A contractor poured concrete at a tree guy's house this year. Decent work, but he left gravel scattered around the yard, and the homeowner spent an hour and forty-five minutes cleaning it up himself. A young, go-getting guy with wheelbarrows and equipment sitting in the garage, and it still took him an hour and forty-five minutes…

That homeowner was Brad Elliott, a recent guest on the Stumped Again podcast who runs Nova Tree Care in the north Indianapolis suburbs shared this story a few weeks back. The math of it stuck with him. His own crew rolls with blowers, chippers, and young legs: "One hour of our time might actually be like six man-hours for someone else." The cleanup your crew skips becomes the homeowner's job, and nobody who rakes leftover shavings and sawdust is going to walk next door and recommend you.

Then Brad said something that I haven't stopped thinking about: "The cleanup is the most underrated important element of tree work." Everyone's focused on the big technical removal. But he's timed his jobs, and more often than not, cleanup runs 25 to 50 percent of the total job time.

You already know that number in your gut. You price it into every bid. But be honest about how you manage it: the removal gets your best climber, your rigging plan, and your full attention. The cleanup gets whatever's left in the tank whenever the job’s finishing up. Which is exactly backward from how the customer experiences the job, because they can't judge your rigging. What can they judge? Their yard, the way your team communicates, and mainly your willingness to work with their requests.

The customer can't grade the cut. They can grade the yard.

Brad's company makes exceptional cleanup a literal client promise, and the bar is specific: no sawdust, "no one able to tell anything was there." His crews got so used to it they do it unprompted now, but for a while he ran a drill: after the site already looked clean, a 120-second timer went on, and everyone hunted sticks until it beeped. Two minutes, on jobs that took all day. "Clients love that ish."

The reasoning underneath it is the part worth borrowing. On every job, somebody eats the inconvenience: you, the crew, or the client. The line he uses with his own employees is "someone's always sacrificing," and then the question that decides the whole thing: "Why not us? It doesn't have to be the client."

Action steps:

Nothing in this issue needs software or a complex understanding of business. It's just the observation that the most-watched part of your work is the part that gets managed the least. Brad's client promise is "do amazing work and then clean up," and his case for why is one line: "you're gonna have endless business."

When the trucks pull out, the yard keeps talking to the customer. You decide what it says. See you all next Saturday.

- Jacob Hastings

The Backcut