Website for tree surgeons, with the photographs in before the drive
Half of what you take on is a lime that has outgrown a front garden and can be booked for a fortnight next Tuesday, and the other half is an ash leaning over somebody's kitchen at seven in the morning after a bad night. Neither of them can be priced from a text message, and both of them arrive as one.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From €49 to €199 a month, excluding VAT.
Three situations, and none of them are about the climbing
The saw work is the part you are good at. These are the parts that happen on the phone, in the van, and at half past six in the morning after a gale.
The morning after the wind
The gale went through at three and by eight you have thirty-one voicemails, eleven of which are the same person ringing repeatedly, and four of which are genuinely urgent because something heavy is resting on something that people sleep under.
You cannot listen to all of them and drive to the urgent ones at the same time, and the ones you do not get back to today will have found somebody else by tomorrow lunchtime.
A photograph is not a price
It comes through on a Sunday, taken from a kitchen window at an angle that makes a twenty metre oak look like a shrub, with the message how much to take this down.
There is nothing in the picture about what is underneath it, whether the neighbour's conservatory is on the far side, whether a chipper can get down the side of the house, or whether the thing has a preservation order on it. And yet the reply that gets the job is a reply, not silence.
Nine miles for ten minutes of work
You drove out on Thursday afternoon to look at a job that turned out to be one branch over a shed, a forty minute round trip for something worth barely more than the diesel.
And the same afternoon you missed a call about a sectional dismantle over a road, which is the sort of job that pays for the week. Nothing about the two enquiries, as they arrived, told you which was which.
Four things that decide which jobs you drive to
None of it replaces standing under the tree. All of it decides which trees you stand under.
An enquiry that arrives with the tree in it
Photographs from two sides, roughly how tall, how close to the house, what is underneath it, whether there is access down the side for a chipper, and whether it is dead, dying or simply too big.
That is six fields and a photograph upload, and it turns a message saying how much for the tree into something you can triage from the van. Free text underneath, because there is always something the fields did not think of.
The risk assessed first, the price written after
The quote is built as lines: the felling itself, the sectional work over the outbuilding, the traffic management if it is roadside, the arisings taken away or left stacked, the stump ground out.
They approve it on its own page, dated, so the argument about whether the stump was in the price never happens. Where you take money up front it moves through your own Stripe account.
The council questions, answered before they are asked
Whether a preservation order might apply, what happens in a conservation area, who applies for permission, what your insurance covers, and where the wood and the chip end up when you leave.
Every one of those is a five minute conversation you have several times a week. On the page they take five minutes once, and the caller who rings after reading them rings knowing what they are asking for.
The list that fills the quiet weeks
Everybody who has enquired is held with the address, the species and what was done. The customer whose two beeches you reduced three winters ago is due again, and that is a job you can go and find in a week when the weather is dry and the phone is not ringing.
Storm work pays well and arrives without warning. The register is the part of the year you can plan.
A service list for a tree job
Names and figures are yours to set. What is worth copying is which lines can carry a from price and which cannot carry anything until somebody has looked up at the thing.
A from price with a size band next to it answers the question most people are really asking, which is whether they are in the right hundreds at all.
Questions tree surgeons put to us
It can collect the photograph properly, from two sides, with the height, the access and what stands underneath. You still price it after looking, but you are looking at something worth looking at rather than a picture through a window.
The enquiries arrive written down instead of as voicemail, each with an address and a photograph, so you can sort the urgent from the ordinary between jobs rather than sitting down with a notepad at nine at night.
Use a from price with a size band on the straightforward work and mark anything near a building as quoted. That way somebody with a small conifer gets an answer, and nobody assumes the same number applies to a roadside oak.
In the FAQ, in your own words, so people arrive already knowing that some trees need permission first and who is expected to apply for it. It saves the conversation and it saves the wasted visit.
Then there is little to import and the builder writes the first version from a description of what you do and where you work. You go through it with the pencil icons and change anything that is not how you would put it.
Plans go from €49 up to €199 a month plus VAT. Your own domain, SSL, hosting, nightly backups and support in English are part of every plan, and SMS is available as a prepaid add-on.
More trades
- Landscapers and gardenersSite visits in spring, maintenance all year.
- Holiday letsDirect bookings with nobody taking a cut.
- Event and function venuesViewings booked against the room's own calendar.
- BuildersQuotes with cost lines, approved online.
- PlumbersThe emergency line, unburdened by prices and an FAQ.
- ElectriciansFixed prices for small jobs, quotes for the rest.
- All trades
Get the enquiries arriving properly
Say what you take on, how far you travel and whether you do emergency work, or point at whatever page exists now. You get back a first version with your service list, the size bands and a form that asks for the photographs and the access before anybody starts the van.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From €49 to €199 a month, excluding VAT.