The Hours You Don’t Bill

The Hidden Economics of Tree Care Operations

Last fall, I was standing in a suburban Minneapolis yard with the owner of a tree care company who had just bought his second bucket truck. He was proud of it — and he should have been. The truck represented growth, demand, and years of hard work.

Then I asked a simple question: “What percentage of your crews’ time is actually billable?”

He didn’t know.

So, we pulled six weeks of GPS data from his fleet and did the math. On a typical 10-hour day, his two-truck operation was losing nearly four hours per crew to driving, idling in staging areas, waiting for job confirmations, and moving between sites. Almost 40% of the workday disappeared before a saw ever touched a tree.

The surprising part was that his operation wasn’t an outlier. Across the tree care industry, owners obsess over production rates, equipment utilization, and jobsite efficiency. But most still measure productivity the way previous generations did: by what happens after the trucks arrive.

That’s a mistake.

The next five points of gross margin in your tree care business probably aren’t 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 utilization, fuel consumption, crew-day production, maybe equipment uptime. Those are important numbers. The problem is that they’re also the numbers most mature operations have spent years improving.

There is only so much efficiency left to squeeze from a veteran climber, an experienced ground crew, or a well-maintained 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 available on the jobsite are incremental.

Yet many owners continue searching for breakthroughs where only marginal 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 moving but also not generating revenue.

Canopy Tree Service has written candidly about a truth many operators would rather ignore: time management, 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 weather conditions, and identifying anything that could trigger a return trip. The logic is straightforward: if three employees 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 misleading. Measuring climbing speed, chipper utilization, and cleanup efficiency 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 highway. The waste is distributed across dispatching, routing, estimating, customer communication, and daily planning. 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 actually pull the data:

• Productive on-site time: 5.5 to 6.5 hours per crew per 10-hour day
• Drive time between jobs (not including the morning yard-to-first-stop run): 1.5 to 2.5 hours
• Idle and stage time (truck on, crew on clock, no work happening): 45 minutes to 1.5 hours
• Yard time, fueling, dump runs, supply pickups: 1 to 1.5 hours

If you are running two crews and can claw back even one hour per crew per day of non-productive windshield and idle time, you are looking at roughly 500 billable hours per year across the operation. At a conservative blended bill rate, that is real money — money you are spending on diesel and wages without generating revenue.

Why “Just Plan Better Routes” Doesn’t Solve It

Some owners have tried to fix this with a better whiteboard, a better spreadsheet, or a smarter office manager. It works for a week. Then a removal in Edina turns into a half-day instead of a two-hour job because the homeowner did not mention the fence. A storm call comes in. The chipper breaks. The neat morning route is in the trash by 11 a.m., and the rest of the day is reactive.

The mistake is treating route planning as a planning problem. It is not. It is a real-time problem. Static routes built the night before assume the day will go as drawn, and tree care days almost never do.

What actually moves the number is treating three things as one connected system:

1. Sequencing: what order do crews hit the stops.
2. Live dispatch adjustment: what happens when a job blows up or a call comes in.
3. Customer ETA communication: homeowner is ready, gate is open, dog is inside, and car is moved.

Treated as three separate tools, they fight each other. Treated as one feedback loop, they compound.

The Hidden Cost: Customer-Caused Idle Time

This one surprises owners every time. When they see the idle-time data broken down by cause, they realize a meaningful chunk of it is not the crew’s fault and not the dispatcher’s fault. It is simply the fact that the customer is not yet ready.

Gate locked. Car parked under the tree that is supposed to come down. No one home to point out which limbs to keep on the elm. Power company contact never called. These are 15- to 45-minute delays on every job in which the homeowner was not primed beforehand. Across a season, on a two-crew operation, this alone can eat 80 to 120 hours.

The fix is unglamorous: a real ETA window sent to the customer when the previous job wraps up, not a “we’ll be there Tuesday” text sent three days ago. When the homeowner gets a 30-minute heads-up that the truck is rolling, the gate gets unlocked, the car gets moved, and the dog goes inside before your foreman has to make the call himself.

The typical contractor on our platform sees route-density gains in the 15-30% range in the first full season after switching from paper schedules to map-based dispatch with live ETA, and a meaningful slice of that gain comes from this one behavior change on the customer side.

What the Data Looks Like When You Actually Track It

Most tree care company owners I talk to have never seen their own drive-vs-on-site ratio in a clean number. They have a gut feel. However, that gut feel is usually wrong by 20 to 40 percentage points in the optimistic direction.

