- ~$1,200
- A working day's receipts at a sub-five-employee shop
- Zero
- Safe moments to take a call mid-takedown
You can't answer the phone from sixty feet up.
Whoever did is at their house by noon.
Down on public land alone in Salt Lake City on Sept 8, 2020 — not counting private property
NOAA/NCEI Storm Events Database — Sept 8, 2020, Salt Lake and Tooele ValleysAverage disaster-repair job — the highest-value category of home improvement work there is
Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, from the HUD American Housing SurveyAmericans who answer a call from an unknown number. That's your five o'clock callback list.
Pew Research Center, December 2020 (n=10,211)What the standard homeowners policy pays toward removing one fallen tree. The rest is their own money.
ISO Homeowners 3 – Special Form HO 00 03 10 00, via the Insurance Information InstituteThis is the whole
product, out loud.
A call is a form being filled in out loud. Watch the intake sheet complete itself as the conversation runs.
7:10 a.m., the morning after a downslope windstorm. Half the valley is picking up branches, the owner is already on a roof in Millcreek, and this is the sixth call since six.
- Cloverly
Thanks for calling Wasatch Tree and Timber. Para español, oprima dos. Is anyone hurt, or is this something I can get on the estimate schedule?
- Caller
Nobody's hurt. Big tree came down in the back yard overnight and took out about twenty feet of fence.
- Cloverly
Is any part of that tree touching a power line, or is there a line down in the yard?
Asked before anything else. A yes here ends the booking conversation entirely — that call goes to the utility, not onto your board.
- Caller
There's a wire running to the house but the tree fell the other way. It's clear of it.
- Cloverly
Good. Either way, stay ten feet back from anything with a wire in it and keep kids and the dog out of that yard until a climber has looked at it — ten feet is the OSHA clearance for anyone who isn't a line-clearance trimmer. Is the tree on a structure or a vehicle, or blocking the drive — or down in the yard?
- Caller
In the yard. But there's a big limb still hung up in what's left of it, right over where the kids play. Trunk's still standing too — maybe twenty-five feet, fifteen off the back corner of the house.
- Cloverly
That's a hanger, and it's the part I'm flagging. Those come down on their own schedule. Rope that area off. What's underneath that can't be moved, and can a truck get into the back yard?
It knows the word and what it implies. A hanger is urgent-but-not-911, and the schedule reflects it.
- Caller
Lawn and a raised garden bed. Gate's about four feet, everything else is fenced. What's something like this run?
- Cloverly
I'd be making it up and you'd hold us to it — price comes off lean, decay, and what a truck can reach, and none of that survives a phone call. The estimate is free and it's the real number. I'm marking this a climb with no equipment access and flagging a possible crane assist so the estimator checks street setup. Thursday between noon and four, with the hanger flagged for a look sooner.
It never quotes. It says why, in terms the caller can't argue with.
- Caller
Thursday works. Gate's open, he can just walk back — I don't need to be here.
The window is held with the intake attached: tree down in the yard, hanger over the play area, twenty-five feet of trunk standing fifteen off the back corner of the house, four-foot gate, climb with a possible crane assist, estimate doesn't need anyone home. No line contact, no price, and nobody came off a roof to take it.
- Down or standing — and if down, on what
- Anyone hurt, and anything touching a line
- Removal, trimming, stump grinding, or storm cleanup
- Rough height and trunk size, in house-heights and arm-spans
- Species, if they know it
- Proximity to the house, garage, fence, and the neighbor's property
- What's under it that can't be moved
- Access: gate width, front or back, room for a chip truck and chipper
- Wood, chips, and stump disposition
- Owner, renter, or property manager — plus a callback number, read back
The judgment is yours.
It just applies it every time.
A structure, a vehicle, or the street is an escalation. The same tree lying in the yard is a Thursday estimate.
Asked in the first thirty seconds, every call. It changes whether there is a booking conversation at all.
Four different jobs with four different crews and day rates. A stump-only job across town may not be one you want.
Nobody estimates feet accurately from their kitchen window. Compared to their own house, they can.
Accepted as "no idea" without pushing. Species drives difficulty, disposal, and the arborist confirms it on site anyway.
Distance to a target is most of what separates a fell from a rigged takedown — and the neighbor's shed is the one nobody mentions until you're standing there.
The drop zone. Pool, deck, septic field, sprinklers, landscaping. This decides whether it's two hours or a full day.
Bucket, climb, or crane assist. Crew size and day rate follow from this, and so does whether you want the job at all.
Hauled, left in rounds, chips kept for mulch, stump ground or not. Scope decided on the phone is scope not renegotiated in the driveway.
Renters cannot authorize tree work. And every other field is worthless if the number is wrong.
InsteadNot a number, not a range, not a "usually around." It qualifies the job and books the estimate. You set the price standing under the tree.
InsteadTells the caller to stay ten feet clear, call the utility and 911, and warm transfers to you. Line clearance is qualified-worker work under OSHA 1910.269 — a crew dispatched to a line contact is a liability event, not a lead.
