Quick question. If I asked you to pull up last month's numbers right now, could you tell me your profit per crew, per week?

Not revenue. Profit.

Most owners I talk to can tell me what came in. They know the gross. But when I ask what stayed after labor, fuel, dump fees, and overhead, the answer is usually a long pause followed by "I'd have to check."

And that pause is where the money lives.

The tree service industry averages somewhere between 10% and 20% net margins. Companies that have been around 15 years or more and run tight operations can push into the 30% to 45% range. That is a massive gap. Both companies might be running the same number of crews in the same metro area. The difference is almost never about pricing or sales volume. The difference is leakage.

Not the dramatic kind. Nobody is stealing from you. No single vendor is ripping you off. The money leaves in small, quiet amounts that are easy to ignore because each one looks minor on its own.

But across a full season? We are talking $40,000 to $80,000 that vanished without anyone noticing.

I want to show you the three places we see this happen most. None of them require you to spend money to fix. All of them can be addressed this week.

This one is quiet and constant. You quote a removal at four hours. It takes five and a half. That extra hour and a half is not just labor cost. It is the next job starting late, which means overtime or a canceled estimate, which means lost revenue on top of the direct cost.

How often does your actual crew time match your estimated crew time? If you do not track this, you do not know. And if you do not know, your estimates are based on feel rather than data.

The industry standard for estimating accuracy comes down to man-hours. If you are off by 30 minutes on a job, you are eating into profit. If you are consistently off by more than an hour, something needs to change either in your estimating process or in your crew efficiency.

One owner I spoke with started comparing estimated time versus actual time on every job for 90 days. He found his removal estimates were off by an average of 40 minutes. Across 8 to 10 removals a week, that added up to roughly 6 to 7 extra crew hours per week that never showed up on any invoice. At $120 per crew-member hour (his blended rate), that was over $800 a week in margin he was giving away. More than $30,000 across a season.

He did not need new software. He needed his foreman to write the actual start and stop time on the work order. That was it.

Ask yourself: do you know how your estimated hours compare to your actual hours on the last 20 jobs?

Every minute between jobs is a minute you are paying wages, burning fuel, and putting wear on trucks without generating a dollar of revenue.

If your travel time between jobs runs higher than about 15% of total shift time, you have a routing problem. For a 10-hour day, that means more than 90 minutes of driving between sites.

Some of this is unavoidable. You serve a wide area, jobs are spread out, traffic happens. But most of the waste comes from scheduling that prioritizes "first come, first served" instead of geographic density.

Are your crews driving 25 minutes between jobs that could be clustered into the same zip code on the same day? Is your estimator running across town for a $600 job when there is a $3,500 removal two streets over from where a crew is already working?

A crew running three jobs in the same neighborhood will always outproduce a crew running three jobs across three different parts of town. Same labor, same truck, same equipment. Completely different margin.

You do not need GPS routing software to start. You need a map on the wall and 10 minutes of thought before the schedule goes out.

This one hurts the most because it feels like you are being productive when you are actually paying the customer for the privilege of doing their tree work.

Every company has a cost per crew hour. That number includes labor (loaded, with taxes and comp), fuel, equipment wear, insurance allocation, and overhead. For most tree services in the $1M to $10M range, that number falls somewhere between $90 and $160 per crew hour depending on crew size, market, and equipment load.

Do you know yours?

If a three-man crew costs you $135 per hour fully loaded, and you send them to a $400 job that takes four hours, including drive time, you just spent $540 to earn $400. You lost $140 and your schedule looks "full."

The instinct in a tight economy is to say yes to everything because an empty truck feels worse than a busy one. I get it. But a truck that is busy losing money is worse than a truck that is idle for an hour while you fill the slot with a job above your threshold.

This does not mean turning down small jobs. It means knowing your number and being honest about which jobs are below it. Sometimes a quick stump grind on the way to a big removal makes sense because the marginal cost is low. But a standalone $350 job across town on a Wednesday afternoon? That might be costing you money you do not realize.

What is your minimum job size that actually makes money after you account for the full cost of sending a crew?

Labor typically eats 30% to 50% of your total revenue. Payroll with taxes, comp, and benefits can run 45% to 55% of total operating expenses. If you have not recalculated this in the past 12 months, your numbers are stale. Wages went up, comp rates shifted, and fuel is a different story than it was last year. Recalculate quarterly at minimum.

If you use Aspire, Jobber, or Arborgold, most of these platforms already track crew time on site versus total time on shift. The data might be sitting in your system right now. Somebody just needs to pull the report and compare it to the estimates. That gap between estimated and actual is your margin leak measured in real dollars.

One more thing. Small, quick jobs (under an hour of actual work) should carry higher margins than big removals. The industry guidance is 60% or more on small jobs versus 15% to 20% on large projects. Why? Because the fixed costs of showing up (drive time, setup, and cleanup) are the same whether the job is $400 or $4,000. If you are quoting small jobs at the same margin target as big ones, the math is quietly working against you.

"We are busy, so we must be doing fine."

Busy is not a financial metric. Busy tells you about volume. It tells you nothing about margin. I have seen companies running $4M in revenue with four crews, packed schedules, and the owner taking home less than his lead climber because the jobs on that packed schedule were the wrong jobs.

Not wrong because the work was bad. Wrong because the math did not work. Too many hours on site relative to the quote. Too much windshield time between jobs. Too many standalone $500 calls that felt productive but cost $600 to complete.

And the owner never knew because he was measuring the wrong thing. He was watching revenue and assuming profit would follow. It did not.

If you came out of last season feeling like you worked harder than ever, but the bank account did not reflect it, this is probably why. The work was there. The margin was not.

The fix is not complicated. It is uncomfortable, though. It requires you to look at numbers you have been avoiding and ask questions you might not love the answers to.

But that discomfort lasts about 45 minutes. The leaks only last until you find them.

If any of those three leaks sounded familiar, you are not alone. Most of the tree service owners we talk to have at least one of them running in the background.

We spend a lot of time looking at where money goes in tree service operations, both on the marketing and operational sides. If you did the math this week and something doesn't add up, reply to this email and let me know which leak you found. I read every reply.

And if you want a second set of eyes on your numbers to identify the biggest opportunity, we do that too. No pitch, no pressure. Just a conversation about your business with someone who looks at these numbers across dozens of tree services every month.

Stay busy, but more importantly, stay profitable.
Talk to you all next week!

-Jacob