It’s a situation many a contractor can sympathize with.
Ask Drew Soper, owner and president of Grasshoppers Tree Service, what his biggest challenge is, and he’ll tell you it’s the fly-by-night tree-care workers who are not licensed or insured and will accept low payment, which allows them to underbid professional contractors like him.
Something that works to his advantage, however, is his use of Vermeer tree care equipment. Grasshoppers Tree Service, which serves the St. Petersburg, Fla., area, has Vermeer SC802 and SC352 stump cutters and Vermeer BC1000XL and BC1400 brush chippers.
Any one of those five machines makes a big impression on customers.
“They say they can tell we’re professionals just by looking at the equipment, versus a guy in a pickup truck with a trailer and brush hanging over the back,” Soper says.
With much of its business coming by word-of-mouth referrals, that type of reaction is important to Grasshoppers Tree Service. It has one five-man crew and does mostly tree trimmings and tree removals, along with safety consulting and inspections. As a certified arborist, Soper’s specialty is pruning, and he has a great appreciation of trees.
“I’ve always liked being around trees, he says. “We have to take care of them. It’s our most important resource. But it’s actually the most abused resource.”
That’s why if Soper believes a tree doesn’t need to be trimmed, he’ll tell the potential customer so, even if it means losing a job.
When he does bid on a job, however, his Vermeer tree care equipment offers an advantage against serious competitors, too. That’s especially true of the 74-horsepower (55.2 kW) SC802 stump cutter, which Soper says can “eat a huge stump” in 20 minutes.
The less powerful stump cutters he sees other contractors using can take a few hours on similar jobs. That lets Soper submit lower bids than the competition but, because his crew works faster, he’s making more money overall.
“I can beat them on a bid by several hundred dollars, and I can get two jobs done to their doing one job,” he says.
That’s one of the reasons Soper has been a Vermeer customer since he started his tree-care business in 1995.
“Vermeer makes a good, quality machine,” he says. “It definitely can keep up with you and the demands of what a professional puts on it every day.”