The company has a focus on design and has a deep understanding of the forestry and arboriculture markets, and the needs of operators in those markets. With a focus on reliability, practicality, and innovation, Vertical Forestry is dedicated to transforming the way that operators work.
Plant Health Care
Vertical Forestry believes tree services can help their clients and their clients’ trees by combining traditional tree pruning/cabling services with recurring applications of treatments. The phrase used in the industry is “Plant Health Care,” and it refers to soil, insect, fungal, and other disease treatments which improve tree health. It offers extraordinary opportunity to tree services and their clients.
If you ask, “why call it PHC?”, stop and consider for a minute the awkward implications of an acronym associated with directing the care towards trees specifically! Soil treatments for trees offer significant benefits to the entire landscape and those are the reasons the PHC name is used to describe this side of the business.
Most tree services start off offering pruning and removal services. This is because of universal demand and the low barriers to entry to this market. Pruning and removal clients are not in constant contact with a vendor. Several years may pass between pruning projects, and - lacking regular contact with a tree service - the client may choose a different one. Offering PHC services helps a company establish continuity with their clients and retain them.
Traditional tree care requires a large amount of machinery and labor. The margins can be lower for larger, established businesses than for start-ups. PHC services are less labor-intensive and capital-intensive. This allows tree service companies to provide services that are much lower cost to their clients; albeit, with less immediate impact -but with a much greater impact over time.
That impact is what really generates value for the client, and by extension, the tree service. At the end of the day, many clients regard their trees as a valuable part of their landscape and don’t want to lose them. Pruning and cabling services may mitigate risk or improve aesthetics, but they do not meaningfully improve tree health, especially when trees are already struggling.
Clients often present their arborists with trees in poor health looking to preserve and “save” the tree, and demonstrating the ability to do that is highly beneficial to the relationship. A good PHC program does just that! This service is ideal for mid and upper-market tree services with a good clientele that values their landscaping.
Initial steps
Many business owners recognize the potential of PHC services early but are consumed with the challenges of tree care and HR or simply don't know how to begin. It's difficult to find someone with the expertise to understand and effectively treat tree disease, and soil health is complicated and takes years to master.
Some owners take some initial steps in the direction of PHC but experience poor results and aren't sure why. Some use subcontractors, sub-par products, or have difficulty timing the treatments. Like anything new, there is substantial time & effort at the front end and the payoff is in the distant future. Vertical Forestry can help jump-start this process and get a program off the ground.
We’ll start with education – we need our clients to understand how PHC can benefit their property and offer lower-cost options. This can be done through newsletters or emails, but we’ll start with the sales team. They are the main point of contact with the clientele, so our experts will begin by explaining why we offer the service, what programs we use, and how they work. This is the first step in educating the sales team so that they begin to educate clients.
Shortly after the initial introduction to PHC most salespeople will begin to report on tree issues they are seeing in the field. This is a critical learning phase, where curiosity must be met with experience & expertise. Vertical Forestry’s team will respond positively, giving the sales team the information they need to serve clients and beginning to reinforce the value of solving tree health problems early. Over time, this turns into PHC experience – an asset for both the sales professionals and the company.
When the clients understand that saving trees and managing health are viable, cost-effective options, their relationship with the tree service changes, and sales in the PHC department tend to be recurring for many years.
Implementation
Vertical Forestry can offer hands-on coaching, teaching materials, and powerful software for scheduling PHC visits, managing soil quality, and handling communication with clients. That tool alone offers significant advantages to anyone trying to deliver quality results to their clients.
At first some of the “ferts & sprays” may be performed by a partner company, but early in the process it’s necessary to begin developing a person (a “PHC Tech”) to perform the sprays regularly. This person needs to have a strong interest in trees and tree health as well as strong organizational skills. While it’s possible to recruit an existing PHC Tech, another good option is to develop a junior person to fill this role.
Regardless of the experience level, It takes training and investment to ensure that a PHC Tech will represent the company well by performing their duties properly. It will take 1-2 weeks to show this person the techniques and methods used to apply basic treatments, followed by many months of disease-specific and situation-specific treatments and protocols – all of which Vertical Forestry can provide. This is done through a combination of formal presentations, literature, and field work.
We’re grateful to be able to bring this level of expertise and competence to our partners, as well as our clients. Helping build great PHC programs is a mutually beneficial endeavor, and we’re proud to partner with great companies!
Existing Programs
Some companies have a good beginning in PHC but may lack momentum. Vertical Forestry can help businesses turbocharge their existing PHC programs. Let us use our experience and training resources to really leverage the opportunities of a PHC program.
Recurring Revenue
Sometimes an existing PHC program suffers from low renewal rates. Although this can by a symptom of poor results or poor customer service, another factor is the hassle of renewing. Rather than asking sales to renew contracts, another approach is to design the system so that renewals are automatic. Vertical Forestry can help with creating a seamless process that clients view favorably.
Coaching and Training
Volumes have been written on the subject of sales coaching and closing, and we won’t pretend to have broken new ground there. However, we can offer your sales team fresh perspective on the arboricultural perspective on selling PHC services – as well as a number of tools to over objections, smooth out seasonality, and increase returns and close rates. We aren’t adverse to throwing in a few closing techniques while we’re at it….:)
Software Integration
Hands down, Vertical Forestry offers the best software solution for arboriculture firms in the world. We understand very well the moving parts of a tree service, and our software solution is tailored to meeting every challenge of the business head-on. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the ways that SalesForce expedites PHC services.
Here is a short sample of the challenges solved or simplified through our seamless software integration:
Proposal writing – simplified
Soil treatments – Solved through logic algorithm.
Client communication – Solved email and text notification
Work orders – digital, automated, and simplified
Compliance – solved through Dept of Ag. integration w/ work orders
Scheduling jobs – automated & simplified
Follow-ups for sales – automated & simplified
HR – solved; fully integrated into the system
Pre-job JSAs – solved; integrated into the work order s
Damage Tracking – solved; integrated into workflows
Sales forecasting – solved; any report can be generated
Safety & Training – simplified; all training auto-documented
