrote a simple program that I would start if I was to copy this business from Kris. Simple steps. Step one, write a basic offer tree trimming starting at 495 fast, guaranteed on time. Two, set up a landing page or form you could use GoDaddy arrow. Three, spend 100 bucks on Google or Facebook ads to understand how to do it. Target your zip code and keywords like tree trimming, not rocket science. Track inbound interest. This means you have a couple forms. You don't book work yet, actually. You just track how many people are interested. And then lastly, if you get leads, call qualified subs and see if you can actually quote the jobs. No truck, no execution yet. You're just playing the very first steps of the game of entrepreneurship. Let's do some napkin math. Startup costs. So you started this business when?

2023.

Amazing. And how much did it cost you to rock and roll and start this business?

Yeah, so in the mid hundreds. Call it four or five hundred bucks.

I like it. So we got five hundred bucks. Then what'd you make in year one?

I want to say 150,000 top line or something.

Okay, so maybe 150k, maybe a little bit more.

Yeah.

Then we got to year two. What are you making in year two?

We tripled. We went to 450.

Nice. I like those numbers.

And then the next year, about 700ish.

Nice. Okay, so that's pretty crazy growth. So let's Talk about the revenue just below that. Where's my whiteboard? What is the average job worth? How much do you make?

So a small job is 500. Big jobs, 5000 on average. Like 1600.

Nice. All right, so we're making 1600 bucks per job on average. Let's talk about fixed costs. How much does this business cost you monthly to run?

So I would say between 1 and $2,000.

So fixed costs are 1 to 2k, and that's things like insurance. Obviously, that would scale a little bit, but not a ton, unless you're getting warehouses and trucks and all of that, which you just don't have. Right?

Yeah. And we don't have employees. We don't have a warehouse. We don't have, like, we're on the go.

Love that. Now, let's talk about variable costs. What are the things that are variable costs in this business?

Gas and tolls. And then our marketing ad spend, which can fluctuate based on the season.

How much profit do you have for every dollar you spend?

Okay, so for every buck, about 50 cents is going to go to the cruise that we're subcontracting out to. We've got 50 cents left. About half of that is going to go to the overhead, the. The phone bill, the insurance, et cetera. So it can vary based on the season. Right. Sometimes it's low in the wintertime because our fix stays the same. And in the summertime, it goes up, but we're left with about 25 cents of profit for every buck.

Nice. You know what I don't think people realize is, like, you're in your 30s, and when you're in your 30s, you have your whole life ahead of you. When you're in your 20s, you really have your whole life ahead of you. So it's like, take some risks.

Yeah.

You know, what do you think?

Yeah, I mean, I've started 75 businesses. I just, like, I chase the energy, wherever that may be. And every cool thing that's happened to me is the result of a test. Right. So I like to say test everything except drugs.

This is your brain on drugs.

I also love that.

Yeah.

That's also because you have four kids. And if they're watching, he extra means it.

That's right. Don't do drugs.

Don't do drugs. Every entrepreneur out there right now needs to hear me. If you haven't made it yet, then there's a path for you. You just saw it today. You start where you are with what you've got. You find somebody to partner with. So that you can also become an owner of a service business. I hate people on the Internet telling us all the time that it's not possible. Other people can do it, you can't do it. I think these guys are a perfect example of yes, you can.