Behind the Bark
If you’re running 2+ crews and still dispatching off personal cell phones, this is for you.
We talked to a tree service owner in California (call him G).
Premium market. Good crews. Solid work.
But his intake and scheduling were running on one fragile system:
“We just use our cell phones.”
“My father is always on the phone… 98% of the time.”
“He just texts us like… this is your estimate from 8 to 9.”
Dad is the dispatcher.
The text thread is the CRM.
It feels “free” because nobody pays a subscription.
But it’s not free.
Every night returning calls.
Every morning searching text history for an address.
Every “wait, what time was that estimate?” moment.
That’s an admin tax paid in time, energy, and missed booked work.
And here’s the trap:
Manual systems scale linearly.
Double the revenue = double the chasing, confirming, rescheduling, and follow-up.
Usually… done by you.
Or your family.
Limb of the Week
The Identity Gap
G wants premium removals and high-end pruning contracts.
But his operation signals: “pickup-truck admin.”
Homeowners don’t only judge your saw work. They judge your control.
Clear confirmations.
Clean reminders.
A paper trail that doesn’t rely on memory.
Sloppy admin is a proxy for sloppy execution.
And sloppy execution doesn’t win $5K–$15K hazard work.
Action Steps
Stop the bleeding in under 60 minutes
Plug the missed-call leak (10 minutes)
If you miss a call, they hit the next company in Maps.
Turn on an automatic missed-call text-back on your main line:
“Sorry we missed you — what address is the tree at? Any photos?”
Create ONE shared inbox for intake (15 minutes)
Not scattered personal phones. Not buried threads.
One number. One place where every call/text gets logged.
If the “system” only exists inside someone’s head… you don’t have a system.
Create ONE job record (30 minutes)
For each job: estimate + photos + approval + invoice in one place.
Quick test: pick a job from last week.
Can you pull up the estimate + approval in 30 seconds?
If not, you’re not busy.
You’re buried.
Sawdust
G told us: “We write down by week how many estimates we’re getting.”
Better than nothing—but it creates profit blindness.
The scoreboard isn’t “how many estimates?”
It’s:
How many calls came in?
How many were answered?
How many turned into booked estimates?
How many turned into booked jobs?
And where are you losing them—missed calls, slow follow-up, weak proof, price?
When that lives in notebooks and text threads, you don’t know.
You guess.
And guessing is expensive.
Kickback
If you feel stuck, it’s rarely “a marketing problem.”
It’s a throughput problem.
Your operation can only process what your people can manually remember, chase, and confirm.
Premium work can’t scale on memory and buried texts.
Homeowners expect professional control… and Google makes it easy to hire the next company in 10 seconds.
Reply OPS with these 4 lines:
How many crews are you running?
About how many missed calls per week?
Who answers calls after 5pm?
Do you have one main business line, or everyone’s cell?
I’ll reply with the 3 biggest leak points setups like yours usually have and what to fix first.
(If you’re 2+ crews and want us to map it live on a screen-share, book a Leak Scan call from the site.)
Written by Jacob Hastings
Head of Growth & Client Strategy at Growth Ring Media