InsteadRecords what the caller describes — lean, dropped limbs, soft spots at the base — and leaves the judgment to an arborist on site.
InsteadSays it's flagging the call for you and gives an honest callback expectation. Twenty homeowners promised the same afternoon is twenty angry people.
InsteadTakes the caller's guess as a guess and lets the estimator confirm it.
InsteadTakes the details and hands the call to you rather than committing your Thursday to it.
InsteadSays crown reduction, and knows the difference — topping cuts to a stub or to a branch too small to take over; reduction cuts back to a lateral at least a third the diameter of what came off. ISA calls topping the most harmful pruning practice there is.
A generic receptionist
doesn’t know your year.
You write these once. Every call after that follows them the same way, at 2am as at 2pm.
- Anything in contact with, or close to, an energized line — or a line down in the yard
- Hard stop. Stay ten feet clear, call the utility and 911. No crew, no booking, no exceptions, then warm transfer to you. This is a utility call, not a tree-crew dispatch.
- A tree or limb on a house, garage, or an occupied vehicle
- Warm transfer to the on-call phone. That's active property damage on a clock.
- Anyone injured, trapped, or under the tree
- 911 first, said plainly, then warm transfer. Nothing else happens on that call.
- A tree still moving — root plate lifting, audible cracking, leaning further
- Tells the caller to clear the area and stay out of it, then warm transfers.
- A tree blocking the only access to a property, or a public street
- Warm transfer. That's an emergency for the city as much as the homeowner.
- A hanger over a walkway, driveway, play area, or parked car
- Not a middle-of-the-night call, but not a next-month one either. Flagged and placed in the same week.
- A commercial, municipal, or property-management account with a response clock
- Warm transfer. The clock started when the phone rang.
- Removals, trims, stump grinds, dormant pruning, second opinions, hazard assessments
- Booked on the schedule. Nobody gets woken up.
There are two wind seasons, not one. Thunderstorm wind peaks June and July; non-thunderstorm high wind — the downslope and canyon wind that hits the Wasatch Front — peaks December through April. Payroll follows the same shape: Salt Lake County landscaping and tree employment runs 1.66 times higher in July than in February, and Q3 earns roughly twice what Q1 does.
The annual floor and the tightest cash of the year. Structural pruning, deadwooding, cabling, bidding, equipment down for maintenance.
Dormant pruning closes out — USU Extension puts the window in winter and early spring, before buds swell. Fire blight guidance says the same thing.
Ramp. Backlog clearing, spring cleanup, and the tail of the high-wind season still producing storm calls.
Peak, and the peak of thunderstorm wind nationally. Removals, storm response, everything at once, and the month calls are most likely to go unanswered.
Hazard work and pre-winter removals. Salt Lake City's own forestry crews run four-plus months behind by now.
Employment falls off, but December carries the year's largest share of non-thunderstorm high-wind events. The lean month is also a storm month.
A caller can tell within one sentence whether the person on the line has done this before. The script is written in tree service language.
Taking the whole tree. A takedown implies it comes out in pieces because there's nowhere to drop it.
A broken limb hung up in the canopy. It comes down when it decides to, which is why it's a same-week job.
The same thing, named for what it does. Crew shorthand, not a term you use with a homeowner.
Where wood is allowed to land. Whether one exists drives the price more than the height of the tree does.
Whether a lift can reach it or someone has to tie in and go up. Different crew, different day, different number.
A crane picks the wood off instead of rigging it down. Decided by access and what's underneath, not by the tree.
Lowering sections on ropes because gravity isn't an option. Slow, technical, and where the day goes.
The stripped trunk left standing mid-takedown, worked down in blocks.
Grinding the stump out after the tree is down. A separate line, often a separate trip.
Where the trunk widens into the roots. Buried flare is a finding; heaved flare is an emergency.
Trunk diameter at breast height — how the trade sizes a tree. Homeowners answer in arm-spans instead.
The person running the chipper and the ropes. Also the reason nobody on site can hear a phone.
Topping cuts to a stub; reduction cuts back to a lateral at least a third the diameter removed. ISA calls topping the most harmful pruning practice known.
Trimming around energized conductors, governed by OSHA 1910.269(r). Qualified-worker work. Not something a call gets booked for.
Three years' experience, a 200-question exam, recertification every three years. Roughly 40,000 hold it against about 350,000 people doing tree work.
A third-party audit of safety programs, training, and insurance on a three-year term. In Utah, where tree work needs no contractor license, it's one of the few things a homeowner can actually check.
Everything above,
with its receipts.
Storm demand doesn't arrive in a curve. It arrives in an afternoon.
The National Weather Service logs every damaging-wind report in the country. Count them by day and about a fifth of a year's events land on ten days; a third land on twenty. Roughly two in three of those reports mention downed trees. September 8, 2020, the Salt Lake Forester counted more than 1,500 trees down on public land alone — 255 in the City Cemetery, 69 in Liberty Park. That is not a busy week. It's one morning where every phone in the valley rings at once.