When you start instrumenting trucks with GPS and tying that data back to the dispatch board, a few patterns emerge fast:

• The morning launch is the most expensive 90 minutes of the day. Yards-to-first-stop drive time, combined with the “did we bring the right saw” supply gap, often eats more clock than the next two transitions combined. Top-performing crews stage gear the night before, and the foreman has the first address loaded before he opens the yard gate.
• The mid-afternoon stop is where the day breaks. Around stop three or four, schedule slip from the morning catches up. If dispatch is not actively re-sequencing in real time, the crew either rushes the last job or pushes it to the next day. Either outcome costs money.
• Friday is the worst day for windshield ratio. Estimates, callbacks, and “while you’re out there” stops tend to pile up. Without a hard rule that Friday routes are built differently from Monday-Thursday routes, Fridays leak hours.

ArboStar’s writing on scaling tree care operations reinforces something most owners already know intuitively: every new crew increases complexity faster than it increases revenue. Going from one crew to two is manageable. Going from two to four is where dispatching starts to become a real operational discipline. Suddenly, every weather delay, equipment issue, sick employee, emergency call, or customer reschedule creates a chain reaction across the entire day.

The mistake many growing companies make is assuming that scheduling is a linear problem. It isn’t. The number of possible crew assignments, route combinations, equipment dependencies, and job sequences expands rapidly as the operation grows. What worked on a whiteboard with three crews becomes a daily exercise in firefighting with six. By ten crews, many companies hit what it calls the “messy middle” — the point where manual coordination can no longer keep pace with operational complexity.

The real value of automation is not that software creates a better schedule on Monday morning. It is that software can continuously rebuild the schedule on Monday afternoon. When a chipper breaks down, a climber calls in sick, a storm emergency appears, or a job finishes two hours ahead of plan, the system can reshuffle routes, rebalance workloads, and account for travel time far faster than any dispatcher working from spreadsheets and phone calls.

This is where profitability quietly lives. Most tree care businesses do not lose money because crews cannot cut wood efficiently. They lose money because trucks cross paths on opposite sides of town, crews wait for equipment that was sent to another site, or an entire afternoon disappears into what dispatchers politely call “adjustments.”

Every one of those adjustments is paid labor. Every one of them comes directly out of margin. As ArboStar puts it, route density matters because every minute of windshield time is a minute a crew is not producing revenue.

The Estimate Quality Problem That Drives Drive Time

Here is a connection I did not see for years and now see everywhere: bad estimates cause drive time. When a job is bid sloppily, the crew shows up to find the work is bigger than what’s on the work order. They either grind through it and blow the rest of the day, or they pack up and come back. Either path adds drive time to the week.

Arborists pricing tree removal jobs see fewer scope disputes when estimates are built with itemized line items and photos rather than a single lump-sum number, particularly on jobs over a few thousand dollars. Those photo-and-line-item estimates also reduce the “Wait, that’s not what I thought we were paying for” conversation on-site, which is another idle-time eater. The estimate is upstream of the route. Sloppy estimating shows up as windshield time three weeks later.

What Top-Performing Crews Do Differently

When I look at the operators who have squeezed the drive-time number down into the 1.0-to-1.5-hour range per crew day, a few practices show up consistently:

• They build routes geographically tight, even at the cost of waiting a day to schedule a job. A job that “could fit Wednesday” gets pushed to Friday if Friday is already routing through that ZIP code.
• They have one person whose job is the dispatch board, full-time, during peak season. Not the owner. Not the office manager doing it on the side. One person, focused, with authority to move crews.
• They send automated ETA notifications when the previous job closes out. Not the morning. Not the night before. The moment the previous truck closes out.
• They treat the foreman’s phone as a dispatch endpoint, not a communication channel. The next address shows up. The job notes show up. The customer’s gate code shows up. No calls back to the office to “ask what’s next.”
• They review GPS playback weekly. Not to police the crew. To find the patterns: where the dead miles are, which customers consistently cause idle time, which yards-to-first-stop routes are always 20 minutes longer than they should be.

According to contractors in landscape design-build, project profitability swings hardest on labor capture accuracy. Crews that clock in and out by job code rather than by day consistently surface margin issues earlier in the season. The same pattern holds in tree care. If you cannot see which jobs ate the labor, you cannot see which routes ate the day.

The Offseason Move That Pays Off in Peak

In my experience, the chimney sweep and arborist operators who treat the offseason as a maintenance-marketing 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 geographic 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 profitably 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, another chipper, or another crew, spend 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 software, use location histories from company phones, dash cams, or telematics apps. Separate the workday into three categories: time on-site producing revenue, time driving between locations, and time spent idling or waiting.

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 disappears into long routes, inefficient job sequencing, forgotten equipment, customer delays, traffic, and dispatch decisions that seemed harmless in isolation but become expensive when multiplied across multiple employees and multiple trucks.

More importantly, calculate the labor cost of that lost time. An hour of unnecessary 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 season, those hours compound into real money.

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 production 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 automation expert, and the Founder of Field Promax. Known for his technical expertise and commitment to field service innovation, Joy writes about transforming traditional business models into paperless, efficient operations. He is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt based in Rochester, MN, dedicated to helping field professionals work smarter through better technology. Connect with him on LinkedIn.