Arbor-X Inc

"THANK YOU for your kind words. This nice customer even sent us a hand written thank you letter. When you described the dogwood was dying, particularly on one side; I told ISA Certified Arborist Matt, to make sure he takes root pruning tools and dig down if he suspects any stem girdling roots when he looks at the tree. He found a significant one that was surely the culprit; as I saw the picture on his cell phone. The tree will likely make a come back this season (although, most of our native dogwoods struggle with all the foliage diseases now a days). I don't know if Angies List works this way, but if you are able to respond to this again, I'd love to hear how it has changed this growing season. We fix a lot of root problems and often see excellent results, quickly. This customer's request was for a diagnosis/evaluation. This is not an estimate. We charge $85 for this type of visit (if Harf Co). If work resulted in the future from this visit, we then subtract the $85 they paid, from the work invoice. We definitely do not nickel and dime anyone, we never have. Nor do we say a tree is dangerous or going to die when it is not. It's sad, I see "tree guys" scaring homeowners all the time, saying the tree is likely to fall on their house and such. I also hate seeing the big companies pushing liquid treatments like fertilizer and insecticide. Often these things are not needed, but it's big money for them with high profit compared to other tree work. We are licensed in pesticide and herbicide, we have a spray rig and can do soil injection fertilizing. Do we do it much? No! On that subject..... homeowners, please stop having pesticide companies spray every tree and plant in your landscape, "preventative spraying" does not work. It kills the beneficials too and can even lead to a pest outbreak, your landscape will basically need spraying all the time. It's a vicious circle. We only suggest treatment of an insect or fungi problem when it's a true problem. I few "bad" insects is not usually a big deal, usually the predator insects will take them out after a while. The big companies claim they do IPM (integrated pest management), this is were they are only supposed to treat problems they find. Well, I've seen how they do their IPM, they find a few aphids or any small amount of a harmful insect and they spray the tree. Thereby, costing you money and also killing your lady bug larvae or lacewings larvae that were hatching and about to take out the aphids anyway. Okay, I'm done my rant for now."

"A "C" grade is very low and hurtful to our grading on Angie's List. A message to future potential customers; we are a small company, but use highly skilled educated employees, which produce high quality work and great care is given to your trees and property. IF you are an individual that does not have the patience to wait for a return phone call, you might not want to call us, as we often do not have someone in the office during the day to answer the phone. See my other responses on reports where I explain this further. Please do not give us a "C" or lower grade unless you feel that we were intentionally negligent."

"Thank you customer, that was a large job. Just last week (this year 2012)we performed a large amount of work for your neighbor, thank you for the referral. People can view our tree removal skills by going on youtube and typing in the search words, ARBOR-X. Some of the faster moving videos are: Arbor-X The X-men, Rope Rigging I, Rope rigging II and Knuckleboom demo days. We are so much more than a tree removal company though. We do plenty of correct trimming, cabling and bracing systems, root work...... well, anything to do with trees."

"Thank you for your report and kind words. I've been wanting to respond to Angies list reports to explain something for a long time, but never have the time. You hit the nail on the head. Our "weakness" is we generally do not have anyone to ANSWER the phone during the DAY when you call, it is an answering machine. But, if tree emergency, you can call or text my cell phone directly and I check my phone often during the day, when ever I come down out of a tree. I answer my cell in the middle of the night too and many times have gone out in the dark in blowing rain to put a tarp over a roof that has had a tree fall onto it. Let me get back to what I was saying about no office manager to answer the phone. We ARE a small company that performs high quality work and puts highly skilled people to work on your trees. My wife writes down calls after her day job of being an O.T. and returns calls, sometimes it takes several days if there are many calls on the machine. IF we had a full time secretary, that is another person with about a $40,000 salary to add to the cost of doing business. I just counted up the number of customers in 2011 serviced, it is about 260 customers. $40,000/ 260= $154. Would you (speaking to everyone) rather your bill be $154 more, just so that someone answered the phone the first time you called, rather than you having to leave a message? If the consensus is yes, then we will make moves to get a full time office manager. In short, here is what you get with Arbor-X: You often do not get a live person when you call the office during the work day, you get the honest truth about your trees and no scare tactics, the person doing the estimating will be an educated ISA Certified Arborist in most cases, the arborists climbing and doing the tree work will ALSO be ISA Certified Arborists and the person you met for the estimate will be there as well. We are as careful with your landscape and property as we are with our saftey, you won't see us working without hard hats, chainsaw chaps on groundmen, eye protection and ear protection. The way I see it is that the actual QUALITY of work is the most important thing to produce. Having highly educated and highly skilled people on the jobsite, is important. A note on employees, since the economy change in 2008, we have not needed to bring in foreign workers, we have the best USA citizen workers that we have ever had. (2006 to 2009 we had some H2B legal foreign workers on 10 month visas). We have never slowed down, no matter what the economy has done. Just about every summer, we have to change our answering machine announcement to say "we are not taking any new customers at this time. Only past customers or direct referrals from past customers", we have to do this to deal with the large call volume, if we did not it would be weeks before you got a return call. Even with this, it is hard to keep up with the number of calls. If a tree service is not busy and can perform your tree work the next day or in a few days (when not a time sensitive situation); then there is often a reason for this. It's because they do not have work. Why don't they have work? Often because they perform low quality work, damage your property, do not completed jobs, etc. Open your current phone books, you will find we do not advertise, we do not need to, we have a good reputation that we have established since the start of ARBOR-X in 1995."

"I do not like to see anything less than an "A" on Angies list. My Dad was in the hospital for three days on life support after a massive heart attack, then died, we were all drained but tried to carry on with business. But I admit, even normally our responsiveness can often be a "B" because we ARE a small company, often with no one to answer the phone during the day. Since we have a good reputation, we receive many calls. I do not understand why we got a B on price, because I think I read that our price was right in the middle. That's an "A" in my book. Especially when it comes to trimming, because we put much more effort and educated decisions in our trimming AND the climber is always an ISA Certified Arborist, not Harry the tree hacker. Sometimes on tree removals, we may be the lowest price, if so, it's because I saw a more efficient way to remove the tree than the other company. It is not because we are cheaper. Quality is not cheap."