Nobody in this trade is big. It's whoever picked up.
Census counts 114,842 firms in the industry that contains tree work. 72% of them have fewer than five employees and average $299,970 a year in receipts; 94.3% have fewer than twenty. IBISWorld estimates the US tree-trimming market at $26.0 billion for 2026, spread across all of that. There is no shop down the road with a call center. The homeowner standing in their yard at 6:40 a.m. is not choosing the biggest company — they're choosing the one that answered.
U.S. Census Statistics of U.S. Businesses, 2022 — NAICS 561730
Google is keeping score on whether you pick up.
Read Google's own Local Services Ads documentation. Under the factors that set your ad rank: "Missed calls may negatively affect your responsiveness." Elsewhere, plainly: "If you regularly fail to answer calls or respond to messages, your ad ranking may be affected." Profile quality explicitly includes average response time. So the storm morning you spend on a roof doesn't just cost you those eleven calls. It costs you position on the next one.
It never gives a number. That's a hard rule, not a setting, and it's the first thing to test when you listen to it take a call. Ask it for a ballpark on a sixty-foot cottonwood over a garage and see what it does.
Some of them will still be there. Pew asked 10,211 Americans whether they answer their cell when an unknown number calls; 19% said yes. Your callback list is mostly voicemails on both ends by then.
Some will. It says it's an assistant and it doesn't pretend to be you. The honest comparison isn't Cloverly against you picking up — it's Cloverly against your voicemail. Listen to it take a storm call and decide from there.
Then she keeps answering it. This covers what she can't: 6am the morning after a windstorm, Saturday afternoon, and the four calls that land while she's on the fifth. It's overflow and after-hours, not a replacement for a person with a life.
Check what you're paying at storm volume — the published rate cards run $400 to $1,200 a month once a hundred-minute plan blows through in week one, and Ruby and Abby don't publish overage rates at all. The bigger problem is the ceiling: Abby's plans cap what the service is allowed to know about you at 5, 10, or 15 FAQs, and PATLive says script changes take 24 business hours. Neither number works during a storm week, and neither one gets you a drop-zone question.
Straight answers.
No. Not a number, not a range, not "usually around." You know better than anyone that price comes off lean, decay, what's underneath, and whether a truck can get in the back yard — and none of that survives a phone call. Cloverly qualifies the job and books the estimate. If a caller pushes for a ballpark, it says it would be making it up. That refusal is the product, not a limitation of it.
It doesn't guess, it asks and routes. Down or standing. On a structure, a vehicle, or blocking the driveway — or in the yard. Anyone hurt. Anything touching a line. A trunk through a roof warm transfers to your on-call phone. A leaning silver maple goes on the estimate schedule for Thursday. The triage is the rules you wrote, applied the same way at 6:40 a.m. as at two in the afternoon.
It does not book it. It tells the caller to stay ten feet clear, call the utility and 911, and it warm transfers to you. Line clearance is qualified-worker work under OSHA 1910.269, and an unqualified person has to keep ten feet back from anything energized under 1910.333. An answering service that cheerfully takes a line-contact job and puts it on your board is handing you a liability problem.
It asks the questions that tell you. Gate width, front yard or back, slope, room on the street for a chip truck and chipper, what's underneath that can't be moved, how close the tree is to the house. If those answers point at a crane assist, it flags the job that way so you can look at street setup before you burn an hour driving out there. It doesn't decide it's a crane job. It gives you what you need to decide.
Judge it on the transcript above rather than on us telling you. It knows a bucket job and a climbing job are different jobs, that a hanger is a same-week problem and not a next-month one, that the drop zone drives the price more than the height does, and that topping and crown reduction are not the same thing. If it said "tree trimming professional" you'd have stopped reading already.
That's the one thing it does better than a person, because it isn't single-threaded. A CSR takes one call at a time; the twelfth caller after a microburst hangs up and dials the next number in the search results. The NWS data says roughly a fifth of a year's damaging-wind events land on ten days — the days you most need coverage are the days coverage is hardest to staff.
It books estimates, not jobs, and it books against the filters you give it: your service area, minimum job size, work you don't do, the accounts you don't take. It also asks whether the caller owns the home or is renting, which kills a whole category of wasted trips on its own. Anything outside the rules comes to you as details, not as a commitment on your schedule.
Fair question, and the swing is real — BLS payroll data puts Salt Lake County landscaping and tree employment about 1.66 times higher in July than in February, with Q3 earning roughly twice what Q1 does. Talk to us about how you want the off-season handled before you sign anything. We'd rather set it up right than have you cancel in November.
Call it
yourself.
Leave your cell and it calls you — so the first thing you hear is the product taking a tree service call. Or book 30 minutes with the team and we'll write your script on the call.
Call the AI that would answer your phone.
Pick your trade, leave your cell. The AI calls you back and takes the call the way it would take one for your shop.
We’re taking our first
tree service shops now.
You’d be early, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. Month to month, setup waived, and thirty days to decide — if it hasn’t booked you a job in that window, we refund the month in full.